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Home arrow Food & Wine arrow Get Outta Town arrow Rise and Shine: Manresa's David Kinch is one of the culinary world’s brightest stars
Rise and Shine: Manresa's David Kinch is one of the culinary world’s brightest stars PDF Print E-mail
Written by Susan Dyer Reynolds   
Monday, 31 October 2005
ImageI grew up in the Valley of the Olive Garden. While the South Bay is renowned as the world’s think tank of technology, it is also land of the Red Lobster and the Black Angus and home to shiny malls filled with teenagers lining up at Hotdog on a Stick. I know, because I was one of those teenagers. If it weren’t for the fact that my mother and father were both wonderful cooks, our summer sojourns back east and the occasional trips to San Francisco, I probably wouldn’t be writing this column right now. Since moving to San Francisco after journalism school, I have endured endless taunting from my gastronomically spoiled city friends about my upbringing in the Bay Area’s vastest culinary wasteland – until a chef named David Kinch opened a restaurant called Manresa in the sleepy town of Los Gatos and gave me some serious bragging rights.

Kinch started racking up critical acclaim in the mid-90s with his first Silicon Valley restaurant, Sent Sovi, in Saratoga. The San Francisco Chronicle named him a Rising Star Chef in 1996 for his work there, but the small kitchen was limiting. In 2002, Kinch bought a building on Village Lane and hired Bacar architect Jim Zach and renowned kitchen designer Mark Stech-Novak to build the restaurant of his dreams. The open, airy kitchen with state-of-the-art equipment (including a medical bath for slow poaching and a Frenchmade stove) gave Kinch the tools he needed to show the world what he could really do, and the world took notice. London’s Restaurant magazine declared Manresa one of 2005’s 50 best restaurants in the world, while notoriously ho-hum Chronicle critic Michael Bauer referred to it as the “French Laundry South,” awarding Kinch four stars on his most recent visit. The New York Times, Gourmet magazine and the London Observer have all called on Kinch, and Eric Ripert, chef of Manhattan’s famed Le Bernardin, was so awed by his meal at Manresa that he invited Kinch to cook for an elite group of New York’s food journalists in Le Bernardin’s private dining room. Kinch hopped on a plane clutching local produce and brought down the house – even the cynical, been-around-the-butcher’s-block Anthony Bourdain declared Kinch’s food “wildly creative” and said of Kinch, “This guy is indeed something special.” And the accolades show no sign of slowing – in the 2006 Zagat survey, Manresa is number 3 on the list of top 10 food rankings overall for the Bay Area, just after Gary Danko and the French Laundry. In that same survey, 50 percent of San Franciscans said they would travel an hour or more for a good meal; and judging from the packed houses at Manresa, a lot of them are heading south.


Lest you think David Kinch is an overnight sensation, he has been working in professional kitchens for 30 of his 44 years. He grew up in New Orleans, where he started as a dishwasher and landed a job as a prep chef for Paul Prudhomme at the age of 17. After high school he attended culinary school at Rhode Island’s Johnson & Wales, which eventually led to four years at Barry Wine’s four-star Quilted Giraffe in New York City. The Giraffe closed after a 17-year run in 1992 but was, in its day, a veritable breeding ground for bright young chefs who looked at food with a fresh eye. After a stint at Silks in San Francisco’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, he cooked his way across Europe at restaurants in Germany, France and Spain. For the last eight years Kinch has made his home in Santa Cruz, where he tries to surf every day, a hobby he picked up on the Gulf Coast nearly 20 years ago when he was a self-described “skateboard and surf punk.” Manresa is in fact both the name of a beach in Santa Cruz and a city in Catalonia, Spain, which in many respects mirrors Kinch himself. His innovative cuisine du terroir skillfully yet comfortably combines French and modern Catalan cookery with the bountiful native ingredients from the surrounding region, primarily the Santa Cruz foothills that rise majestically above his restaurant.



