Personalities

Amaryll Schwertner

Amaryll's Links:

Boulettes Larder

Amaryll Schwertner Born in Budapest, Hungary, Amaryll Schwertner and her family immigrated to the United States in 1956. Her maternal grandmother’s talents, especially in the culinary arts, profoundly influenced her life. After university studies in neuroscience, Schwertner decided to change course. For over 25 years, she has expressed her personal experiences, family influences, intellectual curiosity, broad knowledge, and considerable creativity through the culinary arts.

Schwertner’s acute intuition is manifested through her graceful use of ingredients from all over the world and her commitment to preserving the essential nature of those ingredients. She has developed an authentic and personal culinary vocabulary as executive chef, artist, and advocate of sourcing sustainable food, and has nurtured the efforts of farmers who were growing extraordinary quality sustainable produce and, in turn, nurtured the development of urban farmers markets.

Boulettes Larder Located adjacent to San Francisco’s thriving Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in the Ferry Building Marketplace, Boulettes Larder was founded in 2003 by Amaryll Schwertner. Since its founding, Boulettes Larder has garnered widespread praise. Notable press coverage includes articles in Paper Magazine, The Wall Street Journel, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Examiner and The Chronicle, Esquire, Metropolitan Home, SF Magazine, and many others. All of this means that the Larder has filled a need for a connection to cooking, the learned experience of food in general, and the hearth's inherent nurturing.

In Amaryll's words: " I am fluent ina a cooking style that I refer to as informed improvisation. Though my work, I express a soulful love of old world cooking and hold a great respect and curiosity about the practice of the culinary arts. The force of my work is intrenced in the values and concerns of the agrarians who supply me with beautiful ingredients. These ingedients serve as my daily point of departure as I engage in their culinary transposition and in the continuance of their inherent beauty and ability to communicate complex human intelligence.

While I am privileged to receive many artists and luminaires in my dining room, and I have been honored with reviews and priaise, my daily compelling motivation is the great ephemeral nuance that may reveal itself to me through grace and the alchemy of cuisine."