Bar Malone's has softly opened in the former District space on Townsend Street, Goop Kitchen is opening a second location in SoMa, and there may be some movement, finally, over at Anchor Brewing, all in This Week in Food.

Bar Malone's, named for "spirit animal" Sam Malone, the fictional barkeep of Cheers fame, has softly opened in the former District space near Oracle Park, at 216 Townsend Street. As Tablehopper reports, owners Gabriel Freiberg and Eric Passetti (Natoma Cabana and Yerba Buena Bar) have opened a casual neighborhood hang with a slightly retro vibe — and a design by restaurateur Anna Weinberg, in her first solo design effort. District had some good, brick-walled, industrial charm, and the horseshoe bar has been kept, now with a new laquer top and brass trim. And in addition to cocktails, there is a menu of comfort food including a burger, fried hot honey chicken thighs, and steak frites.

(Also new and near the ballpark, which we noted two weeks ago, is Casa Sofia, from chef Carlos Altamirano.)

Goop Kitchen, Gwyneth Paltrow's healthy takeout concept, is expanding with a second location in SoMa, taking over the former Spice Kit space at 405 Howard Street. As the SF Business Times reports, Goop Kitchen continues its expansion in NorCal with a planned location in Oakland, and after opening its first SF location at 60 Morris Street in SoMa late last year.

We had the news earlier this week that a former Benu chef, Brian Shin, has teamed up with Min Park, the restaurateur behind Menlo Park's Yeobo, Darling and SF's Itria to open Ajae on Oakland's Piedmont Avenue. The menu will focus on Korean comfort classics, and the duo have not yet revealed the exact address, but look for that to likely open by the end of 2026.

After two years of zero movement over at Anchor Brewery, the new owner, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya, has quietly registered a new business document at City Hall for Anchor Brewing Company, as Hoodline reports. Ulukaya was the winning buyer of the brewery and its assets when it was auctioned in May 2024, and at the time he suggested it might reopen by Christmas that year. But instead, two years have passed and former employees have likely moved on, and we await word on when the place might start brewing once again.

Also this week we had the sad news that acclaimed Richmond District ramen tasting menu spot Noodle in a Haystack has closed. Owners Clint and Yoko Tan, who have run the restaurant mostly just the two of them for the last four years after hosting pop-up dinners at their home, are now planning a fast-casual place at Thrive City, by the Chase Center, focusing on the "dry" variety of ramen called mazeman. That will be called Mazé, and it will open sometime this winter in the former GluGlu wine bar space.

And Eater drops back in on Liholiho Yacht Club for a mini-review, finding the place just as charming and delicious as when it debuted 11 years ago. And, they note, you should probably take advantage of the $80 chef's tasting option that's not listed on the menu, which requires full table participation.

Top image: Photo via Bar Malone's/Instagram

Nopa, the bustling restaurant at the corner of Divisadero and Hayes in the Western Addition sub-neighborhood that came to be known as NoPa (north of Panhandle) two decades ago, is celebrating 20 years in business this week, and they had a big bash to mark the occasion on Thursday night.

It is hard to imagine the Divisadero corridor as it was in 2006, long before people were talking about its "Valencia-fication," seven years before Bi-Rite arrived, and back when it was only beginning to show signs of the neighborhood main drag it has become. Sure, Popeye's has been there the whole time, and 20 years ago you could already get good deep-dish pizza (Little Star, RIP) and seafood (Bar Crudo) there. But the stretch of Divis between Haight Street and Geary Boulevard was mostly known for autobody shops, gas stations, and the car wash where everyone brought their Burning Man RVs post-playa.

Nopa played a pivotal role in raising the profile of the area, which chef-owner Laurence Jossel called one of the "last affordable neighborhoods" in the city at the time the restaurant opened. And the restaurant helped usher in an era in which San Francisco's profile on the national food scene grew significantly — becoming a city where even neighborhood restaurants like Frances and Delfina were turning out world-class food, earning widespread attention, and in the case of Frances, a Michelin star.

Jossel and former business partners Jeff Hanak and Allyson Jossel (his ex-wife) had been on the hunt for a restaurant space in 2004, with the idea of opening an all-day restaurant.

"Allyson and I would sit across the street at the Beanbag Cafe, which is still there, drinking coffee, talking about all these spaces around town we'd looked at, and right across the street from us was a For Lease sign on an old laundromat, which was also prior to that was a bank," Jossel says. "We knew change-of-use permits were a big thing, but out of nowhere we thought, 'Wait a minute. Let's just be curious.'"

The partners then contacted the landlord, who also owned the Mission Street Denny's in SoMa, and they found out that the space could be used for a number of things including a restaurant, without a change-of-use. After a meeting over Grand Slam breakfasts, the landlord gave the trio a great deal on the space with a handshake, and after an extensive buildout, Nopa was born.

Jossel still laments the "tiny kitchen" that they designed, which has remained unchanged, but, he says, "I wanted a rotisserie, I wanted a fryer, I wanted a smoker, and a wood grill, and I kinda got everything I wanted."

