Rick & Ann’s Restaurant to close after 36 years in Berkeley

Rick & Ann’s Restaurant, a beloved Berkeley spot for comfort food that opened in 1989, is closing down. The final day will be Aug. 3, owner Ann Lauer announced on the restaurant’s website.

“Thank you for all of your patronage over the last 36 years, and for allowing Rick & Ann’s Restaurant to be a part of your experiences,” said Lauer. “It has been so wonderful to be a part of this community and to experience all of your lives throughout the years. … I’ve enjoyed seeing customers that I held as children, now with their families and some as grandparents.”

Lauer added that her side business, Ann’s Catering, will live on in a “new and bigger location.”

The San Francisco Chronicle was the first to report the news of the closure.

Ann and then-husband Rick Lauer opened the eatery with other business partners to provide what they thought at the time was missing in Berkeley: the “dishes we relished in our childhood,” according to the restaurant website. It quickly became a hit for the brunch crowd, drawing hour-long lines for dishes like red-flannel hash, French toast and tofu scrambles.

Over the years, the restaurant attracted a group of hardcore regulars that included Golden State Warriors superstar Steph Curry and wife Ayesha Curry. In 2010, Rick & Ann’s chefs impressed Guy Fieri so much with a spicy flank-steak sandwich at an Oakland Raiders tailgate party, he came back and featured the eatery for his “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”

“To call Rick & Ann’s (which opened in 1989) an East Bay institution is like calling ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ just another Christmas movie,” John Birdsall of the Contra Costa Times wrote in 2004. “To residents of Berkeley, North Oakland and parts of Orinda, it’s a landscape element, immovable and beloved as the Claremont Resort it nestles at the foot of, its street a relic of Craftsman-era California, human-scale and leafy.”

Unlike many restaurants, Rick & Ann’s survived the pandemic – barely. The business sunk into “precarious financial ground,” Lauer said in a letter to customers, but managed to survive by pivoting to takeout orders and opening a mini-market selling frozen house specialties. Shutting down completely “just really isn’t an option for me,” she wrote at the time.

But now Lauer is stepping back to travel, dip into community involvement and move “forward to the next phase of my life,” she wrote in the closure notice. (Lauer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

For anybody who misses Rick & Ann’s, Ann’s Catering menu for summer 2025 is now posted with breakfast-biscuit platters, buttermilk-fried chicken strips and other comforting fare.