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It’s that time of year. Across the country, food writers have been experiencing the agony and the ecstasy of compiling best-of lists. They’re celebratory and subjective, exclusionary and eternal. Someone’s feelings are going to get hurt. Someone is going to be elated.
So it was with some trepidation this week that we anointed San Francisco’s best new restaurants of the year. Plenty of great places opened here in 2025, but barring the ones that were near unanimously fawned over by both local and national writers — The Happy Crane, Jules, and the eight-seat Fù Huì Huá (where, like teensy Sun Moon Studio, we couldn’t get a table) — there weren’t a ton of smash-you-over-the-head hits. It wasn’t a weak year. Just a diffuse one.
Fikscue at Thrive City.
This meant The Standard’s picks became more personal. Limiting ourselves to 10, with wiggle room for some runners-up, we had to make some tough choices. We put each restaurant through a type of personality test: Did it excite us? Did it add something to the city’s food scene? Had it been open long enough to prove itself? Would we recommend it to our most discerning friends? Would we return ourselves?
We all had our own love affairs. Astrid fought hard for Ciaorigato, which they loved for its cocktails, freewheeling approach to Itameshi cuisine, and sheer gorgeousness. Lauren fell for Arquet, the ambitious new anchor to the Ferry Building, helmed by Alex Hong, the chef at Sorrel. And I was a champion of Meski, not just because of chef Nelson German’s playful mashup of Ethiopian and Dominican food but because it has consciously created a vibrant, velvet-rope scene for a community often sidelined in San Francisco.
Ciaorigato and Arquet.
We unanimously rallied around the Indonesian barbecue at Fikscue — where, on a perfect day overlooking the Mission Bay waterfront, we demolished a behemoth plate of beef “dino ribs” and braised coconut-milk greens. While the Alameda location has lines, the Thrive City location is comparatively quiet, so get yourself there.
Speaking of casual, another shift shaped our list: Across the country, it’s become the norm for best-of lists to celebrate a more eclectic group of restaurants — everything from street food to mom-and-pop shops to fine dining. It is a great trend — one that motivated us to enthusiastically include the new Outta Sight Pizza in Chinatown and Jalebi Street, a family-run Upper Haight joint focused on North Indian street food. True, neither has service like Via Aurelia’s or a cocktail program like Bar Brucato’s. But that slice of shoyu-glazed Spam, jalapeño, and pineapple: fantastic. And the chole bhature with chickpeas? We’ve been dreaming of it.
When I returned to our north-star questions, the answer to almost all of our top new restaurants was, “Hell, yes!”