David Kinch steps up to the plate

In early 2008, David Kinch, the man behind two-Michelin-starred Manresa in Los Gatos, agreed to appear on Iron Chef America, committing to a competition that gave him pause. Kinch hardly has the makings of a Food Network personality. Soft-spoken, bookish, a reluctant self-promoter, he’s something of an anti–celebrity chef. The producers of the show had tried to land Kinch before, but he’d turned the offer down: The idea of culinary competitions runs counter to his vision of what cooking is about. But when the second invite came, times had changed. Economic quakes were rattling high-end restaurants around the country. Alarmed by the slowdown in his own dining room, Kinch shelved his reservations about reality TV.
     “In a climate like that, I figured that any publicity was good publicity,” Kinch says. “And I decided that as long as I was going to do the show, I might as well try to win.”
     Kinch didn’t just win. He trounced Food Network star Bobby Flay in a cabbage-themed cook-off, his 10-point victory amounting to a food-world version of a landslide at the polls. Watch the episode on YouTube, and you feel a twinge of pity for the outmatched Flay. To Flay’s pedestrian take on corned beef and cabbage, Kinch responds with a modernist reworking of stuffed cabbage, a napoleon of sorts composed of rutabaga, turnip, fennel, and onion layered between leaves of savoy cabbage. Where Flay contents himself with filet mignon and kimchee, Kinch conjures a dish he calls Cabbage Patch, a gathering of cabbage stems and leaves, some raw, some cooked, over bits of country ham, splashed with a riesling dressing and underpinned by a toasted-hazelnut-and-chicory “soil” that has since become one of Kinch’s most imitated creations.
     From a business standpoint, the show paid off; no sooner had it aired than Manresa’s phone lines flooded. But for Kinch, 15 minutes of fame were enough. After
the taping, when others might have pressed for more attention, the chef retreated from the spotlight, returning to his post as the artful curator of his out-ofthe-way restaurant, where, it just so happens, a more lasting kind of recognition has found him anyway.
     Kinch, who is 50—an elder statesman by industry standards—is the leader of a movement that is fashioning nothing less than a defining new genre of regional cuisine.
     Just how to characterize that cuisine is a slippery question; like most original forms, it eludes classification. But you know it when you see it, and you see it at a host of the Bay Area’s most interesting restaurants, where a Kinchian aesthetic clearly holds sway. Some, like James Syhabout’s Commis in Oakland and Napa’s Ubuntu under Jeremy Fox, were launched by chefs who trained in Kinch’s kitchen. Others, like Saison and Commonwealth in San Francisco, have no direct lineage
from Manresa but could pass for blood relations in the way they turn our regional conventions on their side.
     The sum of these efforts led GQ’s restaurant critic, Alan Richman, in July 2011, to call out San Francisco as the most exciting dining scene in the country and Kinch as its central figure. In December, the same magazine named Kinch its chef of the year.
     To Kinch, the attention is both flattering and bemusing. “It’s been fun, and I’ve enjoyed it,” he says, “though I’m almost embarrassed by it.” But to his peers and protégés, the recognition has been a long time coming.
     “David Kinch is a guru to a younger generation,” says Teague Moriarty, of Sons & Daughters in San Francisco. “In everything we do here, we owe our gratitude to
him.” Syhabout, who served as Kinch’s chef de cuisine—and also as his assistant on Iron Chef—before earning a Michelin star for his own restaurant, Commis, says, “It may sound like a bold statement, but when you think of all the people who have come through his kitchen, and the way his style has spread to other restaurants, David Kinch has done more than any chef since Alice Waters to reshape California cuisine.”
     There is, of course, no matching the extent of Waters’s impact, its ripples having spread from the White House garden to school cafeterias across the country. And like every sentient chef in the country, Kinch acknowledges his debt to Waters. “Anybody who has put the time and resources into procuring the quality of ingredients that she has—how can you not have deep respect for that?” he says. “At Chez Panisse, they have very strong opinions and aesthetics, and they have stuck to them, when the easiest thing for them to do would be to stint. I think that’s really honorable.”