Almost every Mexican restaurant in San Francisco will tell you the tortillas are made in house. Far fewer make the masa. The difference is nixtamalization — dried field corn simmered and then steeped overnight in water and slaked lime until the hulls slip, rinsed, and ground the next morning into a dough that has to be used before it sours. Nopalito has run that process daily on Broderick Street since 2009, which is a strange amount of labour for something most diners never consciously taste. It is also the reason the food tastes the way it does, and the reason a plate of carnitas here reads differently from the one four blocks away.
Two of the three Nopalito addresses still floating around search results are permanently closed, and the surviving one opens at a different hour on Wednesdays than every other day. Ask Karpo to confirm tonight's hours on Broderick before you cross town for it.
What nixtamal actually changes
Industrial masa harina is corn flour: nixtamalized corn that has been dried and milled into a shelf-stable powder, then rehydrated in a kitchen somewhere else weeks later. Fresh masa skips the drying. The corn is cooked in an alkaline solution, left to steep overnight, washed, and ground wet. What you get back is a dough that smells like corn rather than like paper, and a tortilla that stays pliable for a few minutes longer before it starts to crack. It is a difference of texture more than of flavour intensity — the tortilla behaves like an ingredient instead of a wrapper.
The scale involved is the part people underestimate. When the group was running two dining rooms, the San Francisco Chronicle documented roughly 300 pounds of masa a day and about 28,000 tortillas a week, with someone at the griddle for something close to sixteen hours daily. The corn is bought organic by the pallet; the blue corn used for some of the griddled work comes from a family farm in New Mexico. None of this is visible from a table. All of it is why the kitchen closes for a few hours some afternoons rather than running service straight through.
Two of the three addresses online are closed
This is the practical thing to carry. Nopalito had a second, larger dining room at 1224 9th Avenue in the Inner Sunset; it closed permanently in June 2020 after nine years, when the size of the room made restaffing impossible. A small taco window on 18th Street followed in March 2024. Both still surface in search results, review sites and old map pins, and people still drive to them. There is one Nopalito, at 306 Broderick Street in NoPa, a short walk from the Panhandle. If your directions app offers you a 9th Avenue or an 18th Street address, it is quoting a restaurant that has not existed for years.
The restaurant began as the casual offshoot of Nopa, the Divisadero Street room that has anchored this stretch since the mid-2000s, and it kept the parent kitchen's habits: produce bought seasonally and locally, whole animals broken down in house, nothing arriving pre-portioned. Chef Gonzalo Guzmán, who grew up in Veracruz, published the kitchen's recipes as a cookbook in 2017, which is an unusually open way to run a restaurant whose main technical advantage is a process anyone could copy and almost nobody does.
What to order, and roughly what it costs
The carnitas is the dish to order if you are only ordering one. It arrives as a platter of braised pork with tortillas, beans, salsa and the accompaniments to build with, priced in the low thirties and designed to be split — a table of two will struggle to finish it alone. The mole poblano con pollo is the other long-standing anchor, and the ceviche verde de pescado y calamar is the dish to start with if the afternoon is warm, which on this side of the city it frequently is not.
If you want the masa argument settled in one order, get something griddled to order rather than something stewed. A tortilla eaten within a minute of leaving the comal is the whole point; the same tortilla under a plate of sauce for ten minutes is just a good tortilla. Tamales, when they are on, are the other honest test — fresh masa steams to a texture that masa harina cannot quite reach, light rather than dense.
When to go, and the Wednesday trap
Recent listings put the kitchen at 11:30am to 9pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, 11:30am to 10pm on Friday and Saturday, and — the trap — a 4:30pm start on Wednesday. A midweek lunch plan that assumes the same opening hour every day will find a closed door exactly once a week. Hours at independent restaurants drift, so treat that as the shape of the week rather than a guarantee.
For a first visit, early evening on a weeknight is the calm window: the room is small, it does not take the whole of a weekend rush gracefully, and the kitchen is unhurried before about 7pm. NoPa is a walkable neighbourhood rather than a driving one — street parking around Broderick and Fell is genuinely competitive after 6pm, and the Divisadero bus lines drop you within a block. If you are making an evening of it, the surrounding blocks between Divisadero and Baker will hold you afterwards without a second reservation.
Practical notes
Nopalito, 306 Broderick St, San Francisco, CA 94117 — the only remaining location. Recent listed hours: 11:30am to 9pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; 4:30pm to 9pm Wednesday; 11:30am to 10pm Friday and Saturday. Carnitas runs around $31.50 and is built for sharing. Closed locations that still appear online: 1224 9th Avenue in the Inner Sunset, shut permanently in June 2020, and the 18th Street taco window, shut in March 2024. Masa is nixtamalized and ground on site daily; organic corn, some blue corn from a New Mexico family farm. Walkable from the Panhandle; street parking is tight after 6pm.
Tags: #foodnearme #sanfrancisco #nopalito #nopa #broderickstreet #mexicanfoodsf #nixtamal #masa #handmadetortillas #carnitas #sfrestaurants #innersunset #bayareaeats #sffoodguide
Sources consulted: nopalitosf.com · sfchronicle.com · sfist.com · hoodline.com
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Ask Karpo first
One open address, two dead ones still in the search results, and a Wednesday that starts five hours later than the rest of the week is a lot to get right from a map pin. Ask Karpo whether Broderick Street is serving tonight, how long the wait is running, and what else is open around Divisadero if the room is full when you arrive.
