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Last year, two of San Francisco’s hottest pop-up chefs, Max Blachman-Gentile and James Yeun Leong Parry, debuted their first restaurants: Jules in Lower Haight and The Happy Crane in Hayes Valley, respectively. The reception has been nothing short of rapturous: best-of-the-year lists, month-out reservations, the kind of fawning that fledgling restaurant owners can only dream of.
With 2025’s proverbial confetti swept up, I checked in with them on the transition from pop-up to permanent. Now that the honeymoon is over, how’s it really going? Do they have any words of wisdom for all the dreamers out there?
Parry and Blachman-Gentile, who are both sole chef-owner-operators, agree that it’s tough to go it alone. Blachman-Gentile plans to solve this by eventually making a couple of his employees partners. Meanwhile, Parry is learning to handle the responsibility solo. “As an owner, everything becomes your problem,” he laughs.
Like your trash and recycling bins being stolen. This has happened repeatedly at The Happy Crane, which is on a busy stretch of Gough Street. “The city won’t deliver a new one on the same day,” Parry says. “So we just get backed up. It’s stress we don’t need. Now we have locks, but we have to pay extra for them.”
Or the fact that payroll and accounting — should you choose to do it yourself, like Blachman-Gentile — is harder than expected. “I’ve learned a lot about administration things on the fly,” he says. “But it’s something I’m weirdly proud of.”
A Jules pop-up at Woods Cole Valley in January 2025. | Source: Niki Williams for the Standard
Ownership also means less tinkering with Peking duck and pizza dough and spending more time on unsexy things, like equipment maintenance. Don’t say the word “HVAC” to Blachman-Gentile; the piece of equipment that keeps a kitchen ventilated is officially a trigger. “You shouldn’t let your landlord hire someone to work on it,” he warns, clearly traumatized. “Choose them yourself.”
Parry has had other issues. “Our refrigeration has broken down five times in six months,” he says. Some days, of course, it’s multiple things at once. “I’m learning to be patient with my team and with myself. But when you don’t have a challenging day, something’s not right,” he says. “There’s gotta be something.”
In a city where it’s notoriously hard to find restaurant employees, you will spend a lot of time searching for skilled labor. “In kitchens, people often have to work two jobs, so they can’t come in until service has almost started. I had a whole plan for what my team’s schedules would look like,” Blachman-Gentile says. “But the week before opening, we just hadn’t found a lot of staff. It became clear that I was going to have to change my vision.”
And once you have your people, there’s no guarantee they’ll all work out. When he was running a pop-up, Parry often worked alongside his wife and a few friends. “To go from that to a staff of 25 has been extremely challenging,” he says. “You invest in training your dream team, but then you realize some people are not aligned. That’s been really hard.”
Maitake biang biang at The Happy Crane. | Source: Kelsey McClellan for The Standard
Parry makes dumplings. | Source: Kelsey McClellan for The Standard
There’s also pressure to maintain momentum. While pop-ups create scarcity, and thereby generate demand, restaurants need to maintain diners’ interests for the long haul. “What to do about this takes up a big chunk of my brain on a daily basis,” Blachman-Gentile says. “I imagine at some point, it won’t be as hard to get a reservation here.” Though Jules doesn’t offer delivery, that might have to change. “I don’t want someone’s first experience of our pizza to be a delivered pizza. But I also know that there’s a huge opportunity there financially.”
Despite serving different cuisines at different price points in different neighborhoods, both chefs describe the same learning curve: Cooking becomes the easy part; maintenance, staffing, patience, and sustainability become the real work. That, and keeping one’s sanity.
Blachman-Gentile knows he can’t keep working 14-hour days. Parry knows he needs to get into the habit of exercising again, even if it’s just one day a week. He also sees a therapist, so he doesn’t dump everything on his wife.
Of course, there have been wonderful discoveries, too. The city has come out in full force to support both restaurants, something neither chef takes for granted. Blachman-Gentile loves the regulars Jules is cultivating. “Transitioning from being a lone-wolf pop-up to having a community has been really special.”
Parry has a running joke with one of the chefs who’s worked with him since the start of his pop-up journey, at a little place in Chinatown. “When we’re doing like 140 covers, and we’re stressed and overwhelmed, I always say, ‘Yes, this is bloody hard, but would you rather still be doing a pop-up at a boba shop?’”
Needless to say, the answer is obvious: “This is a better problem.”