Photo: Toni GauthierIt was during an 11 a.m. biology class at Stanford when the hunger pangs would really hit, and then Will Pacio, '02, would find himself daydreaming of pillowy pork buns and doodling them in his notebooks.
Back then, he was determined to become a doctor like his father, Wilfredo, and his oldest sister, Christina, '94, MS '95. But after graduating with a degree in psychology, Will Pacio found the call of the pork bun too strong to resist.
He headed for the French Culinary Institute in New York, despite heated pleadings from his Filipino-American parents, who feared their only son and youngest child was making a dire mistake. Their fears seemed unfounded when in 2010 he opened Spice Kit, a fast/casual, Asian-street-food-inspired restaurant in San Francisco. A second, larger Spice Kit is set to open in July, not far from his alma mater. Like the original, the restaurant at 340 California Avenue in Palo Alto will serve Vietnamese five-spice chicken sandwiches, Korean rice paper wraps filled with 24-hour-braised short ribs, and steamed buns stuffed with grilled pork belly.
"It's fun to be back," says Pacio, 32. "This is the type of place I would have eaten at as a student."
Upon graduating from culinary school, Pacio badgered his way onto the opening staff hired for Per Se restaurant in New York, founded by renowned chef Thomas Keller. Other chefs have razzed him about his Stanford degree, but Pacio credits it for getting his foot in the door at Per Se when he was relatively inexperienced. "They figured I went to Stanford, so I probably wasn't going to burn the place down," he jokes.
Stanford ties helped, too, when it came time to finance his own restaurant. Former roommate Stephen Chau, '02, who developed Google's Street View photographic geo-mapping project, hooked him up with Google colleagues eager to invest.
With 14 employees now and plans for expansion, Pacio hopes to bring his pork buns to his childhood turf. "If at some point, we can open a Spice Kit in Toledo, Ohio, that would be really cool. Then I'd know I was really successful."
Carolyn Jung, a former food writer for the San Jose Mercury News, blogs at FoodGal.com.
