An Intimate Look At Esteemed Two Michelin-Starred Restaurant, Saison

Anyone who’s serious about experiencing the best of what the Northern California culinary scene has to offer has either dined at or has at least heard about the legendary San Francisco two Michelin Star establishment, Saison. Every part of your dining experience — note the word experience vs. meal — at Saison is special.

It wouldn’t be an understatement to say the attention to detail, table side presentation and explanation of each course is close to ceremonial. That said, the staff is down-to-earth and friendly. They’re extremely attentive without suffocating you, and, while it may come as a surprise for such an esteemed restaurant, it really feels like they’re welcoming you into their home.

The restaurant itself is unique in its design and decor. Exposed brick walls, mounted animal heads, high ceilings, and a perfectly stacked firewood pile are a few of the elements that welcome you as you walk in. Before heading to the dining room, you can enjoy a drink at the illuminated bar and lounge area, complete with fur throws and pillows for diners, making the vibes extra cozy.

“We try to create a ‘vibey’ experience where we want to walk the line of elegant and refined with our product and technique, but when it comes to human interaction we want the experience to be comfortable and fun,” explains Chef De Cuisine Richard Lee.

One of the coolest features about the restaurant is, of course, the open kitchen. With hanging copper pots and dried bouquets of flowers and immaculate prep stations, this kitchen is a beautiful sight to see in action. The cuisine is centered around the wood burning stove at which you can see chefs fanning the embers while carefully tending to what’s cooking.

The kitchen is helmed by Chef Lee who got his very first job at Kuleto’s working for free in high school before being hired to the team. After time spent at the Culinary Institute of America, he moved back to San Francisco to work at One Market which had one Michelin Star at the time, and next he moved to New York to work at two Michelin Star restaurant, Gilt.

After working at the esteemed Eleven Madison Park as a sous chef for the next five years, he finally came back to San Francisco to work at Saison with Laurent Gras. Once Laurent departed, he became the Chef de Cuisine.

“The best part of being in an open kitchen is being able to bring our passion and energy while we cook to the guest,” explains Chef Lee. “It allows the chefs to go to the tables and have a dialogue with our guests about what they just prepared. It is definitely exciting for most guests to watch us prep, cook, and plate the food.”

An open kitchen means the chef can see guests’ immediate reaction to the food, allowing the team to be in tune with their experiences. If the team notices a guest’s reaction is less than favorable, it gives the kitchen team real-time feedback to do something extra to make that guest’s night extra special, explains Chef Lee.

“Cooking in front of the guest is just a constant reminder of why we do what we do.”

The camaraderie and enjoyment from the chefs in the kitchen, working together in unison to create something special for each guest, is both impressive and pleasing to see as a diner. Especially given that most Michelin starred restaurants tend to be in the stuffy, overly uptight category.

“We play lively music in the dining room and try our best to create as much conversation at the table as we can,” continues Chef Lee. “We don’t want the kind of experience where someone just sits at the table and gets countless courses over and over, but we also do not want to be the experience where there is too much tableside action or things feel forced or too theatrical. It’s all about balance at Saison.”

While the menu at Saison is always changing, two things remain — the focus of wood fire cooking and doing the absolute most with seasonal ingredients. Each ingredient is broken down and reimagined in more ways than you would even think is possible.

“I believe the best and purest way to work on a dish is to be inspired by an amazing product, apply a technique we think would highlight it and eat it,” says Chef Lee. “From there the ingredient will tell you how it wants to be served.”

An example being an amberjack fish prepared in different ways: raw, served with lettuces and Buddha’s hand and a sauce made from the fish head and bones; and the fish tail grilled with a tangy, complex taste akin to buffalo sauce.

You may be presented with the fresh, in-shell abalone and sea urchin before enjoying it in the next several courses or an in-between palette cleanser course of lightly fermented radishes. You never know.

“The goal is always to make the most delicious and fun experience possible at Saison,” says Chef Lee. “And generally for most chefs inspiration comes from a culmination of work experience, food they have eaten both casual and fine dining, ingredients and just simple curiosity and a desire to learn.”

