In January 2022, Tim Stannard climbed up a ladder and crawled through plywood into a plastic-wrapped government building that hadn’t been occupied in nearly a decade. He immediately knew that he wanted to turn the cavernous space into a restaurant.
Stannard leads Bacchus Management Group, whose portfolio includes 10 Bay Area restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Village Pub in Woodside, Selby’s in Redwood City and Spruce in San Francisco. At the time, he was in the throes of a complicated buildout for the group’s latest project, the swanky Augustine in San Jose. But he couldn’t turn down the opportunity to be part of the effort to restore the historic, Art Deco-style post office, built in Burlingame during the 1940s as part of the United States’ Works Progress Administration.
After five years of careful construction and preservation — which included complying with U.S. Secretary of Interior rehabilitation standards and, in order to build an underground parking lot, temporarily relocating the entire 1,000-ton landmark by rolling it across steel beams — the 220 Park Road building will open on Oct. 1 as the Old Post Office, an upscale restaurant and bar. Locals eagerly anticipating the post office’s restoration have been repeatedly peeking their heads in and getting impromptu tours from Stannard (some, he said, still bringing their mail).
The main area of the post office is now a soaring dining room, with the original teller windows and a wall of brass mailboxes still intact. There, prix-fixe menus will be served for dinner ($120), lunch ($55) and brunch ($70), while more casual food, like a burger and duck fat fries, will be available a la carte in the separate Postmaster’s Bar. Overseeing the kitchen is executive chef Jonathan Granada, who joined Bacchus Management Group in 2025 after spending years as a chef tournant at the lauded French Laundry in Yountville and as culinary director for the now-shuttered Otium in Los Angeles, run by a prominent French Laundry alum, Thomas Hollingsworth.
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Jonathan Granada is the executive chef at The Old Post Office in Burlingame.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
Bacchus sees its specialty as “accessible luxury,” Stannard said: restaurants that serve white truffle supplements and earn Michelin stars, but are also known for their bar burgers. “We like restaurants that are rooted in the communities that they’re in, so if we had gone for a place that’s … $500 a plate to sit down, it just would be a place you go once a year and it wouldn’t be a place that is a part of the community,” he said. “The Village Pub is the living room for Woodside. Spruce is the living room for Presidio Heights, and we wanted the Old Post Office to be that for Hillsborough and Burlingame.”
For the last 20 years, Stannard has searched for the right space to open a restaurant in Burlingame, an affluent, quiet suburb close to the San Francisco Airport. In 2022, Steve Dostart, the president and founder of Dostart Development Company, who Stannard said “splits his time between the Village Pub and Selby’s,” asked Bacchus to be part of the company’s 220 Park Road project, along with Sares Regis Group of Northern California. Dostart preserved the post office and added a 185,000-square-foot, six-story office and retail complex behind it, plus the underground parking garage and a public outdoor plaza that hosts live music, a farmers market and events.
It’s the most ambitious and complex restaurant opening yet for Bacchus, which has operated in the Bay Area since 2001. The post office, which was designed by architect Ulysses Floyd Rible with both Spanish eclectic and Art Deco style elements, had sat dark since 2014, when the building was sold and the post office relocated to a smaller facility nearby. Bacchus and its designer, Stephen Brady, were required to work with an architecture firm that specializes in historic preservation; they could not alter any elements deemed historically significant, including original terrazzo floors, marble walls and most of what became the main dining room. (Even old memo boards in a locked glass window, the key long gone, can’t be touched because the new tenant is prohibited from installing a new lock, Stannard said.)
A wing of the building that once housed the postmaster’s office, a sorting room and storage, however, was not considered historic; this was converted into the moody cocktail bar (though the owners kept the original metal “postmaster” signage) and a large, gleaming kitchen with custom, top-of-the-line equipment.
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Tim Stannard rescued from the black door that once guarded the post office’s safe, now installed as decor in the hallway to the bathrooms at The Old Post Office.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
A cast stone relief sculpture of a woman, called “The Letter,” still sits above the original front doors. Brass eagles, which Stannard rescued from a construction pile destined for the dump, will sit at the host stand, while the hulking black door that once guarded the post office’s safe has been installed in a hallway to the bathrooms. The brass teller windows, backlit and glowing, run along one wall of the elongated dining room, which ends in a smaller, second bar. A line of dramatic chandeliers — so heavy the ceiling had to be reinforced to hang them — run the length of the room. Lighting designer Magnus Schevene of Rose Gold Society said he pulled from a medley of inspiration to create the chandeliers, including: an upside-down wedding cake, Icelandic cathedrals, the hexagonal basalt formations at Devils Postpile National Monument, a DNA helix and the emperor’s palace in “Dune: Part Two” (filmed at the Brion Tomb in Italy). Come spring, there will be additional seating in a glass-encased greenhouse outside, plus gardens and patios that look out onto the new public plaza.
