Embroidery on Paul Einbund’s baseball cap reads “chartreuse” in yellowy-green letters. It serves a dual purpose, announcing his profession as a sommelier and his upcoming travel itinerary. The restaurateur behind The Morris in San Francisco is about to embark on a trip to France to restock his wine cellars.
All morning, he’s been meeting with people who are involved with the launch of Sirene in Oakland, his second restaurant with chef Gavin Schmidt. Between meetings, Einbund greets every guest who walks in the front door with a welcoming hello. His hospitable manners are second nature. Einbund’s public performance as a host is in service to his business, but it doesn’t come across as forced or disingenuous.
Weekdays, Sirene operates as a cafe with an espresso bar. Elaine Lau, the former pastry chef at Sunday Bakeshop, is making a small cross-section of the laminated baked goods that customers used to wait in long lines to try. Lau’s croissants are crisp, buttery treats. She’s also making desserts for the dinner menu, including a chocolate layer cake.
When I dropped by for a morning coffee and a conversation with Einbund, Schmidt took a short break from the kitchen to join us. Once Sirene finds its sea legs, the chef said they’ll be starting an in-house bread program using the woodfire oven. Charlie Hallowell installed it during his reign at Boot & Shoe Service, which used to operate in the space. The oven is still a beautiful showpiece visible at the back of the dining room.
Following Hallowell’s tenure, the proprietors of Sister, Boot’s successor, carried on baking pizzas, until that restaurant closed in early 2024. During its initial opening phase, Sirene isn’t going to be using the oven for pizza—although Einbund believes Schmidt will eventually embrace the idea.
“Gavin feels strongly that you can get pizza everywhere in Oakland,” Einbund said. “I’m working on that. If we make The Morris-style pizza, that would be amazing.”
Unlike a conventional oven, Schmidt explained, the temperature of a woodfire oven can get up to 800 degrees. “Things like cabbage get a nice char on the outside, but it’s still tender on the inside,” he said. “So it’s not just baking; it’s incorporating those good, more rustic, smoky flavors.”
Einbund then added a qualifier to the idea of a Sirene bread program: “We want to go slow and make sure what we’re doing is good before we just start doing everything.” Everything will also include a full-service brunch on the weekend. As Einbund and Schmidt start their new venture together, the kitchen will focus on seafood and feature fried chicken, a combination of dishes that seldom appears on the same menu.
“We eat so much seafood, we wanted to create a program that would focus on local products,” Einbund explained. “But different from The Morris, we’re not limiting ourselves exclusively to local. We’ll occasionally go beyond [the Bay Area] because there’s so much amazing seafood around the world.”
Like Zuni Café’s signature roast chicken dish, Schmidt perfected a smoked duck entreé ($80 half, $160 whole) at The Morris. On occasion, he’d serve fried chicken there as a special. “But I’ve been wanting to do something where we can showcase it,” the chef said. “I love all the fun, bright flavors of crudo and shellfish. But at the end of a meal, I tend to want something richer and hardier to go with the lighter fare.” Sirene’s fried chicken also has add-ons such as caviar and an octopus kimchi sauce, which are nods to a “surf and turf” theme.
Schmidt, an East Bay resident, had been wanting to open a restaurant near his home for ages. When Sister closed, the chef asked Einbund to take a look at the empty space. “The karma just felt so good,” Einbund recalled. He believes that having an established beverage program at The Morris to pull from is an advantage for Sirene. “We’ve got this huge library, our own wine shop,” he said. What doesn’t sell at one restaurant can move, in either direction, across the bay.
Although it took several years of planning before the two opened The Morris—Einbund claims it was nine years and Schmidt said it was closer to six—they both believe the time lag contributed to its success. They spent those years synchronizing their palates.
“Years of Gavin coming over to my place and cooking food, and me opening up bottles of wine,” Einbund said. “Him, understanding my wine cellar; me, understanding how he likes to cook. We’ve got one of those cherished relationships where we can communicate non-verbally.”
They wanted The Morris, and now by extension Sirene, to be the kind of restaurant where they’d want to eat the food they craved, not once in a blue moon, but every night. But Einbund acknowledges that, “you can have the greatest meal, or wine, or coffee of your life served to you by a jerk, and you’ll have no interest in going back there.”
Einbund’s ambitions are old school. With Schmidt’s cooking served alongside his impressive wine list, he wants customers and first-time diners to return to become regulars. To that end, he’s a true believer in a paraphrased maxim by the East Coast restaurateur Danny Meyer: Service is a monologue; hospitality is a dialogue.
Sirene, open Wed to Sun 8am–2pm and 5–9:30pm, 3308 Grand Ave., Oakland; sirene-oak.com. Instagram: @sirene_oak.
