A former Battersby, Dover, and Le Rock chef, now based in San Francisco, comes east for a single meal built around a whole lamb, guinea hens, and a 20-year friendship.
On Thursday August 27, chef Walker Stern flies in from San Francisco to cook a single night at Nines in Germantown, at the invitation of chef and co-owner Ryan McLaughlin, an old friend and former kitchen partner. The plan is for a whole lamb from Kinderhook Farm to anchor the menu but Stern is keeping much of his planning close to the chest.
While that’s not much to go on if you’ve never heard of Stern, McLaughlin says, the region’s chefs know what he can do and the event was intentionally planned for a Thursday, in part, to allow for local culinary workers to attend more easily.
Nines opened this spring in the former Gaskins space on Church Avenue, built around the same wood-fired oven the Suarez family left behind. The restaurant's own point of view runs Italian Riviera but for one night, McLaughlin is handing the kitchen to a friend whose training runs French, by way of two decades in some of New York's more demanding restaurants.
Stern is a Bay Area native who trained at the Culinary Institute of America and came up under chef Sylvain Portay at the Ritz-Carlton's Dining Room in San Francisco. In New York, he crossed paths with fellow CIA grad Joseph Ogrodnek while both were cooking at Alain Ducasse's restaurant at the Essex House. The two stayed in each other's orbit through stints at Dan Barber's Blue Hill and the restaurant 81, and in 2011 they opened Battersby in Cobble Hill together. The restaurant landed on Bon Appetit's list of the 10 best new restaurants that year, and its kale salad was later named Bon Appetit's dish of the year. Stern and Ogrodnek followed Battersby with Dover, which earned them a Food & Wine Best New Chef title in 2014, and eventually a cookbook built around both restaurants' recipes.
In 2022, Stern became executive chef of Le Rock, the Frenchette team's brasserie at Rockefeller Center. Two years later he moved west to run the kitchen when Michael and Lindsay Tusk relaunched their wine bar Verjus in San Francisco's Jackson Square. This past year, he's spent much of his time on Here Before, a roving pop-up he runs with his partner of 16 years, Devon Nevola, at natural wine bars and wineries around the Bay Area.
McLaughlin and Stern's history goes back further than any of that. They met at Blue Hill in 2006, and later reunited when Stern became opening chef de cuisine at the Vanderbilt in Brooklyn and brought McLaughlin on as his sous chef. McLaughlin has since cooked his way through the Hudson Valley and Philadelphia—Daughters Fare & Ale, Gedney Kitchen, Other Half, Mirador—before opening Nines with partner Avery Jannelli this spring.
"He's just so talented, and I'm extremely lucky I got to work next to him for so many years," McLaughlin says of Stern. "People who know good cooking know Walker. He doesn't try to do publicity or anything—he just wants to cook food."
The dinner is planned as a single seating for roughly 70 guests. It's prix fixe at $95 per person, not including wine and cocktails. Stern isn't ready to release the full lineup just yet, but the anchor dishes are set.
"I am not ready to share the whole menu just yet," Stern says. "But lamb and guinea [hens] will both be featured: Ryan said he will be securing us a whole lamb from Kinderhook Farms, which I'm psyched about." The guinea hen will come from Northwind Farms in Tivoli.
Stern describes his cooking simply: "My style of cooking is fresh and ingredient driven. Being on the West Coast with such great access to local products has definitely enhanced my ability to continue to cook this way."
He's calling the night "Friends in Town." As he puts it: "Having worked as a chef for over 20 years, relationships with other chefs is a big part of your life and career. Ryan and I have known and worked with each other for a long time so it's a special opportunity to be bringing my food into his space. I also spent such a great deal of my career working in New York so it will be great to cook for people in the region again, from OG regulars to brand new guests."
With just 70 seats for a single meal, reservations for August 27 are expected to move quickly. Guests can book through Nines directly.
2 Church Avenue, Germantown, NY 12526
Reservations at Ninesgermantown.com.
