The new chef at Osteria Stellina, Jon Helquist, was waxing poetic about potatoes on Friday afternoon, but not just any potatoes. They were red fingerlings from Bolinas.
“They were literally just out of the ground. The skins were like paper, the potatoes were like the creamiest things,” he said. He didn’t have many, he added, but he would roast and serve them and when they were gone, they’d be gone.
Mr. Helquist, who has worked in the culinary field for 25 years and most recently came from a desk job at an upscale San Francisco food delivery startup, is very excited to be back in the kitchen—and within reach of a bounty of local meat and vegetables.
His goal at Stellina, he said, is to keep it simple but ever-changing. “Letting the flavors speak for themselves,” he explained. “Learning restraint with cooking: backing off on salt, backing off on butter, on fat, and learning what water and wine and other liquids can do to enhance and steam or change textures, and how to pull sugars out properly.”
A local regular at Stellina, Peter Nantell, is pleased with the new dishes he has tasted. “It’s been good fun to enjoy new starters and main dishes. Finally. Old standby standards get a little, shall we say, tired; thus it’s time for a true refresh,” he wrote in an email. “[Jon] has brought delightful taste, change-ups, local-sourced and seasonal offerings with surprising combinations. My taste buds are once again entertained and anticipating what’s next.”
Mr. Helquist was born in Portland, Ore., and although he did not develop an early affinity for cooking, as a young boy he hunted deer and duck, fished trout and salmon and foraged mushrooms with his dad and grandfather.
Right after high school, in 1988, he took a bus (a notorious hippie bus called the Green Tortoise) to San Francisco. He was starting to feel his way into the idea of cooking; he’d recently read a book by Ewell Gibbons, called “Stalking the Wild Asparagus.” “It’s basically a little narrative… of him foraging. And he went further and prepared the food [that he foraged]. I was fascinated,” Mr. Helquist said.
He befriended a guy in San Francisco who worked at Chez Panisse, so he went in and asked for a job. When they requested a résumé, he went to a nearby coffee shop and wrote down his work history on a napkin. “Let’s give it a whirl,” he recalled his future mentor, Catherine Brandel, telling him.
Many people in the Chez Panisse kitchen spoke French at the time, and it was an intimidating environment. He started as a garde-manger, which literally translates to “keeper of the food,” and he learned the ropes by performing tasks that teetered on cooking.
“I washed lettuce and hand made pasta and ravioli for almost an entire year and barely got to apply a flame, although I did get to make stocks,” he said. He also took notes of French cooking terms he heard bandied about, looking up definitions in the evening in his English language copy of “Larousse Gastronomique,” a famed compendium of recipes and French techniques. He eventually made it to the line.
After about six and a half years at Chez Panisse, he followed one of the chefs to a well-regarded Italian restaurant, Oliveto, in Berkeley. After leaving Oliveto, he spent the next 15 years largely in the North Bay, and sometimes in San Francisco, consulting with restaurants on menu development and cost control, heading kitchens at a winery and a restaurant in Healdsburg, and working as a purchasing manager at a restaurant, Martini House, that he opened with a fellow chef.
Most recently, he was the culinary manager at Munchery, a Silicon Valley startup of over 100 employees that delivers thousands of gourmet meals a day, prepared by experienced chefs, to clients around the Bay Area. He spent a large portion of his time at a desk, ensuring that the right meals were delivered to the right places and planning menus and prices.
He had never worked for such a big company. But the data-intense atmosphere, though intriguing, ultimately proved lacking; he missed the energy of cooking in a small kitchen and the sense of community. About three months ago, he took the head chef position at Stellina, and soon after moved from Sebastopol to Point Reyes Station.
Some aspects of the menu at Stellina—like the clams with bucatini in a white wine sauce and the selection of pizzas—are more or less fixed. But Mr. Helquist said he changes the menu multiple times a week, depending on the meat and vegetables he has in stock, a practice he hopes keeps diners coming back and his own interest piqued. (“Change is the key to my mental health,” he said.)
Mr. Helquist, who said he works 12 to 15 hour days about six days a week, is by turns confident and humble: he is not flustered by the prospect of a customer walking away displeased, but he makes no claims of infallibility.