Granada described the Old Post Office’s food as “contemporary American” with influences from Asia, Spain and France. In the dining room, customers will be able to choose from several options for a first course, entree and dessert, plus an included canape, mignardise and bread (parker house rolls at lunch, laminated brioche at dinner, both served with a puck of Vermont cultured butter, stamped with the image of an eagle). Possible first courses at dinner include a white polenta tortellini, served in a consomme made from Iberico ham bones and topped with shaved matsutake mushrooms; and Granada’s take on aligot, a French cheesy potato dish. He makes his with pureed parsley root, folds in comte cheese, then serves with a crispy pig’s tail. Main dishes include grilled Maine lobster tail, New York strip steak, and coffee-glazed butternut squash with crispy pepitas and pickled nasturtium berries.
Grilled Maine lobster tail at the Old Post Office, which will serve a prix-fixe menu in its main dining room.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
Chicken breast en crépinette with Périgord black truffle and honeyed daikon at The Old Post Office in Burlingame.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
For dinner, bread service will come with laminated brioche and cultured butter from Vermont.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
Bacchus Management Group Owner Tim Stannard has been searching for the right space to open a restaurant in Burlingame for 20 years; he could not turn down the opportunity to be part of restoring the historic post office.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
Magnus Schevene of Rose Gold Society pulled from a range of inspiration to design The Old Post Office’s chandeliers, including: an upside-down wedding cake, Icelandic cathedrals, the hexagonal basalt formations at Devils Postpile National Monument, a DNA helix and the emperor’s palace in “Dune: Part Two.”
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
One of the most impressive — and labor-intensive dishes — will be highly allocated. Every night, six dry-aged ducks will be available, pre-sold with reservations ($80 for two people). Inspired by a dinner Granada had at the three-Michelin-star Le Palais in Taiwan, the ducks are dry-aged for a week before getting cooked in a “one of one” custom rotisserie oven and served tableside from a custom cart, he said. Granada chose mallards from Jurgielewicz, a Pennsylvania duck farm, which he thinks have “the perfect fat-to-meat ratio” to produce crispy skin. At the cart, he will make an a-la-minute sauce using confit duck gizzards and liqueur, to be poured alongside the fresh-carved breast with parsnip puree, freeze-dried blackberries, amaranth and dehydrated olives. The duck leg will go on a binchotan grill and is paired with a salad, followed by a “sidecar” of duck liver mousse with pluot jam. “You’ll get the breast, the leg, the liver, the gizzards, the sauce, everything,” Granada said.
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Some desserts, created by pastry chef Kyle Caporicci, draw on childhood whimsy, such as a mandarin orange creamsicle; others are more adult, like a tipsy cake, boozy with brandy cream and paired with roasted vanilla bean gelato.
Brunch, also a set menu, includes dishes such as brûléed banana pancakes, chicken fried steak and coddled eggs served in antique vessels sourced from England.
A burger topped with smoked cheddar and a confit egg yolk placed into set egg whites sprinkled with crispy guanciale will be available in the Postmaster’s Bar.
Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle
The Postmaster’s Bar, dimly lit with dark wood, marble tables, leather bar stools and a fireplace, will be open all day, with dishes such as beef tartare ($26), steak frites ($45), a confit chicken leg ($36) and of course, a burger ($27). Each time the Bacchus group opens a new restaurant, a “battle royale” to come up with a better burger ensues, Stannard said. (At Spruce, the bar burger has such a devoted fan base that Bacchus opened a spinoff, Louie’s Original.) The winner for the Postmaster’s Bar is a six-ounce patty, using grass-fed beef from Washington’s Double R Ranch, on a brioche bun with over-the-top fixings: smoked cheddar, pickled onions, fried shallots, a Thousand Island sauce, and a confit egg yolk placed into set egg whites then sprinkled with crispy guanciale.
The Old Post Office will open with dinner to start, then add lunch and weekend brunch.
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Several Bacchus restaurants use the prix-fixe menu format. “The guest gets the benefits of … the choice of an a-la carte menu and the restaurant gets the benefit of a fixed price, which is really important in the economics of restaurants in the Bay Area specifically nowadays,” Stannard said. He acknowledged that “$120 is not inexpensive. I don’t want to sniff at that number, but it is significantly less than most of what our peers charge in an effort to make sure that people can use the restaurant quite a lot.”
The team also hopes to earn Wine Spectator’s prestigious Grand Award, held by the Village Pub, Selby’s and Spruce. The list, by partner and sommelier Andrew Green, spans the globe but is largely focused on France and California. Green has spent years plotting a wine-list restructuring that will finally roll out at the Old Post Office: organizing it by producer, rather than region, to shift the emphasis to the people who make the wine. “It’s really a love letter to our favorite wineries in the world,” he said. “We’ve either visited every single one of our wineries or done a winemaker dinner with them and so they are close to us.”
The list will invert how people typically order wine. “Instead of, ‘Would you like Bordeaux? Would you like Burgundy? ’ it’d be more like, within Burgundy, these are the producers that we think make the best wines full stop, and then here’s the wines that those people make,” Stannard said.
For all the emphasis on making the Old Post Office accessible, Bacchus is not shy about its fine-dining award ambitions. The Village Pub has held one Michelin star since 2009; Selby’s since 2021; and Spruce for a decade until losing it in 2023. Are they going for a star here? “Yes,” Granada said, without hesitation.
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The Old Post Office. Opening Oct. 1. 220 Park Road, Burlingame. oldpostofficeburlingame.com
Dining and Cooking