The Osprey drops the ‘tavern,’ but raises the bar
Pay it forward, the saying goes. An act of kindness, a kind word.
And so, when I got home from my Baldwin Park seafood feast, I sent Jason Chin a text. Yeah, I’d be outing my visit to his restaurant, but so what? It was more important to tell him. To spread niceness.
“Do not ever change that cioppino recipe! (Also, hi. How are you?)”
And so began our conversation about The Osprey’s big concept shift. That’s right, The Osprey.
“It’s a work in progress,” says Chin, “but we wanted to get away from the word ‘tavern.’”
Community was a buzzword when the place was spinning up years back, he says, and what he and partner/wife, Sue, wanted for the new venue — to make it a gathering place. They’d also wanted to do seafood, hence the fish hawk in its name. “But we admit we’ve been struggling with it ever since.”
COVID-19 has had the place struggling, too. But in the eye of that viral storm, the Chins found a little clarity.
“It gave us a chance to slow down,” says Chin. “In the past, we might have been a little scared to make such a sweeping change, but we try to see opportuniPay ty in everything. And we realized that if there was a time to do it — it was now.”
That meant another change of the culinary guard.
Sous chef Anthony Watler’s experience with seafood — his resume includes a stint at Izzy’s Fish & Oyster in Miami — and Grand Caymanian roots will doubtless aid him in his new role as chef de cuisine. Reyes Mezcaleria Executive Chef Wendy Lopez is now serving as The Osprey’s culinary director.
Before you even get to the food, though, you’ll have to run a brief gauntlet of new safety procedures.