Like most fine-dining restaurants, The Wild is the kind of place that compels you to pay attention — to pause your conversation and listen raptly as a chef rattles off obscure ingredients (sea buckthorn, kinome, eucalyptus, salsify, celtuce, black garlic, oyster leaf) each time a dish is set down. You feel your eyebrows raise, in equal degrees of shock and awe, as you watch a chef take your simple entree of noodles with uni and spume a seafood broth, aerated like Cool Whip, all over it.

Not surprisingly, The Wild is pricey. If you choose the five-course chef’s menu at $130, it’s not the most expensive fine-dining restaurant in town, but it’s definitely an investment. From the a la carte, the bowl of noodles alone will set you back $45; add drinks, and dinner for two can edge around $400. Indie rock might be on the playlist, and the seating is counter-only, but for people of normal means, it’s a place for a special occasion, not a neighborhood spot you’d sidle into on a school night. Yet curiously, in a time when we’re all reeling from menu sticker shock, The Wild is exactly the kind of restaurant that’s proliferating in San Francisco. 

It’s not your imagination: The dining options here are getting fancier, with many restaurants offering solely prix-fixe menus. At my count, more than 20 fine-dining restaurants have opened since 2019. Of those, nine have Michelin stars: Kiln, Aphotic, 7 Adams, O’ by Claude Le Tohic, Ssal, Niku Steakhouse, Osito, Hilda and Jesse, and San Ho Won. 

Meanwhile, the kind of ambitious, midprice restaurants that opened around the early 2000s and long defined San Francisco dining in the national consciousness —  State Bird Provisions, Frances, Flour + Water, Cotogna, Rich Table, Liholiho Yacht Club — are becoming scarcer. These are places that burden you with minimal formalities but evince maximal pleasure. Bevan Bunch, CEO of SF-based New Deal Hospitality and former director of operations for Saison, sums up the opinion of many: “I have always said L.A. has the best cheap eats, New York has the best high-end, SF is the best middle.” 

But this is changing, which means the way San Francisco eats is changing with it. And I don’t think it’s simply because we have become a destination for brooding, foam-mongering Carmy Berzatto acolytes in the kitchen. The reason is more cause and effect, supply and demand — less romantic, more economic. It seems midlevel restaurants — long San Francisco’s sweet spot — may no longer pencil out.

When chef Craig Stoll reopened his seminal restaurant Delfina in 2022 after an extensive post-pandemic redesign, he told me with a mix of pride and trepidation that he feared his model — an expansive menu and a dining room that requires many turns — was no longer sustainable. “It’s something I’ve been predicting for decades, actually,” he said when I followed up two years later. “We’re doing about $5 million in sales, and we’re breaking even. Is that insane?” 

Laurence Jossel, chef and owner of Nopa, which opened in 2006 and appears to have been fully booked ever since, agrees. “In a sentence: It’s all about labor,” he says. Speaking with mirth about his youthful, idealistic self, he explains: “Some 19 years ago, some idiot said, ‘I want to do everything from scratch. I want to butcher whole animals, make my own bacon and burger buns and hand-cut fries and all kinds of pastas.’” 

Today, to get all this DIY prep work done, Jossel has 85 employees. Despite the fact that “most people think we just open at 5 and just start cutting onions,” the day starts long before the doors open. Stoll echoes this: “It’s a shit-ton of work to take a whole lamb and turn it into chops, meatballs, shank. It’s hours and hours of labor that we have to manage.” 

Labor, and its related costs, is more of an investment than ever. Laurie Aaronson, founder of AOC, an accounting company that oversees the financials of many big-name Bay Area restaurants — including Che Fico, Ernest, and Flour + Water — knows the numbers by heart. Since 2019, minimum wage has gone up 20%; by 2025, the Health Care Security Ordinance will be up 31% (“the cumulative impact is staggering,” she says); insurance liability for restaurants has typically doubled. Not to mention, utility bills are skyrocketing — a problem all of us can relate to.

Another part of the equation, the cost of food, is something every restaurant, no matter what level, is confronting. Olive oil alone is an indicator: Delfina paid $8.13 a liter in 2019 and now pays $21.53. The Mission District restaurant goes through 3,170 liters a year, which means it spends around $68,250 annually on one ingredient. 

The only way to survive is to raise prices, but, for a midlevel restaurant, there is a pain ceiling. How much can a restaurant charge for a relatively informal dish like duck breast with polenta and saeurkraut or risotto with bone marrow — no matter the quality — before diners clutch their hands to their faces like “The Scream” and give a one-star review on Yelp? Or, worse, they just stop coming. A $44 entree of an expensive item like Umpqua Valley lamb with butter beans already has his diners sucking in their breath, Stoll says. Aaronson adds, “I think it’s tough to pass along all those price increases and still remain a place people want to go out to. And it’s hardest in the middle.” 

All of these factors have forced the “middle class” of restaurants to dream of what it would be like to ease labor costs by raising prices, or maybe switch to a prix-fixe menu themselves. In a perfect world, a set menu lets a chef project sales in order to calibrate costs. Ostensibly, the amount of labor is lowered because there are limited dishes to train on and prepare, even if they’re executed on a higher level.

