This air,

you say, feels as if it hasn’t touched land



for a thousand miles

—From “Land’s End,” by San Francisco poet August Kleinzahler

The dinner guests at the round table are letting the waiter know that they just flew in from Taiwan. As for me, I just flew in from New York. I’m sipping tart, chilled pineapple kombucha—my first course—and scanning a printed menu for what will follow. This is what the menu says: “Winter has come with its cool breeze / See this most adored gift from Neptune, an aureate bloom.”

Wait, what? As attentive gastronomes know, the menu here at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco is not a standard list of dishes and the sundry ingredients that those dishes contain. Instead, what you hold in your hands to guide you through various “treasures of the earth and sea,” as my bill of fare puts it, is a poem—a poem composed on the fly by the chef herself, Dominique Crenn, and meant to evoke the underlying currents of what you’re eating.

The hearth at Saison; the broth at Saison. Bonjwing Lee/courtesy Saison; Joe Weaver

It’s not easy to get away with that sort of thing, not even in a global culinary world that’s full of stuff like smoke liberated from glass domes and consommé that you suck out of test tubes. But if anyone’s likely to convince you that food can be free verse, it’s Crenn, 52, who stands at the back of the dining room with a stance and a haircut that call to mind a wily mod pickpocket in a nouvelle-vague film from the ’60s. She’s got two Michelin stars to prove it, and she’s gunning for a third.

“Winter has come with its cool breeze / See this most adored gift from Neptune, an aureate bloom.”

Thousand-year-old quail eggs, potage, and ginger at Benu. Courtesy Benu

Recently renovated with the kind of polish that could revivify a used pair of brogues, that dining room looks like an apartment where the director of such a film might’ve lived. Black walnut tables and gently worn throw rugs convey a note of cozy modernism. After a while, Crenn squeezes in alongside my table and tells me that I’m about to experience a dish that can be traced back to a pumpkin soup her grandmother used to make in Brittany. I’ve lost track of where we are in Crenn’s poem—maybe “And the shimmering pearls in the depths of the gargoyle’s trove”?—but her official name for the dish is “seeds & grains.” She pours liquid into a bowl full of nubby things. I taste it. Each bite rumbles with texture: Toasted pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, puffed buckwheat groats, and silky round trout eggs cluster like a briny, luxe granola around a gelée composed of more ingredients than my jet-lagged brain can keep track of. (The chef later fills me in via email. The gelée, she says, combines the fermented juice of butternut squash, buckwheat vinegar, black-truffle juice, duck fat, marigold oil, and shiro dashi.) It is delicious. It is not a conventional soup, though. A Breton grand-mère of the previous century might not even recognize it as food.

“I’m not conventional,” Crenn tells me by way of explanation. “At all.”

With that attitude, she’s in the right place at the right time. For any chef in America who has a vested interest in thwarting convention and shooting the moon, San Francisco—long ago one of the fustiest of dining metropolises—has evolved into the promised land. Arguably not since the heyday of Stars, chef Jeremiah Tower’s sensational ’80s canteen, has the city that gave us Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Grateful Dead been viewed as such an indisputable gastronomic epicenter. Overall, the Bay Area, including Oakland as well as Los Gatos, Napa Valley, and Sonoma County, now boasts more three-Michelin-starred restaurants than any other region in the United States. Longtime luxury magnets like Manresa (in Los Gatos), the French Laundry (in Yountville), and the Restaurant at Meadowood (in St. Helena) all secured three stars (the highest rating from the Michelin Guide), but a more recent surge within San Francisco city limits has made New York and Chicago feel like old news in comparison. Benu, Coi, Quince, and Saison have three; Atelier Crenn, Acquerello, Lazy Bear, and Californios have two. I wanted to get a clearer picture of what was going on, so I flew into San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon. By the time I left, in the predawn darkness of a Saturday morning, I’d consumed 13 Michelin stars in four days.

