“Thoughts? Feelings? Emotions?” A smile is playing at the corners of my server’s mouth.
“So… many… feelings…” I reply in a state of overwhelm. The passion fruit pavlova’s mess of textures (crunchy, creamy, squirty) and flavors (kumquat, grapefruit, pistachio) has every bell in my mental slot machine going ding-ding-ding! “I don’t exactly know what’s happening over here, but it’s intense.”
“I know,” my server whispers. Her eyes swell with compassion, and I tell her that she should consider becoming a therapist. Turns out she already is one, and only works at the sensational Rory’s Place a couple shifts a week. Her emotional-processing services have already come in handy a couple times tonight, from the alarmingly bright pop of fennel pollen-dusted olives to a mindblowing plate of baked West Coast oysters, each bivalve as fat and creamy as a toddler’s cheek.
Since opening three years ago, Rory’s Place has come to be the queen of Ojai’s dining scene (and yes, with its plum-tinged glow and gorgeous list of natural wines, there is little question that the restaurant is a she). As I will find out over my next four days in this idyllic pocket of southern California, Rory’s Place, owned by Santa Monica-raised sisters Rory and Meave McAuliffe, is just the starting point. Pound for pound, Pixie tangerine for Pixie tangerine, Ojai is emerging as the nation’s next culinary capital.
Fancy a cone of buffalo milk soft serve ice cream? A movie theater concession stand the size of a studio apartment? A Japanese burger cafe? A bakery-coffee shop that bustles by day and transforms into a first-rate Burmese restaurant at night? You will want for nothing in the enchanted land of Ojai, California, population 8,000.
An 80-minute drive from Los Angeles, Ojai used to be known as a very, very pretty California town awash in good vibrations and those in search of them. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti fell in love with the Ojai Valley and settled there in 1922. His presence can still be felt at the foot of the Topatopa mountain range, from the preponderance of healing studios that dot Ojai s side streets to the towers of secondhand books on things like somatic release and love planets at local landmark Bart’s Books. I pick up a slim volume of Krishnamurti’s notes to self, a collection of thoughts and memories that he captured on a dictaphone before his death in 1986.
I have come to this utopia in search of another kind of nirvana, though. Two years ago, when former New York Times food columnist and Food52 co-founder Amanda Hesser and her husband found themselves empty nesters, they decided to experiment with living somewhere other than Brooklyn, which had been their home for decades. After a long search from coast to coast, they settled on a town that wasn’t even on their original list of contenders. “At the outset, our understanding was that Ojai was kind of ranchy, and it was the kind of place for people who have horses. But all it took was one night there, and a stop by the farmers market, and we just fell in love,” she says.
“Everything is like a painting there,” another Ojai resident, the artist and Vogue contributor Natalie Krim, tells me. “They have enormous artichokes, and the onions are the size of your head!”
“What can I say? The produce is just better here,” cookbook author and food stylist Diana Yen declares as we strap into her little black Jeep the morning after my first dinner. “Even in L.A., all the produce comes from here.” During the pandemic, Yen left her apartment in Brooklyn Heights to camp out at the Ojai getaway of her best friend, the Los Angeles-based stylist Cathy Hahn. That was five years ago. “We have incredible sun and we’re close to the coast, which I guess is the winning combination,” Yen says, slowing down at Earthtrine Farm, her go-to produce dealer.
Just five minutes outside of downtown, rows upon rows of chard and lettuce glisten in the stark California sunshine. The land beyond the vegetable beds brims with citrus and avocado trees. Yen heads over to the farmstead and picks out an arugula bunch and a carton of jumbo figs. I load up on oranges and clementines. They’re sweet and sticky as candy.
Over the next few days, I try, and utterly fail, to locate a meal or snack that doesn’t set my heart racing. Serge Becker, the nightlife and design icon behind countless hotels and restaurants in New York, got the Ojai memo and has just opened Radio Roma, a tiny Tokyo-style “listening room” cum mezcal bar that serves perfectly seasoned tacos until the wee hours. When I come down from a challenging hike, I head to Three Birds cafe and order a draught of local kombucha. It’s far more delicate and refreshing than the bottled version I glug back home.
It was only last spring when Spanish chef Perfecte Rocher was living in Los Angeles and looking for a restaurant space in the Hudson Valley when he heard about a different kind of opportunity. A 15,000 square foot restaurant that Marlon Brando and John Lennon once visited was sitting empty in a lush garden in Ojai. Perfecte’s family packed their bags and relocated, and Rochers at the Ranch House, the high-end restaurant he opened with his wife Alia, was up and running in merely four months.
