Joshua Skenes: ‘I’m not interested in fancy anymore’

Paul Feinstein speaks to the now LA-based chef about his new “casual quality’ restaurant, Leopardo, and falling out of love with fine dining.

Is it possible for a chef who expects and exceeds the highest standards of dining to view food through an entirely different lens? Can a chef like this re-program his brain?

This is the real-time experiment that famed chef Joshua Skenes is currently conducting on himself. Skenes, as you may know him, was the chef of San Francisco restaurant Saison when it was awarded three Michelin stars back in 2014. He was also the opening chef of Angler in San Francisco which garnered another star from the esteemed guide.

But Skenes has left the cushy confines of fine dining in San Francsico and relocated south to Los Angeles where he’s running a new restaurant, Leopardo, that he’s coining as “casual quality.”

“We wanted to do a pizza joint, and we found a great space. It just happened to be a little bigger than what we expected. So, I had to make more of it. It had to be more than pizza for a space that size. And I wanted to do this because there’s a shortage of naturally leavened pizza places and I was looking for something that was naturally leavened wild yeast, really high-quality stone-ground flours that have nutrition in them still, and a depth of flavor to the dough and to the crust.”

The Leopardo space centers around an open kitchen, surrounded by bar seating and flanked with tables against floor-to-ceiling windows. The staff is friendly, the air is the furthest thing from stiff, and the vibe is, for lack of a better word, casual. But Skenes can’t always shut off the part of his brain that’s trained to notice the smallest of details.

“Most nights it’s pretty fun. There's a plethora of shit that I notice. But here's the thing to me—there's a level of integrity that I want at any of my restaurants to operate at. I want a quality product out of it but that can be hard to find. Quality casual is really hard to find in the US. For whatever reason, any other country you can go and get really great products, like live fish, in say Hong Kong, and take it to a stall to be cooked right there. For whatever reason here, it’s damn near fucking impossible to find that casual quality. So, it takes real work to get that.”

Anyone who dines at Leopardo does so for the pizzas distinguishable by their ‘thicc’ bulbous crusts that crackle to the touch and are soft and chewy inside. No two dining experiences will be the same as the pizza topping offerings seem to change almost daily. There could be a simple margherita one day followed by a smoked salmon-topped pie with roe and crème fraiche on another. But dough aficionados will delight in what Skenes has concocted—the crust could live on its own, topping-less and would still create its own fan club.

“When you talk about the R&D process, all food kind of fits into three buckets. At least for the sake of developing a product, the obvious one is products, the levels of quality products. The second, of course, is taste and balance. Taste balance is everything, everything that happens, from the moment you see it through the entire digestion process, and what the textural is, and the mouth feel, the aromas, the flavor, of course, all that stuff. A lot of that has to do with execution and personal preference. But really the big third one is textural. Textural and the technical details are really where we do a ton of work. In this case, I want the dough to be very light and fully fermented, and have a real depth of flavor to it, but also still retain that kind of natural sweetness that you get from really good flour and grain, but also more of a lactic acid rather than acetic acid. And I want it to be super light but want it to be eggshell cracking on the outside and really soft on the inside, which is the best of all worlds. So, my thought process was purely what is the path that I can get through the absolute best flavor in this product, with the right taste balance, and that's always been the way that I cook, and that’s no different here.”

The rest of the menu also changes based on availability. There could be wild game tartare, uni atop lump crab in a salad filled with market produce, lamb saddle, or Morro Bay oysters. A cocktail list runs the gamut of creativity like a filthy martini with “clarified green tomato and pickled things” or a Kyoho Frose made from kyoho grapes with cachaca and Asti Spumante.

For Skenes fans, however, the most glaring thing is the departure from fine dining. What’s ironic is Skenes’s desire to leave the fine-dining world came right after he achieved the highest honor of receiving a third star at Saison.

“It was in 2014, right after we got our third Michelin star and I was like, fuck, I can't go anywhere. I have to stay put, I owe it to my team and everybody here to stay put. But I was in a city trying to make the highest quality food possible, but you can only go so far. I had two different farms, one inland for hot shit like tomatoes and corn and things like that and one on the coast for leafy greens that grow more slowly because you have a morning fog and dew. To me, that's what it takes to get the right quality level. I was having fishermen bring fish, literally have their boat on a trailer. They would walk in with a barrel of live fish and put it in our live tanks, so we were at the level of quality you can't get any further in a city. So, the only logical next step is to go to the source of the product.

“Look, the only thing that I was interested in was high end for a really long time, and I wanted to change that. I wanted it to be fun, I wanted to shed any barriers to a good time. I want to play music at a level that's fun and entertaining. I just don't want any of the bullshit that comes along with, let's call it fancy restaurants. There will always be a place for quality restaurants. I'm just not interested in fancy anymore, I just got disenchanted with anything that gets in the way of quality.”

Skenes acolytes shouldn’t fret though as he has a plethora of plans that will whet the appetites of fine diners and casual crusaders alike. For the next couple of years, Skenes plans to lean into casual quality with two more restaurant openings in Los Angeles.

“We’re going to open a burger joint and a chicken joint—that’s all we know for sure. We’re going to be doing things that I think are smart business decisions, but also, I want to eat burgers that don’t have commodity beef. I want to eat chicken that is not commodity chicken. I think the idea was, like with pizza, that unless we can do this differently and at a higher quality level, then let's not do it.”

And on the highest end of the fine dining/luxury hospitality spectrum, Skenes has plans to open a ranch in Washington State.

“It’s a destination resort that’s all about the food. The point of it is the food and it just happens to have rooms, because that makes sense, and it's in the wilderness on a river and it’s incredible. It’s in the Cascade Mountains in Washington and you can kind of draw a 60-mile circle around everything and literally everything that is used by the restaurant is produced within that circle. I’ll be there full time once these places are all in their steady state in LA. I’ll always go back and forth, but I would guess the ranch would be open, probably in the spring of 2026, possibly the fall of 2025. It’ll be experiential in a way. We’re growing everything. We have a pottery barn where we produce ceramics with clay from around the area. There's a lot of stuff going on, but we haven’t totally decided yet on that stuff and are still figuring out what people will really want. We do have outfitters available for people to go fishing on the river and stuff like that. So, there'll be a lot of things that resemble any ultra luxury destination resort, but the focus will be on the food and beverage.”

So, to answer the question as to whether a chef like Skenes can turn ‘it’ on and off when it comes to how he cooks or how he sources his products is ‘yes, but’. Skenes will never stop searching for the highest quality food he can deliver to the public. He will never stop noticing if his ‘casual’ style of service is slightly off. He will never stop obsessing over the tiniest details of what ends up on your plate. But he has and will continue to stop fretting about stars and ‘best of’ lists, because his standards of quality will always be how ‘he’ measures the meal he’s providing to his customers. And if it doesn’t meet his standards, he simply won’t serve it.