Tommy Toy's Closing In San Francisco After 27 Years

Tommy Toy's, a San Francisco institution, will be closing at the end of March, Inside Scoop reports.

The restaurant, which opened in 1985, was best known for its overwhelming opulence and ability to draw in plenty of celebrity regulars, including Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola. The downtown restaurant was one of the city's most elegant, with silk drapes, Chinese fans, tapestries, paintings, wooden archways and fixtures, and silver mirrors giving diners the impression or being inside an imperial palace.

The restaurant peaked in the late '80s through the '90s, and its brand of fine dining (think a fish tank, upholstered chairs, and fanned scallop-shaped folded napkins) gave way to a more casual approach in recent years. The food served wouldn't be considered authentic Chinese by any stretch of the imagination, but it had plenty of fans (the signature seafood bisque with a puff pastry top, served in a coconut, pictured, was especially popular). Tommy Toy himself passed away in 2008, but partner Alon Yu kept things running smoothly. According to Yu, the closure is due to a combination of factors.

"We've been there 27 years and even after Tommy died five years ago, we kept going," he told Inside Scoop. "But now with a changing market demographic and some lease issues... A number of factors led to this decision. It's an end of an era."