On December 31st 2011, after a few years of travel, exploration, and starting a family, Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski opened the award-winning State Bird Provisions, serving small plates ‘Dim Sum style’. More than a decade later, the dynamic restaurant continues to bustle and thrill diners.

In December of 2014, Stuart and Nicole opened The Progress to critical acclaim. Living up to the name, The Progress continues to evolve and impress with bountiful seasonal-driven plates in a space that pays homage to local artists and makers.

The Anchovy Bar, which draws inspiration from European wine bars yet is decidedly their own, opened in September 2020. The charming spot has received accolades and international attention while inspiring the greater conversation about humble ingredients that are worthy of our attention and why it’s important to eat lower on the food chain.

stuart brioza, CHEF & OWNER

As a teenager, California Bay Area native Stuart Brioza began his cooking & restaurant career. He was immediately entranced by the kitchen’s sensory wonders and the skills and techniques of the professional chef. Even at a young age, Stuart recognized food’s powerful role in defining the cultures and identities of people, regions, and nations.

With his wife and collaborator, the celebrated Pastry Chef Nicole Krasinski, Stuart co-owns several modern-day icons of San Francisco’s vaunted culinary scene: State Bird Provisions, The Progress, and The Anchovy Bar. These restaurants are not simply beautiful dining rooms, but spaces meticulously designed to further the idea of food’s ‘locale’. They share the origin stories of the ingredients served, and capture & convey a genuine sense of place for San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.

Stuart characterizes his honest & bold cooking style as an evolution of California Cuisine, which is to seek out the best examples of organic ingredients in season and respecting their integrity through a cooking process defined by technique and creativity. His kitchens source Northern California's incomparable ingredients (such as quail, anchovies, oysters, seaweeds & wild mushrooms), producing a culinary repertoire that highlights seasonal abundance, preservation, smoking, fermentation & most notably lessening the gap in ‘zero waste’ cooking.

Mentorship, collaboration & management ‘idea workshops’ are examples of how Stuart & his restaurants continue to hone in on goals & continue to have a significant influence on the greater conversation around food and hospitality.

In order to fuel his work as a chef & restaurateur, Stuart spends much of his time with his family in the great outdoors—snowboarding, cycling, gardening, camping, and exploring the globe.

He attributes his national & international success to the delicate balance of focused, yet curious cooking & a lifetime of thrill seeking.

Nicole Krasinski, Pastry Chef & OWNER

Way before she was a pastry chef, Nicole was an art student who baked bread. Practically every morning in her late teens, she made challah dough, leaving it on the counter to rise while she took photography classes at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. When she got into the School of Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to the Windy City. And when she needed a job to pay for school, she found a little bakery in Wicker Park called Red Hen Bread.

Three weeks into her time there, she realized that getting paid to do something she loved beat paying to learn something she wasn't even sure she liked. When Red Hen's owner and head baker, Nancy Carey, told her she was a recovering fine artist who found her way into a life of wheat and yeast, her path became a model for Nicole. Only instead of an artist turned baker, she became an art school dropout turned baker's apprentice and soon-to-be pastry chef.

She joined Stuart in Ellsworth, Michigan, at Tapawingo. For a while, she stuck with the old-school desserts they'd been making, but she got antsy and decided to create a few herself. Thanks to a stack of cookbooks, she studied under mentors she never met, exploring the food of greats through their written recipes. And because it was essentially just her in the kitchen, she also had the freedom to mess up. So she did and she had to figure out why by trying again and again. Every time she did, she got better. When Nicole and Stuart were hired at Rubicon in San Francisco, she kept refining her technical skills as a pastry chef. This is where she discovered the pain and pleasure of making true French macarons, which would end up being the inspiration behind State Bird's now signature ice cream sandwiches.

When State Bird opened, she embraced a new kind of freedom. She took inspiration whenever and from wherever it came, to evolve constantly. And this spontaneity gave the pastry program a vitality it might not have had otherwise. It wasn't carefully planned or even well thought out but it stuck because it was awesome, and trying to be awesome was essentially her only guiding principle. That style continues to resonate and grow with her pastry teams at The Progress and The Anchovy Bar, all while discovering individuality and singularity in each restaurant.

Elizabeth DePalmer, Managing Partner

Growing up in Chicago with Texan parents means that Elizabeth 'Eli' still has friends from kindergarten and she knows BBQ. After several years in Sales and Marketing working with everything from power tools to teddy bears, Eli decided to follow her heart and completed the Chef’s curriculum at CA Culinary Academy.

Spending a 6-month externship in the kitchen at The French Laundry cemented her desire to be in the food industry. Subsequently she worked with a couple of nonprofits working with food, nutrition, cooking & environmental education, but missed the energy of a restaurant, which is what led her to COI where she worked in the office and the growing Daniel Patterson Restaurant Group.

Taking those skills on the road she consulted for and helped open several small independent restaurants before landing with Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski and the State Bird Provisions team just after opening. Eli feels the best part about growing with a restaurant group is the ability to work with people who share similar values and to wear a lot of different hats. As Managing Partner, she manages the Front of House teams; the People, Culture & Benefits; and the business side of the restaurants.

Eli has lived in San Francisco for roughly 25 years and loves it dearly.

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