Escoffier Questionnaire: Chef Stéphane Saint Louis

Table Culture Provisions, Petaluma

Stéphane Saint Louis found his passion for cooking when he was in culinary school—for the second time. “Institut Paul Bocuse was suits and ties, clean shave, crispy whites and toque on. That was really where I fell in love.”

Born in New York, raised in Haiti and high-schooled in Marin, he wasn’t much interested in cooking as a kid. His mom worked long hours and so, as is “very common in Haiti, we had a housekeeper and a maid that lived in, and they would do the cooking.”

After high school, “I had to do something,” he explains. His mom and aunts, his support system, “wanted me to be an engineer or doctor, something like that.”

“A pastor of the family said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘I like cooking,’ I replied. He took me to the California Culinary Academy the next morning. There was this hallway set up with all different cakes and so I’m, like, ‘OK, I’ll give it a try.’” His aunt took out a loan for the tuition. “I owe her. I needed to be engaged into this thing.” Culinary school was fun, but “I was 19 years old; I had different priorities,” he says.

Saint Louis’ first internship was at Rancho Mirage resort in Palm Springs. His first day he was assigned to assist a cook named Sarah at the garde manger station. At 4 o’clock, Sarah called in sick. “‘OK, you’re Sarah,’ my supervisor told me. We did, like, 80 covers and I just went for it. The sous chef said ‘Are you sure you’ve never done this before?’”

After Palm Springs, he visited Miami, where he had a lot of friends. “It’s closer to Haiti.” He went for a two-week visit. “And then on my last night, I go to this party and I say to my cousin, ‘Dude, if I don’t wake up in time to catch my flight, I’m staying.’ I started working at a small French restaurant a few days later.” The distractions made Miami life unsustainable, and he knew it was time to come back to California. “I called my mom and told her I wanted to come back. She agreed and said maybe it was time for me to do something else with my life.”

“But I came home and got a job at Kitchen at 868 Grant in Novato. The sous chef kept calling me ‘Steven’ the entire day. I told him, ‘My name is actually Stephane.’ But he just keeps hammering on me. At the end of the shift, he says, “Here’s your last check. The next time a sous chef calls you ‘Steven,’ your name is Steven.’”

“I’m thinking maybe my mom is right, so the next day, I get an interview at Washington Mutual. As soon as I am done with the interview, I step outside and my phone rings, and it was a buddy of mine. He had accepted a job at Della Fattoria in Petaluma, but then took another job. He asked me to come in and take his spot.” Saint Louis agreed to come in for a stage. “No promises, I’m supposed to be a banker now.”

In the original Della space, there was “massive pastry production on one side and the other side was, like, a couple little toasters. But it felt right. I thought, ‘I’m gonna give this a chance.’”

“Really, the most attractive part to me is the fact that the entire Weber family [the owners of Della Fattoria] lived on the same property. There used to be this thing after work, everyone would go play Mario Kart together. A real family feel.”

The work, however, was mostly “reproducing” and he started to feel like he had learned what he could there. A friend of the Webers named Francois came in as a consultant and he and Saint Louis immediately hit it off, able to speak French with one another. “He’s, like, ‘How long have you been here? Two years? You need to move on.’”

Agreeing with Francois’s assessment, Saint Louis took a gig at Michael Mina in San Francisco. “That operation was just nuts, three chefs de cuisine, four chefs, three chef de partis, stagieres. It’s mayhem in there. Before service, the chefs would crack those big cans of Red Bull at the pass, like they were going to war. I was leaving San Francisco at 3am, catching the last Muni bus to the bridge, then getting in my car for a 45-minute drive up north. Get home after 4am, up at 9am.”

Then Francois called. He was taking over the restaurant in the Ledson Hotel on the square in Sonoma. “I was a one-man show, for the most part: prepping, cooking, washing dishes. A writer came in and wrote a little article about the restaurant. She spoke somewhat highly of the menu. But only Francois’s name was mentioned. My aunty and my mom get the paper. ‘What the hell is this? Where are you?’ My mom says, ‘It seems like you’re very committed to cooking. You like French food. Do you want to go to France?’”