"I think I wrote the menu two days before we opened," he says. Staple dishes like the country pork chop and the house-ground burger have been hits since the restaurant's earliest days. And it's been an expensive burger from the beginning — Jossel believes it was priced at $18 back in 2006, which was pricy back then, and it's now a $29 burger, with high-quality beef, he says, being more expensive than it's ever been.

Nopa was known from the beginning for being a place you could go and have a burger and a cocktail even if it was after midnight — something uncommon in sleepy San Francisco, and even less common now.

"We kept on running into people in the industry who lived in that neighborhood, and we thought, 'Wait a minute, if we can't do breakfast and lunch, late night makes sense in that space.'"

For the first 14 years of Nopa's existence, its kitchen was open until 1 am seven nights a week, turning it into a nototious industry hangout for folks getting off their shifts at other restuarants with saner hours.

"It took a toll on the staff," Jossel says. "We couldn't just keep having people clocking off at 3 or 4 in the morning all the time."

Similarly, brunch, which was a wildly popular thing at Nopa up until the pandemic, has become a less feasible thing to pull off, staffing wise — though Jossel and his wife and current business partner Holly Rhodes have discussed possibly, down the line, sacrificing Sunday night dinner service to make brunch work again.

"Brunch is a labor in itself," Jossel says, noting that they always made their own bread for the French toast, and made their own bagels, etc. "It just asks a lot of the team. Getting people to eat brunch? No problem. Getting people to work it and have a good attitude about it? That's a problem."

The ownership of the restaurant changed after the pandemic hit, with Jossel deciding to buy out his former partners and keep the place going, for the sake of the neighborhood and his employees. And after a year of doing takeout and adding a parklet like everyone else, Nopa has chugged right along, and there's a line just about every night before the doors open at 5:30 to snag a bar seat or a spot at the communal table.

When asked about the secret to Nopa's success and longevity, Jossel says, hands down, it's consistency.

"Every single day we taste every single dish as a team, in the kitchen, and then as a team in the dining room. And if that pork chop doesn't taste exactly as it did 19 years ago, something's wrong," Jossel says. "If you want people to come back again and again and again, I think consistency is a big factor in that."

Jossel also points to the menu, with new dishes appearing nightly since the restaurant's earliest days, driven by his thousands of shopping trips to farmers' markets and a commitment to serving seasonal, organic ingredients whenever possible.

The pandemic also added a new staple dish to the menu, the Morroccan-spiced Yaya's Fried Chicken.

After expanding with Nopa Fish at the Ferry Building last year, the next big project for the Nopa team is a farm that will produce ingredients exclusively for the restaurant, on a property that Jossel has acquired in Sebastopol. But, he says, there will be a big learning curve.

"It's a lot harder than I thought it would be," Jossel says. "I never took for granted that farmers were brave and smart. But, man, it is a ton of work to put food in the ground and harvest it and clean it and get it to its perfect ripeness and grow it properly."

Jossel says that about a half-acre of land will hopefully begin producing lettuces, eggplant, tomatoes, herbs, and more for the restaurant in the coming year or two, which he hopes will "push the menu forward."

When it comes to reaching the 20-year mark, Jossel also points to the boon of being centrally located and becoming a go-to dinner spot for hundreds if not thousands of neighbors.

"I would guesstimate that maybe 60 percent of our guests each night are return guests from the neighborhood," he says. "You just become part of their routine, and that's great."

Nopa - 560 Divisadero Street - Open Mon-Thur 5:30 to 10 pm, Fri-Sat 5:30 to 11 pm, and Sunday 5:30 to 9:30 pm - Reservations

An acclaimed Japanese prix-fixe restaurant that most of us were not lucky enough to dine at, Noodle In a Haystack, has closed, and its owners are going the fast-casual route in the hopes of finally turning a decent profit.

It's a familiar refrain in the San Francisco restaurant scene, where the rising costs of everything, from ingredients to rent to labor to healthcare, have made many small businesses unsustainable. The couple behind the highly acclaimed, 12-seat, Richmond District restaurant Noodle in a Haystack have shut their doors after four years because their tiny operation no longer made financial sense.

Clint and Yoko Tan tell the Chronicle this week that they shuttered the always sold-out restaurant last month because "It felt like we’ve been running in place the last few years," and the physical toll of running the tiny restaurant, just the two of them, had become too much, and was generating too little profit. This is despite charging $306 for their nine-course ramen tasting experience, with beverage pairing, having a waitlist for seats that was 10,000 people long, and not having any other full-time employees besides themselves.

And the closure comes despite an early rave review by the Chronicle's Soleil Ho, and being named one of the best new restaurants in the country in 2023 by the New York Times, and Bon Appetit.

Restaurant profit margins are notoriously thin, and in an expensive city like San Francisco, they can get even thinner — unless you can accomplish things at scale, and with multiple turns per night. The Tans had just two seatings per night, and sometimes were only open two nights per week, sometimes three. Nonetheless, Yoko Tan reportedly landed in the hospital twice because of the physical toll — Chronicle critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan noted last fall that when she finally snagged a reservation after two years of trying, the restaurant had to reschedule at the last minute because Yoko Tan had come down with COVID.

Now, though, more San Franciscans will be able to try the Tans' food, at least one type of ramen dish anyway. They are set to open a fast-casual restaurant this winter at Thrive City, by the Chase Center, called Mazé, specializing in the "dry" ramen style known as mazemen.

