It didn’t matter whether it was sunny and 65 or one of those infamously foggy days when the San Francisco windchill cuts through your coat like the weather’s got a chip on its shoulder. For more than a decade, there was always already a line outside State Bird Provisions as the clock ticked from 5:29 to 5:30 p.m.

Seven days a week since 2012, diners have queued up on the sidewalk along the 1500 block of Fillmore Street, sizing each other up in an unsubtle attempt to suss out which parties had reservations and which would be vying for one of the few tables — 30 percent of the dining room, to be exact — held aside for walk-ins. Anyone who didn’t get a seat during the restaurant’s first turn would be relegated to waiting for at least another couple of hours. Sometimes hungry would-be diners would crack open a bottle of wine and brown bag it, splashing drinks into red Solo cups. On Saturdays, to create a more festive air, the State Bird kitchen staff would pass out hot chocolate.

Co-owners and chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski, along with managing partner Elizabeth DePalmer, say that over the years, they often wondered when they’d show up to find no one waiting outside.

“Every year, we’d be like, is the line gonna go away?” Krasinski says.

“Sometimes they would come a little later than normal,” DePalmer adds. “We’d be like, ‘Oh, is today gonna be the day?’

“But we were surprised every day for 10 years.”

Even now, a full 12 years since State Bird Provisions opened its doors, it’s common to find a line of diners waiting outside the restaurant when service begins. But if you ask the trio, they’d swear they had no idea what a success the restaurant would be. State Bird Provisions has been credited with being among the first (if not the first) to adapt dim sum-style cart service to non-Chinese food — not to mention reinventing entirely new seasonings and turning the California state bird into a culinary phenomenon — but the owners say they opened it, at least in part, out of necessity.

“We didn’t want to bounce our rent checks,” Brioza jokes. “We were definitely doing something radical. And, you know, honestly, I think it was a lot of lukewarm reception in the early days.”

Of course, it didn’t take long for that to change.

“So, little-known fact,” Brioza says. “State Bird was, in a really weird way, never meant to happen.” What he means is that it wasn’t a restaurant he and Krasinski planned on opening.

When the couple started toying with the idea of opening a restaurant, America was just coming out of the Great Recession. Brioza and Krasinski, who’d been working in the restaurant industry for more than a decade already, knew they wanted to open something of their own; they just weren’t sure what it should be. In the meantime, they were catering out of their Hayes Valley apartment. But due to the economic downturn, fewer customers wanted a full dinner spread. Instead, the pair would often cook meals comprised entirely of hors d’oeuvres — a full menu of small bites, but enough to leave guests feeling full.

Around this time, they toured the building that would eventually become State Bird Provisions. The space at 1529 Fillmore Street had previously housed a pizzeria, but it was small and dark, and Brioza and Krasinski weren’t into it. Then they stepped into the space next door and immediately fell in love. The longer, narrower space at 1525 Fillmore Street had high ceilings and character in spades. They wanted it for their dream restaurant — what would eventually become the Progress — but it wasn’t zoned for food and would need a complete build-out. So the landlord, who owned both spaces, made them an offer: He’d give them a deal on the space they really wanted, if they’d take that smaller space, too. They could open something at 1529 Fillmore Street far more quickly and have that up and running while they worked on making 1525 Fillmore Street whatever they desired.

All Brioza and Krasinski needed was, well, a restaurant to move into the space.

“So we had this idea,” Brioza says. “We started to do these mammoth hors d’oeuvre parties, like 10 to 12 items — and that was the birth of State Bird.”

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State Bird Provisions opened its doors on December 31, 2011. The decision to debut on New Year’s Eve was half joke — a goofy idea, because why not? — and half out of necessity, as the owners say they were eager to see sales coming in. The opening team consisted of 14 staff members, and back then the restaurant had just 40 seats. There was no written menu, by design. And the owners were so cash-strapped they could barely afford office supplies. (For a time, they used a laptop with a missing “B”; every time they wanted to insert the letter, they’d have to copy and paste it in.)