Saint Louis stayed with an aunt in Paris, but couldn’t find work because he didn’t have a visa. Then he learned that if he attended cooking school, he would receive a visa. And here we arrive at his second run at a culinary education. The one where he went from reluctant journeyman to cook.

“The Paul Bocuse Institute has a restaurant called Saisons, which received a Michelin star a couple of years ago. The students do the cooking and everything is very meticulous and organized. Then I was fortunate enough to move to Shanghai for a school year. We ran a French restaurant that was owned by the school to train about 80 Chinese culinary students the classic French way. These students didn’t speak one word of English and we didn’t speak one word of Chinese. So everything was eye, taste and gesture.”

He returned to France to finish school. “I met my Marta, now my wife. She’s from Poland and she came to France to do an internship at the restaurant school. I was really into the Nordic style, so I thought I could move to Denmark and still be close to my girlfriend. I worked at Kokkeriet in Copenhagen, which was the only Michelin-starred restaurant in the city at the time where the chef didn’t come through Noma. Their constant was classic Danish food, revisited. I just remember being approached as ‘Chef ‘, which totally threw me off. I’m baking bread with apple juice or beer, curing things, fermenting, stuff I’d never done before.”

“By then, I’m five years deep in Europe, so my visa is getting to its last leg. And then one night, I got a call from Aaron Weber, ‘We’re expanding Della into a bigger space. I would love for you to be here as the chef de cuisine.’ I thought maybe it was meant to be.” Saint Louis moved back to Northern California in 2015, Marta coming soon after. “This adjustment had to be the hardest in my entire life.” Leaving the buttoned-up, Michelin-starred world of fine dining was painful.

The Della Fattoria restaurant project was still in the permits-and-planning stage when Saint Louis arrived, and the pace frustrated him. “My mom and my aunties are, like, ‘We sent you to France and you’re right back here.’” Saint Louis and Marta were married, “so I had other things to keep me occupied.”

“The project was so stagnant, I decided it’s time to go and work at Meadowood for Christopher Kostow. On the third day of my stage, the chef de cuisine calls me in and says, ‘We’d love for you to come on board.’ As soon as I walked into Meadowood, I felt like myself again. Beautiful kitchen. I’m trimming pea shoots. It was heaven.”

“But word got around. I agreed to stick it out with Della. I’m getting the team together, which is how I found my [now] business partner, Steven Vargas. Della is a bit more on the rustic side of things, so it never reached the level I really wanted. And they wanted to focus more on pizza, which makes sense because Aaron is a genius with doughs. But that’s just not for me.”

“One of my best friends, Pierre Jean, who went with me to Shanghai, came to visit. He has a little French restaurant in Nice.

While he was here he gets an email from the Michelin Guide that he got his first star. I got to share that moment with him. It was amazing.”

During the same period, Marta was working at the Shuckery and they had just lost their chef. “The owner, Jazmine Lalicker, was very receptive to my ideas. And it also kind of gave me room to tighten the bolts. I came in as a consultant and she did the whole red-carpet rollout. And then the pandemic happened. I offered to volunteer my time, to just see if it could work. If everybody’s closing, we should do takeout. Things started really picking up for us when we made our fried chicken.”

“At this point, Marta and our son were stuck in Poland for over six months, unable to return to the U.S. because of pandemic travel restrictions. And it was just me here. And we are working 11am—6pm, instead of the usual 10am—midnight. So I had lots of time to think. I knew it was time to start my own thing.”

Saint Louis’ current business partner, Steven Vargas, was the one who planted the idea of a food truck. But those are not cheap! Their now-legendary story of investing their stimulus checks into Tesla, leading to a well-timed cash-out that allowed them to make the down payment on the trailer, evidences business minds not always found in culinary geniuses. But now they had to make the monthly payments.