As the Chronicle notes, Mazé is moving into the 30-seat space that had been occupied by the wine bar GluGlu. And the Tans plan to serve a couple versions of mazemen that appeared on the Noodle in a Haystack menu, including creamy tan tan, and a spicy version made with yuzu kosho, chicharrón, lime, smoked fish powder, and charred pork belly. There will also be fried chicken, inspired by Japanese convenience store chain Lawson, and the naturally leavened nama doughnuts that Yoko occasionally made for the restaurant as well.

More California-influenced, seasonal versions of mazeman may come as well, with one they mention to the Chronicle involving tomato dashi and burrata.

According to the description on the Chase Center site, "Mazé is derived from the Japanese word meaning 'to mix' or 'to blend,' paired with Men, meaning 'noodle.' Together, the name refers to a style of ramen focused on mixing noodles with sauces, oils, toppings, and textures before enjoyment. Rooted in recipes developed over the last decade, the concept emphasizes bold flavors and carefully sourced ingredients."

Reportedly, the Tans are also on the hunt for a second space in the city for a mid-range restaurant of some kind, though they are not announcing any details on that.

A restaurateur with several recent hits under his belt has teamed up with a chef with SF fine dining cred to open a new Oakland restaurant focused on Korean comfort food and home-style cooking.

The restaurant will be called Ajae, and restaurateur Min Park — of SF's Itria and Menlo Park's acclaimed Yeobo, Darling — and chef Brian Shin are aiming for a late 2026 opening at an undisclosed address on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, as the Chronicle reports.

Shin is an alum of Benu and the former In Situ at SFMOMA, both led by Executive Chef Corey Lee. And as the Chronicle notes, he'll be following in the path of other Benu alums James Yeun Leong Parry, who opened the acclaimed Happy Crane last year, and Alan Hsu, who along with partner Sarah Cooper opened Sun Moon Studio in West Oakland, earning a Michelin star and a rave from the Chronicle that named it the best new restaurant of the year in 2024.

Ajae will center its menu on Korean comfort dishes like the rice soup called gukbap, and other things familiar to Korean restaurant menus, but Park tells the Chronicle, with "Brian’s special skill set they get taken to the next level."

Shin has also worked at Chicago’s Alinea, which has three Michelin stars, and he's done comfort food at The Snug in Pacific Heights, but it sounds like Ajae will be more ambitious than that, if not less casual.

Piedmont Avenue has long had a strong dining scene, with the classic spot BayWolf giving way to The Wolf in the last decade, and chef James Syhabout's Commis being the only Michelin-starred restaurant in all of Oakland until Sun Moon Studio came along.

Recent vacancies on the avenue include the former Pomella space at 3770 Piedmont, and breakfast spot The Crepe Pan (4184 Piedmont), which just closed earlier this year.

Stay tuned for more details as we know them.

Asia Live is debuting next week in Santa Clara, Jules gets a boost from the New York Times, Saluhall loses its last original vendor, and Oakland gets a new queer bar, all in This Week in Food.

Asia Live, the grand an ambitious food hall in the mode of Eataly from George Chen of China Live fame, is getting set to open at the Westfield Valley Fair model in Santa Clara next week, on June 5. Chen tells the Chronicle that Asia Live harkens back to his first SF restaurant, Betelnut, in that it connects foods from across Asia and celebrates street food especially.

Saluhall, the IKEA-adjacent food hall on mid-Market, has slowly added a couple new tenants in recent months, but the last of its original vendors, Curry Up Now, has left the building. As the Chronicle reports, the only two food vendors now operating as Ingka Centres seeks new management are Smish Smash and Filipino sandwich counter Izzy & Wooks — but we've recently learned that the central counter space downstairs will soon become a branch of Oklava Café, and a new beverage services company has been hired to take over the three bars in the space.

The latest update of the North America's 50 Best Restaurants list is out, and Saison clocks in at 22, Benu at 33, Atelier Crenn at 44, and Sons & Daughters at 45. And Healdsburg's SingleThread comes in at number 16.

Jules, the hit pizza spot in the Lower Haight, just landed on the New York Times' "25 Best Restaurants In San Francisco Right Now," in the latest update of that list. Owner and pizzaiolo Max Blachman-Gentile and his staff are celebrating, obviously, as Jules just celebrated its one-year anniversary this week, and as the new NYT listing puts it in the good company of Liholiho Yacht Club, Flour + Water, Four Kings, and Zuni. (And it will also mean that tables will remain hard to get, with a tourist factor added.)

International Smoke, the barbecue restaurant opened nine years ago by Ayesha Curry and Michael Mina, has quietly closed. As Eater reports, the restaurant space in the base of Millennium Tower is undergoing a renovation and will reopen as Neighborhood Test Kitchen, a revival of Mina Test Kitchen, the revolving pop-up venue that Michael Mina launched a decade ago. And Mina says the closure comes in part because of the impacts of the construction around the building to fix the tower's sinking problem.

A new queer bar is opening tonight in Oakland, in the former Friends and Family space at 468 25th Street. It's called There There, and as the Chronicle reports via new oener Alli Li, there are some new bleacher seats in the "cruising corner" on the back patio, and drinks are priced in the range of $12 to $17.

