It’s a new year and with it we get the first big restaurant opening announcement for San Francisco: Coming this summer, chef David Barzelay and the team behind Lazy Bear are planning to open a grand, old-school French restaurant.
The name is JouJou, which means “plaything” in French, it’s been in the works for several years, and as the Chronicle reports it’s now set to debut sometime this summer in the loft-like, 6,000-square-foot space formerly occupied by The Grove at One Henry Adams Street in the Design District (where Division Street meets Townsend).
There is a bit of a trend in restaurant culture to return to some of the pomp and ceremony of fine dining, after two decades in which white tablecloths were tossed in favor of bare hardwood, and Edison bulbs took the place of chandeliers. And there is of course a whole generation of people, or even two, who’ve never experienced a fish filleted tableside, or seen bananas Foster being flambéed in the middle of a dining room, except maybe in the movies.
So, following on New York spots like Café Carmellini and Café Boulud, which in recent years have revived such trappings of formal dining, Barzelay and business partner Colleen Booth plan to bring some of this old-world grandeur back at JouJou.
And with it, the menu will skew traditional as well. As Barzelay tells the Chronicle, dishes will include things like salmon almondine with dill beurre blanc, shrimp bisque, and duck a l’orange. On the humble end, there will be perfect dinner omelettes, and there will also be grand seafood towers as at Balthazar in New York — the 25-year-0ld brasserie that the team also counts as inspiration. And Barzelay says some French-influenced New Orleans dishes may make it on the menu as well.
“We’re not going for esoteric, boundary-pushing cuisine,” Barzelay tells the paper. “We’re not daring you to like anything. We’re not trying to give you new and strange flavors that you’ve never had before.”
The former Grove at One Henry Adams Street, via Yelp.
Jon de la Cruz, the designer behind Che Fico, has taken on the design of the space, which includes a large outdoor patio. The direction he’s been given, as Barzelay tells the Chronicle, is a “grand old belle epoque resort on the French Riviera, renovated in the sleazy ’70s.”
And Barzelay says he’s eager to bring back some of the “sense of grandness of going out” that’s been lost in the last decade or so, especially after the pandemic. And he namechecks Stars as well, the buzzy, glamorous San Francisco restaurant of the late 80s and 90s helmed by chef Jeremiah Tower, which many longtime foodinistas still cite as one of the last times San Francisco was home to such grandeur.
Big splashy openings like this have also just become more of a rarity in the city in recent years, and hopefully this is the first of several we’ll be hearing about. Apart from chef Brad Kilgore’s Ama at the Transamerica complex, which is set to open within months, the restaurant-opening docket has been fairly slim.
Barzelay and Booth, who recently oversaw a remodel at Michelin two-starred Lazy Bear, have been fairly modest with expansion plans. Apart from backing former Lazy Bear chef Matthew Kirk’s Automat venture (RIP), they have only opened True Laurel, the high-end cocktail spot that debuted just before the pandemic. But, like many projects, it sounds like JouJou was probably back-burnered for a bit while the city recovered, and hopefully we’ll have more exciting openings like this to share in the coming months.
Top image: Dishes being proposed for the JouJou menu, courtesy of the restaurant.