Tonya Pitts

The Climb

Early wine support work at Bizou Restaurant in San Francisco, California gave Tonya Pitts a practical base in the mechanics of service. Wine help and program support are behind-the-scenes roles, but they are where polish and precision get built into a dining room operation. From there, Pitts moved to One Market Restaurant, carrying forward the same attention to detail into a larger wine program. What defines Pitts’s career is continuity. The line from those early responsibilities to her current work is a steady one: disciplined, exacting, and shaped by accumulated knowledge rather than display. The result is a career that reads as progression through repetition, not reinvention.

Today

At One Market Restaurant, Pitts holds two current roles: Wine Director and sommelier. She has said, “I have been in my role at One Market for thirteen years.” In practical terms, that kind of tenure means long memory for the house, the guests, and the timing of a meal. Her language around wine is direct and sensory. Pitts does not reach for abstraction; she describes what a wine gives off and what it suggests on the palate. Of one Greek bottle, she has said, “I found an assyrtiko from Attica that is really flinty and limestone, just lovely, the perfect alternative to Sancerre!” The note is concise, but it points to the kind of detail a sommelier uses to guide a table: stone, brightness, and structure. That way of speaking turns tasting into interpretation. In Pitts’s hands, a glass is not just selected; it is translated.

In Their Words “I found an assyrtiko from Attica that is really flinty and limestone, just lovely, the perfect alternative to Sancerre!” “One day, I stood up and started smelling and talking about what I was getting out of the glass, how it made me feel.”