“We have this conversation often,” says Sarah Rich, co-owner of Rich Table with her husband, Evan, “about how it would be great if we could do fewer covers, slow it down a little — that maybe we could just do a tasting menu. Currently, we have to do a certain volume to make it work.” The Riches, both chefs, prefer the energy and creativity of their à la carte menu, which allows them to pivot between grilled jerk-spice pork chops with apples from Devoto Gardens & Orchards and black cod with Meyer lemon and puntarelle — and they don’t intend to change it. But their greener-grass economic fantasy is one newer restaurants are acting on.

This, in part, is why in our pro-choice city, there is suddenly less choice. Restaurants from Mister Jiu’s to Sorrel to 7 Adams — not to mention the recent bevy of high-end omakase spots — offer nothing but tasting menus. Corey Lee, the chef-owner of Benu, one of the three San Francisco restaurants to have earned three Michelin stars, says, “When I first moved here, Coi was the only restaurant in the city doing a tasting menu. Now there are too many to count.” 

With the proliferation of these restaurants, the very meaning of fine dining has become diluted, Lee laments. “It should come with a certain level of confidence that you’re putting the evening in the chef’s hands, that you’re trusting them. But it’s no longer like that.”

Chef John Wesley, who opened Michelin-starred Kiln in Hayes Valley in 2023 with his partner Julianna Yang, might serve the city’s longest tasting menu, clocking in at 20 courses for $295, plus $185 for a beverage pairing. He disputes the “set menu is easier” theory — especially if it’s done with proper timing and portion size, and an artful through line. Wesley says a tasting menu requires more skill and finesse than many fledgling chefs possess. “I think they see restaurants like Benu, and in their mind, they think [a tasting menu] is an easier route. And unless you’ve worked in this climate your whole career, it’s not.” 

Wesley points out that at a time when the pool of well-heeled diners is relatively dry — the number of high-spending international tourists has dipped, and there are far fewer conferences full of suits with expense accounts — there is substantial risk to his restaurant, too. “Though a tasting menu is a cleaner model, the profits on à la carte can be much higher, whereas with a tasting menu, if you get 5% profit, you’re throwing a party. Also, you’re expecting to be full. But that doesn’t always happen, because not everyone wants a 20-course tasting menu.” 

If the demise of 10-year-old Mourad or the Dec. 21 closure of Aphotic, the year-old, Michelin-starred restaurant by chef Peter Hemsley, are any indication, not everyone wants a $215, 11-course menu either.

However, it appears many people do want a tasting-menu restaurant — as long as it’s five courses, and the cost is $87. This appears to be the Goldilocks zone for fine dining in San Francisco, and it’s Ryan Cole’s great hope. The CEO of Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group has hung his hat on an “affordable fine dining” model, first with Trestle and, as of last year, the hit Pacific Heights restaurant 7 Adams from chefs David Fisher and Serena Chow Fisher. Cole put in his time as a director of operations for the Mina Group for years, forming his definition of fine dining: “getting something that feels greater than what you’re paying for.”

Cole has been watching the proliferation of tasting menus in the city. “Some hands are being forced now to do a high price point in order to make money,” he says. “So chefs are backing into these $200 tasting menus. And they have limited experience, which hurts the city, because diners are probably going to be let down.” Wesley of Kiln puts it more firmly: “If I go out and pay that much money and it doesn’t hit, it’s soul-crushing.”

Even when you eliminate the debate about price point, volume is part of a successful restaurant equation. Theoretically, the smaller the restaurant — and the fewer seats to fill — the less risk. For example, Kiln has 10 tables in the dining room (plus a private room that seats up to 14) and requires 26 to 30 covers, or guests, a night to keep the doors open. The opposite extreme is Nopa, with 184 seats (indoors and out), which requires 300 covers, or 2.5 to 3 turns, not to mention the Tetris game of walk-ins and last-minute reservations and the inevitable cancellations. 

Meanwhile, 7 Adams has 16 tables, which Cole says have been full since the restaurant opened last fall. Maybe he has found San Francisco’s new sweet spot. A small restaurant like 7 Adams with a prix-fixe menu and reasonable, but elevated, price point addresses the issues of labor and volume. “I’d rather be lower priced and maxed capacity,” says Cole, noting the restaurant’s popularity among people celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. “It creates longevity. When you do high price, low volume, the second a table opens up, you lose five covers that could be 20% of your business.”

The Wild, headed by chef Marc Zimmerman, is clearly attempting to take a page from 7 Adams. He and his business partner Benjamin Jorgensen previously ran the space as a pricier, wagyu-centric restaurant called Gozu but pivoted in August to attempt something “a little more fun, a little more approachable,” says Zimmerman — the kind of place you “want to come in on a Tuesday night.” 

As much as I want to believe that two things can be true at once — that fine dining and a spontaneous, foamy weeknight can come together in perfect harmony — I’m not sure I’m buying it. And if a restaurant isn’t accessible enough to cultivate regulars, how does it develop a rapport with its community? This sense of conviviality and connection is what I think the best restaurants are really all about. 

“I think SF is losing its fun and creative restaurants, where we can go every couple weeks rather than twice a year,” says Evan Rich, clearly defending establishments like his own. “The kind of places you say, ‘Let’s get a bowl of pasta, a glass of champagne, and hang out.’” He pauses. “I don’t mean it in a negative way — I’m sure these restaurants are beautiful and cutting-edge, and I would love to go to them, but honestly, I can’t afford to. These kinds of places can’t be your spot.”