I wanted to cook for one room, forever.
I grew up in Sebastopol, California, on the kind of small dirt road where the neighbors keep bees and the apricots ripen before anyone has a chance to count them. I learned to cook in three kitchens after that. Per Se under Chef Keller, a year in the South of France, and four years on the line at Atelier Crenn. And the whole time I was thinking about the dirt road.
"Alouette is what happens when you cook the place you came from with the hands of the place you trained in."
Alouette opened in the spring of 2018, in a building that was a haberdashery in 1893 and a record store in 1974. We took down a wall, put in an open kitchen, and started cooking for thirty-eight seats at a time. That number isn't going to change. Neither is the number of seatings, or the price, or the answer when someone calls and asks if we can do something other than the tasting. The shape of the night is the shape of the night.
What changes is what we cook. Every Monday we sit down with David, the farmers, and the team, and we rewrite the menu by Tuesday. The room you see when you walk in has been the same room since 2018. The plate in front of you has been on the menu for nine days.
