On the afternoon of August 15, a visitor from Davis named Leanne Chappell stood inside a newly reopened wooden building on top of the Presidio Parkway tunnels and told a CBS reporter what she liked about it. She said she was interested in history, and that she liked how the Presidio was keeping the historical side of what was there before. She added that it felt like it would be here forever.
She was standing inside The Mess Hall, the three-restaurant, one-kitchen food hall that took over a restored 1897 building at 201 Halleck Street, the same weekend it finally opened after roughly four years of construction and federal permitting. Co-founder Rob Gaon put the timeline in plainer terms to CBS: walking into the Presidio feels like stepping back in time, and working with a federal agency has its own pace.
Four years between a park and a kitchen
Presidio Tunnel Tops opened to the public on July 17, 2022, with a ribbon-cutting led by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The 14-acre park sits directly over the Presidio Parkway tunnels and was built with more than $98 million raised toward a $118 million campaign led by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. What it didn't have, for its first four summers, was an indoor building where you could sit down, order a full meal, and stay through a shift in weather. The park ran on food trucks, grills at Picnic Place, and a small transit-center cafe called Il Parco.
That gap mattered more than it might sound. This stretch of the city, facing the Golden Gate Bridge and Crissy Field, catches the same marine layer that rolls into every north-facing lawn in San Francisco. A park built entirely around outdoor lawns and a playground works beautifully on a clear day and less well when the fog sits low for hours. The building at 201 Halleck Street had been sitting empty on the hilltop the whole time, a leftover from the site's military era, waiting for exactly this use. It just took until this August to get there.
What actually opened inside the building
The Mess Hall is not one restaurant. It's three concepts sharing a single open kitchen, a single ordering system, and one shared check, spread across 6,200 square feet with 88 seats indoors and another 120 on a patio that faces the bridge, Alcatraz, and the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts. Guests order by kiosk, by QR code at the table, or at the counter, and everyone in the group can eat from a different menu and still settle up together.
The three kitchens break down like this:
- Breadwinner covers the sandwich and burger lane: breakfast sandwiches, smashburgers, customizable salads, hearty lunch sandwiches.
- Dayboat Seafood leans into raw and cold plates: oysters, shrimp cocktail, crudo, clam chowder, and build-your-own hand rolls designed to travel back to a desk or out to a lawn.
- Boda runs Korean-Japanese street food: Korean fried chicken, kimchi fried rice, mandu dumplings, and housemade banchan.
A full bar pours cocktails and wine alongside local beer from Cellarmaker in San Francisco and Ghost Town Brewing in Oakland. A separate coffee counter opens at 7 a.m. daily serving Wrecking Ball Coffee and pastries from the James Beard-nominated Breadbelly, including a bodega-style egg and cheese sandwich you can build up with sausage, bacon, or tots. Next to the counter, an all-day market stocks Rize Up sourdough, milk, and basic toiletries, aimed less at day-trippers and more at the roughly 3,000 people who actually live in the Presidio and the 200 businesses operating there, who have never had an easy place nearby to grab groceries.
The people who built it
Co-founder Rob Gaon has put the actual build time at "3.8 years," and the team brought in serious culinary weight to run it. Peter Serpico, a James Beard Award winner who was chef de cuisine at David Chang's Momofuku Noodle Bar and Momofuku Ko before becoming Chang's director of culinary operations, consulted on all three menus. He also made a point of putting something on the menu specifically for kids.
"I made sure to get dino nuggets."
Leonard and Gaon, who is based in Mill Valley, chose the Presidio deliberately rather than treating it as one more food hall location. Leonard told SF Standard the location was the whole reason the project made sense in the first place, and that they wouldn't have taken it on anywhere else. The building's design work went to Studio KDA, the same firm behind the recently opened Bar Panisse in Berkeley, which restored the structure's industrial bones while adding details meant to nod to its 1930s and 1940s look.
The building itself has done a lot of jobs since 1897. Depending on which era you look at, it served as horse feed storage, an Army depot, a butcher shop, and a mailroom before anyone thought to put a raw bar in it.
How it fits into a day at Tunnel Tops
Tunnel Tops already had a food scene scattered around its edges before The Mess Hall opened. Piccino Presidio and Colibri Mexican Bistro sit among the meadows, the Michelin Guide has recognized Dalida, and more than two dozen food trucks rotate through on a regular basis. What was missing was a single indoor anchor that could hold a group through a change in weather, or through an entire day that starts with the Outpost playground and ends with dinner, without anyone needing to leave the park or get back in a car.
September has given the building its first full month to settle into that role. The National Park Service has kept up its daily ranger campfire talks at the Campfire Circle near the Visitor Center, and Fiesta en el Parque returned to the lawns this year for its fourth run, bringing Latin music and dance to the same park The Mess Hall now anchors. The timing also lines up with something bigger: 2026 marks 250 years since Spanish colonists established El Presidio de San Francisco on September 17, 1776, a milestone the Presidio Trust has built its whole 2026 calendar around. The food hall opened into the middle of that anniversary year, in a building nearly as old as the park's founding story itself, if not the site's.
None of this required a reservation. The Mess Hall runs on counter service, seven days a week, open until 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday, with the three restaurant menus available from 11 a.m. onward. For a park that spent four years working best only when the sky cooperated, that's the actual change: the fog can roll in now, and the day doesn't have to end.
Linda Ngo keeps a running list of small shifts like this one across every corner of the Bay Area she covers, because a new kitchen at the edge of a national park says more about a neighborhood's daily rhythm than any headline number ever will. Next time you're up at Tunnel Tops, get the crudo, grab a patio seat facing the bridge, and see what four years of waiting actually bought.
