In the Emmy-winning FX show “The Bear,” which returned for a fourth season on June 25, there’s a pivotal Season 2 episode when Richie, aka Cousin, learns what it takes to work at a fine dining restaurant — and just how much intimate research goes into preparing for guests.
Before his first night on the floor of the fictional three-Michelin-star restaurant, the front of house team goes over the evening’s PNOs — persons of note. Guests for the night include the district attorney for Chicago as well as a musician and actor. But then the captain zeros in on two guests of particular note: teachers who have been saving up for a meal of a lifetime, he learned on social media. He is determined to make their night unforgettable and tells the team to pull out all the stops — a tour of the kitchen, a visit to the wine cellar and a meet-and-greet with the chef. Most importantly, he does not want them to pay a dime for the meal.
“I want to blow their f—king minds,” he says.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Richie from “The Bear” Season 3. FX
Turns out, that deep-dive research of guests and over-the-top hospitality is not all that fictional in the world of Bay Area fine dining. A few of our local restaurants are also known to blow some f—king minds.
Take Lazy Bear, the Michelin two-star restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District. The ethos of the restaurant is “modern American dinner party.” But it’s more like you are a royal from another land. And when you visit their castle, they shower you with gifts.
For one guest who was visiting Lazy Bear on her birthday for the third straight year, the team found out she was a penguin enthusiast. Wanting to honor this personal, yet quirky detail, the restaurant staff went all out: They adopted a real emperor penguin chick for her.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
“She was like, ‘Oh my God. I’m floored,’” recalled Colleen Booth, managing partner and chief operating officer of Lazy Bear, in an interview with SFGATE.
Initially, they wanted to do it through the San Francisco Zoo, but the organization never returned the restaurant’s calls. Lazy Bear opted for the next best thing — a framed certificate from the World Wildlife Fund and a penguin plushie, which sat at her table when she arrived. Booth, who has worked in the fine dining industry for almost a decade, does not know of any other restaurant that has ever adopted a living animal for a guest.
FILE: Lazy Bear in San Francisco, May 26, 2015. Eric Risberg/AP
The research and care of each guest at Lazy Bear starts with Catie Kirk, guest services coordinator and operations manager for the restaurant. Before each week of service, Kirk creates a “notable guest report.” She starts by sending out a questionnaire to each reservation asking about any dietary restrictions and if they are celebrating a special occasion. But there’s more.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
Kirk also has a gigantic database of each guest — about 115,000 people — and knows how many times they’ve dined at Lazy Bear since it first opened as a supper club in 2009. She then dives into social media and finds extra information that is publicly available to get a sense of who the guests are before they come in. Finally, she puts all the data she’s gathered into a color-coded Google document that every member of the team, front and back of house, studies.
“We get hundreds of emails a day, and the intimate details that some people are willing to share, sometimes we’re like ‘Holy crap. I can’t believe you told us that,’” Booth said. “But then there’s the fun, the literal joy, our team feels when they get to make these special touches with those details.”
A scallop dish at Lazy Bear in San Francisco. Courtesy of Lazy Bear
Thanks to Kirk, every night is specifically dialed into each guest. She will often pair diners with a certain team member if she knows they have something in common.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
For instance, Kirk once discovered that two first-time diners were visiting from Rhode Island, where Booth was born and raised. In an effort to make them feel a little more at home in San Francisco, she asked head bartender Tabatha Mohn to serve them a rendition of the Rhode Island-born Del’s Lemonade when they arrived. At dessert, she presented them with her own concoction of coffee milk, the state’s official drink.
The team at Lazy Bear really takes its ethos seriously.
“One of the questions we ask our front of house when we hire them is, ‘What was the last gift you gave?’ because we want our people to be thoughtful,” Booth said. “You can be the most amazing waiter in the world and know every single thing there is to know about food, but we are really in this to give people these special moments.”
