Lazy Bear

Last month, our team had the pleasure of visiting farm, one of our favorite farms from which we source a wide variety of produce, from heirloom corn and the masa they make with it, to esoteric chiles and winter squash. For over a decade we’ve also been using their cape gooseberries (the most delicious around) to add a unique touch to our dishes. Established in 1980, Tierra Vegetables has built a legacy of sustainable farming through crop rotation, composting, rainwater irrigation, and collaborative pest management.

In 2019, as the farm navigated challenges with their harvest, they invited our team to pick the gooseberries we needed for our menu. It was an unforgettable experience—touring the fields, learning about their practices, and connecting with the dedicated people behind the produce. What started as a gesture of mutual support has now become a cherished yearly tradition.

We’re grateful to work with a farm that shares our values, prioritizes community, and welcomes others to learn and connect with the land.

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Tickets for December were just released! We’ll be celebrating the season’s finest with ingredients that bring warmth and depth to our winter menu. Expect dishes featuring black truffles and other wild mushrooms, winter squash, nuts, and our beloved fondue. And fingers crossed—we hope to see the return of local Dungeness crab to our menu soon, if the whales cooperate.

Grab tickets for December (or some of the remaining tickets for this month) on our Tock page, exploretock.com/lazybearsf.

Holiday Events
As the holiday season approaches, we’re opening our doors for intimate gatherings and festive events at Lazy Bear. Whether it’s a special dinner, a casual reception, or a private wine tasting, we’re here to make your celebrations memorable with seasonal dishes and thoughtful wine pairings in an inviting setting.

To inquire about hosting your holiday event, reach out to [email protected] and let’s create something special together.

We’re excited to feature Graham Tatomer’s 2008 Kick-On Ranch Riesling (yes, 16 year-old California Riesling), a wine that holds special significance for us. When we first encountered this California Riesling over a decade ago, its pronounced minerality and vibrant acidity made a lasting impression. Graham has since become a standout producer of Germanic-style wines, harnessing the cool climate of Santa Barbara—California’s coolest wine-growing region—to craft exceptional Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners.

This Riesling has evolved beautifully, developing deeper notes of wax and intensified rocky minerality, while still retaining its core of green apple and pear. We don’t often think of Riesling as a pairing for the pyrazines of peppers, but the age, minerality, and saline finish here make it work perfectly.

The sweet and peppery notes of our Sea Scallop dish mirror the layers of the Riesling, making for a cohesive pairing that captures both late summer’s brightness and alludes to autumn’s depth. We’ve salt-cured and sliced the scallops to preserve their natural sweetness, while adding layers of flavor with Jimmy Nardello and red gypsy peppers from . The dish is finished with a clam broth “mignonette” that adds a briny kick to complete the pairing.

The challenge when working with summer squash is to capture and express the subtle and often-elusive flavor of the squash and its blossoms. We work to concentrate summer squash flavor in a number of ways. This summer squash dish by Chefs Tim and Taylor, for instance, was on the menu for the month of July 2024, but as is so often the case with our preserves at Lazy Bear, the prep started years ago.

We made a summer squash miso in 2022 and left it to ferment for a couple of years. Then we decanted off the sweet, umami-rich summer squash tamari. We used that tamari to marinate some patty pan squash and zucchini before grilling them. We placed those pieces of marinated and grilled squash around a ring also dotted with a puree of charred shish*to and grilled zucchini, and layered on some flags of country ham, some fried and some fresh leaves of Thai basil, fresh squash blossom, and squash leaf.

The last component in the ring was a tempura-fried squash blossom stuffed with a mix of deviled country ham, roasted pork belly, and cheddar. After frying, we dusted it with a squash blossom powder and placed it in the ring.

We filled in the ring with a vibrant yellow sauce of gold bar squash emulsified with its blossoms, seasoned with our summer squash miso. The floral flavor of the blossoms brightened the texturally rich sauce, while the miso brought layers and depth.

