Vol. I, No. 28 · San Francisco — Monday, August 24, 2026 · Price: the twelfth location, conditionally

BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL

El Farolito has served burritos in San Francisco since 1983, when Salvador “Don Chava” Lopez opened the first location at 24th and Mission Streets. By 2021 the taquería had grown to eleven locations across the Bay Area. Salvador Lopez had died that January, at 70. His children, Irene and Santiago Lopez, ran the business by the time Planning stepped in. A twelfth location, planned for 1230 Grant Avenue in North Beach, is what tripped a law the city had passed in 2005. San Francisco’s Planning Department told the family that September that opening it would make El Farolito a chain.

The law dates to 2004, when the Board of Supervisors added Section 703.3 to the Planning Code. It defined “formula retail,” the city’s term for a chain, as any business with eleven or more other locations that also shares two or more standardized features: signage, façade, décor, uniforms, or a trademark. The ordinance banned formula retail outright in one neighborhood commercial district and required a case-by-case hearing in two more.

North Beach joined the outright ban within the year. Chinatown’s Visitor Retail district did not follow until 2008, four years later, under a separate ordinance. A 2007 ballot measure, Proposition G, is reported to have extended the hearing requirement to every commercial corridor in the city, a claim this desk did not independently verify against the original ballot record tonight. Two decades on, that hearing has become close to automatic almost everywhere it applies. The outright ban has not. El Farolito’s twelfth location ran into the ban.

Board President Matt Gonzalez introduced the original ordinance in August 2003, co-sponsored by Chris Daly and Tom Ammiano; it passed the following April as Ordinance 62-04. Aaron Peskin, then North Beach’s supervisor, sponsored the North Beach ban a year later, and it passed in April 2005 as Ordinance 65-05. Peskin also sponsored Chinatown’s outright ban, which did not pass until November 2008 as Ordinance 269-08. Planning staff apply that definition case by case, reading a business’s location count against the file. No supervisor votes on an individual application.

The law requires a hearing instead of an outright ban in most other districts, a process Proposition G extended citywide in 2007. That hearing has become close to a formality. GrowSF, an advocacy group that favors loosening the rules and does not publish its own source data for the figure, has tallied a 97.6 percent approval rate for formula-retail hearings since 2014 and 100 percent since January 2020. This desk could not independently verify that count before deadline. The public record is simpler. San Francisco Planning’s own explainer page still describes the outright-ban list in language dated May 2011. That is fifteen years out of date, and it still names the same three districts the North Beach ordinance set in 2005.

El Farolito’s North Beach location never went through that hearing, because North Beach does not offer one. The law there does not ask permission; it says no. The taquería is on Grant Avenue today because the definition bent, not the ban. News accounts from the time report that El Farolito changed the signage at some of its other Bay Area restaurants, enough that fewer of its eleven other locations still shared the standardized features the 2004 law counts. On paper, El Farolito stopped qualifying as a chain. Peskin, the same supervisor who had written the North Beach ban seventeen years earlier, brokered the deal in April 2022. El Farolito opened at 1230 Grant Avenue that June, full yellow signage restored, one of twelve locations now.

Confidence is high on the law’s history and its outright-ban list, both drawn from the Board’s own legislative record and the Planning Department’s own page. Confidence is lower on how toothless the hearing process has actually become, since the only tally of it comes from an advocacy group with a stated position and no published method. The three-district ban is the part of the 2004 law nobody has repealed. It is also the only part that still says no on its own, without a hearing, a vote, or a compromise.