Most food hall write-ups are published in the first month, when every counter is staffed and the photographs are good, and then never revisited. The result is a genre of recommendation that describes a building as it was on opening day rather than as it is on the Tuesday you turn up. This piece is the other kind.
A half-empty room with one great counter in it is often a better lunch than a full one with none. Tell Karpo what you feel like eating and get the specific counters near you worth walking to, not the buildings they sit in.
What has actually happened at 945 Market
Saluhall opened in April 2024 on Market Street, inside the Ikea-owned building at 945 Market, as a two-storey hall with a Nordic-leaning concept and five Bay Area restaurants in kiosks. All five have now gone. Curry Up Now was the last of the originals to close; Cheezy's Artisan Pizza went dark in March 2026. Ingka, Ikea's parent company, ended its partnership with the London operator that had run the hall since it opened and took over day-to-day operations itself.
That is a genuinely bad two years, and there is no version of this article that pretends otherwise. What makes it worth writing anyway is that the two counters still standing are better than the average survivor of a story like this, and one of them is better than most restaurants with their own front door.
The reason to go is a burger counter
Smish Smash is a smash burger counter and it was ranked number eighty in the San Francisco Chronicle's 2026 list of the hundred best restaurants in the Bay Area. Read that sentence against the paragraph above it, because the combination is the whole point. A Top 100 restaurant operating out of a kiosk in a hall that has lost every one of its original tenants is one of the more interesting things you can eat in this city, and it costs what a burger costs.
Its hours are the thing to plan around, because they are not the hall's hours. It closes on Mondays entirely, and on the days it opens it runs a split service — roughly eleven to three, then a break, then a second sitting from four. The gap in the middle of the afternoon is exactly when a passing office worker or a tourist walking up Market Street is most likely to wander in, and it is the single most common way to get this wrong. Do not arrive at half past three.
The other counter is Izzy & Wooks, a Filipino operation doing fried chicken sandwiches, a smashed longanisa burger and arroz caldo. Longanisa is a sweet, garlicky cured pork sausage, and putting it through a smash burger treatment is the kind of idea that sounds like a gimmick and turns out to be structurally sound — the sugar in the sausage caramelises against the flat top in a way plain beef cannot. The arroz caldo is the better order on a cold, grey afternoon, which in this part of San Francisco is most of them.
- Saluhall, 945 Market Street; hall open 9am-8pm Mon-Thu, 9am-9pm Fri-Sat, 9am-7pm Sun
- Smish Smash: closed Mondays, split service around 11am-3pm and from 4pm — mind the afternoon gap
- Izzy & Wooks: Filipino, open into the evening, later than the burger counter on most days
- All five original tenants have closed; the hall is under new ownership management
- Oklava Cafe, a Turkish bakery from Palo Alto, is due to open here
What is coming, if it comes
Two things are in progress and both are worth knowing before you write the place off. Oklava Café, a Turkish coffee shop and bakery from Palo Alto, is set to open inside the hall with Turkish coffee, pastries, salads and pizza slices — which would give the building the one thing it currently lacks, a reason to come in the morning. And Spirited Beverage Co., the drinks arm of a Bay Area hospitality group, is taking over all three of the hall's bars.
Three bars in a building with two food counters is an odd ratio, and it hints at what the next version of this place is likely to be: less a lunch hall, more a room you drink in with food attached. Whether that works on this stretch of Market Street is an open question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, including the people doing it.
Why it is still a good lunch
A hall with two counters in it has one real advantage over a full one, which is that there is nowhere to sit that is not free. The building is large, the upper level has proper tables and daylight, and at one in the afternoon you will have most of it to yourself. If you work nearby and need somewhere to eat and answer email for forty minutes without being moved along, the emptiness that reads as failure in a news story reads as space when you are the one sitting in it.
It is also central in a way that is hard to overstate. This is mid-Market, a short walk from Powell Street station and the cable car turnaround, and within ten minutes on foot of Union Square, the Tenderloin's better restaurants and the Civic Center plazas. You are unlikely to make a special journey. You are quite likely to be walking past.
Practical notes
Saluhall, 945 Market Street, San Francisco. The hall is open 9am to 8pm Monday to Thursday, 9am to 9pm Friday and Saturday and 9am to 7pm on Sunday, but the individual counters keep their own hours and there are only two of them. Smish Smash, ranked eightieth in the Chronicle's 2026 Bay Area Top 100, is closed on Mondays and runs a split service with a gap in the middle of the afternoon. Izzy & Wooks serves Filipino food and stays open later. A Turkish bakery is due to move in and a new operator is taking over the bars. Powell Street station is a short walk.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #MarketStreet #FoodHall #HiddenGems #SFEats #Saluhall #SmashBurger #DowntownSF #CheapEats #OddFinds #LunchSpots #SFRestaurants #ThingsToDoSF #FilipinoFood
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