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Manresa and Love Apple Farm Get Full Bon App Feature Treatment

Love Apple Farms
Love Apple Farms Photo: Bon Appetit

It’s been a real summer of national mag love for David Kinch! First, GQ’s Alan Richman practically kisses his feet and calls him “the father” of the emerging, modern, more-than-farm-to-table movement in the Bay Area. And today the August issue of Bon Appétit landed in our box, and there’s a ten-page spread about Manresa, and in particular, Love Apple Farms, where Kinch has been cultivating all his own produce for the restaurant. “It’s about growing multiple species to contribute to the complexity of our food,” Kinch tells the mag. “It’s about having a dozen different carrot varieties… It’s about having 110 to 130 tomato varieties — and that’s not an exaggeration, by the way.”

Furthermore, they swoon over the fact that “the world’s greatest chefs — including Alain Passard and René Redzepi — will gladly do a rare guest-chef stint [at Manresa] rather than cook in San Francisco, only an hour away.”

The piece also gives credit to farmer Cynthia Sandberg, whom Kinch began contracting with to supply 100 percent of the restaurant’s vegetables back in 2006, and who now runs Love Apple on a larger site thirteen miles from the restaurant. Kinch says this was all modeled on Passard’s “kitchen garden” which supplies his Michelin three-star restaurant, L’Arpege, in Paris.

And there are recipes for Kinch’s Garden Beignets, and the cucumber-aloe gin cocktail created by beverage manager Jeff Bareilles.

This all comes a year after Kinch took home the Best Chef: Pacific medal at the James Beard Foundation Awards, and just over a month after reopening the Manresa dining room with a more modern look and a new cocktail bar. Congrats on the fresh attention, Chef.

The Michelin Garden [Bon Appetit - not yet online]
Earlier: Alan Richman Hearts S.F. Now, Calls New York Restaurants ‘Predictable’
First Look Inside the New Manresa, Now With Cocktail Lounge

Manresa and Love Apple Farm Get Full Bon App Feature Treatment