Grilled antelope at Saison. Bonjwing Lee/courtesy Saison

What accounts for this San Francisco renaissance? Well, after scanning Dominique Crenn’s poem, I had to look up the word aureate. It means golden or gilded. And Crenn’s own phrasing, “aureate bloom,” works pretty well as an accidental encapsulation of San Francisco circa 2018. The city is abloom with lucre, which is another way of saying that rich people are running the show. That could be viewed as a mixed blessing. The tech money that has flooded San Francisco for the past couple decades has decimated the free-spirited bohemianism that gave rise more than half a century ago to Beat poetry and Haight-Ashbury psychedelia. Disruptive business models and rampant gentrification have made it nearly impossible for working people and artists to stay afloat. Paradoxically, though, all that Internet wealth has enabled and ennobled the kind of hypercreative restaurants that often run the risk of going under in other parts of the country. We’re talking restaurants with small dining rooms and exorbitant daily expenses, restaurants that appeal to those customers (and investors) for whom a thousand-dollar dinner for two is no more of a stretch than a night at the movies. Maxime Larquier, the general manager of Atelier Crenn, expressed it in simple terms by the side of my table: “Facebook, Google—we’re in good company.”

Chef Dominique Crenn Matt Edge

It’s Wednesday afternoon and Joshua Skenes, the chef at Saison, sits in the backseat of a car telling me that he hasn’t been anywhere and doesn’t know anything. In spite of Saison’s three Michelin stars, Skenes, at 38, likes to portray himself as something of an enlightened bumpkin—a Florida swamp rat who wandered into the white-gloved sanctum of haute cuisine without a whole lot of training to speak of. To bring this persona home, he’s actually wearing hunting gear. His cap and vest give off the impression that right after lunch he’s going to head out into the brush to bag some quail.

He wants me to know that he has never eaten at zeitgeisty restaurants like Noma and Osteria Francescana. He has never apprenticed in France. In fact, he has never even been to Europe. Then we get out of the car and walk into House of Xian Dumpling, a Chinese restaurant on Kearny Street. Skenes flips open the menu and starts ordering everything—beef tendon, pig’s ears, wontons—in apparently fluent Chinese. A few moments later, the waiter, pleasantly surprised, looks at me and says, “He speaks perfect Mandarin.”

San Francisco, at this point in its culinary history, might be one of the few places where you’d be likely to encounter a walking contradiction like Joshua Skenes. Over the course of our conversation, the chef comes across as both elusive and in-your-face, sophisticated and self-taught, gentle and blustery, theatrical and inward. He knows Mandarin because for many years, starting in childhood, he practiced baguazhang, a Chinese martial art that “has its roots in revelatory Taoist practice,” he says. No, he has never traveled to Europe, but he went to Japan once and has visited China more times than he can remember. For a time, his commitment to baguazhang (and vegetarianism) was all-encompassing.

The city is abloom with lucre, which is another way of saying that rich people are running the show.

“I basically just ate plant life and meditated in the woods,” he says. “I was off the deep end for sure. I’m surprised my head didn’t start spinning—I was almost Gary Busey.”

Another thing that Skenes wants me to know is that he can’t stand tasting menus. Candidly, he thinks the codified framework of most Michelin-starred cuisine is absurd. “I hate it, just for the record,” he says. “You know why? There’s this ridiculousness to it. There’s this silliness—you’re trapped, basically. You’re required to put little silly things on a big silly plate. Hopefully you’ll see tonight that we do it different.” It turns out he’s not exaggerating. That night, I swing back to Saison for dinner with a friend, the food writer Phyllis Grant, and we experience the sort of meal that would be served at a hunting and fishing lodge on the outskirts of Valhalla. There’s a hot purse of kelp that’s untied to reveal a steaming extravagance of caviar. There’s dark brown toast cradling enough orange uni to make you wonder whether you’re being served tangerines instead of sea urchins. There’s a tureen of lobster soup, and a perfectly seasoned T-bone of pronghorn antelope, and a persimmon so ripe that you scoop out its branch-plucked custard with a spoon. Instead of the curlicue fronds of mandolin-shaved flora, the anthills of edible powder, and the roadkill smears of sauce that have become the ghastly clichés of the contemporary plate, you get relatively unadorned ingredients—meat, seafood, vegetables, fruit—at the height of their ready-to-eat-ness.

