On Saturday, June 20, therestaurant known as Anomaly closed. Chef Mike Lanham took to Instagram to explain the closure, citing health reasons as a contributing factor. But what happened behind the scenes was diagnosed as burnout. For 18 months, Lanham says,
he pushed past his limits; he refused to accept it and “hit the wall six or seven times” during that time period, “and just kept getting back up and ignoring it.” What he eventually couldn’t ignore was his body fighting back: Lanham began experiencing some bouts of short-term memory loss, and he also developed mobility issues with some of the fingers on his left hand.
“Straight up, I hit a wall, and my brain quit on me,” Lanham says.
After the restaurant closure, Lanham rested for five weeks, the first true break he’d had since he was 16 years old, he guesses. “I’ve had a spinal compression fracture; I’ve broken all kinds of bones,” Lanham says. “I’ve been through some things before, but it’s never been neurological or to that level of exhaustion. The best way I can describe it is, I had Epstein-Barr virus once, and the level of exhaustion was three times that.”
And yet, despite all of that, Lanham is stepping back into the world of cooking. As of Saturday, September 17, he’s welcoming diners back to the space at 2600 Sutter Street, this time as the new restaurant Athanor. He’s doing things on his own terms this time and is looking to create a more sustainable restaurant where he’s not the sole point of failure, he says. It’s also a return to his love of restaurants and cooking. “I love cooking more today than I did yesterday,” he says.
Athanor shares some DNA with Anomaly. It’s still Lanham running the show; the restaurant maintains a 10-course tasting menu, and it will still serve the fan-favorite egg dish (“An Egg … sort of,” as it was called in its pop-up days). But Lanham says Athanor’s menu is otherwise a “vast departure” from Anomaly. The name Athanor refers to the stove used in alchemy, he explains, meant to be “an allegory for my career and the trajectory this restaurant group has taken so far.” It’s also a reference to Lanham’s new cooking direction, a purposeful transformation of ingredients that “hopefully comes out the other side far, far, far greater than the sum of the parts that went in,” he says. Lanham says this time, he wants his restaurant to be slower, and more intentional.
Expect bites that blur the line between pastry and savory techniques, such as a fermented green tomato meringue that requires a 30-day process just for the base. A savory potato ice cream with hot black truffle cheese, for instance, and a prosciutto panna cotta. It’s also solving for personal food qualms that Lanham has. For instance, while he enjoys quail for its flavor, he’s always been bothered by the tiny bones of the bird, so for one dish, he’s turning the quail legs into sausage for use as a shumai-like filling, and using the remaining quail as the wrapper. Another idea around broken vinaigrettes led to a salad bite, composed of ramp aioli and a vinegar granita served on an endive leaf.
The team is also getting heavy into fermentation, he says, where he’s learned that certain vegetables taste “far better fermented” than in their fresh forms. “I never want to serve another vegetable again that looks like itself on a plate,” Lanham says. “If I have put a roasted carrot on a plate, I have failed you — it doesn’t matter what I’ve done to that. It needs to be different, it needs to be special. You know what a carrot is, but I need you to experience a carrot in a way that you haven’t before.”
The restaurant’s new direction comes with interior upgrades: new art pieces, new lamps and a chandelier — a different look from when Anomaly. “The aspiration is to be able to do something that’s unique to me, that feels meaningful, that guests derive joy from, and to be able to do it without falling over,” Lanham says. “If I could do that, that would be something cool to hang my hat on.”
When asked why he returned to restaurants after this bout of extreme burnout, Lanham turns philosophical, reflecting on his love of cooking and restaurants. “I’m not 22 anymore, and so, at the end of my life, I would like to leave the place better than I found it,” Lanham says. “And so this is a way where I can do something that is competitive and gives me a feeling of meaning, but also makes other people happy and maybe changes how people operate a little as well.”
Athanor (2600 Sutter Street, San Francisco) debuts on Friday, September 17; open Tuesday through Saturday, for two seatings per night and $175 per person. Reservations are available through the website.
