Drinking is what brought us together. A dimly-lit bar in Wicker Park is where Aaron met Gina slinging beer and cosmopolitans in Chicago. We soon realized that together we would go to great lengths to find extraordinary flavor.
This passion transformed our travels into tastings and our kitchen into a laboratory. But it wasn’t enough to consume exciting things. We wanted to make them.
We were the first coffee nerds among our friends. We were throwing regular themed dinner and cocktail parties. And we were experimenting with molecular gastronomy at home, studying the playbooks of Ferrán Adria, Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal.
We had lived and traveled in great culinary cities like Chicago, New York, Paris, London and Tokyo and eaten our ways through every avenue and passage. The real shift came when we moved to San Francisco at the dawn of the craft beverage movement.
Living in the birthplace of California Cuisine during an extraordinary time of food innovation inspired us. In fact, it was the makers that inspired us most. It also gave us access to Berkeley Bowl, Tokyo Fish Market, the Cheese Board, Kermit Lynch and K and L Wine, and many secret chef suppliers that fueled our experiments. We were in the middle of the Bay Area culinary storm, neighbors with Blue Bottle and Four Barrel, Bi-Rite, Tartine, and Humphrey Slocombe.