Few of us miss the signs that a neighborhood’s restaurant scene is booming. We see it on the Divisadero corridor in the Western Addition, Valencia Street in the Mission, practically all of Hayes Valley.

New businesses crowd onto a block like music fans rushing the stage. The lines outside the most popular make it hard to walk down the sidewalk. Food journalists begin to interject comments like “Just how many more restaurants can this neighborhood support?” into their stories about the street.

But not all of the boom zones are as apparent as Valencia Street. And tracking the neighborhoods where restaurant growth is most sluggish is difficult unless, perhaps, you run a business on that strip.

Or unless you look at the data.

The San Francisco Controller’s Office of Budget and Analysis recently provided The Chronicle with sales tax revenue for the hospitality industry on 31 commercial corridors in San Francisco. The figures lay out how much sales tax the city collected every year from 2010 to 2015, which we can reasonably interpret as a measure of how much sales the businesses are doing.

Two caveats: Sales does not equal profit. Minimum wage increased 15 percent (adjusted for inflation) between 2010 and May 2015, and health care expenditures under the San Francisco Healthcare Security Ordinance and the Affordable Care Act may have as well. Restaurants have bumped their prices up to accommodate for any number of increased costs, from rent to beef, which translates to rising sales numbers — and sales tax revenue for the city.

Looking at how quickly tax revenue has risen doesn’t tell us entirely about the economic health of a neighborhood, either. For instance, one of the slowest-growing commercial strips in San Francisco — Chestnut Street in the Marina — has few vacancies and many successful restaurants. The fact that it is slow growing may mean that failed restaurants are quickly replaced by new ones, or that the strip might be close to saturated with food businesses.

The data on three neighborhoods — the Excelsior, the Bayview, and the contrast between Divisadero and the Upper Haight — was surprising enough that we took a closer look to find out what factors might be affecting the health, or stagnation, of the restaurants there.

The Excelsior: Slowest-growing restaurant strip in S.F.

Try to park in the Excelsior during the middle of the business day, and you may wonder why this stretch of Mission Street is the slowest-growing restaurant strip in San Francisco — the only one in the whole city, in fact, whose sales-tax revenue has shrunk over the past five years. Produce markets, taquerias, laundromats, nail salons and pharmacies are all busy.

As the mix of businesses attests, the Excelsior is still a neighborhood whose businesses are all oriented toward locals. It has relatively low commercial rents, rising property values and high home ownership. Despite its reputation as being an isolated neighborhood, 16 bus lines pass through the neighborhood.

Part of the problem, says Stephanie Cajina, executive director of the Excelsior Action Group, is the availability of good spaces. “Although we do have a relatively high (commercial retail) vacancy rate, most of the inventory that we do have is retail,” Cajina says.

Transforming those spaces into restaurants is expensive. “It really requires someone with deep pockets to come in and install a hood and install a kitchen and go through the process, which can take up to a year, year and a half, before you can open up.”

Many of the existing food venues are lower-priced, family-run Chinese, Salvadoran, Filipino and Mexican restaurants. Neighborhood surveys, Cajina reports, have revealed that many residents would like to see higher-priced options, too.

“Big money doesn’t want to come down here because there’s no guarantee of return,” says Sean Ingram, co-owner of Dark Horse Inn, a craft beer bar and restaurant wrapping up its fifth year in business.

Ingram says that his business has just had its best year yet, partly because of a recent appearance on KQED’s “Check, Please!” Yet he complains of a lack of leadership from District 11 Supervisor John Avalos (who did not return The Chronicle’s phone call), as well as economic incentives to bring enough new restaurants and bars into the neighborhood to turn the Excelsior into a destination.

“I wish there were more places out here,” Ingram says.

The Bayview: Fastest-growing area in San Francisco?

Looking over the charts of restaurant sales-tax revenues, the neighborhood that offers the biggest surprise is Third Street in the Bayview, where the numbers jumped 135 percent between 2014 and 2015, the largest year-to-year growth spurt seen — such a dramatic jump that The Chronicle asked the city to double-check the figures (they were correct). In comparison, between 2010 and 2014, sales tax revenue for Third Street actually declined 14 percent.

The fact that the Bayview is doing better doesn’t surprise anyone who owns a business in the neighborhood, though most had no idea the increase in sales could be so dramatic.