One of the standout signature dishes that must not be missed includes the brown butter soaked grilled sourdough topped with sea urchin. This could be one of the best bites I’ve personally ever had. Another is the salt-cured “barbecued” caviar, which comes wrapped in a seaweed bundle and presented tableside before being plated on a bed of wilted spinach and seaweed-and-butter broth.

We sat down with Richard Lee, Chef De Cuisine at Saison, to chat about how he got his start, menu inspiration, Michelin Stars and more. Here’s what he had to say.

What was the catalyst in you deciding that you wanted to pursue being a chef as a career?

When I was 12 or 13 I was often hanging around after school because I didn’t have much to do; I was a bit of a latchkey kid. The school had an after school cooking program that was going on and the chef that taught the class just kind of yelled at me and told me “stop messing around out there and come in and cook something with us” and it was at the graduation of that class where we cooked for all the parents.

It was fun to work with some pressure alongside a team to try and accomplish a greater goal/task. That was what first sparked it, combined with a Chinese background where food is a huge focus of family life, cooking for myself when my parents worked and reading Kitchen Confidential in high school — it really started to become clear that cooking was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to make people happy with food.

What inspires the menu at Saison? Are they one and the same? What is the thought process when reimagining ingredients?

The menu at Saison is inspired by the current season and cooking with fire with the products and ingredients around us. We ask ourselves how we can take all of our knowledge, along with the ingredients we come across at the markets and farms and make it feel like the season we are in.

For example in spring the food should feel young and represent rebirth, things like radishes, soft cheeses, young pine tips, berries. Then in summer the menu should feel vibrant and bold, things like peppers, tomatoes and we take inspiration from cuisines from Latin America, India and Spain – all places that really know how to utilize beautiful summer ingredients that we get. We try to do this to the best of our ability with each season.

Talk about how Saison utilizes tablesides and creates food that inspires and surprises.

We generally have a few courses where we do a tableside presentation or finish a course at the table which helps the dining room team have natural interactions with the guest and also gives us a chance to show the ethos of what we do. Then sometimes we simply just bring a product we think is special and show it to you in its raw state, like a well aged fish or meat or some live seafood or something we are fermenting, this is our chance to show you how special some of the process and ingredients are at Saison.

We also have courses that can cover your entire table, these are meant to be fun and a bit interactive and break up the cadence of a tasting menu. We try not to force any of these ideas, and oftentimes they are usually concepted as a simple dish and then it becomes a “Wouldn’t it be cool if we … or how do we let them know how awesome this is, maybe we can show them…”.

At Saison, how do you come up with the menu? And then how do you come up with the presentation of these dishes?

It is a collaborative effort between the sous chef team, myself, Saison Hospitality Culinary Director Paul Chung and Saison Hospitality Corporate Chef Brian Limoges. No dish is ever the same when it comes to our research and development process and it happens very organically.

I generally sit down with my Exec Sous Chef Adam Gale and we look over the list of which ingredients are available and in-season and begin to sketch out the menu. We talk it over with Chef Paul and Chef Brian to get their initial feedback and any interesting ideas they have as well. We then divide up the dishes, testing recipes and seeing which dishes click and refine them even further. We eventually get to where we are happy with the menu, and the whole culinary team gets together for a tasting and analysis and then we continue editing it until it’s perfect.

Throughout the year we will all get bursts of inspiration and work on these creative ideas that get archived to be used at a later time. The inspiration comes from everywhere whether it’s something we ate on the weekend, something we saw on social media, something at the market, a recipe we’ve done in the past and reinterpreted, or even seeing a beautiful plate and saying this would look beautiful on it and creating something around that.

Is it a lot of pressure to be in the restaurant industry at the highest level? How important are stars to you and Saison?

It is a lot of pressure, especially with what Saison has meant to the culinary world and how inspirational it is to others. I would be kidding myself if I said that these accolades weren’t important. Not so much because we want to say we are a ‘two or three star restaurant’, but because it is a goal and a focus that brings the team together and motivates us to try and be the best versions of ourselves.

I try to remind my team all the time that motivation can sometimes be hard to find in life, but when you find it you have to hold on as long as you can and see where it can take you. The most important thing for the team here is to create an experience that makes guests happy and to inspire our peers. And, for me personally, I would love to show my team that if you dedicate yourself and work hard, anything is achievable and that each one of them can be greater than they ever imagined.