Golden Bear Station

Wood fire and a New York hand

Wood fire gives Joshua Smookler, chef at Golden Bear Station in Kenwood, the heat source for a menu that moves through Italy, Korea, and Japan without treating them as separate rooms. Since 2023, he has worked here as chef and co-owner, after kitchens that asked for pace and control: Bouley, Per Se, Mu Ramen, and Animo. That sequence matters because Golden Bear Station does not read as a loose exercise in fusion. It reads as a station held by a cook who learned repetition before authorship, then kept both.

Smookler’s biography gives the cooking its grammar. Born in Korea and adopted by a Jewish family in New York, he works with Korean, Basque, and Jewish references as a practical vocabulary rather than a theme. At Mu Ramen, where he was chef and co-owner, the register shifted toward his own hand. At Animo, where he served as Executive Chef in Sonoma from 2022, that hand met the market and appetite of wine country. Golden Bear Station carries the same continuity into Kenwood: a brasserie in a repurposed filling station, run with fine-dining muscle but not fine-dining stiffness.

Rice cakes beside cacio e pepe

The menu’s signal is not one dish but the way the dishes sit together. Harlan Burger, Kkot Kalbi, Cacio e Pepe, Rice Cakes with Bolognese, and Hen of the Woods Mushrooms form a working map of Smookler’s range: beef and char, pasta and pepper, rice cake texture under an Italian meat sauce, mushrooms treated as a central plate rather than a garnish. The house also folds Neapolitan pizza and wood-fired cooking into the same program, with Korean and Japanese influence moving through the brasserie structure.

That combination asks for discipline at the pass. Cacio e pepe gives nowhere to hide; the sauce must hold its gloss and heat. Rice cakes with Bolognese depend on chew as much as seasoning. Kkot kalbi brings marinade, cut, and fire into direct relation. The burger has to sit in the same dining room as those plates without becoming a different restaurant. Golden Bear Station’s cooking works in that pressure, where recognizable forms carry Smookler’s personal syntax and the kitchen has to keep each lane clear.

The room under white rafters

The room keeps the craft visible without making a spectacle of it. Golden Bear Station occupies a former filling station, and the architecture still gives the place its frame: soaring white rafters overhead, bar seats softened with furry throws, a counter and room that can hold locals and visitors in the same evening. The mood is polished, but the scale stays approachable. It is the kind of room where the pass has to answer both a small-plates appetite and a full a la carte meal.

The beverage side follows with a curated wine program and espresso, enough structure to meet the food without turning the room into a cellar exercise. In a lively service, the useful details are physical: the rafters, the bar seats, the plates crossing the pass, the heat behind the wood-fired work. The dish that could only belong to this kitchen’s particular crossing of forms is Rice Cakes with Bolognese.