Chef David Barzelay talks with customers before dinner at Lazy Bear in San Francisco in 2014. He is expanding with a new French restaurant called JouJou in the Design District.
John Storey/Special to the Chronicle
The team responsible for one of the Bay Area’s most talked about fine-dining restaurants, the two-Michelin-star Lazy Bear, is expanding.
Partners David Barzelay and Colleen Booth are opening JouJou, a grand French restaurant at 1 Henry Adams St. in San Francisco’s Design District this summer. They say they want to show the city a good time, with over-the-top seafood towers, fish filleted tableside and omelets crowned with caviar in a glamorous 6,000-square-foot restaurant.
Barzelay hopes JouJou will hark back to an era in American restaurants, like Jeremiah Towers’ landmark Stars in San Francisco or Balthazar in New York City, that embodied “this sense of grandness of going out,” he said. “I think we’ve lost a lot of that, especially since the pandemic.”
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Just as Barzelay intended Lazy Bear to channel the experience of a dinner party into a restaurant, the chef also sees JouJou as a response to a fine-dining world that’s become “a little too self-referential and inwardly focused.”
“We’re not going for esoteric, boundary-pushing cuisine,” he said of JouJou. “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.”
An array of dishes from JouJou, a French restaurant opening this summer in San Francisco.
Courtesy of JouJou
Instead, JouJou, which means toy or play thing in French, will serve primarily French cuisine with a focus on seafood. Barzelay wants to serve dishes like local king salmon almondine with dill beurre blanc, shrimp bisque, steak frites and duck à l’orange. The kitchen will focus on classic sauces and preparations that are more laborious and aren’t often seen in San Francisco, Barzelay said. Take sand dabs, which are difficult to fillet properly before they’re cooked because of their bone structure, Barzley said; at JouJou, staff will fillet them at the table.
The food may veer into some French West Indies flavors, such as tropical fruits, as well as French-influenced New Orleans dishes. The menu will offer a variety of price points, plus happy hour. A diner could have an omelet studded with crustaceans and a glass of wine at the bar for a relatively inexpensive dinner, while a large group could order a luxurious seafood tower with French fries and Champagne for a pricey night out. For dessert, think bananas foster, ice creams drizzled with liqueur and canelés.
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Chef David Barzelay, right, works at a Lazy Bear dinner event in San Francisco in 2014. He is opening a new French restaurant.
Sarah Rice/Special to the Chronicle
JouJou takes over the former Grove space in the Design District. It will have about 120 seats, including at a raw bar, main bar, big semicircular booths and a large outdoor patio. The patio will be enclosed in a glass and metal structure “like a Victorian-era greenhouse,” Barzelay said. Jon de la Cruz, a well-known designer who created the look of restaurants like San Francisco’s Che Fico, is designing JouJou. The direction the owners gave him, Barzelay said, is “grand old belle epoque resort on the French Riviera, renovated in the sleazy ’70s.”
The restaurant has been in the works for nearly three years but now coincides with a boom in French food in San Francisco, from Bon Délire on the Embarcadero to the return of the glam Verjus in Jackson Square.
Lazy Bear was born in 2009, when Barzelay, a former attorney, started hosting underground dinner parties at his San Francisco apartment. They became among the most coveted seats in the city — dinners sold out within minutes — and it graduated to a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the Mission District in 2014. One year later, Lazy Bear won one Michelin star, then two the following year. Barzelay later opened San Francisco cocktail bar True Laurel with bar director Nicolas Torres and the now-closed, more casual Automat with chef Matt Kirk. Barzelay operates Lazy Bear and True Laurel with Booth, who is managing partner and chief operating officer. JouJou won’t be their last project, he said.
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JouJou. Opening summer 2025. 1 Henry Adams St., San Francisco.
Reach Elena Kadvany: Elena.Kadvany@sfchronicle.com; Bluesky: @elenakadvany.bsky.social