We recently connected with Kimberly Alter and have shared our conversation below.

Kimberly, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Since I always intended to be a chef I took the first ten years of my career to figure out what I liked. I worked in hotels, big restaurants, corporate, catering, small mom-and-pop’s, fine dining, fast casual, and basically every type I wanted to see what fit me the best. Turns out I like to cook fine dining. I liked the discipline, and the beautiful product and I felt when I was opening Nightbird it made the most sense financially. It is expensive to run a business in San Francisco, so you need to be able to charge more and it all kind of fell into place. So after about 15 years, I decided to open my own restaurant in the heart of SF utilizing all the amazing farms and beauty the Bay Area has. When thinking of the concept I wanted a fine dining-like restaurant, but have it be approachable and a neighborhood gem. So we are one of the cheaper tasting menus, we play louder music, no table cloths, no pretension, just good food done in an elegant way. I also wanted a small bar attached that was a completely different vibe than Nightbird. So we went for a small 8-seat bar that had 1930’s New York Hotel speakeasy vibes, while Nightbird was more airy, light and feminine. So you could have two different experiences in one space.

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 was born in Southern California and when I moved towns and schools I wanted to make friends and I did that by making baked goods with almost every assignment I had. So if I needed to do a science project with a DNA model, I would also replicate little nucleus cupcakes for my classmates. Once I was in high school and started to seriously think about my career I just fell in love with San Francisco and the culinary school there, so I moved up when I turned 18. When I was in school I also worked full-time at a high-end restaurant. I am pretty sure I always had multiple jobs to try to learn as much as I could. I felt I wanted to experience as much as I could to make the right choices for the path of my career. This dates me a little bit, but there was no Google or Instagram when I was a young cook and sous chef so you had to actually work at a restaurant to understand how to master certain things. I wanted to make sure when I was a chef if a cook asked me a question I would be able to answer it. I think this has helped me be a better manager, more creative with my menus, and confident in my skills as a chef. I am proud of the environment I created and the staff that has gone through my restaurant.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I would say I am a pretty strong resilient woman. I am headstrong, I knew what I wanted, and right when I was 18 moved to SF and started to cook. I was the youngest person in my culinary school and throughout my cooking career, was normally one of the only women in the kitchen. This made me feel I had to prove myself more, so I worked very hard. When I was finally at a place to be able to open a restaurant I thought I was able to handle anything, but you get a whole new set of challenges. I would say one of the tougher parts of opening Nightbird was raising money. You really have to put yourself out there. My friend made me a shirt that said High Risk, Undesirable because I was told that is what I was by six banks before I finally got a loan where I had to put everything on the line for it. I was blindly reaching out to people and asking if they would be interested in investing and one specific time I ended up cooking for a group of men. I went all out and cooked a ten-course meal, paired with wines, had amazing staff serve them, and showed them my financials I had made, my story, and the space I was presenting. They thanked me and told me how amazing everything was. A few days later when I followed up to see if they were ready to invest I was told “My food was delicious, the location is perfect, my financials made sense, but they were concerned about investing in someone (a woman) who would be too emotional” I dealt with this throughout my whole career as an employee, a peer, a cook and now I was dealing with it with almost 2 decades of experience and a pretty good track record. I sat on that for a minute and then got up and kept raising money, which I ended up doing. I also ended up paying all my investors back, during a pandemic, and with many obstacles. I think about that a lot and I believe my resilence made me not give up, no matter how many times I wanted

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

This is everyone’s story, but during the pandemic, we had to pivot. It is a hard sell doing a 10-course tasting menu to go. On day one we started to think about what could we do. I was so concerned about my employees, but also all the farmers we work with. So I started working with a few nonprofits who worked with restaurants to cook for the unhoused, churches, and medical professionals. So during the day, we cooked up to 1000 meals for these folks, but we needed to do more. So we started meal kits and a smaller coursed-out menu for pick up at night, but we needed to do more. So we started a burger pop-up mid-day. At this point, we were basically running three restaurants out of one small 300-square-foot kitchen. While doing this I was on about 4-5 zooms a day since I was on multiple coalitions trying to work together with other restauranteurs and help as many folks as we could. It was a 360 of what we did before, but we embraced it, made the best of what we could, and tried our hardest and we did it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nightbirdrestaurant.com/
• Instagram: @kimalter
• Facebook: @Kimberly Alter
• Linkedin: @kimberly alter
• Twitter: @kimalter1

Image Credits
Adahlia Cole