The Captivating August 1 Five
The signature Gol Guppa at August 1 Five.
Ask Hetal Shah, which is harder — creating advertising technology at Google or running a restaurant — and she doesn’t hesitate to answer:
Operating a restaurant. By far.
Shah, who left her job at Google a year ago, and her husband, who still works in tech, had experience opening restaurants, having established Red Hot Chili Pepper in San Carlos in 2010, the casual take on Indian-inflected Chinese food.
But their next restaurant venture was exceedingly more ambitious, August 1 Five, which opened a little over a year ago in San Francisco’s Civic Center.
The name of the splashy, upscale modern Indian restaurant commemorates the date that India won its independence from British rule.
Conveniently located in Civic Center.
The bold interior.
Although Shah and her husband loved the mom-and-pop Indian restaurants in the United States, they missed the more contemporary fare found at high-end hotels in India. So when she and her husband moved to San Francisco from New York, they decided to do something to fill that void.