Camphor is serving up a family-style tasting menu at Coachella.
Chefs Max Boonthanakit and Lijo George’s Camphor took off like a rocket last year, earning a Michelin star less than 10 months after opening in the Arts District of Los Angeles. The upward trajectory for Camphor, known for its elegant and genre-bending riffs on French bistro food, also included a stop at the 2022 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for a one-off Outstanding In The Field collaboration dinner with fellow new LA hotness Horses.
This year, Camphor is flexing even harder at Coachella with its own full-service pop-up restaurant that will be open for VIP ticket-holders both weekends of the festival (April 14-16 and April 21-23). Boonthanakit, George and Camphor owner Cyrus Batchan will be in the desert to serve an over-the-top 13-course tasting menu and also to showcase Le Burger, which is their version of a meaty steakhouse burger.
“It’s going to be shared with like 10 people,” Boonthanakit says of the family-style tasting menu, which will include Camphor bangers like scallop demi lune pasta and a rib eye with choron sauce (tomato-spiked béarnaise) that will be made à la minute. “We like the idea of these little feasts. It feels more grand, and it’s really fun at Coachella because you’re eating with all these strangers. During the pandemic, everyone kind of spread out and became a little more private. We thought it’d be fun to bring everyone back together.”
The tasting menu, which starts at $150 per person, will also include tuna tartare (or a vegan beet tartare alternative), saucisson, artichoke gratin and other transporting dishes. Camphor is highly regarded for its inventive and evocative desserts, so Coachella tasting-menu guests will get almond ice cream with lemon ice, which is the restaurant’s take on marzipan. Reservations for Camphor’s pop-up are available on Opentable.
Boonthanakit and George met when they were working for Alain Ducasse’s Michelin-starred Blue in Thailand. They’re obviously adept at classic French technique, but what really makes Camphor a compelling Los Angeles restaurant is how Boonthanakit (whose parents are Thai and Taiwanese) and George (who’s from Kerala in Southern India) skillfully weave together global flavors and color outside the lines.
For example, the Coachella tasting menu will feature a gunpowder gem salad. Gunpowder is a seasoning blend with lentils, seeds and spices that’s used in Southern Indian cooking. Camphor’s gunpowder is made with black pepper George gets from India.
“The black pepper makes it nice and spicy,” Boonthanakit says. “A lot of people love it because it’s really explosive.”
Le Burger should be a big hit in the desert.
Camphor also isn’t holding back at its Coachella VIP-section burger stand, where the buns will be toasted in smoked beef fat, the sauce will have smoked beef fat, and the caramelized onions will be cooked in smoked beef fat before being pickled.
“Everything’s really savory and rich, but the vinegar cuts through the fat,” Boonthanakit says. “So it’s balanced pretty nicely.”
Camphor will serve half-size patties at Coachella compared to the bigger burgers in the Arts District. But Boonthanakit stresses that guests can opt for a double cheeseburger, a triple cheeseburger or even a quadruple cheeseburger if dancing in the desert makes them extra peckish and they’re craving some more beef and smoked gouda. Camphor’s fries and kiwi cardamom slushies should also be popular.
The Camphor team will be nonstop busy at their pop-up, but George says he hopes he’s able to make a lap around Coachella, check out what other chefs are doing and maybe even catch some music.
“I just want to walk through everything and try as much as I can,” he says. “We’ll see how much time we get.”
Boonthanakit and Batchan say they’d love to see Frank Ocean headline the second Sunday of Coachella, after Camphor has wrapped up its pop-up tasting menus.
But the priority, of course, is creating an ephemeral world-class restaurant at a top-tier music festival that’s very much turned into a food festival as well (other LA powerhouses like Yangban Society, Kogi, Broad Street Oyster Co., KazuNori, Tacos 1986, Love Hour, Amboy, Chimmelier, Ronan and Bang Bang Noodles are also cooking at Coachella this year).
“It really is about not only challenging ourselves and doing something fun and different and getting out of the norm of the restaurant,” Batchan says. “The benefit is exposing Camphor to a demographic that maybe hasn’t seen what Camphor is and giving them something very, very different. It’s about pushing ourselves to take Camphor to what it should be. It’s like a bistro, right? You want to be for the masses at a certain level. So we’re going to the masses with this one.”