Top image via Instagram

Wednesday marked the anniversary of the big day that women won the right to work as bartenders in the state of California in 1971, and in celebration, the city has provided a list of over 50 women-owned bars to support — every day of the week.

Wednesday’s event, dubbed “The Equal Pour,” recognized the 1971 California Supreme Court decision that struck down the state’s ban on women bartenders, as KPIX reports.

Over 50 San Francisco women-owned bars reportedly participated in the citywide celebration led by the Horseshoe Tavern. Brooke Janser, who co-owns the Horseshoe with two other women, said the celebration was also meant to highlight the role women continue to play throughout the city’s bar industry.

“This is personal to me because I've been bartending in this city and state for 23 years and I co-own [the bar] with two other women,” Janser said, speaking to Broke-Ass Stuart. “I think it's important to see how many women-owned / female-forward bars and restaurants exist, as they constitute a huge part of our industry and night life.”

Mayor Daniel Lurie stopped by the tavern Wednesday night to recognize the anniversary, while guest women bartenders took shifts behind the bar, per KPIX.

According to Broke-Ass Stuart, women entered the bartending industry in large numbers during World War II as they took on jobs traditionally held by men, earning the nickname “Bessie the Bartender.” But after the war, several states moved to ban women from tending bar, including California, which kept its restriction in place until 1971.

The California Supreme Court ultimately struck down the ban after a legal fight — reportedly involving a topless San Francisco bar and the state’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Women were broadly banned from tending bar across the country in the post-Prohibition era. New York State also had a ban on female bartenders that was similarly struck down in 1971.

Top image via the Brooklyn Public Library

A confusing fact about the Original Joe's brand in the Bay Area is that it actually belongs to two unrelated families — and if you bring in other "Joe's" restaurants in Marin and elsewhere, the picture is murkier.

The original Original Joe's in San Francisco has long been divorced from its once closer cousin in San Jose. But now that the San Jose Original Joe's has gone on the market, it's conceivable the brand name could be unified once again, though no one has suggested yet that this will happen.

As the Mercury News is reporting, Original Joe's in downtown San Jose just celebrated its 70th birthday, and the brothers who own the restaurant have decided to sell and retire. Brad Rocca, who at 68 is two years younger than the restaurant, and his brother Matt Rocca, 70, say they have no plans to close the restaurant, and they are looking for a buyer "who loves Joe’s as much as we do to take it into the next generation."

Their father, Louis Rocca Jr., was the son of one of the original owners of Original Joe's in San Francisco, which opened in 1937. Louis Rocca Sr. opened the San Jose restaurant in 1956 for his son to run, and it was ultimately purchased by his sons, who worked there since they were teenagers, in 1980, serving a similar — though different — menu of Italian-American classic cuisine as the San Francisco and Daly City restaurants. (The SF and Westlake branches are now owned by John and Elena Duggan, who are also third-generation owners, descended from Rocca's SF partner, Croatian immigrant Tony Rodin.)

A few years later, the Roccas sold their share of the San Francisco and Daly City restaurants to the Duggan family, and they've been separate operations from the San Jose restaurant ever since.

The Chronicle's resident historian Carl Nolte retold the whole Original Joe's saga last month, which includes the devastating 2007 fire that destroyed the original Taylor Street location in the Tenderloin, and the brand's resurrection by the Duggans in North Beach in 2012, followed by a splashy renovation of the Daly City branch, and the opening last year of a new Walnut Creek Original Joe's.

The siblings have also expanded the brand with Little Original Joe's, opening a small, takeout-focused location in West Portal, followed by a buzzy Marina location that opened in 2024.

Wouldn't they want to reunite the businesses and bring the San Jose location back into the fold? We'll have to wait and see.

Just to avoid confusion, Marin Joe's in Corte Madera, which always had similar branding, has never been related to Original Joe's, and was owned by a different family altogether who sold it to new owners last year. It remains closed for a major renovation. Also, San Rafael Joe's? No relation.

A new Napa restaurant is on the way from SPQR's Matt Accarrino, Casa Sofia Kitchen & Bar just debuted near the ballpark, and Che Fico's cocktail bar Golden Rule opens this weekend next to the Chase Center, all in This Week In Food.

Coming later this year in Napa will be a new restaurant from SPQR and Mattina chef Matt Accarrino, called Vetra, at the new boutique resort The Elene — on the Solano Avenue property in Napa that was formerly the Oak Knoll Hotel. The Elene was supposed to open this summer but appears delayed until fall or winter, and with it will come Vetra, an all-day restaurant with what sounds like a casual but upscale dinner menu that leans into Accarrino's Cal-Italian talents, per Eater. Dishes he mentions include a large-format lasagna, other fresh pastas, bone-in Wagyu porterhouse steaks, roast duck and lamb, and fresh breads including piadina, the northern Italian flatbread he makes at Mattina. Accarrino will also be overseeing the menu at a café on the property that does not yet have a name.

