State Bird Provisions partnership serves up the newest course

As customers line up on a neon stretch of Fillmore Street, what is widely regarded as one of the most innovative restaurants in the country readies for the nightly crush. Inside, State Bird Provisions looks like an industrial art gallery, its pegboard and concrete walls hung with vivid canvases. The simple tables aren’t set with much — no tablecloths, scant place settings beyond stacks of ceramic plates — but waiters polish the silver and glassware like it’s a Relais & Châteaux hotel.

Chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski pictured in the construction zone
of their upcoming restaurant The Progress Nov. 15, 2014 in
San Francisco, Calif. Chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski currently
own the wildly popular restaurant, State Bird Provisions, and
will be opening up their second place, The Progess, in December right next door.

In one booth, husband-and-wife chefs and owners Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski scrutinize a pancake. It’s a contender for the menu, a riff on one of Brioza’s creations by their chef de cuisine, Glenn Kang.

The eager clientele waits to get into the adjacent State Bird Provisions.

Earthy with buckwheat, rich with melted bone marrow, topped with corned cow’s tongue, it’s one of dozens of small plates their cooks and waiters might roll out nightly on the restaurant’s signature dim-sum-style carts, many for around $5 apiece.

“I feel like the thicker cut on the tongue is juicier,” Brioza says to Kang, as he pulls the pancake apart to examine the crumb. “I love the color, man.”

Kang nods, trying to read his boss between the compliments. Brioza and Krasinski look at each other, chewing, searching.

Brioza hands back the dish. “Let’s keep playing with it this weekend,” he says amiably.
Kang leaves, the faintest note of frustration in his wake.

“There’s a point when you’re tasting something and you say, 'This is good, but it’s missing something,’” Krasinski later explains about the way they dissect every dish.
“Something that takes it from being pedestrian to floating on air,” Brioza adds.

Since opening on Dec. 31, 2011, State Bird Provisions has proved so popular that Silicon Valley techies have built bots to grab reservations. The accolades don’t stop: two Best New Restaurant nods from the James Beard Foundation and Bon Appetit, one star from Michelin.

Yet Brioza and Krasinski never stop climbing for rarer air. This week they will open a second restaurant next door called the Progress, more hotly awaited than State Bird.

State Bird and the Progress represent the culmination of the unusually long, collaborative and cutting-edge careers of its husband-and-wife owners. Having cooked at establishments from Chicago to Michigan since the late 1990s, the pair combine three rare skills: a willfully idiosyncratic vision. An exceptionally open-minded curiosity. And a freakish ability as a married couple to work well together. Often years ahead of everyone else, they have shifted from formal French toques to locavores to, most recently, cart drivers. It’s no accident that State Bird has changed fine dining in America.

“It seems that just about everyone in the food world is showing up at the door of this quirky, imaginative spot,” Michael Bauer wrote in his Chronicle review. “It's the type of place that makes chefs stand up and take notice: The food, and the entire concept, are original.”

State Bird gave diners new experiences that, on paper, read like a series of contradictions: fast food slowly prepared, served informally (from carts) yet intimately (often by the cooks who prepared it). Almost immediately, chefs around the country began copying the ideas.

The founders could now take it easy, or open up more State Birds. Last year the legendary restaurateur Drew Nieporent invited them to open a New York branch. But they turned him down to embrace what may be their toughest challenge yet.

Chef Stuart Brioza (right) consults with line cook Conor McKee as Max
Sheffler works at left. Right: Brioza (center) and Nicole Krasinski
plan the new spot with staff.

A partnership
Brioza and Krasinski seem low-key for culinary greats, but all their lives they’ve possessed a preternatural work ethic. They grew up less than 10 miles from each other in the South Bay suburbs (Brioza in Cupertino, Krasinski, Los Gatos) but didn’t meet until 1995, as art students at De Anza College: Krasinski, 18, her hair dyed goth-black; Brioza, 20, his head shaved.

Since their college days, they have shared art, food — and a tendency to make major life decisions on airplanes. Brioza’s mother was a flight attendant, which got her family free standby flights. In 1995, the year before they became a couple, Brioza invited Krasinski and some friends to fly to New York to see the museums. He had cooked at South Bay restaurants throughout high school; for dinner he dragged them to Gotham Bar and Grill, Krasinski’s first fine-dining meal.

“It was an eye-opening experience for all of us, that architectural food,” Krasinski says.
In 1996, Brioza enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. That summer they backpacked across Europe. On their standby flight across the Atlantic, they changed planes in Chicago. As they descended over Lake Michigan and downtown, from their seats they fell in love with the city. They decided to settle there the next year, when Brioza would start his culinary externship.

In the late 1990s, fine dining in America still meant big-city, white-tablecloth, French-inflected restaurants. In Chicago, Brioza came under the wing of Chef John Hogan, “a Southside Irish guy who cooked better French food than any French chef in the city,” Brioza recalls.

Hogan said, “I don’t throw this around often, but when Stuart staged at my restaurant, I told my sous chef, 'One day we’re going to be reading about this kid.’” A picture from the time shows Brioza as a postcard image of a French chef, wearing a white coat and toque, spooning a classic French sauce over roast duck from a copper pan.

Krasinksi was accepted at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but never enrolled after taking a job at a bakery called the Red Hen. Starting as a bencher, making baguettes and croissants by hand, she rose to kitchen manager, fueled by a grit and desire similar to Brioza’s — and without the culinary degree. Within three years she helped the bakery grow into a $4 million business, supplying the city’s best restaurants, like Savarin.

