Downtown Pleasant Hill is about to get a few fresh dining options.
The walkable shopping district that’s home to Jack’s Restaurant & Bar, but lost Sweet Tomatoes during the pandemic, is welcoming two new restaurants: an upscale California cuisine concept called Crescent Bistro and a Cajun spot named Southern Comfort Kitchen.
The 2,591-square-foot Crescent Bistro and the 2,100-square-foot Southern Comfort Kitchen, both located near Spavia, are expected to open this summer.
Here’s what we know about each concept:
Crescent Bistro: The brainchild of East Bay chef Bradley Zeller, formerly of such restaurants as Walnut Creek’s Va de Vi and Walnut Creek Yacht Club, this lunch-and-dinner eatery will specialize in locally-sourced ingredients for its menu of snacks, small plates and greens. Among them, house-smoked wings, spicy jerk chicken skewers and a variety of salads and vegetable sides, from a beet salad to grilled baby carrots.
For lunch, Crescent Bistro will offer smoked salmon mousse and butternut squash arancini; sandwiches including smoked chicken, grilled cheese and tasso ham and cheese. For dinner, entrees may include grilled hangar steak, harissa spiced pork tenderloin, pan-seared airline chicken breast, and linguine and clams. There’ll be craft cocktails and desserts, too, from a s’more pot de crème to strawberry buttermilk panna cotta; https://crescentbistro.com.
Southern Comfort Kitchen: Operated by three brothers from New Orleans, this Southern-inspired restaurant offers authentic Cajun dishes, like crawfish etouffee, seafood gumbo, barbecue shrimp and grits, chicken and sausage jambalaya, red beans and rice, and a whopping 10 varieties of po’ boy sandwiches, from oyster and catfish to blackened shrimp. This will be the second location for Southern Comfort Kitchen, which also has a restaurant in Castro Valley; http://www.southerncomfortkitchen.net
