Just five months after opening Cadence in the Mid-Market neighborhood of San Francisco, owner Jay Bordeleau realized that his 100-seat restaurant was not going to make it.

“We realized we could point to the problems and we didn’t have good solutions,” Bordeleau said. Three days later, he gave his staff and customers two weeks’ notice that Cadence would close in early July.

The fate of Bordeleau’s restaurant is not as rare a phenomenon as it would have been several years back. The Bay Area, flush with money and rife with culinary talent, is still in the midst of a golden — or perhaps gilded — era of dining. Yet 2016 has seen the abrupt closures of several restaurants that seemed to have every prospect of success, given their celebrated owners, good food and attractive spaces. The tech mantra “fail fast” seems to have taken hold in the restaurant industry.

Studies led by H.G. Parsa, a professor at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, have found that 30 percent of new restaurants nationally close within the first year, But in past years, a good pedigree and good reviews usually ensured that new Bay Area restaurants lasted beyond 12 months.

Bordeleau’s experience with Cadence is typical of 2016’s crop of fail-fast places. Buoyed by the success of his Lower Haight restaurant, Maven, he spent three years constructing the Mid-Market project that consisted of Cadence and an adjacent cocktail bar, Mr. Tipple’s, which remains open.

“Mid-Market was an underserved neighborhood at that point,” he said. “Not to mention we saw apartments with high rents and youthful people coming in.” The process of opening took eight months longer than hoped, but he still anticipated that residents and workers from the neighborhood would pack the place. They didn’t.

In fact, four of this year’s quick-to-fail restaurants have been in or near the Mid-Market neighborhood: Cadence, Bon Marché, Oro and Volta. Like Bordeleau, owners of the other three restaurants suspect that they bet on a rising neighborhood too soon, or entered the market at the same time as too many other ambitious, pricey restaurants.

Umberto Gibin and Staffan Terje, owners of the decade-old Perbacco, are still searching for explanations for what happened at Volta, which closed in September after just nine months in business. A three-star review from The Chronicle and an initial surge of interest was followed by a 75 percent drop in business in August.

The fail-fast phenomenon has not been limited to San Francisco. The Advocate in Berkeley and Salsipuedes and Grand Fare in Oakland suffered similar fates. Two more, Ninebark and Revival, were located in Napa and Sonoma.

Some restaurateurs admit they simply got the formula wrong. “In my opinion, we missed the concept,” said Andrew Hoffman, co-owner of the Advocate, which closed in late October after a little more than a year.

Cadence’s Bordeleau had a similar take. In his excitement over taking advantage of the Mid-Market boom, he said, “We forgot to ask what they wanted.”

The golden age of dining has rewarded ambition: $200 tasting menus have proliferated, as have international stories celebrating the Bay Area’s restaurant scene. At the same time, 2016 has upped the pressure on new restaurateurs, who are entering a tight, competitive market that allows for no misjudgments and little time to pivot, or change focus, as the tech industry prides itself on doing.

San Francisco is one of the most restaurant-dense cities in the country, trailed slightly by San Jose. According to the San Francisco Environmental Health Department, there are more than 7,600 restaurants in the city.

Talented cooks and servers are in demand, and the high cost of living means workers here need to be paid more, so rising minimum wages can barely keep up. Commercial rents are increasingly more expensive, too.

One commonality among the quick-to-close restaurants has been size: Almost all had the capacity to seat 100 or more diners at a time. Matt Semmelhack, who closed the 200-seat Bon Marché in August after a year in business, explained that bigger spaces translate into not just higher fixed costs but also higher labor. “You have to be ready for a big push,” he said. “At Bon Marché, where you can seat 200 people, you have to be ready for that. So you staff up.”

In a subtler way, the quick-to-close restaurateurs’ considerable experience may have contributed to the short life spans of their ventures. First-time restaurateurs, said Staffan Terje of Volta, may wait longer. “They hold on because they’ve sunk everything they’ve saved up for,” he said. Of course, the decision to close Volta was an emotional one, but the experience also gave Terje the clear sight to recognize that time would not cure all ills.

Watching their plans crash so quickly, restaurateurs said, has led them to question whether it’s still feasible to open a traditional bistro with full table service and an a la carte menu. Semmelhack, for example, said he’ll probably never open another full-scale restaurant in San Francisco. He is encouraged by the response to the Trading Post, his new restaurant in Cloverdale, as well as downtown San Francisco’s fast-casual Sababa, in which he is a minority partner.

In San Francisco in particular, younger diners seem to gravitate to casual places or ones with innovative concepts, such as the global dim sum at the Fillmore’s State Bird Provisions or the communal haute cuisine meals at Lazy Bear in the Mission. More and more, restaurants also compete for diner dollars against delivery services and meal kits like Blue Apron.

The fail-fast phenomenon may be a signal that the golden age may be about to end. A simpler message may be that the Bay Area restaurant scene has become saturated. “We have more seats...than we know how to fill at a profitable rate,” Bordeleau said.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman