Why Hina Yakitori Won’t Reopen in San Francisco

When Hina Yakitori first opened on Divisadero Street in 2019, San Francisco’s general dining public had a hard time making heads or tails of the place. Here, it seemed, was a restaurant specializing in the kind of grilled chicken skewers you could find for $5 or $6 a pop at any izakaya in town. But at Hina, there wasn’t any a la carte menu at all — just an “omakase style” tasting menu that would run you well over $100 a person for about half a pasture-raised chicken’s worth of food.

As far as anyone could tell, it was the first restaurant of its kind in the U.S.

Of course, even back in 2019, anyone who’d eaten at a high-end yakitori restaurant in Japan understood, immediately, what kind of restaurant Hina was striving to be. And anyone who had eaten at chef Tommy Cleary’s earlier, more casual version of Hina in Oakland understood that Cleary was a chicken magician — and that once you saw, as I’d seen, how delicious he could make the “crisp-edged, earthy chicken heart and the fatty, cartilaginous tail,” you could never again think of grilled chicken as a boring menu option.

But now, after four years and a host of accolades, Hina Yakitori — or this iteration of it, at least — is shutting it down. Last week, the restaurant announced that its last day of dinner service will be Aug. 31.

Cleary says the ownership group’s decision to close can largely be attributed to a particularly brutal July when, for the first time in the four years since Hina opened, the restaurant had empty seats even on Friday and Saturday nights. “It just fell off a cliff,” he says.

And at least anecdotally, it isn’t just Hina that’s struggling. Cleary says all of his friends who run restaurants in San Francisco have seen similar drop-offs in business. Even at the buzziest, most highly acclaimed fine-dining restaurants, Cleary says, “you can just walk in.”

While it’s hard to pinpoint a single root cause, Cleary says he can’t help but feel like Hina’s recent doldrums are somehow connected to the broader narrative about San Francisco that’s getting blasted out in the media and across WeChat group chats right now — that the whole city has turned into some kind of lawless wasteland. “The image that’s portrayed of San Francisco is not a good one,” he says. “For people outside the area, it’s like a punching bag.”

For a restaurant like Hina — a destination, special occasion spot for most diners — the downtick in out-of-town visitors has taken its toll. For instance, Cleary says he used to get a big chunk of business from overseas Chinese tourists, but all of that has dried up in the past year. “Even my uncle in Japan was like, ‘What’s going on in San Francisco?’”

Now, Cleary says he’s certain he doesn’t want to open another restaurant in San Francisco in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the road for Hina. Cleary says he’s mulling over four different options at this point: He might reopen Hina more or less as it was — a tiny, boutique, omakase-style yakitori restaurant. Alternatively, he might open a more casual 40- or 50-seat izakaya. Or he might revive the fried chicken sandwich concept that he’d pivoted to during the height of the pandemic, when his take on Nashville hot chicken, seasoned with a Japanese shichimi togarashi spice blend, was one of San Francisco’s most delicious lunchtime takeout options. Whichever restaurant concept he settles on, he’ll look for a space somewhere in the East Bay or in the San Mateo area, where he grew up.

The fourth option would be the most unexpected: Cleary is getting married in Thailand this winter, and he says he might just pack everything up and move there outright. Hina Yakitori would do pretty well in Thailand, he thinks.

What has felt especially bittersweet, Cleary says, is how many longtime customers rushed to make reservations after the initial closure announcement. Within a day and half, they were fully booked for the rest of the month — a last gasp of business that came too late to save the restaurant.

Meanwhile, Cleary had already planned a whole month’s worth of special collaboration dinners in August featuring yakitori chefs from around the country. The original idea was to hype the restaurant up during this sluggish stretch, but the dinners were also meant to be a showcase for the burgeoning yakitori movement here in the U.S. These days, a growing number of pop-ups and restaurants are helping to expand people’s consciousness of the wide range of artistry one can achieve with hot charcoal and skewered chicken parts.

Take one of the guest chefs, Ozzie Mendoza Diaz, a Puerto Rican chef who did street-side yakitori pop-ups in New Orleans for years and is now in the process of opening a yakitori-focused izakaya called Fowlmouth on the island, in San Juan. A self-taught chef, Mendoza Diaz says he was inspired by the similarity between yakitori and pinchos — Puerto Rico’s own version of grilled meat on a stick. “Meat on a stick is cross-cultural as hell,” he tells me. And so his take on yakitori expresses traditional Puerto Rican flavors through the lens of techniques that are distinctly Japanese: His chicken oyster skewer with pigeon pea miso is a play on Puerto Rican arroz con gandules; his “pincho de pega’o” rice cake skewer celebrates Puerto Rican and Japanese people’s mutual love for the crunchy rice at the bottom of the pot.

While Hina is already completely booked for its Aug. 17 collab dinner with Mendoza Diaz — as it is through the end of its run — diners desperate for one last meal can still put themselves on a waitlist.

Hina, of course, has been on the vanguard of this new yakitori movement. Though the guest chef dinners weren’t originally planned as an out-with-a-bang farewell celebration, Cleary believes they’ll show how vibrant and diverse the American yakitori scene is becoming — and how much it’s already grown since Hina first opened on Divisadero with the city’s unlikeliest omakase menu.

“We were almost there,” Cleary says. “The whole idea was to elevate that style to show people that yakitori is not just a cheap street food. It’s up there with people who do sushi — it’s just as respectable.”

Hina Yakitori’s last official day of business at 808 Divisadero St., San Francisco, is Aug. 31. The standard omakase-style yakitori tasting menu is $165 per person; the special collaboration dinners are $200 per person. While the restaurant is currently fully booked through the end of its run, customers can put themselves on a waitlist through Tock.