Casa Sofia Kitchen & Bar, the new spot in the former Brixton space in SoMa from chef Carlos Altamirano and his wife Shu Altamirano, opened last night, May 21. As Tablehopper reports, the menu melds influences from Peru, Mexico, and Argentina, and includes good pre- and post-ballpark food like housemade empanadas, baby BBQ pork ribs, and fried chicken. The space also boasts two private dining spaces, and you can see menus and find reservations here.

Also opening this weekend, on Saturday, is the first cocktail bar from Che Fico's restaurant group, called Golden Rule. It is opening Saturday at Thrive City (Chase Center), in the space below Che Fico Pizzeria, and as bar director Danielle Peters-Clossey tells the Chronicle, the goal was to be "nostalgic" and "festive" with the drinks, given the location at a sports and concert venue. The menu includes things like the MIP ("most improved player"), a nod to Veronica Burton of the Golden State Valkyries, which features gin, mezcal, vermouth, and musk melon, along with a spritz of Hubba Bubba bubblegum essence; and the Bi-Coastal, featuring rum, cold brew, espresso liqueur, and banana cold foam. Also, there are mini freezer martinis, and housemade pizza rolls for snacking.

Hayes Valley fine dining spot Nightbird just announced a special Pride Month menu, with a portion of the proceeds being donated to The Trevor Project. The six-course menu from chef Kim Alter features dishes representing each color of the rainbow Pride flag, including an opening dish of scallop with saffron and a nasturtium farro bread, representing the colors red, orange, and yellow. Find reservations here.

Much loved Hayes Valley bakery Loquat is prepping a second location, as the Chronicle first reported earlier this month. Owners Tal Mor and Jodi Geren and pastry chef Kristina Costa are bringing their love of Jewish diaspora baking to the Inner Richmond, with a plan to open a second Loquat at 4555 California Street, at 18th Avenue, currently a location of Beanstalk Cafe, sometime next year. The new location will allow for some expanded bread making capabilities, and there are plans to have grab-and-go challah sandwiches and more.

And a new Turkish bakery-café called Oklava Café is opening soon on the ground floor of Saluhall, the IKEA-adjacent food hall at 945 Market Street. As the Chronicle reports, owners Aziz Aslan and Elif Uzun opened the first Oklava in downtown Palo Alto three years ago, and they also own the bakery-restaurant Turquaz in SoMa, which opened last year. An opening date for the new café has not yet been set, but it is taking over the central counter space previously occupied by Cheezy's Artisan Pizza.

Top image: A dish of Wagyu beef at Nightbird. Photo by Adahlia Cole

The Michelin Guide has put out a second list of "new discoveries" ahead of the release of the updated 2026 California guide in June, including 21 restaurants across the state.

In keeping with the world's insatiable need for content updates, the esteemed Michelin Guide now releases multiple updates per year for each of the cities and regions for which it now publishes guides. These include semiannual announcements about "new discoveries" to the upcoming guide, which can serve as a preview of the new restaurants that inspectors are considering for higher honors like stars or Bib Gourmand inclusion.

And today we get the latest of these roundups of new additions, which is something that started five years ago, and allows for guide additions to be highlighted ahead of the new guide and stars announcements — and also maybe allows them to make a show of noticing restaurants they had previously ignored.

For the Bay Area, the latest additions by Michelin inspectors deemed "culinary gems" are Maria Isabel — which had just opened when the last additions to the guide were announced — Kitchen Istanbul, Via Aurelia, and Minnie Bell's Soul Movement.

Minnie Bell's is notable because it likely shows that inspectors hadn't made it there yet in the two years that it's been open. The quality of fried chicken and soul food dishes like braised oxtail has remained great and unchanged over that span. And Kitchen Istanbul has been buzzed about for several years, in the Chronicle and elsewhere, getting a formal, rave review back in October, so maybe the inspectors only recently took notice and got over there.

Via Aurelia, the upscale Mission Bay restaurant from the Che Fico team, had been open for six months when the last batch of guide additions was announced in March, so it also could be a case of inspectors only recently making it there.

Additionally, Oakland's Joodooboo and Popoca are among the "discoveries," along with the new high-end tasting menu spot in Los Gatos, Vicinity. The remaining 14 restaurants on the list are in Southern California. See the full list here, along with capsule reviews.

The full new guide for California is scheduled to arrive in late June, as it did last year.

The list of Bay Area restaurants with Michelin stars was nearly unchanged in 2025 from the year before, with only two restaurants debuting on the list — Sonoma's Enclos, which debuted at the two-star level, and Oakland's Sun Moon Studio, which debuted with one star.

New restaurants that could be in star contention include Wolfsbane, Restaurant Naides, and Le Cigale — all three of which were on the additions list in March — as well as Maria Isabel, Via Aurelia, Happy Crane, and Vicinity in Los Gatos.

Previously: Five Bay Area Restaurants Added to 2026 Michelin Guide

Photo of the caviar guacamole buñuelo at Maria Isabel, by Jay Barmann/SFist

Original Joe's really needs to beef up its fire insurance and clean its kitchen flues. The flagship location in North Beach, which moved there after its original location burned down, suffered a small fire on Wednesday night — the owners' third fire in 20 years.

San Francisco firefighters were called to the scene at Union and Stockton streets just after 8 pm Wednesday after heavy smoke was seen rising from the roof of Original Joe's.

