Want a taste of how vibrant downtown SF could be? Try this new Italian deli

The city is expensive, but your next meal doesn’t have to be. In our weekly column, The $25 Diner, we hunt down the best restaurants where you can eat like royalty for a song.

Although Aurora Centro owner Dario Barbone hails from Italy, he’s not averse to sliding distinctly un-Italian ingredients into his panini. The four-sandwich selection at his counter-service cafe, hidden on the fifth floor of Salesforce Tower, includes the DDD, a stack of mortadella, cheddar and arugula, plus pickled red onions, jalapenos and shaved fennel, and the Savi, which stars curried chickpeas, Cambodian chile crisp and salsa verde. These are clearly not your nonna’s panini. 

Or take the seasonal zucchini panino, which combines sliced summer squash and tender squash blossoms with German Grandamer cheese and Spanish piquillo peppers. Barbone also recently added a California-ized version of smørrebrød, the Danish open-faced sandwich, that layers the fancy French egg salad called gribiche with oily tinned mackerel, Calabrian chile and Sichuan peppercorns.

A lot is riding on these panini, and not just because they’re subverting most sandwich lovers’ expectations. In a cosmic sense, the very future of a better downtown San Francisco depends on their success. 

That’s because Aurora Centro is located just off Salesforce’s namesake park, part of the city’s Vacant to Vibrant program to support small businesses downtown. The initiative places coffee shops, bookstores, delis and more inside empty retail spaces for periods of three to six months, during which the business owners pay no rent. 

Simon Bertrang, executive director of SF New Deal, the nonprofit that runs Vacant to Vibrant for the city, says the goal is to remove the friction points that might have prevented an owner like Barbone from getting into such a high-profile space. “We’ve always thought of Vacant to Vibrant as creating a window of what downtown could be,” he said. 

In that regard, Aurora Centro succeeds. 

Outside the restaurant on a recent weekday, sun-starved San Franciscans pulled up colorful chairs to bistro tables for lunch. An instructor cued a small yoga class to move into a revolved high lunge. Local brewery Barebottle poured pints from a shipping-container-turned-bar across the plaza, while a Gio Gelato cart, parked in the shade, offered the tempting possibility of an afternoon scoop. 

Inside the tower, music played so loudly that customers raised their voices as they chatted while waiting in line to order. Two office workers sat at a communal table, eating quickly during a brief lunch break. A solo customer, wearing over-ear headphones to tune it all out, sipped a black coffee while staring into a Macbook. 

It’s typical downtown lunchtime stuff — exactly the kind of scene that stands in contrast to the rest of the park: still more vacant than vibrant, with the empty shell of a future (maybe) NFT-funded club-staurant, a deserted playground and an amphitheater occupied by a lone couple hugging a sliver of shade cast by a small tree. 

If the city is hoping for transformation, Barbone is a good person to bet on. His first location, Aurora Alimentari in Potrero Hill, is so small you can almost touch two opposing walls at the same time. There, Barbone packs the shelves with 30 kinds of tinned fish and dozens of varieties of chile crisp, selling a handful of varieties of sandwiches for three hours a day. Aurora Centro, in contrast, offers a limited selection of pastas, tinned tuna and artisanal chocolate. You can also drop $16 on a bottle of spicy cilantro condiment from Taiwan or $10 on a chocolate bar made in the high desert of Arizona. 

But the centerpiece is the panini. Barbone visits three farmers markets each week to source first-of-the-season cherry tomatoes, juicy peaches and bunches of fresh dill, and he turns a discerning eye toward sourcing the best local and not-so-local pantry items to round out the menu. He has a long-standing relationship with the Midwife and the Baker, which produces the crusty-on-the-outside, creamy-on-the-inside Khorasan baguettes that are the foundation for Aurora Centro’s sandwiches. 

Barbone says he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to work out a deal with the property owner to stay through at least the end of the year. With Salesforce forcing more workers back to the office in October, he expects the building to hit critical mass to sustain the restaurant soon, although “maybe when rent hits me, I may have to raise prices.”  

You can bet on this much: The sandwiches will be worth whatever he charges. 

Aurora Centro