Kayla Abe and David Murphy announced the closure of their food waste-focused restaurant at 3349 23rd St. on social media Thursday. Rising costs and declining patronage proved insurmountable despite four years of pivots.

Shuggie's, the food waste-minded restaurant at the corner of 23rd and Bartlett in the Mission, will close July 11 after four years in business. Owners Kayla Abe and David Murphy announced the news Thursday on Instagram, citing a year of climbing costs and thinning crowds that no amount of reinvention could fix.

"It has been a slow build over the past year — seeing costs climb and patronage decrease," the pair wrote. "We felt like we could design our way out of these problems with new programming, changes in offerings and hours, buyouts, insane deals, even free food and a rebrand. We have tried every conceivable pivot over the last 4 years to make a long lasting version of Shuggie's."

The restaurant, registered with the City in May 2021 at 3349 23rd St., opened as Shuggie's Trash Pie + Natural Wine — a maximalist, noise-forward room that quickly became one of the Mission's most-talked-about rooms. Its signature was a climate-conscious pizza built on whey-based dough and irregular produce, paired with orange wine dispensed straight from a porrón pitcher. Bon Appétit named it among its 24 Best New Restaurants of 2023.

Last year, Abe and Murphy closed briefly to overhaul the concept entirely. Pizza gave way to elevated nostalgia dishes — fish sticks, steak frites, wild boar chop from invasive feral pigs — still anchored in the same food-waste ethos. They added a $40 Wednesday prix fixe, free happy-hour snacks, live music, and annual crawfish broils. The math still didn't close.

What Shuggie's represented on the dining scene was a genuine thesis: that a restaurant could make climate-conscious sourcing the whole point, not a footnote. That the concept earned critical recognition and ran four years in one of the country's hardest dining markets says something. That it still couldn't survive says something else.

"Shuggie's has achieved the massive goal we set out to achieve," Abe and Murphy wrote, "to inspire American diners to think critically about food waste."

The last service is scheduled for July 11.