Atherton

Atherton incorporated in 1923 — the Fair Oaks railroad flag stop, renamed for landholder Faxon Dean Atherton — precisely so its property owners could stay strictly residential rather than be absorbed by Menlo Park. The town still has no commercial zones, and therefore almost no restaurant record of its own: for a century its residents' dining life belonged to the surrounding Peninsula. Earlier hospitality here was roadhouse work — John B. Steinberger's 1852 roadhouse on Middlefield Road, and Louis Golder's Menlo Park House of about 1867, a hotel with a saloon recorded as Menlo Park's first business.

The exception is the building at El Camino Real and Selby Lane, held by the Franceschini family since one of its patriarchs opened Johnny's there in 1938, and used for fine dining more or less continuously since — Barbarossa, then Chantilly.

Bacchus Management Group reopened that address as Selby's in July 2019, with Tim Stannard as founding partner and Mark Sullivan in the kitchen, some produce drawn from the group's SMIP Ranch. It took a Michelin star in 2021 and, under wine director Jaime Pinedo, a Wine Spectator Grand Award in 2025 for a roughly 20,000-bottle cellar weighted toward Burgundy, Bordeaux, Napa and Italy — the group's third, after The Village Pub in Woodside and Spruce in San Francisco.