Eat Here Now is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around – the ones we think are worth visiting. We dine once, serve forth our thoughts, and let you take it from there.
If you ask San Franciscans about the city’s most beloved foods, they might say cioppino, clam chowder, or perhaps a heap of garlic noodles served with butter-roasted Dungeness crab. The more accurate answer, however, might be a beautifully roasted chicken, given our decades-long obsession with Zuni Cafe’s wood-fired bird.
Well, the Zuni chicken has some competition. At Arquet, a 6-week-old restaurant inside the Ferry Building, the chickens share the same pedigree as those served two miles down Market Street. Mary’s organic hens arrive at the restaurant with heads and feet attached, and after a daylong brine, they are slowly smoked before the bone-in breasts are lacquered with hot honey glaze made from local dried chiles and citrus. The white meat is then roasted over a wood-fired grill and finished in the oven. The legs, meanwhile, get a buttermilk bath before being fried with a blend of spices and painted in more of that hot honey glaze.
When it arrives at the table, it is eye-catching. Coated in a craggy, burnt-umber crust, the claw-on leg refuses to be confined to the edges of the plate, and the plump breast glistens under a coating of sticky-sweet glaze. Cut into it, and you find fire-kissed meat that sits at the Lagrange point between sweetness and spice.
The dish is arguably the essence of the new California cuisine: the culmination of sourcing top-quality ingredients, borrowing inspiration from all over the globe, and bringing it all together using uncomplicated but well-executed techniques.
I can’t promise this chicken will ever be as famous as Zuni’s. But I’d bet that Arquet might just become one of San Francisco’s legendary restaurants.
Chef Alex Hong, who spent the last decade establishing his name at seasonal Cal-Italian restaurant Sorrel in Presidio Heights, worked on Arquet for three years before its mid-October opening. He and Joel Wilkerson, the director of operations, were originally looking at a much smaller space in the famous waterfront food hall. Then, in May 2024, the late Charles Phan decided not to renew the lease on his beloved Vietnamese restaurant The Slanted Door. Suddenly, Hong had to decide if he was ready to step into one of the city’s highest-profile restaurant spaces.
“We really weren’t looking for, you know, a 9,000-square-foot restaurant,” he says. “It was intimidating. It was like, no, it’s too big.”
Initial doubts aside, Hong and his team have managed to make the expansive space feel effortlessly cool and comfortable. In one corner, they carved out a footprint for Parachute, Arquet’s sister bakery, which opened in September under the direction of pastry chef Nasir Armar. In the main kitchen, they took things down to the studs to make room for a 6-foot wood-fired hearth, now the focal point of the open space, gleaming with stainless steel and copper.
There is a bar and lounge and a private dining room. But otherwise, Hong wanted the floor plan to remain open, allowing sight lines that run from the front door to the back. Long banquettes and booths big enough for eight keep you from feeling like you’re in an upscale cafeteria. And though the cream-and-khaki palette might have been mundane elsewhere, here, it draws your eyes to the bank of windows along the west wall, framing views of the glittering Bay Bridge beyond.
On a late-fall Friday night, the room reflected the full spectrum of the city’s dining public: tourists in down puffers and jeans sat a table away from a stylish group clad in leather and cashmere. Appeasing both crowds was a priority for Hong.
“I think, foremost, I just wanted to have a very approachable menu,” he says. “Taking over such a big, grand space, especially in the Ferry Building, with it being a huge tourist area, meant having something for everyone was my goal.”
That chicken ($38 for a half; $68 for a whole) is Exhibit A that he has accomplished this objective. It’s straightforward enough to satisfy less adventurous diners while rewarding culinary risk-takers with that gnarled claw.
A bowl of five pillowy ricotta dumplings ($26) likewise speaks to anyone with a love of all things cheesy, though sweet corn, grassy green garlic, and chanterelles ensure that the dish stays squarely rooted in California cuisine. If you’ve ever had Dungeness crab or brioche, then you’ll know combining the two would be pretty hard to mess up. Indeed, a citrus- and dill-spiked crab salad over a slab of buttery bread ($28) is so good, you might have to fight your tablemates for the last bite. “It’s basically like a luxurious crab lobster roll,” Hong says.
Arquet’s hot honey half chicken arrives table-side with claw attached.
Dungeness crab brioche topped with caviar.
For all the comforts on offer at Arquet, the best plates do require a certain amount of open-mindedness. Scallion fry bread ($18) sits somewhere between cong you bing, the flaky savory Chinese pancake, and a very airy focaccia. When dragged through a bowl of creamy buffalo ricotta and honey sourced from Hong’s own beehive, it is so delicious you’ll stop trying to shoehorn the rich, salty bread into any single category.
Meaty barbecued oysters ($7.50 each) come slathered in aromatic, curry-spiced vadouvan butter with a sprinkling of crispy rice — it’s a familiar dish in this city by the bay that manages to feel distinct thanks to the infusion of aromatic, toasted spice.
The whole fish, currently red snapper ($68), has also been a hit; the restaurant goes through about 100 a week, Hong says. Both it and the Santa Barbara spiny lobster ($72) — the clawless, warm-water cousin to the more popular Maine variety — get roasted over almond and oak woods. The fish is dressed with a sauce of vermouth and elderflower, while the lobster gets chile lime butter.
But the menu’s biggest showstopper has to be the 45-ounce, bone-in ribeye ($195), a colossal hunk of beef that, when settled onto the restaurant’s hearth, would make any omnivore’s mouth water.
Barbecued oysters with vadouvan butter.
Ricotta dumplings.
The pressure of taking over one of the Ferry Building’s largest and most storied spaces certainly weighed on Hong. “It was ambitious — and very terrifying,” he says. But less than two months in, it’s clear that he and the Arquet team were ready to make the leap. And they’re just getting started. In the run-up to Parachute and Arquet debuting this fall, they formed a restaurant group and are planning additional bakeries.
“I think this might be the biggest restaurant that I’ll ever do,” Hong says with a laugh. “But, you know, we have 9,000 square feet, and space has gotten really tight in the past couple of weeks. In the future, it’d be great to expand a little bit.”