Jollibee’s Downtown San Francisco Opening Drew Hundreds

By Thursday evening, the line for fried chicken on Market Street was already a sleepover. Fans began staking spots outside Jollibee at 934 Market around 7:15 p.m. By Friday morning, July 31, the queue had grown into the hundreds, wrapping down Market and toward Mason as a DJ worked the crowd and the bee mascot posed for photos. When the doors opened at 9 a.m., San Francisco finally had a downtown Jollibee again, steps from the Powell Street BART station, after roughly six years of permits and about fifteen years without a city storefront.

The opening is a business story more than a ribbon-cutting. Downtown San Francisco still asks restaurants to prove they can draw people into corridors that lost office workers and shoppers. Jollibee arrived with a different problem: how to serve the people who already intended to come.

Jollibee is the flagship brand of the Philippines’ dominant fast-food company, built by Tony Tan Caktiong from a Manila ice-cream parlor into a national habit of Chickenjoy fried chicken, sweet Jolly Spaghetti, and peach mango pie. The first U.S. store opened in Daly City in 1998, planted deliberately in one of America’s densest Filipino communities. A SoMa location near Moscone Center later became a homesick hub with an attached Red Ribbon bakery before closing in late 2010. Bay Area diners kept driving to Daly City and the Peninsula. The brand kept opening elsewhere. San Francisco waited.

That wait is why the Market Street line looked like a concert queue instead of a soft opening. For Filipino American families, Jollibee is birthday-party memory and airport-homecoming food. For everyone else, the crossover has been Chickenjoy and the sandwich, helped by years of social media and a USA Today readers’ choice streak for best fast-food fried chicken. Recent coverage citing Bloomberg has put non-Filipino guests around 60 percent of U.S. traffic, and the company framed a recent Manhattan opening as mostly mainstream. The menu still reads Filipino. The demand now reads broader.

Compare that to the downtown dining bet many American concepts still make: a beautiful room, a chef’s name, and a hope that return-to-office and tourism refill the lunch rush. Union Square and Mid-Market retail vacancy remain far above pre-pandemic levels even as citywide neighborhood retail improves. Value tenants and destination brands are the ones willing to take the space. Jollibee’s North America materials cite average unit volumes near $4.9 million, a company figure that helps explain why the chain stayed with a Market Street lease through utility work, noise fights, and crane paperwork instead of walking away.

Mayor Daniel Lurie has used the six-year delay to argue for PermitSF and faster storefront approvals. The permitting fight is real. What the overnight chairs show is simpler. A brand with diaspora memory and a fried-chicken product people already hunt for can create its own foot traffic. A generic downtown concept still has to invent a reason to leave the house. On opening morning, hundreds of people already had one.