The final touches happened at the table, with a grating of black winter truffle.

Last week we celebrated our tenth anniversary in this space. Now we open back up with new energy and new capabilities, in a more refined dining room, and we can’t wait to share it all with you. We are already certain that this is the best ever version of Lazy Bear.

Tonight is the first night we welcome the public into our newly remodeled space, and there are still some tickets left for October. Today is also the 1st of the month, which means that next month’s tickets were released at 10am today (our new release schedule).

As we settle into the fall season, expect a November menu filled with wild mushrooms (such as matsutakes, chanterelles, black trumpets, and the start of winter truffles), pumpkins, butternuts, and other winter squash, orchard fruits like persimmons, apples, and pears.

Grab your tickets now and join us for the next chapter of Lazy Bear.

With today’s announcement, this year marks TEN YEARS of Lazy Bear having stars in the ! When we look around at the other restaurants that opened the same year we did, we can’t help but reflect on all of the joy our team has gotten to share with those teams, in their restaurants and ours, over the ten years since. We couldn’t be prouder to be part of this hospitality industry here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As we look toward our upcoming ten-year anniversary, amidst the temporary dust and rubble of our current remodel, we also couldn’t be more excited about what the next ten years hold.

Thank you to the , and to our entire team, our Managing Partner/COO , our chefs de cuisine .tim.jacob and , our Beverage Director , our Service Director and Head Sommelier , and all the rest of our kitchen, service, beverage, porter, and operations team members, our forager, our farms and other purveyors, investors, oven repair guy, and emergency plumbers.

The title of the dish on the menu was, “PINEAPPLE IS PERFECT ON PIZZA.” These fighting words functioned as conversation starters for our team when interacting with our guests. Whether or not you agree with the controversial pizza topping, the combination of sweet with salty has often woven its way into our cuisine. 

This is also a sort of composed fondue, one of our favorite dish formats. And while fondue originated as an Alpine dish, it became a popular midcentury American dinner party dish, making it a great foundation for these nostalgic flavors to intertwine.

This particular version of this course came about as a spring fondue started to transition to summer ingredients. We started pairing those spring-to-summer ingredients with two hams on the dish: our house smoked city ham, as well as thinly sliced aged country ham. With the addition of ham and those summery flavors, this fondue course seemed to want something sweet and acidic for balance. As we considered our options, pineapple started to make a lot of sense, and we pushed the flavors of the dish into an homage to Hawaiian pizza.

At the bottom of the bowl is a dollop of creamed fava beans, broccoli, and kale folded with some of our fermented tomato paste. Chunks of juicy pineapple and rolls of city ham accompanied wild blonde morels cooked with brown butter, then deglazed with cream, caramelizing until quite cooked, with an almost crisp textured exterior.

All of that is covered up with the cheese sauce, a.k.a. fondue. The fondue itself is made with the sharpest cheddar in California, the aged, bandage-wrapped cheddar from , and incorporates some garlic as well. We then covered the sauce with a dusting of a fine powder made from basil with a touch of dried oregano, some crispy fried country ham on top, fried baby kales, and wild onion blossoms from .

Hawaiian pizza as a fondue as a composed dish. It’s maybe a little silly, but it’s absolutely delicious.

With blueberry season in full swing, this dessert uses our favorite blueberries from Triple Delight () along with wild conifers. This dessert was developed in large part by our Pastry Sous Chef , and we love how it showcases our local wild flora in ways that hit on our nostalgia for the berry seasons of our youth. But we never had berries like this growing up!

Blueberries offer a sweet and tart jamminess with subtle earthy undertones, but their skins also have a phenolic tannin-like quality, much like conifers. We are using local varieties of conifer like incense cedar, redwood, and Monterey pine, which introduce aromatic notes reminiscent of the forest—evergreen, slightly citrusy, and herbal. This course captures that complexity, playing off of the sweetness of the blueberries while adding depth and a touch of woodsy bitterness.

