The self-taught chef behind the most exciting SF opening of the year 

In just under a week, James Yeun Leong Parry will finally open to doors at 451 Gough St. and welcome the first diners to his debut restaurant, The Happy Crane. But on the Wednesday afternoon when we settle into a booth to speak, things are still far from ready. The warm wooden tables are covered in stacks of ceramic dishes, and massive sheets of paper cover the floor-to-ceiling front windows. Cases of wine wait to be put away, and bottles of spirits clutter the bar. 

“I’m finally starting to get excited,” Parry says, taking in the chaotic scene with pride. “I’ve been having these moments, particularly when I’m leaving late at night like, ‘Oh, shit, actually looks like a restaurant.’”

The modern Cantonese dinner spot is on track to be one of the biggest — if not the biggest — San Francisco restaurant opening of the year. That’s thanks in part to a high-profile location (it takes over the Hayes Valley space formerly occupied by chef Corey Lee’s French brasserie Monseuir Benjamin) and in part to Parry’s exceptional culinary pedigree. Before he launched The Happy Crane as a pop-up in 2023, he worked at Lee’s three-Michelin-starred Benu; prior to that, at a pair of Michelin-level restaurants in Hong Kong and Tokyo. 

In fact, Parry has almost exclusively worked at the kind of posh, destination restaurants that attract globe-trotting diners and require cooks spend years toiling away in kitchens before they can even get a foot in the door. In Parry’s case, however, it wasn’t a killer resume or decades of experience that landed him his first Michelin-level job. 

It was language. And maybe a little bit of luck.

“I think it was out of sheer innocence that I applied for a job at a three-Michelin-star restaurant, Bo Innovation,” Parry says in a British accent, the result of a childhood spent between London and Hong Kong. “I was like, hey, I’ve got no resume. I didn't even know what a three-Michelin-star restaurant was. My only advantage was languages — speaking Cantonese, speaking Mandarin, speaking English.”

Though Parry never attended cooking school, he has always had an interest in food. Growing up in Hong Kong, where space is at a premium and apartment kitchens tend to be small, his family didn’t often cook meals at home. But at about eight years old, he bought himself a copy of The Usborne First Cookbook, which includes kid-friendly recipes for dishes such as spaghetti bolognese, strawberry tarts, and fudge. (He still has the torn and tattered copy in his office at The Happy Crane.) “I think back then, you just didn’t think of aspiring to be a chef,” he says. “It's not an aspirational job, definitely not in Hong Kong. My dream job was to be a businessman.”

Which is why, after high school, he left Hong Kong to study business in London. While he was there, he began preparing dinners for friends — and in doing so, discovered he enjoyed cooking for others. He wasn’t tackling anything as complicated as multicourse tasting menus or the smoked-kissed, slow-roasted duck that will become a staple of the menu at The Happy Crane. But he started developing an interest in traditional Chinese techniques. 

After graduation, he landed in Beijing, where common practice would have seen him take a job teaching English. “It's easy money,” he says. “They just want someone foreign to teach their kids.” But instead, he saw an ad in a magazine that caught his eye: Classes with a culinary instructor in exchange for English lessons. “I met up with her, and all I can describe her as is this hippie Chinese lady, which is quite unusual,” he says with a chuckle. “She had this idea to do The Monkey King, but as a cooking show. She was like, ‘I'm gonna do the cooking, and you're gonna be the monkey.’” 

For reasons that probably don’t need to be explained, the idea “didn’t materialize,” Parry says. But it made him realize he wanted to pursue a career in the kitchen. So he went back to Hong Kong to look for work in restaurants. Which is when he applied for — and landed — his first job at Bo Innovation. 

He started in the front of the house where his language skills made him an asset. But it only took a couple of months before he got shot in the kitchen — and never looked back. After two years with the restaurant group and a stint helping to open an outpost in London, he ended up back in Hong Kong, sleeping on his sister’s floor and pondering his next move. 

The answer came when he watched the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. “I remember being like, these guys are nuts — really, really insane,” he says. “So, again, just reached out to the most famous Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong at the time, which was a kaiseki restaurant called RyuGin.” It was in that kitchen that he says he made the transition from “being a cook versus a chef.” After a chance meeting with San Francisco’s own three-Michelin-star-holder Corey Lee — he parlayed into a job at Benu and moved out. 

Now that Parry is on the precipice of opening his own restaurant, he’s adamant about one thing: “I don't want to do that really serious Michelin gig. I don't aspire to be that, and I don't envisage a restaurant that I want to work in to be that kind of restaurant.”  

If you’re a fan of The Bear, then you have some sense of how long — and how much burnout — it usually takes for chefs to come to this conclusion. (If they ever do.) Parry’s vision for The Happy Crane is the opposite of that meat-grinder environment. It will be “a sweet spot in the middle,” not a high-volume dim sum joint like Palette Tea House, where we worked during the pandemic, and not a stuffy or pretentious tasting-menu restaurant like Benu, either.   

He plans to do what San Francisco restaurants have always done best: showcase local and seasonal ingredients and simple, thoughtful techniques. He installed a massive wok and a hulking stainless steel gas-and-coal-fired oven used to roast Peking-style ducks. He’ll put his own spin on labor-intensive street food and dim sum favorites like Hong Kong-style golden coins. Typically made with char siu, Parry is instead using coppa and rose wine chicken liver-mouse, which will be sandwiched between fluffy housemade bao buns. The restaurant will mill rice into flour to make bouncy rice rolls stuffed with crab, and roast pork belly to make luscious char siu that will be sliced and served with miso hot mustard and tomato relish. 

Reservations for The Happy Crane, which opens on Aug. 8, went live on OpenTable on July 24, and tables are already nearly booked up through the end of this month. Looking back on everything that brought him to this point — the life choices that led him to some of the world’s top restaurants, the seemingly dead-end jobs that helped him find his passion — Parry says it’s all given him the work ethic and adaptability to make his high-profile debut a success. 

“It sounds like I had no plan,” he says with a laugh, “and it kind of has been a little bit like that. I just kind of roll with it.”