WILD AT HEARTH
Seeking a venue truer to his elegant take on primitive cooking, Saison chef Joshua Skenes creates an exclusive supper-club experience at his Sonoma ranch
Seeking a venue truer to his elegant take on primitive cooking, Saison chef Joshua Skenes creates an exclusive supper-club experience at his Sonoma ranch
Unable to shed the fundamental orderliness needed to run their own kitchens, chefs can always be counted on to arrive early to a dinner party, even when the tables are turned and they’ve been invited to enjoy the food rather than expedite it. That’s exactly what happened one recent midsummer’s evening when Mourad Lahlou of Mourad in San Francisco and James Syhabout of Commis in Oakland arrived 90 minutes premature for a mystery repast — the latest in a series that has been fabled on social media — at the Sonoma ranch of Saison chef Joshua Skenes and his wife, Amanda.
From the belly of the house, a sturdy Normandy-style revival whose carved wooden doors, thick stone walls and beamed cathedral ceilings will eventually take on beautiful character as centuries pass, Garth Brooks, via Spotify, belts out “Friends in Low Places.” The song’s irony is not lost on Lahlou and
Syhabout, who stand on the patio admiring the estate’s 300 undulating acres, blanketed in Cabernet grapevines and studded with gnarled oak trees. Skenes greets his guests with bleepable language that, among this crew, can only be construed as terms of endearment. The sun still has a few hours before it dips below the ridge in the distance, and since these dudes cared enough to show up early, Skenes might as well put them to work.
The chefs jump into the Polaris with a hunting rifle, and Skenes takes them on a dusty ramble through the hills in pursuit of jackrabbits. If they manage to take one out, he’ll stew it up adobo style, with chiles, garlic and tomatoes, over the fire in the cowboy cauldron. It would make a delicious precursor to the night’s main course, barbecue antelope T-bone, carved from an animal that Skenes took down in New Mexico. Hunting has been a way of life for the 38-year-old since boyhood, when his half-disciplinarian, half-hippie parents set him free in the swampy wilds of Jacksonville, Fla., to swim among water moccasins and lure alligators to the riverbanks with squeaky toys.
“My dad would say, ‘You want meat? Here’s a knife, go get some,’ or ‘If you want to catch a gator, just be sure not to get eaten,’ ” Skenes recalls. “When I think about all the stupid s— I used to do as a kid, I get the heebie-jeebies.” While hunting is integral to Skenes’ cooking (a sort of stylized primitivism that involves, among other tricky balancing acts, the mastery of fire and smoke), it’s an experience that’s hard to replicate in San Francisco for his guests at Saison, what with the general lack of game animals roaming the urban jungle and laws against the open carrying of firearms in public. (Although the sport is well documented in the moody ambience at the restaurant and the country house, where faux hides drape the backs of dining chairs and taxidermy busts are mounted on the walls, including the first elk Skenes ever shot and Amanda’s inaugural conquest, an antelope that she impressively squared in her crosshairs from 720 yards away.)
The ranch dinners are an opportunity to make more indelible the connection between the food and the world from which it comes. Perhaps due to decades of Chinese martial arts training, the chef is particularly regimented when it comes to “eliminating the gap” between the procurement of ingredients and their eventual consumption. The practice is made more complex when also considering the timing of peak flavor.
Antelope loin, for example, is dry-aged for a month, concentrating the flavor and giving the natural enzymes a chance to tenderize the meat, while Half Moon Bay box crabs, also on the menu for the
“Fire is like a trance song.” — Joshua Skenes
evening, are kept alive in a cooler full of ocean water, and then poached very gently for less than a minute in delicate wild-fennel nage. The salad course is a bohemian tumble of red romaine, purslane, basil and nasturtium harvested from the culinary garden, located 15 paces from the kitchen.
“When there’s no gap, no interference, everything tastes different. It feels different. It is different,” says Skenes, opening the wooden door to the preservation shed, a cool, dark place on the side of the house where he steeps rose-petal vinegar, dries herbs for Saison sauce (a seasoning of grilled fish bones and fermented grains that provides umami depth to broths and dressings) and stores the housemade barbecue sugar (a dry rub of chile, coffee, sugar and sea salt) that will be used on the grilled antelope tonight.
Elmer Fuddian in their attempts to hunt down rascally rabbits, the chefs skid up to the homestead, a cloud of dust in their wake, empty-handed but spirits high. “You experience a rush when you’re out there looking for something to bring back to the table,” says Lahlou, stricken with pangs of nostalgia for his native Morocco, where the “gap” between, say, live chickens and a tagine with preserved lemons and cracked olives is a whole lot shorter — and bloodier — than the sanitized American reality of boneless, skinless thighs perfectly arrayed on Styrofoam trays. “It feels like you’re coming alive.”
