He pays $35,000 a month to run a ‘third space' in a dying S.F. mall. Will it survive?
Executive Order founder John Eric Sanchez said he doesn't want to close his bar in the San Francisco Centre Mall, despite most of the shopping center's businesses leaving. (Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle)
There are moments when John Eric Sanchez can almost forget he is paying $35,000 a month to operate a cocktail bar in the dying San Francisco Centre Mall.
Take the "Soul Train" dance party last Sunday. It drew a hundred people to Sanchez's venue, the Executive Order Bar & Lounge, which faces Mission Street from the mall's exterior. As dusk glimmered through the windows, patrons bobbed and swayed to classic Motown, or sat in wingback chairs and sipped drinks from fluted glasses. The lights were sultry, the outfits were grown and sexy, the shrimp po' boy sliders and top shelf liquors were flowing.
Other nights are frustrating. Two hundred people RSVP'd for a "Pitch My BFF" dating event in October, but only about 30 people showed up. Sanchez sat on a bar stool near the front window, chewing a piece of pizza and wearing a fatigued, but resolute expression. He'd grown accustomed to being ghosted. But he won't put up with it any more.
BJ Tilos, general manager and event host, talks to participants and guests at the Executive Order Bar & Lounge during the elevator pitch-style speed dating event "Pitch My BFF" in October. The bar has tried themed events like this to try to attract business. (Jana Ašenbrennerová/Jana AÅ¡enbrennerová/For the S.)
For years, Sanchez had struggled as foot traffic evaporated in SoMa and other businesses fled the mall one by one. With the expense of rent, $20,000 a year for insurance, and labor costs for ten employees, he estimates he would have to make $350,000 a month to remain profitable. That's an impossible benchmark when offices are vacant and the department store next door is boarded up.
Earlier this month lenders foreclosed on the 1.5 million square foot mall property, now a near-empty monument at 865 Market St. On Nov. 18, Sanchez and other remaining tenants received letters from a lawyer representing the new owner, an entity called DBJPM 2016-SFC Emporium, LLC.
The message: Their leases had been terminated. But Sanchez refused to give up.
"We're trying to hold out as long as we can," he said, sitting at the bar on Monday afternoon, as two hired rodent exterminators roamed the lounge area. Although Sanchez pays fees for the mall to handle pest control, he said the new owners have little hands-on involvement. He's keeping the loading docks and emergency exits clean on his own.
Representatives of JLL, the real estate brokerage managing the mall, did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer representing the bank that owns the mall declined to comment.
The desolate, domed structure serves as a powerful metaphor for San Francisco's stagnant downtown recovery, in sharp contrast to the freewheeling mood when Executive Order opened, in late 2018.
The Executive Order Bar & Lounge in San Francisco has been sent a letter by its new ownwers that its lease in the San Francisco Centre Mall has been terminated, according to the bar's owner. (Jana Ašenbrennerová/Jana AÅ¡enbrennerová/For the S.)
City officials and boosters had envisioned the bar as an anchor to the Filipino arts and business district in SoMa. Sanchez, who previously owned a watering hole in Chinatown, had spent a year securing loans, a liquor license and support from City Hall. His new space in what was then Westfield Mall seemed promising. Its doors opened to a bustling stretch of Mission, bordered by the back entrance of Bloomingdale's. The rent hovered at $26,000 a month back then, and was projected to rise annually, but the block was busy enough to make it feasible.
Inside, Sanchez decorated the walls of Executive Order with deer antlers and sepia-toned photographs of old presidents, blending a venerable, American history vibe with flavors of multicultural San Francisco. A celebrity chef helped develop a menu that combined finger food with lumpia to mark Sanchez's Filipino roots.
During its inaugural months, the bar hosted engagement parties and black-tie gatherings, catered to crowds from conventions at Moscone Center, welcomed office-goers in the Financial District for nightly happy hours and served signature cocktails to tourists from nearby hotels.
"They're a very important community asset," said Desi Danganan, founder of Kultivate Labs, a nonprofit that helps develop cultural districts. He and others had tried to reimagine SoMa as an arts corridor rivaling parts of Chinatown or Japantown. Executive Order was key to that concept.
