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Agnolotti of Matsutake
<p>Agnolotti of Matsutake</p>

San Francisco chef serves up cutting-edge dining experience

David Barzelay says his establishment sells out both seatings every night

If you want to know how young, affluent diners in trend-forward cities spend their money, take a look at Lazy Bear.

Self-taught chef David Barzelay opened Lazy Bear in San Francisco’s Mission District after several years of cooking his own underground dinners, first in his home, and then, as the dinners grew, in rented spaces.

Barzelay is at the cutting edge of many high-end dining trends: He only serves a tasting menu of 18 to 20 courses, and while health-based dietary restrictions are accommodated, preference-based ones are not. He changes the menu constantly, and never repeats a dish once it is taken off the menu. Diners can only be seated — at a long, communal table — by buying non-refundable tickets in advance.

Lazy Bear, which opened on Sept. 25, 2014, has two seatings per night, Tuesday through Saturday, at 6 p.m. and 8:15 p.m., and they sell out every night. Tickets are priced at $110 to $150 per person, depending on the day and time of the seating. Beverage pairings are an additional $75.

Chef David Barzelay. Photo: Lazy Bear

Barzelay recently discussed menu development and restaurant operations with Nation’s Restaurant News.

Walk me through a Lazy Bear dining experience.

Everybody arrives and they head upstairs. The mezzanine is decorated with a living room kind of feel, so it’s meant to evoke a certain era of entertaining in America.

So you have a cocktail hour before dinner?

Exactly. Complimentary punch, as well as à la carte drinks. We serve the first seven or eight bites from the tasting menu upstairs in cocktail-hour fashion. We encourage guests to mingle. They don’t have to — some do, some don’t. They’re up there for maybe 45 minutes. Then we take them downstairs to these communal tables — 40 diners per seating. The two seatings actually overlap, so while the first seating is finishing their desserts, basically, the second seating is upstairs looking down on it.

We give them miniature pencils, and there are blank lines for notes on the menus — it’s like a little field guide.

Cooks get up and describe all the dishes. The first thing they always get is a bread and butter course. The exact bread changes, but our butter’s always the same, and it’s incredible. I love butter and ours is the best butter I’ve ever had.

Do you make your own butter?

Yeah. We’ve been making it for a couple of years, and when we started doing it it was rare, and now I feel like everyone’s doing it. But we now have a two-year-old culture that has evolved to the point where it’s super-cheesy and complex and unique, and I think it’s amazing.

I also tell our guests on the first seating, “Toward the end of your dinner you’ll notice that the second seating of the night will be arriving, and they’ll be headed straight upstairs just like you guys did when you arrived, and the great thing about this space” — I put a positive spin on it — “is that you guys can stick around as long as you like after the meal, we just need you to head back upstairs to do it. So after you’re done downstairs we ask that you head right back upstairs and we’d be delighted to continue serving you drinks and coffee on the mezzanine.” And mostly they do it. [Those drinks are an additional charge]

You sell non-refundable tickets instead of taking reservations. Does that eliminate cancellations?

We have some cancellations. We have a lot of people that try, and we’re pretty rough about it. We get these stories, and some of them, you’re like, that’s clearly false, and some of them you’re like, that’s probably true. We’re not completely heartless. If [the cancellation] is more than a day or two in advance we’ll often allow it.

Tell me about some of your food.

We have a duck charcuterie plate with four items on it. We start with a PB and J that’s a duck liver mousse with a black walnut purée and fresh Concord grape jelly. Then there’s duck rillettes wrapped in a quince fruit rollup. We have a duck confit hush puppy with black lime, and then duck Slim Jim with sour cream and radish and chervil, which temper the heat and the salt of the Slim Jim somewhat.

We say “Slim Jim” and “fruit rollup” as opposed to “fruit leather” and “duck sausage” to call to mind part of the shared food experiences that we have.

Where do you get ideas for new menu items?

(Continued from page 1)

I’m sure you’ve realized this as a writer: Sometimes the thing writes itself and it’s like you have magical inspiration, and sometimes you just have to sit down and write something and there is no magical inspiration. It’s the same thing with creating dishes. Sometimes it’s like magically a dish pops into my head. Other times we just need something new on the menu. One of the ways I typically get inspired is I know I want to use an ingredient. I’ll do a Google image search for that ingredient in various combinations. And everything is in a thumbnail too small to actually see what it is, and I scroll through really quickly so I can’t tell what anything is, and I see something, and I go, “Oh, that looks amazing,” and my mind jumps to, “It was probably this with this,” and I’m like, “That would be great,” and it stimulates me. But then I actually click on the thumbnail and it wasn’t that at all, but it doesn’t matter because I already have the inspiration in my head of something that would have worked.

Perhaps I have a particular aptitude for combining things, but I think anybody can do this. I didn’t go to culinary school. I grew up cooking and it just gave me kind of a comfort level in the kitchen, and a comfort level with trying things. If you have certain basic techniques down, you can be pretty sure that no matter what you try, it’s going to be edible. It may not always work perfectly, but you’re going to have dinner on the table.
Before I was cooking professionally, just experimenting on my own, that served me well.

What is your professional cooking background?

I really have very little. I got really into cooking in law school and I was briefly a lawyer, and I just spent all of my time in law school cooking and doing big dinner parties, and then they got to be bigger dinner parties, and then I got laid off from my job as a lawyer in spring of 2009, after eight months on the job, and I had a really awesome, long severance package and the job market sucked anyway.

Lazy Bear's downstairs dining area. Photo: Lazy Bear

I was like, “I’m just going to wait out the job market and have fun.” And the most fun thing I could think to do was work in restaurants. So I staged [interned] in restaurants, at NoPa and then Mission Street Food, and then I got hired at Mission Street Food, but it was only two days a week, so I could still maintain plausible deniability that I was looking for a real job for my now-wife, then-fiancée. Then I started an underground restaurant, just for fun. It wasn’t meant to lead to a career. It took about two years of doing an underground restaurant before I was like, “I guess I’m just a cook now, and that’s what I do.”

How did you decide how much to charge for tickets?

It changed constantly. I think our idea was always that no matter what we charge people, they had to say, “That was a good value.” That was always our guiding principal with the underground restaurant, and we still want that to be the case.

We just this month moved to that demand-based pricing model, where different time slots are different prices, and now for the first time I think, if you pay $150, I think it’s worth it, but I’m not confident saying it’s worth much more than that. We’re asking you to take a leap and say that getting that time slot is part of the value.

Do you take into consideration how much you spend on food and drink?

No.

Do you know what your food cost is?

I do, but I think that our food cost varies so much, and basically I also own the place, so there’s no one telling me, “You have to maintain this food cost.” I know that we have more money coming in than going out, but we buy really expensive ingredients. If you look through this menu, we’ve got the most expensive oyster we can buy. The first course has geoduck clam, live spot prawn and snails, all of which are very expensive. Second course — onion broth with Benton’s ham, that’s not so expensive. [The third course is] saffron with lobster, then squab with foie gras, Wagyu beef. I think it’s a good value, but I’m still getting comfortable with [the $150 price].

Are you enjoying yourself?

There are aspects of it that I am enjoying very much. I find that the restaurant business in general is something that is very hard to enjoy while you’re in the moment at the level that we’re trying to do it, because there’s this constant sense of, “Are we going to pull it off?” and push push push push push, and it isn’t until after you stop for the night that you look back and say, “Wow, that was pretty cool. I’m proud of what we did.” But while you’re doing it, it’s more this constant thing — not stress so much as just, you’re in it.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

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