B randon Jew wasn’t looking for a 10,000-square-foot, multi-story restaurant. But when he learned that the iconic Four Seas space—a banquet hall in San Francisco’s Chinatown that had been home to many family gatherings in his youth—was on the market, signing the lease wasn’t an option; it was an obligation. “I felt responsible in a way to have this restaurant be here,” Jew told me recently over the phone. “I couldn’t turn my back on this place.”
So even though Jew had been searching for a space roughly a third this size, he began the project of transforming the old Four Seas into the restaurant he’d been turning over in his mind for years. His vision: apply San Francisco’s ingredient-obsessed, hyper-seasonal, cure-it-yourself ethos—which he’d thoroughly absorbed as a cook at Zuni Café and Quince and the chef of Bar Agricole—to the canon of Chinese food that he grew up with and later studied in Shanghai.
But you don’t need me to tell you all this. Order practically any dish on the Mister Jiu's menu, and you’ll see (and more importantly, taste) where Jew is coming from. Take, for instance, the BBQ pork buns, made with Berkshire organic pork and garnished with Jew’s riff on Dutch Crunch, S.F.’s cult-classic white bread. Try the delicate, pork-stuffed wontons, plated with Monterey squid. Study the plump, not-at-all-gamey quail, sourced from Wolfe Ranch, which comes along with some sticky rice and Chinese sausage that Jew cures in house. Or dig into the large-format Peking duck, wherein Jew bastes and seasons the best fowl he can find (from Sonoma County Poultry), then hangs and fan-dries them for three days, before cooking them to a beautifully rosy medium temp. Even the desserts, from pastry chef all-star Melissa Chou, feel seamlessly dialed into Jew’s worldview. In fact, in this age of charcoal-colored everything, Chou’s black-sesame cake struck me as more modern than traditional.
Then there’s the space, decked out with midcentury-style dining chairs and contemporary art, feels stylish and of-the-moment—not like a paean to time gone by. The gleaming lotus-shaped chandeliers were salvaged from the upstairs of Four Seas. Yet, in this environment, they look brand-new. And that’s exactly the point.
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