San Francisco’s Yakitori King Is Back

When Tommy Cleary opened his landmark Japanese skewer restaurant, Hina Yakitori, back in 2019, most diners in San Francisco had never heard of “omakase”-style yakitori. The Divisadero Street restaurant was the first yakitori spot in the U.S. to do away with a la carte ordering, instead breaking half a pasture-raised chicken into a 16-course tasting menu — skewer after precisely binchotan-grilled skewer highlighting the juiciness of the bird’s underarm, the crunch of the gizzard, the exquisite tenderness of the thigh oyster.

It was, in a word, amazing.

The restaurant cemented Cleary’s reputation as the king of the Bay Area’s high-end yakitori scene. But at $165 per person, Hina was a once- or twice-a-year splurge for all but the wealthiest Bay Area diners. And so, after it closed in 2023, Cleary started thinking about how he might create a more accessible yakitori restaurant.

In some ways, then, his new izakaya, TBD — a partnership with SF sushi superstar Ray Lee (Akiko’s, Friends Only) — is a return to Cleary’s roots. Longtime customers might recall that the earliest iteration of Hina was a much more casual yakitori joint in Oakland where you could order five or six skewers, a rice bowl and a cold Asahi, and be out the door for $40 or $50.

TBD isn’t exactly an inexpensive restaurant. You can go all out, as I did during a recent dinner visit, and order every yakitori item on the menu, some sashimi, a couple of hot appetizers and a finishing hot pot, and drop well over $100 a person. But a single diner can also order one small set of grilled items and a (quite substantial) fried chicken leg for about $50, and leave completely satisfied.

Cleary is hoping that range of price points will make TBD the kind of place where regulars might more easily visit a couple times a month. He cites a recent Saturday night when a customer came in by herself, ordered tuna tataki, fried chicken and one box of skewers, and then sat at the counter reading a book.

“That’s kind of the ideal situation,” Cleary says. “You come by, do your thing, have a good time and leave. I feel like the vibe is warm and intimate, but also lively like an izakaya.”

When Cleary closed Hina, he questioned whether he ever wanted to open a restaurant in San Francisco again. In the end, the opportunity to team up with Lee, who runs two of the city’s most celebrated sushi spots, was too intriguing to pass up. The new restaurant is located on the edge of Union Square, in the space that originally housed Akiko’s. Broadly speaking, Cleary heads up the yakitori program while Lee is in charge of sashimi and hot izakaya-style small plates. But the whole kitchen team collaborates on every dish.

The aforementioned fried chicken leg, for instance, is a showstopper of a dish that comes with the claw attached — Lee’s idea, Cleary says. Another chef, Jerry Lam, built out the rest of the dish — the double-fry technique that gives the chicken its exceptional crunch, the honey-butter chile glaze, the housemade furikake topping. And the hint of shichimi togarashi and side of yuzu hot sauce echo the hot chicken sandwiches Cleary sold at Hina during the takeout-only days of the pandemic.

And even though TBD is a more casual restaurant, Cleary is still pushing into new frontiers of yakitori technique. For instance, the izakaya is one of the very few yakitori specialists that forgoes the skewers themselves — a first for Cleary. At TBD, the various cuts of grilled chicken are instead presented in an elegant wooden box. One box comes with a trio of different cuts of crispy chicken skin, topped variously with ikura and pickled mullet roe. Another plate features an egg-yolk-topped chicken meatball served between two rice-flour wafer buns, like a Japanese ice cream sandwich.

“I wanted something that looks a bit better and more unique, I guess,” Cleary says. “I wanted my own thing.”

The other big change is that Cleary is now one of the only yakitori chefs in the U.S. who’s dry-aging all of his chicken — a logical area of experimentation given that Lee’s sushi restaurants are known for their innovation in dry-aging raw fish; they’ve already got several of the aging cabinets on site.

Up until this point, however, dry-aging chicken hasn’t really been a thing in the yakitori world. According to Cleary, the results have been incredible: “It makes the skin really, really crispy and concentrates the flavor of the meat a lot more.”

The only problem for diners who want to score a TBD reservation right now? The restaurant isn’t open to the public yet, strictly speaking. Only folks who are on the Akiko’s, Friends Only and Hina mailing lists have access to a private OpenTable link. The idea, Cleary says, is to slowly ramp up the number of covers the kitchen is able to handle in a given night — and to give longtime supporters first dibs on checking out the new spot. The restaurant might still be a couple months away from opening at full clip.

That said, Cleary says the intent isn’t to gatekeep the restaurant in any kind of elitist way. Everyone is welcome, he says. But for a private reservation, for now at least, you have to follow TBD on Instagram.

“We post the link in our stories,” he says.

TBD is open Tuesday to Saturday, 5:30–8:30 p.m. For now, follow the restaurant on Instagram, where it periodically posts its private reservation link.