Nob Hill Huntington Hotel Reopening and Dining Changes

The neon sign atop California and Taylor went dark in 2020 and stayed that way for six years. When it came back to life this March, the relighting drew a small crowd, a few cameras, and Mayor Daniel Lurie, who called it another sign that the city is on the rise. Cable cars still climb past the same corner every few minutes, and the Fairmont still sits catty-corner with its lagoon and its rainstorms running on schedule in the basement. From the sidewalk, it looked like Nob Hill simply got its grand hotel back.

It also, in the same stretch of months, lost its restaurant.

The reopening everyone already heard about

The Huntington Hotel spent six years as a locked, half-furnished building at 1075 California Street. It reopened to guests on March 1, 2026, under new owners Greg Flynn and Highgate, following a renovation designed by Ken Fulk that kept the 1922 brick shell and reworked nearly everything inside it. The hotel now counts 71 guest rooms and 72 suites, a footprint smaller than before but with rooms that run closer to 580 square feet, well past the industry standard of around 200. Rates start at $799 a night and top out at $15,000 for the penthouse. In September 2025, ahead of the reopening, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The Big Four, the wood-paneled restaurant that anchored the hotel for half a century, reopened to the public on March 17, in its 50th anniversary year. General manager Matthew de Quillien said the team tracked down the restaurant's original 1970s recipe for its chicken pot pie and put it back on the menu. Next to it sits something new: Arabella's, a cocktail salon named for Arabella Huntington, second wife of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, built around decades-old spirits, a bottle of vintage Soviet vodka among them, and a bar cart shipped in from 1930s France. Upstairs, the old Nob Hill Spa was rebuilt across three levels with an indoor pool, treatment rooms, and city-view terraces.

"It effectively renders, from a guest perspective, as a brand-new hotel," Flynn said at the reopening, "but in a lovely historic format."

That is a fair description of what a full architectural overhaul buys. It is also, for a resident weighing where to eat dinner without leaving the neighborhood, a narrower answer than it sounds.

The restaurant that isn't staying

Sons & Daughters held two Michelin stars and a small dining room on Nob Hill for years. This year it is leaving for a larger space in the Mission District, at 18th and Florida streets, with a reopening targeted for late 2026. It was the neighborhood's one independently owned destination restaurant at that level, the kind of place people crossed the city to eat at rather than the kind that served the block.

Its departure lands at the same moment the Huntington reopened its own dining room down the street. That is not a coincidence worth over-reading, but it is worth naming plainly: Nob Hill's highest tier of dining did not grow this year. It relocated. What used to be an independent restaurant answering to its own chef and its own lease is now, for the neighborhood's top end, a hotel dining room answering to Flynn Properties and Highgate. If you want a serious sit-down dinner on the hill itself in 2026, your options increasingly run through a lobby.

What's actually filling in at street level

The gap Sons & Daughters leaves isn't being filled by another white-tablecloth room. It's being filled by smaller, cheaper, faster places, mostly in Lower Nob Hill.

Le Mil's opened as one of the city's few Indian coffee shops, pouring espresso standards alongside a chicory-forward drink finished with masala jaggery syrup and cascara, plus baked goods from Saltwater Bakeshop and a small selection of Indian pastries. Bay Breeze Scoops opened nearby as a straightforward gelato shop, also serving soft serve, coffee, matcha lattes, and milkshakes. Ruay Mitr Chicken & Rice brought in Thai comfort food built around khao mun gai, the Thai take on Hainanese chicken rice, along with khao soi, crab wontons, and ba mee moo dang.

None of these are trying to be Sons & Daughters. That's the point. The neighborhood's everyday food scene is getting denser and more casual at exactly the same time its formal dining scene is thinning out and consolidating inside hotel walls.

The one thing that didn't move at all

A block away, the Fairmont's Tonga Room kept doing exactly what it has done since 1945. Guests still gather around the old hotel pool turned lagoon, a band still plays from a floating stage most nights starting at 7 p.m., and the S.S. Forester's old timbers still make up the dance floor. It's a strange kind of stability to point to, a tiki bar built in the basement of a Beaux Arts hotel, but it's the one dining and drinking landmark on the hill that neither closed, renovated, nor left. Everything around it changed shape this year. The Tonga Room just kept the lagoon running.

A realistic week on the hill

For someone who already lives up here, here's what the actual rotation looks like now:

1. Coffee at Le Mil's if you want something other than the usual cortado, otherwise Muse Juice Bar for a smoothie on the way out the door
2. A casual lunch at Ruay Mitr or a sandwich at Cordon Bleu if you're keeping it under ten dollars
3. Gelato at Bay Breeze Scoops on a walk that takes you past Huntington Park, which Arabella Huntington gave to the city back in 1915 and which still anchors the neighborhood a short walk from the hotel
4. A proper dinner either at the Big Four, now back in its 50th year, or a reservation at House of Prime Rib if you can get one
5. A nightcap at Arabella's if you want something quiet, or the Tonga Room if you want the floating band and the occasional indoor thunderstorm

That's a workable week. It's just a different shape than it was two years ago, when Sons & Daughters gave the neighborhood a serious restaurant that belonged to no hotel at all.

What this actually means if you live here

The headline version of this story, the one the mayor stood up for at the ribbon-cutting, is that Nob Hill is having a comeback year. That's true as far as it goes. A landmark building that sat dark for six years is lit up again, staffed again, and taking reservations again. But a comeback isn't the same as more of what was there before. The neighborhood's fine dining got smaller and more concentrated inside two hotel properties this year, even as its casual food scene got busier and more varied at street level. If you're the kind of resident who used to walk to Sons & Daughters for an occasion, that occasion now means either a hotel dining room or a trip across town. If you're the kind of resident who wants a fast lunch, a coffee, or a scoop of gelato within a few blocks of your building, this was actually a good year.

Nob Hill isn't getting bigger or smaller. It's getting more sorted, the top end consolidating behind hotel doors, the everyday end spreading out along the sidewalks of Lower Nob Hill. Worth knowing before you assume the corner you've lived on for years works the same way it did last spring.

If you're weighing a move within Marin or keeping an eye on how a neighborhood like this one is shifting under the surface, Heather Thompson tracks these changes closely, on both sides of the bridge. Schedule a free design and home valuation consultation to talk through what's actually happening in your corner of the map.