A Biodynamic Sense of Place
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While my homeland has been much-derided by my city friends, I still love to visit, and Los Gatos is one of my favorite towns. Quaint and relaxed yet sophisticated, it is ground zero for Silicon Valley’s upper echelon, many of whom are Kinch’s regular customers. Inside Manresa on a warm September Sunday, Kinch and his team are preparing for another busy evening with a sense of fun and camaraderie not often seen in upscale establishments. The handsome ranch house-style interior features a central dining room, a cozier fireplace room, and an outdoor patio. Persian rugs line the cement floors, etched and stained to resemble large natural tiles, and hues of burgundy and mustard dance on the walls below the wood-beamed ceilings. A wine case up front filled with Fuji apples appears whimsical but actually serves a purpose: “It gets too much sun to stock with wine,” explains general manager Michael Kean. “Our other manager, Esteban, has horses so when we change the fruit, they benefit.”

On the bathroom walls at Manresa you will find menus from around the world, a fraction of Kinch’s 1200-piece collection celebrating the restaurants where he has eaten and worked. The menu collection speaks volumes about a key element of Kinch’s personality – part of what makes him a great cook is that he is a fan of great cooking.

Despite the growing din of food critics singing his praises, Kinch retains an almost childlike love for what he does. Taking a short break in a corner banquette with the sun streaming across his chef’s whites, his demeanor is laid-back and soft-spoken. Like most of the world’s best chefs, Kinch says he couldn’t imagine doing anything else from a very early age: “I was bitten by the bug of what goes on in a restaurant – the tension, and I mean that in a good way – the rush, the passion of the people you meet. It’s given me the opportunity to see the world and work with chefs who were heroes before I worked with them and those who became heroes after I worked with them.”

Growing up in New Orleans exposed him to the city’s incredibly vibrant culture and cuisine, and it was while he worked as a waiter in an old-school French restaurant called the Commander’s Palace that he realized the kitchen was the place to be. “I was mesmerized by the chefs. They were like pirates – treating people insolently and working over open flames,” he recalls.

His love of French cooking and many visits to Spain played integral roles in his culinary development. “I was enamored with France like everyone else who gets into this business – it’s such a benchmark,” Kinch says. He has been traveling to Spain every year since 1984, but not originally for the food: “The Quilted Giraffe closed for a month in the summer and I’d spend it in Spain; this was before the explosion of hypermodernism. I ended up falling in love with it. I ran with the bulls for five years straight in Pamplona. Spain was off the beaten path then; the post-Franco people were just figuring out how to let their hair down.”

While the time he spent in New York and Europe helped to shape Kinch’s style, he says it is the 10 years he spent being his own boss that brought it focus. “Having your own restaurant gives you the opportunity to develop style with impunity,” he explains. “And cooking is dynamic, not passive, so it will continue to evolve. The past couple of years my food has matured. As much as Manresa is perceived as creative and is known for experimenting and combining disparate flavors, it’s never about the science. It’s about being delicious.”

Inspiration comes to Kinch in taste memories that spring from the simplest experiences. “A great piece of fish in olive oil – that’s when stuff happens. Just close your eyes and enjoy the food,” he says. “If I eat someone’s interpretation of a tomato dish, that’s complete. But I was at the Ferry Building with Joe from Dirty Girl Farm and while we were talking I ate like 14 of his tomatoes – just one of his tomatoes with a sprinkle of salt is all I need to get the creative juices flowing.”



