This column originally ran in Wednesday’s Off Menu newsletter, where you’ll find restaurant news, gossip, tips, and hot takes every week. To sign up, visit the Standard’s newsletter page and select Off Menu.
I’m delighted to report that Rupert and Carrie Blease, owners of the now-closed Lord Stanley, have proved me dead wrong. Before they closed the Russian Hill restaurant in May, the husband-wife team told me somewhat conspiratorially that they had another project up their sleeves. I was positive I knew what it would be. Based on years of my own unscientific data collection, I have formed a sort of culinary pattern recognition:
- Chef dreams of opening an ambitious, full-service restaurant.
- Dream turns out to be really f’ing hard for a multitude of reasons: labor, food costs, the city’s obstinately casual customer base.
- Chef gets worn down. Dream is revised to a goal of not being financially destitute.
- Chef opens counter-service concept.
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If you’re the team at Ju-Ni, you go from omakase to adding smashburgers. If you’re Brandon Jew of Mister Jiu’s, you do a tasting menu and peddle cashew chicken.
In the case of the Bleases, I would have put money on them creating a fried fish sandwich joint. After all, toward the end of their 10-year run at Lord Stanley, they were serving a Michelin-starred prix fixe menu at night and a casual takeout day menu that included a banger of a “Filet o’ Fish.”
I would have lost that bet. The Bleases’ next project will be — drum roll, please — another fine-dining restaurant! “It’s definitely not what people expected us to do,” Rupert admitted.
Partnering with their old friend Tommy Halvorson, owner of Foxtail Catering and Events, Carrie and Rupert will be moving into the former Serpentine space in Dogpatch. (Halvorson was briefly the owner of Serpentine.) They hope to open by October.
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Rupert, who is English, came of age cooking at Michelin-starred kitchens in France. At Lord Stanley, he had stopped cooking, handing the reins to chef de cuisine Nathan Matkowsky. Rupert clearly has missed it. “I just find fine dining exciting — the produce you can work with, the fancy ingredients, the refinement in plating. Having a smaller menu means there’s time to make things beautiful,” he told me. The menu, Carrie said, will be “modern European with California ingredients — that’s the best way to describe it.”
The restaurant will be called Wolfsbane, after a poisonous flower purported to offer protection from everything from vampires to, yes, wolves — giving the restaurant a feminine, if lethal, edge. Carrie hopes the name signals “an escape from the terrible things” happening in this world. “Also, we always wanted it to have an animal reference.” Carrie clearly doesn’t watch TV. (I couldn’t help but ask. Like “The Bear”? Carrie laughed. “Oh my god, I didn’t even think of that.”)
The Bleases are refreshingly and unfailingly positive about their new venture. “San Francisco is in a better place than it was even 12 months ago,” said Rupert. “I think the city supports restaurants that are good. Plus, you can fail at anything, so you might as well fail at something you love.” It’s a good adage, not just for chefs, but for food writers who should try to be less presumptuous.
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