Editor:
Please share this open letter with your readers:
Owner of the Seal Rock Inn
545 Pt. Lobos
San Francisco, Californian 94121
Dear Owner,
I have lived around the corner from your Seal Rock Inn since 1989. Like many people in the neighborhood, I was a big fan of the Seal Rock Inn Restaurant. I have lots of memories of times spent at the Restaurant, eating a delicious omelet and talking with family or friends while a waitress refilled my coffee mug. The Seal Rock Inn Restaurant was a one-of-a-kind place. The man who ran the restaurant, Andy, was well-liked in our neighborhood and so were the waitresses and waiters who worked there.
I know that the Seal Rock Inn Restaurant leased its space from you and that the Restaurant shut down in 2020, but I don’t have any first-hand information as to why. From what I’ve read and heard, it seems that Andy was hit with a really big rent increase and that, even with the pandemic-related grants that he had applied for and hoped to get, he had to close.
If 2020 had been a normal time, you would have heard from me and probably lots of other people about the Restaurant closing. But at the time that the Restaurant closed, we were all busy with living through the first months and years of COVID-19.
But if it had been a normal time, I would have found a way to say to you something like: Please give the Seal Rock Inn Restaurant a temporary break on rent while the restaurant figures out how to stay afloat. If you can possibly do that, I think it will be good for business in the long run. And I know that if Andy and his staff can stay, it will be good for the neighborhood, too.
But sadly, it’s been almost three years since the Restaurant closed and I have waited until now to write. Why am I bothering to write you after all this time? First, because each time I look at that sign on the awning outside your Inn, and see “Fine Dining Ocean Views,” I get a bit sad. I look at the deserted restaurant space and I remember the restaurant that for 46 years was full of people, restaurant people making and serving delicious food, and people gathered there as patrons, talking and eating and looking out at a world-class view of the Pacific Ocean.
I am also writing because I wonder, since the restaurant space is still vacant, if there’s any chance of you being able to get Andy and his restaurant back? I don’t have any contact information for Andy or even know if he would be interested. But I figured if anyone could find out about this, it would be you.
Sincerely,
Janice Bressler
Categories: letter to the editor
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
Nice try Janice, but the landlords are the Maven properties, and corporate america does not care about your nostalgia because nostalgia does not make money. Otherwise they wouldn’t have jacked the rent on the Psarras family in the first place. So now it sits empty and is probably used as a loss on the bottom of the corporate balance sheet, where they get to discount the jacked up unrealistic rent that no one can afford.
Personally I don’t think it is a good idea to permit all this property ownership by out of town conglomerates. Back in the day that was called Aristocracy. Currently it’s disguised as investor investments and management operations and is driven by creating revenue. Having viable businesses at the bottom of the top-down operation is not an ingredient for consideration in that narrow-minded economic thought process.
This kind of stuff is happening all over the city too. Corporate landlords and property management firms are busy squeezing the tenants and business owners, unable to be satisfied with the current profit margins — because they aren’t losing money, they just want more revenue. My apartment complex just got outsourced to a property management firm that now charges me $10 to use my debit card through an online portal to pay my rent. I imagine that will also go up at some point in the future, because … reasons.
I used to get the Sutro omelet all the time. I lived across the street in that funky green duplex in the mid 1990’s up until about 2003 when I move further on down Geary Blvd to where I am living currently. The quarter pound hamburger sancwiches also rocked. Nothing in the entire city compared in my opinion. There is really no place to go at 7am to get an good omelet, although Americana on Balboa is pretty good, but you have to wait until 11 am.
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Thank you for this thoughtful letter.
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