Food adventure

PUSHING BOUNDARIES ‘MORE OF AN EXPERIENCE

THAN A MEAL’

MÄS chef Josh Dorcak tops raw bluefin tuna with roe. “The experimental stage of a restaurant like MÄS is over,” he says. “Every single one of these dishes is a knockout.”

COURTESY PHOTO

Eating at MÄS, Ashland’s latest culinary sensation, is an adventure in food

By Sarah Lemon

for the Mail Tribune

Afood foray to Portland and Seattle convinced Andrew and Michelle Finazzo the “best in the Northwest” was back at home in the Rogue Valley.

The Medford couple, in short order, booked a reservation at Ashland’s MÄS. Even in the wake of an epicurean excursion, they could hardly wait to travel the latest culinary trails that MÄS chef-owner Josh Dorcak is PHOTO BY LINDSEY BOLLING blazing. Josh Dorack started MÄS

“You just go five years ago as a pop-up on a journey,” restaurant in Ashland. says Andrew Finazzo, 44. “It’s an adventure.”

Dorcak’s journey to Ashland started at San Francisco’s Le Cordon Bleu-affiliated California Culinary Academy and progressed through restaurants in Seattle, Berkeley, California, and Phoenix-Scottsdale, Arizona.

On vacation in Northern California, Dorcak decided to just keep driving north on Interstate 5. He awoke the next morning to a winter wonderland that charmed him enough to leave big-city hustle and bustle for the relative calm and quiet of Ashland.

PUSHING BOUNDARIES

“This is automatically a very comfortable feeling,” he says of visiting Ashland 15 years ago.

Dropping off a business card at Erik Brown’s former Amuse, Dorcak was hired as chef de cuisine to prepare French-inspired Pacific Northwest fare. A few years later at Ashland’s Lorella, he met then-dishwasher Luke VanCampen, an Ashland native who became his sous chef and business partner in MÄS and its sister restaurant, NAMA.

Along the way, Dorcak, now 36, won top chef honors at the 2015 and 2016 Ashland Culinary Festival before gaining recognition as the state’s “Iron Chef” at the 2017 Bite of Oregon in Portland.

The accolades, however, didn’t influence Dorcak as much as a pilgrimage to Tokyo, where he and VanCampen, now 25, realized they could operate a restaurant with only their four hands and create a cuisine the region’s diners had never seen. Their observation of Japanese methods and mentality, says Dorcak, “tilted the idea of what a restaurant is on its head.”

Starting as a popup five years ago, MÄS has made a dizzying impression on Southern Oregon.

“We love sitting at the bar watching them make the food,” says Finazzo, “And in just a couple of bites, you’re blown away.

“When we go to MÄS, it’s almost like we went to 10 restaurants.”

Indeed, MÄS’s 10 fixed courses far outnumber any other multicourse meals at Southern Oregon restaurants. And the cost of $185 per person easily identifies it as the region’s most expensive dining destination. But the Finazzos attest to family, friends, co-workers and acquaintances that there’s more to MÄS than its price tag. “It’s really more of an experience than a meal,” says Michelle Finazzo. “Every time we go there, it’s a memory,” echoes her husband. The couple COURTESY PHOTO rhapsodize over Sea scallops are among the proteins Dorcak’s succuregularly served at Ashland’s MÄS. lent duck breast, surprisingly savory custards and Japanese milk bread topped with roe to mimic sushi. The course immediately preceding dessert tantalizes with subtle sweetness, says Andrew Finazzo. The mixed wine and sake pairing, he says, shows MÄS’s versatility and Dorcak’s willingness to take risks — a boon to customers who can relinquish dining decisions and step outside their comfort zones.

PHOTO BY LINDSEY BOLLING

Luke VanCampen works in the kitchen at MAS.

“He really, really pushes the boundaries,” says Finazzo.

It’s a commonplace reaction, say Dorcak and Finazzo, for MÄS customers to swear they usually “hate” an ingredient, but they “love” the way Dorcak prepares it. He’s enticed vegetarians and vegans to set aside their ethic for a single evening of incomparably fresh seafood. Dorcak even manages to characterize items customers never would think to eat — magnolia flowers or koji fungus, for example — as delicacies.

“The experimental stage of a restaurant like MÄS is over,” says Dorcak. “Every single one of these dishes is a knockout.”

Dishes defy description at MÄS, which continuously adjusts to seasonality and even one-time windows of availability. An early spring menu lists: dashi; kohada; geoduck, lovage and mirin; king crab and magnolia; roe, potato and koji; trout and kohlrabi; lamb and herbs; stewed morel; wagyu, roasted cabbage and egg yolk; cherry blossom and woodruff.

“We’re promoting overwhelming access to quality ingredients,” says Dorcak. “Any chef from a big city would be like, ‘This is amazing here.’”

Although an Ashland farm grows produce almost exclusively for MÄS and NAMA, Dorcak and VanCampen still draw inspiration from farmers markets and natural landscapes. Their cuisine has been dubbed “Cascadian” in national publications. But Dorcak says the term more accurately describes not finished dishes but their annual efforts to forage and preserve the native bounty as a “stepping stone into other seasons.”

“Wild ingredients are really interesting and have all kinds of potential,” he says. “Our larder is this localism thing.”

While the West Coast’s metropolitan diners make tracks to MÄS, locals still claim the restaurant for their own — as comfortably as eating in Dorcak’s home kitchen, says Finazzo. Once they taste MÄS, no one takes for granted such a “treasure to have here in Jackson County,” he says. “It tastes right for Medford, Oregon — or Ashland.”

See masashland.com