“Sometimes it’s not perfect and that’s exactly what cooking is. We fail a little bit every day, and we know how to make something happen out of our failures,” he said. “That was a big thing in the startup business. Fail. Fail soon and fail often, because you have to do that to learn from mistakes…. Everything can be improved upon or done differently next time.”
He ruminates on new dish ideas at night, as he goes to bed. He arrives at Stellina around 11 a.m., and during the day he and his staff craft the menu, sometimes preparing components before the final plate arrangements or combinations are made. He takes a brief daily walk in the Giacomini Wetlands in the afternoon or evening, to help him think about the dinner menu.
His cooking philosophy, he said, is easy: “Keep it simple and respect ingredients.” Although they were not all on the menu (at least as small plates) last Sunday night, Mr. Helquist sent three small plates to our table: a pair of red fingerling potatoes roasted in their skins and topped with crème fraiche and salmon roe; two slices of raw salmon dressed in olive oil and red pepper; and roasted Italian frying peppers.
Small plates invite you to taste slowly and think deeply, even when the ingredients are few and the preparation simple. The salmon, dressed in a delicate, fruity olive oil and topped with chewy, just-flowering bits of brassica, was almost a dreamy textural feat, though Mr. Helquist applied a pinch of red pepper flakes to snap the diner back to reality.
The two first small courses—a red oak leaf and endive salad with pine nuts ($11) and an aged cheddar grissino (a slender, upscale cheese stick) and a melon salad ($12)—also captured the kind of restraint to which Mr. Helquist aspires. He accented the melon, juicy and sweet, with the same wisp of olive oil and red pepper flakes as the salmon, and the light dressing on the pine nut salad would have been a much riskier proposition had the endive, which can tend to bitterness, not tasted surprisingly sweet, too.
It helps that, like other restaurants in West Marin, Stellina buys many of its ingredients locally; Mr. Helquist attempts to keep much of it within a 150-mile radius, which helps both local producers and the palate.
“I think he understands how hard farming is and how unpredictable it can be,” said Molly Myerson, who raises quail and grows vegetables on Little Wing Farm north of Tomales, which sells much of its produce to Stellina. “He’s excited to work with what I have.”
Mr. Helquist is not beholden to a purely local menu, however; he’s fond of monkfish, which he has sourced from Maine, and he recalled a cheese from Oregon that is “freaking delicious. Don’t cry about it, we’re gonna eat it. People understand that,” he said.
In addition to nabbing fresh ingredients that can be savored without ever touching a skillet or landing in the oven, Mr. Helquist likes to tap into the flavors in his produce. In roasting the peppers (called Jimmy Nardello peppers), “we blistered them until they’re black,” he said. “It’s like a red pepper but also becomes like a soft, ripe tomato, meaty and creamy.”
A fillet of salmon with romesco sauce and corn, zucchini, spring onion and red pepper succotash ($27) was simple and sweet, and the fillet itself—notably free of the extra oils that salmon sometimes has—reflected an earlier, leaner time in this fish’s season, before it has fattened up, Mr. Helquist said. The dish, though delicious, was maybe a little too gentle for this diner’s palate; a hint of an acidic or bitter component might have added a playful punch.
But the dish may also may have paled slightly in comparison to what came next: a lamb loin from Barinaga Ranch in Marshall, marinated in mustard and served with brilliant flowering bok choy, trumpet mushrooms and leeks ($30). Mr. Helquist said he has committed to buying two lambs every two weeks from Barinaga while they are in season; in fact, lamb appeared as another entrée that evening, with polenta and greens. (One of his employees spends roughly a day and a half breaking the carcasses down when they arrive, he said.)
The most memorable part of the lamb loin was the lovely layer of grilled fat on the bottom of the cut. Charred and smoky, it was like a slice of bacon beneath the tasty muscle; the treatment was decadent and complex, the kind of flavor that makes you want to close your eyes. But the warm flowering bok choy, with a tender bite and vibrant color, brought balance and beauty. So we opened our eyes, if only to see the flowers before we ate them. It was hard to think of a way to improve upon the plate, but maybe during a recent walk in the wetlands, Mr. Helquist has already thought about new ways to prepare the next round of loins when they come through.