About midway through a recent dinner at two-Michelin-starred Lazy Bear, a server approached the table using both hands to cradle a pressed glass bowl the size of a small watermelon. After placing it on the table, she theatrically removed the top to reveal literal pounds of the restaurant’s house-made butter. “You can have as much of it as you want,” she said coyly. “You just have to finish it all.”
The ostentatious display — an invitation to gorge yourself on what Lazy Bear chef David Barzelay claims is the best butter “in the world” — is intentional. “We wanted to find a way to hype the butter — to give it the moment that it deserved,” he said.
He’s not alone in wanting to put butter on a pedestal. It’s on statuesque display at the newly reopened wine bar Verjus, where a small tower of Le Beurre Bordier anchors the view of the open kitchen from the dining room. At Pasta Supply Co, chef Anthony Strong not only coats ribbons of mafaldine in it, he sells it by the ounce infused with lemon and garlic, sage, or fragrant black truffles.
The buttery boom has even reached restaurants not typically associated with the stuff. At Four Kings, one of the year’s most celebrated debuts, escargots get drowned in butter-based spicy XO sauce. The recently opened Hamburger Project plops two full tablespoons atop a double stack of patties and cheese. At Union Square’s Bombay Brasserie, the entire menu gets a French twist: a tandoor oven gives a smokey kiss to king salmon before it gets smothered in a silky beurre blanc. Chef Erik Aplin even dabs a little nori butter atop salmon nigiri at Chisai Sushi Club.
Of course, butter is the backbone of many European cuisines, French being le numéro un. But since the late ’90s, some of San Francisco’s most acclaimed restaurants — Delfina, Flour + Water, Cotogna, A16 — have leaned into Cal-Italian menus, defining us as a staunch olive oil town.
The shift toward the exuberant embrace of butter reflects a boomlet of bistros across the Bay Area and the country. San Francisco’s French dining renaissance kicked off in late 2022 with a flurry of openings and has continued with Bon Délire on the Embarcadero, Galinette out by Ocean Beach, and Le Parc Bistrobar near Union Square — all of which opened within the last six months.
There are economic factors, too. As anyone who has had to buy olive oil in the last few months has likely noticed, prices have gone through the roof. According to the Federal Reserve, the price of olive oil has been on the rise since 2020 and nearly doubled between October 2023 and October 2024. Experts say this is primarily the result of several years of drought conditions in the Mediterranean, where much of the world’s olive oil is produced. To top this off, producers worry that with President-elect Trump’s planned tariffs, prices of olive oil coming in from other countries could rise up to 25%, as they did during his first administration. In other words, don’t count on relief anytime soon.
Which underscores one of butter’s key advantages over olive oil: It’s not hard to make yourself. At Lazy Bear, Barzelay has taken years to perfect his process, which involves inoculating cultured buttermilk from Straus in Marin, letting it rest for up to a week, then churning and hand-squeezing it to remove excess moisture. The chef has optimized his recipe to achieve the ideal fat content, elasticity, crystal structure, and texture, resulting in butter with a distinctly tangy flavor and just the right amount of salt. “I recognize that saying it’s the best in the world is a ridiculous statement,” he said, but noting that customers have brought him highly sought-after butters from around the world to compare, he stands firm. “We consider it to be pretty precious stuff.”
So, considering how much value Lazy Bear places on its butter, how much will the staff really let you take with your milk bread? Barzelay said two ounces, or a little more than a full shot glass, would be a reasonable, unobnoxious amount. Then again, he noted, once you’re seated at that table, you can ask for pretty much anything you want — including a hell of a lot of butter.
