FROM FARMING TO FINE DINING, MEET THE QUEER CHEF BEHIND SAN FRANCISCO’S NEWEST POP-UP

A new tasting menu pop-up has launched in San Francisco, highlighting seasonal ingredients from a former farmer and fine-dining cook. Though when chef Brenden Blaine Darby first launched Fare Play, it wasn’t a pop-up at all, just a dinner party for friends in the queer community.

Burnt out and injured after spending thirteen years in professional kitchens, Darby stepped away from the stove, instead focusing on their husband’s art career. But as a measured return to cooking, Darby began throwing monthly dinner parties for friends and acquaintances at the couple’s art studio, pay-what-you-can events that could swell to 45 diners a night. The dinners lasted for a year and a half until the pandemic started. Then recently Darby says they wanted to start them up and see their friends and community again. Spotting an opportunity via a Craigslist ad for Joint Venture Kitchen, Darby talked the owner into letting them run Fare Play in the space. “With about two months of, ‘Okay, we’re doing this,’ we renovated the space me and my best friend [Sergio Garrido-Ramirez],” Darby says, “and just decided to go for it.”

These days, Fare Play is a proper pop-up — that is, open to the public and operating in a restaurant space — taking up residency as of February 15 at the Joint Venture Kitchen space at 167 11th Street in San Francisco. Running until the end of May, with a potential for extending that end date, Fare Play continues the dinner party vibe but on a larger scale. “We have a queer staff of friends that make it a blast to work in there,” Darby says. “And so as long as everybody’s having a good time, we want to keep going.”

Darby began their career at the culinary program at Johnson and Wales University, before traveling through Europe to stage at Michelin Star restaurants as part of a graduate program. From there, they began working at Love Apple Farms in Scotts Valley and at Manresa; then farm owner Cynthia Sandberg helped land Darby a position at Noma in Copenhagen, where they worked in the test kitchen for six months. Returning to the Bay Area, Darby wound up doing stints at Flour + Water and Boulettes Larder, before becoming a private chef.

At Fare Play, Darby cooks hyper-seasonal fare inspired by the latest produce at the Heart of the City farmers market, and Love Apple Farms where Darby once worked. Darby’s grandmothers who taught them Italian and Portuguese dishes also influenced the menu. Given that the menu will flex and change with the season’s produce, dishes could vary from visit to visit, with substituted ingredients based on what the kitchen’s making at the time. For example, Fare Play’s “Scrap Caesar” has at one time employed shaved hearts of sous vide cauliflowers, celeriac from another dish for the sauce, and fried potato skins from a gnocchi item as topping along with “a ton of Parmesan on top,” Darby says.

Grandma’s Soupage, based on a Portuguese bean stew, is composed of eight to 10 heirloom beans from the farmers market cooked with cumin, coriander, cinnamon, and bay leaf, served with bread. The aforementioned gnocchi, meanwhile, is the base of another dish with accompanying ingredients such as Far West mushrooms or ripe asparagus, depending on what’s good at the market. Dinner is available as both a tasting menu or a la carte, ranging in price between $75 and $95 depending on the week and ingredients used, or starting at $14 up to a maximum of $26 for an a la carte item.

The drink menu is smaller, and Darby says they “wanted to keep the beverages simple, like if you’re at someone’s house.” That said, there are two options of red or white wine (available by the glass or bottle), one beer, and two or three nonalcoholic options. Already there are plans to expand that list, as Darby does some fermentation and has come into possession of a juicer. Some upcoming wine tastings are also in Fare Play’s future.

But along with the food and drinks comes Darby’s mission to create a vibrant experience for guests. It’s all in service of the name of the pop-up, Fare Play, or, as Darby puts it, playing with your food. They want the space to feel playful, and it starts with being greeted at the door by Garrido-Ramirez whose “larger than life” personality sets the mood for the start of the meal, when diners are given an overview of the food and encouraged to draw or write jokes or notes on the menu. The menu then gets sent back to the kitchen where the staff will respond to the notes in kind before being returned to each table for visitors to keep. The cozy space also encourages tables to talk with each other, and it’s not unheard of for dinner neighbors to wind up hanging out outside of the restaurant, they say. “We’ve had a lot of people come in very grumpy,” Darby says, “and when they leave, they say, ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I came in so upset. This was the best night I’ve had, I needed it.’ We don’t take it too seriously, we’re more about giving people an experience that’s fun and playful, and showing them you can have fun with strangers.”

Fare Play (167 11th Street, San Francisco) is open for reservations only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m. Reservations are available via OpenTable.

2024-03-28T20:01:45Z dg43tfdfdgfd