“The Bayview is still one of the last neighborhoods that remains affordable,” says Yvonne Hines, owner of the 10-year-old Yvonne’s Southern Sweets. “It’s going to turn around really quick.”

In fact, the city’s sales tax figures don’t take into account the economic activity taking place off Third Street, including the cluster of breweries and distilleries that have recently opened along Evans and the side streets further south.

“We’re not just Bayview anymore; we’re San Francisco,” Hines adds, referring in part to the T line, which has helped connect this formerly isolated neighborhood, though neighbors dispute how much of an effect the 8-year-old line has had to date on Third Street restaurants.

The improvements appear to be scattered along a very long commercial corridor, whose character evolves from industrial to a commercial core near Mendell Plaza, then returns to industrial again.

Bayview has problems with crime, says Kristin Houk, owner of All Good Pizza, who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years. But the neighborhood also retains a strong sense of community that is disappearing in other parts of the city. “As the city changes, people are realizing this is a great place to build that,” she says. Where else, she asks rhetorically, could she rent a sunny, 7,000-square-foot lot where she could install a food trailer and picnic tables?

The north end of the strip, near Evans, has fared especially well in the past few years. Renaldo Guerrero, owner of the 15-year-old La Laguna Taqueria, has seen business increase 20 percent.

According to Earl Shaddix, executive director of Economic Development on Third, 21,000 people already come into the Bayview every day for work. Construction workers from Lennar Homes, which is building housing complexes in the Hunters Point Shipyards and former Candlestick Park site, are lunching in the neighborhood, and La Laguna now sees workers coming from UCSF Mission Bay as well.

“A few years back there were a lot of empty warehouses. Now they’re occupied,” Guerrero says. “People got to eat.”

Divisadero vs. Upper Haight: A tale of two corridors

These days, the corner of Haight and Divisadero feels like the intersection of two fates, not just two major commercial strips.

Walk west along Haight Street from the intersection, and starting at Central you encounter tourists and shops selling souvenirs, sneakers and vaporizers interspersed with bars and inexpensive restaurants. Walk north on Divisadero from Haight Street, and you encounter upscale grocery stores, cocktail bars, barbecue smoke and four-dollar-sign menus.

Any vacant storefronts on Divisadero, it seems, are already claimed, boarded windows hiding remodeling projects.

Michael Krouse, owner of the 12-year-old Madrone Art Bar on Divisadero at Fell, says Divisadero has benefited from the quality of the restaurants that have established themselves on Divisadero, such as Nopa, Bi-Rite and 4505 Burgers & BBQ. They’ve made it a safer investment for newcomers such as Souvla and Horsefeather. “We’re in the middle of the city, so we draw people from Castro, Upper Divisadero, all different areas of the city,” Krouse says. “We don’t just cater to the neighborhood.”

Krouse and District 5 Supervisor London Breed, whose district encompasses both commercial corridors, attribute the boom to work that a city staffer named Ellyn Parker spearheaded a decade ago. The city increased its police presence, installed a tree-lined divider in the middle of Divisadero Street, established a merchants’ association and offered tax credits to employers for hiring from disadvantaged areas.

“It wasn’t an overnight thing, but it happened because people worked at trying to make the neighborhood safe, and as it got better more restaurants started to open up,” Breed says. No surprise that Divisadero’s restaurants are generating 136 percent more sales tax revenue now than they did in 2010.

When discussing the Upper Haight, where those same revenue figures have grown just 21 percent, Breed calls out the same contributing factor: perceptions of safety. “We unfortunately have a lot of problems with crime, specifically people who are selling and openly using drugs,” she says.

Other merchants suggest that Haight Street’s attraction for tourists fills the sidewalks during the day, but does not bring locals to the strip at night. Christin Evans, owner of Booksmith on Haight Street and a board member of the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association, says the rising costs of doing business are a factor. “I think we’ve seen a record number of vacancies on the street as a result of unrealistic rent demand,” she adds.

As in the Excelsior, most of the vacancies are retail spaces, and the restaurants that thrive on Haight Street are low- or moderate- priced, popular with tourists and younger customers.

Breed is working with neighborhood groups to make Haight Street and the Stanyan entrance to Golden Gate Park look better, with new sidewalks and pedestrian lighting. As with Divisadero, though, any transformation of the Upper Haight won’t take place overnight.

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