The pine-mushroom dish from Corey Lee. Peden Munk Trunk Archive

“The only thing we care about is taste,” Skenes explains. “Taste is a really simple word for something that’s a pain in the ass to get. If you come here seeking fancy things, you’re not gonna find them. If you want anything other than honest taste, it’s not here. I want people to have an experience that’s super-down-to-earth and genuine.” Scoring prime ingredients at their peak is not cheap, though—“you’ve got to fish it, you’ve got to hunt it, you’ve got to ranch it,” Skenes says. Fortunately, like many of the top Michelin-starred spots in San Francisco, Saison is backed by tech-enriched investors who want to see what the restaurant can do when it doesn’t have to cut corners. “Wealth exists in New York, too, but it’s a different support system,” Skenes says. “If you look at San Francisco, the place was built by the Gold Rush. Who were the Gold Rushers? Risk-takers. That’s in our DNA. There’s an acceptance of new things.”



Skenes himself has been prospecting in risky new territory. Now more of a spiritual leader at Saison than an operational chef, and fueled by Bay Area investors who are game to buoy his aspirations, he has shifted his focus to a rural patch of land on the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, where he hopes to open a lodge devoted to the pure food of the land. “I’m up in the woods all the time,” he says. “You go to the tide pool, you pull out a sea urchin, you crack it open, you wash it in the seawater, and you eat it. That’s perfect. The front yard’s a river. There are herds of elk running around. Ocean. Mountains. Forests.” At Saison, Skenes once served black bear to Ruth Reichl. As Phyllis and I are leaving after dessert and a final glass of wine, the Saison crew gives her a bag containing a raw antelope steak she can cook at home for her kids.

Steamed bun and black truffle at Benu. Mark Mahaney/Redux

In San Francisco, an appetite for innovation has fostered the rise of chefs with bold, unmistakable points of view. Corey Lee’s tasting menu at Benu, a few steps away from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is arguably the best being offered anywhere in America, and what gives it depth is the personal way that Lee roots every dish in his South Korean heritage (he was born in Seoul) as well as the techniques and flavors of China and Japan. Lee’s opening salvo at Benu, identified on a printed menu only as “small delicacies,” might qualify as the most sublime sequence of dim sum you’ll ever find. As the menu moves forward in waves, his kitchen’s attention to detail is apparent in every ramekin and cup—homemade soy sauce, hand-pressed sesame oil, fermented crab sauce, a bouillon of quail with mountain yam, a sorbet made from the five-flavored Asian berry known as omija.

“If you look at San Francisco, the place was built by the Gold Rush. Who were the Gold Rushers? Risk-takers. That’s in our DNA."

Gratifyingly, Lee, who turned 40 last year, has a consistent audience for such high-level cooking, in spite of a $295 starting price for the tasting menu—before you add in drinks, valet parking, and a service charge. “Young people with money,” he says. “I don’t think we can underestimate the impact that has had on the dining scene of the city. You’re going to get a shot at getting people’s attention.” When he opened Benu in 2010 with a $160 menu, he wasn’t so sure. “Immediately overnight, we were the most expensive restaurant in San Francisco,” he recalls. “That really shows you how recent this all is. This was a huge dice roll for me when I started. The first two or three years were fucking scary, man. I never could have imagined that the dining scene would evolve to this place.”

