La Balena: Carmel Italian restaurant goes all-out with local ingredients
When guests arrive for dinner at La Balena in Carmel, they have no idea that the chef has been working on their meal since sunrise. Chef Brad Briske starts his day circling Monterey Bay in search of that day’s harvest, stopping at farmers’ markets, the wharf and local livestock farms to buy ingredients for themenu.
Jostling for space in the 250square-foot kitchen, Briske butchers local meats while a sous chef makes pasta and soup stocks. A new menu is printed every day.
Shelving Sysco shortcuts and skipping frozen food in favor of building themenu on local ingredients daily is a laborintensive, and very expensive, way to run a restaurant.
But it’s theway La Balena owner Emanuele Bartolini watched his grandmother run her restaurant in Florence, Italy, where the family’s reputation rested on the love and integrity she put into her food.
“The relationship she built with local farmers who saw her at the market every daywas amazing,” says Bartolini, who opened La Balena with wife, Anna, in November 2012.
“Ifmy grandmother didn’t showup one day, they’d all ask if something had happened to her.”
Bartolini grewup shopping with her, washing vegetables and cleaning dishes in the restaurant alongside his uncles, aunts, cousins and parents. He left to study electrical engineering in college, but kept coming back towatch his grandmother roast pheasant with black truffles andmake pappardelle with wild boar sugo— dishes that make appearances on La Balena’s rustic Italian menu.
“Her restaurant was where the locals ate,” he recalls. “She lived upstairs, therewere tables for 40 below, and a cellar for wine. Her connection to the community impressed me; it was the reason I decided to drop electronics and followher.”
Anna, an American studying art history in Florence, was introduced to Emanuele at a wedding in 1998, and the two later discovered they had been set up by the bride and groom. It worked, and they moved to New York where Bartolini worked in several Italian restaurants, eventually spending five years as a manager at Mario Batali’s Del Posto. The couple married in 2000 and moved to Carmel, where Anna has relatives, and they started looking for a restaurant of their own.
It took awhile to find a chef who shared their extreme farmto-table philosophy. They discovered Briske at a dinner at Live Earth Farmin Watsonville, where he prepared a five-course dinner for more than 100 guests in a barn. Briske, who had worked at Millennium in San Francisco and was working at Casanova in Carmel at the time, wowed the Bartolinis with his handmade chicken sausage.
“Itwas just like being home in Florence,” Emanuele says.
With just 48 seats, including the patio, La Balena fills up nightly, and is regularly booked 10 days in advance. Readers of the food-centric magazine Edible Monterey Bay voted La Balena this year’s best restaurant, and Briske Monterey Bay’s best chef.
Briske must be nimble, as he’s beholden to whatever the small farmers can give him, and often that translates to running out of things in the kitchen.
“Farmers can give us only 20 chickens aweek, sowe only serve fried chicken on Sunday and Tuesday,” Briske says.
The Bartolinis are protective of the integrity of their restaurant, turning away produce sellers who use chemicals and refusing any corporate labels in their kitchen.
Sometimes this can get sticky when a customer wants the familiarity and convenience of, say, a Coca-Cola. The Bartolinis will offer to mix an Italian soda on the spot to mimic a Coke, or send the diner across the street to Bruno’s Market.
Even Emanuele admits his restaurant is not for everyone. But he believes the food movement is on his side, and there is a rising tide of customers who want to eat locally grown and slowly prepared food.
“We’re not doing this to become rich,” Emanuele says. “We do this becausewe love what we are doing.”