The future is once again looking concrete for Teatro ZinZanni.

The purveyor of circus and dinner theater, a fixture on the Embarcadero from 2000 to 2011, announced on Thursday, Feb. 27, that it got final approval from Mayor London Breed to rebuild its historic Palais Nostalgique — a Belgian spiegeltent, or mirror-walled circus tent. The structure is slated to be erected at a former parking lot on the Embarcadero at Broadway, half a mile from the venue’s old site at Pier 27 and 29.

Teatro ZinZanni was ousted from its previous, city-owned site for the America’s Cup yacht race, and then the pier became a cruise ship terminal.

Groundbreaking is planned for the fall, with a reopening targeted for 2022 as part of a larger project with a hotel and park. The whole project will cost about $145 million.

“It’s a case for perseverance furthers,” Teatro ZinZanni founder Norm Langill told The Chronicle, quoting the I Ching.

Teatro ZinZanni is partnering with Kenwood Investments LLC and Presidio Hotel Group on the project, and the venue will share the property with a 192-room hotel and a 14,000-square-foot park. The venue’s lobby will be in the hotel’s lobby, and the spiegeltent itself will be encased in a glass pavilion, which will both protect it from the elements (Langill jokes that he’ll need a lot less duct tape to keep out rain now) while also allowing passersby in the park and on the Embarcadero to see acrobats, clowns and other performers warming up and hustling on and off stage.

Originally, the company thought it would be able to reopen at a new site as early as 2013. But it took time to work with neighborhood groups to allay their concerns about what the venue would look like and increased traffic on Broadway. Financing, too, was daunting.

“We had to figure out, how do you put a cabaret theater in one of the most desirable pieces of land in the city?” Langill says. “Theaters operate, what, three hours a day?”

Teatro ZinZanni needed a partner, he says, even as he credits the Board of Supervisors for their commitment to finding a new spot for the company. ZinZanni and its partners got to bid on the site on a sole-source basis, meaning competing proposals weren’t accepted. They now have a 60-year lease with the Port of San Francisco, which owns the parcel.

In October, the Mercury News reported that San Jose Stage Company is taking a similar approach with its downtown San Jose property. The company bought it in 2018, largely financed by the Swenson and Huntington Hotel Group. The plan is to build a seven-story hotel on the site and a new, much larger theater.

Teatro ZinZanni reached 800,000 audience members in its 12 years in San Francisco, many of them tourists, and the news of its reopening comes shortly after San Francisco’s other chief theatrical offering for tourists, “Beach Blanket Babylon,” closed on New Year’s Eve.

The company has counted Joan Baez, Maria Muldaur and local clown Geoff Hoyle among its performers, serving aerial work, clowning, juggling, flips, contortions and cabaret along with a five-course meal. As part of its magic, the waiters serving you your first course might swashbuckle in, all in sync. Or maybe your server would be part of the next circus trick.

Langill hopes to produce three to four shows per year at the new site, as the company did at the previous one.