If you look at James Yeun Leong Parry’s resume, one interpretation is that things start to go off the rails around 2018. That’s when, after stints at fine-dining restaurants helmed by celebrity chefs in Hong Kong, London, Tokyo and San Francisco, he left Benu for a position at Palette Tea House.
San Francisco, CA
This eagerly awaited S.F. restaurant won’t ever earn three Michelin stars — and that’s a good thing
No disrespect to Palette, a high-volume restaurant in Ghirardelli Square that traffics in newfangled dim sum, such as taro puff swans, their lacy bodies blackened with charcoal, and har gow skewered with pipettes of lobster butter sauce. But a certain breed of ambitious chef would note that it has three fewer Michelin stars than Benu. (Which is to say, none.) Parry’s pivot is the equivalent of a violinist leaving the symphony to take up the fiddle with a bluegrass band.
Now, with three years as head chef at Palette under his belt and several more running successful tasting menu popups, Parry has struck out on his own. After months of frothy anticipation, the Happy Crane opened in August in Hayes Valley. A modern Chinese restaurant, it sings the greatest hits from Hong Kong (where Parry spent much of his youth), Beijing, Chongqing and beyond with a California accent. It’s the opening salvo of a chef with a point of view, and a welcome addition to the city’s contemporary Asian culinary scene.
Patrons dining at the bar, where half the seating is reserved for walk-ins, at the Happy Crane.
It’s possible to engage with the Happy Crane’s menu on multiple levels, depending on your familiarity with — or desire to be educated about — Chinese cuisine. An appetizer of a split bao, griddled in brown butter and topped with chicken liver mousse and thinly sliced coppa ($11 per piece), could conceivably be at home in a New American restaurant serving deviled eggs and an heirloom tomato salad. But the curious might ask about the name of the dish, “golden coin,” which is a reference to the esoteric Cantonese snack gum tsin gai, or gold coin chicken. Originating as sustenance for the working class, it was a way for roast meat specialists to sell char siu offcuts, pork fat and chicken livers, all stacked on a skewer, glazed with sticky-sweet sauce then served sandwiched in a bun.
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The staff at the Happy Crane, while gregarious, are not walking encyclopedias. They might mention that an entrée of fish-fragrant fish featuring local lingcod ($48) is a cheeky nod to fish-fragrant eggplant, a dish that contains no fish whatsoever, but they’re far from pedants. Unless you drive the conversation, you might not learn about the braising technique applied to the beef shin ($18), or jiang niu rou, a process whereby the meat is babied for nine hours in master stock. This flavor-packed liquid, a sweetened mix of soy and shiaoxing wine infused with spices and aromatics, shares common ground with a sourdough mother or sherry aged using the solera method: After each braise, the master stock is saved and topped up, a never-ending continuum of flavor that will, presumably, only get better as the Happy Crane gets older.
The Happy Crane’s “golden coin,” made with chicken liver mousse and thinly sliced coppa, is a reference to the esoteric Cantonese snack gum tsin gai, or gold coin chicken.
The beef shin and celery root, left, and a pair of drinks, right, at the Happy Crane.
Photos by Santiago Mejia/S.F. ChronicleThe beef shin and celery root, above, and a pair of drinks, below, at the Happy Crane.
Photos by Santiago Mejia/S.F. ChronicleWhat 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. Parry then gives it a mala xiang guo treatment, dressing it with a Sichuan peppercorn vinaigrette and plating it with some vegetables that are commonly found in dry hot pot (celtuce, fried lotus root) and some that decidedly aren’t (last month, creamy confited artichoke hearts). It’s a masterpiece.
The same consideration for balance — crunch meeting softness, acid tempering richness — is evident in the char siu pork jowl ($43). Glistening with its maltose glaze, the sweet, fatty roast pork begs for something sharp and structured. Parry pairs it with shaved raw fennel — mirroring the licoricey notes in the five-spiced marinade — and intense, translucent crescents of green apple that are infused, under vacuum pressure, with lime juice and ginger. I’d like to keep a jar of those pickled apple slices in my fridge to munch on whenever I need to feel alive.
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The char siu pork jowl with raw fennel and thin slices of green apple that are infused, under vacuum pressure, with lime juice and ginger.
