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Magidow in the kitchen during a friends and family dinner on Aug. 28. Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle |
Magidow writes out the menu at the chef’s counter before a friends and family dinner at La Cigale. The set menu price, of $140, is all-inclusive, with tip and tax factored in, a rarity among U.S. restaurants. |
When customers dine at La Cigale, a highly anticipated French restaurant opening next month in San Francisco, they’ll sit at a 14-seat chef’s counter and watch owner Joseph Magidow cook every single dish on a wood-fired hearth. When the bill arrives, there will be no surprises. The price on the set menu — $140 — is exactly what diners pay: no tax, tip or additional fees.
La Cigale, at 679 Chenery St. in the quaint Glen Park neighborhood, is poised to be a decisive, highly particular business in almost every way.
It is likely the only restaurant in the Bay Area with a fully all-inclusive pricing model. And it will also be the region’s sole restaurant devoted to food from Occitania, a part of southern France. (Oakland’s now-closed Occitania once served the cuisine.) At La Cigale, there is no gas equipment: Magidow will cook the whole menu over fire, from spit-roasted pork neck to a hyper-regional flatbread. La Cigale won’t take reservations. There are no tables, just the striking hexagonal counter made of Monterey Cypress that anchors the maroon-walled dining room.
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Chef Joseph Magidow explains the menu to guests during a friends and family dinner at La Cigale, a new French restaurant from Magidow and his wife, Daisy Linden, in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco. |
Magidow, a veteran San Francisco chef, hopes La Cigale will create new paradigms for the Bay Area, from the food to the business model.
A restaurant without tax, gratuity or extra fees is nearly unheard of in the United States, where debate has raged about the rising cost of dining out, and operators continue to experiment with alternative business and labor models to survive. Magidow, who previously worked at San Francisco restaurants including Italian favorite Delfina and the now-closed Tawla, watched last summer as the failure of legislation that would have made restaurant surcharges illegal in California stoked intense outrage among diners.
“Clearly a lot of people are pissed off about the way that restaurant pricing (is), the equilibrium we’ve arrived at recently, especially in San Francisco,” he said. La Cigale’s website calls it an “act of hospitality to take responsibility for building our costs into the menu price, rather than engaging in legerdemain to pass them on to you.”
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The menu at La Cigale during a recent preview meal for friends and family. |
Magidow saw past employers toggle between gratuity and tipless models, with mixed satisfaction for both workers and customers. He helped spearhead the move from pooled tips to a service charge at Tawla, but said internal communication issues led the restaurant back to tips. Service charges and pooled tipping started to feel like “half measures,” and Magidow wants to prove that an all-inclusive model can work, even with what might be initial sticker shock. (Before tax and tip, dinner at La Cigale would cost about $100 per person.)
The experiment has failed in many cases, with few exceptions. San Francisco brunch favorite Zazie has operated without tips for 10 years. Pasta Supply Co. in San Francisco optimistically moved to all-in pricing at one of its two locations last year, but soon returned to a service charge. Prominent restaurants that moved to service charges in recent years including Che Fico and Good Good Culture Club in San Francisco later changed their models.
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Staff gather for a meeting before a friends and family dinner at La Cigale. Its six employees will receive some unusual benefits for restaurant workers, including four weeks of paid time off. |
La Cigale’s six employees will receive some unusual benefits for restaurant workers, including four weeks of paid time off. For much of his career, even in kitchens with well-intentioned employers, Magidow was overworked and underpaid.
He’s hopeful that building the inclusive pricing and labor model into the restaurant from the beginning will lead to longer-lasting change.
“Like a lot of things, people revert back to what they know,” he said. “Cultural change is a very long, slow process.”
La Cigale will follow a set menu structure with soup, salad, bread, mains and dessert. One course will always feature a peasant soup, like garbure, a minestrone-like soup made from vegetables and pork. Magidow will source game birds from Corvus Farm in Pescadero, a favorite of top Bay Area chefs, for dishes like duck “demi-deuil,” which translates to “half mourning.” The spit-roasted bird looks like it’s clothed in black thanks to slices of black truffle under its skin.
