Bay Area Restaurants Score Big in Fall Food Awards

A bar owner, a software engineer, a chef, and a writer grab a table at a packed San Francisco restaurant. It’s not the set up to a dad joke. It’s a typical night at Chinatown’s new It Girl restaurant Four Kings, the destination for nostalgic Hong Kong-inspired cuisine since opening in February 2024. Getting a reservation at the restaurant was nigh impossible at that point, and, as summer turns toward fall, it’ll get even harder. That’s because the annual food media awards are rolling in like so many lightning strikes. And, unlike in recent years, San Francisco and the Bay Area are cleaning up.

Four Kings is joined by Oakland Salvadoran restaurant Popoca on longtime kingmaker Bon Appetit‘s Best New Restaurants 2024 list. Moreover, Oakland restaurant Burdell took home a major W as Food & Wine‘s Restaurant of the Year. All three made waves when they opened locally, but these kinds of awards can be game changers for a business’s bottom line. The San Francisco Standard, in writing up a weird Michelin party in Half Moon Bay, reminded readers that even the high-minded out there can’t overlook the some 20 percent revenue boost a Michelin star can deliver. After a veritable assault by media outlets the world over, the Bay Area will take the praise.

Four Kings, the only restaurant your journalist has had the pleasure to visit of the three so far, comes after a series of pop-ups by two chefs from the kitchen at Mister Jiu’s. Opening a few blocks away, the restaurant’s become fast-loved for fried squab — an old school San Francisco favorite of James Beard himself — alongside inventive dishes including Singaporean style chili crab and Taiwanese douhua, a kind of tofu pudding dessert. Burdell comes from chef Geoff Davis, a cozy testament to his maternal grandmother. A smart shade of salmon runs through the color palette at the Telegraph Avenue restaurant, opening in late 2023 and serving roasted Sonoma duck with cherries and inventive spins on chicken and waffles. “Dining there feels like inhabiting a memory you haven’t quite had yet,” Food & Wine wrote.

Popoca, which translates “to emit smoke” in the Salvadoran indigenous language Nawat according to the restaurant’s website, opened in late summer 2023. The restaurant was a long time coming for chef-owner Anthony Salguero who delayed the opening after pivoting locations in 2021. A masa master, Salguero finishes his tamales and pupusas in fire. Still, Bon Appetit wrote those traditional dishes done well can be appreciated in concert with finely braised chicken and salty chorizo as Salguero “hopes to expand diners’ perceptions of this cuisine.”

These wins come at just the right time. Across the board, the restaurant game in the Bay Area had been dealt an unfair blow in the last few years — some from the same publications that are now doling out these awards. The James Beard foundation, sort of like the Oscars for the food world, gave nearly nothing to the region this year. Michelin star-holding restaurants held their star power, though, and three new restaurants joined those hallowed ranks. That all said, people really slept on all the chef talent in the city and Bay Area over the early 2020s as COVID cautionary tales conflated with doom loop hysteria to create a kind of illusion that the good food had gone somewhere else.

These awards can embody the definition of inward gazing, seeming like the last important thing in a country and world that is ever more precarious. But a boost of support to local restaurants and their workers can only bolster a much-buffeted industry through these turbulent times.