Most people come up Grant Avenue. That’s the Chinatown tourists know — painted lanterns, souvenir shops, roast duck hanging in windows. Brandon Jew moved the entrance to his restaurant around the corner before he ever opened it, tucking the door into Waverly Place, a narrow alley that runs parallel to Grant and feels like a completely different city. Quieter. More lived in. The street where old men sit outside in folding chairs and the shops are for people who actually live here, not people passing through. You have to mean it a little to find Mister Jiu’s. That was the idea.
Jew grew up in San Francisco. His family came from China during the Chinese Exclusion Act, his grandfather getting through Angel Island on forged papers, his name changed in processing — whatever was easier for the official with the pen. It happened to a lot of people. The restaurant’s name is spelled J-I-U, a reclamation of what his family’s surname might have looked like in proper Cantonese romanization, before the paperwork made it J-E-W. Jiu means several things depending on how you say it. Nine. Dove. Beer. There are doves in the signage. Most people eat the whole meal and never notice.
That ground carries real weight. The building housed Hang Far Low starting in the 1880s — described at the time as the grandest restaurant in San Francisco — and later the Four Seas, which for fifty years hosted Chinese dignitaries, elected officials, and celebrity clientele. Weddings, red egg ginger parties, political fundraisers. When the Four Seas closed, along with the nearby Empress of China, Chinatown lost two of its great celebratory institutions.
Jew knocked down the walls between the kitchen and the dining room on the second floor, kept the original gold lotus chandeliers and filigree lights, added chairs of Brazilian hardwood and midcentury-esque tables, and opened Mister Jiu’s in April 2016. Six months later it had a Michelin star — the first Chinese restaurant in San Francisco to earn one. It has held that star every year since, now nine consecutive years and counting.
The cooking is built on a specific philosophy that Jew has articulated clearly: Cantonese cuisine and California cuisine share the same soul. Both are ingredient-driven. Both are minimal. Both are about finding the best possible thing and doing as little to it as necessary to make it sing. At Mister Jiu’s, that means Liberty Farms duck from Sonoma, organic produce from Bay Area farmers Jew has been visiting twice a week for his entire cooking career, and house-made everything — tofu, rice vinegar, fermented black beans — when the pantry calls for it.
His grandmother Ying Ying, who passed from cancer when Jew was in his mid-twenties, is present in the food constantly. He couldn’t get her recipes in time. The restaurant is, in part, his attempt to reconstruct them.
Dinner at Mister Jiu’s currently offers two primary experiences. The four-course banquet menu at $125 per person is built around the restaurant’s most celebrated dish: the Liberty Farms Peking-style whole roasted duck. This is not a quick preparation. The duck takes days of curing and air-drying before service, and another hour of final roasting once you arrive. The result is lacquered skin of extraordinary crispness over breast meat that comes to the table at a perfect medium rare.
It arrives with savory pancakes, cucumber, cilantro, scallions, and a peanut hoisin sauce — and alongside it, a bowl of whipped duck liver mousse that could stand on its own as a first course at a lesser restaurant. The Michelin Guide calls it nonnegotiable. That is correct.
The à la carte menu moves seasonally and gives you access to the dishes that have built the restaurant’s reputation over a decade. The scallion milk bread — pillowy, yielding, served with honey butter — is the kind of thing you order immediately and regret not ordering more of. Cheong fun rice rolls stuffed with manila clams and bok choy in a traditional soy-based sauce is Cantonese nostalgia elevated to something precise and new. Silken tofu with maitake mushrooms, cranberry beans, garlic confit, and green Sichuan peppercorns brings together California farmers market and the Chinese pantry in a single bowl that makes the combination feel obvious in retrospect.
Longjing tea-smoked king salmon, wok-charred squid, and oysters on the half shell with rhubarb mignonette have all appeared across recent menus. The fried rice is legendary in its own right — nothing like the sticky, gummy version the Chronicle’s Michael Bauer once criticized in the restaurant’s earliest weeks. It took time for Mister Jiu’s to find itself. It found itself.
Upstairs from the main dining room is the Moongate Lounge, a cocktail bar Jew opened in 2019, where the drinks are Chinese-inflected and the room is intimate and deliberately beautiful. The bar downstairs in the main dining room takes walk-ins for à la carte dining — a genuine gift in a restaurant this decorated, where reservations for the full dining room book out well in advance. In 2022 Jew won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: California, after three previous nominations.
His cookbook, Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown, co-written with Tienlon Ho, won its own James Beard Award the same year. This past April, the restaurant celebrated its tenth anniversary with a series of dinners featuring guest chefs from New York, Toronto, Hong Kong, Melbourne, and Los Angeles — a gathering of the Chinese American culinary world that Jew, more than perhaps anyone else, helped bring into being. Mister Jiu’s is at 28 Waverly Place, San Francisco. Tuesday through Saturday, dinner service from 5pm.
