In a move that sent shock waves through San Francisco, chef Traci Des Jardins announced last month that her flagship Hayes Valley restaurant, Jardiniere, would close after a final dinner service on Saturday.
There’s arguably no Bay Area restaurant that better personifies the aesthetic opulence of San Francisco dining in the late 1990s — white table cloths, supple leather booths, exposed brick, illuminated ice buckets along mezzanine railings — than Jardiniere.
“It was one of those places that I never thought would close,” said Michael Dellar, founder and managing partner of San Francisco’s One Market restaurant. He described Jardiniere as one of the most influential restaurants of its generation.
For many locals, layered within the closure is an acknowledgment of culinary mortality — every restaurant has its time and, no matter how iconic it may be, will be forced to adjust to changing dining demographics. Jardiniere’s closure, to many restaurant industry folks, represents the end of an era of San Francisco dining.
When Jardiniere made its debut in fall 1997, it was a blockbuster, staffed by a dream team from San Francisco’s top restaurants. The project was primarily a stage for Des Jardins, a culinary talent who was already on the national radar, having been named America’s top rising star chef by the Beard Foundation in 1995 during her time at Rubicon on Sacramento Street. Her partner at Jardiniere was Pat Kuleto, a generational talent in restaurant design who, at the time, was coming off two massive hits in Boulevard (1993) and Farallon (1997). (Des Jardins bought out Kuleto in 2012.)
Des Jardins’ Hayes Valley cathedral quickly attracted crowds and racked up the accolades, from both local and national press.
Here “was a young, queer, woman chef who was turning the city on its ear. The place felt old school and modern at the same time, which is awfully difficult. But when we achieve that balance, we are realizing what is truly good about San Francisco,” said Thad Vogler, who worked as a bar manager at Jardiniere and now owns several local restaurants, including Bar Agricole and the newly opened Obispo.
Following the traditions of Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, Des Jardins pushed forward California cuisine. While doing so, her restaurant became an incubator for stellar culinary talent.
“Jardiniere was a sought-after kitchen for many young chefs seeking to hone their technique and learn more about fine dining,” said One Market chef Mark Dommen, who staged (interned) at Jardiniere and saw the kitchen become a hub for chefs in the region.
Then there was the impact on the neighborhood: In the 1990s, Hayes Valley was a far cry from the culinary destination it is today. When it opened, Jardiniere served as the area’s most ambitious enterprise.
“She went into a location knowing that, at some point, it would be the spot,” said Kim Alter, chef-owner of Nightbird a few blocks away in Hayes Valley. “Hayes Valley was not the nicest neighborhood, but she was smart.”
In 1999, City Hall reopened after a seismic upgrade, a few years after the central freeway came down. With the work complete, Jardiniere quickly became a beacon for a demographic headed to symphonies and operas in the area.
Jardiniere’s best years, according to its chef, were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On nights when the theater crowd flocked to the neighborhood, Des Jardins said it wasn’t unusual to see the restaurant do three turns, meaning each table got three separate dining parties, so the kitchen could serve 600 or so meals in a night.
Multiply that number by three to four courses, composed of dozens of menu options, each dish containing multiple components, and you can understand what an undertaking such restaurants can be — and what happens when things slow down.
“With Jardiniere, you want to see growth, year-over-year. When you get into a period like we were where you stop seeing that, it makes you pause,” Des Jardins said. “We weren’t in a dire situation or anything like that. It just seemed like the right time to make this decision.”
Upscale dining, in general, is still thriving in the Bay Area, which is home to the most Michelin three-star restaurants in the United States and a place where a new tasting menu restaurant seems to pop up on a weekly basis.
What has changed is the business model.
A generation gone
High-end Bay Area restaurants with 75 or more seats that have closed since 2010 as different business models have proved more sustainable.
Ame
Aqua
Bacar
Bourbon Steak
Camino (Oakland)
Dirty Water
Fifth Floor
Fleur de Lys
Pican (Oakland)
Redd (Yountville)
Rose Pistola
RN74
Terra (St. Helena)
Volta
Waxman’s
“I think restaurants of Jardiniere’s size may be obsolete,” said Umberto Gibin, co-owner of the 12-year-old Perbacco in San Francisco. “You have to have a steady clientele in the dining room each day. You have to have fannies in seats.”
Jardiniere’s closure is emblematic of the plight of high-end, a la carte restaurants in San Francisco — operating costs are too grand and profit margins too slim. There’s a reason that small restaurants — often fewer than 40 seats — that serve only one tasting menu option are proliferating, while choose-your-own-adventures restaurants like Jardiniere, which has more than 180 seats over two levels and myriad menu combinations, are fading away.
“Jardiniere was the high-end place that took all comers: a five-course meal at midnight after the opera, drinks after work, oysters at the bar. To staff for this kind of place is difficult,” said Vogler. “You need to have the labor to cover whatever happens, which means being careful and maybe keeping too many people on the clock and to over staff these days is to die.”
Colossal fine dining restaurants in San Francisco are rapidly becoming relics of the industry’s past, a time when chef ambitions weren’t limited by square footage. Real estate has skyrocketed over the past two decades, as have minimum wages, thus taking overall restaurant operating costs to new levels.
Meanwhile, more chefs like Des Jardins are finding solace in more casual ventures, as success is no longer measured by fine dining accolades. Once Jardiniere closes, Des Jardins plans to focus on Mexican cooking and casual service, two avenues running through some of her other San Francisco restaurants, such as Arguello and Mijita.
Large restaurants are still opening in San Francisco. The lasting lesson from Jardiniere’s run, however, may be the importance — and some may say, perils — of a built-in audience.
Michael Mina’s Trailblazer Tavern opened in December 2018 with 215 seats over 7,000 square feet, but resides within the Salesforce East building where it has a captive crowd. The same could be said for the Vault, the new 160-seat, 4,800-square-foot restaurant in the bottom of the Bank of America building at 555 California, home to thousands of employees at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Mourad Lahlou’s eponymous Moroccan restaurant in the Pacific Bell Building at 140 New Montgomery has more than 150 seats over two levels; it has 26 stories of office space above it.
Jardiniere could have catered to other crowds, like the various tech workers over the decades, Des Jardins said, by adding trendy items to the menu or tweaking aesthetics to fit the rest of the dining scene, but that wouldn’t have felt right.
“We could have done those things. We just didn’t, and we weren’t able to get those new regular guests a place needs,” Des Jardins said.
The business represented the highs of a bygone generation of restaurants — a la carte menus, large crowds and ambitious floor plans. The restaurant was also a harbinger of change as Hayes Valley became a culinary destination. But now, as it bids adieu, Jardiniere will be the latest addition to the growing list of bygone San Francisco restaurants.
“Virtually no restaurants are remembered once they close. This fact is sad but also kind of beautiful; they come and go. Jardiniere is an exception to that rule,” Vogler said. “I think it will join a few places, like Ernie’s, like Stars, that are discussed for years to come.”
Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/For-San-Francisco-restaurants-Jardiniere-s-13799556.php 2019-04-27 11:00:00Z
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