About Paul

Hey All, My name is Paul, or David, depending on how you know me.  I live in San Francisco.  Yep that is right.  I live in the place where being called a ‘foodie’ is a compliment.  But, regardless of how you swallow the reputation of the San Francisco food scene, and regardless of how you know me, you may begin to perceive me as the urban contrast to Sav’s backwoods ways.  On the other hand you may begin to see me for what I feel more like I am, a gastronomical enthusiast and flavor astronaut with an urge to get home to create something authentic.  Call me a “gastronaut”with but 1 sole interest  (and I argue only 1) in my culinary  restlessness; to replicate (and at best improve upon) foods that have blown my mind or brought me home.  While Savastio develops his reputation as a cosy country gourmet in the Sonora Hills, you might say my mission is to bring the backwoods ethic to the urban back yard.  With cooking, any ‘fancy’ skills I may have developed were surely by accident.  I’ve almost as a rule been driven by my gut, literally and figuratively.  My back story begins in the backyard garden of my Grandparent’s Pittsburgh, PA home on Mt. Washington.  It seems the most lucid of my childhood food experience begins there, as did my education about food.  It would seem too that the ether granted me with extreme food awareness as a youth.  You guessed it, I was the fat kid.  Between the ages of 7 and 13 I was somewhere between “Vern” from Stand By Me and “Chunk” from Goonies.  So, suffice it to say that my interest in food was…well… personal.  

In my Grandparents garden (in inner city PGH) my grandfather ‘Bud’ grew the veggies and raspberries.  He used to have me and my cousin Max slay slugs while he weeded his beautiful beds. Often with us in tow, he harvested the day’s crop which would always take a starring role in the rustic meals my grandmother ‘Mutsie’ used to cook each and every night.  Cooking, an essential part of their thrift, was transformed from drudgery to delight.  For them, cooking truly was entertainment.  In the home of my nuclear family it might have been too except that my parents, not unskilled in the kitchen themselves, were both “professionals” in the business world.  Food in my own home was often fuel; I am no stranger to Carnation instant breakfast, Stauffer’s French Bread Pizza, Kraft Easy-Mac or the odd Kelogg’s Pop Tart.  Perhaps though, spurred by my grandparents WWII wholesomeness, I came to want more than fuel (or should I say in addition to).  My muse drove me to watch cooking shows like “Yan Can Cook” and “The Frugal Gormet” as a youth.  And while my family got to be the early test subjects of my burgeoning artistry, I was getting an education.  Little did I know that almost every job I would ever love would have something to do with food. 

I came to know Chris Savastio on Claybrook Farm (R.I.P.) in Jericho, Vermont.  While I’d met him before, the farm was the catalyst that allowed for the unlikely friendship of an Air Force Sergant and an idealistic hippie to make sense.  When you are both covered in dust, sweat, and 1000 mosquito bites, it doesn’t matter where you come from.  And when you’re hungry, arugula never tasted so good.  My hippie-driven ideals turned out to be a good match for a military work ethic. Now, five years later, fate has led us here to our respective versions of California. Sav makes soil maps for the government out in the sticks and I start urban farms in people’s backyards in the smog of San Francisco.  Here’s How We Eat.