San Francisco's dining scene picked up four new feathers in its cap this week, as Michelin officially folded Dingles Public House, La Cigale, Restaurant Naides, and Wolfsbane into the California Michelin Guide. The announcement, made Wednesday as part of a broader round of 12 new additions statewide, confirms what local food obsessives have been murmuring about since fall: these four newcomers are playing at a different level. All four join the guide as "Recommended" — meaning no stars yet, but the kind of formal acknowledgment that often precedes them.
A Dogpatch Homecoming for the Ages
Perhaps the most anticipated of the four additions is Wolfsbane, the tasting menu restaurant that opened in October 2025 in the Dogpatch neighborhood at 2495 3rd St. As SFist previously reported, the restaurant is a collaboration between the husband-and-wife team behind the beloved, decade-long Michelin-starred Lord Stanley — Chef Rupert Blease and front-of-house director Carrie Blease — and Tommy Halvorson, a Kentucky-born chef and catering veteran who formerly ran Serpentine in the same Dogpatch space. Lord Stanley closed in May 2025 after a decade on Polk Street, and Wolfsbane is their triumphant second act.
Michelin's inspectors praised the duo's "much-anticipated return to fine dining," calling their indulgent multicourse tasting menu a showcase of creative flair with pristine local products, according to SFist. The $248 per person tasting menu leans into Rupert's version of California cuisine, accented with Nordic, Japanese and French elements, as SFGate reported. With a 20 percent service charge automatically added, dinner for two with wine pairings can push past $1,000 — a fact The Standard noted pointedly in its December review, though it conceded the meal was largely a great one.
Filipino Fine Dining Gets Its Flowers
Near Union Square at 708 Bush St., the newly opened Restaurant Naides has been generating Michelin buzz since before it even served its first plate. Chef Patrick Gabon and partner Celine Wuu took over the former Sons & Daughters space — a location with two Michelin stars in its own right — and promptly launched what became the Bay Area's only dedicated Filipino tasting menu restaurant. The restaurant is named after Gabon's mother.
Gabon and Wuu bring serious pedigree to the table: he cooked at two-Michelin-starred Sons & Daughters before a year at two-Michelin-starred Restaurant Milka in Slovenia; she held a leadership role at three-Michelin-starred Benu, as The Standard detailed in its February review. Rather than defaulting to fusion gimmickry, their 11-to-13 course menu ($205 per person) honors traditional Filipino flavors through Nordic-influenced fermentation and preservation techniques, foraged California ingredients, and an extraordinarily inventive non-alcoholic pairing program led by Wuu. Michelin's inspectors called it a "labor of love" and a "jewel box operation," according to SFist.
The restaurant has only been open since mid-December — barely three months — making its speed to Michelin recognition all the more remarkable. Standout dishes include a brioche "pandesal" with braised chicken gizzards in a clever riff on sisig, and a sinigang reimagined with abalone in a clarified tamarind broth built on dry-aged beef stock, as Eater SF described.
Hayes Valley Gets a Proper Local
Dingles Public House, tucked into the ground floor of the Inn at the Opera at 333 Fulton St. in Hayes Valley, opened on Thanksgiving weekend 2025 and has been a hit with the pre-symphony crowd ever since. Chef George Dingle, who honed his craft in Michelin-starred kitchens in London and the Cotswolds before arriving in San Francisco to work at Corey Lee's former Monsieur Benjamin, launched the restaurant alongside his wife Anissa — and together they've described the place as "the love child of NoPa and Bix," as The Standard reported ahead of opening.
According to SFGate, Michelin praised the restaurant's beer-battered fish and chips, mushy peas and curry sauce, and a "spot-on Scotch egg" with a jammy yolk and panko-crusted exterior. The menu leans into British pub classics — fish and chips, beef and Guinness pie, Welsh rarebit, and a Sunday roast — and as Eater SF observed, Dingles is SF's most visible entrant into a wave of British pub openings that has been sweeping the country over the past year. The Scotch egg alone reportedly sells 40 per day, as Gazetteer SF noted.
Glen Park's Best-Kept Secret Goes Mainstream
Of the four additions, La Cigale at 679 Chenery St. in Glen Park may be the one most likely to give reservation-hunters fits. Chef-owner Joseph Magidow operates what is essentially a solo one-man show: a 15-seat chef's counter where he cooks the entire three-course menu over a custom wood-fired hearth, two seatings a night, with no gas equipment anywhere in the kitchen. The Standard called the reservation system "frustrating" — first seating requires showing up to add your name by 4:30 p.m. — but conceded the meal itself was "fantastic."
The menu showcases Occitan cuisine from the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France, changing daily based on whatever Magidow can source from Bay Area farms, according to MerciSF. Magidow is also making waves for La Cigale's radical pricing model: a fully all-inclusive $140 per person for the tasting menu, with tax and tip already built in — a near-unheard-of structure in San Francisco. The restaurant even offers four weeks of paid time off to its six employees, as The Standard reported.
What Comes Next
All four restaurants enter the California Michelin Guide as "Recommended" and tagged as "New" — a designation that functions as a kind of official shortlist for what inspectors are watching ahead of the annual ceremony. As Eater SF explained, restaurants in this category are generally seen as frontrunners for either a Bib Gourmand or a star designation at the June ceremony, though neither is guaranteed. A date for the 2026 California Michelin Guide ceremony has not yet been announced.
The class of 2026 additions spans a striking range: a no-frills British pub and a Filipino tasting counter sit alongside a $500-a-head Nordic-inflected fine dining room and a fire-only French counter where the chef personally butchers 700-pound pigs. It's a lineup that reflects the actual breadth of San Francisco's restaurant scene — which, despite years of closures and hand-wringing, keeps producing world-class cooking from all directions. The full Michelin Guide is available online.
