'āina

Our verdict

Hawaiian cuisine has rarely found a serious foothold in San Francisco, which made 'āina's run in Dogpatch all the more notable. Chef-owner Jordan Keao, a Hawaii native, built the restaurant around the kind of food that doesn't often survive the translation to the mainland: taro bread French toast with salted coconut caramel, misoyaki Spam musubi, guava malasadas, kalua pork belly. These weren't novelty items dressed up for an unfamiliar audience. They were the point. The San Francisco Chronicle placed 'āina on its Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants list in 2018, with critic Michael Bauer specifically citing the tasting menu, which ran at $80 with an optional wine pairing. The format shifted depending on the hour. Weekend brunch drew lines out the door of the small Dogpatch dining room, while the chef's counter offered a more structured tasting menu experience in the evenings. Keao's wife Cheryl Liew co-owned the operation, and Chris Yang served as chef de cuisine. The physical space was compact and bright, which suited the cooking's directness: nothing about 'āina was designed to obscure what it was doing or where it came from. 'āina occupied a specific gap in the Bay Area's dining scene. Modern Hawaiian cooking, as a category, has found more traction in Los Angeles and New York than in San Francisco, and the restaurant's Dogpatch address, away from the city's more trafficked dining corridors, meant it operated somewhat outside the usual critical circuit. That the Chronicle still found it and ranked it speaks to how clearly the food communicated. The restaurant has since permanently closed, and no direct successor in the same vein has taken its place in the neighborhood.