Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem the Divine Comedy serves as the inspiration for countless movies, plays, and shows, but the latest project it’s influenced will hit closer to home. Dante’s Inferno is a new multilevel restaurant, music venue, and rooftop bar all rolled into one building, launching in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley in fall 2026.
Owner Dante Buckley left the world of video game design — he’s the mind behind first-person VR shooter game Onward — and he is now a first-time restaurateur leading this ambitious venture. It’s a personal project for him; Dante’s Inferno draws on his Jamaican background for the food, drinks, and feel of the space, as well as his interest in music as a blues guitarist on the side. It is also, of course, a nod to Buckley’s shared name with the famous poet. But it feeds another passion: bringing people together. Moving to San Francisco as a 17-year-old, Buckley loved the city’s bar and music scene, but he says the vibe of the Bay Area has shifted since the pandemic.
With Dante’s Inferno, he’s hoping to bring back some feel-good moments. “I need to open up a spot that helps connect people and brings something new to the city that’s Jamaican, that has different types of live music, that has a rooftop bar that’s really awesome and feels like paradise,” Buckley says. “Things like having a no cell phone policy, forcing you to connect, having community events, and [I’m offering] a different perspective that I don’t think the city has seen a lot from somebody like me and my background.”
Dante’s Inferno
Dante’s Inferno
Set at 1815 Market Street, the ground floor of Dante’s Inferno sets the stage (literally) for an intimate, 50-seat supper club that combines live music with food. The plan is to pair a pre fixe, ticketed dinner with a 90-minute live show featuring different styles of music and artists, in an acoustically impressive setting. The venue makes up the “inferno” part of the business, and early renderings show stage curtains and curved velvet banquettes dressed in deep reds, a black marble bar top, dramatic lighting, and stained glass windows facing the street. Literary types will likely gravitate toward the Inferno nods throughout the space, while Buckley promises that audiophiles will enjoy the precise sound system they’re installing. “You’re going to be very close to the performer, lights will be low, and enjoying a great meal, but it’s an experience you really can’t get anywhere else,” he says. “It’s like being in somebody’s living room, eating, and watching a show with them.”
The prix fixe menu at Inferno skews toward “beautifully plated” Jamaican dishes with a bar to keep drinks flowing before, during, and after the show. At the rooftop restaurant and bar, dubbed Paradiso, the menu will be a la carte, also incorporating Jamaican food favorites, but with nods to Italian food, in keeping with the Inferno and the Divine Comedy theme, per Buckley. Among the early ideas for the menu are staples like patties with different fillings, jerk chicken and pork, curry chicken, plus ackee and saltfish. Italian touches will come in the form of things like a pizza with Jamaican flavors, he says, dishes “that taste Jamaican authentically, but are more Italian in their presentation.” Buckley adds: “If you know Jamaican food — really good Jamaican food — then you’ll understand the taste, you’ll understand the flavors,” Buckley says.
Dante’s Inferno
As for the dual bars at Dante’s Inferno, Buckley didn’t want to share too much on the cocktail program, but visitors can expect amaros and rum to feature prominently, another nod to the Caribbean and Italian coming together, he says. Each space will have its own drink menu, he divulges, but the rooftop will more prominently feature Miami-Jamaican-Caribbean-Paradise drinks while Inferno will lean into “intricate, sophisticated cocktails.” Buckley says he wants Paradiso to feel like being in Jamaica. “With the right heaters, the right vibes, with the right music, with the right hospitality, it will feel like you are in Jamaica out on the beach, even on a cold day.”
Construction has just begun on the space, and by the sounds of it, Buckley has more surprises up his sleeve for the space. But at the end of the day, he says the project is all about people building connections with one another in the city that he loves. “So many people left and just got the hell out of here, and I had that same inclination to do that, too,” Buckley says. “But I had such a great experience [living here], and this is pivotal to my adulthood. I can stay and do something, so I should, just out of duty — plus it’s fun as hell to do this.”
Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso (1815 Market Street) open in Fall 2026.
Dante’s Inferno