One of the signatures of Kinch’s creative cuisine is his utilization of local produce. Many of the farmers he works with are hobbyists rather than full-time purveyors, and Kinch is out every morning, scouring the Santa Cruz foothills and picking his own fruits and vegetables. “We’re trying to evoke a sense of place here; the terroir aspect, the biodynamic aspect. There are a lot of folks with one or two acres of land who love to grow – I’d be foolish not to take advantage of it,” Kinch says. “Ninety percent of heirloom tomatoes are crap – everyone thinks they’re about wild colors and shapes, but the flavor is crap. They’ve got to be ripe and they’ve got to taste good. I get these amazing heirlooms from a lady named Cynthia – I don’t care about the crazy shapes. It’s almost a tired old cliché but it’s all about the shopping and the ingredients. No one wants to hear that, but it’s true. You can learn to cook in culinary school, but without good ingredients you’re not going to be a good cook.”

Kinch will do whatever it takes to get the best ingredients available. He buys chicken from a farm in Pennsylvania where rumor has it only he and famed chef Alain Ducasse can get it (though Kinch says he believes Thomas Keller buys from her occasionally as well). What makes these chickens so special? “This woman takes really good care of them. It’s a small farm where they’re fed well and they can roam free. They taste the most like the chickens I had in France.”

The way Kinch uses his ingredients further separates him from the pack – much of his menu is created spontaneously: “We don’t write the menu on paper and then go buy ingredients. We buy them, we look at them and then the dishes come together – that way we can get small amounts of things. We lock in on the meat and fish sources, we tweak the menu about five percent every night and every six weeks or so we retool it.”

The Canvas in Kinch’s Kitchen
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Mixed media: Edible elements form a spontaneous work of art on the limestone cutting board canvas in Kinch’s kitchen.

As late afternoon approaches, my photographer, Elizabeth, tells Kinch she is ready to take some food shots. “How do you want them plated?” Kinch inquires. “I don’t want them plated,” Elizabeth says. “I want you to arrange stuff on the cutting board in the kitchen.” Most chefs wouldn’t have a clue as to what she wanted, but Kinch knows immediately. “Cool!” he says, and within minutes he is buzzing about the kitchen collecting ingredients. You can see the wheels in his head spinning furiously; his expression is half mad scientist and half sculptor as he lays a salt-roasted Japanese sardine on the slab of dark green limestone. “Do you know what this is?” he asks, pulling what appears to be thin sheets of mozzarella from parchment paper. Elizabeth and I both guess wrong. “Milk skin,” he says as he wraps it around some creamy risotto and an heirloom tomato core. That’s right, it’s the film that forms over scalded milk, and Kinch makes it look like art. With magician-like sleight of hand he deftly scatters sauces, adds things and takes things away, moves items around—fresh masatake mushrooms, roasted meat juice jelly, octopus a la plancha formed into tiny flowers, fresh garbanzo bean purée, chive oil ... Elizabeth snaps away. Half an hour goes by and Kinch has created no fewer than four masterpieces, wiping the canvas clean each time and starting over with a new set of edible elements. Periodically he crouches beside Elizabeth to look at shots on her playback screen, genuinely delighted by their artistic adventure. A young chef standing next to me smiles with a mix of admiration and amazement. “You think his food looks great,” he says, “wait until you taste it.”

In His Seasonal and Spontaneous Hands

The sun sets on Los Gatos, and Manresa fills with an eclectic crowd – a couple celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, a twentysomething trio decked out in their Sunday best, a man in shorts and a white button-down who could easily be a multimillionaire high tech executive. We have put ourselves in David Kinch’s hands tonight, and that’s just how he likes it. While the menu does offer three- and four-course options, the best way to experience Manresa is to order the “seasonal and spontaneous” tasting menu – as many as 25 Kinch-selected courses. Priced around $100, this is undoubtedly one of the Bay Area’s best deals.

Like a fine wine tasting, the flavors move from light to bold and each dish dazzles the taste buds even more than the one before it. To start, Kinch sends out petite Madeleine cookies too early for dessert, but these are flavored with red pepper and black olive and served with peppery gum drops. The savory madeleines are followed by light-as-air fried Padron peppers sprinkled with Maldon Salt, common tapas in Spain. According to our server, one in 10 of these turns out to be spicy, so eating them is sort of like playing pepper roulette –fortunately, ours are all sweet like little pepper candies. Tiny one-bite corn croquettes are filled with a surprising burst of buttery corn soup infused with a bit of vanilla, and crunchy parmesan churros have a delicate, moist inside that the woman seated next to us aptly describes as “heavenly.”

