Dave Beran’s Case for Imperfection

10 Minute read

02 Apr 2025

Journalist

After years inside some of the world’s most precise kitchens, the former Alinea chef is letting go of perfection—and finding something deeper in the process.

A few weeks into opening his latest restaurant, Seline, chef Dave Beran removed a dessert he loved — a menthol coconut chocolate dish that reminded him of a York Peppermint Patty—because it didn’t say enough about him. “Anyone could make that,” he said. “It didn’t have a perspective.”

That, in a sentence, is Beran’s new north star.

At Seline, the dishes don’t aim for pyrotechnics or Instagram virality. They aim for emotional resonance. A leek dish might tell the story of a wildfire-stricken farm. A piece of duck might evoke the family dinners of his Midwest childhood. This is food designed to make you feel something—not just admire the technique.

It’s a striking shift from the early chapters of Beran’s career, which took him from a flea market diner in Michigan to the rarefied kitchens of Alinea and Next, two of the most ambitious and exacting restaurants in the world.

The Long Road to Seline

Before he was sous-chef at Alinea, Beran was “toast boy” at a diner in southwest Michigan. His job? Don’t fall behind when the omelet orders start flying. He worked the takeout window. He scooped ice cream. He flipped burgers. “Hard mornings,” he says. But the spark was there.

His father, a hospitality professor, gave him a lifelong curiosity about how restaurants worked. A college trip to MK—one of Chicago’s buzzy fine dining spots in the early 2000s—cracked something open. “It blew me away,” Beran recalls. “I was a vegetarian at the time, but I realized how emotional food could be.”

He went to school for business and philosophy and played Division III hockey, chasing a dream that ended with a knee injury. But cooking soon filled the void. After graduation, he staged and hustled his way into Chicago kitchens, eventually landing at Alinea.

He started as a food runner. Then came the kitchen. The sous-chef role. Then chef de cuisine. It was an era of balloons, edible tableware, and molecular sleight of hand — and Beran helped orchestrate it all.

“I never really thought about what my restaurant would be,” he says. “Because everything I’d ever dreamt of, I was doing.”

What Comes After Perfection

Then came Next—a concept restaurant designed to change menus entirely every few months. Beran found his voice there, particularly in menus like “Hunt,” “Vegan,” and “Kaiseki,” which explored theme and structure through wildly different culinary lenses. But even with his creative fingerprints all over it, the restaurant wasn’t his.

He built a full proposal for his own concept—projections, decks, renderings, and even a page on why the Alinea Group should be his partner. But Grant Achatz gave him the advice that finally nudged him out of the nest: If you want it to be yours, it can’t be mine.

So Beran left.

He moved to Los Angeles, nearly ran out of money, consulted for Wolfgang Puck to stay afloat, and opened the intimate, genre-defying Dialogue on the Santa Monica Promenade. It earned a Michelin star. He opened Pasjoli, a refined French bistro. And then, in late 2024, came Seline.

Welcome to the (Midwestern) Kitchen

Seline doesn’t look like a temple of gastronomy. It looks like a dining room—and that’s by design. The concept draws on the architecture of Beran’s grandparents’ home in Michigan: the formal dining room no one used, and the messy, beloved kitchen where people actually lived.

Guests walk past the garden and enter through the kitchen. The cooks serve the food. There’s no parade of tweezers or towers of foam. “Our goal is to disarm people the moment they walk in,” Beran says.

The food resists the algorithm. It doesn’t photograph easily. It isn’t over-explained. But it is precise, thoughtful, and deeply personal. Every dish has a reason to be there—and sometimes that reason changes week to week.

One of Beran’s favorite anecdotes involves Daniel Humm telling him how a simple dish at Noma brought him to tears. “I thought it was stupid,” Beran admits. “Just a few pickled vegetables and broth.” But then Humm explained how it reminded him of his grandmother, who kept vegetables and bones in the root cellar. “It hit me like a lightning bolt,” Beran says. “That’s what I want my food to do.”

At Alinea, the goal was to wow. At Seline, the goal is to connect.

No Room for Arbitrary

There’s a Midwestern practicality baked into everything Beran does. Seline was originally imagined as a grander space—a 70-seat fine dining playground. But he scrapped that vision. “It didn’t feel honest,” he says. Instead, the space is intimate, open, and flexible—a place where things can evolve.

“We’re 10 weeks in, and 80% of the menu is different from opening night,” Beran says. “That’s the best part. We can keep changing.”

Still, even in the looseness, there’s rigor. “Nothing’s arbitrary,” Beran says. “If we can’t explain why it’s on the plate, it doesn’t stay.”

He once pulled a dessert he loved—that menthol coconut chocolate dish—because it didn’t reflect a time, a place, or a personal memory. “Delicious isn’t enough,” he says. “It has to mean something.”

Discipline and Identity

Beran still has the drive of an athlete. He trained for a half-marathon to get himself in line during his early MK days. He still finds camaraderie in the kitchen, the way he once found it on the ice. “The best cooks I know,” he says, “either came from the military or played team sports.”

That discipline fuels Seline’s constant motion. New dishes hit the cutting board weekly. The menu morphs. Ideas churn.

But the destination isn’t innovation for its own sake—it’s intimacy. “If you eat one of my dishes,” Beran says, “it should shine a light on who I am.”

And maybe, just maybe, who you are too.

02 Apr 2025