Perfecte doesn’t go in for menus. Instead, he sends out whatever comes to his wild and beautiful mind. On the night I visit, he is in the mood for duck and turnips cooked sous-vide and a scallop crudo served with the most delicious homemade nori crisps. He sends out little treats between courses, too, like a basket full of tiny potato croquettes and a shot glass of melon elixir laced with lime oil. “I decide what I m making based on whatever is freshest,” he tells me. “Why would you put lots of dishes on your menu if it means that the food might have been sitting around the kitchen for days?”
The commitment to the bit extends to the Ojai Valley Inn, the sprawling and immaculately maintained resort that was pretty much the only game in town until a couple of months ago. The soft swells of the Topa Topa mountains are in view from seemingly every spot on the property, which lends the place an irrefutably calm quality. “Even running on the treadmill here is relaxing!” I text a friend while panting at the gym.
Depending on who you ask, there are four or five onsite restaurants. Dinner at The Oak, the more casual of the two main dinner spots, starts with a winning dip of local crab and tarragon, and ends with a pleasantly subtle slice of brie cheesecake. The dessert is drizzled with honey from the property’s apiary.
The food here is far more thoughtful than high-volume dining needs to be. This might have something to do with the fact that the hotel’s general manager, Ben Kephart, presents like a hotel general manager—gracious, chinos-wearing, business card at the ready—until you get him on the subject of food. Only then do you realize that you are in the presence of a gastro-maniac. After a lovely facial at the Inn’s impressive spa, I meet my host and he drives me in a golf cart to his favorite part of the property, a vast and modern gray barn with a state-of-the-art kitchen and room to seat more people than came to my wedding. This is where the Inn’s cooking events are held and where Ojai Food + Wine Festival ticket holders can chitchat with food royals like Jonathan Waxman, Alice Waters and Jessica Koslow of Sqrl.
I am beyond sated by my final night in Ojai, but that doesn’t stop me from tucking into a meal that is indulgent to the point of obscene. The dishes are all prepared by Brandon Boudet, the chef who oversaw the kitchens at the Little Dom’s restaurant empire in Los Angeles before heading north to develop Condor Bar, the marquee restaurant at the newly resurrected and much buzzed about Hotel El Roblar.
Formerly a health retreat, the Spanish Colonial property was devastated by the Thomas Fire of 2017. It was sitting empty until five years ago, when a team of four men with obsessively good taste and an unstinting work ethic decided to bring it back to life. Among the band is Eric Goode, the New York nightlife impresario and restaurateur (his CV includes the Bowery Hotel and The Waverly Inn) who has stepped away from the party scene to turn his attention to turtle conservation. Goode lives on the other side of town at his Twin Peaks ranch, HQ of his 20-year-old global turtle nonprofit The Turtle Conservancy, where creatures who’ve been rescued from poachers and black market dealers roam the grounds. A modest donation is all it takes for one of Goode’s kind colleagues to open the gates and lead a private tour. Do it—and not just for the photo ops. Goode’s foundation buys and preserves land around the world where animals on the brink of extinction roam.
Another Hotel El Roblar partner is Jeremy McBride, the affable documentary filmmaker who is often to be found in the hotel lobby, toggling between triaging maintenance issues and greeting guests with his kid-in-a-candy-shop energy. El Roblar is less a hotel, and more a Wes Anderson-level tribute to old California style. The hallways are fragrant with cedar from the walls and toasty smoke coming from the lobby fireplace. The 50 rooms, no two alike, contain curios scrounged from local estate sales. A traditional newspaper rack is stocked with ideal reading to take to La Cocina, the daytime restaurant whose complimentary breakfast is not to be missed (by which I mean the homemade jam is best eaten by the bowlful).
The hotel’s other restaurant, Condor Bar, is named after the massive California bird that almost went extinct, and the cuisine is what Boudet calls “California-Mexico modern.” He suggests I try the king oyster mushroom in a green mole sauce that he co-created with Chef Jesus Duron, formerly of two-Michelin-starred Mexico City restaurant Pujol. “It just happens to be vegan,“ Boudet tells me. The accidentally vegan mushroom is massive, and the mole is rich without being gloppy. It’s just the beginning of a procession fit for an entire marching band. I can hardly make out any sign of table beneath the goblet filled with jumbo shrimp cocktail, the tacos of butter-tender smoked ribs with miso pineapple butter, and a salad of melon, tomato, and Chicatana ants. “It’s my version of prosciutto and melon,” Boudet explains with a grin.
I have no room for dessert, but Boudet will hear nothing of it. He comes out with a plate of piping hot churros and fudgy sauce. I dip a churro in the pool of chocolate. The sauce is exquisitely balanced, just bitter and smoky enough to offset the sugar-dusted churro’s sweetness. I lean in to scoop up a bit more chocolate, and a passage from my Krishnamurti book comes to mind. It’s about a hummingbird, and it is about everything else too. “It is a marvelous thing to watch it, to feel the delicacy, the bright color, and wonder at its beauty, so small, so rapid and so quickly gone.”