Mirabeau Restaurant - Oakland

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The Mirabeau Restaurant was a four-star French restaurant overlooking the Kaiser Roof Garden, open from 1967 to 1985.

The restaurant opened in 1967, and was co-owned by Gilbert Barthe, the maître d' of Ondine, a restaurant in Sausalito, and John Hamilton of Marin County. George Gutekunst and Chef Alfred Robin, partners in Ondine, also signed the lease. ¹ In 1969, Robert Beaupre, president of the Seattle First National Bank, asked Barthe to open another Mirabeau restaurant in Seattle.

The original decor included a concrete and mosaic piece by artist Emmy Lou Packard. ⁹

Over the years, the restaurant had some notable visitors:

Ronald Reagan - then California governor dined there in 1967 ⁵
Neil Armstrong - California College of the Arts and Crafts presented a Jacques Schnier sculpture to Armstrong in 1972 ^2,3
William Knowland - dined there several times in the days before his death in 1973 ⁴

In 1980, the restaurant was run by the Merritt Park Corporation, with Bonnie Guiton as president and general manager. Andre Pierre Mercier was the chef, and Jean-Paul Menet del La Mellene was the maître d'. ^6,8

Although it received a fourth star from the Mobil Guide in 1980, ⁶ the restaurant closed 5 years later in 1985. The primary reason was that Kaiser stopped subsidizing the restaurant, but high costs of running the restaurant were also cited. ⁷ The space then became the Central Park Restaurant.