As the meal unfolds, waiters circulate carrying the farm-fresh “Arpege egg” amuse, Kinch’s homage to chef Alain Passard’s famous egg at his Paris restaurant, L’Arp&eacutege. There are entire online food forums devoted to Kinch’s egg and its origins, but one thing is for certain: he’s made it his own and it’s delicious. Served in its shell, the egg appears unremarkable, but one deep dip of the spoon brings up the unlikely pairing of maple syrup and sherry vinegar along with the rich yolk and custardlike whites.

Courses continue to flow beautifully, from a “barely cooked” soup that highlights the smoky, acidic characteristics of Paul Robeson tomatoes to fresh Monterey Bay abalone presented meuni&egravere-style atop creamy braised pig trotters that perfectly illustrate Kinch’s gift for combining incongruous flavors and textures. Corn and tomato salad “new version” is slowcooked corn thickened with the natural starch into a pudding, then layered with lemon basil oil and tomato sorbet. It’s topped with tomato water gel&eacutee infused with lemon balm and a tuille of thinly sliced bread with parmesan cheese.

The visual appeal is as stunning as some of the unusual taste combinations; however, Kinch’s food remains accessible and never gets bogged down in technique. Wild and farm-grown celeries accent velvety sweetbreads floating on a tangy cloud of garlic pur&eacutee, while Japanese bass swims in a sofregit of basil, tomatoes, anchovies and onions mellowed over four days of cooking. Salt-grilled sardines are accompanied by that milk skin risotto which, it turns out, is more than just an oddball garnish – the sweetness offsets the strong but wonderfully briny taste of the fish.



By the time the beautifully rare roast squab with crushed raspberries and an unctuous prime beef roasted in its own fat arrive, we feel perfectly satisfied but not stuffed. Madeleines provide the perfect bookend to the meal, but this time they are sweet, flavored with milk chocolate and served alongside chewy strawberry gumdrops.

The international wine list at Manresa is as good as any you’ll find, but I like the fact that wine director Jeff Bareilles adds to the sense of place by including local makers like Bonny Doon and Graff Family Vineyards. We chose the optional wine pairing with our tasting, which I always recommend when dealing with a libretto of a wine list, and Bareilles’ picks paired perfectly with Kinch’s distinctive style.

Manresa’s service is thankfully not the stuffy overly polished service you’ll find at some of San Francisco’s high-end eateries – while the staff has benefited from training with a consummate professional such as general manager Kean, the relaxed tone that permeates the evening suits the laid-back Los Gatos locale and Kinch’s thoughtful cooking to a tee.

Another night ends, and as Kinch and crew clean up the magnificent kitchen and prepare to close up shop, he is still buzzing with what seems to be an endless source of energy. “I am still passionate about food – whether it’s reading about it, talking about it or cooking at home,” he says. “Every day here is a new day and it’s still very exciting. I like making people happy.”

Driving back to The City, Elizabeth and I agreed that Kinch’s passion shines through his cooking and that our meal at Manresa was one of the best in recent memory, but we also agreed that it was so much more than just a meal. Dining at Manresa is an experience, a sort of long and winding gastronomic road trip where the journey is as much fun as getting there, and you can’t help but sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Manresa: 320 Village Lane (near Santa Cruz Ave.), Los Gatos. (408) 354-4330. Dinner Wednesday through Sunday. Reservations are accepted two months in advance. The Hotel Los Gatos will waive their weekend two-night minimum stay if you are dining at Manresa. Call the hotel at (408) 335-1700 for details.
Last Updated ( Saturday, 12 January 2008 )