Daniel Patterson

Chef-owner, Coi
San Francisco, California

The chefs in chef Daniel Patterson’s kitchen at Coi (pronounced

“kwa”) are highly alert and deeply engrossed in their various

kitchen tasks: one chef holds a cherry log over a fire, and once it

catches, he runs to a metal tin that contains olive oil, drops in the

log, and covers it with plastic. (“That’s for smoked olive oil for

our bread crumbs,” explains Patterson.) Another chef vigorously

presses solids through a chinois, extracting every last morsel of

flavor from the stock she’s been making.

And as Patterson weaves his way through the kitchen, the chefs

are constantly aware of him. His power comes not from a maniacal

nature (he has a subdued but intense manner); it comes from the

force of his vision, a vision that he articulates rather clearly when I

ask him the name of one of the dishes he’s teaching me.

“That’s not the most important thing about what’s been going

on here,” he says. “It’s about ingredients and paying attention and

adapting to the situation.”

Ingredients are, indeed, at the heart of Patterson’s cuisine. The

first dish that he makes is a simple assembly of radishes, turnips,

fennel, and wild greens. But the attention that he pays to each of

these elements is nothing short of fanatic.