We Just Figured Out Why 598 Guerrero Is the Most Cursed Restaurant Location in SF

This week, yet another restaurant boldly moved into 598 Guerrero St. in San Francisco, despite the Mission District location’s many years of proving how cursed it is.

The owners of Handroll Project, the location’s most recent tenant, will reopen the restaurant as Hamburger Project Two — a second location for the burger spot at 808 Divisadero. Handroll Project took over the high-ceilinged space on the corner of 18th Street in 2022 and survived just over three years, having taken over from AL’s Deli, which soldiered on there for just eight months until March 2020. (At the time of that departure, owner Aaron London told Eater, “It just never really hit the mass appeal to make that model make sense.”)

Remarkably, AL’s Deli wasn’t even the shortest-lived restaurant to occupy 598 Guerrero. That honor belongs to Ebb & Flow, which lasted just six months in 2010. Before that, Craig’s Place served diner food between 2007 and 2008. The location’s longest restaurant success story was Izakaya Yuzuki, which endured from 2011 to 2019.

The sheer number of restaurants that have tried and failed to make this spot work belies good sense. Situated opposite Tartine’s always bustling original location, and a short walk from Delfina, Bi-Rite and other popular neighborhood spots, the repeated failures at 598 Guerrero have been perplexing. (Just a few doors down, Faye’s has been going strong since 1998.)

Handroll Project was a usually busy sushi joint that I believed would break the spell. I wasn’t the first to think a restaurant could actually survive there. Writing about Izakaya Yuzuki for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2017, Chris Ying remained idealistic: “It turns out there are no cursed restaurants. It comes down to the right idea taking root, and, when something great begins to grow from it, diners nurturing it.”

Izakaya Yuzuki was gone two years later.

So what exactly is wrong with 598 Guerrero? While claims of a curse have long been pooh-poohed by skeptics (and optimistic new tenants), the answer might be just as strange as rumored.

A paranormal property

It turns out that, all the way back in 1889, 598 Guerrero was occupied by a “trance medium” and fortune teller by the name of Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers. Mayo-Steers held healing circles (“skeptics invited”), “psychometric readings,” “psychic delineations,” and claimed to provide “diagnosis of diseases.” For at least 15 years, Mayo-Steers operated out of locations all over San Francisco — Turk, Market, Oak, Grove, 24th and 17th Streets included — but 598 Guerrero was where she communed with spirits in daily “sittings,” at least for a time.

As a member of the Progressive Mediums’ Society, Mayo-Steers was well known in Victorian San Francisco’s spookier society corners, once speaking at a meeting for Progressive Spiritualists in 1889 and appearing at the State Spiritualist Convention of 1896. In a 1903 edition of Now — a journal “devoted to the science and art of soul culture” — the editor wrote that “among the Spiritualists, our friend … Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers [has] resumed work in the city. In work along New Thought and psychic lines, our city is wide awake.”

If in fact Mayo-Steers turned 598 Guerrero into a psychic hotspot, that could explain what happened there in 2022, shortly after Handroll Project moved in. At the time, Eater reported that staff members believed there was paranormal activity at the restaurant. Lights were said to inexplicably flicker on and off, and containers seemed to fly across the room on their own volition. One employee even claimed to see a long-haired apparition in the basement break room.

“It’s just too crazy,” restaurant partner Geoffrey Lee said at the time. “Customers have been saying the veil between the living and the dead is very thin right now because of Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos and I’m like, ‘I’m not trying to hear that stuff.’”

Some observers at the time attributed the paranormal activity to an incident in 2003, just three months after Central American bistro Platanos had moved into 598 Guerrero.

After leaving work late one night, Platanos’ executive chef Carlos Perez got into an altercation and died on Valencia near 22nd. The fight reportedly started over the volume of Perez’s car stereo. According to a report in the San Francisco Examiner that February, police considered the death a result of self-defense. However, Platanos’ co-owner Lisa Lazarus told the newspaper, “I just saw him in the casket [and] this was not a guy hit with a couple of blows and then stopped breathing … He was beaten to death.”

Lazarus sold Platanos to a new owner, Pascal Rigo, in September 2005. Nine months later, the Chronicle’s Michael Bauer wrote: “The food has now taken an even more delectable turn, and customers are returning.” Within a year, Platanos was gone.

Raided by federal agents

So what was at 598 Guerrero between the psychic lady and the failed restaurants? Well, a speakeasy, for one.

The building’s post-1906 earthquake iteration arrived in about 1909, when it appeared for sale in the San Francisco Examiner’s “City Real Estate” classifieds as a “clean, level lot 25 x 80” complete with “gas, water, sewer.” By 1920, the address was an entertainment venue under the proprietorship of a J. Hoegeman. That year, Hoegeman advertised the availability of a beverage at his joint called New Crow, marketed as “the California drink that makes YOU FORGET prohibition.”

Clearly, New Crow did not achieve its stated goal. On Sept. 29, 1922, 598 Guerrero was raided by federal prohibition agents who hit venues all over the Mission that night. The speakeasy was forcibly closed for violating alcohol laws, and its operators at the time, Peter Jacobs and Jack Warren — as well as building owner Ellen Boardman — were charged in abatement suits by Assistant United States Attorney Garton D. Keystone.

Shortly after prohibition hammered 598 Guerrero’s doors closed, the building transformed into a pharmacy — Dunnigan’s in the ’20s and ’30s, and Mission Prescription Pharmacy in the ’50s and ’60s. In the 1970s, the location became a produce store that wound up listed for sale in the Examiner’s “Business Offers” in 1982. It was, the ad noted, “priced to sell.”

Whatever happens to Hamburger Project Two, you have to admire the devil-may-care confidence to stay at 598 Guerrero. May the ghost of Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers enjoy smash burgers and loaded fries as much as the rest of us.