Japanese curry strike Hinoya is already opening a new place in Berkeley

Photo of Elena Kadvany

Katsu curry from Hinoya, which is opening a second location in Berkeley.

Katsu curry from Hinoya, which is opening a second spot in Berkeley.

Offered by Hinoya Curry SF

Just 7 months right after Hinoya introduced its wildly popular Japanese curry to San Francisco, the entrepreneurs are organizing to open a 2nd site in Berkeley.

Hinoya will open at 2512 Bancroft Way, across from the College of California, Berkeley campus, at the stop of 2021 or early 2022, proprietor Thomas Uehara verified. The new outpost will serve the same Japanese curry, built from the Tokyo chain’s proprietary recipe, as at the San Francisco place. The thick curry will come around rice with a protein, this kind of as pork katsu or deep-fried prawns, and Japanese pickles. Other menu items will be the very same in Berkeley as properly, however Hinoya is operating on some new dishes for both destinations.

The Berkeley place will have some counter seats, developed to look and really feel like curry stores in Japan, but it will mostly be a fast-everyday spot geared towards brief foods, takeout and supply.

It’s the initial move in an bold enlargement system for Hinoya. Two more eating places are in the performs in downtown San Francisco and the South Bay, just after which Uehara options to expand to Southern California and franchise nationally. He envisions a foreseeable future in which most big U.S. metropolitan areas will have a Hinoya.

The first stateside Hinoya opened to extensive traces in San Francisco’s Marina community in February. Uehara explained the high demand from customers for their Japanese curry, even they couldn’t give in-individual dining at to start with because of to the pandemic, enabled him to accelerate Hinoya’s growth and sign a lease in Berkeley.

Uehara has the exceptional license on the curry chain in the United States but the company operates as a individual entity from the one in Japan. A Japanese-American San Francisco native, Uehara lived in Japan for 30 decades right after graduating from UC Berkeley. His purpose with Hinoya is to make its curry as mainstream in the United States as in Japan, the place just about every cafe and domestic clings tightly to their possess most well-liked recipe.


Elena Kadvany is a San Francisco Chronicle team author. E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @ekadvany