When Is San Francisco Getting Jollibee?

There’s only one thing I love more than fried chicken: Filipino Fried Chicken, and luckily there’s about to be a lot more Filipino Fried Chicken in the Bay because Jollibee is coming to Alameda. Which is great. Alameda deserves delicious fried chicken, but one city remains free of Jollibee’s chickenjoy, and that’s San Francisco. 

Why? 

According to the San Francisco Standard, a Downtown San Francisco Jollibee has been in the works since 2020, but the site at 5th and Market remains chickenless. It wasn’t always this way, but there used to be a Jollibee in SoMa.

This is unacceptable. According to scientists, the only way to properly defeat a ‘doom loop’ is with a sufficient amount of chickenjoy. This is the only way forward for the city. Without Jollibee, San Francisco is doomed.  

I’m kidding, but one of the things I miss about living in Vallejo, a city with a large Filipino population, was being introduced to Filipino food. The food of the Philippines is an underrated blessing that more people should experience. And I’m not only referring to Jollibee, but to Filipino street food. 

One of the great things about Vallejo was you’d have grandmothers selling lumpia out of their garages. Their kids would post on local Vallejo community pages that they were selling food, and people would come from every corner of town until the lumpia was sold out. 

San Francisco is a city with a storied Fil-Am community, but the city’s culinary scene is lacking strong Filipino representation. While Chinese and Mexican food are synonymous  with San Francisco, several other communities have called the CIty home, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. 

For example, SoMa used to be home to a thriving Filipino community, but due to gentrification and urban renewal efforts, those communities have all but been erased. Now SoMa is home to high rise condos and the types of businesses to cater to people who live in high rise condos. The only problem is that a lot of those condos are empty, so those businesses are also empty. 

I would much rather walk around Little Manilla than a faux-urban ghost town.  

While obviously we can’t just wave a magic wand and bring back SoMa’s Filipino community, we can diversify the City’s fast food. 

San Francisco is a world-class food city with lots of options, but honestly, there are very few options that smack as hard as Jollibees. Here’s to hoping the city has some delicious Chicken joy in its future. 

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