Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1529602
P H OTO S BY B R I A N N A DA N N E R ( TO P R I G H T ) , C Y N T H I A G L A S S E L L ( B OT TO M ) ; C O U R T E S Y O F C Y R U S ouglas Keane is a highly decorated chef. His restaurant, Cyrus, is Michelin-starred. He has multiple four-star San Francisco Chronicle reviews. He has a James Beard Award for Best Chef Pacific and was a Top Chef Masters winner. In February, he's releasing his memoir, "Culinary Leverage: A Journey Through the Heat," a darkly humorous, brutally honest snapshot of his 30 years in the restaurant industry, and this past spring Keane and his restaurant were the subject of a Harvard Business School Case Study. "Cyrus is arguably one of the world's most innovative gourmet dining business models," says UPS Foundation Professor Emeritus James L. Heskett, author of the HBS study and more than 200 others. "When you have a memorable business exercising unorthodox policies that produce outstanding results for clients, the team members, and the investors, I like to think of it as a trifecta of success." Keane originally opened Cyrus in 2004 in Healdsburg, a small town in Sonoma's wine country. Following a lease dispute with the landlord that dragged on for several years, he closed shop in 2012 and set out to find a new home for his then–two-Michelin starred restaurant. That ultimately took a decade, but the hiatus allowed Keane the time and space to reconsider just about everything "normal" in the restaurant industry. A 1993 graduate of Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, Keane worked in some of New York (Four Seasons, Lespinasse) and San Francisco's (Jardinière, Gary Danko) premier restaurants, witnessing CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT The dining room at Cyrus was designed to "float" above the vineyards; Pastry Chef Josh Gaulin's Mont Blanc cake, made from chestnuts, candy cap mushrooms, and parsnips; Chef Douglas Keane plating Kushi oysters. FROM TOP Tk deliquid utequ iature es acerrum nulpar inetur sequaes torerferum ide llia eproid quis quam quid eaque posant mollupt Chef Douglas Keane is an industry disruptor, upending the restaurant system with his Michelin-starred Cyrus in Sonoma County's little-known town of Geyserville. BY TALI JAFFE-MINOR legacy project D BALHAR B O U RSH O P S .CO M