Three ambitious California restaurants survived for less than a year after opening in 2025. Their exceptionally short runs place them among the restaurant closures that have shocked customers across America.
Hamburger Project struggled to attract customers before becoming associated with an alarming photograph of raw beef left on a San Francisco sidewalk during a heat wave. Dreamboat Diner and Vulture spent years in development, only to open after the restaurant economy had changed dramatically beneath them.
In hindsight, each carried warning signs that made its rapid demise seem almost inevitable.
Hamburger Project in San Francisco
Hamburger Project’s Mission District location soft-opened in mid-October 2025 and closed on April 19, 2026, giving the smashburger restaurant a lifespan of roughly six months.
The restaurant occupied a prominent corner at 598 Guerrero Street that has cycled through a striking number of short-lived concepts over the years. The same ownership group previously operated the sushi-focused Handroll Project in the space before flipping it into a second Hamburger Project.
The new concept never generated the excitement enjoyed by the original Hamburger Project on Divisadero Street.
“We simply weren’t getting the traction needed at that location,” co-owner Tan Truong told Eater San Francisco.
The Mission location also opened under a cloud. In late 2024 and early 2025, an online dispute between then-executive chef Geoffrey Lee and food influencer Kat Ensign — which spiraled into accusations of harassment — led Lee to step back from Hamburger Project, Handroll Project and the group’s Michelin Guide-listed omakase restaurant Ju-Ni. That controversy played out primarily around the original Divisadero location, but the fallout followed the restaurant group into its new Mission venture.
Any hope of quietly building a customer base became more difficult in late March 2026, when a photograph showed four tubes of raw ground beef and a jar of mayonnaise sitting on the sidewalk outside the restaurant during San Francisco’s early-spring heat wave.
No employees were inside when the delivery arrived. The driver left the products outside, where a neighbor photographed them and posted the image to Reddit.
Hamburger Project said the compromised food was immediately discarded and never served. Nevertheless, the image spread across social media and generated national attention just weeks before the restaurant closed.
The raw-beef episode was not officially blamed for the shutdown. The owners instead pointed to weak customer traffic.
Still, a restaurant already struggling after only a few months could hardly afford a viral food-safety controversy. The original Divisadero Street Hamburger Project remains open, but the Mission experiment ended almost as quickly as it began.
Dreamboat Diner in San Diego
Dreamboat Diner opened in San Diego’s University Heights neighborhood in May 2025 and served its final customers on February 8, 2026.
The entirely plant-based restaurant was not designed as an ordinary neighborhood diner. It was a meticulously styled, 10-seat “micro-diner” offering coffee, pastries, breakfast dishes, burgers, shakes and desserts at different times of the day.
Dreamboat also served as the entrance to Vulture, an elaborate vegan fine-dining restaurant hidden behind a hallway and velvet curtain.
The two concepts were visually striking, but Dreamboat’s tiny size limited how many customers it could serve. Its fully vegan menu also narrowed the potential audience before many walk-in customers ever discovered Vulture in the back of the building.
The restaurants followed a five-year, design-heavy redevelopment of the property. During that period, food, labor, borrowing and operating expenses rose significantly.
Owner Kory Stetina later acknowledged that choices that appeared workable when the project began had become far riskier by the time the restaurants finally opened.
“The project took years to bring to life, and during that time the climate of our industry changed underneath our feet,” Stetina told San Diego Magazine.
Dreamboat received praise for its inventive design and earned a VegNews nomination for best vegan diner, along with an Orchid design award nomination from the San Diego Architectural Foundation. Recognition, however, could not overcome the economics of operating a highly specialized restaurant with only a handful of seats.
Less than nine months after opening, the dream was over.
Vulture in San Diego
Vulture opened behind Dreamboat on June 16, 2025 and closed alongside it on February 8, 2026.
The restaurant represented an even bigger gamble.
Vulture was billed as San Diego’s first high-end, fully plant-based restaurant. It reimagined classic steakhouse and continental dishes without meat or dairy, offering creations such as lion’s mane mushroom Steak Diane, vegan oysters Rockefeller and a Caesar salad made with chickpea-based cultured cheese.
Its theatrical dining room featured dramatic wallpaper, sculptures, custom plasterwork, velvet accents and elaborate cocktails. The restaurant earned a VegNews nomination for best new vegan restaurant in the country, an Orchid design award nomination from the San Diego Architectural Foundation and generally strong attention for its design.
However, fine dining is expensive to operate even when it appeals to a broad audience. Vulture combined high labor and opening costs with a vegan-only menu, an elaborate service model and a customer base becoming increasingly cautious about expensive restaurant meals.
The owners said the restaurants had real support and momentum but could not overcome their financial structure.
“High opening and operating costs, combined with the economic realities of today, ultimately made it unsustainable,” Stetina said.
Vulture’s food and design may have been admired, but admiration did not guarantee enough repeat customers willing to support an upscale plant-based restaurant.
The concept remained open for less than eight months.
Big ideas met difficult economics
Calling these restaurants doomed from the start does not mean they lacked creativity or good food.
Dreamboat and Vulture were developed by experienced operators whose other San Diego concepts — Kindred and Mothership — have found significant success. Hamburger Project’s original San Francisco location also continues operating.
The problem was the combination of ambition and vulnerability.
Hamburger Project opened a second location in a space with a long history of short restaurant runs, launched under the shadow of an existing controversy, then suffered a damaging viral incident. Dreamboat tried to support an extensive operation from a 10-seat diner. Vulture paired costly fine dining with an intentionally narrow plant-based audience.
All three opened with attention and optimism in 2025. None survived long enough to celebrate its first anniversary.
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