CHEF DARRYL BELL, STATELINE ROADHOUSE, NAPA

This summer Napa welcomes Stateline Road Smokehouse—or, as chef and owner Darryl Bell calls it, “the Cathedral to Smoking.” The homage to Kansas City and its barbecue is a former auto shop and its cylindrical metal ceiling gives the feeling of being inside the world’s most beautifully designed barrel smoker.

A barbecue joint seems like a pretty straightforward proposition and Stateline Road will, no doubt, be a non-fussy pleasure for diners. Chef Bell’s road to Stateline, however, has been anything but expected. It is the culmination of a sauce created to help or-phans, besting the fine dining system, Kansas City, a Michelin star and the pandemic-era popularity of In-N-Out.

Darryl Bell: I’m kind of competitive.

Edible: I’m picking up on that.

Darryl Bell: In culinary school I was on a competitive culinary team, where I learned to work under extreme pressure. After culinary school, I went straight to France. I noticed making pastries was the weak point of many chefs. So, I did a formal training. Honestly, the way I approach the kitchen is almost as a sport. Like an athlete.

Have you always had that certainty?

When I went to stage at Bouchon, I was going there with people from really fancy, well known culinary schools. That’s intimidating. I may not have been the most decorated but I could be really efficient, really fast, and work really hard. So while those guys were getting tired, I was just getting going.

I did the tryout at Bouchon for [Chef Philip] Tessier. Years later, he told me he still clearly remembered hiring me. “You had the salad spinner and we thought you were going to break that thing with how fast you were using it. Other cooks were moving fast but you were really moving.”

They told me ahead of time that everyone comes in with rose-colored glasses. That’s the exact speech: rose-colored glasses. And that’s the speech that I gave to every person I hired there. It’s great until you see what it actually takes to get stars and to maintain them on that wall. Those jackets are light but they feel heavy.

You were only at a few places between culinary school and Bouchon. Did you feel prepared to work in such a heads-down kitchen?

You’re supposed to start at the bottom. For better or worse, I started at garde manger instead of at the entry position of oyster bar. Jumping the line added a little pressure. Because everyone’s, like, “What did you do before this?” “Oh, I was in Kansas.”

My wife still had the car in Kansas. I had a motorcycle and I would drive from my sister’s house in Fairfield to start working at 3 in the afternoon, get lit up [yelled at] for most of the shift my first three months, and then ride home at 1:30 in the morning, in the rain. Once you get past that and you survive, then you can start to thrive. When you’re thriving, then it becomes fun...winning is fun.

Where did you rank out at Bouchon?

Everyone’s goal is to get to the end of the line, which is the meat station. I got there, which is when most people end up moving on to another restaurant. But once I got there, I thought, “Hundreds of people have come in and out since I’ve been here. All of them are going to say that they worked at Bouchon, same as me. Management is the difference.” So I decided to go for demi-sous, which is an entry-level chef manager. I thought, “After that, I’ll be done.”

But then I thought, “I should go for sous chef.” I did that for a year. And then I started thinking about executive sous. I’ve only seen two of those in my whole time at Bouchon. Those chefs went on to do very cool things.

Did it get less stressful or more stressful?

My wife was patient. I was so grateful to have the opportunity to keep learning and growing but we had our daughter during that time. For seven months straight, I worked with one day off per week. Management was intense hours and intense pressure. But the dream that I would sell my wife, which was true, is something I wrote on a toque in culinary school and hung on the wall: “Do it one good time, and you’re done.” It was hard for her and for me, but we just had to do it one good time. And now it stays with us forever.

What came after your time at Bouchon?

Every project has a lesson. At Foundry & Lux in San Francisco, I learned business. The concept was owned by Bon Appetit Management and was a restaurant, a lounge and a café. You had to know the numbers thoroughly, there’s no talking your way out of budgets. I was to show up to weekly meetings and justify every line of my budget for the overall kitchen operation. Fortunately, my costs and expenses stayed well in line. I wouldn’t be doing this without that experience.

And next you were at PRESS Restaurant in Napa with your Bouchon colleague Chef Tessier?

We got there in June 2019 and immediately took to turning things around. Seven months in, we were putting an even larger emphasis on shifting the menu and then we’re hearing about some Covid Corona thing. We shifted to takeout and fried chicken sandwiches, then moved into elevated take-home meals. Opening and closing and reopening.

The second time we reopened, we pulled the Band-Aid off with a completely new menu. We pushed hard for the next year and, in 2022, Michelin awarded the restaurant a star. At around that time, I left to start this project.