The most beautiful restaurants in San Francisco

There are very few restaurant addresses in San Francisco with the history and presence of the Ferry Building — and when the team behind MICHELIN-starred Sorrel took over the storied space that had long been home to the Slanted Door, the city paid attention. Arquet is the result: a wood-fired, ingredient-driven California restaurant that blends the grandeur of its setting with a warmth and approachability that feels genuinely new. Working with Studio KDA, Chef Alex Hong and Director of Operations Joel Wilkerson blew out walls, flooded the room with natural light, and built a design language centered on the restaurant’s own name — arquet means “little arch” in Catalan — resulting in a series of warm, earthy archways that draw the eye through the space toward the Bay Bridge views beyond. A massive wood-fired hearth anchors an open kitchen that sits steps from one of the finest farmers markets in the country. On the menu: scallion fry bread with buffalo stracciatella and salsa macha, whole roasted fish, and seasonal sharing plates built around what the market makes available each week. Arquet is one of the most anticipated and most talked-about restaurant openings San Francisco has seen in years.

Via Aurelia is among the most significant restaurant openings in San Francisco in recent memory — a full-scale fine-dining statement from Chef David Nayfeld and partner Matt Brewer, the team behind Che Fico, set within the new Mission Rock development on the city’s waterfront. The room, designed by Jon de la Cruz of DLC ID, is one of the most beautiful Italian-inflected dining spaces on the West Coast: vaulted ceilings with mosaics of stretched linen panels, frescoed plaster patinas finished in time-worn hues of olive, terracotta, and ochre, Florentine sandstone floors, olive and white oak banquettes, and velvet-lined coves along the edges. Windows look out over China Basin Park and the Bay. The menu draws on the culinary traditions of coastal Tuscany with real depth and precision: tartara di tonno prepared tableside from dry-aged bluefin, pici all’aglione with a seven-hour heirloom tomato sauce, dry-aged duck with seasonal accompaniments, and a wine list of over 650 bottles anchored by Italian producers. Via Aurelia announces itself as a destination restaurant for the city in its entirety, not merely its neighborhood.

The Progress occupies a space of quietly extraordinary beauty on Fillmore Street in the Western Addition — a century-old theater, built in 1911, transformed by James Beard Award-winning chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski into a lofty, warmly lit dining room that feels both historical and entirely alive. The design is all warm wood, hanging plants, pottery, and exposed arched ceilings, with a generosity of scale that invites the kind of unhurried, convivial dining the kitchen is designed to produce. This is the home of what the team calls “the greatest dinner party ever”: a family-style, shareable menu that draws on California’s seasonal abundance with imagination and technical precision. The caviar potato “cloud,” Liberty Farm duck with crispy peanut fried rice, and an evolving roster of whole-animal and whole-vegetable preparations that reflect the duo’s deep commitment to sustainable, waste-conscious cooking. MICHELIN-starred and James Beard Award-recognized, The Progress remains one of the essential rooms in the city — a restaurant where setting, cooking, and hospitality work together with complete coherence.

Copra is one of the most transportive dining rooms in San Francisco — a South Indian restaurant in the Western Addition where the interior itself does a significant amount of the cooking’s work before the first dish arrives. Natural textures, woven macramé, soft wooden tones, and abundant greenery create an atmosphere of coastal Kerala warmth, an indoor-outdoor ease that is both calm and characterful. The kitchen is led by Chef Srijith Gopinathan, who brings a MICHELIN-pedigreed background and a command of South Indian coastal cooking rarely found at this level outside of the subcontinent. Bold, spice-driven dishes — shrimp mango curry, seafood preparations that channel the richness of Kerala’s coastline, and an array of vegetable-forward cooking rooted in the region’s most distinctive culinary traditions — arrive with a precision that makes the food feel both rigorously researched and genuinely personal. The cocktail and wine program extends the same considered sensibility. Copra is one of those restaurants that reminds guests why San Francisco’s dining scene, at its best, has no equal in the United States.

