Downtown San Diego Office Tower Lands New Italian Spot From LA Restaurant Empire

A new Italian restaurant called Duecento Ristorante is in the works for Downtown San Diego, with plans calling for a spot at 225 W. Broadway inside a high-rise office tower in the city's central business district. No opening date has been announced yet, but the filing marks the first confirmed San Diego location for Tudor Hospitality, a Southern California restaurant group in the middle of an aggressive multi-concept expansion.

According to WhatNow, Tudor Hospitality has submitted documents to the San Diego Department of Environmental Health and Quality for the Broadway address, which sits inside a building owned by real estate firm The Irvine Company, according to Coastal Pacific Window Coverings. Duecento Ristorante is described as an Italian restaurant concept emphasizing quality without pretension and consistency, with a menu built around craftsmanship and approachable dining, and a design meant to foster community-driven dining, per the same filing details.

Who's Behind the Concept

The restaurant is the work of Lucian Tudor, founder and managing principal of Tudor Hospitality and former chief executive of Global Dining Inc. of California. Tudor's résumé includes stints in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Dubai, and the report notes he began his restaurant career at age 22 as a busboy at La Bohème in West Hollywood, working his way up over 13 years to lead the company's parent operating entity, according to CityWatch LA. Global Dining Inc. itself is a Tokyo-based hospitality group running roughly 50 restaurants across Japan, China, and Dubai, including Tokyo's Gonpachi Nishi-Azabu, the restaurant that famously served as the setting for the fight scene in Kill Bill: Volume 1, as reported by Restaurant Business.

Tudor Hospitality's current Southern California portfolio already includes La Bohème, described as a European-inspired brasserie, and 1212 Santa Monica, a New American dining and nightlife spot on the 3rd Street Promenade that combines full-service dining with late-night lounge operations. Hoodline covered 1212 Santa Monica's rise on the Promenade back in 2018, in a piece that tracked its growing popularity as part of the neighborhood's evolving food scene.

A Bigger Rollout Across Southern California

Duecento Ristorante is one of five concepts Tudor Hospitality currently has in development, spanning Italian, cafe, and Japanese dining formats. In Santa Monica, the group is building out Trecento Ristorante, planned as a modern Italian restaurant, alongside 301 Caffè, an all-day cafe centered on simple food and everyday coffee service. Los Angeles is set to get the Tenshou Collection, while Beverly Hills is slated for a concept called Yokocho.

The group's most recent Italian launch, Settecento, opened in January 2025 as a 4,000-square-foot restaurant in Downtown Los Angeles' Maguire Gardens near the Central Library, built around handmade pastas and non-GMO imported Italian ingredients, according to WhatNow's earlier reporting. Tudor Hospitality describes Settecento as an Italian restaurant focused on regional cuisine and contemporary execution, and the company says its work spans site strategy, menu architecture, staffing, systems, and opening execution, with operational planning and financial controls built in to support the group's growth.

From Wage Protests to Expansion

The San Diego move comes a few years after Tudor took a very different, more defensive public stance on California's cost of doing business. In August 2023, he publicly protested West Hollywood's $19.08 hourly minimum wage increase — then the highest local minimum wage in the nation — saying the added labor expenses forced him to lay off busstaff and put La Bohème up for sale, according to the same report from WeHo Times. That city council policy had passed in late 2021. Three years later, Tudor is now orchestrating a five-concept expansion across San Diego, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills.

Downtown San Diego offers a dense customer base for the new restaurant to tap into. The neighborhood's urban core had grown to more than 37,000 residents, 81,000 employees, and 4,000 active businesses by 2023 amid a strong post-pandemic recovery, according to CBS News. The area saw 297 new businesses open during the 2021–2022 fiscal year alone, an 11% year-over-year jump in active storefronts, per Downtown San Diego Partnership data cited in that report.

Duecento will still have to carve out space in a city where Italian dining has long been anchored elsewhere. San Diego's Italian food scene has historically centered a few blocks away in Little Italy along India Street, home to long-running fixtures like Mona Lisa Italian Foods, open since 1973, and Buon Appetito, operating since 2002, according to Allegro. Whether Duecento can pull downtown's office crowd away from that established dining district remains to be seen, with no opening date yet locked in.