Raw Meat Left in Sun Goes Viral: Hamburger Project Responds

A photo of raw ground beef and a jumbo tub of mayonnaise baking on a Mission District sidewalk went viral over the weekend, and the restaurant linked to the scene is now doing damage control.

The image, posted Sunday to Reddit by user BubblegumCircus, shows several pounds of ground beef in plastic tubes sitting on the hot concrete outside Hamburger Project at 598 Guerrero Street, accompanied by what appears to be a restaurant-sized container of mayo. The post, titled “Raw hamburger left in the sun on the sidewalk. Ewww! Double Ewww!!”, racked up more than 3,000 upvotes and over 500 comments before the day was out. Commenters did not hold back. “Hamburger Science Project” earned plenty of laughs, as did “Eating there is gonna land you in the Mayo Clinic.”

The original poster added context in the thread: the items sat outside for roughly an hour, after which the meat disappeared and the mayo moved inside to the counter. Where the raw beef ended up, the poster said, was unclear.

Hamburger Project addressed the situation on Instagram this week. The restaurant said a delivery driver left the product unattended on the sidewalk after being unable to access the building, and that staff discarded everything immediately upon discovering it outside. “This was the result of a delivery driver leaving the product unattended after being unable to access the restaurant, something we would never authorize or accept,” the statement read. “When our team arrived at the restaurant and found the product outside, it was immediately discarded as it was obviously compromised by being on the ground, without proper temperature control.”

The restaurant also shared a screenshot of the message sent by the delivery driver alongside a photo of the abandoned order. The message read: “Hiiii. I don’t have time.”

That single line is doing a lot of work in this story. Whether the failure lies with a rushed third-party driver, a restaurant with unclear delivery access procedures, or both, the result was raw protein sitting in direct sunlight on a San Francisco sidewalk. Hamburger Project says it has updated its delivery procedures to prevent a repeat.

The timing is rough for the Guerrero Street location, which only opened last August. The restaurant grew out of a pivot by the team behind omakase spot Ju-Ni and its former sister concept Handroll Project. That pivot itself came roughly eight months after executive chef and partner Geoffrey Lee became the subject of significant online criticism following a public dispute with a female influencer that many characterized as bullying. Lee stepped away from all three businesses at that time.

Since then, the team has been working to rebuild quietly. A silly delivery mishap, under normal circumstances, might get a shrug and a corrective memo. Instead, BubblegumCircus happened to walk by at the wrong moment, and the photo found an audience hungry for exactly this kind of content. The story spread from Reddit to local television and the Chronicle by Monday.

None of this necessarily reflects the quality of the food or the kitchen’s actual food safety practices. Delivery logistics are messy, and a driver who abandons a temperature-sensitive order on the street without waiting for a signature is a problem that could happen to any restaurant relying on third-party services. San Francisco Health Department records for this location would be the more meaningful indicator of how seriously the team actually takes food safety on a day-to-day basis.

But perception matters in the restaurant business, and Hamburger Project has now absorbed two viral news cycles in less than two years. The statement the team released is reasonable and direct. Whether it reaches enough people to counteract the Reddit thread and the “Mayo Clinic” jokes is a different question.

For now, the restaurant is open. If you’re planning a visit, the safest assumption is that your burger will not be sourced from whatever was sitting on Guerrero Street Sunday morning. The team says that meat went straight in the trash.