Nicole Krasinski
Nicole Krasinski
The Progress / State Bird Provisions / The Anchovy Bar
www.theprogress-sf.com
www.statebirdsf.com
www.theanchovybar.com
Cooking at:
San Francisco Gala Dinner
Way before she was a pastry chef, Nicole was an art student who baked bread. Practically every morning in her late teens, she made challah dough, leaving it on the counter to rise while she took photography classes at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. When she got into the School of Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to the Windy City. And when she needed a job to pay for school, she found a little bakery in Wicker Park called Red Hen Bread.
Three weeks into her time there, she realized that getting paid to do something she loved beat paying to learn something she wasn't even sure she liked. When Red Hen's owner and head baker, Nancy Carey, told her she was a recovering fi ne artist who found her way into a life of wheat and yeast, her path became a model for Nicole. Only instead of an artist turned baker, she became an art school dropout turned baker's apprentice and soon-to-be pastry chef.
She joined Stuart in Ellsworth, Michigan, at Tapawingo. For a while, she stuck with the old-school desserts they'd been making, but she got antsy and decided to create a few herself. Thanks to a stack of cookbooks, she studied under mentors she never met, exploring the food of greats through their written recipes. And because it was essentially just her in the kitchen, she also had the freedom to mess up. So she did and she had to fi gure out why by trying again and again. Every time she did, she got better. When Nicole and Stuart were hired at Rubicon in San Francisco, she kept refi ning her technical skills as a pastry chef. This is where she discovered the pain and pleasure of making true French macarons, which would end up being the inspiration behind State Bird's now signature ice cream sandwiches.
When State Bird opened, she embraced a new kind of freedom. She took inspiration whenever and from wherever it came, to evolve constantly. And this spontaneity gave the pastry program a vitality it might not have had otherwise. It wasn't carefully planned or even well thought out but it stuck because it was awesome, and trying to be awesome was essentially her only guiding principle. That style continues to resonate and grow with her pastry teams at The Progress and The Anchovy Bar, all while discovering individuality and singularity in each restaurant.
