SFist Interviews: Elizabeth Falkner

So I have Citizen Cake right, I've been running that restaurant for 11 years. When we opened the restaurant, like a lot of places, when you start expanding, you hire a chef de cuisine, put a chef de cuisine over here…I found somebody I wanted to work with, and I hired him, way before the restaurant even opened. Eventually, the chef de cuisine who I had hired didn't have the same exact vision. It wasn't coming together for me. It just wasn't what I wanted to see. We parted ways in October, and I was thinking, 'Ok, I gotta hire another chef de cuisine.' And I'm like, 'Well, wait a minute. The economy is crazy right now.' I thought the only way for me to do this is to do the food that I am talking about. It was kind of like, 'Ok, this is the stuff we're doing,' a changing of the guards, here I am. I had a really great team that stayed around during the transition.

We actually had the opportunity to eat here last summer when it was the former chef de cuisine, and what we had noticed was the desserts were excellent. And you could tell where the savory was coming into the desserts and it was very well balanced and it really worked. And then it seemed that some of that sweetness that you're so associated with was working to make its way into the entrees and that's where there maybe was some unbalance. Was that supposed to be the vision?

It's pretty simple. Cooking is very personal for a lot of people. My former chef de cuisine is a really good cook. Certainly has his own kind of style, which is different than my chef over at Citizen Cake because he and I speak the same language. So I can say [to him], 'I really want you to do a play on paella or do something with steak and ice cream.' We have been working together for 6 years. Maybe it was something that was lost in translation. It was never supposed to be: let's bring some pastry things into the savory food. There were some people here last night, and I was explaining to them that I like a lot of deconstruction of food in general, hence the cookbook Demolition Desserts, and sort of looking at iconic food and saying, 'Ok, that's lemon meringue pie, but how can we remodel that to make it a different adventure—that it's actually lemon meringue pie but a totally different experience or a different adventure. I'm not really just trying to bring sweet into savory and savory into sweet.

There are classic things that I like—braised beef short ribs for example—and wanting to do that with instead of just mashed potatoes or horseradish potatoes (I love the horseradish with beef…I'm kind of a horseradish freak), but there's another starchy, pasta thing that I like called, gnudi. You don't hear it very much here, but I had a great one at the Spotted Pig a few times in New York. It's something that's kind of Austro-Hungarian. It's like naked ravioli. It's kind of like gnocchi; it's related. I just have a 'Hey, that's a really yummy thing! I just want to make those. I want to make horseradish gnudi covered in beet sauce.

That combination: beef, horseradish, and short ribs is pretty classic. It's been done before. But making the little gnudi and making those explosive and interesting with beets and a lot of crème fraiche in it too..that combination is just magical to me.

More on her concept as a chef de cuisne... I'm definitely kind of dying to do this soon, a jambalaya concept but more California-ized. So that's what really occurs to me. How can I make this more like our region, but with an influence from somewhere else, and with stuff that's in season, and maybe there's a little bit of playfulness in it. I don't know if that's really just a pastry chef thing, but that's my personality in the food. There's a little teeny surprise element. Or it's just beautiful, there is definitely the artfulness going on in the plate. Somebody said to me last night too, 'You're kind of like a little bit rustic and you kind of like a little bit of architecture, and I said, 'I've always been like that.' I do that with my desserts all the time. This space feels like that.

This is the best example of that. It's totally 21st century in a space completely from the past.

And I think that's sort of the era that we're in right now, aesthetically, certainly conceptually, because think about how much in the last century we're still holding onto a lot of concepts, but there's so much newness. How do we even continue as a culture with all of this traditionalism and all this modernism. How does that work? I think that's very natural for me, for it to be expressed through this medium.

Did you leave anything from the old menu.

No.

Just a clean slate?

Yeah.

When Orson first opened, one thing the restaurant was slammed for were its tiny portions and big price tag. Falkner definitely is keen on letting folks know that they get what they pay for in terms of volume at her restaurant, and explained how Orson is working to be more than a special occasion restaurant. You know, I think this restaurant is so cool because it's big. We can seat 250 people here. It's got the big bar thing. So I wanted to have a menu where you can come into the dining room and say, 'Great, we want a $65 tasting menu,' which the table is going to try everything that we do. Not like everybody gets a petite, mini courses, but everybody gets to try the whole menu. But at the bar, you might just want to have a really good burger. We do foie gras mayonnaise, a little house-made steak sauce in this cup, cobb salad relish is what I call it because it's bleu cheese, bacon, and shaved egg, and parsley all mixed together. And you throw all this stuff on the burger, a house-made bun. It's $15, not expensive, and it's really good, it's good quality. Or some duck fat French fries, or pizza, or whatever.

Is there a dish that you've yet to deconstruct or a cuisine that still perplexes you

It would be a cool to do a whole roasted pig in the oven. Or a baby lamb. Or something like that. But when? It has to be for a special occasion because people aren't just going to fly in for that [these days].

Your food is so structural, we're curious, does certain architecture influence your cooking. Can you look at the Transamerica building and go, "A-ha! Bingo! I know what I am going to make next!"

It's not totally like that for me, although I grew up around Los Angeles and grew up around a lot of modern art, my dad's an artist and did all the paintings here. That architecture of the '80s in LA where everything is kind of more boxy…certainly Frank Gehry, and I went to art school, not culinary school. So a lot of that modernism and architecture and art has just influenced my aesthetic in general. I've definitely had interviews and conversations over the years about my cake stuff, in particular, having so much of that style. If I could really pinpoint what drives that sense of design more than anything, it's growing up in Southern California and seeing buildings under construction all the time. It's not even finished architecture. It's the guts of it. There's a little bit of a war-tornness that I liked in the '80s during that whole Reagan era. Do you remember the fashion of that time?

Yeah, well, ripped jeans for one.

That's a good piece of it. I can appreciate the sort of perfectionism, and I like that, but I also like it to look like people have made it, not a machine.