It’s been less than a year since Gizela Ho stepped out of the kitchen at Rich Table, and she has already found a home for her first restaurant.
Good Morning 96, a dinner destination rooted in California cuisine and shaped by global influences, will open next year in the Upper Fillmore. Ho signed a lease for the space at 2235 Fillmore St., the former home of Japanese restaurant Ten-Ichi, which closed in 2024 when billionaire investor Neil Mehta purchased the building.
As Ho navigated the city’s commercial real estate market for the first time, she began refining her vision for the much-anticipated restaurant. The narrow, boxy space with its unadorned gray exterior and tall ceilings wasn’t an immediate fit. It took a conversation with her former boss to help her see the potential.
“I had a hard time imagining it into something that I could be excited about. Then I talked to Evan [Rich] about it,” Ho says. “Now I can’t imagine myself going into any other space.”
Source: Courtesy Jason Leung
Source: Courtesy Jason Leung
She initially planned for a cozy restaurant with minimal staff. Now, she says, Good Morning 96 will be closer in size to Rich Table, where she cooked for more than a decade and established herself as one of the city’s rising culinary stars. She was drawn to the energy of the Upper Fillmore, a neighborhood in the midst of transformation as Mehta spends millions buying up properties, where “there’s always someone on the street.”
Raised in Guam and with family ties to Hong Kong, Ho naturally draws from her Chinese heritage in her cooking. But after cooking at pop-ups and collaboration dinners across the Bay Area over the last year, she realized much of what she cooks isn’t easily recognizable as Chinese or even Asian. Instead, she is inspired by her extensive travels.
“I need to travel in order to be creative,” Ho says, “and I need to step away from the kitchen and go out and eat.”
That means dishes such as a scallop- and shrimp-stuffed chicken wing (opens in new tab) glazed in garlic and fish-sauce caramel, which she cooked for a dinner at Angeler in partnership with Nisei. After selling out despite preparing more than enough for the event, Ho spent a few months refining the recipe, which is intended to be reminiscent of fried fish balls, a popular street food in Hong Kong.
She’s also planning to put the salted duck egg (opens in new tab)soufflé she made for a September dinner at Oakland’s Pomet on the opening menu. “One of my regulars was like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be the next soufflé place, because there’s no soufflés anymore,’” Ho says, referring to the closure of North Beach’s Cafe Jacqueline. “I was like, ‘OK, everybody, calm down. I have one soufflé that was successful!”
A molten black sesame cookie she developed for one of her earliest pop-ups has also earned a place on the menu, and if the timing aligns, Ho wants to feature her Dungeness crab salad, made with pomelo and spaghetti squash and topped with smoked trout crumble in a red curry sauce. From her time at Rich Table, she’ll bring back a cucumber and zucchini salad served under a simple, savory sesame granita that’s refreshing for the city’s increasing number of warm days.
Scallop- and shrimp-stuffed chicken wings. | Source: Courtesy StarChefs
She’s planning a full beverage program — though the logistics of making that happen within the tight footprint have yet to be determined. The bottle list won’t be extensive, Ho says, but she’d like an abundance of approachable options by the glass. “My husband and I love cocktails and drinking, so we never thought that we wouldn’t have a full beverage program,” Ho says. “We want to have really fun cocktails.”
For the interior, Ho cites the 2000 romantic drama “In the Mood for Love” as a design influence; she’s in good company, as the film’s “era-defining aesthetic (opens in new tab)” has been cited by everyone from Sofia Coppola to Marc Jacobs. “I’ve always been the type of person who liked highly saturated colors and really rich and moody vibes for interiors,” says Ho, noting that the palette for her wedding was deep burgundy and white. She plans to incorporate subtle nods to her personal history, such as design motifs common in Guam.
The space will undergo a fairly extensive renovation that will see the installation of a mezzanine, which will serve as a private dining room. Ho plans to open up the kitchen, which is shoved into the back of the space, to make it more of a showpiece. “It’s taken a lot of brainstorming of how to use all of that space,” she says, “but in a way where it’s exciting for San Francisco and not something that you can see in any other restaurant.”
Ho says her design and construction teams told her to plan for a midyear opening, a quick timeline. But after decades in the industry, she’s willing to be patient. After all, she hopes Good Morning 96 will be the kind of restaurant that lasts for 30 years.
“Whenever young cooks come to work for me, and they ask, ‘Do you have any advice for me, chef?’ my advice is to not look at the next year, at the next two years, or even five years. You should be looking at where you see yourself in 10 years, and which road gets you there the fastest.”