Walk into Crocker Galleria at 50 Post St. in downtown San Francisco, and the first thing you’ll notice is that the grand, airy three-story mall is almost completely dead. Except for, that is, Julie’s Kitchen on the third floor, which remains a bustling lunch destination on most work days.
Julie’s is run by Julie and Jisoo Yoo, who opened the restaurant in 2014 and grew it into a favorite of the downtown office crowd. Back then, all three stories of the galleria were full of tenants. As of today, Julie’s is one of only three remaining businesses, and by far the busiest.
Despite that, and the fact that the Yoos say they’ve never missed rent, the future of Julie’s is at risk. Its lease, which was up for a five-year renewal this year, remains in purgatory as the Yoos fight landlord PGIM, Inc. (formerly Prudential Global Investment Management) in court for the right to stay at Crocker Galleria. A key tentative court ruling on Friday afternoon could determine whether the case goes to trial in 2026.
PGIM argues that it can legally evict Julie’s Kitchen because the business failed to meet its contractual minimum annual revenue from 2020 to 2023. The Yoos, on the other hand, say that PGIM is misportraying the obvious cause for a drop in revenue in that time period: the pandemic and the hollowing out of the financial district. They also say that PGIM took steps that made it difficult to run Julie’s Kitchen, including failing to repair common areas, refusing to advertise the mall, and ignoring other contractual obligations stated in the lease.
All along, the Yoos paid rent. Now, even with their sales back near a pre-pandemic level, the Yoos claim that PGIM is continuing a pattern of behavior intended to force them out ahead of a planned redevelopment of the mall into a gleaming hub of offices, new restaurants and retail. The couple maintains that PGIM has manipulated or falsified revenue numbers to justify the initial eviction notice.
“To have our lease terminated in November 2023, based on what we allege are fabricated sales figures, at the very moment we had finally overcome a global crisis, was deeply shocking,” co-owner Jisoo Yoo told Gazetteer in an email. “The stress goes beyond financial loss. It is the sense of betrayal by a landlord we believe actively worked to undermine a small business that had proven it could survive.”
The Yoos’ goal is to continue operating at Crocker Galleria and to complete the lease dispute through a trial, Jisoo Yoo added. “We believe we still belong here,” he said, noting that “negotiating exit scenarios” is not their goal.
(PGIM/Post-Montgomery Associates did not respond to Gazetteer’s request for comment by press time.)
Crocker Galleria opened in 1982 as an attached mall to the 38-story One Montgomery Tower, and the skylit property had upwards of 60 tenants during its peak. The upcoming redevelopment is designed to not just modernize the center, but shift the usage of space toward office tenants.
The Yoos say they do not want to stand in the way of the redevelopment, but rather make PGIM honor its current lease before the two parties figure out the future. Whether Julie’s Kitchen would stay amid a renovation is unclear. In January 2020, PGIM ordered Julie’s Kitchen to relocate within Crocker Galleria to a new space ahead of the start of planned construction, but the order was scuttled by onset of the pandemic.
The Yoos say that in the following years, PGIM stopped managing Crocker Galleria to its previous standards. In the lawsuit, they note that the escalators were left inoperable at different times between 2020 and 2023, with repair parts left scattered across the first floor. The Yoos say PGIM ignored dust and grime building up on common spaces, failed to provide proper HVAC in the building, and did not fulfill its obligation to promote existing Crocker Galleria businesses. This happened at the same time PGIM raised common-area maintenance fees on Julie’s Kitchen, the Yoos claim.
“The trial was previously vacated just months before it was scheduled to begin, which was a major setback,” Jisoo Yoo said in an email. “[Our] goal is to secure a firm trial date and finally have the opportunity to present evidence of what we believe was a trap set over time.”
