Cortney Burns

A one-woman preservation society, Cortney Burns knows her pickles, cheeses, spices, and charcuterie. As a co-chef at San Francisco’s iconic Bar Tartine, Burns puts her preservation skills to work—paprika from local peppers, root vegetables fermented in beer mash, and a beef-tongue pastrami, to name a few. Burns has made Bar Tartine, with its experimental takes on Hungarian, Nordic, and Japanese-inflected food, a place that relies heavily on local produce and techniques of layering bold flavors with powerful simplicity. Burns’ cookbook Bar Tartine: Techniques and Recipes (published in November 2014) shares some of its secrets. The urge to expand horizons has always been a part of Burns: from studying cultural anthropology and the Tibetan language at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to travels in Nepal, India, and Australia. It was in Australia that she took on cooking with a vengeance, working her way up the line in restaurants before moving to the Bay Area in 2001.