Quince

Pasta discipline in Jackson Square

The pasta arrives with the restraint of a long apprenticeship: rolled thin, filled cleanly, at Quince in San Francisco, where Michael Tusk, chef at Quince, works from that discipline in Jackson Square. He opened Quince in 2003 with a northern Italian instinct and a California larder, after training at the Culinary Institute of America, cooking in France and Italy, and working in the Bay Area under Alice Waters and Paul Bertolli. The restaurant moved to Jackson Square in 2009, giving the room more breadth without loosening the hand at the pass.

Tusk and his wife own Quince, and his cooking here still carries the lessons of Piedmont, the Bay Area farm table, and years spent refining pasta as a language rather than a garnish. The house has held three Michelin stars since 2017, and the menu continues to turn on season, dough, stock, shellfish, truffle, and the produce coming in from Bolinas.

Bolinas produce, truffle, shellfish

The kitchen draws from a partner farm in Bolinas that grows more than 40 heirloom varieties for Quince and its sister restaurant. That relationship gives the tasting menu its frame: vegetables picked for a narrow window, seafood treated as a point of clarity, pasta used for texture and concentration. The cooking moves between Italian and French regional grammar without becoming fixed to either one.

Signature dishes name the method plainly. A black truffle omelet asks for eggs, heat, and restraint. Dungeness crab with uni depends on sweetness meeting salinity without noise. Spiny lobster with romanesco, squab with black truffles, beetroot spaghetti with yuzu, vodka, and Tsar Nicoulai caviar sauce, and passionfruit risotto with urchin, espelette pepper, Meyer lemon, and sea beans all sit inside the same argument: California ingredients can take precision without losing their place. The cellar supports that pace with wine pairings, Champagne, Italian depth, California bottles, and a spirits finish that keeps the last course in the same register as the first.

The room after the long closure

In 2023, Quince closed for 11 months around its anniversary work and returned in spring 2024 with a changed floor: a bar, a lounge, a salon, and the dining room held for the full tasting. The early 1900s Jackson Square building gives the room brick, timber, and a kind of civic stillness. Service moves formally, but the room does not need volume to make its point.

The pass carries that quiet. Courses land in measured sequence, the counterpoint shifting from caviar sauce to farm vegetables, from lobster to squab, from Champagne to amaro. The restaurant also sits on the North America list at 48, a number that belongs less to spectacle than to continuity. A plate of Dungeness crab with uni is set down in the Quince dining room.