The Peninsula’s newest dining destination — a view restaurant that sits atop two floors of home furnishing inspiration — will make its debut Friday at Stanford Shopping Center.
Called RH Palo Alto, the Gallery at Stanford, this is the company’s fourth Bay Area gallery, after San Francisco, Yountville and Marin, and its first for Silicon Valley. RH operates galleries around the world, with recent openings in Brussels, England’s Cotswolds, Munich and Dusseldorf.
The gallery, set in a northeast corner of the center’s property, replaces the longtime RH presence on University Avenue. That legacy store is closing at the end of business today.
“We believe great architecture amplifies and renders our product and brand more valuable,” RH Chairman and CEO Gary Friedman said in an email. “We either find great historical architecture and re-adapt it” — in San Francisco, the company renovated the vintage 1917 Bethlehem Steel behemoth — “Or we build it. RH Palo Alto is an entirely new design built from the ground up.”
The galleries blend retail, design and restaurant functions in one location. Friedman said this concept creates spaces for consumers that “cannot be replicated online.”
At the Stanford center, customers will enter a spacious first-floor gallery with 13-foot ceilings where room-size displays of furnishing collections, enhanced by pieces collected by Friedman on his world travels, are arranged under contemporary RH chandeliers.
A floating double staircase leads to the second floor, which houses the RH Design Studio and its meeting spaces for homeowners and designers.
On the third floor is the RH Rooftop Restaurant, with a glass conservatory design that blurs the indoor and outdoor spaces. The restaurant seats 150 diners around a sculpted Biancone limestone fountain and offers views of the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west.
A new RH menu features such new entrees as a Whole Grilled Branzino, a Grilled Vegetable & Shrimp Salad and a signature Fried Chicken Sandwich.
A bar flanked by two quiet waterfall walls sells glasses of wine that customers are welcome to sip anywhere in the gallery, including the open-air seating spaces that wrap around the building.
The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday. The restaurant serves an all-day menu from 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays. Diners will find earlier hours for brunch on weekends, starting at 10 a.m.
Details: 180 El Camino Real, Palo Alto; 650-328-4004; https://rh.com/us/en/restaurants
