The unseen hand of a single interior designer has guided the look of virtually every restaurant that’s opened or reopened in SF in the last few months.

From Mission Bay’s Thrive City to North Beach’s Washington Square, Jon de la Cruz is on fire.

De la Cruz is hardly new on the scene. His flame has been burning brightly for almost 25 years. He’s worked on multiple high profile projects, been the design director for Ken Fulk, and been nominated for a James Beard Award. In 2017, he crafted House Beautiful’s “Kitchen of the Year.”

So when restaurant and hospitality work came back with a vengeance at the close of the pandemic, de la Cruz’s eponymous firm De la Cruz Interior Design (DLC-ID), which he founded in 2015, was perfectly poised to make a splash. Now those projects are almost simultaneously coming to fruition.

De la Cruz is known for marrying modern design and functionality with vintage pieces, bespoke furniture, and custom wallpaper. He doesn’t follow restaurant design trends, he sets them.

“I’m tired of seeing a rectangular subway tile,” says de la Cruz. “Reclaimed wood anything is always just a trap. I personally don’t like looking at bare exposed Edison bulbs. Communal tables, no one wants those anymore.”

But even his own signature moves are continuously evolving. “Wallpaper, I’m trying to use it less and less and focus more on natural finishes like plaster and stone and other shapes of tile that aren’t rectangular,” he says. “Harsh overhead lighting is something I’m trying to avoid now, [instead using] eye-level lighting and lighting the actual tables with LED rechargeable lamps.”

No two restaurants are created equal, however. Each has a unique vibe that de la Cruz works to capture.

At Thrive City Chase Center (1725 3rd St., Mission Bay), for example, the bayside location lent marine undertones to two recent high-profile projects, Che Fico Pizzeria and Kayah, a new bar concept from the team behind Burma Love.

“Che Fico is at the top of Thrive City, facing the East Bay and overlooking the new park on the shore,” says de la Cruz. Having worked on the restaurant’s earlier iterations, he knew exactly how to play with their aesthetic to combine known elements with new ones. “We still have some of the Che Fico familiarities with patterned tile and fig wallpaper but we used regatta stripes for a little more of a marine feeling, and it feels a little sporty, too.”

At Kayah, the objective was to bring the vibrancy of Southeast Asia to life. “The design immerses guests in lush landscapes with deep blues, warm earth tones, and spice-inspired hues accented by woven rattan, bamboo lighting, and murals that reflect Burma’s maritime heritage,” says Desmond Tan, owner of the Burma Food Group.

Part of the trick there was to find a way to teach people about Burmese culture without being too “on the nose” with its representation, says de la Cruz. “We still wanted it to be contemporary and modern, to be just a little bit nicer than casual without feeling too stuffy and formal.”

Across the Bay, DLC-ID gave Oakland’s Odin (444 Oak St.) a cool Mexico City vibe that plays off the idea of a church dedicated to the country’s homegrown agave elixir, mezcal. “We created this sexy space and an altar basically to display the mezcal with a back lit onyx bar at the center.” They sourced church pews for seating and lined the walls with art the owner collected in Oaxaca and Mexico City.

Reopening Park Tavern in North Beach (1652 Stockton St.) was more of a “restoration process” than it was creating a fresh design (“chef Jonathan Waxman knew exactly what he wanted, so we just helped them put it all together,” says de la Cruz), but when Tyler Florence’s Wayfare Tavern (currently at 558 Sacramento St., FiDi) makes its big move to a new location in early 2025, it will be gift wrapped in a look de la Cruz has been hashing out with the team for two years.

“My unofficial concept for that, whenever I get to work on a project with multiple rooms, I always think of the house in Clue, you know, like Colonel Mustard in the dining room with a lead pipe? Downstairs there’s a huge dining room and a great bar and a special chef’s kitchen with a group of tables that face the hotline. It’s going to be everything that we know and love about Wayfare Tavern but a little bit fresher.”

Regardless of the restaurant, says the designer, there’s no place in San Francisco for spaces that are too polished or pretty. Here, unlike Vegas or L.A., people don’t trust places that are overly designed. “As long as the food is good, people will stand in a parking lot or a garage. If it’s over-designed, they start to smell rotten fish like, ‘oh, you’re trying to distract me from the quality of the food.’” When he begins work with a chef-owner, one of the first things he tells them is, “just do your job well and you don’t need me.”

Nevertheless, de la Cruz tries to walk the line between the vision and needs of the restaurant’s staff and its diners. The clean-lined, minimalist, Japanese-influenced atmosphere that dominated pre-Covid has transitioned into a look that’s more of a visual feast in which seat count is no longer as important as comfort and space, both at the table, and around it.

“We’re going back towards more design,” says de la Cruz, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

// Learn more at dlcid.com.