Le Colonial says "au revoir" after 26 years, a tiny Thai-Lao restaurant debuts in Parkside, and Four Kings gets a new national accolade, all in This Week in Food.  

Some big news arrived mid-week that Jules, the popular pizza pop-up from Tartine alum Max Blachman-Gentile, has landed a brick-and-mortar space in the Lower Haight. Jules will be opening, hopefully, in February 2025, at 237 Fillmore Street (the former Iza Ramen). In the meantime, Jules will continue popping up at Buddy, the wine bar, Loquat Bakery, and possibly elsewhere.

In other important pizza news, Chronicle-approved Oakland pizza spot June's Pizza is reopening tonight in its own new brick-and-mortar location at 2408 Mandela Parkway in West Oakland. As the Chronicle reports, chef-owner Craig Murli, formerly of Atelier Crenn, will be making two pizza types each day — his beloved margherita, and one rotating special, and you can either walk in or order online for takeout (the website hasn't yet updated with these options, but it should soon). There's no reservations, and June's will be open from 4 to 9 pm tonight, and regularly from Wednesday to Sunday.

As we learned earlier this week, The Cliff House will not be reopening this fall as was originally promised. The new operators, Sutro Lands End Partners, say they've encountered unnecessary repair work to the building that needs to be done, to the tune of $10 million or so dollars, and now they are aiming for sometime in 2025.

Tablehopper reports that a tiny new Thai-Lao restaurant called Chaa Roen Pohn has opened in Parkside, at 1241 Vicente Street (at 23rd Avenue). Chef-owner Mimi Pohn, who is Lao, is serving dishes like like kao piak (hand-pulled rice noodles in ginger chicken broth, pork loaf, pork spare-ribs, topped with green onion, cilantro, and crispy onion), and the popular crispy rice salad called kao tod, and the place is open daily for both lunch and dinner.

Longtime Union Square-area restaurant Le Colonial, which survived at 20 Cosmo Place for 26 years, is closed for good, as of earlier this month. The restaurant began as the sister property of a New York spot of the same name, using the problematic theme of colonial Vietnam to shape its menu and aesthetic — although this space was, even longer ago, home to the original Bay Area Tiki palace Trader Vic's, so it already had an orientalist aesthetic. The restaurant's late-90s popularity and a nightlife spot took a few years to fade, and reinventions every few years, including a revamp by chef Laurent Manrique in 2015, did not do much to improve the quality of the food. Then came Soleil Ho's blistering review of the place in 2019, asking the fairly obvious question, "Why does this place exist?" Le Colonial still held on though, sometimes as a wedding and event venue, with noted chef Geoffrey Deetz taking the helm in 2021 for another revamp, but he tells the Chronicle this week that that 2019 review basically did them in and they never recovered.

And speaking of Trader Vic's, Victor Bergeron's classic Tiki creation, the Mai Tai, is going to be declared the official cocktail of Oakland. Council member at large Rebecca Kaplan has introduced a resolution to make it so, in recognition of the original-original Trader Vic's location at the corner of 65th Street and San Pablo Avenue where the cocktail was invented in 1944.

Sister businesses Mission Bay Wine & Cheese (114 Channel Street) and Mission Bay Wine Bar (Chase Center) have shuttered. As Tablehopper reports, via a note on their website, the owners say they have struggled to make the businesses sustainable.

Also closing after a much longer (18-year) run, is City Beer Store (853 Valencia Street). The place has relocated twice since it originally opened on Folsom Street in 2006, becoming a go-to bottle shop and hangout for beer geeks of various stripes. But owners Beth and Craig Wathen tell the Chronicle that sales haven't rebounded since the pandemic, and beer sales in general are suffering competition from the hard-seltzer and canned cocktail markets.

Associate Chronicle Restaurant Critic Cesar Hernandez filed a review this week of Popoca, the Oakland Salvadoran restaurant that was recently lauded as one of Bon Appetit's best new restaurants in the country. Hernandez raves that Popoca "marks a high point for Salvadoran cuisine in California, establishing an elegant path that begins from a place of tradition but zooms past any boundary." He particularly recommends a dish of yuca topped with marinated anchovies, as well as one of the best guacamoles he's ever tasted, topped with smoked and cured egg yolk.

And while we missed it last week, we can't let this Week in Food go by without acknowledging that Chinatown hot spot Four Kings also landed on Bon Appetit's 20 Best New Restaurants list, giving the Bay Area two coveted spots on this national list, barely a year after a Bon Appetit writer declared the local food scene all but dead. Restaurant editor Elazar Sontag raves that chefs Franky Ho and Mike Long "know how to really let loose," and recommends a bar seat for the best experience.