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San Francisco’s seemingly limitless appetite for sushi doesn’t extend only to daintily plated omakase or monstrous, all-you-can-eat portions crammed into a 90-minute window. An equally popular middle tier also exists — and it’s thriving, most notably in Lower Pacific Heights, where $5 handrolls and crispy rice “bubus” are luring diners in droves.

Two sushi restaurants along the Fillmore Street corridor have leveraged their Instagram presences to go low-key viral for their tasty — and tasteful — twice-daily happy hour. Four blocks apart, the year-old Bubu and weeks-old Nono Baru might best be described as sushi-izakaya hybrids, which may be the secret sauce for accruing long lines in this town. Curious passersby asking, “What are you all waiting for?” remains an excellent form of marketing.

Bubu, the smaller and arguably more elegant of the two, takes its name from the salty-sugary-crispy rice dish onto which the kitchen places hamachi, salmon, tuna, and butterfish. (Imagine the vinegared rice used to make sashimi, only sweetened, fried, and topped with mayo and salmon roe, and you’ll get the idea.) They’re the main attraction, but Bubu also serves a wealth of two-for-$5, mix-and-match handrolls, containing everything from jalapeño hamachi and spicy salmon skin to the fatty tuna with onion preparation known as negitoro.

Rolled into cones of nori and squirted with mayo, the handrolls can be a challenge to tell apart when they arrive six or eight to a plate, but it’s impossible to go wrong with any of them. After waiting outside, you can shake off the chill with a mug of miso soup, then round out your order with fried Brussels sprouts, kimchi tofu, and some of the juiciest karaage anywhere. Drinks are also $5, including Sapporo, Asahi, and small carafes of house sake.

Bubu requires some planning, though. Happy hour No. 1 runs from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday. The second, shorter happy hour is 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., seven days a week. All seven tables are likely to fill up at once. Consequently, parties are likely to wrap up their meals at the same time. Arrive early or risk leaning against a parking meter on California Street for the better part of an hour.

On the corner of Fillmore and Sutter streets, Nono Baru is the successor to NoNo, a shuttered izakaya down the block. Woody and monochrome, it’s owned by prolific restaurateur Kevin Chen, who recently opened the all-you-can-eat sushi-and-hotpot destination Party Pig on Geary Boulevard and, before that, Mission Street’s now-defunct Ko. 

Chen is a tinkerer, prone to changing concepts, and Nono Baru’s twice-daily happy hour — 5 to 6 p.m. and 9 to 10 p.m., every day — is a different beast. The menu is tighter, with a greater emphasis on terrestrial meats, like the surprisingly hefty, can’t-miss super tacos made with black chicken, kal-bi (barbecued short ribs), or chashu (pork belly) carnitas, each dusted with cotija cheese. As with Bubu, every item is $5, the exception being a premium Otokoyama sake priced at $10.  

Although there are oysters at three to an order, sashimi anchors everything, with salmon, hamachi, tako (octopus), and ankimo (monkfish liver) available. Bone-in chicken karaage comes with a cilantro dipping sauce, but the real standout is tsukune, skewered chicken meatballs accompanied by raw egg yolk for dipping. Nono Baru’s afternoon happy hour is as lively as evenings are quiet and romantic, which is to say that past 9 p.m. — inarguably late-night in this ever-quiet town — it makes for a great first-date spot. But that sound you hear is the entire city falling back in love with happy hour.