“When she first arrived, we called her Skinny — she was like 100 pounds soaking wet,” said founder Nancy Carey. “But she worked harder than anybody. Without her, we could never have done what we did.”

By 2000, Brioza and Krasinski felt ready for a slower pace. They left for the Northern Michigan resort restaurant Tapawingo, where they became chef and pastry chef. Five years before “locavore” entered the national lexicon, the restaurant’s approach was to cook with whatever nearby farmers would bring them. They embraced the task, cultivating duck farmers and foragers years before the rise of artisan butchers and gleaned food.

They also learned to cook together. Since art school they’d been adept at speaking bluntly when a creation fell short.

“It was kind of effortless,” Brioza says of their earliest culinary collaborations. “With us there were never worries about feelings or sensitivities.”

“It just had to be delicious,” Krasinski adds.

With each other and their staff, they so enjoy collaboration that they often prefer the process to the finished product.

“It sounds like a Nike commercial, but with us it’s all about the path,” Brioza says. “The progress of cooking is more interesting to us than the final dish.”

In 2003, Brioza was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s 10 best new chefs.

Heading west
That year, nearing 30, Brioza and Krasinski decided to return home. In San Francisco, they looked for posts where they could keep working together.

“She consulted for another chef once, and I was like a jealous boyfriend,” Brioza says. “We’re so awesome together, I didn’t want her to be someone else’s pastry chef.”
“It didn’t feel right,” Krasinski agrees.

Then they heard Drew Nieporent needed fresh talent at Rubicon. He had opened the wine lovers’ mecca in 1994, launching San Francisco chefs Traci Des Jardins and Dennis Leary, among many others.

The restaurant inspired Brioza and Krasinski to simplify. The kitchen was broken up over the building’s four stories, which made it physically hard for Brioza to serve rabbit six ways, or Krasinski to offer apricot parfait with three other stone-fruit iterations. But simpler didn’t mean easier. On the contrary, Larry Stone, partner and sommelier at Rubicon, who married the couple in 2008, admired how they kept pushing. “They never said, 'This is my repertoire,’” Stone says. “They’d go out to a restaurant, or to Asia, and kept incorporating new elements.”

Then, in 2008, Rubicon closed. Nieporent invited the couple to take over his New York restaurant Montrachet, which later became Corton. But they wanted to stay west, to work for themselves. They took a six-week trip around Latin America — Chile, Peru, Argentina — where practically every meal came on a communal platter, with condiments on the side.

“We thought, 'God, this is how we love to eat,’” Brioza says.
They drew up a business plan for a restaurant serving a refined, family-style menu — the initial idea for what would become the Progress.

The next two years, they searched for the perfect space, consulted and cooked private dinners. Then, in 2010, their son, Jasper, was born. Brioza felt pressed to act. “You’re looking at this baby; you feel the need to provide,” he says.

A real estate agent showed him a funky former movie theater on Fillmore with room for two restaurants. The bigger space seemed ideal for their original plan, but it would take years to build and rezone. The second, smaller space would be ready much sooner. The landlord had never built a restaurant before, the couple didn’t have much money, and the sketchy location only added to the risk. But they signed a lease for both spaces, cobbling together funding through their network of private dinner clients. The family-style restaurant would go into the bigger space, whenever it was ready. For the smaller space they had an idea they’d dreamed up years earlier — once more, on an airplane.

“We were flying somewhere, and Stuart said, 'How cool would it be to serve food on a dim sum cart, with no pretense?’” Krasinski says. “We wanted to break down that barrier between chef and diner.” Only later did Brioza realize that the cart cruising down the aisle been such a theme in his life.
The bare-bones approach also meshed with the new economy. After the 2008 crash, chefs everywhere searched for less capital-intense ways to serve customers, including Mission Street Food, serving high-end cooking out of a Guatemalan taco truck.

But when the couple floated the idea with friends and potential backers, many hated the idea.
“When he told me about the cart service and what they were calling the place,” Nieporent says, “I told him, 'Stuart, do yourself a favor, put your food on plates and change the name.’”
Today, State Bird feels like an airplane — in a good way, from back when flight was fun. Diners sit in rows along a central aisle. Cooks and servers bring carts and trays of small dishes.

In the same casually but carefully choreographed way, Brioza and Krasinski juggle their home lives. Their Hayes Valley apartment — industrial-style, art-lined — looks a lot like State Bird. They rely on their wide network of friends and family for help, and split duties like line-cook stations.
“Every relationship takes work,” Krasinski says. “When you meet at 19, you don’t always have the same interests at 38. But we’ve somehow been able to grow personally and professionally along the same trajectory.”

This month, the trajectory continues as the Progress opens. Brioza and Krasinski have spent much of the last five years (if not 15) thinking about it. But as with State Bird, two weeks before opening, they have not finalized the menu.

“The theme of the Progress will come from Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, with Middle Eastern meze and a Japanese minimalist sensibility,” Brioza says. He laughs at the absurdity of that statement, but he means it. “A lot of American chefs are perplexed by the question, 'What’s your style of cooking? What are you, a northern Piemontese chef by way of California? A Japanese sushi chef?’” he says. “We are all of the above.”

So they’ll wing it. And may once again, in the process, reinvent what a restaurant can be.

Article and Photo Sourced From:  http://www.sfgate.com/restaurants/article/State-Bird-Provisions-partnership-serves-up-the-5940431.php#photo-7229176