Parry’s attention to texture is so dialed in for his most successful dishes that the ones that fall short come as genuine surprises. A saucy crab rice roll ($32) made with steamed rice noodles that are milled in house should have been a triumph, but the cheung fun was frail, lacking chew and integrity. And the main crunch came not from the celery but, unfortunately, bits of crab shell.
Whether fair or not, diners will want to know where to mentally situate the Happy Crane among San Francisco’s other titans of modern Chinese cuisine; I look forward to a time when, like Cal-Italian restaurants, there are so many excellent examples that we no longer have to play them off one another. On the casual-to-swank spectrum, it falls solidly in between Four Kings and Mister Jiu’s — both on our list of the top 100 restaurants in the Bay Area. It’s a date night or pre-theater spot where the service is informal and, although a tasting option exists ($120 per person), the menu does not aspire to fine-dining pageantry.
Parry’s time in exacting, three-star kitchens is evident — the knife work, the plating, the wink-wink cleverness — even in humble stir fries and smacked cucumber salads. Kate Moss without makeup still has cheekbones. But I, for one, am grateful he chose a less buttoned-up road. I don’t dislike a tasting menu, but that $18 beef shin deserves to be eaten by everyone.
A staffer is seen waiting at the pass at the Happy Crane.
The Happy Crane
451 Gough St., San Francisco. thehappycranesf.com
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Hours: 5-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, no outdoor seating
Meal for two, without drinks: $125-$240 (for the “happy as a crane” tasting menu, which is $120 per person)
What to order: Ginger scallion scallop ($18); beef shin ($18); golden coin ($11 per piece); oyster pancake ($28); char siu pork jowl ($43); Peking duck service ($110, by preorder); mango sago sorbet ($14)
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Meat-free options: Smacked cucumber and smoked figs ($14); snap pea dumplings ($7 per piece); maitake biang biang noodles ($36)
Drinks: Spend some quality time with the drink menu, which features gorgeous original artwork by Parry’s sister, Yolande Lui Parry. Creative cocktails ($17-$20) with housemade cordials incorporate Asian flavors; try the Serpent’s Kiss, which layers miso and hot mustard atop an agave base, but skip the too salty non-alcoholic Flying Nimbus. A couple Taiwanese beers and a dozen or so wines by the glass, with Advanced Sommelier Justin Chin on-site to assist with bottle selection.
Best practices: The blazing hotness of the Happy Crane currently makes securing a reservation challenging, but eventually this will become an excellent pre-opera/symphony option for the Civic Center crowd. Half the bar is reserved for walk-ins, if you’re striking out on Open Table.
San Francisco, CA
Retired San Francisco firefighter dies from lung cancer after Blue Shield denies treatment claims
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The retired San Francisco firefighter at the center of a bitter insurance fight has lost his battle against cancer.
Ken Jones passed away Saturday, 14 months after being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
PREVIOUS REPORT: City asked to intervene after SF firefighter’s stage 4 lung cancer treatment denied by Blue Shield
We first told you about Jones in January — when the 17-year veteran and supporters asked the City Commission for help.
The Fire Department’s insurance carrier, Blue Shield, denied coverage for some of his recommended treatments.
Ken Jones was 70 years old.
SF firefighters rally for retiree denied cancer treatment by Blue Shield as more come forward
“After we got some publicity, thank you, a Blue Shield physician reached out to Ken’s physician, and they worked out a different plan that Blue Shield would cover. It’s still an incomplete plan,” said Helen Horvath, Jones’ wife when ABC7 Eyewitness News spoke to her in January, 2026.
Since then, Jones’ story has led to an investigation into other cases, with the city’s mayor vowing to support firefighters.
According to San Francisco’s Health Service Board, about 5,000 city employees and retirees are insured by Blue Shield. Now, city leaders are asking anyone who has been denied cancer treatment to speak up.
Tony Stefani with the Cancer Prevention Foundation said firefighters with a cancer diagnosis have a 14% higher chance of dying than other cancer patients in the general population.
“Current statistics tell us that 65% of the men and women in our profession are going to contract some form of cancer in their lifetime. Some of them will be fatal,” Stefani said.
In a Statement Blue Shield said, in part: “For Medicare members, health plans must follow medical policy established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).”
Copyright © 2026 KGO-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Few things are more valuable in the Bay Area than real estate. In San Francisco, the median house price is now over $2 million. Last month, at least seven houses in the city sold for $1 million over the asking price, and buyers regularly offer to pay in cash or waive contingencies to stay competitive. Yet there is one thing that remains even more valuable than a house, and possibly more valuable than money itself: stock in Anthropic or OpenAI.
