A Hot Startup Made a Restaurant for Some Reason. So We Ate There
Northern California is famous for its food, but the tech industry is better known for Soylent than haute cuisine. Could a new startup-run restaurant in San Francisco’s buzzing venture capital hive be anything but soulless? I had to try it.
In 2017, Brex, a white-hot financial tech startup offering “the smartest corporate credit card,” bought the South Park Cafe, a historic French bistro that had served the city for 20 years. Under the wing of two Stanford dropouts barely older than the cafe itself, the restaurant reopened its doors last month.
South Park, home to the South Park Cafe, is an emblem of recent San Francisco history. The neighborhood played host to notable companies of the Dot Com Boom, fell into disrepair in the crash, and has once again regained favor as a hub of tech companies and investment firms in this second, bigger boom.