Faux-shark-fin porridge at Benu. Mark Mahaney/Redux

A similar gamble has been woven into the business model at Californios, in the Mission, where a family trio—chef Val M. Cantu; his wife, Carolyn, the maître d’; and her sister, general manager and beverage director Charlotte Randolph—joined forces to open their intimate tasting-menu sanctuary early in 2015. Anywhere else, a young chef like Cantu (he’s 33) might have been nudged toward venturing forth with something overtly crowd-pleasing and casual, but “I just decided I didn’t want to cook that way,” he says. “This is what I’m passionate about: fine dining.” The bill of fare at Californios—mushroom tacos, a fire-blackened cross section of mandarin oranges, a porridge of beans fedora’d with caviar and leaves of gold, a churro ribboned with foie gras—represents his spin on Mexican foodways. (His ancestry is Mexican and Venezuelan.) “Our food is about California, and it channels my cultural background,” he says. In that sense, it’s emblematic of the San Francisco moment in cooking, a moment marked by, as Cantu puts it, “people putting themselves on the line to display what they believe in.”

Grilling pineapples at Saison. Bonjwing Lee/courtesy Saison

“You’re gonna have to give me a hand.”

Erik Anderson needs assistance with the duck press. He asks me to grab the base of the metal device, an imported French behemoth that is about 120 years old, so that he can throw all his weight into turning what looks like a steampunk steering wheel. From a spout at the bottom pours a trickle of bird blood and bone marrow. “The Romans have been making sauces out of bones for thousands of years,” he says here in a private room at Coi.

For lunch, Anderson is making me a Gallic classic associated with La Tour d’Argent in Paris. Duck is used there; he’s opting for squab. What he squeezes out of the press is only part of what goes into the ethereal, stick-to-your-mouth sauce. Over the blue flame of a sterling-silver “spirit burner” from London, he flambés a generous pour of cognac and throws red wine and thyme and peppercorns and mandarin peels and other things into the saucepan. “The dish is more about the sauce than the actual meat,” he explains.

Anderson is in a weird position. He’s the new chef at Coi. Last October, the restaurant landed three Michelin stars, but by November the chef whose cooking had earned those stars, Matthew Kirkley, had departed. Coi is owned by chef Daniel Patterson, who is often still identified as the top toque in the kitchen even though Patterson would be the first to tell you that he no longer cooks there. Which means that the 45-year-old Anderson, a veteran of the Catbird Seat in Nashville and more recently a transplant from Minneapolis—“I’m like the new kid here,” he says—has to carve out a reputation for himself in an elite dining destination that’s mistakenly associated with two other people.

"The first two or three years were fucking scary, man. I never could have imagined that the dining scene would evolve to this place.”

He’s doing so with a lusty ode to tradition. The thrill of the San Francisco food scene right now is that chefs truly get to express themselves through tasting menus. “One of the beauties of it is when you can see somebody’s personality through the meal,” Anderson says. So while Dominique Crenn is exploring her connection to poetry and Corey Lee is mining his heritage, Anderson is setting out to redefine the experience at Coi as one grounded in the grand kitchens of Europe.

Beef tendon and sea cucumber glazed in lobster sauce with dried garlic flowers at Benu. Mark Mahaney/Redux

If you look at all of these San Francisco chefs through the lens of Saison’s Joshua Skenes, what they’re all seeking—and getting a chance to locate, thanks to deep pockets in the city—is a flow state. “You’ve got to find your flow state,” Skenes says. “Every craft has one. A flow state is where you are just observing yourself. You are not reacting. You’re working the best that you have ever worked but nothing can distract you from it.” What that means for Skenes is a near-pathological fixation on the nuance of flavor—the absolute rightness of handmade sea salt (“Kosher salt’s banned from our restaurant,” he says), caviar that doesn’t taste like it came from a mucky aquaculture tank (“Zero pond-scum flavor—it’s got to be from spring water”), and mulberries whose succulence cannot be questioned because he owns the damn orchard. Skenes used to worship the mulberries he ate at Chez Panisse, the OG Berkeley landmark where Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower kick-started what we now think of as California cuisine.

“Until recently, the mulberries I had there were the best mulberries I had ever put in my mouth,” Skenes says. “That was until I started growing them.”

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