JouJou, a much-anticipated French restaurant from the Lazy Bear team, is about to open in San Francisco. While it’s seafood-focused, meat dishes will also include this roasted chicken breast with garlic-brown butter and pan sauce.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
At San Francisco’s two-Michelin-star Lazy Bear, partners David Barzelay and Colleen Booth have long operated within the golden confines of tasting menus.
Their new restaurant, the highly anticipated JouJou in San Francisco, will be an ambitious, fine-dining effort, but there will be no lengthy, multi-course progression of dishes. Instead, the glamorous French restaurant, which will open March 6, will serve an a-la-carte menu at every seat in the 6,500-square-foot space at 65 Division St., from cozy booths to bustling bar stools. It will take walk-ins, and ownership envisions its bar packed from 4 p.m. onwards.
Barzelay and Booth hope to break the mold of fine-dining in San Francisco, which, as the city in California with the most Michelin-starred restaurants, is virtually synonymous with tasting menus. “We think this ought to fall under the definition of fine dining, but I’m not sure it falls under everyone’s current definition of fine dining, which I think is part of what we’re trying to address,” Barzelay said.
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“That’s definitely a characteristic that’s very Bay Area. If you go to other metropolitan cities and you talk about high-end or fine-dining restaurants, it’s not inferred to be a tasting menu,” said Booth, JouJou’s managing partner. “But I think a lot of the business practices and hurdles have made it that a tasting menu in this area is the only way they can guarantee the bottom line.”
The Sun Also Rises cocktail with Calvados, ginger and seltzer.
KELSEY MCCLELLAN/For the S.F. Chronicle
JouJou’s bar will open at 4 p.m for snacks and drinks, like this martini made with French gin.
KELSEY MCCLELLAN/For the S.F. Chronicle
The pommes frites at JouJou are McDonald’s-inspired, “but skin on and way more flavor, darker and they stay crispy.”
KELSEY MCCLELLAN/For the S.F. Chronicle
The raw bar will serve several seafood towers.
KELSEY MCCLELLAN/For the S.F. Chronicle
Barzelay has been thinking about some version of JouJou since 2009, when the former attorney started hosting multi-course dinners in his San Francisco apartment. His underground popup became one of the city’s most sought-after bookings, with tickets selling out in minutes, so he started looking for a permanent space. As the process dragged on, Barzelay debated opening something more simple: an a-la-carte seafood restaurant. A sample menu from 2013 for this “untitled seafood concept” envisioned dishes like swordfish belly lardo shaved onto grilled sourdough and pan-fried sand dabs with Meyer lemon beurre blanc, the classic French butter sauce.
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Lazy Bear debuted in the Mission District in 2014, and quickly became known for its experiential, communal dining experience. It went on to earn two Michelin stars. (Barzelay was also behind the openings of popular cocktail bar True Laurel in 2018 and casual spinoff Automat in 2022, which later closed.)
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A few years ago, when Barzelay and Booth decided it was time to expand, he returned to the seafood idea. They envisioned a French restaurant where people would eat sand dabs filleted tableside and go to see and be seen, like Stars in San Francisco in the late 1980s or New York City’s famed Balthazar. Balthazar is the kind of restaurant that “feels special every time you go, whether it’s a quick lunch or a big grand to do,” Barzelay said. “It always feels like you’re just in a place where it’s happening.”
From left: Pastry chef Yesnia Castañon, chef/owner David Barzelay and chef de cuisine Nick Vollono at JouJou.
KELSEY MCCLELLAN/For the S.F. Chronicle
Around 2020, when they were discussing the idea, San Francisco’s French scene was largely static: San Francisco had lost several notable French restaurants, including the 32-year-old La Folie, and there were few newcomers taking risks. But by 2026, the city would be flush with exciting new ventures, from the vibey Bon Délire on the Embarcadero (a space Barzelay and Booth considered) to La Cigale, devoted to hyper-regional, wood-fired food from Southern France. As the owners built out JouJou over the last three years, the country experienced a French food revival — such as Le Veau d’Or and La Tête d’Or by Daniel in New York City — while the doom loop narrative in San Francisco finally gave way to a positive vibe shift.
When diners enter JouJou through a tall arched doorway, they’ll see employees behind a marble bar shucking oysters, stacking $250 seafood towers with spot prawns and lobster and filling crepes with caviar. There are multiple seating areas, from a cavernous dining room decorated with gold-rimmed mirrors and green accents to an enclosed patio with a dramatic, sloping glass ceiling and the main bar.
