Wednesday, June 25, 7:00 p.m.
Members $85, guests $110

It’s not easy to be Staffan Terje, not least of all because everybody spells your name incorrectly: Stefen, Steffan, and Stefan, just to show a few of the orthographic variations that have appeared in print. Luckily the one thing that everyone gets right is that this Swedish-born chef knows how to translate the cooking of Italy and France—think slow-cooked pasta ragù and hearty cassoulet—into something that keeps Scala’s the “smashing success” it has been since it opened in 1995 (that’s how the San Francisco Chronicle’s Michael Bauer described it.)

Terje left his family in the Swedish countryside to attend hotel school at age 16. He apprenticed with the late three-star Michelin chef Alain Chapel at his eponymous restaurant in the south of France, and then apprenticed back in Sweden at the Michelin-starred Gourmet in Stockholm. Upon completion of his three-year apprenticeship, he moved to the sous-chef position at St. George’s Restaurant in Sarasota, Florida. He traded coasts for a job as head chef at Joseph Matthew’s Winery in Napa, where Sherry Oven Restaurant was under his direction. In 1988, Terje joined the Piatti Restaurant Company, which owns several restaurants in and around California, as executive chef.

Owned by Donna and Giovanni Scala, who also operate Bistro Don Giovanni in Napa, and designed by Bracken, Arigoni, and Ross as part of the Kimpton Hotel renovation of the Sir Francis Drake hotel on Union Square, Scala’s was described by Bauer as the “the splashiest Italian restaurant in the city. And the food is among the best, too.”

Terje took over the kitchen after the Scalas separated from the Kimpton Group in 2000, not an easy task considering the successful history he was up against. In a re-review of the restaurant after his arrival, Bauer noted: “The old favorites are expertly rendered—particularly the pastas…the best of the new dishes is the wood-oven roasted mussels with garlic and white wine…It’s absolutely wonderful.”