Sergeant Ma, a new restaurant from Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group, opens on Sept. 9.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Sergeant Ma’s 54-seat dining room features light teak wood tables and high ceilings.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
A romano beans and Jimmy Nardello pepper dish at Sergeant Ma, which will channel Chinese, Vietnamese and Bay Area influences.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
The historic Wharfside Building, an enormous, multistory structure that dates back to 1922 and was once used by the Southern Pacific Railroad as a shipping hub for bananas and other fruits landing in the Port of San Francisco, will soon take on new life as a restaurant. On Sept. 9, the waterfront building, which faces Oracle Park, will open as Sergeant Ma, serving California cuisine with Asian influences.
Sergeant Ma at 185 Berry St. in China Basin is the latest from Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group, operated by partners Ryan Cole, Lucas Bierbower, Tai Ricci and Jason Halverson, also the group’s executive chef. They run San Francisco restaurants including the Michelin-starred 7 Adams, North Beach prix-fixe spot Trestle and Mama in Oakland.
Sergeant Ma will mark the latest arrival in the fast-growing Mission Bay area, which has become a hotbed for new restaurants, breweries and leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Nvidia. Sergeant Ma shares the 185 Berry St. campus with tech companies including Lyft and Sierra, an AI startup from OpenAI chairman and former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor that leased 300,000 square feet of the complex.
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Cole said that emphasizing Sergeant Ma’s location and proximity to water was key in its design, created by architect Cass Calder Smith. Diners will enter the restaurant through a walking path along Mission Creek, instead of on Berry Street. The modern dining room features sliding floor-to-ceiling windows that can open year-round to offer views of the creek, where kayakers often float by. A 4,000-square-foot waterfront patio features five fire pits, couches and other seating.
The Sergeant Ma dining room looks out onto Mission Creek.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Sergeant Ma’s menu will draw on Halverson’s upbringing in Wichita, Kan., where he grew up eating his family’s Vietnamese and Chinese cooking — especially from his mother, who immigrated from Vietnam to the United States at 16 years old.
“It was just constantly food everywhere and everyone sitting at the table sharing,” Halverson said. The restaurant is named after his mother, who the family affectionately calls both the “sergeant” and “ma.”
Starters will include a king salmon crudo with wood ear mushrooms and chili crisp ($26); a half-dozen shigoku oysters from Washington state dressed with a strawberry-chile sambal ($30); and a tuna noodle salad with a smoked soy and sesame vinaigrette ($27). A peak-summer salad of heirloom tomatoes, roasted eggplant and basil comes with yuba, an ingredient Halverson and his siblings would fight over as kids.
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“Yuba can carry all of those flavors like the umami of the tomato,” he said. A classic Chinese pineapple bun will be paired with roasted mortadella, liver mousse and caramelized pineapple mustard.
Whole grilled branzino with fermented chili sauce and romano beans from Sergeant Ma.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Entrees also weave in Chinese influences, such as a mafaldine pasta with a Chinese black bean and lobster butter, in homage to Chinese buffets ($38). Dry-aged ribeye “au poivre,” meanwhile, is seasoned with tingly sansho pepper and served with fava beans, bone marrow and pommes frites ($68).
All dishes are geared toward sharing. Cole and Halverson decided against offering individual dishes due to the space limitations of the kitchen, which has room for only about three or four cooks. They could not build out a larger kitchen due to the support columns in the building that could not be moved. Yet “the smaller dishes are still substantial,” Cole said. “They’re not a bunch of small portions because you’re not supposed to have the whole menu on one visit.”
Beverage consultant Suzanne Miller created a wide-ranging cocktail menu, from spirit-forward to bright and refreshing drinks. Some incorporate Chinese candies, such as turning milky White Rabbit into a syrup for a riff on an old fashioned, or using the flavor of Haw Flakes, made from Chinese hawthorn fruit, for a tequila drink with lychee and hibiscus. The Banana Depot, a banana pudding-inspired milk punch, is a nod to the building’s history and channels a current obsession with banana flavors.
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Nonalcoholic drinks include Patty’s Ransom, a fruit-flavored take on a martini. It’s named for a piece of local history: When newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, part of the terms of her release were to distribute food to people in need, which the Hearst family coordinated through the building on Berry Street.
An 18-foot-tall fiddle-leaf fig tree is the centerpiece of the dining room.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Sergeant Ma’s 54-seat dining room has high ceilings, an 18-foot-tall ficus tree inside and a bar with TV screens for sports games. There’s also an indoor-outdoor lounge, plus a daytime café, Water’s Edge.
Sergeant Ma will mark the sixth restaurant for Hi Neighbor, which is also working with the new operator of San Francisco’s Cliff House on food options for the landmark’s highly anticipated reopening. Cole is happy to land in a booming corner of the city that’s becoming more of a dining destination. “You need good company to make it in a neighborhood,” he said.
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Sergeant Ma. Opening Sept. 9. 185 Berry St., San Francisco. sergeantma.com
Dining and Cooking