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A counterweight-driven rotisserie mechanism at La Cigale. The owner cooks exclusively on a wood-burning hearth, using no gas equipment. |
Rather than tricking out his first restaurant with modern bells and whistles, Magidow equipped it with medieval technology, such as the custom, 2½-ton grill fueled by almond and pistachio wood. He installed what is certainly San Francisco’s only pulley-operated spit rotisserie, controlled by a weight that slowly drops down, turning the spit. He’ll use handmade tools (bought from a forge whose usual customers are historical reenactors) including a flambadou, from southern France. A metal funnel attached to a long rod, the flambadou sits in the coals until it gets red hot; Magidow puts a chunk of pork fat in the funnel, where it renders and drips out to baste meat.
When Magidow was a college French major studying abroad in Montpellier, part of Occitania, he’d stop at a bakery on his way home from class for warm fougasse. The thin flatbread might be plain, or filled with herbs, anchovies or olives. His favorite: When bakers scraped the fatty, crispy remnants of pork confit from the bottom of the pot, fried them in their own fat and folded them into the fougasse.
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Magidow tends to his custom wood-burning grill at La Cigale. |
At La Cigale, he’ll make small, thin fougasse to order in a coal oven attached to the grill. Magidow has been thinking about Occitan food since his time in Montpellier. While the depth and breadth of Italian food is well-established in the Bay Area, regional French food is underrepresented, Magidow said.
“When you ask someone, ‘What is French food? ’ you’re going to get a set of common answers: steak tartare, frites. Those are for the most part Parisian cuisine,” he said. “Those are not the food of the countryside of France, certainly not the kind of food people cook at home.”
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The dining room at La Cigale, opening in September. |
The Occitan region is geographically and culinarily diverse. (The cigale, or cicada, holds symbolic importance for the area.) In the mountains, dishes typically lean on foraged mushrooms, wild herbs and wild game; on the coast, there’s Mediterranean-like food such as simply prepared seafood with lemon and herbs. One category, marinière, refers to meat with anchovies, capers and olives grilled on a boat as fishermen come in from the day’s catch. Occitan food culture is also defined in part by whether people cook with olive oil, as they do on the coast, or duck fat, as in the southwest. Much of the fare is simple “poverty food,” Magidow said, “driven by seasonality not because we fetishize seasonality but because that’s what we have.”
Like the Basque separatists of Spain, Occitania has a tense and complicated relationship with France. After France took over the region in the 13th century, the language of Occitan was banned, said Oliver Whitmore, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate who studies Occitan language and culture. Students who were caught speaking the regional language in schools were beaten, he said. “It creates this large tension: We do not want to pass on this language because we don’t want our kids to suffer,” he said. The law banning the language was repealed in the 1950s, and there are now some efforts to revive it, Whitmore said, including a restaurant in Toulouse that hosts language workshops and where all the employees speak Occitan.
The historical tension can still be felt in the region’s food. “There’s a very strong regional identity as being not really part of France, certainly not part of Parisian France,” Magidow said.
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Wines served during a dinner at La Cigale, where wine director Matt Montrose focuses on bottles from Southern France. |
La Cigale will serve exclusively French wine, with a particular focus on the southwest. Beverage director Matt Montrose, an advanced sommelier who’s worked at many of the Bay Area’s top fine dining restaurants, hopes to expose people to lesser-known wines and grape varieties from Languedoc, a major coastal wine region. Beyond wine, La Cigale will serve vermouth and housemade shrubs in vintage glass cordials collected from estate sales.
Rob James, owner of Corvus Farms, works with many of the Bay Area’s best restaurants. The ambition of La Cigale, to him, already stands out. “He’s my kind of crazy,” James said of Magidow. “We were texting each other at 10 o’clock at night about sourcing Armagnac and pigs blood.”
Earlier this week, James dropped off a 510-pound pig — the largest Magidow has ever butchered. He planned to use it to make head cheese, sausages and jambon cuit (cooked, sliced ham). For a friends and family dinner on Thursday, he would filet part of the neck, butterfly and stuff it with herbs and then wrap it in caul fat before getting its turn on the spit roast.