SF’s new hot spot for late-night fried squab, pig head and ‘typhoon shelter’ crab. May 22, 2025Part of the excitement at Four Kings comes from covering the table with an abundance of dishes. The new-school Cantonese restaurant is open until 11 p.m. on the weekends in SF Chinatown. (Thien Pham) The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene. The buzziest, most popular restaurant in San Francisco today sits in the heart of Chinatown, in a cheerful alleyway festooned with red lanterns, directly downstairs from a Kumon (as the restaurant’s young, first-gen Cantonese proprietors are fond of pointing out). In that way, Four Kings feels a little bit like some metaphor for millennial Asian America, or maybe just the setting for a novel I’d like to read — one whose plot hinges on the re-creation of some particularly decadent and nostalgic version of claypot rice or Hong Kong pepper steak. Of course, we had come to this bustling Hong Kong–inspired diner late on a Friday night because we’d heard it stays open, and fully packed, until 11 p.m. on weekends — and because we finally wanted to see for ourselves if the place lived up to all the hype. More than a year after the restaurant’s feverishly anticipated debut, Four Kings still gets booked up weeks in advance. Luckily for night owls, 9:30 p.m. is the most likely time you might be able to land a last-minute reservation. That’s also the best time to just show up and get in line, as we did, hoping to snag one of the tables they save for walk-ins. (We only had to wait about half an hour.) Even apart from the food, Four Kings comes advertised as a rollicking good time, and the vibes are indeed excellent from the moment you walk in: Posters of ’80s and ’90s Cantopop idols decorate the walls, and their songs provid