I · Dining room
Menu Dégustation
Seven courses tracing the season, from Tomales Bay oysters to a soufflé finished tableside. Approximately three hours.
The tasting menu
One Michelin star · San Francisco
The art of slow light.
A seven-course meditation on the French seasons, cooked over embers and served beneath a canopy of hand-blown glass.
The Michelin Guide
San Francisco Chronicle
Condé Nast Traveler
Bon Appétit
Food & Wine
The New York Times
Bienvenue
A dining room built around a single flame, and the patience to let it work.
Since 2014, Maison Lumière has occupied a former 1912 printworks on Hawthorne Place − forty-two seats, an open hearth, and a menu that changes with each of the six French micro-seasons Chef Élise Marchand grew up cooking in Burgundy.
L'histoire du chef
Élise Marchand
Raised above her grandmother's bistro in Beaune, Élise trained under Michel Troisgros in Roanne and spent five years as chef de cuisine at Le Clos des Sens before crossing the Atlantic with two knives and a jar of thirty-year-old vinegar mother.
Her cooking is precise but never cold: whole Sonoma ducks dry-aged for fourteen days, sauces mounted to order, bread baked twice nightly. “I want every plate to taste like the hour it was made,” she says.
“French cooking is not a museum. It is a conversation with whatever came through the back door this morning.”
Élise Marchand
Chef-Propriétaire
42
Seats nightly
900+
Labels in cellar
6
Menus a year
☆
Michelin since 2017
Les expériences
Three ways to spend an evening
II · La Cave
The Cellar Library
Over nine hundred labels with deep verticals of Burgundy and grower Champagne, curated by head sommelier Julien Arnaud.
The wine list
III · Salons privés
Private Dining
Two salons and a chef's counter for gatherings of six to sixty − anniversaries, rehearsal dinners and quiet negotiations.
Plan an event
Plat signature
Canard à la ficelle, turned over vine embers for ninety minutes.
Course six · Menu d'Automne
What the press says
The most quietly confident French cooking in America right now. Every plate feels lit from within.
Marchand's duck is reason enough to fly to San Francisco. The soufflé is reason to stay the night.
Worth a special journey for the cellar alone − Julien Arnaud pours Burgundy the way other people tell secrets.
A dining room that whispers, a kitchen that sings. Four stars, no hesitation.
Nos convives
Notes from the table
★★★★★
We came for our tenth anniversary and Julien remembered the Meursault we'd had on our first visit. Nobody does hospitality like this.
★★★★★
Three hours vanished. The beurre blanc with the halibut is the best sauce I have eaten on either side of the Atlantic.
★★★★★
Hosted a client dinner in the Salon Verrière. Flawless from the first email to the last madeleine in the take-home box.
Nous trouver
An evening on Hawthorne Place
Jackets suggested, never required. We accommodate most dietary needs with 48 hours' notice.
Hours
- Tue - Thu5:30 − 10pm
- Fri - Sat5:30 − 11pm
- Sun - MonClosed