JouJou is heavily seafood-focused. The raw bar will serve crudos and an array of shellfish. Local seafood, like Dungeness crab, will be rolled into a French omelette with toasted brioche, while a crustacean bisque will change depending on what fish is available. A spiny lobster salad, poached in coconut and surrounded by slices of kiwi, mango and turnip, pays homage to a lobster and mango dish Barzelay ate at the experiential fine-dining restaurant Cyrus in Geyserville nearly 20 years ago. (He asked Cyrus chef-owner Douglas Keane for permission to serve it; the menu describes the salad as prepared “à la keane.”) Pommes frites ($15) are McDonald’s-esque, “but skin on and way more flavor, darker and they stay crispy,” Barzelay said.
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A spiny lobster salad with tropical fruits at JouJou.
KELSEY MCCLELLAN/For the S.F. Chronicle
Entrees will include black cod a l’ananas ($43), which Barzelay described as “duck a l’orange but instead of duck it’s black cod, and instead of orange, it’s pineapple.” The broiled, pineapple-marinated black cod is also inspired by Nobu’s famous miso black cod. There are plenty of French classics, from gougères and French onion soup ($21) to steak au poivre ($75), while influence from the French West Indies and French Polynesia also pops up in the form of tropical fruits.
Desserts will include caneles, tarte tatin and baba au rhum, a small, brioche-like cake soaked in a boozy pineapple rum broth and topped with chantilly cream. Scoops of Tahitian vanilla ice cream can be doused in diners’ choice of dessert wine, strawberry confiture, or chocolate and passionfruit.
Many members of the JouJou team come from tasting menu restaurants, including chef de cuisine Nick Vollono (Quince, Atelier Crenn and Spruce), pastry chef Yesenia Castañon (Birdsong) and beverage director Matteo Villano (Quince & Co.). Barzelay and Booth hope to channel the quality of a fine-dining experience, but reject the pretense. “I think that we’ve gotten to a place a lot of times in our restaurants that it’s about the ego of the chef or the bar director and they’re going to tell you how to eat and when you should eat,” Booth said. “Sometimes I feel like everyone’s just trying a little too hard to be something. We just wanted to be a place.”
The wine menu will be mostly French, featuring regions from Le Jura and Loire Valley to Corsica. JouJou will pour 10 wines by the glass, including two custom blends on tap, which the owners developed with Les Lunes Wine in Richmond. Cocktails will lean classic: “Our martini is a martini,” Booth said. An absinthe fountain sitting on the corner of the bar will be filled with house-macerated pastis, a French anise aperitif, whose flavor will change with the seasons, such as winter citrus or summer berries. Instead of Champagne buckets, bottles will sit on ice in an ornate concrete fountain by the host stand.
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JouJou is still a fine-dining restaurant, and is priced as such. There is nothing cheaper than $17 on the menu; entrees range from $35 to $75. But the owners hope it will be a destination for a glass of wine and French fries as much as a splurgy special occasion dinner.
JouJou opens in San Francisco’s Design District on March 6.
KELSEY MCCLELLAN/For the S.F. Chronicle
The arched front door is one of the only elements the owners and well-known designer Jon de La Cruz kept from the previous tenant, a café chain. They transformed the space into several different seating areas. There are cane-backed bistro chairs underneath glowing globe lights at the brass-topped raw bar, booths that Barzelay hopes echo semi-circular ones at House of Prime Rib) and green corduroy corner seats in the “rose room,” a back section with custom rose curtains that looks into JouJou’s wine collection. Attached to the dining room is what the operators have dubbed the “menagerie”: an enclosed patio with a slanted glass ceiling, large sliding doors and the main bar. Booth said they don’t want this to be a four-people-deep bar, but “we do want the bar scene to be quite lively.”
The bathrooms are decorated with plum and cream Parisian-inspired subway tiles, plus erotic wallpaper in the stalls depicting people and animals in various states of coitus. (JouJou means toy or plaything in French; the owners’ hope the vibe feels playful, and a little cheeky.)
One-third of seats at the raw bar and in the menagerie will be reserved for walk-ins. The bars will open at 4 p.m. for drinks and an abbreviated menu; dinner will start at 5 p.m.
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Barzelay and Booth hope an exuberant new restaurant will draw people out of their homes and away from their screens. “People got really used to dining at home, ordering in” during the pandemic, Barzelay said. “We want to give them a great reason to go out again.”
JouJou. Opening March 6. 65 Division St., San Francisco. joujousf.com
Dining and Cooking