68 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {food coloring} DINING ruling the roost words by JOHANNA HARLOW • photography by PAULETTE PHLIPOT Don't tell Jared Wentworth what he can and can't do. An upscale restaurant in a concert hall? Sure, why not. A Michelin-starred brewery? Make it two stars. “My background is opening crazy, weird, esoteric concepts,” Jared chuckles. Because what’s the fun in doing what’s already been done? “I could do a straight-up French restaurant, but it’s been done a thousand times,” he points out. “It's perfectly fine. But that kind of lukewarm tweezer food—I've done it for a while at a very high level and I'm kind of over it.” delightful depth of flavor. “I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life cooking nothing but A-5 beef from Miyazaki, the best Japanese fish that you can possibly get, the best urchin, all of that,” Jared shrugs. “And at this point, I'm bored of it.” Oftentimes, less is more, Jared preaches, a lesson drilled into him by an unexpected source. As an avid bonsai enthusiast, this man finds beauty in the process of reduction. “There's a simplicity to it that's not garnered through simplicity,” he describes of the Japanese artform. “It's refinement. It's a lot of stuff you'll never see.” That complexity behind simplicity also applies to cooking. “As a young chef, you will throw everything but the kitchen sink at a dish,” he reflects. “You don't need 700 ingredients thrown at something. Let's keep it down to four really pristine ingredients that pair well with this.” Which is why whole-roasted chickens at Café Vivant are spotlighted with their own umami-rich jus simmered from about 300 birds a week. “It's kind of like my Americanized French mole,” he describes. Café Vivant in Menlo Park, his latest venture, centers around heritage breed chickens sourced from Corvus Farm in nearby Pescadero. These aren’t the industrial hybrid birds we all know with mild-mannered meat that serves as more of a blank canvas for sauces and marinades. Heritage chicken—hardy traditional breeds established before the mid-20th century that mature more slowly— offer firmer texture and a
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