San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Michelin stars align with perfect pairing
Six months after Bruno and Christie Chemel laid off the last cook at Baumé, when they were working harder than they ever had but were beginning to think this crazy plan might succeed, they decided they could do without their dishwasher, too.
By that time, they’d fired the cleaning company for showing up late, let go of the linen service — Christie simply took napkins home to wash and iron — and indulged their 11-year-old son, who had been begging to help his father in the kitchen after school.
The Palo Alto mom-and-pop shop kept the thing that mattered, however: their two Michelin stars.
The international restaurant guide is so tightfisted with its stars that only seven Bay Area restaurants hold such an honor (another seven restaurants have the maximum of three). Two-star dining is usually associated with convoys of waiters, more courses than you should count and stratospheric prices. According to a Michelin representative, Baumé is the only two-star restaurant in the United States with only two staff: Bruno, the chef, and Christie, the general manager.
Early in the current eight-course tasting menu at Baumé — which, if you order the cheapest wine pairing, costs more than $800 a person — Christie, whose waterfall laugh can frequently be heard in the dining room, brings over enough golden Osetra caviar to supply a minor Russian duke’s breakfast, heaped onto two asparagus spears.
Squares of yuzu and parsley paper not much bigger than tabs of acid are laid over the top. There’s not much to the dish beyond the startling, buttery sympathy between the vegetal and the marine. It exudes a luxury that has disappeared under their contemporaries’ effusive love of microflowers and swoops of puree.
So does Baumé’s small dining room, whose walls are painted an eggplant hue so dark it resembles the last few seconds of dusk. The four tables are separated from the entryway, and from one another, with heavy curtains and lighted shelves of wine glasses, and an overhead spotlight is trained onto each of the dark wood tables. The front windows are blackened so thoroughly the street disappears.
Passersby ask the Chemels all the time, they say, when their 8-year-old restaurant will open. Few of their clients live in the neighborhood, or even in San Francisco. Diners come from Silicon Valley old-money circles — funders more than founders — and Hong Kong, New York and Europe. The Michelin guide brings them here. Bruno Chemel grew up in a tiny town in France’s Auvergne, son of an ex-military engineer type, and entered the world of Michelin-starred restaurants at 16. By 18 he had moved to Paris to the rigor-driven kitchens of Guy Savoy and Le Grand Véfour. He came to New York and unwittingly ended up with a green card, spent two years cooking at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo, then traveled east again to San Francisco in 1997.
With his experience, Bruno could get hired anywhere, and so he dove into the flash-and-fail world of the first dot-com boom’s restaurant scene. In 2000, during a three-month tenure as the executive chef of Qi and Water Bar in San Francisco International Airport (months in business: also three), Bruno met Christie, who was supplementing her job as an American Airlines ticket agent. Qi, and Bruno, were Christie’s entry into an 18-year-career in restaurants as a server and manager.
After Michelin began awarding stars in California in 2006, Bruno returned to the anointed realms, replacing Christopher Kostow as chef at Chez TJ in Mountain View. “I was changing my jobs every two years,” Chemel says. “I
was thinking: Can I keep doing that until I’m 70? Probably not.”
By 2009, Bruno, who has retained the French talent for illustrating his sentences with onomatopoeic whistles and tchak!s and bofs, was more than ready to run his own restaurant. “I’m definitely a very shy guy, but when it comes to cooking, I’m very open, sometimes too open,” he says. He couldn’t restrain himself from telling cooks, waiters, owners what he thought of what he was doing. Enemies were made, he admits, bozos — a favorite word — dismissed.
Between the foie gras, presented as a trompe l’oeil strawberry, and the squab breast, whose skin is caramelized with sugar and cooked to a crackle, comes a dish whose trickery stumps even a seasoned cook. Two soft green leek skins encase a turbot mousse so insubstantial no human hand, one thinks, could have divided it into such neat inch-long cylinders.
If the current fashion in Michelinstarred kitchens is like a Debussy opera, lush and harmonically agile, Baumé’s food is a spare Satie gymnopedie. The meal resembles kaiseki in its minimalism. It relies on the precise balance between a few flavors and, occasionally, a sip of wine. Yet Christie Chemel’s warmth undercuts its formality.
Talking to the couple around the table on one of their off days, Bruno and Christie seem to mute each other’s intensity. Christie laughs away Bruno’s brooding and flare-ups, he honors her own fervor for detail.
In December 2009, the two charmed their way into a 15-year lease on a small storefront in Palo Alto, last a shortlived Italian restaurant, and installed 10 tables in the dining room. At the time when Baumé earned its second Michelin star in 2011, Bruno oversaw six staffers in the kitchen. Christie managed six in the dining room.
But Christie was tired of re-polishing glasses and re-cleaning the bathroom, constantly dragging her servers out of emergencies. Bruno was fed up with berating his cooks for all their mistakes and inexactitudes, not to mention the grumbling.
After a lunch in 2012 at Guy Savoy in Paris, where the Chemels and two other tables were served by just the maître d’hotel, they wondered: Could smaller be better? It took the couple until 2015 to rip out the last extra tables and let go of their employees.
Four tables a night, Christie quickly found, she could handle. She trusts that when she sets the tables they won’t need dusting, and when she washes the linen napkins on Sundays, they won’t need re-ironing. Chemel found that when he took charge of the wine list — focusing on rarities and the ultra-luxe wineries his clients tended to stock in their own cellars — his beverage sales shot up.
The first two years, Bruno admits, were even more stressful than he imagined: one guy doing all the prep and the plating, plus sweeping the floors several times a day and doing all the dishes. It didn’t help that he feels compelled to change the menu every few weeks.
But he indulged in some sharp new knives that line cooks wouldn’t mar. He didn’t need to make prep lists for staff because everything was in his head. Their son, Antoine, now 13, has kept up his grades even while playing sous-chef most nights, and has turned out to have a phenomenal palate. “He’s driving me crazy with his attention to detail,” Christie says, nothing but approval in her voice.
They don’t know if Baumé will ever earn three stars. “I don’t think I’m good,” Bruno says, several times. Then he acknowledges that’s probably all right, because two stars keeps him from getting lazy.
These days the couple work in a tightly calibrated syncopation that begins when they drop Antoine off at school and endures until after midnight. Gaining control has finally freed them. This past year, Bruno says, he sometimes stands around between courses. The couple have taken up midmorning coffee breaks.
“Being by myself, to me that’s a relief,” Bruno says. “I don’t need to yell at nobody. I just yell at myself if I want to.”
He does, Christie agrees. Then she laughs. At the sound, her husband almost smiles.