There’s only one way to make a gloomy San Francisco afternoon gloomier, and that’s to dine at the San Francisco Centre, the phantom mall formerly called the Westfield Emporium that serves as the poster child of the city’s doom loop narrative.
Pre-pandemic, the 1.2 million-square-foot mall at 865 Market St. hosted nine stories of popular brands, a movie theater, and spa. These days, it’s 95 percent vacant.
In the past six months, the food court has seen a violent exodus: Jamba Juice, Blondie’s Pizza, Izzy & Wooks, Mija Cochinita, Umai Savory Hot Dogs, Fire of Brazil Express, Wetzel’s Pretzels, Sarku Japan, and Mashaallah Halal Pakistani Food Restaurant closed one after another, leaving the downstairs food court effectively gutted. Mashaallah co-owner Mohammad Waqar told SFGATE last month the decision was “like taking off the ventilator from a dead body.”
I decided to go for one last meal before the whole place flatlines.
For my sad lunch, there are just two remaining restaurants to choose from in the once-booming food court: Panda Express and Shake Shack. It’s a great place to eat if you’re feeling emotionally masochistic and too physically healthy.
As I descended the escalator to the basement level, it was clear that the mall had actually died and was in its ghostly phase. The hollow, tiled interior made the overhead music sound echoey and full of eerie reverb, the Top 40 hits unrecognizable. Some people sought respite from life on the pavement in the court’s shadowed corners. Delivery drivers in Tron helmets filtered in and out anonymously. The Shake Shack and Panda Express were little glimmers of civilization, the last franchises on a dead planet; if you directed your gaze there and only there, it almost felt like a normal mall.
I waded in decision paralysis, having not eaten either food chain since before high school, until finally opting for Panda. At roughly a dollar per 150 calories, a meal here could be a cost-effective option for the end of the world.
It was neither empty nor full. It seems those with a hankering for Panda or Shake Shack will weather the bad vibes. There were some office workers, a few security officers. There were also enough unaccompanied, unoccupied diners to trigger my terrible tendency of hallucinating broad assumptions about the feelings and lives of those eating alone and then subsequently get terribly depressed over those assumptions. I’m a sad lunch professional.
The Centre is more like a cemetery than a mall. But this may be a Market Street-specific issue, after all: Just a couple miles away, the Stonestown Galleria has little vacancy, and it's often frustratingly packed. I stared at my sad lunch and tried to turn it into the Stonestown Marugame Udon with my eyeballs.
The San Francisco Centre has been struggling since its previous operator Westfield and partner Brookfield Properties announced they would surrender the mall to its lender in June 2023, just after Nordstrom ended its 35-year residency at the mall. In the two years since, most of the retail companies have vacated their shops in the Centre. As I ate my sad lunch, my view was the old Bloomingdale’s, which closed in spring 2025.
Gregg Williams of Trident Pacific was appointed the mall’s receiver in October 2023. The Newport Beach-based company and partners JLL made a flimsy attempt to breathe new life into the mall by changing the name to Emporium in 2024. Spoiler: It didn’t work. The building just sold in a nine-times-delayed auction to a conglomerate of banks and investors led by Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase ,for the minimum bid of $133 million. The property was reportedly worth $1.2 billion in 2016, making this sale price just 11% of that value.
The property’s landlord, San Francisco Unified School District (not kidding), is apparently owed millions. It has granted a lease for the space through 2043 for $1 million a year plus 0.1% of the mall’s gross revenue, which these days puts the total annual rent in the ballpark of $1,000,020.
As I poked at my chow mein and eggplant tofu, Kelly Clarkson told me amid the reverb that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I wondered why the rotating circus of firms couldn’t figure out how to do either to this place.
The last time I ate Panda Express was probably around 2011 off Route 202 in central New Jersey. Here, pushing the wet noodles of my sad, sad lunch around with a plastic fork (the city’s compost-forward packaging trend hasn’t yet made it underground), I felt a rare nostalgia for the malls of my childhood, especially with the holidays approaching. I missed the bustle, the echoing of hundreds of voices, the smell of buttery soft pretzels. I somehow missed the screaming children, the weird holiday-themed photo scenes, and the people at kiosks who nonconsensually spray you with scents.
I missed all that, even though I hate malls. But I hate that there’s nothing left to hate at the Centre and I learned at a young age that you should never speak ill of the dead.
