Let that sink in. In a city where restaurants close monthly because of sky-high rents, brutal permitting fees, and a regulatory environment that treats small business owners like suspects, the places that survive become so oversubscribed they're practically unobtainable. HOPR isn't some Michelin-starred tasting menu with a 47-course foam situation. It's prime rib. Carved tableside. With creamed spinach. And people are planning half a year ahead like they're booking a European vacation.

This came up recently when a Bay Area resident tried to book a birthday dinner for a group of six — classic prime rib, traditional sides, reasonable hour — and hit a brick wall. The question "where else can you get great prime rib in the Bay Area?" shouldn't be this hard to answer, and yet here we are.

The real story isn't about one restaurant's popularity. It's about what happens when a region makes it nearly impossible to open and sustain new restaurants. When permitting takes months, when compliance costs eat margins alive, and when foot traffic in certain neighborhoods still hasn't recovered from pandemic-era policies, you end up with a scarcity problem. The good spots become impossible to get into. The mediocre spots hang on by a thread. And the spots that would exist — the next great steakhouse, the hidden gem prime rib joint — never get off the ground because some aspiring restaurateur looked at the numbers and decided it wasn't worth the headache.

San Francisco doesn't have a demand problem. People clearly want to go out, celebrate birthdays, and eat a beautifully roasted cut of beef at a civilized hour. What we have is a supply problem — artificially constrained by a city that talks endlessly about supporting small business while doing very little to actually make it easier to run one.

So if you're hunting for prime rib alternatives across the Bay Area, godspeed. They're out there. But there should be a lot more of them, and the reason there aren't has less to do with the free market and more to do with City Hall.