Top image: Atherton’s historic Town Hall. Selby’s sits on El Camino Real at Selby Lane in Atherton. Photo: BrokenSegue / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Selby’s, at the corner of El Camino Real and Selby Lane in Atherton, is one of a handful of Peninsula restaurants that hold a Michelin star and a top-tier wine award at once. Its newly posted fall menu is a good moment to look at what the record says about it.
What the menu says
The dinner menu posted on Selby’s website, labeled “Dinner | Fall 2026” and checked Oct. 27, is a three-course prix fixe at $130 per person. Starters include a Charentais melon consommé with anise hyssop, butternut squash confit with preserved gooseberries, smoked Mount Lassen trout with cauliflower soubise, chou farci with sea scallop mousse, and glazed chicken quenelles with sauce suprême. A yellowfin tuna tartare is an $8 supplement. A handmade ricotta raviolo with Royal Baika caviar beurre blanc is a $20 supplement or $48 à la carte.
The entrées run from maitake mushrooms with Périgord black truffle and grilled black cod with matsutake to roasted Liberty duck and a Marcho Farms veal striploin. Grilled Maine lobster is a $35 supplement. A separate “prime cuts” list adds $10 for a six-ounce eye of ribeye, $40 for a Charolais striploin, $65 for a 14-ounce dry-aged ribeye from Flannery Beef of San Rafael and $25 for beef Wellington. Desserts include a midnight chocolate cake with salted caramel. A Petrossian caviar service is priced at $120, $160 or $200, depending on the caviar.
The menu notes that “in support of San Mateo County employer mandated expenses, a 6% fee will be added.”
According to its About page, Selby’s is open nightly from 5 to 9 p.m., offers complimentary valet parking and describes its food as “classic American continental cuisine.”
Who’s behind it
Selby’s is operated by Bacchus Management Group, which also runs The Village Pub and Spruce, Wine Spectator reported. Both of those restaurants also hold the magazine’s Grand Award. Selby’s opened in 2019. InMenlo reported that it opened in July 2019, closed during the pandemic and reopened Sept. 7, 2021.
Andrew Green, Bacchus partner and president of fine dining, told Wine Spectator that executive chef Mark Sullivan “pulled out classic cookbooks from the 1950s and ’60s” while building the menu, aiming for “a fresh look at old classics.” The magazine cited Sullivan’s honey-lacquered duck breast, finished tableside with a bigarade sauce, as a signature dish. Green said the group “started accumulating wine two and a half years before we opened.”
What the critics have said
The Michelin Guide, which lists Selby’s with one star in its 2026 California selection, says the room “drips with old-school Hollywood charm.” It describes the cooking as “modern takes on classic American cuisine,” credits “an extra boost from SMIP Ranch,” which it calls the restaurant’s private farm, and mentions a fresh-baked Gruyère popover, and says the “chocolate cake is a signature dish for a reason.” InMenlo reported that Selby’s earned its first star in the 2021 guide.
In August 2025, Wine Spectator named Selby’s a Grand Award winner, its top restaurant wine honor. The magazine described a cellar of about 20,000 bottles, a list of roughly 130 pages and nearly 40 wines by the glass. It quoted wine director Jaime Pinedo calling it “one of the best restaurant wine lists in the country that nobody knows about.”
The record
San Mateo County Environmental Health posts restaurant inspection results through an online search portal, described on the county’s food inspection results page. The Chronicle was unable to retrieve Selby’s inspection history from the portal before publication. This column will be updated with the restaurant’s most recent inspection date and findings once they are retrieved.
The long view
Selby’s is a study in how the Peninsula’s high end has chosen nostalgia over novelty: a supper-club room, a menu built from mid-century recipes and a list deep enough to win the wine world’s top restaurant award. It also shows the costs of operating in San Mateo County. The base price is $130, the steak supplements run as high as $65, and a 6% surcharge is printed on the menu and tied to “employer mandated expenses.” On the Peninsula, a celebration dinner increasingly comes with fine print.
The Reported Table is built from published menus, public records and other critics’ published reviews. The Chronicle does not award stars and our reporters do not claim tastings.
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