This Buzzy Late-Night Restaurant in Chinatown Lives Up to All the Hype

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

The buzziest, most popular restaurant in San Francisco today sits in the heart of Chinatown, in a cheerful alleyway festooned with red lanterns, directly downstairs from a Kumon (as the restaurant’s young, first-gen Cantonese proprietors are fond of pointing out). In that way, Four Kings feels a little bit like some metaphor for millennial Asian America, or maybe just the setting for a novel I’d like to read — one whose plot hinges on the re-creation of some particularly decadent and nostalgic version of claypot rice or Hong Kong pepper steak.

Of course, we had come to this bustling Hong Kong–inspired diner late on a Friday night because we’d heard it stays open, and fully packed, until 11 p.m. on weekends — and because we finally wanted to see for ourselves if the place lived up to all the hype.

More than a year after the restaurant’s feverishly anticipated debut, Four Kings still gets booked up weeks in advance. Luckily for night owls, 9:30 p.m. is the most likely time you might be able to land a last-minute reservation. That’s also the best time to just show up and get in line, as we did, hoping to snag one of the tables they save for walk-ins. (We only had to wait about half an hour.)

Even apart from the food, Four Kings comes advertised as a rollicking good time, and the vibes are indeed excellent from the moment you walk in: Posters of ’80s and ’90s Cantopop idols decorate the walls, and their songs provide a boisterous, deeply nostalgic soundtrack for your meal — lots of moody, sentimental rock ballads with sick guitar riffs. The counter is lined with Polaroids, lucky cat dolls and shochu bottles, and everyone is talking loudly, waving around their chopsticks, throwing back Tsingtao lagers and almond-milk highballs.

What we loved about the place, even before we’d taken a bite of the food, was how casual and low-key it was compared to other similarly trendy, acclaimed Bay Area restaurants. The one-page menu is peppered with little cartoon drawings and doesn’t feel the need to name-check any farm or fine-dining technique (despite the chefs’ fancy pedigrees). And while Four Kings isn’t an inexpensive restaurant, the kitchen’s bells and whistles don’t call attention to themselves, so even the most exciting dishes just feel like really, really good versions of classic Cantonese cuisine.

The chefs have said they designed the menu to consist mostly shareable small plates, not much bigger than a standard dim sum, because of the narrowness of their dining room. Budget-minded diners might complain about the price-to-portion-size ratio, but if you order prudently, you can eat really well for about $50 a person.

That said: We didn’t order prudently.

The best and worst thing about Four Kings is that there are so many amazing-sounding dishes, on both the regular menu and the handwritten specials board, that you really have to restrain yourself from ordering way too much food. (We could have assembled a whole feast out of dishes we lusted after but weren’t able to make room for this time: mapo spaghetti and Singaporean chili crab, clams with black bean sauce and whole fried petrale sole, and and and…)

The net effect was that we wound up filling our table with an abundance of little and not-so-little dishes, one after another. First the complimentary peanuts (roasted with bits of seaweed) and garlicky smacked cucumbers. Then, a sinus-clearing salad of hot mustard jellyfish, cut thick so they resembled udon noodles, but with a pleasing, cartilaginous crunch. Chili crisp pig’s head, cut into thin, fat-speckled rounds and topped with chrysanthemum greens. One perfect butter-seared scallop served on the half-shell over a nest of umami-drenched vermicelli.

If Four Kings has a signature dish, it’s probably the fried squab (i.e., young pigeon), which comes cut into succulent quarters, claws still attached, tiny head staring back at you on the plate. The bird’s bronzed, glistening skin was immaculately crisp, giving away to a burst of soft fat when we bit in. The pink meat was rich and earthy, like duck with an extra bit of oomph. We tore the squab apart with our hands, squeezing lemon over top and dipping each morsel into a dish of tongue-tingling Sichuan-pepper-salt. If you’re bold and willing to work at it a little, even the head makes for good eating — the bits of crispy skin and the sweet, creamy brain in the center.

The prospect of 10 p.m. squab alone makes Four Kings an elite late-night dining destination, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that it wasn’t even our favorite dish of the night. That title goes to the “typhoon shelter” soft-shell crab, one of the daily specials. Popularized by a genre of floating restaurant that used to hold court in Hong Kong’s typhoon-safe protective harbors, the “typhoon shelter” style refers to seafood that’s batter-fried and topped with a ton of crispy fried garlic and, in this particular version, fried basil. To make the dish even more outlandishly luxurious, Four Kings also places the crunchy crustaceans on top of a layer of aioli — another rich counterpoint to the tender, sweet flesh inside the shell.

And there was so much more. A hefty fried pork chop rice bowl with sweet onions and velvety tomato-egg gravy. Water spinach electried with the pungent jolt of fermented shrimp paste. For dessert, mango pudding with tangy strawberry sorbet, served in a pool of liquified almond tofu.

We ate and we ate until we couldn’t possibly take another bite, and then we packed up our leftovers, leaning back ruefully, our hands on our bellies. That’s the kind of energy that Four Kings inspires: At almost every table, people were hunched over four or five different plates at once, crossing chopsticks, double-dipping, letting all those big flavors mingle together. Who’s going to stop you if you decide to dip a morsel of fried squab in the pig head chili oil? What’s to keep you from drizzling some of the fermented shrimp sauce from the ong choy over your pork chop rice?

We didn’t regret any of it. And walking back out into the crisp Chinatown night, we were already dreaming about all those dishes we couldn’t wait to try next time.

Four Kings is open Thursday through Saturday 6–11 p.m. and Sunday to Monday 6–10:30 p.m. at 710 Commercial St. in San Francisco.