A long, considered evening.
An evening at Lumière is a single arc — three hours, twelve courses, one room. It begins with a glass of champagne by the fire and ends with a small farewell at your table. There is no music. There is, instead, a slow attention to your evening.
The menu is written by the year.
We write a new menu every six weeks. The decision of what to cook is rarely made the night before; more often, it is made in March when we plant a crop that will arrive in October. The kitchen is a slow conversation with the farm, the boat, the orchard.
In the spring there are peas — three weeks, sometimes four. In the summer there are stone fruits we will not let leave the county. In the late autumn there is the long, deep flavor of roots and game that asks for the longest cooks of the year. In winter, when there is less, we learn to make more of it.
Almost everything we serve was alive within ninety miles of the dining room four days ago. Our salt comes from one bay in Bretagne. Our chocolate is from a single estate in Madagascar that we have worked with since 2019. The rest, we grow, fish, forage, or buy from people whose names you will find listed further down this page.
“The best compliment a guest can give us is to forget the time. That is the whole reason for restraint — to make room for an evening to become an evening.”
— Élise Marchand
Élise Marchand
Chef · Proprietor
Élise was raised in Lyon, in a household where Sunday lunch was an event of liturgical seriousness. She trained at Institut Paul Bocuse, then spent four years at Maison Pic in Valence and two at Mirazur on the French-Italian border, where she ran the garden brigade.
She returned to California in 2017 with one ambition: to cook a menu that could only be cooked here, in this fog, in this season. Lumière opened in November of 2018 with nineteen seats. The room has since grown to twenty-eight. The menu, mercifully, has not.
Élise is the author of The Quiet Kitchen (Phaidon, 2023), and a James Beard finalist for Outstanding Chef. She lives in Sonoma County with her partner and a deeply unimpressed terrier named Pomme.
Twenty-one people, one evening.
Élise Marchand
Chef · Proprietor
Élise opened Lumière in 2018 after a decade between Maison Pic, Mirazur, and a quiet farmhouse in Provence. Her cooking is rooted in the ingredient and the hour.
Daniel Park
Head Sommelier
Daniel built the Lumière cellar from a single bottle of 1990 Comte Lafon Meursault. He believes great pairings should make a guest forget the wine is there.
Mei Tanaka
Pastry Chef
Trained at Pierre Hermé and Den, Mei composes the final third of the menu — the half-hour she calls 'the slow descent.'
Henri Caldwell
Maître d'hôtel
Henri has shaped the room for seven years. He greets every guest by name by the second visit, and remembers their seat by the third.
The names behind the plate.
A small list of the farms, fisheries, and dairies whose work you will taste tonight. Most have been with us since the first year.
- Caldwell FarmHeritage vegetables · Sonoma
- Liberty DucksPekin duck · Penngrove
- Five Dot RanchDry-aged beef · Napa
- Cowgirl CreameryCow and sheep cheeses · Point Reyes
- Bellwether FarmsSheep's milk, ricotta · Sonoma
- Andante DairyAged cheeses · Petaluma
- Monterey FishDay-boat halibut, oysters · Half Moon Bay
- AcquerelloAged carnaroli rice · Piedmont