A spruce tip dacquoise gets layered with a blueberry bavarian cream and blueberry jam along with grilled and dehydrated blueberries, marinated unripe green blueberries, as well as fresh ripe blueberries that get coated in conifer oil, brown sugar-roasted pine nuts, pine pâtes de fruit and a delicate disk of pine “glass” made from isomalt and spruce tip powder. The top of the pine glass gets a few spruce tips and either wild forget-me-nots or farmed bachelor’s buttons, depending on the day. 

Much like our lamb course, this dessert offers a bit of foraging with pine ice cream bars hidden in a forest of spruce tips. The pine ice cream is made with an evergreen oil blend, and is swirled with a bit of blueberry jam. We freeze the ice cream in sheets, punch out the bars, and dip them in a pine-infused white chocolate magic shell.

We are honored to announce that Lazy Bear has received the Wine Spectator Grand Award! This esteemed accolade represents the pinnacle of achievement for a wine program, and is a reflection of uncompromising passion and devotion over the course of the last ten years. The Grand Award is a testament to the hard work, dedication, and expertise of our team, who have meticulously curated a wine list that boasts over 2,500 selections from the world’s top producers. And also from wineries outside of California. 😉

Our wine list is characterized by a unique focus on California’s rich wine history, alongside an extensive array of selections from around the globe. We offer unsurpassed depth in mature California vintages, with nearly half of our list comprising vintages from before the year 2000, including some dating back to the 1920s. Our collection also includes dozens of pre-WWII and pre-Prohibition spirits, as well as fortified wines and brandies from the 1800s. 

Our beverage program has always been intricately designed to pair seamlessly with our menu, creating an extraordinary dining experience that highlights the connection between our diners and the vintners behind each bottle.

This achievement would not have been possible without the incredible efforts of our current Beverage Director, Jacob Brown (), our assistant Beverage Director Caroline Costarella (), our service director Megan McGannon (), our cellar manager Daniel Pendleton (), as well as our previous beverage directors members, Andrey Ivanov (), Matt Dulle (), and Zach Pace, not to mention the vision and dedication of Chef David Barzelay (). This team has worked tirelessly for ten years to serve, educate, and delight our guests.

Thank you for this incredible recognition. We look forward to continuing to share our passion and look forward to many more years of growing our wine list.

Surprise early ticket release! Sorry if you were waiting for Monday, but we were too excited to hold off! We’re thrilled to offer this last month of tickets (and a week-long return to the original dinner party format) before our renovation and wanted to give you an extra couple of days to secure your spot. We’ve got so much in store for this July and can’t wait to welcome you.

We talk a lot about nostalgia here at Lazy Bear, and it doesn’t get more nostalgic than our original communal dinner party! We welcome old friends and new to come experience it in our last week of service before we temporarily close for a renovation. Join us in a fond farewell to our current space this month as we close out with a week-long return to our communal dining format from Tuesday, July 23rd to Saturday, July 27th. You don’t want to miss it. Prior to that, the rest of July will be in our current format, staggered seating times, space between parties, and treating individual parties separately.

As always, we feature the amazing produce of the San Francisco Bay Area, both wild and cultivated. The menu will feature our progressive American cuisine rooted in the nostalgic flavors of 20th century American dining, and that last week we’ll have some of Lazy Bear’s greatest summer hits thrown in for fun.

The first signs of summer produce have already made their way to the menu, with corn, blueberries, cucumber, cherries, and other stone fruit in full swing. We’ll soon be transitioning into dishes featuring eggplant, melon, squash, and, of course, tomatoes, everyone’s summer favorite.

Saturday, July 27th, will be our last night of service before we close down for the month of August and anticipate reopening in mid-September. So raise a glass to the room, space, and decor that have given us so many memories for the last 10 years.

Tickets were just released! Grab yours now, link in bio.

