Sears Fine Food has been serving up its “world-famous 18 Swedish pancakes” in San Francisco’s Union Square since 1938. The dining landmark has been visited by everyone from cable-car tourists to former President Bill Clinton and entertainer Tony Bennett. Now the family who owned Sears from the 1950s until 2004 has put the building that hosts the restaurant on the market with an asking price of $15.5 million.
Sears is located at 439 Powell, a half-block from its original and much smaller Union Square location, where two pink Cadillacs served as a waiting room for tourists who wanted its pancakes. The Cadillacs were the idea of Quita Benner, according to preservation group San Francisco Heritage. Benner bought the restaurant in the 1950s from its founders Ben Sears, a former circus clown, and his wife Hilbur. The couple started the first Sears location down the coast in San Luis Obispo in 1924 using Hibur’s family’s secret Swedish pancake recipe.
Benner bought the trademarked recipe and kept the menu and the name when she took over. By the early 1960s the restaurant was doing so well that her son-in-law, Albert Boyajian, led the charge to move to a larger space and in 1964 the family bought 435-441 Powell.
In addition to a two-story portion of the building that houses Sears and a vacant salon space on the second floor, totaling more than 9,000 square feet of commercial space, there is also a slim six-story residential portion with 10 studio apartments, according to the listing site from agent Jeremy Blatteis of Blatteis Realty. Nine of the 10 units are rented, according to the site.
On the listing site, Blattis said the 1907 building is on the market for the first time in more than 80 years, even though other historical accountings of the restaurant give the 1964 date. He did not reply to requests for comment.
Public records show that the building still belongs to Boyajian’s son, Lee, and his wife Joan, who ran Sears together after Boyajin died in 1991 until the end of 2003, when they told the San Francisco Chronicle they could not afford to keep the restaurant going because they were too far in debt. Back property taxes, insurance and labor disputes were some of their financial issues.
“We were going to see if we could qualify for another loan, but … we just didn’t know if it would be worth it to go deeper in debt to save it,” Lee Boyajian said at the time.
After a short closure, the couple sold the restaurant in 2004 to Man Kim, who owned several Lori’s Diners, a Chinese restaurant and a sushi restaurant and was the director of the Union Square Association. Kim invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to update the interior and digitize the restaurant; he also added dinner service and opened the restaurant seven days a week instead of five. He signed a 20-year-lease with a 10-year option and paid $20,000 a month for rent and the rights to sell Sears pancake mix in to-go bags, according to the Chronicle.
“I really feel strongly that this restaurant should not close,” Kim said at the time.
Union Square was hit hard by the loss of tourist and business travelers during the pandemic, though recently it has seen an uptick in foot traffic and several high-profile retailers have signed leases.
On the listing site, Blatteis said Union Square “should see an increase in tourism” and that the Sears property “offers an investor a generational opportunity to acquire a true ‘jewel’ that boasts a rich history intertwined into San Francisco’s DNA.”
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