Dalida sits at the edge of the Presidio, one of the most beautiful urban parks in America, and the restaurant takes full and considered advantage of its setting. The airy dining room is wrapped in windows that frame the surrounding greenery and fill the space with a shifting, season-dependent light; repurposed materials from the nearby Presidio grounds run throughout the interiors, grounding the room in a sense of specific place. Hand-drawn wallpaper and artistic touches add warmth and visual interest to a space that manages to feel both refined and deeply relaxed. The menu of Eastern Mediterranean sharing plates is built for the kind of long, unhurried dinner the park-side setting invites: fluffy pita with a range of spreads, pristine seafood preparations, and juicy short rib and sweetbread kebabs that anchor the table alongside an all-day natural light. A thoughtful cocktail program and a wine list that ranges across the Mediterranean complement a kitchen that knows its own point of view. Dalida is one of the most beautiful restaurants in San Francisco, and one of the most distinctively located.

Angler is unlike anywhere else in San Francisco — a MICHELIN-starred, fire-cooking seafood restaurant on the Embarcadero waterfront from Joshua Skenes and Saison Hospitality, housed in a dramatic space that functions equally as a seaside lodge, a sporting trophy room, and a temple to live-fire cooking. The interior makes an immediate impression: rich wooden paneling, brick walls hung with museum-quality taxidermy — swordfish, tuna, and marlin reproductions alongside a full-scale bear in the Game Room private dining space — and a 30-foot custom wood-burning hearth at the center of an open kitchen that dominates the room. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out over the Bay Bridge and the water. The menu is built entirely around the hearth, with a philosophy of elemental cooking applied to pristine, locally sourced seafood and game: hand-dived scallops, California king crab, spot prawns, and whole-roasted fish, alongside an award-winning wine list that has no particular geographic agenda beyond quality. Angler is one of the most energizing dining experiences the city offers, and one of the best restaurants with a view in San Francisco.

Abacá is the restaurant that made San Francisco pay full attention to Filipino cuisine — and the room itself is central to why the experience works so completely. Set inside the Kimpton Alton Hotel in Fisherman’s Wharf, the dining space is airy and atelier-like, with a warm skylight overhead, hanging tropical plants, and a cool outdoor terrace that carries the same easy, tropical energy into the open air. Chef and co-owner Francis Ang spent more than a decade in fine dining kitchens across San Francisco before opening Abacá, and that accumulated skill is evident in a menu that honors traditional Filipino flavors — family recipes, heritage techniques, and the culinary research of a chef who has thought deeply about his cuisine — while drawing on Northern California’s seasonal produce and the precise, ingredient-forward sensibility of the best Bay Area cooking. The sisig fried rice, the squid ink noodle pusit, the seafood chowder in coconut milk and tomato oil: dishes that are both unmistakably Filipino and unmistakably of this place. Named to the New York Times best restaurants list and recognized by the MICHELIN Guide, Abacá has earned every accolade it has received.

Boulevard is one of the defining rooms in San Francisco’s dining history — a Belle Époque landmark in the historic Audiffred Building on the Embarcadero waterfront that has been drawing the city’s most devoted diners since it opened in 1993. The room underwent a major reimagining in 2021, with designer Ken Fulk bringing his signature maximalism to a space that already had tremendous bones: handmade mix-and-match wallpapers and textiles, a textured ceiling, theatrical lighting, vintage touches, and a dramatic new entrance and bar that the New York Times described as “an ornate mash-up of William Morris-style patterns and Art Deco accents.” The result is a dining room reborn — not simply restored, but genuinely elevated into something more stylish and more alive than it had been before. The kitchen, led by Chef Dana Younkin under the founding vision of Nancy Oakes, delivers quintessentially Californian fine dining: salmon carpaccio, artichoke and truffle lasagne, roasted pearl hen, and a menu that shifts with the season and sources with real conviction. Boulevard remains one of the most beautiful restaurants in San Francisco, and one of its most irreplaceable.

Morella arrived in the Marina in late 2024 and immediately established itself as one of the most visually arresting new restaurants the neighborhood had seen in years. Occupying a sprawling corner space at Fillmore and Chestnut, the restaurant layers its influences freely and confidently: Murano chandeliers, Victorian floral wallpaper, Lilly Pulitzer-adjacent pinks and greens, fern bar greenery, tufted velvet dining chairs, gold-gilded sconces, and a semi-private mezzanine that extends the drama upward. The effect is maximalist, warm, and entirely deliberate — a room that understands its audience and its neighborhood while doing something genuinely new with the format. The kitchen follows an equally original logic, exploring the intersection of Italian and Argentinian cuisine through the lens of the mass immigration that brought millions of Italians to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Executive Chef Jesus Dominguez, a Taj Campton Place alumnus, brings the result to life with wood-smoked Argentinian sausages, Dungeness crab sorrentinos, lamb Bolognese pappardelle, and a cocktail program that divides its menu into “sassy,” “spritzy,” “classy,” and “messy” categories with considerable charm.