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At first glance, sorrel and rhubarb don’t appear to have much in common with buckwheat, even though they are all in the same family. Sorrel and rhubarb stand out in the culinary world for their distinctive flavor derived from oxalic acid, while buckwheat groats/berries are hearty, nutty, and earthy. But if you try buckwheat’s leaves or flowers, the connection is much more apparent. Oxalic acid gives both sorrel and rhubarb that punch of sourness and an overwhelming impression of freshness, grass, and spring.

This dessert course features all three of these ingredients, starring a rhubarb cobbler topped with a buckwheat biscuit, and paired with sorrel frozen yogurt made with garden sorrel from , and adorned with foraged wood sorrel from Bryan .

We poach chunks of rhubarb (imported for us by ) with sweet and slightly savory aromatics, then fold them into rhubarb jam and pour the mixture into mini cast iron pans. We then top with the buckwheat biscuit and sprinkle on a little demerara sugar. We warm them á la minute so that they come out of the oven perfectly hot and gooey, a nice contrast to the cold freshness of the sorrel frozen yogurt.

The frozen yogurt sits on top of a rhubarb and sorrel relish, for which we pickle rhubarb and combine with finely sliced sorrel stems and a rhubarb consommé derived from the cobbler’s poaching liquid. Finally, the scoop gets finished with some puffed buckwheat and the wild wood sorrel. The grassiness screams spring, while the sweet and tart rhubarb gives us the patience to wait for the peak of berry season.

Tickets for June were just released today! And as we mentioned yesterday, we’ve got some news to share.

We opened here on 19th Street on September 25, 2014. As we approach our ten-year anniversary, we’ll be doing a little construction and remodeling to refresh, to upgrade, and to make the experience for our guests and our employees the best that it has ever been. This release of tickets for June will be one of the last before we close down for about six weeks this summer, most likely starting around the end of July, for our long-in-the-works revamp.

So whether you’ve been curious about dining with us before or have been coming for years, this is your chance to join us once more in the current iteration of our dining room before we close our doors for a while and eventually return in a new iteration.

Grab tickets for June through with the link in our bio, and stay tuned for updates on the upcoming closure, sneak peeks of our remodel, and updates on the reopening!

We’re approaching our tenth anniversary in our current location at Lazy Bear, and we have some exciting news to share! Check out tomorrow morning’s June ticket release email!

As always, signing up for our email list is the best way to ensure that you’re the first to hear about any Lazy Bear news, ticket releases, and special events! Comment “Tickets” to receive a link to subscribe or use the link in bio.

We get so excited when the sweet spring veggies start to hit. This course is a celebration of some of the best, with sweet English peas, asparagus, and tart and grassy green almonds from , all paired with the whole .

We shuck English peas and make a pea shell stock from the washed shells (actually a double stock). The peas are dressed á la minute in a beurre monté made by blending some peas with the pea shell stock, along with some of our house-cultured butter, wine, and other aromatics. That’s then folded in with some more peas (double-shucked if they’re large), sweated and minced ramp tops and bottoms, grilled WILD pea shoots from , asparagus, and some cured, smoked, and finely diced trout belly that adds a pop of salty, smoky trout flavor. The mix sits at the base of the bowl and is topped by the trout loin.

We marinate the loin in brown rice shio koji and gently steam the loin, barely cooking it while keeping the trout’s delicate flavor and dense, slightly gelatinous texture intact. We then garnish the top of the loin with thinly sliced coins of hand-peeled asparagus as well as thin slices of green almond. Next to it, we place some toasted, mature almonds cured in koji, an asparagus tip, pea shoot (cultivated, this time) and foraged greens like chickweed, New Zealand spinach, and miner’s lettuce. 

To the left is a sidecar of asparagus, prepared as described in the last reel we posted. We wrap that stalk in a slice of smoked and cured trout belly dipped in crushed, toasted almonds. We serve the course with a bouillon on the side made from the roasted trout bones and steeped with shells of the English peas, seasoned with brown rice shio koji and with a float of charred spring onion-infused brown butter for extra richness.

