Eat Here Now is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around – the ones we think are worth visiting. We dine once, serve forth our thoughts, and let you take it from there.

The brisket is fatty. The cornbread is buttery. The squirt bottles are filled with barbecue sauce. In other words: Memphis Minnie’s (opens in new tab) is back. Perhaps most important, so is “the original cook” — as advertised by a sign taped to the window. The chef in question is Angel Pech, who reopened the Lower Haight institution in December. 

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say Pech is the only one who could have brought the restaurant back to its former glory. 

After Kantor died in 2013, his widow ran it for several years before selling in 2018 to Gui Bok Lee, who oversaw a period of decline. Fans scattered. The once-pioneering Memphis Minnie’s — often held up as Exhibit A whenever someone said San Francisco had no good barbecue — closed unceremoniously in September 2025.

Pech, in the meantime, had risen through the ranks to work the meat station, hanging on through both transitions before leaving San Francisco during the pandemic. Back in town to visit friends last year, he dropped by Memphis Minnie’s during its final days, and Lee gave it to him straight: “I asked him how business was,” Pech says. “He said, ‘It’s bad.’”

A soft-spoken man with an estimable work ethic, Pech is disinclined to share any unkind words about the previous owner, other than to say Lee was happy to hand over the keys. The situation was dire. By that point, nearly everyone who had worked with Kantor had moved on. At least 15 of the recipes were lost. 

What amounts to Memphis Minnie’s 4.0 is as close to a turn-back-the-clock situation as it gets. The food, the decor, the Farberware plates, the quirky, Memphis-style exterior signage — it’s all there. So is the sauce quartet: North Carolina vinegar, South Carolina mustard, a ketchup-y Texas red sauce, plus an extra-spicy hot sauce that’s almost a crime to waste on good barbecue.

Above all, the barbecue is back where it was. Anyone crestfallen over the platters of dried-out, oversmoked meat — and judging by the one-star Yelp reviews from the past few years, there were many — would do well to revisit for slow-smoked Texas brisket and snappy andouille sausage. It’s hard to go wrong when choosing sides. The ramekins of beans are smoky, the mac-and-cheese is industrial-strength, and the slaw is acidic but not excessively vinegar-y. The cornbread remains the gold standard for keeping your Clean Plate Club membership in good standing.

Minnie’s still runs daily specials: pastrami on Wednesdays, fried chicken on Thursdays, and a “maxi burger” with pimento cheese, bacon, and fried onion rings on Fridays. The notably soft pastrami-on-rye sandwiches aren’t stacked to the heavens the way they’d be at a New York-style Jewish deli, but the cheese and sauerkraut melt beautifully into the meat, which is cured for 10 days, then smoked for 16 hours. 

Pech is otherwise tight-lipped about his kitchen’s work, declining to share much beyond noting that nearly every combo plate that goes out includes brisket. “Brisket is No. 1,” he says. “Ribs are No. 2. Then tri-tip.” That garlicky tri-tip, it should be noted, is grilled over oak, Santa Maria-style — a nod to California’s singular contribution to barbecue and a relative rarity north of the Central Coast. If you want some, start walking to Memphis.