"Commercial areas have that drag you can walk, that central hub," Danganan said. "And Executive Order was so important to that aspect."
More than a bar or nightclub, Executive Order represented, in Danganan's words, a sort of "third space." People congregated there for 50th birthday parties, political meet-the-candidate forums or dance nights where DJs spun west coast and Filipino hip-hop. Community organizers held afterparties at Executive Order for the "Undiscovered" night market. The bar's pastiche aesthetic, mixing American presidents with Filipino music and cuisine, became a statement about what the neighborhood wanted to be.
A mural with an ode to "American Progress" is seen decorating a lounge area with sofas and shadow box cocktail tables that tell different stories from American history at Executive Order in San Francsico. (Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle)
Then a global pandemic swept in, and everything unraveled. Lockdown orders forced businesses to close. Streets emptied out in San Francisco. The restaurant and hospitality industries cratered. Sanchez, who had just been diagnosed with bladder cancer, had to cancel all the events on his bar's calendar, and refund the deposits people had paid.
On the night of May 30, 2020, vandals shattered the front glass windows of Executive Order and stole numerous bottles of liquor from the shelves. Sanchez, who had been preparing to open for modified service in June, found himself obligated to post a long, heart-wrenching plea for help on the crowd-funded donation site GoFundMe. He earned about $13,000.
Still, Sanchez was a survivor. When his landlords at Westfield offered a parachute plan for beleaguered tenants to cut their leases and leave, Sanchez refused. He began negotiating with the owners for an alternate option to pay up to 30% of his sales revenue as rent. In the meantime, he obtained a federal economic disaster loan and state grants to help stabilize his business.
"I could have taken a loss and walked away," he said. "But a lot of people were involved in making this happen. And I was feeling emboldened. I was able to fight off cancer. The government was able to offer loans. I believed in the city, and I believed in that building."
A second, more severe round of calamities came in 2023. Nordstrom, a flagship tenant at Westfield, announced its departure. With downtown shopping at a nadir, Westfield and its partner, Brookfield Properties, walked away from the property, allowing a bank to take over and appoint a receiver to manage the mall's operations.
The Hancock Room Bar & Lounge on the mezzanine level of Executive Order in San Francisco. (Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle)
In the chaos that followed, dozens of shops and restaurants shut down. Sanchez tried in vain to resume talks with the new owners of a rapidly deteriorating building, rechristened San Francisco Centre. He kept asking to get the rent-as-a-portion-of-sales deal in writing. At times, he stopped paying rent altogether, just to get the landlords' attention.
Today, the walkways of Westfield are barren and institutional gray, the storefronts have roller shades drawn. A couple kiosks remain open on the ground floor, including Shake Shack and Panda Express, which mostly function as ghost kitchens for delivery orders. Otherwise, the halls are cavernous, the lights are out and only a few people loiter at the old food court tables, waiting to be shooed away by security guards. Even the vending machines are broken.
Executive Order sits at the far end of the property, clean and well-lit amid decay. Sanchez said he's booked events through March, and would stay on if the mall changed ownership again, provided he can get the rent adjusted. He's even talked of a rebrand, changing the bar's name to "Mahal," which means either "love," or "expensive" in Tagalog. The new moniker would allow Sanchez to lean into his Filipino heritage, and distance himself from an "executive order" that people associate with ICE raids. Danganan hoped to convene local artists to paint a mural on the building's side walls.
But it's hard for a business that's so focused on basic self-preservation to dream about the future.
"This building is beautiful, it has such great bones, it's filled with people who risked everything," Sanchez said. "These are landlords who would rather see their spaces empty and rot away, than work with tenants to keep the buildings lit up and having activity."
Real estate insiders have speculated that the owners of San Francisco Centre are trying to evict tenants so they can close the money-losing property, possibly to put it on the market for redevelopment.
Within the next few years, a university campus could move to Fifth and Mission streets, providing clientele for any bar or restaurant that survives the transition. Sanchez worries that by then, Executive Order will be gone.
