They are not ski celebrities or terrain park badasses. They don’t have a pair of fat skis named after them or star in their own ski movies. Jacob Burton, Mark Estee, and John Weatherson may not be famous athletes, but they are doing something that is normally the domain of extreme sports stars — they are putting the Reno-Tahoe area on the map.
Burton, Estee, and Weatherson are chefs who either have been bringing national attention to the Reno-Tahoe region or are the first to bring a new type of culinary experience to the area. Either way, these three men are changing the way the rest of California and the country views Reno-Tahoe, from a backwoods burger depot to a foodie hub with big talent on par with culinary cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Jacob Burton
The Cedar House Sport Hotel’s Stella has only been open for three years, but in that short time, Executive Chef Jacob Burton has created a name for himself and the restaurant. Burton, who is only 29, was one of 100 chefs nominated in March for Food & Wine Magazine’s People’s Best New Chef award.
“It was a big honor,” said Patty Baird, Cedar House co-owner. “Truckee never gets recognized; it’s always San Francisco, always Los Angeles.”
The contest was divided into 10 regional divisions. Burton was matched up against nine other chefs in California, all of whom (except for Burton and a chef from Carmel) were from the Bay Area or L.A. There were big names in the food world like Matthew Accarrino of SPQR in San Francisco and Jordan Kahn of L.A.’s Red Medicine. When online voting opened on March 11, Burton was out front for a few days, attracting notice from SFGate food blogger Paolo Lucchesi, who wrote, “In a huge upset over the city folk so far, the guy from Truckee is winning the vote in the early going.”
Alas, Burton was not able to maintain his lead, and by the time voting closed a week later, Accarrino had received the most votes (the overall winner was Chef Brendan McGill of Washington’s Hitchcock restaurant). But winning was beside the point, said both Burton and Baird.
“Just to be a part of that, that’s what’s important to me,” said Jacob. “I believe a lot in the Reno-Tahoe area and what we are doing. Just the fact that a national publication has Truckee on their radar is really rewarding.”
What Burton and Stella are doing is laid-back, upscale international cuisine. Dishes like Burton’s duck paté, which took him three years to develop, fire roasted bone marrow (which guests demanded he put back on the menu after taking it off), and citrus terrine are making food lovers sit up and take notice. Burton’s online cooking classes — he has 140 technique videos and 20 basic skills lectures on sauces, baking, and knives, among others — at stellaculinary.com, as well as his farmer’s market cooking classes and five-day culinary boot camp have only helped spread the word about his culinary prowess. Stella’s November boot camp, which sold out in three days last year, already has a 150-person waiting list for the 12 spots.
“Overall this was great recognition that Truckee does attract this level of talent,” Baird said. “We attracted the eyes of the foodie world and showcased our talents. For little Truckee, we did very well.”
Mark Estee
The Food & Wine award is a big deal, but the height of culinary recognition is the James Beard Award, the “Oscars of food.” This year, Chef Mark Estee, chef-owner of Reno’s Campo, became the first person in Tahoe, Truckee, and Reno to make the semi-finalist list for Best Chef of the West.
“I am psyched to have Reno on the map,” said Estee, a former owner of Moody’s Bistro in Truckee and owner of Burger Me in both Truckee and Reno. “It’s not about me; it’s about Campo, about putting Reno-Tahoe on the map as a great food city.”
Estee was up against 19 other chefs, many of them from San Francisco and Los Angeles, including Food & Wine California winner Matthew Accarrino. Although Estee did not make the James Beard final list (neither did Accarrino), which was announced March 19, like Burton, Estee is just happy to be getting national attention for his restaurant.
“Campo is kickin’ ass,” he said. “We are a national player. We are producing food unlike anything anyone else is doing.”
Campo, which serves up rustic Italian fare, has made its mark with Napolitano-style, wood-oven baked pizza, fresh pasta, and homemade charcuterie. The menu changes daily. Since opening Moody’s more than a decade ago, Estee has had a commitment to using local and seasonal food.
This is not the first time that Campo, which only opened a year and a half ago, has been recognized on the national level. In 2012, it was named one of Esquire Magazine’s 20 Best New Restaurants in the country. Estee opened a second Campo in Mammoth in December.
“We are really pushing the region,” Estee said.
John Weatherson
John Weatherson and his wife Nyna, both chef-owners at Trokay, haven’t won any awards yet, but they might soon with the new kind of cuisine they are cooking up in Truckee — modern gastronomy. John didn’t invent modern gastronomy, what he prefers to call a cooking style commonly known as molecular gastronomy, which turns to science to transform and manipulate food, but he is the first chef to bring it to the Reno-Tahoe area.
“No one else is doing it,” said John, 30. “What we are doing without a doubt is special.”
An example of the Weathersons’ modern cooking is their take on the French classic, tuna Niçoise. The key ingredients are cooked with modern equipment and science that alters them, so an egg, cooked at 165 degrees in a Rational combi oven that coagulates the protein and separates the yolk from the white, becomes perfectly white cubes and yellow discs instead of just a plain hardboiled egg. The olives are cooked at 30 degrees Fahrenheit on an anti-griddle, resulting in an olive puree that is then frozen in the shape of an olive and dipped in Kappa-carrageenan liquid, a gelling agent. The liquid inside the “olive” then thaws, while the outside becomes a semi-permeable membrane.
“It looks like an olive, but it’s not,” John said. “It’s a faux olive. But the goal at the end of the day is not science; it is the customer experience and food.”
John is a graduate of the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York, and in 2008 won the Katherine T. Angell Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, awarded to the top-ranked student in each graduating class. He went on to work for some of the top chefs in New York City, such as David Bouley and Christian Delouvrier, and one of the top restaurants in the world, Daniel. Nyna is former head cheesemonger of the famous Murray’s Cheese in New York City. In 2010, the couple moved to Truckee to open Trokay Café, named after the Paiute word for “peaceful greeting,” trokay, which morphed into the name of Truckee.
Trokay Café, originally located in the old Elijah Blue’s space, closed last September after its lease was up. The Weathersons spent the next five months remodeling the old O.B.’s Pub, and in February Trokay opened in its new and much bigger location. The new restaurant has tripled its staff and quadrupled in size; the kitchen alone is the same size as the entire earlier café was.
“Our goal is a fantastic customer experience that challenges people’s notions of what dining could be like in Truckee,” said John, who is not surprised by all the talented chefs in the area. “There has been an American food renaissance over the last 10 years that has been incredible, and Truckee is no exception.”
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