Silvers Gets the Gold

Welcome to a post more of photos--all mine from my iPhone so not superior quality, sorry--than words, but I wanted to be sure to attest to the greatness that is Silvers Omakase. I had a terrific talk with Lennon Silvers Lee about the spot that the Indy ran, but now have had the chance to indulge, and it is a magnificent indulgence, one bite at a time. The beauty of it is you have to slow down, you must consider, you must be as intentional and present as Lee and his team with their precise slices, wordless interplay getting out course after course, light passes of brushes to add minute yet powerful dashes of shoyu or homemade elixirs, the arrangement of flowering, flavorful accouterment without any fussy tweezer action. And the joy of some between course shimmying to the well-chosen, properly-volumed jazz soundtrack. 

That's a shot of the foyer you enter, after ringing a bell for entrance, as this is will be an evening out of the ordinary, requiring ceremony. At most there will be 10 of you eating at one time. Decompress with some champagne and enjoy the art. Not shown, a Damien Hirst behind us, fortunately not The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, as facing a 14-foot-long tiger shark in formaldehyde before a sushi meal might be a tad unsettling. Plus, that piece's owner Steve Cohen also owns the Mets, a very different kettle of dead fish. (I am a Mets fan, I'm allowed to make that joke. And go cry.)

That's dish 2--you get a couple composed dishes before diving into nigiri. Kanpachi on the left, uni on the right, the darlingest dollop of wasabi at the bottom. Clean, lean, yet texture and flavor off the charts. As with the gorgeous crystal that welcomes your hand like a handshake you never knew you longed for, the serving pieces are also artisanal bowls from Japan--but you can read about both in my Indy article.

The Kinmedai above is Goldeneye, but don't think Bond, think snapper. Its other nickname is Splendid Alfonsino, which sounds to me like a wrestler beloved by Tony Soprano, but what do I know. For a whitefish it brings colorful flavor. That's the housemade (as is everything here--they even mill their own rice) pickled ginger alongside. Lee even suggests you can pick up the ginger with your fingers. There's ritual, and then there's "you're here to have a great time." Silver's is all about the latter.

  

Saba--mackerel--just lightly pickled, to cut its native oiliness just the slightest. And notch the flavor even further. Note, despite my odd angle in the photo, that piece is placed on my plate to ease the way for my left-handed approach. They noticed my sinistral nature early on, switched my chopsticks and cool chopsticks holder to the left side of my place setting, and then all the nigiri came angled just for me. That's the kind of attention everything, everyone gets here. (A teenager with her dad--I sure didn't have that dad!--down the bar got the NA pairing, as special and explained to her as the sake pairings were to me, for example.)

Akami. Yep, "aka" in Japan means red. Often consider a lesser tuna (it's the least fatty), but nothing is lesser at Silvers.

Among the greater things at Silvers is Jaime Rocha, here expounding how Iwa 5 is the Dom Perignon of sake. That's no idle comparison, for it's made by Richard Geoffroy, the former Master Brewer of Dom Pérignon. This sake is “orchestrated” with three different rice varietals and five different brewing yeasts including two wine yeasts. Complex isn't word enough. It veritably danced across one's palate. Rocha knows how to pair, how to pour, how to explain, how to pique your interest so you can't wait to taste. Plus, he was the waiter for Chryss and me when we had our wedding reception at Wine Cask many moons ago, so how could we not love him?

The Zuke, which spell check doesn't want you to type, is a marinated tuna that gets a very quick sear, too. It likes to pretend it will fall apart at its segments, but won't, quite. It does bring the meaty texture to fish fintastically [sic] well, though.

And the last course before a killer sorbet was simply titled uni & caviar, but there was nothing simple about it. I actually giggled with joy after my first bite. Lee suggested we eat it in four chomps, but I kept trying to practice Zeno's paradox with it, I didn't want to stop enjoying it. He lavishes on the caviar, and those little crunchy pearls (I forget exactly what they were--a buckwheat something? sorry, didn't take notes as I didn't plan to write about it and just wanted to live in the moment) added just the right texture and crunch. Luxuriousness defined.

