Caffe Centro, at 102 S Park St, is the only restaurant left in South Park — a SoMa enclave where venture-capital offices have rebounded sharply but retail has not kept pace.

At 102 S Park St, on the northern edge of the grassy SoMa oval that stretches between Second and Third Streets, Caffe Centro keeps the tables set. It is, according to Mission Local, the only restaurant South Park has left.

The park has been cycling through closures for years. South Park Cafe pulled its shutters in March 2020. Mexico Au Parc, which operated on the ground floor of the Madrid Hotel — a local SRO overlooking the oval — closed in 2021. The Butler and the Chef, a French bistro that had outlasted the dot-com bust, closed at the end of 2017. The Mexico Au Parc space remains vacant; Mission Local reported in July that a prospective tenant recently signed a lease, then defaulted.

Erwin Ganschow, Caffe Centro's co-owner, has worked there since the early 1990s and has watched the park cycle through the full sequence: dot-com boom, bust, recovery, pandemic, and now whatever this is. The cafe wobbled through the last downturn, then found an unusual lifeline: in 2024, Mission Housing, the affordable housing developer that owns the building, allowed the staff to reconstitute as a worker-owned collective. The building's three nearby SROs, home to nearly 100 residents, became Caffe Centro's most reliable customers during the lean years. Ganschow told Mission Local the cafe is now doing roughly three-quarters of its pre-pandemic business — and that younger tech workers seem drawn to what it isn't. "They seem kind of interested in this place because it's not like your normal Apple Store-type cafe," he said. "It's kind of old-school."

The offices filling back up around the park tell a different story. Flourish Ventures opened at 140 South Park in 2022. Touring Capital followed in 2025, announcing a $330 million AI software fund alongside its South Park address. Notable Capital and Coatue both list offices at 21 South Park. Cameron Tu, a broker at Touchstone Commercial Partners, told Mission Local that office rents per square foot have risen significantly, driven in part by early-stage, venture-backed startups willing to pay for the address. Retail, Tu said, is weaker and more volatile.

The permit record offers a partial counterweight. The city issued an over-the-counter alteration permit — number 202606173408, estimated cost $18,000 — for 155 South Park on June 17. Lauren Arnsdorff, who is opening a bakery called Flour & Branch at 155A South Park, the former Butler and the Chef space, told Mission Local in July that she hoped to open this month; passersby, she said, regularly stop to tell her the park needs another restaurant.

Caffe Centro's immediate neighbors also include the occasional humanoid: OpenMind, a robotics company with nearby offices, tests its wheeled and humanoid machines around the oval several times a week, according to Mission Local.

Ganschow told Mission Local he sees "a light at the end of the tunnel." On a good midweek afternoon, the tables are fuller than they were two years ago. But anyone walking the oval can still count the dark storefronts along its edge before landing on one remaining lit window.