Toque of the Town: Lark Creek's Fresh Perspective

Chef Adrian Hoffman instills a systematic approach to Lark Creek’s seasonal focus.

By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 4/1/2005

Chef Adrian Hoffman, Lark Creek Restaurant Group

It’s 6 p.m. Saturday at an early spring benefit on Treasure Island. Chef Adrian Hoffman watches San Francisco’s blessed and beautiful sample sips of California wines and nibbles from the area’s best restaurants.

Most of the prep work for Hoffman’s own evening offering—pillows of Gruyere-filled pasta, silkily swathed in butter and cream and dotted with black-truffle shavings—has been done in advance, freeing him to schmooze and smile between batches. The sign over his shoulder reads, “One Market Restaurant,” and people are quick to make the connection: Hoffman garnered a rare three-and-a-half star rating from San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer and has been numbered in the firmament of the James Beard Foundation’s rising stars.

But it’s a segue moment for Hoffman. Since Lark Creek Restaurant Group promoted him from chef of One Market to group chef for its seven concepts in September 2004, he has deliberately slipped behind the scenes. He now supports and trains the chefs at Lark Creek’s Bay Area properties and develops the systems, cost controls, sourcing procedures and training methods that will take the company to a new level as it grows beyond California.

“Basically, I’m putting the structures in place that will help Lark Creek’s properties succeed apart from the chef at the helm,” he says.

The company recently stepped up its growth with Yankee Pier. The East Coast-meets-West Coast, clam-shack concept first opened in October 2000 with a menu shaped by Lark Creek’s founding chef Bradley Ogden, followed by a second unit in San Jose in December 2002. The third location opened at San Francisco’s airport in December 2004, adding a breakfast menu. The company plans to open one or two new restaurants a year for the foreseeable future, some Yankee Piers and some new individual concepts.

With Ogden focusing on his namesake restaurant in Nevada, “It became very apparent that we needed a torchbearer for Bradley’s vision here,” explains company co-founder and proprietor Michael Dellar. “Someone had to be the thread of continuity adhering all of our restaurants to our seasonal, farm-fresh, American mission. Adrian is that very bright and creative guy.”

Fresh Absolutely
Hoffman is thrilled to be working with Ogden, “one of the originals of the fresh-food movement in American cuisine,” Hoffman says. “He preaches seasonality, freshness and the locality of produce, and he’s absolutely right. When you start with the right ingredients at the peak of season, it’s difficult to do them wrong.”

The focus on fresh-from-farm or fresh-from-ocean ingredients plays out differently according to each restaurant’s niche. “Ensuring that each restaurant adheres closely to the focus on fresh is one way we ensure our group’s success—no matter which chef is in charge—as we grow,” Hoffman says.

Promoting fresh, not fried, fish selections, such as this chinook salmon entree, has upped Yankee Pier’s check averages $2 at lunch, $3 at dinner.

On the high end, the menu at The Lark Creek Inn changes daily, with checks averaging $32 at lunch and $53 at dinner. That means organic lettuce, tomatoes and onions from rainwater-irrigated County Line Farm in nearby Petaluma, Hog Island Oysters from the banks of Tomales Bay in Marshall, and quail and squab from the Wolfe Ranch in Vacaville. Food costs average 28.5 percent.

More modestly, at Yankee Pier, where checks average $18 at lunch and $23 at dinner and food costs are at 26 percent, dishes are more simply prepared without luxury ingredients. But those parameters “still leave lots of room for what we can run,” Hoffman says. Ipswich whole-belly clams, for example, are flown in from the East Coast. And a recent catch-of-the-day list featured organic chinook salmon, petrale sole and corvina sea bass grilled, sauteed or baked with spicy cornbread crumbs and served with chile-lime butter. Hoffman says seafood items can change daily, depending on the season and how fresh the catch is.

Topped with a dab of butter and dill-drop biscuit, Clam Chowder sells by the bucketful at Yankee Pier: 50 gallons at a single unit daily.

Adhering to this scratch-made focus has been a challenge at Yankee Pier’s airport location, which does 900 covers a day and only seats 85. Prep work happens on site just about round the clock. The fresh albacore tuna, for example, which serves as the base for Yankee Pier’s best-selling tuna melt, is slowly roasted in olive oil with

garlic and aromatics. Staff starts baking brown-sugar-baked beans at 11 p.m. the night before. They also prep rendered bacon for the clam chowder in the wee hours. By the time the restaurant opens for service at 5:30 a.m., the kitchen has already been running for hours.