Around the time we were growing up, a steak wasn’t complete for many people without A.1. Sauce. However fancy we sometimes get now, we can’t deny the deliciousness and nostalgic appeal of customizing our meat at the table with an umami-driven sauce. This wild and unique play on the classic is an optional condiment with our current lamb course, and compliments the flavors and aromas of the wild elements in the dish, in which we perfume and season lamb with conifers and huckleberry.

Chef de Cuisine .tim.jacob starts this LB Steak Sauce with a wild porcini miso that we made a year ago and aged, and adds fermented wild yellowfoot mushrooms, fermented green garlic tops, black garlic, pickled green garlic vinegar, wild California bay leaves, and local dates for sweetness and body. Or zoom in on the third photo for the REAL list of ingredients, according to Executive Chef . 😜

Unlike A.1. Sauce, this is a thinner sauce that gets dashed out at the table, only a little thicker than a hot sauce or Worcestershire.

All of those ingredients are pressure-cooked together, marrying the flavors while caramelizing and developing richness and intensity. Guests are encouraged to use as much or as little as they want. 

Current seafood tower on the menu:

1. Hook-and-line caught California bluefin tuna, wrapped around tuna tartare dressed with a kosho made from habanada peppers and yuzu, with creamy , and a charred avocado puree

2. Mt. Lassen trout rillette on our own butter cracker à la “Ritz” with fines herbes and fresh and preserved Meyer lemon

3. Royal Miyagi oysters with preserved oro blanco and star ruby grapefruit and Terroir Gin

We keep talking about how much we love spring, and it's true! It is the absolute best time for cultivated ingredients, and also pretty great for wild ones! Every year we see these ingredients with a fresh set of eyes, and it never fails to be inspiring for us in the kitchen.

In addition to the wide variety of spring alliums we are using, here are some of the spring ingredients that are already on the menu:

1. Wild pea shoots and flowering fava greens, currently in a fondue course with spring broccoli and morels. We are eagerly awaiting peas and fava beans. In the meantime, we have their greens. The wild pea shoots are foraged from around the bay and are far meatier and more flavorful than the “microgreens” pea shoots (which we also like, for different reasons).

2. Rhubarb and sorrel, two plants in the same family, are currently in a dessert along with buckwheat, another relative. Rhubarb and sorrel uniquely share high levels of oxalic acid that give them a grassy, fresh acidity evocative of spring.

3. Wild greens, clockwise from top: miner’s lettuce, New Zealand spinach, watercress, wood sorrel blossoms, chickweed. All of these grow abundantly in the San Francisco Bay Area and provide fresh crunch and flavor to our dishes from late winter through spring.

4. White asparagus, the same as green asparagus but grown without exposure to light so that it never develops chlorophyll. A rare ingredient that we don’t get locally, ours is grown in the Loire in France, and has incredible minerally flavor that we are pairing with smoked indigenous Northern California white sturgeon and its caviar.

5. Green asparagus, one of the treasures of the Delta to the East of SF. The sweetest, freshest, brightest, grassiest grass that we’ve encountered, we break out the bird’s beak knives and use this product from Zuckerman’s Farm whenever we can get it.

6. Avocadoes from Brokaw Farms, simply the best. Their farms are far enough South of SF to capture a long growing season. We associate avocadoes more with summer than spring, but we can’t help but get excited about them the second they become available.

So much of our cuisine is inspired by childhood food memories, in this case, the orange creamsicle bar. We’ve been highlighting the wide array of California citrus available in the winter, like cara cara oranges, blood oranges, mandarins, and kumquats along with some of our citrus preserves from over the years, contrasting against the fresh citrus and amplifying their flavor.

At the base of the dish is a moist vanilla pound cake made with sour cream and citrus zest. Once baked, the pound cake gets soaked in arbequina olive oil. We top the pound cake with segments of marinated blood orange, along with mandarin and kumquat, followed by a scoop of frozen mandarin curd. 

