Leo Petroni, the son of Lorenzo Petroni, one of the restaurant’s late founders, confirmed this week that the restaurant will serve patrons and honor existing reservations through the end of December. 

“The restaurant will be closing at the end of the year unless we locate a buyer to carry our traditions forward,” said Petroni. 

On Wednesday, North Beach Restaurant’s longtime home, a white 1920s-era building that stands two stories tall at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and Stockton Street, hit the market. 

Catherine Meunier and Santino DeRose of San Francisco real estate firm Maven Commercial have the listing and are advertising the 6,400-square-foot restaurant’s assets. The asking price is $4.5 million, according to a sales brochure for the property shared with the Chronicle. 

Petroni said that North Beach Restaurant’s closure is the result of a combination of factors: His father’s death in 2014 was the “end of an era” for the business, and recovering from the pandemic has been challenging. But even before 2020, the city was changing rapidly, he said.

“Tourism has gone down tremendously. The convention business has gone down, and that was before the pandemic. Club Fugazi closed,” said Petroni, referring to the longtime North Beach home of the musical revue “Beach Blanket Babylon.” “So there was a combination of things, and then you get hit with COVID. And that’s really tough.”

The restaurant shuttered for nearly 18 months at the start of the pandemic, reopening again in late 2021. But things haven’t been the same, said general manager Maureen Donegan. 

“We were reopened by September 2021 and then started to get ahead of steam and then Omicron came in January,” said Donegan, referring to the COVID variant. “Then you build up again — everyone was going out last summer and fall, people were building their businesses — and then you get to this year and now we’re fighting this whole image of San Francisco being a place that’s not safe.”

Donegan said that she was tapped following the pandemic shutdown to “bring the restaurant into the 21st century.” She spearheaded renovations of the restaurant space and private rooms below and updated the menu.

Many of the “old school San Franciscans” whom North Beach Restaurant served for decades had moved out of the city during the pandemic, Donegan said. The restaurant also experienced a brief moment of misdirected public backlash when it was mistaken for another establishment in North Beach that had refused service to police officers in late 2021.  

But it was the drop in tourism in recent years that proved to be the biggest challenge to the restaurant’s long-term recovery.

“This was the worst summer I’ve ever seen in 35 years of restaurant business. July and August were just atrocious,” said Donegan. “It just makes it really hard to operate when there’s no one there.”

Petroni said that it is difficult to let go of the business that his father — an Italian immigrant who worked his way up from dishwasher to renowned restaurateur and proprietor of Petroni Vineyards in Sonoma County — built with his late business partner, Bruno Orsi.