about ato
ATO consists of three carefully curated venues: a restaurant helmed by FoodLab with daily lunch service and a line-up of up-and-coming and A-list chefs; Rio Grande, a bar created by renowned cocktail and spirits team The Bon Vivants; and the Trailhead, a satellite retail project developed by the Luggage Store Gallery in collaboration with Intersection for the Arts that brings together coffee, a youth-initiated high-end denim boutique, seedling farm outlet, and local artist-made ephemera— including books, zines, and maps.
Kor purchased the historic Renoir Hotel in early 2012 and immediately set out to engage the local community by exploring ways to creatively activate the hotel’s vacant and boarded up retail spaces which had previously added to the area’s blight.
ATO is both a destination for food, drink and art as well as a place for local entrepreneurs to test new ideas and showcase their skills in a relaxed setting that encourages experimentation and embraces the neighborhood.
Founded in 1999, The Kor Group is a fully-integrated real estate investment, development and management firm that also works with third-party clients to deliver a comprehensive package of advisory services. Kor has been recognized in the industry as a leading innovator in the design and development of lifestyle properties. Its track record demonstrates its expertise in bringing new life to an investment, often through design coupled with extensive rehabilitationand repositioning. By fusing creative design with an agile investment and development discipline, Kor has amassed a portfolio of high performing assets and has built a signature brand translatable across its properties. Since inception, Kor has acquired and developed hospitality, residential, and office assets valued in excess of $2 billion. Kor was also the force behind the origination and development of the renowned Viceroy hotel brand, whose immense success led to the spin-off of its hotel management division, Viceroy Hotel Group, in 2008. Today, Kor maintains the same commitment to creative design and distinctive branding to bring enhanced value to its investments and the investments of its third-party clients.
Founded by food industry veterans Mark Walker, Matt Cohen and Gabriel Cole, FoodLab supports small business development by renting licensed commercial kitchens to food entrepreneurs in varying sectors. In addition to curating the restaurant space at A Temporary Offering, FoodLab offers mobile food entrepreneurs, caterers and food artisans a space to prepare, maintain and store their products.
The Bon Vivants is a nationally recognized cocktail and spirits team specializing in the creation of tailored on premise beverage programs, branding and guerilla marketing strategies for liquor companies, audience identification, ambassadorship, the concepting and execution of exceptionally curated and unique events, and a soon-to-be released line of aromatic bitters and liqueurs, as well as an umbrella for a growing brick and mortar component which includes the forthcoming Trick Dog and General Beverage Co. One of the principle tenets of The Bon Vivants is to bridge the gap between the beverage industry and the consumer while building community through the act of enjoying a delicious drink.
About The Luggage Store Gallery
The Luggage Store, also known as The 509 Cultural Center, is a non-profit artist-run multidisciplinary arts organization, founded in 1987. The Gallery’s mission is to build community by organizing multidisciplinary arts programming accessible to and reflective of the Bay Area’s residents. Their programs are designed to broaden social and aesthetic networks, and to encourage the flow of images and ideas between the diverse cultural communities that cross paths in their exceptionally dynamic downtown San Francisco neighborhood. To implement their mission, they organize exhibitions, performing arts events, arts education and public art programs designed to amplify the voices of the region’s diverse artists and residents, to promote inclusion and respect, to reduce inter-group tensions and to work towards dispelling the stereotypes and fears that continue to separate us. The Trailhead project is supported in part by National Endowment for the Arts, San Francisco Art Commission’s Artery Project, and Intersection for the Arts Trailblazing Fellowship.