The fried chicken had been a hit at the Shuckery, so they rented kitchen time at Wishbone (a former restaurant in Petaluma) and started selling pre-paid takeout dinners. And, thus, TC Provisions was born. “It’s just me and Steven— beer, hip-hop and chicken. We’re selling out every week and it’s feeling really good.”

After Saint Louis and Vargas cooked a private dinner for Jeremy Forcier, a mortgage lender, and his staff, “Jeremy texted that he was still thinking about the incredible meal,” Saint Louis tells me. Vargas prodded Saint Louis to respond, “If you invest in us, you could eat that well every night.” Forcier wrote back “I’m all in. You have the three elements: You’re passionate, skillful and easy to work with. Plus, when everybody was down, you decided to find opportunity.”

They planned to buy the Wishbone space, but after many months of health department talks, contractor bids and landlord negotiations, they were looking elsewhere, still doing pop-ups four days a week. Forcier saw the listing on the previous Chili Joe’s space on Petaluma Blvd. “Twenty minutes later, the deal was done,” Saint Louis says.

TC Provisions opened in January, serving tasting menus as well as an a la carte menu. With Marta running the restaurant, and Vargas and Saint Louis in the kitchen, the shared passion is very clear. The food is a fine-dining blend of French technique and low-key international influences from the very world-wise ownership team. Feels like Petaluma is due for its first Michelin star. And Saint Louis’ mom? “She is very proud. She comes in for brunch every weekend.”

The TC Provisions team has also formed a partnership with Asombrosa, a new event space located on the outskirts of Petaluma, where they have installed a culinary garden as well as finding a home for their beautiful trailer. You’ll find them there serving food for concerts and events.

To repeat the words of Jeremy Forcier: “Plus, when everybody was down, you decided to find opportunity.” Indeed.

Edible Marin & Wine Country:

What was the first meal you made that you were proud of?
Chef Stephane Saint Louis: Beef Wellington

What was your favorite food as a kid?
Mille Feuille, also known as “Napoleon” in the U.S.

What food do you wish you loved?
TBD

What food do you love unreasonably much?
California cheeseburger

What is the most difficult cooking technique to do well?
Making sauces

What are you exploring in your kitchen now?
Tasting menus

What non-culinary influence inspires you?
Music

What is your idea of a very healthy meal?
Farro and chicken salad from Lunchette [Petaluma]

What is your favorite ingredient?
Butter

What is your favorite hangover meal?
Chicken & waffles

What restaurant in the world are you most dying to try?
Frantzen in Stockholm, Sweden

What kitchen utensil is most indispensable to you?
Tasting spoons

Who do you most like to cook for?
Other chefs

If you could do one other job, what would it be?
Sound engineer

What is your favorite midnight snack?
Toast with honey

What most satisfies your sweet tooth?
Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche Ice Cream

What would you eat at your last meal, if you could plan such a thing?
Haitian rice and beans, braised goat, avocado and fried plantains

What’s your favorite place to go for (and what is your favorite thing to order for)…

…a splurge meal?
Animo [Sonoma] for the whole grilled turbot

…breakfast?
Garden Court Cafe [Glen Ellen], Denver omelet with hash browns and a green salad

…pastry?
Della Fattoria [Petaluma], Pain Au Chocolat

…a late night/after work meal?
In-N-Out, a #1 Double Cheeseburger “Animal-style”

…a cup of coffee?
Stellina Pronto for a 16-ounce latte

…a greasy spoon meal?
There used to be a place called the Fremont Diner…

…groceries?
Petaluma Market’s butcher shop

…kitchen equipment?
Chefs’ Toys cutting boards

…ice cream?
Humphry Slocombe in SF, their Cornflake Crunch

…chocolate?
See’s Candies, Milk California Brittle

And lastly but not leastly… what is your favorite local wine or beer for the season?
Beer: Cooperage Brewing Company’s Moment of Truth
Wine: Fres.Co’s Primitivo