Welcome to What's Cooking at Flour + Water, a new series on Shift Notes that brings you behind-the-scenes at our restaurants in San Francisco. Each month, we'll dig into new menu drops, special events, and all things pasta + pizza.
Summer is a slow roll in the Bay Area. While friends around the country have already shed their coats and are heading to the beach at this juncture, we’re still hovering in what California coastal regions have not-so-affectionately dubbed “June gloom.”
As chefs, we embrace this time when late spring produce is still verdant and collides with the proliferation of some of our favorite wild ingredients. Morels. Nasturtium. Nettles. And, of course, sea urchin, a year-round Santa Barbara staple.
At our O.G. Flour + Water, this distinct NorCal micro-season inspired chef de cuisine Aaron Shapiro and our talented team to create a Forager pasta tasting menu that celebrates the incredible products from across our state (with a guest appearance from East Coast ramps).
“The concept for the first Forager menu in 2023 initially started from our love of morels,” says Shapiro. “While we would have embraced the opportunity to create an entire pasta tasting menu featuring these intensely earthy mushrooms known for their honeycomb appearance, we decided to expand it to all wild foods with morels as our north star.”
Now back and available through early July, the 2025 iteration once again takes our guests through the wilderness while also giving some shine to purveyors such as Sea Stephanie Fish, Morchella Wild Foods, Black Diamond Mushroom Co, and Shared Cultures. These wild food whisperers are the foundation for the Forager menu. They harness and unlock the beauty of the ingredients that spark our creativity, and we’re honored to be their students, as well as the stewards of their products.
In San Francisco proper, we’re fortunate to have Eleana Hsu and Kevin Hondo, the co-founders of Shared Cultures, as our neighbors. Eleana + Kevin use koji, an ancient fungi, to create modern fermented food products that are meticulously crafted using traditional fermentation methods. Eleana and Kevin’s journey into fermentation was initially cultivated from a passion for mushroom foraging during which they discovered koji. Koji has been used for centuries to make products such as soy sauce and sake, so paved a way for them to preserve and honor nature's bounty, resulting in deeply complex and nuanced misos that are an expression of our NorCal terroir.
Their prized products are a constant on our menus (the secret in the sauce so to speak), and are also front-and-center on our Forager menu. We feature their three cornered leek miso in a ramp sformato for a West Coast meets East Coast composition, and their morel miso in a grilled morel mushroom course with koshihikari rice.
According to Eleana and Kevin, the three cornered leek (Allium triquetrum) was brought to the Bay Area from the Mediterranean by European settlers, and grows wild in the Bay Area especially in the spring when they begin to flower. Their flavor profile is reminiscent of ramps, or as they say, “a mix of garlic, onions, chives, and leeks all rolled up into one.” Their koji miso preserves and punches up this vibrant allium, coaxing out notes that evoke a sense of place.
When our guests dig their spoon through the layers of our menu’s sformato, a traditional Italian custard-like dish where we feature the miso, our hope is that they are transported, as well. That the entire Forager menu takes them outside of the restaurant, offering a glimpse at the magic of nature – and all who play a hand in honoring and celebrating its bounty.
Reservations can be booked for Flour + Water on Resy with the Forager pasta tasting menu available through July 3.
Photo Credit: Carter Hiyama
Menu Graphic: Lindsay Stripling
