“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.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
The entry tile at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
The interior of JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
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 flair. Basically, JouJou is a playground for adults with taste and a weeknight desire to dress up, just a little bit.
“We forgot what it was like to go out,” says Booth of the past decade of increasingly industrialized, casual restaurants. JouJou is intended to be “an escape from your own home — even as much as you love your home.” Great restaurant spaces are filled with inviting vignettes, she tells me: how a potential customer views the host stand from the doorway matters as much as the tablescape of silverware, plates and glasses when they sit down. The small details add up, giving customers something they can’t replicate with a delivery app.
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At JouJou, the bathroom is more than a vignette; it’s a separate show.
First, there’s the gender-neutral communal bathroom area, accessed via an arched doorway, that contains the necessary sinks and mirrors. The aubergine-toned space is warm, and there’s just enough illumination to spot a loose crumb on a collar or to fix up a wayward lock of hair. The intimate room never feels harsh.
The entrance to the bathroom at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
A credenza in the common area of the bathroom at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
A yellow-orange beaded vase containing tampons on top of a credenza in common area of the bathroom at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Left of the entrance, a low, three-panel wooden credenza on legs hides a few necessary bathroom tools, while a small floral bouquet bursts from a clear bowl on the top. If you care to stare, your eyes will be pulled to a pair of yellow-golden hobnail jars, each with its lid affixed. Pop one open, and you’ll discover a discreet stash of menstrual products (“We are well past the times where I think ladies have to ask each other for tampons,” Booth says). The other is filled with handfuls of individually wrapped breath mints — though Booth admits she originally purchased candy cigarettes before realizing they didn’t have the aesthetic she wanted. The unlabeled contents of both ornate jars are readily available to anyone who happens to peek, but otherwise the objects carry no signage to point the way. That’s part of the plan.
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“You don’t want to give the big picture away right away,” says Jon de la Cruz of de la Cruz Interior Design, who worked with the Lazy Bear Restaurant Group on the look for JouJou. De la Cruz says that moments like those jars, as small as they may seem, are part of a process of exploration for customers. “You want people to discover things slowly.”
Like Booth, de la Cruz is an industry veteran, having designed a number of well-known Bay Area restaurants including Wayfare Tavern, Che Fico and Oakland’s Odin Mezcaleria. He says that San Francisco diners are a discerning bunch; they glorify the food on the plate, but are also keenly aware of how a space looks and makes them feel. Come on like a pomp-and-sparklers Las Vegas clubstaurant, he says, and diners will smell a scam.
“They’re all very intelligent,” de la Cruz says, “and the minute they know that they’re being fooled, or you know the food isn’t good, they’re never going to come back.”
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A credenza in the common area of the bathroom at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
A credenza topped with a yellow-orange beaded vase, a tissue paper box and flowers in the common area of the bathroom at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
And there’s more. Each of the small anterooms comes with sturdy wooden floor-length doors (a must for any truly great restaurant bathroom) and locks with visual indicators that tell customers whether any stall is occupied or not. The doors also push inward, rather than pull outward, making it even more difficult to accidentally walk in on someone in restroom repose. You won’t find any “I Think You Should Leave”-style operational confusion here.
The real surprise of JouJou’s bathroom, though — and, frankly, the reason for my calls to Booth and de la Cruz — is the toile-style wallpaper that wraps each of the individual stalls. You’ve seen toile wallpaper before, even if you didn’t know what it was called. The farmhouse-chic design features small, repeating and seemingly hand-drawn images, usually depicting something like the European countryside or various nautical elements. Traditionally, toile — a French invention said to have been brought to America by none other than Ben Franklin — is meant to be elegant but informal, something befitting a country manor house.
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At JouJou, the wallpaper is much, well, hornier.
The wallpaper inside the JouJou bathroom in San Francisco, on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
A credenza in the common area of the bathroom at JouJou in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Purple line drawings of trees catch the eye at first, pulling unprepared viewers into the endless and hedonistic scene. Below the branches, couples of various sorts and sizes engage in an array of lovemaking on ruffly daybeds. Stare long enough and you’ll eventually notice the man in the powdered wig, spanking his bare-bottomed partner as she lounges on a long wooden bench. And just above her head, the most stunning scene of all: a pair of pigs just straight up gettin’ it on.
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“Everyone needs to know how bacon’s made,” Booth tells me, her Cheshire grin somehow audible through the phone. “What’s wrong with that?”
Absolutely nothing. Well, unless you’re Diana B. from San Francisco, who on April 1 left a one-star Yelp review for JouJou that reads, in part: “Who wants to see pigs doing it…? Lost my appetite after that… won’t be back.”
Diana seems to be in the minority. Early write-ups have praised the restaurant for its grand ambition, its elegant energy and its unexpected moment of naughty whimsy in the bathroom, which is all thanks to Booth and de la Cruz.
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“There were a lot of those very traditional French trappings,” de la Cruz says of the restaurant’s early concept art, “but how do we make it sexy and fun and San Francisco and exciting?” Ultimately, it was artist Manuela Jarry who crafted the wallpaper design that one Yelper truly hates.
Booth isn’t bothered one bit. “I think it’s funny,” she says of her funky little bathroom surprise. “I think it’s cute. I think it’s charming.” And while restaurants like JouJou are always living playthings that wear and change as time goes on, Booth says that she can’t imagine ever letting the restaurant lose its sense of childish wonder. “I will be the first one that says: I have a Peter Pan complex. I don’t ever want to grow up.”