The soundtrack has changed to a playlist of ’80s easy listening — Ambrosia, Christopher Cross, Fleetwood Mac. Senior staff from Saison, including general manager Bevan Bunch, head sommelier Noah Dranow and wine director Mark Bright are hustling to ready the patio, the dining room for the evening. A weathered-wood table is placed atop a chunky gray rug. Edison bulbs are strung through the trellis, alongside the Sally Holmes climbing
“If you understand a certain standard of quality, you have a responsibility to provide it. Anything else would be compromised.” - Joshua Skenes
rose. A painterly centerpiece of blackberry vines, magnolias and roses begins to take shape. Wineglasses are shined. Table linens ironed. A taxidermy rattlesnake, coiled in striking position, is placed at the cigar bar between a bottle of Nikka whiskey and a humidor full of Cuban stogies.
Amanda shoos chickens off the patio while she sweeps away fallen leaves. A year ago, when the ranch dinners were just a germ of an idea, her husband envisioned a mom-and-pop operation, in which he did all the cooking and she managed the front of the house. “I’m a pharmacist, what do I know about hospitality and service?” says Amanda. “I think he saw the fear in my eyes. For the sake of our marriage, I suggested we take another approach.”
After a few trial runs with such culinary luminaries as Jason Wang (owner, the Halal Guys) and Chris Ying (Lucky Peach cofounder) in attendance, the exclusive affairs have evolved into a more rustic version of Saison’s Michelin three-star experience: A sharply dressed staff, with its graceful, intuitive fine-dining choreography, serves a family-style meal of Saison-level dishes, many of which are best consumed using fingers as utensils (bowls of fresh water afloat with rose petals are provided to freshen the hands).
“If you eat this way, you have more sensual awareness of the food,” says Skenes. “Maybe it’s a placebo effect, but I actually think the food tastes better.” A seat at the table will now cost $500, double that if you want wine pairings. The fine print: Not all who express an interest will be invited to dine — Skenes has so far “hit the eject button” on only one potential guest, whose pre-dining questionnaire came back with too many dietary restrictions.
For the record, Skenes was once one of “those people,” having spent some time in the late ’90s “living like a monk” in a Japanese temple in Atlanta before beginning culinary school at Johnson & Wales in New York. During that time, he ate “nothing but leaves,
berries and temple food,” a simple vegetarian cuisine bereft of such pungent aromatics as onions and garlic, believed to be disruptive to the pursuit of Zen. The experience, he claims, reset his palate. Now an undiagnosed “super taster,” he’s able to recognize the subtleties of, say, pellet feed in commodity meats (hence his strong preference for pasture-raised animals and wild game) or “pond scum” on caviar.
By contrast, Saison’s private-batch caviar — presented at the ranch dinners in an impressive 1-pound kelp-wrapped package that’s gently warmed by the fire before it’s dramatically cut open tableside and drizzled with seaweed butter — comes from Sacramento and is plump, briny, nutty and, above all, says Skenes, “clean-tasting.” It’s cured with a smoked house salt — the kosher variety is strictly verboten — that’s made using deep-ocean water, a level of craft that often goes undetected by the average palate. A self-sacrificing martial-arts mentality kicks in. “It doesn’t matter who notices,” he says. “If you understand a certain standard of quality, you have a responsibility to provide it. Anything less would be compromised.”
While the guests, who now include tech investor Ilya Fushman and his wife, Ewa, partake in a round of archery against an unsuspecting plastic boar, the outdoor cauldron fire, built with almond wood, is being coaxed to a state of glowing red embers and white ash. A wayward arrow ricochets off the kettle, narrowly missing sous chef Paul Chung’s femoral artery; the poor thing shields himself behind the protea bushes for the remainder of target practice.
Skenes’ fire cooking is well documented (char, smoke and fatty drippings asizzle are strong taste memories from a youth spent hunting and camping in the wilderness), but less so is his fascination with its elemental nature. “Fire is like a trance song,” he says. “You could take a tablet of acid and stare into the flames and be happy for a long time.” Arguably, its primeval origin seems more authentic to the ranch setting. “I’d love to have a bigger fire at the restaurant, maybe outside in the alley, but apparently, the city wouldn’t like that.”
It’s the golden hour now. Skenes, who eschews his chef ’s whites for a black T-shirt, a baseball cap and a towel around his neck, joins the guests for a toast. Mark Bright uncorks a prized bottle of 2002 Krug Brut Champagne. As the crystal flutes clink, Bevan Bunch brings a mysterious wicker basket to the table. The most adoring of ’80s pop ballads, “Lady in Red” by Chris De Burgh, purrs over the speakers. Lahlou places his hand over his heart. “This music makes me want to ...” he muses. Bunch pulls back the basket cover. “Release some butterflies?” she asks. And just like that, a flurry of more than 100 monarchs and painted ladies, with their orange bands and pretty white spots, are liberated into the sunset, a winged migration that’s at least as magical as the evening that’s about to unfold.