In 2015, Christopher Renfro landed a job waiting tables in downtown San Francisco at a newly opened eatery called Oro. The name, meaning “gold” in Spanish, was a tribute of sorts to the restaurant’s location in a plaza shared by the former San Francisco Mint.
Renfro was 32 years old, and Oro was his first gig at a high-profile restaurant. An artisan with an environmental bent, he had done many things over the previous decade, from refurbishing storefronts for American Apparel to working the register at a co-op grocery store to gardening at the city’s Conservatory of Flowers. Before Oro, he had worked at a ceramics company, where his innovative thinking sparked the creation of a tile-recycling program. “The work was backbreaking,” says Renfro. He calculated that he was lifting the equivalent of two elephants, or about nine tons, in tile a day. Earning generous restaurant tips seemed a better way to provide for his young daughter at home.
At Oro, he says, he wore a nice blue shirt that covered the tattoos on his espresso-brown skin, and he kept his black, woolly Afro cut short and combed out. The cuisine was served family-style and highlighted local California produce, fresh meats, and charcuterie cured in-house—reminiscent of the pâté, liverwurst, and other foods Renfro had eaten as a boy in Germany. (He’d spent 10 years of his childhood there while his mother worked on a U.S. Army base.) But what intrigued him most was the menu of 140-plus mainly Italian, French, and Californian vintages. The wine director, Kelly Evans, had been the head sommelier at Saison.
Renfro’s early experiences with wine had been subpar. While he was growing up, his
