The grill cook flicked colorful ramekins into the air, catching them on a metal spatula so they nested inside one another. He managed to land three of these trick shots, including a particularly impressive one from behind his back. 

His coworkers, taking a break from browning entrees on the plancha, rapped their spatulas on the edge of the grill in encouragement. Enraptured diners cheered. Going for ramekin flick No. 4, he appeared to miss — but then the little bowl landed on his shoe, and he managed to kick it high and stick the landing.

The Farberware was his paint. The spatula was his canvas.

This was the scene one sunny July evening at Fire+Ice Interactive Grill, a massive all-you-can-eat (or AYCE, in Yelp-er parlance) restaurant at the tip of Pier 39. It combines the approachable indulgence of the Sizzler salad bar with the theatrics of Benihana. Diners queue up, cafeteria-style, to fill a bowl with the likes of top sirloin, scallops, penne, hot dogs, spinach, water chestnuts, or udon, then head to a grill station in the middle of the room, where a team of black-clad cooks takes their meals over the finish line. 

As the food — mostly American fare with pan-Latin and Asian accents, like fajitas in jalapeño lime sauce or lo mein with bok choy and sriracha — sizzles, the grill team juggles cookware and squirts mixtures of oil and water onto the plancha, generating huge flames and choruses of applause. It’s an extrasensory dinner-in-the-round — loud, hot, and rowdy.

AYCE experiences are in with a vengeance across San Francisco. Fire+Ice  — which charges $35.99 for unlimited bowls and trips to the grill — is among the flashier examples of a dining style that’s increasingly on display. In the past three months, Party Pig, Wasabi Bistro, and Azúcar Lounge have opened or reconcepted. These restaurants allow for maximum customization, eating to excess, and Vegas-style showmanship and superabundance. As with pricey tasting menus, a meal becomes an experience — if a slightly less sophisticated and far more affordable one.

Welcome to San Francisco’s gluttony era. 

Conceptually, AYCE is hardly new. At Brazilian steakhouses, like SoMa’s Fogo de Chão or Hayes Valley’s Espetus, diners have long flipped a colored coaster to signal to the servers that yes, they would like some more lamb chops. On weekends, the wait for a party of four at Japantown’s bottomless Korean barbecue spot Yakini Q, where $39.99 gets you endless galbi and thinly sliced brisket, routinely stretches to an hour or more. 

But at this latest incarnation of AYCE, the focus isn’t just the quantity of food; the quality is impressively high, too. Housed in a former Round Table Pizza on Geary Boulevard in Laurel Heights, Party Pig is a spiritual successor to Ko, the short-lived Mission restaurant that offered all-you-can-eat sushi and all-you-can-drink sake until it flamed out over the winter. But Party Pig expands on its predecessor by adding hotpot to the mix — all for an impossible-sounding $19.95 during the twice-daily happy hour (one 4:30 p.m. seating and one from 9 to 11 p.m.) and $29.95 at other times.

Overall, Party Pig’s dining experience is so excessive and affordable, it feels almost like sanctioned theft. It’s impossible not to wonder how the place turns a profit as you devour a fifth helping of nigiri. Owner Kevin Chen, who clearly loves offering a good deal, admits that people would pay upward of $100 elsewhere for the quantity and quality of the food at Party Pig. Which is exactly the point. “It’s good to see in San Francisco,” he says. “People are on a budget and looking for something fun.”

What helps Party Pig stay afloat, Chen says, is its size — with seating for more than 100, it’s far larger than Ko, which had seven cramped tables. Still, an unshakeable feeling of naughtiness, of potentially nudging a restaurant into the red through overindulgence, may be part of the transgressive allure. 

Notably, Party Pig’s tables are large, with some seating 10, which underscores the sense of togetherness. If it feels like the world is coming apart, at least there are more opportunities to stuff oneself in amiable company.

