In early 2020, Thad Vogler owned four San Francisco restaurants along with a set of four liquor licenses worth more than $1 million. The licenses had acted as a kind of insurance; if something went wrong with a restaurant, its liquor license would still be valuable. When the pandemic hit, he had to close three of his businesses — Trou Normand, Obispo and Nommo — right as the value of the liquor licenses also plummeted, from around $250,000 to $110,000.
“That was literally my undoing,” said Vogler, who closed his last restaurant, Bar Agricole, in 2024 and is in the process of selling its liquor license at a loss. “The price of a liquor license is an index of what people believe about San Francisco and the restaurant industry. They’ve stayed down. They’re not going up.”
For decades, restaurant liquor licenses in San Francisco functioned as long-term investments. Similar to taxi medallions in the pre-Uber days, the number of full liquor licenses in San Francisco is effectively capped, making them scarce — and therefore, valuable. They began losing value in earnest at the start of the pandemic as bars and restaurants shuttered en masse. Though that reversed during a brief period of economic recovery in early 2022, they have declined again in the few years since, according to longtime broker Cameron DeRuosi. The owner of Alcoholpermit.com, DeRuosi also sees the liquor license market as a barometer for the state of the restaurant industry…