Bruno Chemel trained in Michelin-starred kitchens in France before coming to California, where he took over as head chef at Chez TJ in Mountain View in 2008. When Chez TJ earned two Michelin stars in 2009, Chemel left at year's end to open Baumé on California Avenue in Palo Alto. The restaurant earned its first Michelin star in its opening year and a second in 2011. Over the following years, Chemel gradually stripped away everything he considered unnecessary: he reduced seating from 22 to eight tables, eliminated his staff, and ran the kitchen and front of house with his wife Christie. The result was something closer to a private dinner party than a public restaurant — prix-fixe menus reflecting whatever Chemel was interested in that season, served to a small group of guests who had reserved weeks in advance.

In 2021, Baumé did not receive a Michelin star for the first time since its opening year. Chemel said the absence was his own choice: he had asked Michelin to remove the restaurant from their guide. His reasoning was that Baumé had become essentially private — a tiny, chef-driven operation that no longer fit the framework Michelin used to evaluate restaurants. Rather than chase the stars, Chemel chose to exit the system on his own terms. He briefly rebranded as Bistronomie by Baumé, offering a more casual format, before closing permanently in August 2023. In 2024, Chemel opened Le Parc Bistrobar in downtown San Francisco, continuing his career on a different scale.

Baumé occupied an unlikely position in the Silicon Valley food landscape: a rigorous, expensive, deeply personal French restaurant in a tech suburb that did not especially cultivate that kind of dining. Its clientele drove from San Francisco, from San Jose, from further away. The restaurant's very smallness — eight tables, no staff, one chef and one spouse — gave it a character that larger restaurants could not manufacture. When it closed, the question of where to find that kind of experience on the Peninsula was left genuinely unanswered.