Vespertine celebrates spring with foraged flowers and herbs.
The rebirth of Vespertine, the transporting, almost otherworldly Los Angeles tasting-menu restaurant that chef Jordan Kahn reopened on April 2, is a story about beginnings and endings. The food itself at Vespertine is also about beginnings and endings, about origins and first things and re-centering yourself and discovering newness in the ancient.
But the thing about origin stories, of course, is that there are many beginnings and endings.
Let’s start with one beginning, which led to a new menu that includes Red Earth, a dish with smoked pumpkin and huitlacoche. Kahn went to visit his family in Mexico. During this trip, the chef and his wife, Zara, saw a thousand-year-old palm tree, rooted in red-clay soil.
“When I crafted this menu, I basically wrote it all at once when I was on this trip in Nayarit with my wife,” Kahn says during an interview at Vespertine. “But it wasn’t a menu. It was feelings and concepts and forms. After we had performed this Temezcal ceremony with this shaman, I basically took my notebook, grabbed a piece of charcoal from the ashes and just started writing and sketching and creating things. And that’s what essentially still remains as the menu. None of it had ingredients attached to it. None of it had techniques there. They weren’t, like, dishes. They were ideas in terms of what I was feeling in the moment. It was pure expression of distilling that experience.”
At a preview dinner a few days before Vespertine opened, we ate this smoky and, yes, earthy Red Earth dish and three beautiful preparations of Coturnix quail (breast, leg and a liver mousse with a strikingly airy sourdough porridge bread). There were also, among other things, foraged flowers and deep-water Hawaiian fish (so difficult to catch that they’re typically caught when fishermen are going after larger species like tuna) and a pancake dessert with salted lamb fat.
In the past, Kahn called Vespertine (which is located at the four-story “waffle” building designed by architect Eric Owen Moss in Culver City’s Hayden Tract area) a spaceship. But as it turns out, there are plenty of inspiring ingredients on the planet he inhabits.
Kahn now says that the spaceship reference was “stream-of-consciousness talking,” but his main idea stands.
Vespertine makes an impression in Culver City's Hayden Tract area.
“It is only a spaceship in its idea that it takes you somewhere, and where it takes you is kind of different for everybody,” Kahn says. “Or at least the way it feels is different for everybody. The spaceship analogy has less to do with literal space and more to do with getting you out of your day-to-day, taking you out of your element in Los Angeles. It just wants to take you to some place that doesn't really exist anywhere else. And that place, hopefully, is a very beautiful, hopeful, serene, calm place.”
People are eager to go on this journey into uncharted territory. Vespertine’s first month of reservations, one seating a night, were booked quickly. Vespertine is now at two seatings a night, and the demand for seats hasn’t subsided, with the second month of reservations also booked quickly. Kahn thinks a big part of the demand comes from the takeout he did during the pandemic. That was also a new beginning that took people on a journey.
“Our pandemic takeout changed everything for us,” he says. ‘It changed the landscape. It changed our guests. It changed our connection to our guests. It was easily the weirdest and most fascinating experience to work through. I remember when we got shut down. Takeout was the only option available. And I looked at Zara and I was like, ‘How the fuck are we going to translate this food to takeout? It's impossible.’ She said, ‘You're looking at it through the wrong lens. This is an opportunity that you’re never going to have again. You don't have to translate Vespertine’s food to takeout. You just have to translate you and Vespertine into people's homes.’ That changed my perspective a lot.”
So Kahn channeled his heritage and made Cuban food for takeout. He cooked dishes he previously served at Red Medicine. With Thomas Keller’s blessing, Kahn re-created iconic preparations from The French Laundry, where he had worked. He made Sicilian meals and Oaxacan meals. He did a Southern feast with Lowcountry flavors.
“It was a retrospective of my life of cooking in this takeout form,” Kahn says. “Every time we did a takeout menu, we got more and more ambitious, with plateware, with stories, including vignettes and recipe cards and photos.
Customers did Zoom dinners to feel a sense of togetherness while eating Vespertine’s takeout at home. What Kahn did was create a new restaurant, a new thing to look forward to, a new adventure, every month. And now there are guests coming to Vespertine for the first time, like they’ve gone to Meteora for the first time, because they enjoyed Kahn’s takeout during the pandemic. They know that dining at Vespertine will be very different than what they ate at home. That’s why they are here.
“I had that thought, which is like, ‘Are people going to come here and expect that we're going to make Sicilian food this week?’” Kahn says. “It hasn't been the case. Everyone, really impressively, knows exactly what they’re getting themselves into. People who have never dined here but who had the pandemic takeout kind of know everything about us. They're expecting a tasting menu of a wide range of ingredients and crazy presentations and sort of an immersive experience with all these things. When they're here, they're like, ‘We're super excited to drink all the Kool-Aid.’”
“It is only a spaceship in its idea that it takes you somewhere, and where it takes you is kind of ... [+]
When we visited Vespertine for our preview, we ate aged dairy calf and big Maine scallops (a nod to the Cambrian explosion) and an expertly layered (textures, flavors, temperatures) dessert with black raspberry and roasted almond praline that simultaneously reminded us of peanut butter and jelly but was also unlike anything we’ve ever eaten.
“It’s really about getting people deeper and closer to an ingredient that they either otherwise would never have or something that we’re particular fond of at the moment because it has stories to it that philosophically resonate,” Kahn says. “It’s electric when I come down and say hi to guests. There’s genuine glee in people’s faces. We’ve moved it from a headful place into a heartful place. And that’s sort of the biggest shift for me with Vespertine, to make food and an experience that’s not cerebral, to make it more heartfelt.”
He likens his menu to a concept album. You should hear the tracks in order to experience them in the right context. Kahn is ready to create more concept albums. He says that his wife has changed him in manifold ways and that he can’t wait to see the menu he comes up with after he becomes a father. The beginning is the end is the beginning. And if you’re going to make art, why not make it about everything?
But, also, it’s totally fine if you can’t always explain the origin story. Sometimes, things just happen. Consider The Deep Seven, a course with the hard-to-procure Hawaiian fish Kahn gets at Vespertine and a sauce that came straight from the chef’s mind.
“I immediately thought about this paste that I wanted to serve the fish with, and I couldn't tell you why I came up with this,” he says. “They were just ingredients that made sense: caramelized papaya with timur pepper, red pepper, caramel and rose petals all blended together. I remember the first time I made it, I said, ‘This is the weirdest delicious sauce I’ve ever made.’ There's no reference for this sauce. It's not a derivative of anything. It's not similar to this or similar to that. It’s its own thing. And that felt in that moment very appropriate as being kind of a special thing for this fish, because this is a fish that you can't get and a paste that doesn't exist.”