The kitchen set-up was similarly bootstrapped. Brioza recalls the mise en place being set out on a wooden table. Cooks might tweak dishes mid-service, making slight changes as they went along. “It was really freeform,” Brioza says. “And I loved that. It was just the spirit of cooking, not overly conceived. We didn’t sit and test dishes, you know? It was like, just go.”

Diners, however, didn’t immediately warm to the restaurant’s free-flowing ethos. Building on the inspiration of those catered parties, State Bird opened with a walk-up standing bar so diners could truly feel like they were at a dinner party. But the owners quickly found that standing up while eating at a restaurant didn’t quite land with customers, so they replaced it with a six-seat counter where diners could perch with a full view of the kitchen. Over those first few months, they continued to make similar tweaks, sorting out how to structure the written menu (once they decided that they did, in fact, need one) and how to explain the restaurant’s cart and tray service to first-time customers. In essence, they refined the State Bird Provisions concept based on feedback from those early diners. The idea to label the dishes diners could order from the kitchen as “Commandables,” for example, came from a Yelp review.

After the first four or five months, things started to click. But that didn’t mean the new restaurant was on solid ground. Check averages remained incredibly low relative to cost, about $35 per diner, Broiza says. They were committed to keeping the restaurant affordable, even selling half beers to keep prices low, but at the same time, they needed to make money. So they shifted their focus on raising check averages by $2 increments week over week.

“All of those little things played a big impact,” Brioza says.

The restaurant was moderately busy at that point. Then, the article happened.

“Honestly, the biggest thing in our lives was when Bon Appétit came around,” Brioza says. “That was kind of the day that changed everything for the restaurant.”

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On August 15, 2012, the day after Bon Appétit magazine crowned State Bird Provisions the best new restaurant in America, the restaurant’s phone would not stop ringing. It was a tsunami, DePalmer recalls. Diners hoping to snag a table would call and email the restaurant to falsely report that the online reservations system was broken. In fact, the restaurant was just completely booked. Yelp told the owners they’d never before seen so many clicks on a restaurant’s page.

“Everything was being broken in the best way,” DePalmer says.

Suddenly, the staff didn’t have to explain the restaurant or its unconventional service style; Bon Appétit did that for them. The magazine praised the restaurant’s freewheeling menu of small plates, which arrived on “dim sum-like” trolleys and trays. The Best New Restaurant in America 2012 title spawned the now-infamous line outside and preceded DePalmer joining the team to help weather that tsunami of attention. The chef-couple initially brought her on to help answer phones, but DePalmer has since become a key piece of the leadership team. The rest, as they say, is history. In August 2013, State Bird Provisions shut down for a two-month renovation that saw the dining room expand to its current footprint, and not long after reopening that October, the restaurant earned its first shining Michelin star. In 2014, the owners opened the Progress next door.

Still, despite more than a decade of success, Brioza says it might not have worked out the way it did had it not been for that piece in Bon Appétit. “That put us on the trajectory,” Brioza says. “It was like, we turned the music up loud, and we just cooked with as much care as we could. Freedom and flexibility. And we just started to grow into the restaurant that we never knew we were meant to be.”

These days, the State Bird Provisions restaurant family includes the Progress; the seafood-focused Anchovy Bar, which opened in 2020; and private event space the Workshop, located above the Progress. The trio of leaders has invested much thought and energy into building an ecosystem that connects all the businesses on the back end. They built a commissary kitchen that serves all the restaurants and created an internal newsletter to facilitate communication between all three restaurants’ staff. This allows one team to utilize another’s extra product and reduce food waste. For example, when the savory team has extra puffed black rice from making crackers, that excess product might go over to the pastry kitchen to be worked into a chocolate dessert.

Brioza says they talk often about the concept of doors, encouraging staff to adopt the mindset that anything — a leftover product or a new technique — can be an opportunity to create something new. Freedom and flexibility remain core to the State Bird Provisions mindset, even after 12 years in business. The trio is tight-lipped for now about future expansion plans, though they admit they’re not off the table.

Most importantly, perhaps, Brioza is still pleased with State Bird’s most famous dish.

“Personally, I still love frying the quail,” Brioza says. “I still love eating it. It’s not tired. It’s got a kind of timeless appeal for me.”