Private chef Shawn Phillips says he came to the work like a fish far, far from any body of water: just focusing on survival. He’d originally left Michelin star-holding kitchens to take care of his daughter, starting to cook more and cash bigger checks with each stint in a different Bay Area restaurant scene.
Now, when he’s not working his 9-to-5, he’s running his debut pop-up Tartufino. He rolled up to Hayes Valley’s Birba in October 2024. Once a month, he takes over the patio. Some summer Saturdays, he takes over his buddy’s Tal Palo in Los Altos.
But Phillips is no 20-year-old elbowing around the city’s powerful pop-up scene. He’s cooked at Napa’s La Taberna, Yountville’s the French Laundry, and in San Francisco at Saison under Joshua Skenes and Atelier Crenn where he worked as sous chef. He even pulled a stint at Chicago’s Alinea. Tartufino is his shot at re-entering the fray. “I haven’t been in a professional kitchen in a very, very, very long time,” Phillips says. “But it’s kind of like riding a bike, once you kind of get back into it, it kind of all just falls into place.”
And for diners, Phillips’s food is the quality his Michelin-star pedigree might imply — but at a dramatically lower price and with zero pretension. The filthy risotto and red beans and rice dishes are luxurious, creamy, but nuanced in presentation. There’s a delightful hint of sweetness in the Jamaican banana curry gastrique he lathers on quail. It’s a bit of a cliche: Haute cuisine, but for the people. Yet Phillips finds a way to pull that off with a big smile and even a few primo nods to Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West (the old Kanye). The former in dish names, such as the Blacker the Berry, which is an end-of-season mulberry and mushroom medley over creme fraiche. The latter serves as design inspiration, the Chicago rapper’s teddy bear traipsing across Phillips’s menus.
The dishes on his menus come from his myriad personal and professional backgrounds. There’s French cuisine from his chef jobs. Then there’s Southern food from how he grew up, his roots. Next Mexican food, or Latin food he adds, thanks to his daughter’s half-Mexican identity. Spanish food and Italian food hail from his career, too. The jamon toast — tomato jam with bread soaked in jamon fat before loading it up with cured meat itself — is a play on a dish he served at Saison. The San Francisco Chronicle’s write-up in February of his homemade tortellini with lamb neck and uni with fondant potatoes and chicken drippings helped vault his work further into the posh dining conversation.
But that doesn’t mean he’s going to turn over an open sign to his own place any time soon. The pandemic, and the rippling cataclysm that hit the restaurant industry, shifted how Phillips views restaurants. Unless some wealthy benefactor cut him a blank check, he isn’t so sure he’ll look for backers. A few cooks at Birba and Tal Palo pitch in, but Tartufino is fully a one-man operation. Twice a month works for him. “At heart, I’m a kitchen rat,” Phillips says with a laugh. “I love seeing people with smiles on their faces. Now, it’s about having my little girl watch daddy do something he’s always loved to do.”