It's official: The SF entry on Bon Appetit's Hot Ten this year is Mister Jiu's, despite the place being nearly a year and a half old — that's just how things go in the print world sometimes. The Chinatown restaurant, a passion project for SF native chef Brandon Jew, now joins the ranks of AL's Place, Rintaro, State Bird Provisions, and Lord Stanley, all of which have enjoyed Bon App list accolades in recent years, and the tourist traffic that comes along with this national recognition.

We knew that Mister Jiu's was on the "long list" for inclusion, as the magazine has made a habit in the last few years of releasing a list of the 50 top contenders for Best New Restaurant honors a few weeks before the final 10. And now this means that Mister Jiu's, in its uniqueness for giving a modern makeover to Chinese dishes in the heart of the nation's oldest Chinatown, beat out two other restaurants that have had no shortage of accolades themselves: Tartine Manufactory and SingleThread.

Writing about Mister Jiu's, critic Julia Kramer writes:

Order practically any dish on the Mister Jiu's menu, and you’ll see (and more importantly, taste) where Jew is coming from. Take, for instance, the BBQ pork buns, made with Berkshire organic pork and garnished with Jew’s riff on Dutch Crunch, S.F.’s cult-classic white bread. Try the delicate, pork-stuffed wontons, plated with Monterey squid. Study the plump, not-at-all-gamey quail, sourced from Wolfe Ranch, which comes along with some sticky rice and Chinese sausage that Jew cures in house. Or dig into the large-format Peking duck, wherein Jew bastes and seasons the best fowl he can find (from Sonoma County Poultry), then hangs and fan-dries them for three days, before cooking them to a beautifully rosy medium temp. Even the desserts, from pastry chef all-star Melissa Chou, feel seamlessly dialed into Jew’s worldview. In fact, in this age of charcoal-colored everything, Chou’s black-sesame cake struck me as more modern than traditional.

Also interesting to note about this year's list: It's the first time in recent memory that no LA restaurant made the cut.

And each year for the past several, the mag has declared one city "the most exciting city to eat in right now," and this year it's Chicago, which gets two restaurants (Giant and Elske) on the top ten. Last year the prize went to Washington DC, and in 2015 it was San Francisco's turn — but given that all the restaurants they raved about two years ago are still open, and given that this is still an incredible place to eat, it's hard to accept that we need to give the title up just because this food magazine needs to say something different each year.

In any event, go to Mister Jiu's if you haven't already! Reservations are likely to get harder to get.

Previously: It's About Time: Bon Appétit Declares SF The Best Food City In The Country