t AL’s Place, an unassuming 46-seat restaurant on a sleepy corner of San Francisco’s otherwise buzzing Mission District, things can get complicated. Consider the french fries: First, large new potatoes, grown for the restaurant, are passed through a fry cutter. Then they are brined for 96 hours in 68-degree water that has been inoculated with salt and cabbage leaves to accelerate fermentation. Next, they’re fried for about five minutes at 325 degrees in rice bran oil. Finally, when an order comes in, they are fried again at 375 degrees for exactly one minute. They are served with a smoked apple barbecue sauce whose creation is equally involved. I had no idea about all of this when I first bit into them. All I knew was that they were like no other fries I’d ever tasted: slightly pickled, creamy in the middle, crunchy on the outside. And they cost $7.
It wasn’t just those fries that left me scratching my head and scribbling notes like “Genius!” and “Bonkers!” on my first visit. It was also the dish of baby lettuces served on crushed avocado, the fregola in a pickled pea broth, the green pea curry with black-lime cod and pickled strawberry, and the clear melon gazpacho. What deal with the culinary devil had chef Aaron London made in exchange for being able to produce such off-the-charts, flavor-rich creations? How was it coming from just three cooks working in a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet?
It’s only when you start asking questions, as I did while spending the day at this vegetable-focused spot back in May, that you realize just how special AL’s Place is. To understand the restaurant and its cooking is to understand Aaron London himself—his troubled early life, his professional ups and downs, and what inspires him now. Think of the place as a window into the slightly manic and fully obsessive mind of an extremely talented and driven chef. It’s a restaurant so personal and passionate and satisfying that it was easy to name AL’s Place this year’s best new restaurant in America.
Growing up in Sonoma County, Aaron London was a bad kid. Real bad. At 14, after a run-in with the law, he was put under house arrest. “I wasn’t allowed TV or music or anything,” says London, now 32. “Cooking from a baking book that my aunt had sent me was all I could do.” Soon his probation officers began giving him a heads-up—and orders—before they stopped by. His baked goods were that good. “It was an aha! moment for me,” he remembers. “For the first time, I was making people—and, more importantly, myself—happy.”
The only job he could get was washing dishes at a Mexican restaurant. Eventually, he started cooking at Mixx, a since-closed bistro in Santa Rosa where, in his own words, he “showed creativity but lacked discipline.” During one rough night on the line, the chef gave him some advice: “Stop sucking so much.”
He listened and learned. The seminal French Laundry Cookbook had just been released, and London buried himself in it. It wasn’t so much the recipes, but Keller’s obsession with systems and detail. He enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, in 2002, doing an externship at Restaurant Daniel in the city. A year in, London dropped out and moved to Montreal, where he was the opening line chef at the now-legendary Au Pied de Cochon. Two years later he returned to school, graduating into a gig at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns. There, he not only learned to “taste terroir in the vegetables,” he made the conceptual leap from cook to chef. “The blinders came off and I could see the whole kitchen,” he says. “I was ready to run a restaurant.”
In 2008, when he arrived at Ubuntu in Napa Valley, everything clicked. While there, Ubuntu became the first vegetarian restaurant in America to win a coveted Michelin star. Pulling from the restaurant’s two acres of gardens, London discovered that vegetables could be more versatile than meat. It’s also where he learned how to run a kitchen with military precision. All the unchanneled energy of his youth was now focused on being the best chef he could be. He was a leader, a role model in the kitchen—unthinkable just a few years earlier. When Ubuntu closed in 2011, London struck out on his own.
And then for the next three years he didn’t cook. The San Francisco restaurant he’d signed on to open ran into delay after delay. He started bartending and eventually dropped out of the project. “Those were dark days,” he recalls. “I feared that I would never cook again.” To regain his culinary mojo, he traveled to Southeast Asia for a few months. When he returned, he was inspired and ready to try again, this time on his own terms.
The vibes at AL's Place:
London's trippy tattoos are based on sketches by the 19th-century naturalist Ernst Haeckel. "I'm obsessed with the juxtaposition of organic and geometric shapes—it really informs my plating," he says."
London gets much of his produce from Rose Becker of Blue Dane Garden.
The restaurant brightens up an otherwise sleepy corner of the Valencia Corridor.
