“Not everyone orders the steak,” says Colleen Booth, co-owner of JouJou, San Francisco’s busy new Design District restaurant. “Not everyone orders oysters. But everyone goes to the bathroom.

“So why would we waste the opportunity to build a moment for our guests in that space?”

As managing partner and chief operating officer for Lazy Bear Restaurant Group, the gang behind the eponymous Lazy Bear as well as True Laurel, Booth knows a thing or two about building moments for diners. She has been immersed in the restaurant world since she was 12 years old, she tells me, and by her loose count, she’s on her “17th or 16th opening” at this point. 

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The latest is funky French stunner JouJou (which roughly translates to “plaything”), a long, multi-faceted space in the ground floor of a boxy modern apartment building within echo’s reach of the freeway. The Lazy Bear team’s newest project opened to the world on March 6, and immediately received a wave of attention, including a big write-up in Food & Wine. In less than two months, the restaurant has become one of San Francisco’s hottest dinner spots.

I reached Booth by phone from my home in Los Angeles (I’m the Southern California bureau chief for SFGATE) about a week after I’d visited the restaurant during a recent work trip to San Francisco. I had one question for her, something I really couldn’t get off my mind: What the hell is up with JouJou’s bathroom?

The exterior of JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.

The entry tile at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.

The interior of JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.

Booth’s answers lasted more than 20 minutes.

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“I think with the way of the world right now, we just really want to encourage all of the adults in the room to remember what it's like to have that simple joy of being a kid,” Booth says, nodding to both JouJou’s design — bathroom or otherwise — and its overall ethos as a playful, a la carte restaurant.

Booth wants a little fun around every corner, and JouJou delivers. The music is curated with precision, the look is lush and overdone in the best way, and the kitchen produces food that is familiar without once feeling dull. Casual bar diners can snack on country pate with pork, chicken and mango, or splurge on 2 ounces of high-grade caviar for $125. The $71 steak au poivre is earthy and funky thanks to wild peppercorn shoots, and the dessert baba au rhum is given the usual flambe........

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