The San Francisco Centurion Lounge Is To Double In Size (Almost)

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The American Express Centurion Lounge at San Francisco International Airport is one of only nine Centurion lounges that are currently open but, following an agreement that Amex has reached with the airport, it won’t be a lounge that many frequent visitors will recognize in the not too distant future. The lounge is getting bigger. A lot bigger.

There are next to no clear details available right now so I’m just going to report what I have been told by American Express (this won’t be a long post!):

• The expanded Centurion Lounge at SFO will be almost 16,000sq ft in size
• The lounge will be introducing a new menu from Executive Chef Ravi Kapur.

That’s it! That’s all Amex has been prepare to say about the changes to the lounge so far.

I managed to extract a follow-up comment about Ravi Kapur…

Chef Ravi Kapur is recognized for his heritage-driven cooking at the critically acclaimed Liholiho Yacht Club and Louie’s Gen-Gen Room. Kapur will continue to bring his inspired cuisine to Platinum Card and Centurion Members traveling through the San Francisco airport. Born and raised in Hawaii, Ravi Kapur and his team are dedicated to creating complex dishes that represent the breadth of flavors and influences found in both Hawaii and throughout California.

The new menu created for the Centurion Lounge in the San Francisco airport will provide clean ingredients focusing on local purveyors from the Bay Area.

…but I’m not sure that tells us a lot more that we knew (or could have surmised) already.

Ravi Kapur is already the Executive Chef for the San Francisco Centurion Lounge so we can get a reasonable idea of what to expect from the new menu by looking at the existing menu:

I’m not sure that this is what the lounge is serving right now (in the tome of Covid) but that’s what the lounge’s website currently shows.

To date, I haven’t managed to find time to visit the SFO Centurion Lounge so I can’t pass comment on it from personal experience but, based on what I’ve heard from others, this is an expansion that the lounge badly needs – apparently it competes with the Miami Centurion Lounge for being one of the busiest lounges in the network.

When the new Centurion Lounge in JFK opened last month, Amex commented that at over 15,000sq ft it was the largest Centurion Lounge so far. Presumably, therefore, at almost 16,000sq ft in size, the San Francisco Centurion Lounge will take over as the largest lounge in the network.

Note: For comparison, the Centurion Lounge at LAX is approximately 14,000sq ft in size, the Centurion Lounge at Dallas Fort Worth measures approximately 12,500sq ft, and the lounge in Miami comes in at a little over 12,000sq ft.

Bottom Line

At this point in time Amex won’t tell us more than what you see above – the Centurion Lounge at SFO will be expanding to almost 16,000sq ft in size at some unspecified date in the future. The location of the lounge is set to stay the same (in Terminal 3 near Gates F1 & F2) and the lounge is keeping the same executive Chef but a new menu will be provided.

If any readers are passing through the Centurion Lounge at SFO in the coming days/weeks, please ask the staff there if they have any further information – it would be good to know if there are any indications as to when this expansion project is set to start and when it’s expected to end.

Featured image: San Francisco Centurion Lounge courtesy of Amex