How I Made Fine Dining Accessible in LA
Most photos courtesy of Dylan + Jeni

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Food

How I Made Fine Dining Accessible in LA

All of my training is in fine dining, having worked at places like Daniel in New York and Manresa. But when I moved to Los Angeles during the dotcom crash, my cooking was immediately influenced by its multicultural food community.

All of my training is in fine dining, having worked at places like Daniel in New York and Manresa in Northern California in the past. But when I moved to Los Angeles during the dotcom crash, my cooking was immediately influenced by its multicultural food community. I quickly realized how the places to find food in Los Angeles were at the time—for the most part—polar opposites of each other. You either had your expensive restaurants only attainable by people with expense accounts or street food, with very few viable mid-level options in between. So I took it upon myself to do something about this.

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I started by creating a three-course dinner available for $30, with as many $10 supplements as you wanted, at one of the first restaurants I worked at in LA. I'll never forget this one time when these 17-year-old Vietnamese girls came in with their whole family, including their grandparents, for their birthday dinner; they all got tasting menus. There were about ten of them in total and I was so excited about having the opportunity to cook some of my favorite ingredients for them, like foie gras, truffles, John Dory fish, and sea urchin. They all loved it and I knew I was onto something: There was an entire middle-range demographic of diners in this city that had nowhere to go.

A full table at Bäco Mercat

A full table at Bäco Mercat A bäco

My suspicions were validated when Jonathan Gold walked into my restaurant for the first time and sat at the bar by himself. He asked my server for 14 courses, which I didn't have at hand, so I started to frantically make his dinner out of anything we had in the kitchen—on the fly. This resulted in a poblano chile cream soup with crispy pork belly and pickled grapes. I think he liked it because he was one of the first critics to write about me, and then came back to celebrate when he won his Pulitzer award, too.

That poblano soup—along with this makeshift taco-flatbread hybrid that I created one night after service called a bäco—helped me find my food niche in Los Angeles: guerilla-style food cooked from the heart and soul in a way that went against against the mainstream form of cooking, yet with a very stripped-down approach (almost too stripped down). Finding this out got me closer to my goal of opening up my own restaurant that would be approachable by anybody.

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I was obsessed with the menu there and I worked for nine months straight without any days off for 14 hours a day. Consequently, I almost dropped dead.

I lived in Echo Park at the time and remember skating around the neighborhood on my days off, looking for anywhere that I could cook out of. It was around this time I met my business partner that helped me open up my first solo project doing my kind of guerilla, middle-range cooking: Lazy Ox Canteen, which was busy every single night from the get-go.

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Josef Centeno (photo courtesy of Skandia Shafer)

I was obsessed with the menu there and I worked for nine months straight without any days off for 14 hours a day. Consequently, I almost dropped dead because I knew it was what I had to do to push myself as hard as I possibly could. The menu started off with ten items initially, but I found myself cooking all over the board. Gold once even joked in his review of Lazy Ox that "other chefs could probably spin four or five restaurants from the controlled chaos of Lazy Ox." This got me thinking and made me see that I could probably open up a few more places with different concepts if I really wanted to. This mentality helped me open Bäco Mercat.

At Bäco, I was able to raise more money and parted ways with Lazy Ox so that I could put all of my energy into it. The menu quickly took a life of its own and I was finally 100-percent happy with the direction of it. Then we made the Bon Appetit list and it was instant mayhem after that—we couldn't cook fast enough to feed everyone that came in. A year and a half later, I had a team of 25 cooks and 15 front-of-the-house employees. I knew then that I would have to start thinking of opening up another restaurant really soon.

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I knew the process of opening up more restaurants nearby would be a little tricky because I would encounter the risk of cannibalizing my restaurants, thus the birth of a completely different concept for the area: a Tex-Mex restaurant. Bar Amá became my attempt to get back to my roots, it was an ode to my Texan mom and grandparents. That restaurant extracted and compressed everything that was Mexican-inspired at Bäco Mercat.

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A lunch bowl from Orsa & Winston (photo courtesy of the restaurant)

Nine months later, I was offered another space which would become Orsa & Winston, and this was when I knew that I had come full circle in my career, because I had reverted to my fine dining ways. Another nine months later, they offered me another space just up the street, so I took the opportunity and turned that into Ledlow. Ledlow was inspired by Americana and partly a sort of indigenous cuisine using ingredients like Carolina rice, Virginia peanuts, and sorghum syrup—ingredients that I soon found out are just as hard to consistently source as some gourmet European ingredients. Ledlow opened my eyes and made me see how the US has incredible ingredients that are just as easy to geek out to as other stuff in the world, especially here in California.

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Interior at Orsa & Winston

Suffice to say, this has all been a natural evolution. I've got these four restaurants that are all succinctly different within a block of each other. That being said, my root of everything is still just to bring good food to the neighborhood.

As told to Javier Cabral