This seasonal curry, served with a meaty fish like black cod, has quickly become London's signature dish.
London uses this charcoal to grill menu items such as his fish "mullet" and fish head under a brick.
London gets flats of these breakfast radishes delivered in their own soil from Becker of Blue Dane Garden. Find them on the menu with preserved bergamot butter.
That brought him to the corner of Valencia and 26th Street. “It was love at first sight despite the fact that it was absolutely hideous and filthy,” London says of the space. He knew he could turn it around and make it something special. After all, he’d done something similar with his own life.
On December 1, 2014, London got the keys. He did almost everything himself, from designing the crab logo on the door to putting tape on the floor so the contractors would know where to install each wall, outlet, and piece of kitchen equipment. No detail was left to chance. On February 4, 2015, a crazy-quick two months later, AL’s Place—note the capital A and L for the chef’s initials—opened.
I knew none of this as I sat at the restaurant’s six-seat bar on my first visit. The sun-filled room that London had designed—blue-painted tile floor, stark white walls, orange bursts of color—reminded me of a restaurant on the island of Santorini overlooking the Aegean. It felt optimistic. I was focused on the menu—divided into five categories (“Snackles,” a goofy term that London made up, “Cold/Cool,” “Warm/Hot,” “Limited Availability,” and “Sides”)—when I noticed a blur out of the corner of my eye. It was London. Tall and lean with tattoos, a topknot, and white clogs, he zigzagged from kitchen to dining room despite, I later learned, having a bum knee from a rock climbing accident. He plated with a furious but controlled energy.
By the time I’d finished those pickled french fries—plus dishes of lightly cured trout with crispy potatoes in a strawberry gazpacho, asparagus in a currant soffritto, and pork belly with a galangal reduction—it was obvious that London had a knack for showcasing the flavors and textures of vegetables in very nonobvious ways. There was tons more going on in each dish than I got from reading the menu. The intensity of flavors was revelatory. It was almost as though I’d been eating vegetables in black and white my whole life, and then suddenly everything was in Technicolor. I needed to come back and watch London cook.
On my return, I spent the day with the whirlwind chef. One minute London was breaking down black cod into one of his signature cuts, “the mullet,” which consists of the collar with the belly attached. The next minute he was mixing sugar, vadouvan and local Marcona almonds—all at Mach 2. The only thing he does faster than dart around the kitchen is talk. “What do you guys pickle?” I ask. He rattles off a list that includes green fig, rhubarb, pea shells, quince skin, and cabbage. Next he shows me his “collection” of frozen oils made from things like melon, grapefruit, and lemon rinds. Nothing goes to waste, not only because it’s environmentally responsible but because it also forces him to develop dishes he wouldn’t think of normally.
Take the fava mayo that accompanies a dish of grilled mushrooms. Most chefs see a fava as a highly seasonal bean. They shuck them after blanching and then remove the skins on each bean. End of fava story. Not for London. He uses the pods to make an ultragreen oil that tastes more like favas than any favas ever have. He then takes that oil, the skins, and a few other ingredients, whizzes them in a Vitamix, and creates a fava mayo so fresh-tasting, it’s like an illusion. He calls it the economy of flavor. The dozens of steps that go into even his most simple-sounding dishes would make your head spin. “It’s always about flavor,” he says before zipping upstairs.
At the end of the day, when you’re eating at AL’s it might not matter to you how many hours something was pickled or what kitchen scraps went into your dish. It might not matter that every cook in London’s kitchen is required to drink water out of a CamelBak thermos (to eliminate spills) or that the tape that holds the seating chart at the pass (where the finished dishes leave the kitchen) has to be perfectly aligned. His personal story might not matter to you either as you down the most intensely flavored, creative food you’ll taste all year. But know this: The most important ingredient at AL’s Place isn’t any of the meticulously curated produce or meat—it’s London himself. It’s his passion, his dedication, his life experience. That’s what makes all the eye-opening flavors possible and what makes AL’s Place such an extraordinary restaurant.
“If it wasn’t for cooking, I’d be either in jail or dead,” London tells me one night after service. “It saved me.” And we’re all very lucky it did.
Young Lettuces with Herbed Avocado
Galangal-Braised Pork Belly With Trout Roe
Pickled French Fries
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