As the SFFD reported, the fire was in a chimney or exhaust flue, coming out of the kitchen, and it was contained as of 8:19 pm.

Part of Union Street and a section of Stockton Street were both temporarily closed for the firefight and cleanup, and the restaurant and a neighboring building were both evacuated during this process.

As KTVU reports, it remained unclear Wednesday night whether the restaurant suffered any serious damage. Original Joe's has not posted any update to its social media.

No injuries were reported and the SFFD said the building was turned back over to the owners Wednesday night.

This flagship Original Joe's opened in this space (formerly Joe DiMaggio's and, even earlier, Fior d'Italia) in 2012. The restaurant relocated and reopened here after an October 2007 fire shut down the original location on Taylor Street in the Tenderloin. Third-generation owners John and Elena Duggan, who are brother and sister, have since expanded the business to include Little Original Joe's locations in West Portal and the Marina, as well as the revamped Daly City Original Joe's, and in 2024 they opened Elena's, a Mexican-American restaurant in West Portal.

A third Original Joe's location that opened last August in Walnut Creek also suffered a kitchen fire that shut it down just days after its grand opening. That location reopened in October.

We'll update this story once there is word about whether the North Beach restaurant will be open as usual tonight.

In a sign of weak demand for restaurants overall, the once highly valued "full" liquor licenses in San Francisco, which could only be obtained on the secondary market due to a longstanding legal exception, are now worth about a third of what they were before the pandemic.

You might not think that the market price for a liquor license would fluctuate, or that the price could tank in a matter of just a few years. It's not like people have stopped drinking — Gen Z maybe has — and it's not like the local restaurant scene is in the doldrums like it was in 2021.

But as the Chronicle reports, much like BART ridership, things have rebounded in the liquor license market since the dark days of the pandemic, they just have not rebounded back to where they were, by a long shot.

The coveted Type 47 liquor licenses, which once traded hands in San Franciscofor $250,000 or more, are now valued at around $100,000, the Chronicle explains. That's still far more than the $20,000 that the same license would cost in other parts of California. But it marks a serious decline in value that is being driven by a decline in demand.

"The price of a liquor license is an index of what people believe about San Francisco and the restaurant industry," says Thad Vogler, formerly the owner of Bar Agricole, Trou Normand, and two other bars, all of which had licenses he'd paid a quarter million dollars for, speaking to the Chronicle. "They’ve stayed down. They’re not going up."

A broker who has traded in SF Type 47 liquor licenses for years, Cameron DeRuosi, confirms this to the Chronicle, saying that the rock-bottom price of $95,000 in late 2025, but has come up slightly since then.

And, DuRuosi adds in speaking to the Chronicle that such slumps in the price of licenses usually presage a larger recession on the way.

The reason that liquor licenses ever climbed to $250K or higher is because of the unique position San Francisco has in the state's liquor license economy. The number of licenses in a given jurisdiction was capped back in 1939 at one for every 2,000 residents, but when that rule was set, San Francisco already had around 1,000 bars and restaurants serving booze, so they were all granted licenses rather than be forced to shut down, and ever sense, no new licenses have been issued except under a recent state program to help under-represented or struggling neighborhoods.

The Chronicle pegs the current number of Type 47 licenses in SF at 741 — these licenses are geared toward restaurants, but many bars that hold them serve food as a requirement for serving booze. The state ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control agency) says that there are between 202 and 210 active Type 48 licenses in the city as well, and those are "On Sale - General" licenses for bars with no food requirement.

Whenever a restaurant closes, that license becomes an asset the owner can then sell. But with a glut of these coming available in the last couple of years, the price just ticked downward as the pace of new openings has not kept up, and demand went soft.

DuRuosi tells the Chronicle that just three years ago, in 2023, you still couldn't buy a Type 47 license for less than $230,000, so the price trajectory actually began in the pandemic hangover and not during the height of the pandemic itself.

Ironically, this past fall and winter, as these licenses hit their lowest price point in decades, the city was feeling like it was in a sudden restaurant renaissance, with a spate of splashy openings, like Via Aurelia in Mission Bay, Wolfsbane in Dogpatch, and Michael Mina's revamped Bourbon Steak at the St. Francis.

We'll have to wait and see what this year brings.

Previously: Lurie Gets His 20 New Liquor Licenses for Union Square, After Newsom Signs Bill Allowing These

Photo by Declan Sun

Now an established seasonal destination in the Napa Valley, Addendum, which started slinging Ad Hoc's popular fried chicken out of a "shack" behind the larger restaurant in 2011, is opening back up this weekend in Yountville.

Napa day-trippers, tourists, and locals alike have come to love the daytime, takeout-focused Addendum, which makes for a great lunch or brunch option when passing through Yountville. And this season, the menu expands with a couple of new items.

As it always has, when Addendum relaunches for the summer on Friday, May 22, it will be serving Ad Hoc's popular buttermilk fried chicken — three pieces with cornbread and macaroni salad will run you $22, while small (7 pieces) and large buckets (14 pieces) of chicken cost $40 and $60 apiece.

