RESTAURANT NEWS | CALIFORNIA
Susan Dunn Opens Esme, the French Bistro She’s Been Building Toward
ESME | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Mei Chen
5:13 a.m. PT, July 6, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
Susan Dunn has opened Esme in San Francisco, and the appeal is blessedly direct: a small French-California bistro in a city that knows exactly what to do with roast chicken, a good patio, and a serious cheese plate.
Esme sits inside the Metro Hotel on Divisadero, in the former Ragazza space, with a 30-seat dining room and a back patio finished with redwood benches. Dunn has leaned into the building’s old San Francisco bones rather than trying to make the place look imported. There are burgundy leather banquettes, globe pendant lights, Art Deco touches, and a salon-style wall of Bay Area art. It sounds polished because it is, but not in the way that makes you worry about touching the silverware.
Dunn comes to Esme after years in restaurants that already earned local loyalty. She’s a co-owner of Pearl 6101, cooked at Pizzetta 211, and is also behind Paladar 511 in New Orleans. This is her first solo project, with Nate Arnegard as her chef de cuisine, whose résumé includes Flour + Water and Penny Roma.
The menu takes French bistro language and runs it through California produce. Early dishes include rillettes, steak frites, charcuterie, roast chicken, and seared halloumi with grilled peaches.
There’s cappelletti with two kinds of peas, talk of duck, rabbit, and seasonal galettes, and a cheese program built around producers like Cowgirl Creamery and Point Reyes Farmstead. For dessert, Dunn brought back a strawberry mascarpone tart from her Pearl days, alongside moelleux au chocolat.
San Francisco has had plenty of French-ish restaurants. Esme feels less like part of a trend than the restaurant Dunn was destined to build: intimate, a little dressed up, and built around the sort of cooking that gives a neighborhood one more reason to argue over reservations.
