The 15 Best Restaurants in San Francisco

Dominique Crenn's poetic French tasting room is the rare three-Michelin-star restaurant where the chef-owner is also the headline. Crenn became the first female chef in America to earn three Michelin stars when Atelier Crenn was elevated in 2018, and a decade-plus into the project she still personally writes the menu as a poem rather than a list of dishes. The kitchen leans hard into seafood and produce — no land animals on the main menu since 2018 — and the dining room is intentionally small and quiet, treating the meal as a piece of theater rather than a status flex.

Corey Lee, the former chef de cuisine at Yountville's French Laundry, opened Benu in 2010 in a quiet alley off Hawthorne and made it the first San Francisco restaurant to earn three Michelin stars in 2014 — a rating it has held every year since. Lee was also the first Korean chef in America to hit three stars. The 40-seat dining room is studiously minimalist, and the menu is a long, technical interrogation of what Asian fine dining can be when filtered through California ingredients and French-Laundry rigor.

Eighteen wooden stools, one marble counter, no tables — Swan has been doing seafood the same way since the post-1906-earthquake rebuild in 1912. The original Lausten family (Danish immigrants) sold to the Sancimino family in 1946, and the Sanciminos still run it. Anthony Bourdain called it "true love"; locals call it the only honest seafood counter left in the city. There's no kitchen — just a marble slab, fresh fish, oysters from the morning, and one of the country's great clam chowders.

The late Judy Rodgers (JBF Outstanding Chef, 2004) took over Zuni's kitchen in 1987 and rebuilt it into one of the most influential American restaurants of the late 20th century — a rustic, ingredient-driven room where brick-oven cooking and a Caesar made the way they should be made set the template for what California cuisine would become. The James Beard Foundation named Zuni the Outstanding Restaurant in America in 2003. The dining room itself is a quirky triangular wedge on Market Street with a copper bar, exposed brick, and a wood-fired oven you can see from your seat.

Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt opened Tartine in 2002 and won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2008. The bakery is the reason a generation of American home bakers learned to talk about hydration, levain, and bulk fermentation — Robertson's country loaf became the most copied bread of the 21st century. The corner shop at 18th and Guerrero still bakes 240 of those loaves a day; they sell out within an hour of coming out of the oven.

Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski opened State Bird Provisions in 2012 with a then-radical idea: serve American small plates from rolling dim-sum carts. The format works — Brioza and Krasinski won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: West in 2015, and the restaurant has held a Michelin star since 2013. The signature is a brined, fried California quail (the state bird, hence the name) served with stewed onions, an inheritance from their old job at Rubicon.

Brandon Jew opened Mister Jiu's in 2016 in the second-floor banquet hall of an 1880s Chinatown building — the same room that once housed Four Seas Restaurant, where his family ate at weddings. Six months in, it became the first Chinese restaurant in San Francisco history to earn a Michelin star. Jew won James Beard Best Chef California in 2022, and his cookbook Mister Jiu's in Chinatown won a Beard award the same year. The food is recognizably Cantonese — roast duck, salt-and-pepper Dungeness crab, sourdough scallion pancake — but routed through California ingredients and modern technique.

Miguel Jara opened La Taqueria on Mission Street in 1973 with no formal training, just memories of the food he grew up with in Tijuana. Bon Appétit credits him with inventing the Mission-style burrito; FiveThirtyEight named his the best burrito in the country in 2014; the James Beard Foundation gave La Taqueria its America's Classic award in 2017. The format is unusual — Jara skips the rice and doubles down on meat, and finishes the burrito on a flat-top so the foil is golden-brown when it hits your tray.

Nopa opened in 2006 in a former laundromat at Divisadero and Hayes and effectively named its neighborhood — the area is now universally called NoPa, after the restaurant. Chef-owner Laurence Jossel runs a wood-burning oven as the heart of the kitchen and a menu that defined the casual end of California cuisine for the late 2000s and 2010s: organic pork chop with romesco, the famous Nopa burger, a vegetable plate that's never the afterthought. The dining room runs late by SF standards — kitchen until midnight on weekends — and locals treat the bar as a second living room.

Ravi Kapur grew up in Hawaii to a Native-Hawaiian-Chinese mother and an Indian father, cooked his way through SF's high-end kitchens, and in January 2015 opened Liholiho Yacht Club as a love letter to the food he ate growing up — luau party food, plate-lunch flavor, but composed by a chef who came up at Boulevard. The restaurant earned a James Beard Best New Restaurant nomination its first year and has held a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The room is loud, the cocktails are strong, and the menu is unapologetically about sharing.

House of Prime Rib opened in 1949 and has barely changed since — same English-style 21-day aged prime rib, same stainless-steel rolling carts, same spinning salad tableside, same red-leather booths. There's exactly one dish on the menu (plus a token fish option for pescatarians). Joe Betz turned it into a SF institution, and OpenTable consistently ranks it among the most-booked restaurants in America. It feels like a movie set; in many ways, it is one.

Tony Gemignani is a 13-time World Pizza Champion and the first American to win the World Champion Pizza Maker title in Naples. He opened Tony's Pizza Napoletana in 2009 on Washington Square in North Beach and built it around an unusual premise: seven different ovens, twelve different regional pizza styles. You can order a true Neapolitan margherita next to a Detroit square next to a New Haven white clam — all baked in their proper ovens, with their proper flours. Forbes called it the best pizzeria in America.

Chef Lijun Han, formerly executive chef at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco where he cooked for two visiting Chinese presidents, opened Z & Y in 2008 on Jackson Street in Chinatown. It's been a Michelin Bib Gourmand pick continuously since 2012 — the Guide's recognition of good quality, good value cooking. This is the SF spot for serious Sichuan: numbing-hot mapo tofu, dan dan noodles with deep chili-oil heat, hand-pulled noodles, fish-flavored eggplant, the works.

Suzette Gresham opened Acquerello with Giancarlo Paterlini in 1989 in a converted Nob Hill chapel. She earned Acquerello its first Michelin star in 2007 and a second in 2014, making her one of only three female chefs in the U.S. holding two stars at the time. The food is the most quietly refined Italian cooking in the city — handmade pastas, classical sauces, white-truffle service in season — without ever tipping over into showy. The room (still in the old chapel) is hushed and grown-up.

Foreign Cinema opened in 1999 in a former Mission District movie house, and in 2001 the husband-and-wife team Gayle Pirie and John Clark — both Zuni Café and Chez Panisse alumni — took it over and turned it into one of the city's most consistently great California-Mediterranean restaurants. The dining room is cool-industrial, but the soul of the place is the back courtyard, where they project foreign and indie films onto a brick wall every night while you eat. The "Pop Tart" at brunch and the cookies-and-milk dessert are city institutions; the kitchen has held a San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 spot for more than 20 consecutive years.