New to the menu this summer will be a shrimp po'boy on Bouchon Bakery milk bread, with dill mayo, celery leaves, and Bibb lettuce ($24).

And there is also a pastrami Reuben on Bouchon Bakery rye ($19).

As before, you can also take away chocolate chip cookies for dessert, and soft-serve sundaes. And Ad Hoc's house wine — white, rosé, or red — is available by the can.

Addendum is open Friday to Sunday 11 am to 2 pm, in the garden behind Ad Hoc at 6476 Washington Street in Yountville. And it is also open on holiday Mondays including Memorial Day, July 6th, and Labor Day. It will be open on weekends until Labor Day, which is September 7.

Ever a champion of American cuisine, Thomas Keller said he was sad to see how fried chicken had fallen out of favor early in his career, but he's watched it rise back up to a place of honor on American menus. "I’m happy to say that fried chicken is back, with some of the best chefs across the country and some of the best restaurants frying chicken," Keller said in recent years.

He's even shared his own recipe via Master Class, if you dare to do any deep-frying at home and have time for a 12-hour brining process.

Keller's kitchen also turns out a good burger, and he launched a very popular burger pop-up Burgers & Half-Bottles in Yountville during the pandemic, which he brought back for a 10-week special run last year. That has now been made permanent at 6518 Washington Street.

*This post has been corrected to show that Burgers & Half-Bottles has been made permanent.

• According to Oakland police, good Samaritans helped to detain the 17-year-old suspect who plowed a car into a group of people in East Oakland Saturday night, killing three and injuring five others. The boy reportedly tried to flee the scene but bystanders detained him until police arrived. [KRON4]
• Crime is certainly down on BART, with ridership still about half what it was pre-pandemic, and it's down so much that people feel comfortable using their laptops on the trains these days, which would have been unheard of seven years ago, or even two years ago. [Chronicle]
• The Sandy Fire, now burning in Ventura County north of LA, has grown to 836 acres, and evacuation orders in the Simi Valley have expanded. [ABC Los Angeles]

National:

• The Trump Justice Department announced a new $1.776 billion (get it?) fund that allies and friends of the present can make claims and collect from if they feel they were unjustly targeted by the previous administration. The fund's creation comes just as Trump dropped his own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leaking of his 2019 tax returns (which weren't leaked by the IRS, but by this guy). [CNN]
• Three people were killed in a shooting outside a mosque in San Diego on Monday, and the suspects, a teenage boy and his teen companion, were found dead afterwards in a nearby vehicle. A mother reportedly warned San Diego police two hours before the shooting that her son, who was suicidal, had taken guns from her house and taken her car. [New York Times]
• The Colorado Supreme Court has ordered a children's hospital in the state to resume providing puberty-blocking drugs and other gender-affirming treatment to trans kids, after the Trump administration's threats against institutions who provide this care. [New York Times]
• Former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, who was at the center of the OJ Simpson trial, has died at age 74. [KTVU]

Video:

• Joseph Shaw, the longest-serving bartender at The Buena Vista in San Francisco, celebrated 50 years working at the bar on Friday, as KTVU reports, pouring a ceremonial 50 Irish coffees in a long row for friends and longtime customers. Shaw started working at the Buena Vista in 1976 as a barback, and then worked his way up to bartending, and he says the place keeps him "happy."

Top image: Photo courtesy of The Buena Vista

Parasol begins dinner service in the Castro, Saltwater Bakehop opens its first brick-and-mortar in SoMa, and The DeLuxe prepares for an opening in the Upper Haight very soon, all in This Week in Food.

Over in the Castro neighborhood, Parasol at Flore, the new spot that has replaced Fisch & Flore in the former Cafe Flore space at Noe and Market, has fully opened for dinner, after we noted its soft opening for breakfast service last month. The bar offers cocktails, with a full selection of spirits and a few riffs on classics on the menu, as well a wine list curated by new owner Jacob Paronyan, who also owns Roaming Goat in Cow Hollow, focusing on Armenian and Georgian wines. Unlike Fisch & Flore, which never quite found its footing, Parasol offers a casual menu that allows for having just fries (they're excellent and well seasoned) and a drink at the bar, or a burger, as well as a few larger Mediterranean plates. And there's a very reasonably priced happy hour menu, available from 3 pm to 5 pm Wednesday to Sunday, with $7 and $9 glasses of wine, $9 cocktails, and appetizers starting at $5.

Club Deluxe replacement The DeLuxe in the Upper Haight is aiming for a June opening, we learned this week, with an exact date still TBA (and might come a little later). As we reported in September, the place won approval for live music to be played seven nights a week from 9 pm to 2 am, and the new owners are former Deluxe bartender Christian Beaulieu and Mr. Tipple's Recording Studio founder Jay Bordeleau, who have plans to keep the spirit of the place well intact.

Saltwater Bakeshop has opened its first brick-and-mortar location in SoMa, at 1309 Howard Street. The operation run by baker Brittany Dunn Holden, formerly of Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, already has a following from its presence at the Ferry Plaza and Fort Mason farmers' markets, and products at various cafes, and now it has a permanent home. As the Chronicle reports, there are plans to expand the food menu and add espresso drinks as of May 30.