At 5,000 square feet, with a view of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge (weather permitting) the Pier 39 location of Fire+Ice — which also has outposts in Anaheim, South Lake Tahoe, and Boston — is an impressive space. According to CEO Kacee Colter, the most important consideration in hiring grill cooks is not skill; it’s finding outgoing people who can remember whose food is whose and don’t mind being filmed for social media. In fact, in some ways, it’s preferable to hire cooks who’ve never held a spatula before. “They’re coming into this new, and we can train them our way,” she says. That means flames, juggling, and joshing with the customer.

Although Pier 39 has made strides to woo locals — esteemed Santa Cruz-based brewery Humble Sea opened there in the spring — Colter doesn’t hide the fact that Fire+Ice’s pyrotechnic silliness caters largely to visitors. But the all-you-can-eat boom isn’t being driven by out-of-towners. 

In fact, the west side’s least touristy thoroughfare might be the nexus of the city’s AYCE culture. That’s where you’ll find Wasabi Bistro on Geary Boulevard in the Richmond. Its new lunchtime hotpot special is an endless bounty of offal and other delights. Walk in with two hungry people, and before the broth even has time to boil, your table will be carpet-bombed with heaping plates of lamb shoulder, flank steak, pork tongue, quail eggs, king oyster mushrooms, udon, and that ultimate staple of Americanized Chinese cuisine, crab rangoon — all for about $25 per person. It’s a meat parade so showy you can’t help but take out your phone to capture the display of superabundance. 

Meanwhile, in SoMa, Azúcar Lounge recently revived a Taco Tuesdays special it suspended during the pandemic, promising unlimited beef and vegetarian tacos, two at a time, for 90 minutes. Owner Jon Ojinaga quietly brought back the special two months ago to test the waters, and on an average Tuesday, he gets 20 to 30 takers ordering tacos at a 4 to 1 ratio of beef to veg. “We are noticing an uptick,” he says of his poblano-heavy tacos. “It’s not cheap to live in San Francisco, and people want to go out and have fun again.” 

And if the prospect of endless tacos isn’t fun enough, Azúcar can also tote out one of its three varieties of 88-ounce margarita towers, each equipped with several spigots. They cost $135, and while they’re not bottomless, they’re certainly a visual signal of wild abandon that speaks to the current appetite for excess. 

“We’re repositioning ourselves to offer more things that are super boozy,” Ojinaga says. When I visited, a boisterous table of six drained their tower practically in real time. Endless tacos, it seems, may simply be a pretext for boozy camaraderie.

But all-you-can-eat doesn’t mean anarchy. Ko imploded, in part, because it lacked sufficient structure, Chen says. Party Pig is thriving because it has rules and regs aplenty — and since it opened, they’ve proliferated. Per a sign in the window, diners now have 100 minutes to eat, which is 10 minutes more than before, though the time still goes by faster than you’d expect. Only now, exceeding the time limit incurs a $20 per-person charge. Wasted food similarly results in an extra fee, based on the “market price” of the unfinished dish. Diners must eat the rice that comes with their nigiri — everyone should anyway — lest they be charged $1 per violation. And you’ll get slapped with $5 fines if caught walking out with drinks, dessert, or ice cream. 

Fair! But the menu, which was always in flux, has shrunk, and some items have moved from regular to premium status — meaning they’re subject to a limit of one per person, among other little tweaks. What felt gleefully anarchic in the spring now feels like a mad combination of mayhem and bylaws. It’s possible to work all this to your advantage, as the paper menus now have spaces for rounds one, two, and three. Plan your meal starting with the more elaborate sashimi and nigiri (hamachi, toro, unagi) with at least a couple of non-seafood bites (cumin lamb skewers, chicken karaage) per course to add contrast. Hand rolls, though, are a must.

With the clock ticking, patrons may find themselves in a state of escalating near-panic similar to what befell me on my last visit. Gripping our last two “happy spoons” (the restaurant’s name for scallops topped with uni and ikura) with considerable agitation, my date and I miraculously managed to finish everything we’d ordered. We left Party Pig flush with sake and triumph alike, for we had consumed a spectacular amount of sushi and hotpot for only $79, including a 20% tip, and evaded every fee. We had won! No amount of indigestion could ever overcome the satisfaction of getting away with that.