Last week, 160 Noe Street, an Edwardian home in San Francisco’s desirable Duboce Triangle neighborhood, was listed for sale at $2.9 million—or the equivalent amount in Anthropic or OpenAI shares, as based on those companies’ current valuations. Rachel Swann, the listing agent, says she was inspired to set these unusual terms after meeting several Anthropic employees at an open house for a different property. “These people have a lot of paper wealth, but they don’t always have the liquidity to do things they want,” Swann says. Some of these employees were expecting to come into as much as $50 million from their Anthropic shares, and wondered if they could use that as leverage to buy a house, according to Swann. “This kept coming up over and over again.”
Swann’s listing is unconventional, but not singular. In April, an investment banker named Storm Duncan offered to exchange his Mill Valley home and an adjacent parcel of land for Anthropic shares. And in May, Vijay Chattha, who owns an agency that does PR for tech companies, listed his Healdsburg home for $2.5 million, or $2 million in Anthropic stock. “I want to sell my house, and I want to invest in Anthropic,” Chattha says. “Why not combine the two?
Chattha’s house—a three bed, three bath with a pool and a bocce court in a part of Sonoma County that abuts some of the region’s most famous wineries—also comes with coveted short-term rental status, allowing the owner to list it on platforms like Airbnb. Only a handful of properties in Healdsburg come with that status, and only about a dozen come up for sale in a given year.
Chattha is offering a $500,000 discount to Anthropic employees because he believes the value of Anthropic shares will grow faster than any other investment, and his vacation home in wine country is the best bargaining chip he has to try to access them. “If you look at Anthropic’s growth last year, it’s insane,” he says, noting the $380 billion valuation the company claimed in February. “Now they’re raising at $965 billion. That’s three X in like three months.” He added that he was open to exchanging the house for shares in Anthropic, but not OpenAI, because he prefers using Anthropic’s products.
The real estate listings come at a time when investors are salivating at the record-high valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI, and even those considered wealthy by Bay Area standards are feeling FOMO about the affluence that could come from these companies’ debuts on the stock market. (On Monday, Anthropic submitted paperwork for its initial public offering; OpenAI is also reportedly preparing to file in the coming months.) Despite the unprecedented valuations of these companies, many people believe their stock prices will only go up, and that anyone who gets a piece now could win the jackpot.
People are clamoring to buy equity in OpenAI and Anthropic on the secondary market, leading to a frenzy of transactions that may or may not be legitimate. As a result, Anthropic updated its policy around “unauthorized Anthropic stock sales” this spring, which notes that “if someone purports to sell Anthropic shares without proper board approval, that transaction is invalid.” A spokesperson for Anthropic pointed back to this policy when asked about the possibility of exchanging company shares for real estate.
Welcome to our running tally of Election Night results. Or, as this is California, well beyond tonight, as results continue to trickle in.
The first batch of results should arrive at 8:45 p.m., with three more to follow tonight. The Department of Elections has the breakdown.
San Francisco is voting in three special elections, for District 2 and District 4 supervisors and for a Board of Education member. Both supervisor races are referendums on housing, especially District 2, while the main backdrop of the D4 race is all the hot feelings around the fate of the Sunset Dunes Park (nee Great Highway).
The winners of all three special races will have to compete again in November for their seats.
Keeping it local, SF is also voting on four ballot measures. Prop A is for a bond to pay for an emergency water-system. B is for term limits. C and D are dueling measures related to the “overpaid CEO” tax. (Links go to our reporting on each race or issue; or click here for our Election 2026 page.)
Vote local, think national: Which two candidates will advance to the November election to replace Nancy Pelosi?
Statewide races include the primaries for governor, education superintendent, lieutenant governor, and much more.
Polls close soon. If you haven’t voted yet, find your polling station here.
Tuesday, June 2, 5:40 p.m.
Two and a half hours until our polls close. Before we go down the local rabbit hole, a reminder that other states have primary action today: New Jersey, Iowa, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Montana.
Why does it take so long to get results in California? CalMatters has you covered on that story. We shouldn’t expect a call tonight on the governor’s race.
The last big election was November 5, 2024. (Remember?) Ten days later, there were still races to call in San Francisco.
So if you’re waiting for the pundits (and maybe even us) to tell you What It All Means, you might have to wait a while.
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