Here's your present for heading home, feeling a bit transformed, eyeing the world for all its delicate possibility. Inside that lovely package is some loose-leaf, organic Sencha Yuzu green tea. As the package says, "This tea is bright & smooth," and after sipping it, so am I.

Silvers Goes for the Gold

 

When you hear the too-common story of a Santa Barbara restaurant taking 30 months to open, you assume it will be a tale of permit hell and financial woe. But for Lennon Silvers Lee, whose big gambit Silvers Omakase finally debuted on February 6, that long wait was a secret blessing. “I had two and a half years to work on my dream restaurant,” he asserts. “I went all-out.”

Lee certainly has had help going all-out. His partners in Silvers Omakase are venture capitalists Mitchell and Lisa Green, who befriended him when he opened Sushi|Bar in Montecito with his brother Phillip Frankland Lee (the Top Chef alum who was behind The Monarch and Silver Bough in Montecito and still heads the Scratch Restaurants empire). When older brother Phillip pulled the plug on every regional business but Sushi|Bar in October 2019, hoping to spin the sushi omakase concept into more locations, Lennon decided it was time to move out on his own. “I’m just a young kid with a 4-year-old,” he admitted during a long, recent interview sitting at his sushi bar. “It was a big leap to leave my brother and do something of this caliber.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.

Sushi Gets Along Swimmingly with Star Lane

If you're like me, dear reader, when it's 4 o'clock you have this struggle--what in the world do I want for dinner? And when you figure it out, at 4:30, you're all proud of yourself. You have a plan.

Let me introduce you to the world of the Dierbergs, the family behind Dierberg Star Lane. They've got a 250 year plan.

Now, we could all feel embarrassed about our lack of future thought, or we could have a glass of one of the many fine Dierberg/Star Lane wines and contemplate the future in a more pleasant place. I vote for that plan, and would do so for 250 years, if I only could.

The Dierbergs have managed to buy some of the most wonderful wine-growing property Santa Barbara County has to offer, from the Dierberg Vineyard in the Santa Maria Valley to the Drum Canyon Vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills to the Star Lane Vineyard in Happy Canyon. Add those three prime locations up and even someone with no wine knowledge could stumble upon some good pinot, chard, sauv blanc, and cab. But, of course, you don't kick off a 250 year plan with a someone as your winemaker.

Nope, the Dierbergs hired Tyler Thomas, stealing him from the more famous wine counties up north, which shows a certain sense of commitment. Thomas has one of those stories--French grandmother, wine at the table, college years studying botany and getting into cooking. Then, after marrying young, he and his wife traveled the world, only to land in New Zealand and discover winemakers. It seemed like a cool career.

Fast forward through a Master's from Davis (viticulture and enology) and an ornery mentor, Mark Matthews, author of Terroir, and Other Myths of Winegrowing, with whom he didn't always see eye-to-eye, and that feisty back-and-forth made him a better winemaker. For as Thomas puts it, "In wine school, you tend to learn how to do stuff to wine, and that's not always good."

He got practice learning not to do too much at Hyde de Villaine in Napa and Donelan in Sonoma, but the Dierbergs came wooing, and once he saw the properties, and heard of their desire for a long-range plan, he couldn't say no. So now they get to do things like plant all sorts of clones to see which grow best ("it takes 25 years to see what clones work on your site"), and to experiment with stem inclusion (he's a fan, in moderation), and to age in oak vs. maloactic fermentation to find what creates more "body," and to see what different barrels can do, and to grow grapes at different elevations (thank you, rising Happy Canyon topography), you name it.  If there's a best way to make a wine, Thomas and his team will find it.

In addition to the magnificent sites to grow the grapes in the first place, and that they've even got 15 acres of own-rooted vines in Happy Canyon (did I mention they have 40% of the planted acreage in that Bordeaux-blessed area?) since it's protected enough from phylloxera (plus they have to water less, and the flavor profiles seem more classic, with richer textures), they've got a half acre of caves to age the wines in perfect conditions. There's something nearly religious about a place like this, as if you can feel the growth and change about you amidst the silence of the barrels.

