After over 20 years, Boulettes Larder — one of the Ferry Building’s longest-running tenants and shining stars — has closed. Both the full-service restaurant and its fast-casual spin-off, Bouli Bar, served their final meals Thursday.
Owners, chefs, and life partners Amaryll Schwertner and Lori Regis said the closure “feels like a natural and elegant end.” They’re not sure what their next chapter will be, but there will be something. “I would like to take a break and do some writing. But after that, I want to continue cooking. And I’m looking forward to it,” Schwertner said.
Ever the romantic, she followed up with a quote from Walt Whitman: “The role that is what we make it, as great as we like, or as small as we like, or both great and small.”
Boulettes Larder opened in 2004, debuting alongside the Ferry Building we know today. The building, constructed in 1898, had undergone a years-long, $90 million renovation to be transformed into a food hall and market, with Boulettes serving as one of the crown jewels. Named after the couple’s espresso-colored, dreadlocked Hungarian sheepdog, who often hung around the restaurant (Boulette died in 2013, just after Bar Bouli opened), the water-facing, sunlight-filled restaurant functioned as a shrine to ingredients and seasonality.
The eclectic California menu changed daily and comprised simple but elegant dishes — from creamy corn polenta with scrambled eggs to greens soup with harissa — as well as prepared foods and pantry items. Schwertner and Regis’ dedication to farm-to-table cooking was as fierce as that of Alice Waters.
In 2007, GQ magazine critic Alan Richman wrote about the restaurant’s famous brunch with an arched eyebrow: “The stone-ground grains of my griddle cakes were without peer. I don’t know if they were milled or panned for, like gold. I sipped hot chocolate that tasted like melted ganache. I thought I could hear a Pan flute, but maybe it was my imagination. … I was in a place that only natives of California — and possibly denizens of some mythical New Age paradise — would consider realistic. Admittedly, Boulettes Larder is not the norm, not even here. It is an expression of such extreme idealism that I labeled it Extraterrestrial Organic, the highest rating I could bestow.”
The space, complete with an open kitchen, made you feel as if you were eating in someone’s home — if that someone had beautiful copper pots, an array of flowers on the cherry-wood communal table, and a natural aesthetic ripped right out of the pages of Kinfolk, the prettier-than-thou design magazine. Schwertner and Regis’ private dinners were legendary — as were many of the guests, often artists and thinkers like Bono, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, and Japanese starchitect Tadao Ando. “I made this spectacular meal for him to communicate my respect for his genius,” Schwertner said of Ando. “A week later, I received a letter from his interpreter saying that Mr. Ando had seldom enjoyed a meal in the U.S. more than the one which I had prepared for him that day.”
Patricia Unterman, a former San Francisco restaurant critic and food writer, was saddened to hear of the closure. She called the couple’s dedication to pristine, local ingredients inspirational and praised their rare ability to cook so spontaneously. “It was no bullshit,” Unterman said. “For Amaryll and Lori, their cooking was absolutely a religion and a faith, and they always did it with great joy and tenderness. Honestly, something as precious as Boulettes — it’s amazing that it was able to exist as long as it did.”