A storefront on Valencia Street that has swallowed four restaurants in a row finally has a tenant that looks like it might stick. Mandi House, a Yemeni restaurant that opened in June at 680 Valencia St in San Francisco's Mission District, is serving mandi chicken, lamb haneeth and bubbling stone-pot stews to groups that can range from a couple on a date to a table of twenty.
The location has something of a reputation. According to Gazetteer SF, the address previously housed Hawker Fare, which closed after the pandemic, followed by The Kickback breakfast restaurant and bar in 2023, a Petra Mediterranean outpost (complete with a Mitchell's ice cream pop-up and belly dancing) that could not survive in 2024, and the barbecue spot Smokey Joe, which shut down after just six months in 2025. Mandi House is owned by Faris Alqabass, who expanded the concept to San Francisco from its original Los Angeles location, per the same outlet.
Inside, the space leans into theme rather than shying from it. The restaurant's décor includes an outline of the nation of Yemen, replicas of qamariyahs — traditional Yemeni stained glass — and large screens playing Yemeni cultural and historical videos, Gazetteer SF reports. There's also a full second floor, giving the restaurant a banquet-hall feel suited to its group-dining ambitions.
Built for Big Tables, No Reservations Required
Mandi House doesn't take reservations, but it's clearly built with groups in mind. Traditional majlis booths fit eight to ten people, while other tables can be combined to seat anywhere from four to twenty, according to the Gazetteer SF report. The restaurant's manager, Omar, reportedly welcomed a request for a large table with excitement, a detail the outlet noted as emblematic of the hospitality on offer.
The menu spans breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes available all day, including hradas — stone pots used to cook and serve stews and meats — and seltah, the Yemeni national dish, a bubbling stew made with meat, fish or vegetables. Entrées include the restaurant's namesake mandi chicken or lamb, along with lamb madhbi, and the kitchen turns out tandoor bread pieces about 15 inches across. For bigger appetites, large shareable dishes like lamb haneeth and mandi chicken run from $80 to $180, per Gazetteer SF. Karak tea and freshly squeezed lemon juice with mint round out the drink menu, and the restaurant is sometimes known to sell hot, fresh kunafa out front.
Mandi House's own website lists its hours as 11 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. daily and describes its food as 100% halal, with online ordering available for pickup and delivery, according to mandihouse.com. That conflicts with Gazetteer SF's report that the restaurant serves food from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily — a discrepancy that remains unresolved. Either way, the restaurant is serving customers well past 10 p.m., a late-night window that has helped it stand out on a strip not known for post-dinner dining options.
Riding San Francisco's Yemeni Café Wave
Mandi House's arrival lands amid what's become a genuine boom in Yemeni food interest across the Bay Area. Yemeni cafés such as Delah Cafe and Heyma Cafe are booming in popularity in San Francisco right now, even though restaurants serving Yemeni cuisine remain few and far between in the region, Gazetteer SF notes. Full-menu Yemeni restaurants are still a rarer find than the café scene suggests.
That café boom has had a ripple effect. “We have the Yemeni café boom to thank for driving interest in Yemeni cuisine,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The paper has also reported that it seems like every other week there's a new Yemeni café opening in the Bay Area, whose Yemeni population numbers roughly 6,000 according to American Community Survey data from 2020 to 2024. Sheba co-owner Bassam Alkabsh, whose Oakland restaurant was founded with four uncles in the East Peralta neighborhood, told the Chronicle, “I've never seen this much interest before, ever.”
San Francisco's Yemeni dining map has been filling in piece by piece. Hoodline first reported on Mandi House's move into the old Hawker Fare space, and Yemen Kitchen has shuttered; Yemeni Kabab & Mediterranean, which chef Abdul Al Rammah opened in the Tenderloin in 2024, followed it.
Gazetteer SF, whose reporting forms the backbone of what's known so far about the restaurant's early months, said Mandi House did not respond to a request for comment before its story published. Whether the hours discrepancy gets ironed out or Mandi House simply keeps packing its majlis booths past midnight, the restaurant appears, for now, to have done what four predecessors could not: find a reason for diners to keep coming back to 680 Valencia St.
