High
   Stakes
    Game


Adam Powell  




























Illustration: Adam Powell












 






San Francisco is the jewel in the culinary crown of America's west coast. With
more than three thousand restaurants in the forty-nine square miles of the city
limits, the competition is extremely fierce in the top echelon of eateries, and
there are only three possible outcomes when a restaurant is opened: fame, lucre,
and the pride in successfully conquering a highly elite and discerning market,
mediocrity and the realization that you will have to continue doing this for the
rest of your life without ever getting rich, and absolute failure, which always
involves a substantial financial loss and some degree of ignominy.




















    

On October 10 Meribel opened with Derek Burns at the helm as chef de
cuisine, serving up hearty "Modern French" dishes in the lush new room at 1001
California at the top of San Francisco's Nob Hill. Burns is  striking, angular,
and all sinew and dexterity at thirty-one.  His boundless enthusiasm for his art
is contagious, and if he seems on edge it is probably because he understands the
potential for disaster always at hand in the world of fine dining.  

Fillet met with Derek Burns on a
Saturday afternoon two weeks after the restaurant opened to ask him how he planned to meet the
challenge of introducing progressive fine dining fare into a locale notorious for
its staunchly conservative culinary tradition.









































"You've got to think about the market... because it's a hotel neighborhood, 
you have the people from Akron and
Des Moines who want their beef and
potatoes and their fried fish.  Then you have the whole old San Francisco society scene,
Herb Caen and his pals, that have seen this restaurant go through all of its
different incarnations; they're hard to impress... I'm trying to address that old
world market, but also I want to attract people who live in San Francisco and are
more progressive. It's a fine line between challenging those that know about food
and scaring those who don't.


























"Case in point: I'm doing a short ribs dish that I did at the James Beard
House last spring. It's inspired by an Elizabeth David provencal daub of beef, kind of 
an old grandma's recipe that you might to eat at sundown by
the hearth. We braise it for 6-8 hours, Nieman-Schell beef, with olives and thyme
and bacon and smoked tomatoes... the smoked tomatoes impart that hearthside
flavor.  The ribs are served on a potato mussoline, which I'm calling mashed potatoes... 
the short ribs are braised and then taken off the bone,
put into a cylinder of steel, a mold, and then pinned, so you get a modern and classy presentation
of an ancient beef provencal recipe.  I'm calling the cuisine Modern French, in
the sense that the techniques are all French. I like to keep all the ethnic
influences only from places that the French have been, so Indochina and Vietnam
are fair game, North Africa is fair game.  I have an Algerian lamb dish. I have a
couple of Vietnamese dishes like the lobster ravioli, and I have a hot and sour
foie gras with glass noodles.  I've also got a twice-baked potatoes with 
of beef - the meat is trimmed, rolled, and tied back on - with broccoli,
carrots and cauliflower. Very straightforward, but the techniques involved in
preparing the dish are fairly advanced."




























  








Burns' obsession with conquering the limitations of the market without compromising the 
artistic integrity of his menu is probably a necessary feature for anyone who wants to make it 
under the bright lights of the fine dining world in San Francisco.  
He must deliver a menu that dazzles industry professionals, the jaded and gossipy
"foodies" who flit from not-spot to hot-spot and whose persistent gossip can make
or break you locally, and the tourists whose number keeps the restaurant from
folding, but who don't know anything about fine dining and really just want a
good hot meal with nothing experimental about it.



















"The market is a big challenge.  Right now I have to keep certain
aspects of the menu in line with our clientele, but I'd liked to see this
restaurant evolve into an even more progressive, fine dining experience.  It's
perfect for my personality... smashing the norms... confounding the expectations of the complacent."




































Four weeks after this interview took place Derek Burns handed in his notice to Meribel, unhappy with the 
way things were going.  He continues his quest to uncompromisingly deliver his culinary vision to his customers, 
stubborn in the face of those who wish to make him acquiesce to market forces.  The loss is Meribel's.