French Laundry Alum Returns to Dining Scene with Hayes Valley Pop-Up
A new pop-up has emerged from a chef who has run the Bay Area Michelin restaurant gauntlet for decades. Tartufino launches on Sunday, October 13, with service from 1 to 8 p.m., at Grove Street wine bar Birba. The name translates to truffle in Italian, an idea from his girlfriend that’s indicative of his more than 20 years in cooking. Chef-owner Shawn Phillips says he’s getting into the scene once again after seven years working as a private chef. “I just want to get back out there,” Phillips says. “See my peers. And get that feedback in real time.”
It was seeing his friends killing it in the Bay’s robust dining scene that was part of his wanting to return. Phillips cut his teeth in the Bay Area’s fine dining world when he moved here in 2011 from the Cleveland area and quickly found his place in upscale kitchens including Napa’s La Taberna, Yountville’s French Laundry, and in San Francisco at Saison and Atelier Crenn. He even went back to the Midwest for a stint at Chicago’s Alinea. According to his girlfriend, who requested her name not be shared, the only thing more vast than Phillips’s experience is his palette. “The big restaurants give your name clout,” Phillips says. “Yeah, I was Dominique Crenn’s sous chef. But after you have a kid these things don’t mean as much.”
The menu on Sunday is a simple, tapas-style menu of eight playful riffs on various dishes from Phillips’s childhood, or that of his now seven-year-old daughter. Take the “My Bologna Has A First Name,” the nostalgic Oscar Meyer song taken to higher heights with mortadella and pistachio pesto. There’s a blue fin tonnato inspired by his mom’s noodle casserole, and a bread and butter dish using whipped lardo and hazelnuts on sourdough from his friends at Tarts de Feybesse. Though he just wants to get his muscles stretching again, Phillips says it would be wonderful for this pop-up to turn into a restaurant in Italy someday; He says Lake Como is a cut above anywhere he’s had the good fortune to visit.
Indeed he’s got a wide array of experiences under his belt, now counting cooking multiple times for Golden State Warriors player Draymond Green over the years. The French Laundry was influential to his style — all of his restaurant jobs were — but he credits Saison in shaping much of how he thinks about food, working with lauded chef Joshua Skenes in the early 2010s.
Getting out of the restaurant world was a financial decision. He was at the French Laundry at the time and felt he could have gone further, but he and his then wife decided it made sense for him to have a flexible schedule and get that Silicon Valley private chef income. Now, with the groundswell of The Bear infecting pop culture and those nagging “what ifs” at the back of his mind, he wants to show his chops once again with Tartufino. “It always stuck with me,” Phillips says. “You see your friends do these things. It’s almost an identity crisis: Am I good enough to do this?”
Update, October 10, 2024: An earlier version of this story did not correctly state Phillips moved to the Bay Area in 2011.
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