VC Neil Mehta, who’s quietly nabbing prized SF property, plans a “Y Combinator for restaurants”
Neil Mehta, the VC behind the acquisition of a string of properties on San Francisco’s tony Fillmore Street, made waves earlier this week for reportedly throwing long-established local restaurants to the curb to bring in more high-end retailers. The San Francisco Chronicle talked, for example, to the owner of Ten-Ichi, a neighborhood sushi restaurant for almost 50 years that now has to vacate its space next month. “This is the opposite of what San Francisco does to long-term, legacy business tenants,” the restaurant owner told the outlet. “This guy [Mehta] is displacing us.”
Sources close to the low-flying Mehta paint a very different picture, however. They say that Mehta’s very focus is on bringing a wealth of restaurants to the area, and that he’s even planning a kind of “Y Combinator for restaurants,” says one source.
According to this person, Mehta has a pretty grand vision for turning the roughly four-plus blocks he has quietly acquired over the last year into an oasis where ambitious restaurant owners can afford to set up shop, San Franciscans can find a wealth of dining and shopping choices, and a 111-year-old movie theater on the street is restored to its former glory and “not turned into an Equinox.”
