From Living Rooms to Dining Rooms: How Jon de la Cruz Is Rewriting the Rules of Restaurant Design

For years, Jon de la Cruz built his reputation as one of the Bay Area’s most sought-after residential designers. Seven years as Design Director under Ken Fulk helped shape his eye for layered luxury and emotional storytelling, and his own practice quickly earned placements in Architectural Digest, House Beautiful’s Kitchen of the Year, The Wall Street Journal, Luxe, and The Robb Report.

But lately, de la Cruz has been doing something unexpected: designing restaurants.

Not as a rebrand. Not as a pivot. Almost as a side project.

And yet, quietly, his hospitality work has become some of the most influential in San Francisco’s dining scene. From Leo's Oyster Bar and Che Fico to Wayfare Tavern, Via Aurelia, and JouJou, his projects have helped define the city’s ongoing restaurant revival. Via Aurelia was recently named one of the most beautiful restaurants in the world, while a 7x7 profile credited de la Cruz with “single-handedly shaping the new era of San Francisco restaurant design.”

What makes the work stand out is exactly what you would expect from someone trained in residential interiors: his restaurants don’t feel staged. They feel lived in.

There’s warmth instead of performance. Texture instead of spectacle. The spaces feel less like hospitality concepts engineered for social media and more like someone’s impossibly glamorous home — the kind of place where guests instinctively settle in, linger longer, and order another bottle of wine.

That distinction may point to a larger shift happening inside hospitality design itself.

For decades, restaurant interiors often prioritized visual identity above emotional experience. The rise of Instagram accelerated that instinct: dramatic lighting, hyper-branded moments, and rooms designed to photograph well before they functioned well. But residential designers approach space differently. Their work begins not with turnover rates or visual impact, but with intimacy — how people actually live, move, gather, and feel.

De la Cruz brings that sensibility directly into hospitality.

For him, the philosophy is deeply personal. He grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District in a Filipino household where food was both ritual and connection. Meals were less about presentation than atmosphere: conversation stretching late into the evening, guests constantly arriving, rooms expanding to hold more people than they were designed for. That upbringing gave him an instinct that cannot really be taught in design school — an understanding of how spaces can make people feel cared for.

It’s why his restaurants rarely feel transactional. They feel hospitable in the truest sense of the word.

The irony is that hospitality-native designers often spend years trying to manufacture the exact feeling residential designers begin with naturally. Residential work demands emotional fluency: understanding comfort, memory, routine, and belonging. When translated into restaurants, those instincts create spaces with soul — environments people remember not because they were visually loud, but because they felt good to be in.

That may explain why de la Cruz’s projects resonate so strongly right now, particularly in San Francisco, where the dining scene is rebuilding itself around experience and intimacy rather than excess.

His work suggests that the future of restaurant design may not belong solely to traditional hospitality firms. It may belong to designers who understand domesticity — who know how to create rooms that feel personal before they feel performative.

In de la Cruz’s hands, the line between residential and hospitality design almost disappears entirely.

And perhaps that’s the point. The best restaurants have always felt a little like home.

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