Inside Keiko à Nob Hill, Now Open

Grid View

• The back dining room, painted in hues of pale blue and pink, will be closed until the kitchen is ready to scale up.
• This is the main dining room, which opens for dinner on 11/10/11
• Here's the front lounge area where the izakaya menu will be served.
• The owners see the lounge area as an extension of their living room.
• Takei revamped an old storage room to create this bathroom. See the former checkerboard from Le Club repurposed as a decoration beside the sink.

At last, here we have Keiko à Nob Hill, a project that's been in the works for almost exactly two years, now open in the former home of Le Club. You'll remember owners Seigo Takei and chef Keiko Takahashi sold their Michelin-starred El Paseo to Tyler Florence and Sammy Hagar in 2009. Now they're excited to open a new restaurant in San Francisco proper, where they suspect more diners will tap into Seigo's 50,000-deep wine cellar, and open-minded city palates will allow for a more creative Japanese and French inflected menu from Madame Keiko. Starting today, the restaurant opens for lunch, and tomorrow you can try her 8-course, $88 tasting menu in the main dining room.

Wine pairings for each course are available for a $78 additional charge, and Takei has also used his highly educated palate to custom-create non-alcoholic "wine" pairings ($58) to go with his wife's food.

In the coming weeks, as the kitchen gets its sea legs, dinner service will begin to be served in the back dining room, and then Keiko will roll out a more casual izakaya-style menu to be served in the lounge area up front. Seigo says the lounge food will be very similar in style to what Keiko cooks at home: beef tongue stew, hamachi tartare, black cod with saffron risotto and the like. Most lounge dishes will be priced under $25. Now have a look around inside at the revamped interior: lounge, bar area, two main dining rooms and bathrooms. If you'd like to peruse the menus, we'll defer to GrubStreet here.

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