Around 5:45 on a Tuesday evening, Brandon Jew walks through the dining room of Mister Jiu’s like he’s checking in on old friends — touching the back of a chair, glancing at a table setting, pausing near the kitchen pass to exchange a few words with his crew. The restaurant won’t open its doors for another fifteen minutes. He does this every service.
Mister Jiu’s sits in a building on Waverly Place that has housed a Chinese banquet hall since 1882. That history isn’t decorative. It’s load-bearing. Jew, who grew up in San Francisco and trained in kitchens in Europe and New York before coming home, spent years thinking about what it would mean to cook Chinese food in Chinatown honestly — not fusion, not nostalgia, but something true to the neighborhood and true to where he’d been. The restaurant that opened in 2016 is the answer he landed on, and it’s still being refined.
The dining room is formal without being stiff. Red lacquered panels, paper lanterns strung overhead, round tables dressed in white linen. It looks like a banquet hall that someone thoughtful took seriously. Upstairs there’s a private room and a bar area where the cocktails run toward bitter, aromatic, and occasionally smoky — the kind of drinks that hold their own against bold food.
The menu changes seasonally, but certain ideas keep coming back. Quail and fois gras siu mai, served in the traditional bamboo steamer, taste like a very good memory of something you didn’t actually eat as a child. The char siu — barbecued Liberty duck rather than pork — arrives lacquered and glistening, with a smokiness that lingers. There’s almost always a whole fish preparation, often with fermented black bean and ginger that smells like a Cantonese kitchen at full roar. Portions are sized for sharing, and the staff will help navigate order quantities without making anyone feel managed.
The tasting menu runs around $145 per person before drinks, and à la carte options let smaller parties eat well for less. The wine list skews toward natural and low-intervention producers, with a few California bottles that interact well with the kitchen’s umami-heavy instincts. Service is knowledgeable but not performative — the kind of floor team that can answer a real question about a dish without launching into a monologue.
What Jew has built here is unusual in that it seems to get more settled and more assured the older it gets. In a city where restaurants frequently pivot or perform, Mister Jiu’s has stayed focused. The dim sum brunch on weekends, when the room fills with a mix of longtime Chinatown families and visitors, is a different mood from dinner — louder, more communal, carts circling through. Reservations are strongly recommended for dinner; brunch is slightly easier to walk into, but only slightly.
Waverly Place is one of Chinatown’s narrower alleys, lined with temple flags and old painted facades. Standing outside before a dinner service, listening to the city settle into evening around you, the building on its own tells a long story. Jew’s job, night after night, is to make sure what happens inside honors it. By most accounts, he keeps doing exactly that.