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
A window to the kitchen at SingleThread in Healdsburg, Calif. Johnny N. via Yelp
Up in Healdsburg, the reservation team at three-Michelin-starred SingleThread, dubbed one of the world’s best restaurants, also spends a part of each day on guest research. To honor each guest, what they call a kaicho, the Japanese word for chairperson or high-ranking official, the team will scour social media, Google, LinkedIn and other forms of public data to educate the staff.
“The information is used as a precursor to gain more of an understanding of who our guests are,” general manager Akeel Shah explained to SFGATE. “We may not even use the information, but it gives us a better way to tailor the experience and make it memorable.”
Every member of the staff, even the culinary team, is clued into as much background research as possible. The goal at SingleThread, where a typical meal fetches just over $500 on weekends, is not to be overbearing or pressing, but for each kaicho to have the best time without any pressure, Shah said.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
Sometimes, that means giving a tour of the nearby SingleThread Farm at Dry Creek to help diners understand the kitchen’s devotion to peak, microseasonal fruits and vegetables. Though the menu changes daily, the restaurant will indulge certain regulars by preparing a dish that they adored on a past visit. There’s one guest who has dined multiple times at the restaurant, and he loves a specific smoked salmon course he had on his very first visit.
A dish at SingleThread in Healdsburg, Calif. Lisa Y. via Yelp
“It reminded him of something that he had during his childhood,” Shah said. “We make that course for him in some way every visit. We also gave him a complete set of donabe, called an ibushi gin (the smoker to smoke the salmon), with the wood chips and all instructions on how to prepare it at home.”
But the familial relationships at SingleThread are also built through research on the floor. Shah, for instance, will write down notes of conversations he had with guests so that if they ever return, he can chat them up on the same subject as if no more than a day had passed. It goes both ways, according to Shah — returning guests who know about the recent birth of his child will take the time to ask about the newborn.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
“That’s one of the cooler things of our industry — building connections with people you may not meet in your immediate circle,” Shah said.
At the two-Michelin-starred Acquerello in San Francisco, research is a bit more old school. Since the restaurant has been around since 1989, co-owner Giancarlo Paterlini said the data collection started 36 years ago, and it used to all be handwritten in a huge book.
“We don’t rely so much on social media; we rely more on the information that we have gathered ourselves over the years,” Paterlini told SFGATE. “Our director of operations is very meticulous about going through each reservation to see what kind of needs they have, what kind of wine they enjoyed last time and what kind of history we have together.”
Food at Acquerello in San Francisco. D.T/Chris Y. via Yelp
Many times, the research manifests itself by placing diners at certain tables they enjoy or by surprising them by picking out a bottle of wine they’ve never had before but that is similar to their favorite bottle from a previous visit, Paterlini said. Other times, it takes the form of remembering someone’s spatial preferences, such as not placing someone in the middle of the floor because they don’t want to feel like the center of attention. For first-timers, those who are not yet in the database, Paterlini trains his staff to get to know each guest as much as possible (so long as they are the chatty type).
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
“When [our waiters] talk about the menu or the wine, we ask them to ‘uncover’ something that the guest might not realize they would like by asking questions,” he said. “If they have a fondness for Italian wine, maybe they will also enjoy a similar Californian wine. Then we can surprise them with something they did not order but we think they will enjoy. We have little tricks, you know, up our sleeve.”
Indeed, the writers on “The Bear” could have taken a page from the rule book of the Bay Area’s best fine dining restaurants when it comes to indulging their guests. Just consider the time Lazy Bear printed baseball stats on the menu of a Los Angeles Dodgers fan — noting why the San Francisco Giants are historically the superior franchise by overall games won: 11,541 games by the Giants compared to 11,434 by the Dodgers (as of March 22, 2025).
Or the time two former high school sweethearts, who recently reconnected, were treated to a special dinner in Lazy Bear’s wine cellar after the team had transformed it into a movie theater and set up a high school date night for the couple.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad