Chef Laurence Jossel's wood-fired room at 560 Divisadero at Hayes celebrates its 20th anniversary this June — a span that has outlasted Coi, Salt House, Dosa, and most of its 2006 class, while the brand has extended to the Ferry Building.

Nopa, chef Laurence Jossel's wood-fired room at 560 Divisadero at Hayes, celebrates its 20th anniversary this June — a span that puts it in a category of its own among the restaurants that opened alongside it in 2006. Of that cohort, Coi, Salt House, and Dosa have all since closed. Perbacco, Aziza, and Blue Plate are still standing. Nopa is the one people talk about.

Jossel found the space around 2004, sitting at the Beanbag Café across the street and noticing a vacant laundromat — a former bank — on the corner of Divisadero and Hayes. He opened with two partners: Jeff Hanak on operations and Allyson Jossel. All three came up through the Chow restaurant group. Jossel had trained under Roland Passot at La Folie and spent four years at Gary Danko before landing at Chow.

The founding trio didn't survive intact. During the pandemic, Jossel bought out both Hanak and Allyson Jossel and became sole owner. Holly Rhodes, his current wife, became his business partner. The restaurant kept going; the kitchen did eventually pull back from its 1 a.m. last-call — a tradition the room had held for 14 years as an industry workers' destination — due to staffing constraints.

The room seats north of 100 across a main dining room, chef's counter, upstairs mezzanine, a bar, and a heated outdoor parklet on Hayes. The house burger was around $18 at opening; it runs $29 in 2026. Roughly 60 percent of nightly guests are regulars, by the restaurant's own reckoning.

In the 19th year, Jossel extended the brand. Nopa Fish opened June 10, 2025, in the Ferry Building's south hall — the former San Francisco Fish Company space — as a counter-service fish market hybrid. The partners there are Rhodes and Joe Conte of Water2Table Fish Co. Nopa is also developing a farm in Sebastopol to supply the flagship, expected to produce within a year or two.

George McCalman — the San Francisco-based graphic designer and artist who has designed Nopa's menus through his studio McCalman.Co — has been a fixture at the bar for all 20 of those years, arriving on day three and returning most weeks since, often sketching the room and the people in it. McCalman, who also writes the "Observed" column for the San Francisco Chronicle and teaches graphic design at California College of the Arts, is the subject of an anniversary profile by Sara Deseran published Wednesday in the SF Standard, with his illustrations from the bar throughout.

In a city where restaurants routinely last a chapter or two and close before the third act, two decades at 560 Divisadero is a fact worth noting on its own terms.