{"id":81358,"date":"2025-12-04T14:32:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T14:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/81358\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T14:32:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T14:32:18","slug":"the-ferry-building-has-a-new-crown-jewel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/81358\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ferry Building has a new crown jewel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eat Here Now<\/a> is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around \u2013 the ones we think are worth visiting. We dine once, serve forth our thoughts, and let you take it from there.<\/p>\n

If you ask San Franciscans about the city\u2019s 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\u2019s wood-fired bird.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t promise this chicken will ever be as famous as Zuni\u2019s. But I\u2019d bet that Arquet might just become one of San Francisco\u2019s legendary restaurants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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\u2019s highest-profile restaurant spaces. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe really weren\u2019t looking for, you know, a 9,000-square-foot restaurant,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was intimidating. It was like, no, it\u2019s too big.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s sister bakery<\/a>, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

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\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n

On a late-fall Friday night, the room reflected the full spectrum of the city\u2019s dining public: tourists in down puffers and jeans sat a table away from a stylish group clad in leather and cashmere.\u00a0Appeasing both crowds was a priority for Hong. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think, foremost, I just wanted to have a very approachable menu,\u201d he says. \u201cTaking 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That chicken ($38 for a half; $68 for a whole) is Exhibit A that he has accomplished this objective. It\u2019s straightforward enough to satisfy less adventurous diners while rewarding culinary risk-takers with that gnarled claw. <\/p>\n

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\u2019ve ever had Dungeness crab or brioche, then you\u2019ll 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. \u201cIt\u2019s basically like a luxurious crab lobster roll,\u201d Hong says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AArquet\u2019s hot honey half chicken arrives table-side with claw attached.\"ADungeness crab brioche topped with caviar.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s own beehive, it is so delicious you\u2019ll stop trying to shoehorn the rich, salty bread into any single category. <\/p>\n

Meaty barbecued oysters ($7.50 each) come slathered in aromatic, curry-spiced vadouvan butter with a sprinkling of crispy rice \u2014 it\u2019s a familiar dish in this city by the bay that manages to feel distinct thanks to the infusion of aromatic, toasted spice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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) \u2014 the clawless, warm-water cousin to the more popular Maine variety \u2014 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But the menu\u2019s biggest showstopper has to be the 45-ounce, bone-in ribeye ($195), a colossal hunk of beef that, when settled onto the restaurant\u2019s hearth, would make any omnivore\u2019s mouth water.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ABarbecued oysters with vadouvan butter.\"FiveRicotta dumplings.<\/p>\n

The pressure of taking over one of the Ferry Building\u2019s largest and most storied spaces certainly weighed on Hong. \u201cIt was ambitious \u2014 and very terrifying,\u201d he says. But less than two months in, it\u2019s clear that he and the Arquet team were ready to make the leap. And they\u2019re just getting started. In the run-up to Parachute and Arquet debuting this fall, they formed a restaurant group and are planning additional bakeries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this might be the biggest restaurant that I\u2019ll ever do,\u201d Hong says with a laugh. \u201cBut, you know, we have 9,000 square feet, and space has gotten really tight in the past couple of weeks. In the future, it\u2019d be great to expand a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eat Here Now is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around \u2013 the ones…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[35067,13807,2980,143,145,144,412],"class_list":{"0":"post-81358","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-eat-here","9":"tag-eat-here-now","10":"tag-ferry-building","11":"tag-oakland","12":"tag-oakland-headlines","13":"tag-oakland-news","14":"tag-restaurants"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}