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San Francisco Bay Area favorite La Mediterranee is approaching five decades in business thanks to the right balance of old and new.
The team behind the beloved Mediterranean restaurant opened its first location in San Francisco in 1979. It’s expanded over time, opening a second San Francisco location, a catering facility, and another restaurant across the bay in Berkeley. In the famously boom-and-bust Bay Area, La Med, as the locals call it, has seen some stuff.
It’s weathered a few cycles of tech-fueled economic ups and downs, facing its share of San Francisco-style wins and losses. The city granted the business legacy status in 2019, a designation that carries added help and protections. More recently, its original location on Fillmore Street faced potential closure under a new landlord. Late last year, owners announced the restaurant would stay open, at least through 2028 — great news for the locals that love it.
I spoke with Trevor Ledergerber, a La Mediterranee co-owner who’s worked at the restaurant since 2012. “A casual restaurant with decent prices and a server waiting on you is a dying breed in restaurants,” he said. But the restaurant has managed to maintain much of what made it special decades ago, even as the industry (and the neighborhood) changed around it.
Honoring longtime customer expectations
New restaurants tend to fall on one end of the spectrum, according to Ledergerber. They’re either high-end, full-service concepts, or they’re casual counter-service spots built for speed and volume.
La Med is neither. It offers what Ledergerber calls a “kind of old-school” menu where entrees come with a soup or salad to satisfy the kind of expectations diners had 20 years ago. (It’s meant to satisfy stomachs, too. “A warm meal that’ll fill you up as well as being delicious and unique,” he added.)
Take lunch at La Med, which hovers around $18. “We’ve always said that at minimum wage, an hour’s worth of work should pay for a good, sit-down meal with someone taking good care of you,” Ledergerber says. (Minimum wage in San Francisco and Berkeley is just above this threshold now, with an increase coming later this summer.)
Maintain great hospitality with modern technology
Still, La Med isn’t immune to troubles that plague the industry. Even the most charming restaurant struggles with the same problems as its more modern neighbors. Staffing is challenging, Ledergerber says, especially since the kind of high-touch service La Med provides requires a fully staffed restaurant. Food costs are high and margins are low. But their staff tries hard to keep guests happy.
It’s working. La Med enjoys a fiercely loyal customer base. In Berkeley, based on sales data, Ledergerber estimates about half of the people in the dining room at any time are returning guests. Many are locals who have patronized the restaurant for decades.
It’s easy to see why the restaurant wants to reward those diners with warm, friendly, nostalgic hospitality, even as it has to modernize other parts of the business. Paper tickets and an old-school cash register — both still in use when Ledergerber joined 13 years ago — have been replaced with digital ordering, kitchen, and payment tech. (La Med was also an early tester of the new Square Handheld device for restaurants.)
Staying a Bay Area legacy restaurant
Historically speaking, all those screens may be “a little less charming” than the ding of an old-school register. But the details that really matter — the ones that have made La Med an appealing choice for decades of Bay Area diners — remain the same.
“There’s a lot more competition in Mediterranean food now than there was 40 years ago. We were the only kids on the block,” said Ledergerber. “Now we have to be a little bit more conscious of what we’re what we’re serving, making sure it’s very authentic and delicious.”
