Two kids were found safe in the Bayview after a carjacking/kidnapping in Pacific Heights on Saturday, Oakland swears in a new police chief, and San Jose police de-escalate two standoffs in one morning.

Like all neighborhood restaurants and bars around the city, the businesses of Bernal Heights/La Lengua need your support — and there's no better time to go check out the scene again than this sunny weekend in SF.

Sand Bar, a new Caribbean-themed "beach club" and cocktail lounge, is readying for an opening on Oakland's Auto Row, in a former auto dealership space at 2418 Broadway. Hoodline has the exclusive news of this new project from the team behind Uptown cocktail spots Drexl and The Miranda, and the sports bar Fort Green in Old Oakland.

Sadly, Arguello and The Commissary are no more at the Presidio, and we learn this nine months after the restaurants laid off their staffs to prepare for months of pandemic closure. And despite the greater-than-average amount of outdoor space around these restaurants that would make outdoor dining more than feasible, something in the six-year-old business arrangement that opened the restaurants appears to have collapsed.

Low Bar (2300 Webster Street, Oakland), a new bar and restaurant from a pair of industry vets that was announced early last year and subsequently delayed by the pandemic, is getting ready for an imminent grand opening.

The new hybrid digital/pipe organ that has been in the works for the grand Castro Theatre for about six years is finally about to become a reality, and depending on how long it takes to ship from Pennsylvania and how long it takes for movie theaters to safely reopen in San Francisco, it may arrive just time for the Castro's next public screenings.

While San Francisco and other cities around the country are facing shortages of vaccine supply compared with demand, the process of getting vaccines into arms quickly and efficiently continues to be honed in the city with the opening of the first of three mass-vaccination sites, at the main campus of City College.

As she promised to last year, Ayesha Curry has just opened her first retail store in Oakland, in conjunction with her lifestyle magazine called Sweet July. The Sweet July store and cafe debuted Tuesday at 455 23rd Street in the Uptown neighborhood. 

An autobiographical essay titled "The Hard Crowd" by novelist Rachel Kushner, published in last week's New Yorker, offers some vivid snapshots of several long-gone Tenderloin bars, including one with a convalescing person in a bed in back.

Los Angeles-based sandwich outfit Heroic Italian recently got its feet wet in the Bay Area, launching a pop-up in mid-December inside wine and spirits shop Swirl on Castro (572 Castro Street). With online ordering available, it's a quick and delicious lunch or dinner option — and if you pick it up yourself rather than opting for DoorDash delivery, you can snag a bottle of wine too.

A new LGBTQ bar appears to be headed for downtown Oakland — technically in the Uptown vicinity — in a ground-floor space of the iconic I. Magnin Building at 2001 Broadway.

A pair of cherry blossom trees outside the Japanese Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco's Japantown won't be blooming this year after a vandal or vandals went to great efforts to rip all the branches off of them.

Though the situation in hospitals remains worse in Southern California, Santa Clara County has become the first county in the Bay Area to experience serious delays as ambulances arrive at emergency rooms — due to the ERs and the hospitals already being overwhelmed with patients. As cases and hospitalizations potentially surge again following the holidays, other counties are on alert that this emergency-response failure may spread.