San Francisco’s 2024 Eater Award Winners

As 2024 comes to a close, the Eater Awards are an opportunity to celebrate the food and beverage scene by looking back at the year’s restaurant and bar openings. Over the past few months, Eater SF has been looking back at our most enjoyed meals, our most lingering cocktails, and our journey to finding the perfect croissant.

This year, Eater SF recognizes the most outstanding restaurants and bars in a field packed with great food and drink. Visit a restaurant that evokes feelings of joy and transports you to another place and time in one bite, or a bakery that confirms that there are still places to discover in the Bay. Indulge in thoughtful drinks, whether they’re from passionate bartenders who pour technical skill and curiosity into their glasses, or beautifully constructed, simple four-ingredient cocktails that demonstrate poise amidst constraints. Or, relax in our restaurant, where the warmth of the fireplace and fairy-tale cottage interiors exudes warmth. Here are SF’s 2024 Eater Award winners.

Four Kings: Restaurant of the Year

Provided by Seven Rooms

Just one year after launching its pop-up in 2023, Four Kings burst onto the San Francisco restaurant scene with a bang in March and hasn’t slowed down since. The restaurant combines thoughtful culinary touches with nostalgia for 1990s Cantopop’s Big Four and Char Chaan Teng, the Hong Kong-style cafe that chefs Mike Long and Frankie Ho frequented in their youth. has become something that fascinates people. It’s a step beyond authenticity and all the stickiness that word evokes. Instead, the restaurant remains true to the Big Four of Long, Ho, and their respective partners Lucy Lee and Millie Booncoqua, as a Cantonese restaurant that approaches tavern territory in its California home of San Francisco. It reminds me of all the twists and turns of cooking. .

Remove the escargot from the shell with plenty of XO sauce. Slurp the spicy mapo spaghetti. The team eats clay pot rice highlighting a family recipe of Chinese sausage and bacon that they make themselves. Order the fish-scented eggplant and watch the shavings of bonito flakes dance on top, or enjoy the breathtaking wok-seared steak. For many in the Asian diaspora, it’s poignant, but it’s hard not to get caught up in it in the same way, even if it doesn’t equate to a certain nostalgia for their childhood. The Four Kings’ siren for good food and hospitality rings through Chinatown and the nearby greater Bay Area, and everyone listens.

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Store: Best New Bar

The quiet confidence that Lower Haight’s bar and store exudes speaks volumes. San Francisco hospitality veterans Alison Jossel, Yani Kehagiaras, Gonzalo Guzman, and chef Joji Sumi have thoughtfully brought style and poise to the bar’s drinks and food, all with a neighborhood feel.

The drinks are beautifully simple, yet offer a wide variety of flavours. Stoa is a bartender’s favorite bar. Here you can learn, sip, and ponder how three or four just the right ingredients can sometimes create an outcome greater than the sum of its parts. Your drinking adventure begins in one of three categories: “low octane but complex,” “strict but fair,” or “lean and average.” From there, wherever you go, you can expect a gentle drink like a gentleman. This balanced combination of tequila, Bonnard and gentian is just one testament to Kehagiaras’ approach to beverages. Come sample the flavors of Sumi’s cuisine, which focuses on traditional bar menus and pursues bold flavor combinations. Think Korean rice cakes with wild mushrooms and Savoy cabbage wrapped in seaweed, or porridge with braised chicken, vegetables, eggs and peanut chili crisps. A solid bar for those paying attention.

Bloom’s End: Best New Bakery

We wind through ocher hills and eucalyptus groves, past bikers on their weekend bike rides, and turn off the main road into a dirt clearing to find, of all things, a vintage camper van stuffed with quirky pastries. . Welcome to Bloom’s End’s pastry playground. A treasure at the end of the rainbow (actually Petaluma), drivers are promised Fontina Hot Honey Morning Buns with ricotta, Delicata Squash Croissant Tarts, and other seasonal pastries. This is a destination bakery where sweet and savory croissants and cake slices are laminated and sold to the backdrop of the mellow sounds of nostalgic cassette players.

Fans of Denham’s pop-up days and pastry chef stints at Outerlands and later Neighbor Bakehouse will already be familiar with Coffee Cardamom Monkey Bread, but thanks to the bakery’s seasonal menu, Bloom’s End You can always feel fresh. Enjoy a roasted rhubarb twist in spring. Tomato pie in the summer. In the fall, you’ll see a sweet potato marshmallow moon, a special way to experience the Bay Area. Follow Denham on Instagram. Her weekly menu notes show the love and care (and playfulness!) that drives us down the winding, windy roads to reach Broom End’s pastries.

Restaurant you want to be a regular at: Tanzie’s

The cool, cozy, fireplace-like atmosphere of Tanzie’s is matched by an equally cozy breakfast menu created to satisfy Thai expats and lovers of a proper morning meal. Owners and partners Krissana “Tansies” Tussanaprasit and Jezreel “Jay” Rojas met while working at Kinkao in San Francisco, and a few years later they started Tansies together in Berkeley. Offering Chiang Mai breakfast dishes, this menu focuses on the ‘lava egg’, a soft scrambled egg with a rosy twist, served over rice and garnished with proteins such as nam pliong or ground nam pliong . Pork with curry paste or flavorful homemade sausage accented with a burst of lemongrass. It feels like you’re enjoying Thailand’s best casual breakfast in your Bay Area backyard.

The concept has created a cult following among Berkeley neighbors and beyond, captivated by the premise of carefully crafted Thai breakfast. And if this isn’t already appealing enough, Tanzie’s is uniquely positioned to improve over time. The team is preparing to add dinner to their menu offerings, which already looks promising.

Isler Thomas: Bartender of the Year

Isler Thomas loves giving drinks a sense of time and place. It’s not easy coming across the ocean from India to establish yourself in San Francisco’s orbit as a bartender new to the area, but Thomas has adapted with poise. He has worked on the drinks menu at Raspberry Rhinoceros in Mumbai’s Juhu area, followed by Luu in the same city. He then moved to the United States to head the bar at Emeryville’s Pippal, before working with the Sarkar brothers to lead the drinks menu at the Michelin-listed Tiya in the Marina.

Thomas, 25, entered the cocktail scene at a young age and now creates drinks that speak to him, his team, and the city they serve. As he explored San Francisco, he took those impressions and distilled the unique regional flavors into cocktails. The team then shakes up (or stirs) a glass-worthy urban perspective. The Marina Cocktail, for example, takes the concept of mango lassi and turns it on its head by clarifying the rum and mango with coconut yogurt. Borrowing techniques from mentors and chefs, Thomas speaks his own language over drinks, and San Francisco gets to converse with its world over a glass.