5 minute read
Food as Entertainment
by 805 Living
Offering a dramatic new kind of dining experience, The Silver Bough is the hottest ticket in the 805.
BY VICTORIA WOODARD HARVEY
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Truffles from Burgundy and olive-fed A-5 Wagyu rib eye from Japan’s Kagawa prefecture are some of the premium ingredients featured in The Silver Bough’s 18-course tasting menu. Tenderloin of wild venison from upper New York state (top) is butter-roasted in a cast-iron skillet with port and verjuice and served with a mélange of black truffle and matsutake and blue-foot chanterelle mushrooms.
The adventure begins in a curtained vestibule where diners gather around a tableau of the fabled silver bough laden with canapés of Wagyu tartare, meringue and rye mousse, and chive matcha sponge cake with whipped butter and salmon roe. Co-owner and executive chef Phillip Frankland Lee leads the culinary team in the kitchen.
Dinner at The Silver Bough (silverbough montecito.com) is a revelrous experience, garnering national attention from food critics since its debut in late January. The seating for no more than eight guests Thursday through Sunday evenings is a ticketed event, much like a theatrical show that takes place behind an unmarked door within the historic Montecito Inn. The new restaurant could well become the global dining destination it aims to be, attracting those with a deep appreciation for international ingredients, imaginatively and impeccably prepared, much like The French Laundry or Atelier Crenn in the San Francisco Bay area, or the similarly phenomenal Somni or Vespertine, both in Los Angeles.
The force behind this venture is chef and owner Phillip Frankland Lee, whose accolades include being chosen as one of Zagat’s 30 under 30 in 2014, as a finalist for S. Pellegrino’s Young Chef 2015, as a semi-finalist in Eater dining guide’s Young Guns in 2016, and Global Cuisine Awards’ Chef of the Year in 2018. Within six years’ time, Lee and his wife, pastry chef Margarita Kallas-Lee, have opened six restaurants, including The Monarch, which is also at the Montecito Inn.
Until now, Lee was best known for Scratch Bar & Kitchen in Encino, where he implemented the tasting-menu-only concept for the past three years, making the list of the Los Angeles Times’ 101 Restaurants We Love in 2018. Lee is openly ambitious about shooting for the stars—as in Michelin, which many chefs, Lee included, hope will soon assess Southern California again. (Its last annual guide for Los Angeles was published back in 2009.)
Throughout his prodigious past decade, Lee has nurtured the fantasy of what has now become The Silver Bough. Patience while dream-tending may have served the chef well, and he admits his skills and creativity have evolved. “These dishes are more mature and more restrained,” he says of The Silver Bough offerings. “Instead of trying to impress people, which you do when you’re young, [this is] more about preparing food so well that people have to have another bite.”
Kallas-Lee, whose own accolades include being a semifinalist for Eater’s Young Guns 2016 and one of Zagat’s 30 Under 30 in 2016, recalls Lee’s vision. “Phillip had this idea of guests walking in for a cocktail in a room that opens up to a staffed kitchen ready to prepare an incredible meal,” she says, which is exactly how an evening at The Silver Bough begins.
With glasses in hand, guests enter a small antechamber with ruby velvet curtains and sounds of ethereal music. Over canapés that hint at the courses to follow, a narrator shares the Irish folkloric tale of the silver bough, the legendary portal to the hidden Celtic Otherworld where visitors were temporarily bestowed with endless feasts and eternal joy, beauty, health, and youth by the gods. From this tiny vestibule, there’s not a kitchen in sight, until a dramatic moment when one curtained wall opens to reveal a prepared chef’s table behind which stands the ready team.
Ingredients for the evening’s dishes are presented in a stunning display, like a visual playbill, and introduced by the loquacious chef Lee before each of the three themed acts. Kinmedai (golden eye snapper) from Japan, live spiny lobster, and king crab caught off the coast of Russia are just some of the edible players in Act I titled, The Sea. Costars of Act II, The Land, include local squab from Flying H Ranch in Carpinteria, a rack of wild venison from upstate New York, and, the culinary diva of the night, the olive-fed A-5 Wagyu rib eye from Japan’s Kagawa prefecture, which Lee describes as the most highly prized beef in the world. With such a lineup, it’s almost surprising that pescatarian requests are accommodated, with advance notice.
Around course 15 or so (who’s counting in the Otherworld?) come confections by Kallas-Lee: shaved truffles over sweet custard with candied bee pollen and a combination of macerated fruits with duck liver mousse and frozen granita. These flavor hybrids of savory and sweet lead to her signature mignardises, an assortment of perfect confections that signal the end to the revelry is near. And each bite serves to transition participants from what may be the meal of a lifetime back to the realm of mortals.
On with the show: Act I, The Sea, presents a ring of smoked eel and roasted-lobster broth gelée, topped with local caviar, hazelnut cream, and edible 24-karat gold. In Act II, The Land, a tea broth made from pigeon bones is poured over lightly seared wild venison tenderloin, butter-roasted chanterelles, shaved black truffle, and radish, for venison soup. In a captivating presentation, a cloche is lifted from a tartlette of duck liver with a sherry and verjuice gastrique.
Nature-themed serving and dinnerware by artist Michael Aram evokes The Silver Bough’s idyllic fantasy. Ticket prices are tiered to include pairings of premium wines, such as 2013 Pelissero Barbaresco Nubiola or 2013 Wenzlau Blanc de Blanc Cuvée l’Inconnu, or nonalcoholic herbal elixirs, with each course by sommelier Brian Lockwood. Co-owner and pastry chef Margarita Kallas-Lee pauses between the presentation of courses.
