The city’s most stylish new hotel now has a restaurant to match

In Eat Here Now, we serve up the newest, the buzziest, or simply the rediscovered in SF food. If you can pick only one place to eat at this week — go here.

There are not many restaurant interiors in San Francisco that make me feel sophisticated by association. But in the dark, clubby bar at Prelude, I could be a woman of mystery on a business trip — the type who sits, lost in deep thought, tracing her finger along the delicate rim of a martini coupe filled to the brim with a shiso-and-roasted-tomato gin cocktail called Smoke on the Water ($20). The type of woman for whom anything could happen at any moment. (Less the woman going home after dinner to put on sweats and guilt-watch “Emily in Paris.”)

I’m being a little dramatic — but so is Prelude, the restaurant in the eminently stylish new Jay Hotel, located in the Financial District and the vision of hospitality design firm AvroKO. It provides a sexy foil to San Francisco’s usual vibe of care free windows and light. 

In contrast, the hotel leans into inviting “warm brutalism,” inspired by midcentury architect John C. Portman Jr., who designed the original building, with its jagged concrete facade. Prelude’s design has touches of this but goes deeper. It’s a gorgeous, expensive cocoon, covered in sumptuous eucalyptus wood. There is sage-green leather, mohair, a gold-ceilinged entryway, herringboned stained glass, and a dignified open kitchen. The private dining room is stunning and seems to await very important people. The surroundings here are their own feast.

Of course, there is food, too. The restaurant is helmed by the SF-based Omakase Restaurant Group, which owns the high-end sushi restaurant Omakase, plus the casual Dumpling Time, Rosemary & Pine, and the upscale Niku Steakhouse. The menu is inspired by the Southern cooking of chef Celtin Hendrickson-Jones’s grandmother. It’s not the cuisine I would have expected in this environment, but even fine-dining chefs yearn to have a soulful connection to their food.

Though Prelude categorizes itself as fine dining, I’d call it elevated but easygoing — at least in presentation. You’re not going to find foam. Squiggles of sauce are absent. There’s a gem salad ($17) with Granny Smith apples and fried shallots that could find its way onto the menu at Nopa, no problem. Chicken wings stuffed with “dirty rice” ($14 for two) taste like grandma’s cooking, yet the process of making them demonstrates the lengths to which a chef will go to make a wing more than just a wing. “We debone it, make a mousseline with the flavors of dirty rice, including country ham, andouille, and chicken livers,” says Hendrickson-Jones, who was most recently at Niku, but also spent time at Morimoto and Commis. “Then we heavily caramelize it and deglaze it three times, fold in chicken breast, and pipe it all back into the wing. Then it’s lightly battered and, hot out of the fryer, we coat it with chiles we ferment in-house.” 

The “heartbeat” of the restaurant,” as the chef puts it, are the grits made from corn grown by Santa Rosa farm Tierra Vegetables, who then nixtamalizes it and stone-grinds it till toothsome. At the restaurant, the grits ($18 for two) are cooked till creamy and served in a vintage Pyrex bowl, accompanied by a smattering of garnishes, including crispy ham and pickled shrimp — and, of course, a big pat of butter. I’d say they’re best with the dry-aged pork chop ($54) marinated in fermented stone-fruit barbecue sauce. “It’s fun to see how far we can take something that people think of as unrefined,” says Hendrickson-Jones. 

Remember sommeliers, that dying breed? I’d forgotten what a treat a good one is. Here, Master Sommelier Morgan Harris, previously of Saison Hospitality, is at your service. With effortless banter, he leads my friend and I entertainingly through the histories of the wines, pouring us tastes in glasses with stems so delicate they could snap. Prelude is also working with an excellent pastry chef. Daniela Herrera’s whimsical reinvention of a banana cream pie ($15) is served upside down with a paper-thin “pretzel” crust dusted in cocoa that, with the tap of a spoon, shatters.

Everything is à la carte now; an additional tasting menu is coming soon. But Hendrickson-Jones makes clear that he doesn’t want it to be the kind that is so long that it runs diners ragged. “I get the sense that guests are fatigued by the 20-course marathon where, by the end, you’re probably a little drunk and don’t remember what you ate at the beginning or the middle. By no means do I want our food to be fussy and precious.”