Concealing the base of the dessert are pieces of crisp citrus meringue, each piece infused with a different variety of citrus, including mandarin, satsuma, and blood orange, giving each its distinct flavor and color. The meringues also get a dusting of shaved preserved black citrus, providing a tangy, earthy note.

Tableside we pour a drizzle of olive oil infused with citrus leaves from , bridging the flavors of the olive oil-soaked pound cake while adding a delicate richness and a bright floral note against the sweetness of the meringue and frozen mandarin curd.

We’re saying goodbye to this year’s crab season.

Dungeness crab is one of those iconic San Francisco Bay Area products that’s woven into the food traditions of our city. After a late start, we were lucky to enjoy a nice crab season this year and got to showcase it in several courses using every part of the crab.  

We love using the sweet and tender claw and body meat as a canvas for our various preserves as well as paired with fresh seasonal produce. The shells are often roasted and used for stocks and fumets, or to make crab butter, which is one of the most amazing smells in the kitchen. But arguably our favorite part of the crab is kani miso (the fat, juices, and liquified internal organs of the crab). It’s briny and crabby and full of umami, and we love to reduce the kani miso and incorporate it into sauces. 

Today is the very last day Dungeness crab will be on our menu, don’t wait until next year to experience the ways we’re using one of our favorite seafood products. There are a few tickets left for tonight, grab yours now, link in bio!

Last month, we were honored to host some of the most esteemed women in the wine world for an unforgettable dinner as part of our Third Annual Women’s Month celebration. We returned to our communal format as we were joined by legendary Master Sommeliers Emily Wines and Madeline Triffon (who flew out from Detroit for this dinner!), along with featured winemakers Vanessa Wong of and Maya Dalla Valle of .

Our guest speakers lit up the room, providing stories and insight into each of the wines poured throughout the evening, including the 2014 Maya from Dalle Valle Vineyards, the 2014 Elanus from Peay Vineyards, 2016 Château Margaux Pavillon Blanc, 2015 Quintarelli Recioto della Valpolicella Classico, Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, along with other curated top wines from around the world made by female winemakers or by female-led wineries.

Our Chefs de Cuisine and .tim.jacob led the culinary team and crafted a special menu with entirely new dishes just for this evening.

We’re so honored to have hosted such an event and look forward to next year’s celebration of the remarkable women of the wine industry

Big news: our cultured butter is spreading its wings! That’s right, the world’s best butter is now available from a grocery store near you!

We’ve kept the same unique culture of microorganisms going for 12 years now, propagating it from batch to batch. Over time it has evolved, developing a really cheesy and complex flavor with lots of lactic tang and plenty of salt!

Over the last few years, we’ve been hard at work getting our butter onto the shelves of your local grocer. We are so excited to announce this next chapter of our butter’s legacy!

Available while supplies last *Brown butter milk bread sold separately.

This course is a celebration of our native Northern California sturgeon and its roe, pairing them with spring alliums and a decidedly non-local ingredient, white asparagus from the Loire.
We cure and smoke this local white sturgeon, then incorporate crème fraîche, preserved Meyer lemon, pickled and fermented ramps, chives, and a bit of our hot sauce.
We layer the rillette with thinly sliced coins of white asparagus that have been gently poached in milk and seasoned with lemon and garlic. We top with a few slices of white asparagus tips, and a dollop of Lazy Bear Reserve Caviar by . We garnish with fried spring onion rings and a garlic chive blossom.
Tableside, we spoon in a caramelized cream sauce split with a vibrant ramp oil. We make the caramelized cream sauce by steeping cream with wild California bay leaves, Meyer lemon peels, and black pepper. Then we get a nonstick pan quite hot, pour the cream in quickly, and let it caramelize on the bottom without touching it. During this process the cream also reduces and thickens. We deglaze with white wine and re-emulsify the sauce with the poaching liquid from the white asparagus, as well as some crème fraîche.
We love using sturgeon side by side with its caviar in this dish. The delicate flavor of the fish and the minerally white asparagus play so well with the caviar, highlighting its nutty and vegetal notes.