They're also after perfect pairings, so let a bunch of us heathens, uh, journalists, in for a tasting with Chef Kiminari Togawa from Sushi Karaku in Tokyo. Alas, I have not been to Japan, so don't know the culinary highlights, but a family came from Japan to this event as they like Togawa so. That's dedication. (Here I go with my limited knowledge, but they sort of looked like a couple from Tampopo.)

The point was to prove you can have red wine with fish. It helps that Togawa does Edomae sushi, the older version that has been pushed aside by what we now know of as sushi (but that's only 50 years or so old). That means fish that's pickled, marinated, even sometimes slightly quickly cooked, yet still sushi. You don't dip this into soy and wasabi, as it's got all its proper flavor pre-packed, as it were. It looks like simple nigiri, but my god, do those flavors last and last--one way it certainly works with red wine, as it finished as fine and long as a delicious cabernet.

Take the pickled red maduro (tuna red meat) in soy alongside the chu-toro (fatty tuna) sprinkled with wine salt (photo above). The maduro glistens for a reason, hinting at its richness. It almost had red beets depth, and sure enough their handy flavor profile matching chart nailed the fish's iodine and iron core. Then the wine salt on the chu-toro excellently bridged sea and grape in one tasty bite. These two paired so well with the pinots, one from Santa Maria--the 2014 Dierberg Vineyard--and the other from Sta. Rita Hills--the 2014 Drum Canyon. Guess which one had more salt air, to match? You see how this can be, done, don't you.

Of course, there was even more, brilliant non-sushi bites between the courses, like a king crab mille feuille that had no pastry, but lots of crab, plus bonus salmon because why not, and then that rich zip of spinach for both color contrast and earthiness.

Or this modestly named oil marinated salmon with tomato water, that somehow left out the salmon roe atop that gave the dish a crazy series of bright bursts.

So does sushi go with red wine? You bet. And I'm pretty sure it would even not in a stone cellar setting, made by a chef flown in from Tokyo for the event, with wine poured from a producer with a 250 year plan. (How did I not get to the mirin marinated conger eel and the 2011 Star Lane "Astral"? Was it because I gave up on notes and was reduced to grunting with pleasure?)

Do You Know the Way to Jina Bae

When the Independent handed out its first Foodie Awards last October, we worked hard to come up with cleverish (the best ones probably weren't mine, don't worry) names for each honor as we definitely didn't mean for them to be "best French restaurant" or anything like that (and anyway in Santa Barbara that category in the best-of contests generally means "best restaurant with a French-sounding name," which begins to suggest some of the problems with best-of issues)(oh, they do sell advertising though). That said, there was no name as apt as the one given to A-Ru Japanese Restaurant -- The Fish Out of Water Award. For the joke isn't just that this is sushi (arguably the county's best) in the Santa Ynez Valley, just down the 246 from Frank Ostini and his pith helmet and grill. It goes further, as it's tucked into a strip mall (official address 225 McMurray Rd.), an unlikely location for food so fine. And what's more, and more again, A-Ru is owned by Jina Bae, a Korean woman. That's not how sushi is supposed to happen, if you ask the traditionalists.


But if you sat them down at Bae's restaurant, they'd shut up fast, beyond the occasional moan of pleasure. For everything here is plus quality, and not just the fish she gets herself several times a week at the fish markets in LA. That tofu in the miso--and what could be, and often is, more of a toss-off than miso at a sushi spot--how did she find tofu so silky and lovely? That eel sauce several rolls sport--it seems extra punchy, with depth you usually don't get in the roll itself, let alone the drizzled accompaniment.


So, if you're up in Wine Country and want something different to eat, or if you're driving back from Paso, say, or San Francisco, or Seattle, or Juneau.... Well, I'm planning trips north just to visit A-Ru more frequently, let's put it that way.