The Happy Crane
James Yeun Leong Parry left Corey Lee's three-star Benu to spend three years running dim sum at Palette Tea House in Ghirardelli Square. He opened this Hayes Valley corner in August 2025 with a duck oven and a stone mill in the kitchen. The Chronicle's critics put it at No. 61 in the Bay Area for 2026.
Why go
Parry was born in England, raised in Hong Kong, and cooked in Hong Kong, London and Tokyo before Benu. The dishes he chases are the ones falling out of use. Gold coin chicken was a Hong Kong snack: char siu offcuts, pork fat and chicken livers stacked on a skewer. His version is a split bao griddled in brown butter, with liver mousse and slices of coppa on top. The char siu is pork jowl, a cut more common in Hong Kong than here. It comes glazed in maltose, cut with shaved fennel and green apple infused under vacuum with lime and ginger.
The beef shin goes nine hours in a master stock. The kitchen keeps that stock and tops it up after every braise, and Fegan compares it to a sourdough mother, so the dish gets better as the restaurant gets older. It arrives in a Sichuan peppercorn vinaigrette with celtuce, fried lotus root and confit artichoke hearts.
451 Gough Street was Corey Lee's French bistro Monsieur Benjamin before this. The oven runs ferociously hot for whole Peking-style birds, the mill grinds fresh rice for cheung fun, and Parry added a wok station beside them. Kevin Diedrich of Pacific Cocktail Haven built the drinks list with bar manager Carolyn Kao, and it runs on lychee, red bean and five spice.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the golden coin. It is the dish that explains the whole restaurant.1
- Order: a whole duck if you can plan ahead. They go by pre-order and come with housemade pancakes and a tian mian jiang that Parry lifts with pluot juice.2
- Avoid: the crab rice roll.1
What locals & experts say
- MacKenzie Chung Fegan, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2025:
What results is an impossibly tender and savory cut of beef that, thinly sliced and still rosy in the center, is what roast beef wishes it could be.
1 - James Yeun Leong Parry, to Elena Kadvany for the Chronicle, July 2025:
A lot of my inspiration comes from humble ingredients or humble dishes and those techniques, I feel, are dying.
2 - Cesar Hernandez and MacKenzie Chung Fegan, on the Chronicle's summer 2026 list:
Artichoke is not what you would call a traditional Chinese ingredient.
3 - Julia Chen's 8.7 for The Infatuation, in October 2025, puts the dim sum plates ahead of the mains. She grants that the entrees,
though not as imaginative as the starters,
still earn their place.5 Her other dim sum picks are the firecracker shrimp wrapped in shiso and nori, and the ginger scallion scallop.
Good to know
- Booking: OpenTable, through the restaurant's own page. There is a chef's choice dinner at $120 a head as of October 2025, and the rest of the menu is a la carte.1 Tables go up thirty days ahead at midday, and the house takes walk-ins.5
- Days: dinner Tuesday through Saturday.4
- Where: 451 Gough Street, in Hayes Valley.
Jeff's take (his words)
- Note: "must visit - unreal; must be booked a month in advance! sold out; nate and other rec"
Verdict
must-visit — Fegan sets this between Four Kings, the Chronicle's No. 1, and Brandon Jew's Mister Jiu's at No. 47, on the casual-to-swank line. That is where a good weeknight dinner sits. Come as three or four and order across the card.