The Empress by Boon is one of the great restaurant transformations in San Francisco’s history — a space that spent more than fifty years as the legendary Empress of China, one of Chinatown’s most beloved and storied dining rooms, reborn by MICHELIN-starred Chef Ho Chee Boon and UK design studio Atelier LLYS as a destination for modern Cantonese cuisine of exceptional ambition and beauty. The 7,500-square-foot room makes an overwhelming visual impression: dramatic chandeliers, intricately carved wooden screens, and panoramic views of the city skyline from three distinct vantage points that shift in character and mood across the course of an evening. The design manages the difficult task of honoring the space’s pedigree while making it feel completely contemporary — both a throwback to the neighborhood’s most celebrated special-occasion restaurant and something entirely new. Chef Ho’s seasonal tasting menu applies traditional Cantonese techniques to fresh, often unexpected ingredients: steamed shrimp and squid dumplings, lobster lemongrass curry, and refined compositions that reflect a deep knowledge of a cuisine that is too rarely given this level of care and seriousness in the United States.

ABSteak is one of the most singularly designed restaurant spaces in San Francisco — a Korean steakhouse hidden past a discreet doorway near Union Square, reached by descending a black marble staircase into an underground room conceived as an abstract interpretation of a cow’s belly. Oxblood red marble, rib-cage-like arches, glowing onyx surfaces, leather banquettes, and an unmistakably high-energy atmosphere make the dining room as much an event as the food itself. Chef Akira Back, who earned a MICHELIN Star at his Seoul fine-dining restaurant and now operates 28 restaurants around the world, built the San Francisco ABSteak as his first Bay Area outpost, betting on the return of Union Square as a dining destination. The kitchen centers on smokeless tabletop grills at each table, where servers cook dry-aged cuts — including American Angus, Australian Wagyu, and marinated galbi soaked for twelve hours in bone broth — alongside Korean banchan, buchimgae (scallion pancake), and silken tofu jjigae. The in-house dry-aging program, running thirty to forty-five days depending on the cut, is the foundation on which the entire experience rests.

Elena’s brings a quietly striking beauty to one of San Francisco’s most residential corners — a modern Mexican restaurant in Forest Hill and West Portal whose dining room makes an impression from the moment guests step inside. High ceilings, tall mirrored arches, and a trio of living ficus trees that sway gently in the room create an atmosphere that is both verdant and elegant, with a sense of scale that feels unexpected in this neighborhood context. The menu leans into the traditions of Mexican home cooking with real warmth and confidence: house-made pork tamales, grilled shrimp preparations, skirt steak tacos, and seasonal specials that reflect the kitchen’s strong instinct for restraint and quality. Signature margaritas are built for lingering — which suits a room that rewards exactly that. Elena’s is the kind of neighborhood restaurant that a city only produces when its dining culture is genuinely healthy: a space where beauty, cooking, and hospitality come together without pretension, making somewhere that feels good simply to be in.

Crustacean is one of San Francisco’s most storied Vietnamese fine-dining institutions — and in its striking new Financial District home on Pine Street, it has never looked more beautiful. The nearly 6,000-square-foot space, designed by Elizabeth An and the JH2 architecture firm, is lavish and almost impossible to take in at a single glance: cavernous dining halls with soaring ceilings, a rose gold bar, eighteenth-century antique Asian carved-wood doors at the entrance, bamboo wall coverings, rose gold metal latticework, and custom chairs inspired by traditional Vietnamese woven hats alongside velvet-wrapped settees. Giant floral arrangements fill every corner, including the ceiling. The kitchen’s heart is the legendary Secret Kitchen, where master chef Helene An’s closely guarded recipes for AN’s famous garlic roasted Dungeness crab and AN’s garlic noodles — dishes that have shaped the entire Bay Area dining landscape — are prepared by An family members alone. A 2024 California Hall of Fame inductee and widely celebrated pioneer of fusion cuisine, chef Helene An remains the guiding force behind a menu that extends from tuna cigars and king crab bánh khọt to Wagyu dumplings and a kohlrabi Caesar with furikake and Vietnamese black pepper.