An innovative Mexican-Italian restaurant at an unlikely location: The bus station

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What if they combined two of the planet’s best cuisines and served it in a beautiful restaurant, but that restaurant just so happened to be in … a bus station?

That’s the quandary posed by Modí, which harmoniously fuses Mexican and Italian dishes in an upscale setting on the ground floor of the Transbay Terminal. A deceptively large restaurant with a quasi-outdoor patio — open to the air, although Salesforce Park’s metal canopy is directly overhead — it’s almost like a relic from another era, when downtown lunch crowds still roamed the Earth.

Once you’re inside, Modí — an homage to the modernist painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani and a pun on the Italian word “modi,” meaning “ways” — feels like an artfully enclosed retreat. If I were, say, a VP at Salesforce instead of a lowly journalist, I would take meetings in a semi-secluded corner of the patio set off by dangling ropes. 

Modí, which opened in November, has been in the works since 2019 — and even by the standards of a restaurant buildout, it’s been a heavy lift. Most of the materials for the lavish interior left the port of Livorno in a shipping container in 2021. Consequently, Modí is a little too nice for its location, where the other dining options are decidedly casual, from Philz Coffee to Venga Empanadas to Barebottle Brewing’s beer garden.

Modí serves some clever riffs on two culinary traditions, without the clumsiness — if not outright disrespect — that plagues so many bygone fusion restaurants. (Anyone remember the gimmicky dishes at Fuzio Universal Pasta, circa 2008?) Maybe that’s because the menu is not fusion in the mashed-up, global-pantry sense of the term. Instead, it’s a reflection of chef Marco Avila’s life experience. The native of Cancún moved to Pisa, Italy, in his youth before relocating to San Francisco, where he’s been the executive chef at Acquolina in North Beach for 10 years.

Those Mex-Italian sensibilities infuse starters like tangy tamarind octopus ($22) and beef tartare with a fried egg and poblano sauce ($22), which share the menu with genuine hybrid dishes like parmigiana di nopales ($20), cactus that’s been “lasagna-fied” with tomato and mozzarella. Same goes for mains like birria lasagna ($27), which repurposes the dripping, flavorful beef often served in a taco into a very different kind of comfort food. (Delicious, yes. Instagrammable, no.)

There’s a wealth of Neapolitan-style pizzas, but the one that stands out is the leopard-spotted, salty-earthy huitlacoche ($25), with a corn fungus considered to be a delicacy in Mexico, graciously labeled on the menu as “Mexican truffle” and not its other name — corn smut. There’s plenty of corn on it, too, along with cherry tomatoes and blobs of mozzarella.

The list of cocktails is extensive, with not one but two Negronis, but the wine list feels brief, with one selection from each of the best Italian hits: Chianti, Super Tuscan, Sangiovese, and so on. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with elegant food in a transit hub. SFO has outstanding dining options — including a brand-new food hall — and while the Ferry Building may be a foodie paradise, its primary purpose is, of course, boarding boats. Modí’s juxtaposition of elote ravioli with Greyhound buses may strike some as a different beast. And it is. But while the Transbay Terminal’s lack of bustle still underwhelms as a transit hub, at least its food options have gotten a significant boost.