Nudging, Nurturing, Shaping
All Lark Creek restaurants have seasonal core menus; a few change menus daily. Hoffman monitors them all, nudging and nurturing chefs in new directions and raising the performance bar. He’s on the phone with Ogden often and makes surprise tasting visits to the group’s Bay-Area locations.

Hoffman also shapes the menus for Lark Creek’s new concepts as they emerge. There’s talk of a future steak and chophouse and perhaps a deli, but thus far, Hoffman’s menu-development work has centered on breakfast at Yankee Pier.

Matching morning menus to the East-Coast style of the other dayparts, Hoffman shaped entrees such as the No. 2-selling Dungeness Crab and Poached Egg Benedict with Yankee Potatoes, $12.95, and the Yankee Full Breakfast, $10.95, two eggs any style with Hobbs’ applewood-smoked bacon, Yankee potatoes, brown-sugar-baked beans and a buttermilk biscuit.

Fresh, Not Fried
Beyond breakfast, Hoffman and Ogden recently shifted Yankee Pier lunch and dinner menus away from fried-food offerings. The new menus emphasize the catch of the day, steamed-in-the-shell items and raw bar offerings. Seasonal farmer’s-market-inspired side dishes, grilled-fish sandwiches and new soups are on the horizon. “We absolutely want to ensure that people don’t think of Yankee Pier as a fried-fish restaurant,” says Hoffman.

An added benefit to the focus on fresh: higher check averages. Fish and chips are still No. 1, but since shifting tactics a year ago, Hoffman says 40 percent of guests now order from the catch-of-the day section, and checks have increased $2 at lunch and $3 at dinner.

Old fashioned lemon meringue pie—baked daily with fresh-squeezed lemons, sugar and eggs—is a top-selling Yankee Pier dessert.

New York restaurant consultant Clark Wolf believes the group has a “great thing going” both with Hoffman and Yankee Pier. “The West Coast take on an East Coast tradition is very unique,” Wolf says. “Only a West Coast company could up the ante on the fresh-to-fried quotient at a fish shack. And they’re not pulling some old fisherman out of the Bay to do it. Rather they’ve chosen someone able to make the fresh connections with an international view.”

Hoffman has also reformatted menus to better reflect each restaurant’s niche and developed more focused events. At One Market the theme “Big City Dining” is best served by tableside preparations of special dishes for two and the myriad proteins prepared on the restaurant’s wood-burning grill and rotisserie oven.

Because the focus at The Lark Creek Inn is on small, local, sustainable farms, new spring menus carry profiles of ingredient purveyors. The restaurant also plans to bring the suppliers in for special demonstrations, presentations and dinners.

Another big effort: formalizing staff training. “Right now, most of our guys have been promoted from within,” Hoffman says. “But as we grow beyond the West Coast, we’ll need to draw from a larger pool.” He is working on a kitchen-training manual for cooks, sous chefs and dishwashers. The manual will address proper care of china; pot and metalware washing techniques; general safety and sanitation procedures; simple knife techniques; and lifting procedures. Training modules will include seasoning drills for cooks, new kitchen-rotation procedures for sous chefs and basic computer skills.

Bye-bye heavy breading. Traditional fried crabcakes are being replaced by Hoffman’s lightly breaded version with crab, hollandaise, lemon juice and hot sauce.

Hoffman explains that while many items in the manual are already in practice, formalization is necessary. “Sometimes employees leave with little warning. The time constraint to get new hires up to speed quickly is a big issue.” Hoffman hopes that by investing extra time and money in new hires, turnover will decrease and employee satisfaction will improve.

Looking at sourcing and cost-control issues, Hoffman has just developed a new bid system for buying foodstuffs. All chefs must solicit bids from a minimum of two vendors for each product they buy weekly. However, they are allowed to shop at farmers markets if the items are available.

“Of course we do make some exceptions for specialized items,” Hoffman adds. “If one purveyor simply has the best watercress, we will pay more for the best. But it’s still important to know how much more we’re paying for the best.”

Yankee Pier is also standardizing recipes—not needed as much at restaurants such as The Lark Creek Inn and One Market, where menus change daily. “Formalizing the recipes for Yankee Pier is a constant project,” Hoffman says. “We do try and slowly expand our repertoire at the Yankee Piers. So as the chefs run successful specials, they can be incorporated into our existing recipe book.”