The Eater Awards are a celebration of the year’s best and brightest new restaurants and bars, as well as the people who power them. Plenty of new spots opened in the last 12 months, and the Eater SF team reflected on the best drinks and bites we’ve had all year. It was tough whittling down the list to just five categories, but what struck us most is the genuine hospitality and vision we saw in these places we visited.
This year, we ate at a fine dining restaurant whose reservations are as rare as gold, powered by a hardworking family championing the food of their home country. We sipped drinks at a retro-futuristic bar that looks ripped from a 1970s movie. A playful pop-up with serious technique had us checking our calendars for the next event and sharing with others. Meanwhile, a nonalcoholic bar had editors reconsidering the flavors and textures of drinks in ways that their boozier brethren couldn’t. And one Oakland establishment had us wishing we could visit every week, sitting shoulder to shoulder with locals at a community table for each lovely bite. Here are the Bay Area’s 2025 Eater Award winners.
Crispy spring rolls with uni at Fù Huì Huá. Camille Cohen/Eater SF
Tao William preps dishes for dinner service. Camille Cohen/Eater SF
Photos of chef Yuezhong Ge throughout his cooking career. Camille Cohen/Eater SF
The interior of Fù Huì Huá in the Mission. Camille Cohen/Eater SF
2809 24th Street, San Francisco
Yuezhong Ge hand-pounds sweet rice into two tanguyan. He prefers his smaller than those his mom made when he was growing up in Shanghai. Ge’s come in a small dish of sugar just the same, but he stuffs them with white and black sesame paste, a kind of bite-sized yin and yang. He wanted to create a restaurant that feels like the best home-cooked meal of your life, and he and his son William Tao have achieved just that in their stupid-popular 24th Street restaurant Fù Huì Huá.
Here diners sit at a tiny omakase-ish counter and work through New Zealand elephant fish done in the style of a thick, rich shark fin soup; crabs from around the world served in myriad styles, including fried rice enriched with crab butter; and much more. The staff is composed of the father and son chef duo, only one server (a close family friend), and one additional family member who supports the kitchen and front-of-house. Menus here run about $300, and the waitlist is almost unfathomably long. But once inside, the stark countertop transforms into a stage befitting the best show San Franciscans can catch in 2025; like props in a puppet show, Tao pulls fruits and roots that appear on that night’s menu from a small display behind the counter as he assembles the meal. Each moneybag dumpling or little candied bird at Fù Huì Huá proves there are indeed some wizards behind curtains. Those tanguyan arrive at the end of the 10-course Chinese feast. In a community of top-tier cooks and chefs, this family of four plants a big, beautiful flag for the intimate, cosmopolitan power of Chinese cuisine. — Paolo Bicchieri, audience editor, Eater Northern California and Pacific Northwest
The Jalisco Hotline at the Valley Club. Nicola Parisi/The Valley Club
398 Geary Street, San Francisco
Mitchell Lagneaux’s bar, the Valley Club, was always meant to be cool. An experienced barman around town, he’s worked at thoughtful drink purveyors like Brass Tacks and Horsefeather, so it only makes sense that his own bar would be heavy on technique and flavors. Take his carefully considered cocktail, the Lovemaker: It channels the classic, bitter Negroni but pairs it with white chocolate and raspberry flavors, giving new purpose to the deep red hues of the drink. His riff on the vodka soda, the Crushed Velvet, infuses strawberry with vodka before forced carbonation takes the drink to its naturally bubbly state with notes of acid and basil added to turn up the volume on flavor. But Lagneaux’s ultimate vision for the Valley Club takes this bar into awards territory; with halo light fixtures, velvet booths, and light gleaming and bouncing off the mirrored walls, the Valley Club looks like a 1970s retro-futuristic spaceship bar beamed down to San Francisco. That theme continues with its menu, which channels excess from bygone eras, with what amounts to a catalog for the bar’s cocktails. If you want to be transported to another place, just steps from Union Square, set your coordinates for the Valley Club. — Dianne de Guzman, regional editor, Eater Northern California and Pacific Northwest
Chef Shawn Phillips plates a dish at his pop-up, Tartufino. Patricia Chang/Eater SF
The Tartufino menu lineup at a recent Birba pop-up. Patricia Chang/Eater SF
Frequently at Birba (458 Grove Street, San Francisco)
San Francisco is subject to a billion pop-ups every calendar year. Some are big hits, and some are small flubs. Tartufino is a north star in the constellation. Chef and operator Shawn Phillips sharpened his knives at top restaurants in the country: the French Laundry, Saison, Atelier Crenn, Alinea. But he hasn’t taken over the scene thanks to his personal life: He’s a single dad living on the Peninsula, schlepping his gear to San Francisco’s wine bar Birba a few times a month, or to Tal Palo in Los Altos. But his quail served in a sweet and savory Jamaican banana curry gastrique, or his dirty rice crowned in oxtail and chicken liver, has the potential to take over the Bay — though Phillips isn’t so sure he even wants to open a restaurant.
