Personalities

Annette Yang

Annette's Links:

It makes perfect sense that Annette's first restaurant would have a 60-foot palm tree growing right in the middle of it. After all, it's Annette's love of all things coastal and casual, sophisticated yet simple, that informs every aspect of Nettie"s Crab Shack. She has opened and managed some of San Francisco's most highly regarded and highly visible restaurants over the last 15 years, but this is ultimately where she would want to eat, the kind of soulful place that is truly in her heart.

It was the sense of community in San Francisco's progressive restaurant industry that drew Annette from the Southern California coast to the Bay Area. Although she never wavered in her desire to open her own restaurant, it wasn't until she arrived in San Francisco that she began to learn the lessons that would eventually guide her to her own place. Annette started her career in the City with a bang at Square One and Aqua, two of the most well-known restaurants of their time and San Francisco institutions even now. She partnered with Chef Gordon Drysadale to open the wildly popular and award-winning Gordon's House of Fine Eats, moved on to manage the uniquely successful Foreign Cinema, opened the highly publicized Jack Falstaff with the PlumpJack Group and served as the Director of Operations of Home Restaurants. She has most recently opened the highly acclaimed Spruce, easily San Francisco's most anticipated and talked-about restaurant in years, and its most coveted reservation. She maintains a spotless reputation in the Bay Area as a hard worker with a sense of humor, balancing the highest standards for food and service with a healthy perspective that after all is said and done... "it's just dinner".

It is Annette's firm belief that great food can be prepared either simply or exquisitely and that service doesn't have to be pretentious to be precise. She is thrilled by the prospect of celebrating the seasons with food, by sustaining the planet by serving only what is the freshest and most available, and by restoring confidence in service that is "California casual" but San Francisco worthy. Annette's time has finally come-a cool, urban setting for a warm, seaside restaurant-palm tree included.