ABOUT

“Joshua Skenes could be the best chef in America, and not in some vague, potential sense. He actually could be. He opened his first restaurant in 2009 in the Mission District of San Francisco, as a pop-up, and later found a permanent home for it in the South of Market neighborhood. Within a few short years, he earned a lifetime’s worth of the food world’s highest honors, including a full three Michelin stars. Today, it’s a globally recognized fine-dining institution, and Skenes is regarded as an uncompromising auteur who forged a fire-based culinary genre original enough to be called Skenesian.

His second restaurant opened to a cascade of critical acclaim. The Chronicle, Esquire, GQ and the James Beard Foundation have all called it one of the best new restaurants in the country.

Skenes’ scorching, self-propelled trajectory is unprecedented and his gifts are beyond question. Nearly everyone, including former employees, competitors and others with potential axes to grind, describes him, unprompted, in terms of preternatural greatness.” - The San Francisco Chronicle

In Joshua’s own words, he says “I’m sure my mom thinks so. Although I appreciate and welcome the recognition the entirety of my life’s work comes together in Skenes Ranch and its purpose is to leave a positive contribution significant enough to last throughout the generations.”

If you wish to visit Skenes Ranch, book an event, or just do some fly fishing, please request an invitation here.

You can read more on Skenes Ranch here.

Hegel was the philosopher of retrospection, for whom understanding only comes in retrospect. "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." 3 out of 4 of the Gastromondiale editors (who were able to dine at Saison before he left the stoves to Gras) were dazzled by perhaps the only American chef to show how ingredients could be enhanced by paying a parental care to them. No American chef had ever exhibited the sort of maniacal care to their temporality, patient to their developing maturity as an elementary school teacher might wait for an unruly one to shed its acerbic edge.

The Skenes era at Saison was the greatest period, not only in Californian cuisine, but in American. Skenes was an original, not because he did not borrow, but because his sensibility and capacity to adapt the ideas that preceded him, soared beyond those from whom he learned. As with any figure who shrugged off the politically correct imperatives of a mediocre American dining scene, he attracted his detractors. Greatness seeks resistance and produces resentment, inevitably.

We celebrate Joshua Skenes, the chef who made us rediscover the possibility in a turnip, a beet, a pumpkin. Who made us enjoy cuisine, uniquely American in its diversity, unlike we had until then and have since.