It's standing room only at San Francisco's Postrio

Nation's Restaurant News, May 8, 1989 by Alan Liddle

It's standing room only at San Francisco's Postrio

SAN FRANCISCO -- Just four weeks after opening, Postrio, the new restaurant created by chef Wolfgang Puck, designer Pat Kuleto, and management specialist Bill Kimpton, is booked for dinner six weeks in advance.

Lunch reservations are easier to secure, management indicated, as long as they are made one month in advance.

The 200-seat restaurant, which cost more than $2 million to develop, is managed by Puck and employees of Kimpton's company, Kimpton Restaurant Group (formerly Kimco Hotel Management). Kimpton veteran Geordy Murphy is the general manager.

Puck, who also owns Spago and Chinois on Main in Los Angeles, is a partner in Postrio with Blackman Flynn & Co., an investment banking firm. Because he can't be in San Francisco full time, he hired two former Spago stalwarts, Anne and David Gingrass, to run the kitchen.

Already, Postrio is doing an average of 470 to 500 covers per day, said Nancy Mootz, Kimpton Restaurant Group operations vice president.

Per-person checks, including beverage, are averaging about $10 at breakfast, $25 at lunch, and $50 at dinner, she says.

Projections indicate Postrio could report first-year sales of $7 million, Mootz says.

According to Puck and Mootz, early best sellers include smoked duck carpaccio with wilted greens and shallot-black pepper vinaigrette ($9.50), and sauteed sweetbreads with arugula and sherry sauce ($18).

Also popular, they say, are barbecued Chinese sausage with sweet-and-sour cabbage ($9); a combination plate of grilled quail and ravioli filled with spinach and soft quail egg ($9.50); and Maine lobster with spicy curry risotto and fried spinach ($19.50).

Designer Pat Kuleto devised the interior of Postrio, which occupies three levels in a space adjacent to the new Prescott Hotel. Nearly all accounts indicate Postrio customers are as enamored with the decor as they are with the food.

The front door and 42-seat bar, complete with wood-burning pizza oven and pantry, are off the street; the 38-seat mezzanine is a level lower.

Below the mezzanine--and accessible via an elegant and sweeping staircase that provides what Kuleto likes to call a "grand entrance" -- is the 120-seat dining room. Dominating the view on that level are an exhibition cooking line and free-standing pantry island, custom-made wall sconces and hanging orbs, and commissioned modern art by Sam Francis and Robert Rauschenberg.

"Fun and theatrics were really the major [design] elements," Kuleto says. "I think the most dynamic thing about the restaurant is the physical space and how it works . . . The way everyone can relate, see, and feel a part of the whole and still feel they have an intimate space."

Though pre-opening publicity said Postrio would serve modern interpretations of San Francisco "classics," even Puck admits that little of what comes out of the kitchen has strong ties to the city's past.

His true objective at Postrio, he syas, is to create food reflecting "San Francisco the way I feel it [to be], a city with many ethic groups and cultures."

The result is an eclectic menu that revolves around the produce available in Northern California. The influences of Chinese, Italian, and other foreign and ethnic cooking practices are evident.

The Gingrasses, a husband-and-wife team, helped Puck create the menu, he says.

Prior to signing on at Postrio, Anne Gingrass had been Puck's chef at Spago for three years; David Gingrass was most recently Spago's chef-kitchen manager. Both are Culinary Institute of America graduates.

Mootz says that as chef de cuisine, Anne Gingrass is responsibile for the line and for developing new menu items. David Gingrass, she says, is the restaurant's chef-kitchen manager and oversees purchasing and the preparation of fresh pasta, breads, house-smoked salmon, and a variety of sausages.

The restaurant's name, Postrio, is a play on words relating to the restaurant's location on Post Street and the fact it has a trio of chefs.

Pastry production at the new restaurant is the domain of Barbara Ury, who was formerly the pastry chef at the Dakota Bar & Grill in Berkeley.

Ury and her crew of eight do such a good job, Moots says, that 75 percent of Postrio's clientele order a dessert.

Among the sweets recently offered on the 12-item dessert menu were chocolate devil's food cake with coconut and walnuts, served with mango sauce; pecan rum pir with praline ice cream; creme brulee with seasonal berries; poppy-seed shortcake with soft strawberry swirl ice cream strawberry compote. All desserts are $5.

Beverage sales at the restaurant account for about 35 percent of total sales, Mootz says, adding that Puck's 150-bottle wine list, which features older California vintages, is being well received by patrons.

PHOTO : Postrio co-owner Wolfgang Puck, left, and executive chefs Anne Gingrass and David Gingrass gather on the stairway that leads down into the dining room of the 200-seat restaurant in San Francisco.

PHOTO : Pastry chef Barbara Ury applies nuts to a chocolate cake.