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Palmer Does Healdsburg We go behind-the-scenes with celeb chef Charlie Palmer at the third annual Pigs & Pinot festival. |
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posted on March 17, 2008 |
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San Francisco is a city that loves its local chef celebrities, but one that has yet to lure big name chefs from elsewhere (paging Mario Batali). But just a few hours to the North, in Healdsburg, there’s a celeb in our midst: Charlie Palmer. It would be fair to call Palmer an “old-school” chef—he’s classically trained with a good French foundation and opened his first restaurant, Aureole, in New York City in 1988 when he was only 28. In the twenty years since he’s opened 12 more, including Dry Creek Kitchen at the Hotel Healdsburg, the town he, wife Lisa and their four sons now call home. Last weekend, Palmer hosted his third annual “Pigs & Pinot” event, a pork and wine bacchanalia that’s a benefit for Share Our Strength (an organization that leads the global fight against hunger) and Healdsburg’s St. John School, where his boys attend. It’s safe to say that Palmer’s arrival amped up the food scene in Sonoma a hundred fold—now, this sleepy Sonoma town is a destination for both dining and wine, with Dry Creek Kitchen (together with Cyrus restaurant down the street) anchoring the two corners of the quaint plaza, which, this time of year, is filled with flowering trees that gently rain their petals down on people strolling by. It’s only fitting that Palmer throw a party that’s part homage to his adopted town, and Pigs & Pinot fits the bill in a big way: the best Pinots in the world from the top producers (many of them the “cult wines,” like those from fabled Sonoma producer Kosta Browne, that you hear about but can never get your hands on) paired with pork in myriad forms. Says Palmer, “It’s the perfect pairing—pinot can cut through the fat and smoke in any pork preparation.” That theory is put to the test the first night at the opening reception, when some 50 pinots are on offer, along with a panoply of porcine-heavy eats like barbequed ribs, wild boar sliders, pork satay and carnitas tacos. It’s easy to feel intimidated by Palmer. He stands about 6’4” and has the build of a football player, a pursuit he was serious about before becoming a chef and attending the Culinary Institute of America (He now sits on their Board of Trustees). But then I catch him the second night of the festival, when he and a host of visiting chefs (including SF chef Nancy Oakes of Boulevard, David Burke, Philippe Rispoli, and Australian Luke Mangan, the executive chef of SF newcomer South Food + Wine Bar) are in the midst of preparing the five-course gala dinner, and he couldn’t be nicer. He ushers me into the hot kitchen, corrals the chefs for a photo and then stands by the sidelines talking with me. His phone rings, and he picks it up: It’s his 14-year-old son, complaining because his younger brother (one of the 10-year-old twins, and the one that shows the surest signs of becoming a chef) has refused to cook for him. He’s asking his dad, in the middle of service, to tell him how to cook pasta. Palmer patiently guides him through the steps, including “chef tips” like how much salt to add to the water (a lot). Palmer, who regularly flies to New York, Vegas, Dallas and Southern California to check on his restaurants, moved his family to Healdsburg precisely because he wanted to be part of this mundane stuff—football games, pasta dinners—with his kids. And though it would make perfect sense for Palmer to be the first big time chef with national presence to open a restaurant in San Francisco, he’s not planning one—ever. “I won’t and can’t do a business in San Francisco” says Palmer, “Because I love the city. If I opened a restaurant there, it would be another place where I went to work.” Another reason you won’t see him opening up in San Francisco anytime soon are the punishing regulations that are giving restaurant in this city the squeeze—the minimum wage, universal health care and other red tape. Compared to his most recent project in Vegas, a hotel and restaurant compound in downtown that will break ground this spring (a deal the city of Vegas made very attractive), the SF regulations seem downright Draconian. Instead of opening a restaurant here, he’s planning on selling one of his apartments in New York so he can buy one in San Francisco, though he and his wife has somewhat divergent ideas about what neighborhood they like best. When I ask Palmer where he likes to eat when he’s in San Francisco for fun, he mentions SPQR (ed. note: Join the club, Chuck) then says casually “I really like Michael’s place.” That would be Michael Mina, he of four-star Chronicle fame, who also happens to be an old friend of Charlie’s. That shouldn’t be surprising. When you’ve been a top chef for as long as he has, you’ve got a lot of friends. In fact, much of the guest chef line-up is comprised of people that Palmer once shared the stove with. He and David Burke (also a CIA grad) worked together at River Café before parting ways; Philippe Rispoli cooked at Aureole before joining fellow Frenchman Daniel Boulud (Rispoli now cooks at Boulud’s Vegas outpost). When we finally get a chance to sit down, I ask Palmer to talk to me about some of the trends he’s seeing in New York now (figuring it’s likely that those same trends will make their way westward in a red hot minute.) “ Yeah, there’s a big trend. It’s called David Chang,” jokes Palmer. Chang, for those who don’t know, is the young ingénue of the food world in New York right now, the man behind Momofuku, Momofuku Ssäm Bar and the brand new restaurant Ko, which is causing quite the stir in the Big Apple. Palmer laughs for a minute, but it’s clear he’s dead serious. In the silence that follows, I wonder if Palmer’s contemplating his similarities to Chang (young New Yorker opens ambitious restaurants, wins acclaim, loves pork). Possibly, or maybe he’s just thinking about how he can lure him to next year’s Pigs & Pinot.
San Francisco is a city that loves its local chef celebrities, but one that has yet to lure big name chefs from elsewhere (paging Mario Batali). But just a few hours to the North, in Healdsburg, there’s a celeb in our midst: Charlie Palmer. It would be fair to call Palmer an “old-school” chef—he’s classically trained with a good French foundation and opened his first restaurant, Aureole, in New York City in 1988 when he was only 28. In the twenty years since he’s opened 12 more, including Dry Creek Kitchen at the Hotel Healdsburg, the town he, wife Lisa and their four sons now call home. |
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