The chef April Bloomfield is no longer involved in Tosca Cafe, the 100-year-old San Francisco landmark restaurant that she revived in 2013 with the restaurateur Ken Friedman, her former business partner. After abruptly closing on Saturday night, Ms. Bloomfield said in a statement that she expected the restaurant to reopen soon, but under “new management.”
Tosca Cafe, in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, is the latest casualty of the meltdown of the pair’s restaurant group, which at its peak in 2017 encompassed seven restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In December of 2017, a report in The New York Times revealed a pattern of verbal abuse and sexual harassment at the restaurants they owned and ran together. While Mr. Friedman’s aggressions were singled out by 10 women who had worked for them, Ms. Bloomfield was also accused of doing little to protect the victims. Mr. Friedman issued an apologetic statement and stepped away from daily operations, and the empire was ultimately dissolved in June of 2018. Months later, Ms. Bloomfield spoke publicly about the accusations for the first time, in an interview that addressed her own responsibilities and regrets.
In the separation, Mr. Friedman gained sole control of the Spotted Pig, the pair’s flagship restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, and the place where Ms. Bloomfield made her name as a chef when it opened in 2004.
Ms. Bloomfield kept all the remaining restaurants: Tosca Cafe, Hearth & Hound in Los Angeles, and the Breslin Bar and Dining Room and the John Dory Oyster Bar, both in the Ace Hotel in Manhattan’s NoMad neighborhood. (Salvation Taco and White Gold Butchers had already closed in the aftermath of the scandal.)
But Hearth & Hound closed in January, the John Dory closed in February (to be replaced by a marquee Milk Bar store from the chef Christina Tosi) and Ms. Bloomfield’s version of Tosca served its last meal on Saturday night.
Ms. Bloomfield has come full circle: She moved back to New York from California and now has just one restaurant, as she did when she arrived from England to create the original menu for the Spotted Pig.
Since opening in 2010, the Breslin has been Ms. Bloomfield’s most adventurous kitchen, where she was not confined by the Spotted Pig’s identity as a hectic, star-studded gastropub, or by the John Dory’s single-minded dedication to seafood. She served headcheese and fried lamb fat and stuffed pigs’ feet alongside popular lamb burgers, triple-fried French fries and sticky toffee pudding, and won a Michelin star for it all in 2011. (It retained that star until the most recent guide was released; inspectors cited a decline in “consistency and quality” as the reason for demotion.)
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