A Chat With Chris Bleidorn, Executive Chef And Co-Owner, of Two Michelin Starred Birdsong

Dining at San Francisco’s two Michelin starred restaurant Birdsong is an experience rooted in heritage, one which draws inspiration from ancient cooking traditions while honoring Bay Area producers and farmers by implementing whole ingredient cooking methods. The menu at Birdsong focuses on presenting ingredients in their most flavorful, complete form. Local produce and whole animals are at the epicenter of every dish that’s masterfully created in Birdsong’s open kitchen using technics that include dry aging, fermentation and heath-centric cooking.

Chris Bleidorn, the Executive Chef & Owner of Birdsong, and partner Aarti Shetty, originally intended on opening Birdsong in New England. Though Birdsong ultimately opened May 2018 in San Francisco’s Theater District, the team continues to honor the Pacific Northwest’s culinary lineage by using the best of what Northern California has to offer and preparing it as they would in the Northeast.

“It’s not so much the lineage that ties the sense of place of the Pacific Northwest to our food — it’s always been about sourcing ingredients when at their best, and this usually means getting closer to the source,” says Chris Bleidorn, Executive Chef & Owner of Birdsong. “Birdsong was originally meant to be in New England. When our plans changed, we didn’t want to ship ingredients and risk them losing their integrity.”

“The bounty of incredible ingredients in the Pacific Northwest only adds to this narrative, and we continue to be inspired by what’s around us.”

Bleidorn’s tasting menu changes with the seasons with sample dishes including Mt. Lassen Creek-Raised Trout with pine, herbs and shiso-infused vinegar; Black Cod grilled over embers with corn, okra, cob bouillon; and Aged Lamb Loin with chanterelles.

Menu highlights include the Sea Urchin Cream Puff with fermented shiitake and savory butterscotch; lacquered and smoked Brent Wolfe Quail with Parker House rolls; and the decadent Cornbread & Caviar — each of which have become Birdsong mainstays.

Chef de Cuisine Yesenia Castañon offers artful, unexpected desserts that also harness flavors and traditions from her Mexican heritage. For dessert, sample dishes include milk & persimmons with grilled milk custard, salted milk candy, and bourbon & hoshigaki.

One of the main tenets of Birdsong is embracing a constant, forward moving evolution. And even exceptional dishes like the Cornbread & Caviar have gone through numerous iterations, each improving upon the last.

“When guests come to Birdsong, we want them to have a singular experience that reveals the care that each ingredient and composition went through to arrive in its final form,” says Bleidorn.

We chatted with Chris Bleidorn, Executive Chef & Owner of Birdsong on Birdsong, the competitive San Francisco restaurant scene, menu inspiration and more. Here’s what he had to say.

How has Birdsong evolved over the past few years with the pandemic and constant competition of the San Francisco restaurant scene?

During the pandemic we took a break from our regular tasting menu at Birdsong and focused on how to sustain the business through a more casual concept until it was time to open again for regular dining. When restrictions loosened, we were excited to offer our tasting menu experience again with the objective of building on the foundation we had in place prior.

In general, our approach with Birdsong has been to start off with something manageable and then gradually challenge ourselves to reach the next level. We’ve found this keeps us all engaged in the forward progression of the experience at Birdsong. We have a story to tell and you don’t start by telling a story in the middle of the book — there is a journey that informs everything we do.

Competition is a funny thing in restaurants — we always refer to those in the industry as “colleagues,” not “competitors.” If we were the only two-starred Michelin restaurant in the city, we’d be less busy. Because there’s so much talent concentrated in one area, it generates excitement for San Francisco as a culinary destination to explore. People travel here to experience all the great restaurants that contribute to the vibrancy of our dining culture. We are better for it.

Talk about seasonality, flavor and ingredients. How do you pick and choose your purveyors?

Flavor is at the center of what we do, and we seek out ingredients when they are at their most flavorful. While this typically means what’s in season, we will not compromise and serve something that is not at its best just because it is seasonal. Woody asparagus is still woody asparagus even if it is the peak of spring.

We work closely with producers who share our commitment to flavor, growing and raising the best produce and animals. There is so much pride in that process, and it almost always equates to those who are practicing regenerative agriculture, and taking a holistic and ecological approach.

We care about building relationships with our farmers and ranchers with the intention of supporting the ecosystem. We still work with many of the same purveyors we worked with on day 1 of Birdsong and feel a responsibility to them and their products. Producers such as Tierra Vegetables and Mt. Lassen trout. Our whole ingredient philosophy speaks to this respect for our producers and the work that they do in growing and raising our food.

What is the inspiration for the menu? Talk about the ancient cooking traditions much of the menu is inspired by.

We live by this quote by Michael Frome at Birdsong — “Each succeeding generation accepts less and less of the real thing because there is no way of understanding what has been lost.”

So much of the world’s current ways of producing food are rooted in volume and profit. We want to be part of the preservation of flavor. We practice techniques like dry aging and fermentation. Our hearth is the core of our cooking and we utilize it in different ways — the embers are used for cooking, the radiant heat above the hearth is used to dehydrate, and the smoke is used to aromatize and flavor.

While this all takes more time, labor, skill and thought, it is worth it to us.

Talk about the Birdsong mainstays, particularly the cornbread and caviar course. How did these mainstays come about? Did you know they’d be hits when you created them?

Birdsong is rooted in tradition, but we are constantly evolving. Having dishes thought of as “mainstays” places a certain kind of limitation that we challenge by finding ways to reimagine a dish, keeping it relevant and fun for our team and guests. When something has reached its peak, we’ll take it off the menu.

Taking the cornbread for example, the recipe has changed many times over the years. Not all of these changes might be immediately perceivable to our guests, but they are small and important tweaks that have allowed us to make the cornbread tastier and tastier.

What do you hope guests take away from dining at Birdsong?

Feeling happier than they did when they arrived.