Daniel Patterson's restaurant family just keeps getting shinier.
The chef-owner of San Francisco's four-star Coi has hired James Beard Award nominee Jeremy Fox as chef at Plum (2214 Broadway), his Oakland neighborhood restaurant due this summer.
Originally, Patterson's plan was for Lauren Kiino - who is a co-owner in their Ferry Building outpost, Il Cane Rosso - to head the Plum kitchen. She'll still be part of the opening team and a partner, but her baby will be Patterson's fourth venture - the rustic, open-hearth Bracina. When the opening date for Bracina was moved up to the end of this year, the possible overlap meant they needed to find another chef for Plum.
Enter Fox, who earned national recognition for his work at Ubuntu in Napa before leaving in February. At Plum he'll create a vegetable-based (but not necessarily vegetarian) menu in the artsy, casual space. Fox will also be a key player in ramping up Patterson's forthcoming farm, not to mention other supportive roles in the sister restaurants.
"Our whole organization is pretty collaborative in every kitchen," says Patterson. "I might ask Jeremy about a dish at Coi and vice versa. We'll work together on some things, but it'll be his menu at Plum."
For Patterson, it's the latest coup in his steadily growing restaurant family. Dessert virtuoso Bill Corbett will continue to oversee all the restaurants' pastry programs, and onetime Oliveto general manager Charlie Roberts has signed on to Plum's GM role. Andrew Mosblech - formerly of A16 - has been named the new sommelier at Coi and will concoct Plum's wine list. All in all, it adds up to quite the collection.
"By the time Bracina opens, we're going to have a really interesting cross section of NorCal cuisine," says Patterson, whose four restaurants will run the spectrum from fine dining to sandwiches. "We're going to share ingredient sources, philosophies and values, but how those are expressed is going to be quite different. Same language, different dialects."
Switcheroo: Changes are in store for the Moss Room (55 Music Concourse Drive), Loretta Keller's restaurant in the California Academy of Sciences. Opening chef Justin Simoneaux - a 2009 Chronicle Rising Star - is leaving this week to pursue his own project. He'll be staying local, and if a prediction has to be made, one good guess would be that the Louisiana-born chef will soon be exploring his native cuisine.