Tablehopper brought word this week about the closing of Ristobar at 2300 Chestnut Street, which for many years until 2020 had been owner Gary Rulli's Emporio Rulli Gran Caffè. It's not clear what comes next for the space, but it's apparently being taken over by this Marin-based event and hospitality company, so we'll have to wait and see.

We got the word on the food and beverage lineup at at Outside Lands (August 7-9), and the full Taste of the Bay Area lineup can be seen here. It includes a couple of notable additions in longtime SF stalwarts Original Joe's, Perry's, and Balboa Cafe, who will all have booths at the fest.

A new sports-themed bar and restaurant called SoMa Social has taken over the restaurant space at the SoMa House hotel at 121 Seventh Street, near Minna (formerly known as the Americania Hotel). As the Chronicle reports, the opening comes just in time for World Cup tourists to arrive, and the sports bar has a back room called The Huddle with a shuffle-board table and a large TV.

Tablehopper also had news of the soft opening of Hardware Coffee Co., in West Portal — in the former Papenhausen Hardware store at 32 West Portal Avenue, with its lovely historic mezzanine. This is the second cafe for Hardware Coffee, which opened a kiosk in Ghirardelli Square last summer, and they serve their own blends that are roasted at Grand Coffee in Oakland, as well as pastries from — guess who! — Saltwater Bakeshop.

Fans of the erstwhile Cafe Jacqueline (RIP), about 50 of them, reportedly lined up this morning for a unique tag sale in which longtime chef-owner Jacqueline Margulis was selling off all the bits and pieces of the North Beach restaurant after failing to find a buyer for the business. The wares included escargot shells, dining chairs, vintage cookbooks, and, of course, soufflé dishes.

Chronicle associate critic Cesar Hernandez brings us a review of TBD, the new Japanese izakaya concept that grew out of a partnership between yakitori expert Tommy Cleary (who trained at Ippuku in Berkeley), and sushi chef Ray Lee of Akiko's fame, which opened in March in the former Akiko's space on Bush Street after Lee moved that restaurant to larger digs in SoMa. Hernandez raves about dishes like the Nashville hot chicken-inspired hot karaage, and the tuna Wellington, saying that "TBD offers a fresh take on the modern izakaya, and it doesn’t look or taste much like its contemporaries."

The all-important food and beverage lineup for Outside Lands 2026 has been released, and among the new offerings this year are some dishes from historic San Francisco restaurants who have never been part of the festival before.

The usually terrific lineup of foods available for festival-goers at Outside Lands will include some returning favorites this year, as well as a continued focus on global cuisine, and booths from three iconic and historic San Francisco restaurants: Original Joe's, Perry's, and Balboa Cafe.

Original Joe's will be serving up spicy rigatoni and prime rib dip sandwiches, while Balboa will be serving Caesar salad wraps, chicken paillard tenders, and espressotinis on tap.

Also new this year will be a couple of collab booths featuring first-time partnerships between SF businesses, like Wise Sons x Outta Sight Pizza, which will be serving hot pastrami dip sandwiches, pizza bagels with burrata, and cacio e pepe French fries.

There will also be an Arab-Singaporean-Italian mashup via Reem’s x Lion Dance Cafe, which will together be serving vegan fried eggplant and potato flatbread wraps w/ sambal.

New Ferry Building star Arquet, which had a presence at last year's fest before they had even opened, will be back with lobster rolls with brown butter and chives, as well as BBQ West Coast oysters with garlic butter. And Arquet's sister bakery Parachute will be new at the festival this year, so festival-goers can expect to see people taking a lot of selfies with its photogenic vanilla and passionfruit croissant cubes.

You can expect returning favorites including Sandy’s muffulettas, Smish Smash smashburgers, and Sorrel's fried chicken sandwiches.

Global offerings this year will include newcomer Meski — the restaurant co-owned by Draymond Green and chef Nelson German — bringing its mashup of Ethiopian and Afro-Latin flavors by way of Dominican braised chicken sambusas and Ethiopian sampler platters. And West African food truck Jollof Kitchen will be on site serving up Nigerian dishes, like grilled chicken with jollof rice.

For folks in VIP, standout new Michelin contender Restaurant Naides, which specializes in elevated takes on Filipino street food, will be serving BBQ pork and garlic rice bowls. And Indian spot Copra will be serving chicken Kari and Mysore masala dosas, as well as butter chicken basmati rice bowls.

The lineup this year was curated by Bay Area resident Tanya Kollar, who has been the lead food curator and food vendor program coordinator for Outside Lands for almost a decade — and has worked on the food end of the festival since 2010.

Kollar said in a statement, "Taste of the Bay Area at Outside Lands honors San Francisco’s culinary legacy through iconic long-standing restaurants while embracing the region’s evolving diversity with new global cuisines and one-of-a-kind festival dishes. Together, these newcomers capture both the history and the future of the Bay Area’s dynamic food scene."

Three-day general admission tickets to the festival are sold out, as are three-day GA+, three-day VIP tickets, and single-day VIP tickets, but you can join a waitlist and some late ticket releases may be occurring.

Single-day GA tickets ($269) for Friday and Sunday are still on sale, while single-day tickets for Saturday are sold out.

Check out the full food lineup here.