In May, three splashy new food businesses that Miami chef Brad Kilgore opened in San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid Center abruptly closed after the iconic skyscraper was sold to a new owner. Now, Kilgore is preparing to open a new restaurant just blocks away.
Kilgore’s newest project, a seafood restaurant named the Bonacker, is slated to open in early 2027 at 568 Sacramento St., where the once-buzzing Leo’s Oyster Bar closed in July after its lease ended and its owner filed for bankruptcy. The Bonacker will mark Kilgore’s comeback to downtown, where in late 2024 and early 2025 he had opened Italian Japanese restaurant Ama by Brad Kilgore, casual all-day spot Café Sebastian and frozen desserts shop MadLab Kakigori, his first businesses in San Francisco.
Kilgore, a James Beard-nominated chef best known for his four, now-closed restaurants in Miami, said he is happy to open a new restaurant in the same neighborhood. Shortly after his San Francisco businesses shut down, he said he received several lease offers, including for the Leo’s space. Kilgore was drawn to the location due to the proximity to his former restaurants. He had also been wanting to open a seafood restaurant. “We had some conversations (about possible locations) but this was the only one that was in our serious consideration,” he said.
The Bonacker refers to a name for the longtime locals of Accabonac Harbor, a major oyster production area in East Hampton on New York’s Long Island, where his managing partner Julian Uribe is from. The restaurant will offer three different types of Bay Area or Northern California oysters, along with one or two East Coast bivalves. Fresh-shucked oysters will be paired with sauces made from scratch, some classic, while others will incorporate ingredients one may not expect to see in seafood dishes, Kilgore’s dijonnaise, for example, gets flavor blasted with Massaman curry powder. Other chilled items will include a tower made up of a three-piece set of sandwich rolls filled with crab, shrimp and lobster.
Hot dishes may include a Sichuan peppercorn fish sandwich and a buttery saffron risotto with fresh Montauk red shrimp, prized for its sweet flavor and rich texture, flown in from New York. There will also be hot lobster rolls with fresh claw meat in a brioche bun, served with a lobster bisque drizzled with chile morita and green onion oil. To make the soup, Kilgore reduces San Marzano tomatoes in a vat with heavy cream, coconut milk and lobster carcasses. “When you dunk (the lobster roll) into the bisque it balances the heat and richness,” Kilgore said.
The bar will pour wines from Napa, Sonoma, France and Italy. Bottles may cost between $110 and $250 while wines-by-the-glass will run from $20 to $40. A cocktail menu is currently being developed. Kilgore plans to offer happy hour every day — plus, on Tuesdays, bottles of sparkling wine will be half off.
The Bonacker will accommodate 40 diners in a main dining room, plus another 15 in the bar area, and more space in a back dining room and a sun room. The space will get a revamp from lauded San Francisco designer Ken Fulk, who created Leo’s eye-catching look, featuring soft lighting from shell-shaped sconces, patterned wallpaper and 1950s-style checkerboard floors. Fulk wrote in a statement that he plans to “keep the essence of what made Leo’s so magical, while breathing new life into this beloved spot.”
Kilgore, for his part, has his eyes set on San Francisco. He hopes to eventually bring back his previous restaurants, especially Ama. “That place was buzzing, so that would be nice,” Kilgore said.
Dining and Cooking