His style is playful, his cooking premier but with a heavy wink toward his music and pop culture influences; menus come decorated in Graduation-era Kanye West graphics or with Christopher Nolan Dark Knight screenshots. Phillips is also committed to affordability, routinely serving dishes that go for about $20, a la carte. In short, Phillips is a true rarity in the Bay’s chef-driven culture: a creative, hungry talent with a dizzying career just popping up for pure love of the game. — PB
The oxtail jjigae at Oakland’s Oken. Niki Williams/Eater
Oyster mushrooms prepped by the Oken team for service. Niki Williams/Eater
Fluffy buns receive a final crisp in the pan. Niki Williams/Eater
Ok’s Sichuan spiced popcorn chicken. Niki Williams/Eater
Oken: Place Where We Want to Be Regulars
6200 Claremont Avenue, Oakland
Oken is chef Albert Ok’s followup to Ok’s Deli, and if diners were already impressed with the flavors of his sandwiches, they won’t be disappointed here. OK plays a wider field at Oken. The menu skews Korean and Japanese, but its influence jetsets to other Asian locales through punchy dishes like the oxtail jjigae and okonomiyaki salad — a dashi omelet stuffed with cabbage and pork belly, doused with okonomiyaki sauce and Kewpie mayo, and then smacked with a healthy dose of katsuobushi. But it’s not all flashy flavors; subtle moments like the chilled somen noodles or halibut sashimi show restraint, knowing when to let ingredients shine without too much manipulation. The snacks, meanwhile, are playful, like the yukhwe onigiri, taking a mound of beef tartare and placing it on a crisped triangle of rice, quail egg yolk at its center and a nest of shredded perilla leaves on top. The pie slice-shaped restaurant is at its best when it’s humming with activity, diners sitting cozily side by side at the community table or at intimate two-tops, each patron vying for a taste of this menu that can only be found in Oakland. — DDG
Anand Upender of York Street Coffee. Selina Pan/York Street Collective
1100 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Nonalcoholic cocktails have become prevalent in recent years, upping the game from flat, listless sodas to crafted drinks worthy of their alcohol-included brethren. Nobody in the Bay Area this year made the case for nonalcoholic drinks better than Anand Upender, whose York Street Collective has lit up the corner of 22nd and Valencia streets with an array of flavors and careful balance. Upenders’ playbook doesn’t just rely on cocktail standards to lead his taste buds to the shop’s final drinks; everything is fair game and ripe for amping up texture, citrus, sweetness, or whatever each nonalcoholic drink calls for. Pandan in Paradise is a menu favorite, taking vanilla-sweet pandan, and incorporating the heady flavors of chicory and cardamom, along with a dose of salted coconut to prop up the drink. On the other end of the spectrum, Pith Party leans into the bittersweet, pairing Abstinence Blood Orange Aperitif with NA Hazy IPA and orange juice, all topped off with a nori cold foam. Tack on the fact that Upender had the foresight to craft a community space filled with music, poetry, and workshops — it’s a joyful place that’s not only a celebration of sober culture, but also the artists that call the Mission and greater San Francisco home. Although the residency only lasts through December, Upender proves that he can make nonalcoholic drinks sing, and unite a thirsty community. We can’t wait to see what he does next. — DDG