We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Harrison Cheney a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Harrison thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Have you ever had an amazing boss, mentor or leader leading you? Can you us a story or anecdote that helps illustrate why this person was such a great leader and the impact they had on you or their team?

The Best boss I ever had was actually two people, Jacob Homström and Anton Bjuhr – the two owners of Gastrologik.

They were both very very different people, individually they were great leaders and role models but together they were incredible, they gave me an opportunity to be creative, to learn and to be myself as a leader within their restaurant when the time came.

They thought about everything and took the time to explain why everything was important, the science behind things, the psychology behind things.

I learnt so much about my philosophy for food, how important purveyors are, and most importantly how important your staff and team is.

I really would not be where I am without both of them, I am very blessed to have worked under both of them.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am orignally from England, mostly growing up in London. Art is something I have always been interested in, My mother is a ceramicist and a jeweller so I have always been surrounded and inspired by art in many different ways.

I am now the Executive chef at Sons and Daughters in San Francisco, Previously the head chef at (the now closed) two Michelin starred Gastrologik in Stockholm.

I have been cooking for nearly 15 years and it is the only thing I have ever done and over this time I feel I have built a very unique cooking style, I really feel that part of this comes to my expression of my personality and of course the experience that I have gained from previous mentors and people I have been fortunate enough to work with.

I have always had a very clear idea of what I wanted to achieve as a chef, every restaurant I have worked in I have made sure to always leave with positives or negatives, slowly learning and creating my idea of what I wanted to achieve when I run my own restaurant, this is so important. If I haven’t liked things in the past why keep it the same when its my turn?

My food is focused on Sustainability, this is integral to our style at the restaurant, knowing where and who things come from, do they share the same ethos on sustainability as us? Building relationships is also extremely important, all of our ceramics, wood work, and of course the produce comes from people we know and want to work with.

My food is heavily inspired by New Nordic cuisine, this comes from my time in Scandinavia. I loved the focus on purity of ingredients and notes of acidity and freshness, it also links back around to sustainability as it is all centered around locality.

I am very proud of what we achieve at the restaurant, it sounds cliche to say but it really would not be achievable without the team, the dedication to our craft, the level of belief they have in me is inspiring and makes me want to do better and achieve more.

We have a very small, unique but beautiful space, it is a great balance between elegance and refined and welcoming and comfortable, which translates very well with the food and experience we provide.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

At the start of my career being a chef in London was very tough, It is a notoriously grueling and demanding industry and I definitely put myself in some of the harder positions and kitchens I could of.

I was always very ambitious, sometimes too much so! I was working in a Two Michelin starred restaurant in London working 18 hours shifts sometimes if you were unfortunate enough to have Monday, Tuesday off the first week and Saturday Sunday off the following week I would work 10 of those shifts straight, sleeping around 3 hours a night.

It was extremely tough and a lot of the chefs I worked with aren’t cooking anymore, I often would think whether it was worth trying something else but I love the industry with such a raw passion I would never forgive myself for giving in.

Years later, I have meetings with ceramicists that I look up to, designing plates for my food – this in itself is a dream.

I go to farmers markets and pick out produce I want on my menu.

I have guests tell me about how much they enjoyed their dinner, to be told on occasion that this is the best meal they have had in their life at first did not resinate with me but i really took some time to process what that meant and how special that is for someone to say is an incredible feeling.

These few things alone made it and still make it worth all of the hard work in my earlier days.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

While I haven’t focused on building social media presence, I have really focused on dedicating the time to researching and educating myself on my craft.

Social media is a great way to build an audience and to spread the word of what we are achieving as creatives, but I feel like sometimes people sacrifice potential to try to be something that they aren’t for the eyes on the internet.

I really believe that within hospitality the focus should be showing up everyday in person for our guests, staff and ourselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sonsanddaughterssf.com/
• Instagram: hcheneychef
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrison-cheney-200a1a59

Image Credits
Kelly Puleio Jim Sullivan