R&G Lounge Founder to Open Restaurant in Massive Embarcadero Location

The enormous Embarcadero space left vacant by Crystal Jade Jang Nian will be filled by Harborview Restaurant and Bar late this fall. The new restaurant will, like Crystal Jade, serve Cantonese cuisine. However, this time it will come from a local restaurateur: Kinson Wong, a founder of Chinatown’s popular R&G Lounge.

The 200-seat restaurant will serve dim sum and classic Cantonese dishes, some of which may be recognizable from R&G Lounge’s canon of recipes. That restaurant, located in nearby Chinatown, is known for signature dishes like salt and pepper crab, peking duck, and lo mei gai (a deboned chicken stuffed with Chinese sausage, vegetables, glutinous rice, and chicken meat, that’s then fried whole).

Harborview has big shoes to fill, taking over a restaurant with over 20,000-square-feet spread throughout the dining room, patio, bar, and private dining rooms. Crystal Jade, owned by the private equity arm of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, closed on June 30; representatives from the company indicate a change in course for its restaurant holdings, shifting from an ornate and ridiculously expensive model — Crystal Jade’s Embarcadero restaurant cost $14 million to build — to a smaller-format, casual format. (The company says it’s still open to SF locations; stay tuned for more on that.)

On the food side, however, there is plenty of potential for improvement — Crystal Jade was widely panned by critics for its average food and extremeley high prices, including now-retired SF Chronicle critic Michael’ Bauer’s comparison of his dinner to a proctology exam.

Eater has reached out for more information on the restaurant, whose representatives say will open in “late fall.”

• Bauer Takedown Compares Dinner at Crystal Jade Jiang Nan to Proctology Exam [ESF]
• Crystal Jade Jiang Nan Calls It Quits, Four Years After Its $14 Million Opening [ESF]
• Harborview [Official]