Burdell
Geoff Davis cuts his collard greens with berbere and brines the fried chicken in pickle juice, on Telegraph Avenue in Temescal. The Chronicle's critics ranked the room first in the Bay Area in 2025.
Why go
Davis carried this restaurant around for a decade before he built it. This restaurant has existed in my head for 10 years,
he told the Oaklandside two months after opening.2 He was born in Philadelphia and raised in Modesto, and the cooking comes off his grandfather's farm in New Jersey, vegetables first with a little meat worked through.2 He went to the Culinary Institute of America, then Aqua, Cyrus and The Fifth Floor, took a year in the Napa wine trade in 2016, worked with James Syhabout, and ran True Laurel's kitchen in San Francisco.2 The pop-ups started in 2022. Burdell opened in September 2023, and he named it for his maternal grandmother.4 The menu is his argument about the cuisine. Every Black person has a connection to the south, but it's not one that should necessarily be celebrated,
he said. He puts his own family the other way: My family has been in the north for generations, and that's the food I know.
2
Order this / avoid
- Order: the collard greens and the fried chicken. The MICHELIN inspector notes what Davis does to them, berbere in the greens and pickle brine in the bird.3
- Order: the chicken liver mousse, which arrives on a cornmeal waffle.3
- Order: the dry-aged duck, served with cherry
drippings
and dirty rice.3 - Avoid: walking up. It is a small Temescal room that the Chronicle put at No. 1, and bookings run through OpenTable.4
What locals & experts say
- MacKenzie Chung Fegan, San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic (April 2025):
When colleagues in the food world visit the Bay Area, they always want to go to Burdell.
1 - The MICHELIN Guide inspector: the halibut crudo comes with buttermilk and grapefruit, the wine list is
particularly thoughtful,
and the write-up ends on a question,who doesn't love fried chicken with champagne?
3 - Geoff Davis on how the room is run, The Oaklandside (December 2023):
We're not going to terrorize the staff.
2
Good to know
- Award: No. 1 on the San Francisco Chronicle's 2025 Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area, the first edition ranked by critics MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez.1
- MICHELIN: carried in the guide with a full inspector write-up and no star or Bib.3
- Booking: through OpenTable from the venue's own site.4
Jeff's take (his words)
- Note (verbatim): "Esquire 2024 list, jbf nominee 2024". Neither claim is verified here: I could not pin the category or the result at the Foundation, so both stay his words and not ours.
Verdict
must-visit — Two critics who eat for a living put this room first out of a hundred in April 2025, and one of them says visiting cooks ask to be taken here. Geoff Davis is arguing something with the food, that soul food is a northern lineage as much as a southern one, and he cooks the argument: berbere in the collards, pickle brine in the chicken, dirty rice under dry-aged duck. He built it after ten years of carrying it around, through Aqua and Cyrus and True Laurel and a year in Napa wine. His 2024 awards are still unverified on paper here, which changes nothing about the cooking.