IN THE KITCHEN OAKLAND’S JEN BIESTY GIVES LOCAL TUNA A SUMMERY TWIST.
According to Jen Biesty, her professional success in the Bay Area has everything to do with falling in with a good crowd.
“When I moved here in 1995 from New York, the city was filled with successful female chefs,” she recalls. “Nancy Oakes, Traci Des Jardins, Loretta Keller — they became my mentors.” Biesty took a position working with Keller at the now-defunct Coco500, a seminal San Francisco neighborhood restaurant that opened four years prior, eventually working her way up to executive chef.
Biesty has sparkly blue eyes and a shock of hair reminiscent of Tintin, and her compact frame moves efficiently around her home kitchen, spinning from the stove to the cutting board with practiced ease. A seasoned television vet (she was on “Top Chef ” in 2007) and no stranger to media attention, she’s ready for our show-and-tell.
On the counter, summer’s bounty is piled: a generous heap of peppers, apricots and peaches, handfuls of herbs. Biesty removes a fat loin of albacore tuna from the refrigerator, which she’s planning to give “the porchetta treatment” — that is, rubbing the exterior of the fish with a punchy mixture of fresh marjoram, thyme, rosemary, garlic, fennel seeds and red chile flakes, a flavoring typically used on pork but well suited to the meaty fish.
Biesty left Coco500 in 2008 for an executive chef job at Scala’s Bistro, the restaurant within the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. It was a surprising, challenging move for the chef, who admits with a smile that it was a “fake-it-until-you-make-it situation.” Biesty was responsible for the food in both the restaurant and the hotel, managing a staff of 65. “It’s scary running a place like that. But I figured if I could succeed there I could eventually open a restaurant of my own.”
Two years ago she did just that, opening Shakewell in Oakland’s Ivy Hill neighborhood, together with Scala’s former pastry chef, Tim Nugent. “To be honest, I didn’t want to open in Oakland,” says Biesty. But when space after space in San Francisco fell through, they reconsidered. “Now I never want to leave,” says Biesty, who lives with her wife in a bungalow a 10-minute drive from the restaurant. “It’s friendlier here, and the pace is a little slower. And my favorite farmers’ market is blocks from the restaurant.”
Biesty typically shops for Shakewell’s Spanishinflected menu at the weekly Grand Lake market, which is where she picked up the ingredients for her ersatz porchetta tuna. At the restaurant, many of the dishes are cooked in the wood-burning oven. At home she uses a hot cast iron pan instead, searing the fish in pancetta drippings to imbue the meaty albacore with porky savor. In a second pan she chars apricots and peppers, melding them into a warm salad that she spikes with Sherry vinegar and garnishes with toasted pine nuts.
Biesty slices the fish, still rare at its center, and fans the slices over the salad. She fusses with the plate, readying it for the camera and my waiting fork, then takes a few steps back and admires her work. I take a few steps forward, swooping in on her smart composed salad. Because a summer dish this good isn’t meant to be merely admired.