In August, a customer came into Edith’s Pie in Oakland, bereft about local restaurants and bars that had announced they would soon close. He wondered if the 22nd Street pie shop and café was in trouble, said co-owner Mike Raskin, and told him: “Put up the signal before it’s too late.”

“At that point, it was already too late,” Raskin said. Edith’s sales were down as much as 35% from last year. By November, it closed.

The end of 2025 saw a cascade of closures in the East Bay. Since November, at least 10 popular food-and-drink businesses have announced they will close, including the pioneering Standard Fare in Berkeley; beloved bars Friends and Family, the Lodge and the Good Hop in Oakland; breweries including Roses’ Taproom and 21st Amendment, whose production facility is in San Leandro; and the flagship café of Red Bay Coffee, the Bay Area’s leading Black-owned roaster. Others have warned they could be next.

Business closure announcements are common in the final months of any year, and there were plenty throughout the Bay Area.  

Owners say there’s no single cause, but a maelstrom of familiar challenges, from tariffs and the looming possibility of a recession to post-pandemic shifts in customers’ dining and drinking habits to the increasingly impossible math of sustaining a small, independent business in the Bay Area. And while in San Francisco, an optimistic vibe shift has helped to spark a turnaround for the food industry, Oakland’s post-pandemic recovery remains in flux. Many of the city’s bars and restaurants reported that their sales plummeted this summer and fall — the final catalyst for some owners who had been privately deliberating how much longer they could stay open.

This was the case for Hillary Huffard of Roses’ Taproom in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. She and co-owner Luke Janson had made every feasible pivot to keep their pink-hued brewery alive in recent months, including opening for fewer hours, reducing staffing and, most significantly, shutting down their in-house brewing production, which they hoped would put the business on a path to solvency. But after a brutally slow September and October, the owners faced a “big reckoning,” Huffard said. 

“I really wanted to continue fighting for it, until I realized if I were to advocate to invest more money, to seek out more operating capital, that that would be a risk,” she said. Roses’ served its last beers in November. 

Local bars are grappling with a broader crisis: A nationwide decline in alcohol consumption, particularly among younger generations. The percentage of Americans who report drinking alcohol hit a nearly 90-year low earlier this year, according to a Gallup poll. To survive, some Bay Area craft breweries are shifting away from beer. (Meanwhile, some local bars are finding ways to thrive.) Some bar owners didn’t believe the nationwide trend was fully to blame for their businesses’ declines; Huffard said she noticed some regulars changing their preferences to non-alcoholic drinks but she was excited, not daunted, by the opportunity. 

Alexeis Filipello, who owns Oakland dive bar the Lodge, which will close in January, said many customers quit or pared back drinking during the pandemic and that even more are spending frugally amidst nationwide economic uncertainty. Customers might still come in for a drink or two after work on a Friday or Saturday night, “but then there’s Monday through Thursday. There’s Sunday night. Those five slow days to one busy day — you can't make enough to keep a full staff supported,” she said.

Filipello, a veteran of the East Bay bar scene, said the 10-year-old Lodge has been struggling for months. Payroll has been late several times. She also runs a day spa in Nevada City, which she said helps to pay for the bar. “I have to make really tough choices. Am I going to pay my staff, or am I going to pay the bookkeeper? Am I going to try to make a whole new menu with new products and keep it fun and exciting or am I going to try to keep the business surviving?” she said. “The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze at a certain point.”

Before shutting down, both the Lodge and Edith’s Pie launched GoFundMe campaigns to help cover their closing costs: $200,000 for the Lodge and $50,000 for Edith’s. (Neither have met their fundraising goals.) 

When a popular local business closes, a well-worn cycle begins. The initial announcement is met with an outpouring of sadness and, often, a boom in business. In Standard Fare’s final days, for example, a line wrapped around the block and the kitchen sold out of most daytime dishes; dinner sales quadrupled. Customers go in for their final meal or drink, lamenting the loss of another local favorite. Then, more or less, they move on.

“I think there’s a cultural pain that will come,” Raskin predicted. “You’ll look backwards and be like, ‘All of my favorite places are gone.’”

Berkeley’s Standard Fare, which Kelsie Kerr opened 11 years ago, was beloved for vegetable-driven sandwiches and other seasonal fare that looked simple on the plate, but was often incredibly labor intensive. The kitchen once made nearly every ingredient in its sandwiches from scratch, from the house-baked bread to fermented pepper paste, aioli, chimichurri, hummus and macerated organic vegetables from local farms. The menu changed every day. In the last year or so, Standard Fare stopped making its own bread and bacon to save on labor, which made up more than 50% of the business’ costs, Kerr said. Last year, she opened the restaurant for dinner service to bring in more sales, which helped, but ultimately not enough to sustain the business. Standard Fare closed on Dec. 19.

“If it’s not a financially feasible thing to do anymore, I’m sad, but I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to get to do this and be part of people’s lives,” she said.

Many of these businesses fall into a challenging category: striving to be affordable while paying for high-quality ingredients and fair wages for labor. “It’s the classic conundrum: We’re not fast casual. We’re not a dive bar,” Friends and Family owner Blake Cole said in a previous interview with the Chronicle. “We have certain costs that are going to be more expensive than other places, but we’re also not a Michelin-rated restaurant that has guaranteed reservations.” 

Many owners said they were reluctant to raise prices for fear of driving away customers. As small, independent businesses, they could only increase volume by so much; both Roses’ and Edith’s tried to shore up losses with wholesale, but didn’t have the capacity to scale to what would have saved the businesses. “People are unable to spend as much money. We’re not able or willing to charge what it costs us to produce it. It became an unsolvable equation,” Huffard said. 

Several Oakland restaurant and bar owners expressed frustration with what feels like a lack of urgency to their plight in local government. Owners said Oakland should offer more grants to help businesses open, and form a commission that investigates why it’s difficult for small businesses to survive in the city. 

“They were really paying attention to small business in the early 2000s and they just lost sight after the pandemic,” Filipello said of the City of Oakland. “There’s not a lot of financial support or incentive or grants or business loans.”

Some elected officials have acknowledged this sentiment, that “City Hall hasn’t always sent the message to businesses that we value them,” Council Member Zac Unger previously told the Chronicle.

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee — who took office this May after a contentious mayoral recall and amidst the exodus of three major professional sports teams, high office vacancy rate and public safety concerns — has put forth some business relief proposals, including permit reforms and a ballot measure that would temporarily lower taxes for existing small businesses and provide tax breaks for new businesses of any size. If approved, the tax breaks would take effect in 2027.  

“I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, but that’s not a ‘now’ solution,” Raskin said. “We’re at critical point where we need ‘now’ solutions.” 

Early next year, another chef will attempt to make the math work inside Standard Fare’s brick-walled corner building in Berkeley. Emmanuel Galvan of Bolita Masa, a popular Mexican popup devoted to heirloom nixtamalized corn, will open Café Bolita with tamales, fresh tortillas, tostadas and some dishes that pay homage to Standard Fare, all at prices between $9 and $15.

“How special is it for me to hand over the baton to someone doing something heartfelt, traditional and trying to preserve traditional ingredients that I would hate to lose?” Kerr said. “I look forward to seeing what the next generation is going to bring.”