Behind this fall’s hottest restaurant debut, a chef worth championing

Eat Here Now is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around – the ones we think are worth visiting. We dine once, serve forth our thoughts, and let you take it from there.

When the crab rice roll ($32) arrives at The Happy Crane, dinner at the city’s latest modern Chinese restaurant comes into focus. The exemplary dish speaks to the tradition of Cantonese cuisine without kowtowing to it. Its slurpability also belies the underlying effort. 

The tender, slippery noodles — typically served for dim sum, wrapped around fillings like shrimp and char siu — have been snipped with scissors tableside and set free to float, along with bits of crab and orange orbs of salty trout roe, in a delicate, soupy sauce enriched with crab butter and brightened with Chinese celery. It’s all finished with a splash of nutty-sweet Shaoxing wine. 

Though it appears easygoing enough — something to joyfully lap up, rather than intellectually dissect — nonchalance is not a thing under the watch of chef-owner James Yeun Leong Parry. At 40, he has the determination of a bright, young chef (which means that, behind the scenes, he’s sweating it). We are just the beneficiaries of every labor dollar he’s spent.

The noodles are made in-house from soaked and ground long-grain rice; the crab butter is steeped with ginger and scallion and emulsified with chicken stock; the scratch-made soy sauce is infused with fennel and licorice. 

Parry opened The Happy Crane in August on a Hayes Valley side street, in the glass box that used to house Monsieur Benjamin. The minimalist design touches are classic nods to China: celadon banquettes, a floral silk lantern over the private room, an abstract painting on linen by Chinese-born, San Francisco-based artist Jesselle Sue.

You can see from where his rigor stems. Parry, who was born in England and raised in Hong Kong, cooked in Michelin-level restaurants in both Hong Kong and Japan, then, nine years ago, moved to San Francisco to briefly work for Corey Lee as a chef de partie at his three-Michelin-starred restaurant Benu. In 2019, Parry got deep into dim sum working as the chef de cuisine at Palette Tea House, helping crank out up to 500 covers a day and overseeing a huge team. 

A year earlier, he had started doing “semi-legal” pop-ups called Lazy Susan. That’s when the buzz began. “Tech people would come and then ask, ‘What’ll it take to open your own place?’ You’d think I’d be excited, but honestly, it terrified me,” he told me one quiet afternoon when the restaurant was closed, a soundtrack of bachata trickling out from the prep kitchen. “If someone had given me a blank check at that point, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.”

But clearly he has figured it out. Just getting your doors open in San Francisco is no easy feat.

Burned out on fine dining, he has also succeeded in opening a place that is refreshingly light on showmanship. The menu starts with “dim sum,” including a lovely, tiny, handmade sugar snap pea dumpling topped with sudsy pea foam ($7); a pleasant tangle of tofu skin tossed in roasted red-bell-pepper sauce with dried shrimp ($15); and a disparate jumble of a cucumber salad with smoked figs, avocado, and whole cherry tomatoes ($14) with chinkiang balsamic vinegar. 

A few dishes strain a bit with effort. Beef shin braised in a traditional “master stock” (a cooking liquid that’s reused over time), infused with star anise, dried mandarin peel, Sichuan peppercorn, and cardamom, topped with lotus root chips ($18), is delicious. But the slivers of confited artichoke hearts and slices of salted celtuce get lost in the mix.

Further down the menu, things start to meld. Like any self-respecting “it” restaurant, The Happy Crane offers a signature bird. In this case, a killer Wolfe Ranch quail, fried, rotated on a yakitori grill, then finished with a scalding oil and served simply with Sichuan salt and pickled Tokyo turnip ($42). A trio of crispy, hot, and delicious squash blossoms are stuffed with butternut squash, peppers, and makrut lime, and tossed in a dusty froth of salted egg yolk, all wrapped, Vietnamese-style, in cold, crunchy little gems ($25).

Parry laughingly admits that chefs “like to be challenged,” which is why he’s just trumped his own quail by adding to the menu a special-order of Peking duck served with housemade pancakes ($110), inspired by his time eating a lot of it in Beijing. (Since he makes only a few each night, you have to book it in advance; I have yet to try it.). “Here, people expect more meat, but I still want to highlight the skin,” he said. Roasted to order in a coal-and-gas oven wedged into the kitchen, each bird is glazed, dry-aged for a week. They are also cooked to order — similar to how “Zuni does it with their chicken.” 

Few, if any, ambitious first-time restaurant owners find their footing three weeks after opening, which is when I visited, barely able to get a reservation. The Happy Crane has been booked six weeks out since the start. But Parry’s humble, caring demeanor makes me feel confident that, at every step, he will be listening for feedback.

So, yes — as at many chef-driven restaurants — the front of house still needs polishing. Servers, wearing matching polo shirts, look almost as if they’re at a diner and, perhaps with that casual vibe in mind, course dinner a little quickly; our table was a mass of plates. The cocktails — such as the Serpent’s Kiss ($19), with tequila, mezcal, apricot, miso, mustard, Pommeau, citrus, and whey — are pre-batched, which means the bar lacks the energy and sounds of one where bartenders are mixing and shaking to order.

And while the majority of the early praise Parry has received (and it has been fawning) calls his cooking Cantonese, he would like a correction: “I pull from Cantonese, Sichuan, Beijing — dishes that interest me and start conversations.” 

Inevitably, I had to ask the touchy question: Does he feel any pressure to live up to certain SF restaurants, particularly the other chef-driven Chinese restaurants of the moment, the established Mister Jiu’s and the 2024 media darling Four Kings?

And then, in his thoughtful and soft-spoken way, he set me straight. “Representation of a country shouldn’t be just one restaurant — it should be many voices. Look at how many Italian restaurants there are here, and no one says a thing. Chinese cuisine in the Bay Area is still only getting started.” 

Of course, he’s completely right, which makes me even more excited to see where he drives things — and how far San Francisco can take it. In a city that’s been beaten up and starved for culinary heroes lately, I’m here to cheer Parry along. He might well be our next one in the making.