Phillip Frankland Lee Title: Chef, restaurant owner Business: Scratch Restaurants Group Born: Los Angeles, 1987 Most Influential People: Neal Fraser, chef; Stefan Richter, chef Personal: Married, lives in Encino Chef Phillip Frankland Lee has brought culinary fine dining to the Valley with a trio of Zagat-rated restaurants including Scratch Bar and Kitchen, Sushi Bar and Woodley Proper, all in Encino. Next, he will open a high-concept, tasting menu-only restaurant in Montecito that seats just eight people and costs $550 a meal. The Silver Bough, set to open at the end of the month, will be “an exercise in opulence,” serving only the finest ingredients such as Wagyu beef and whipped caviar. Lee grew up in the Valley and got his start in the restaurant industry as a dishwasher at 18. He worked his way up at some of the city’s most renowned kitchens before founding Scratch Restaurants Group with wife Margarita Kallas-Lee in 2013. He has appeared as a contestant on popular cooking shows including “Chopped,” “Cutthroat Kitchen” and “Top Chef.” He also owns the Monarch restaurant in Montecito. Question: What was the thinking behind the $550 tasting menu at the Silver Bough? Answer: A lot of people may see a little bit of sticker shock. But when you break down what you’re actually getting and what that $550 includes — it’s obviously still very expensive for the average person — but not for the average fine-dining diner. Most of the comparable tasting menus around the country are in the $250 to $350 range. And once you include tip and tax, you’re looking at $400 while you’re drinking tap water. But what we’ve decided to do with the concept of the restaurant is we’re making the entire experience all-inclusive — the gratuity, the taxes and all the beverages for the entire evening. And the reason we’re doing that is to be able to control and curate the exact experience we have in mind. One of the ideas of the Silver Bough is that it is sort of an exercise in opulence — serving some of the most exotic and sought-after ingredients. What is the experience? The Silver Bough is an eight-seat restaurant and we’ll be doing one feeding a night as opposed to multiple. It follows the progression of a tasting menu, but it does so in a more curated and theatrical format. We wanted to take away the feeling of being in a restaurant and make it more like an experience or a show — not that there’s singing and dancing or anything. Everybody who comes in, whether you drink alcohol or not, will have a fully curated experience. There are many amazing restaurants where you’ll have a Wagyu (beef) course in the tasting menu, but you’ll also have a course that’s a simple and humble vegetable. Why’s that? Multiple reasons, one of which being very that it’s difficult to price a menu where every single course is a show stopper that is garnished with another show stopper. For us, it wasn’t about only using the best, but it also kind of was. There’s a foie gras course, followed by a bluefin tuna toro course, followed by Wagyu, and then everything is just covered in truffle. That’s sort of our interpretation of how that meal would have went. (Editor’s Note: A California ban on foie gras was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.) What is else makes the experience unique? Once we’ve finished with our final dessert, the room remains open for these guests for the remainder of the night and we break out some really nice digestifs. It’s sort of like going to the theater and after the show, having the opportunity to hang out with the cast. At that point the chefs and the entire team will pour a drink for themselves and hang out with you. What was the inspiration for the name? The silver bough is an emblem from ancient Celtic folklore. It was a mythic apple branch that was hidden in the mortal realm by the gods. It acted as a doorway into the world of the gods. And whoever found it would be transported into that world. There, they would wine and dine you, the mortal, as if you were the king and queen. Imagine being teleported to this place with the richest, endless resources and no famine and where time stops. Imagine that if you were transported into the world of the gods and you sat at that table, what would they be serving you? How did growing up in the Valley influence your cuisine? Growing up in the Valley has had a huge impact on the way that I approached food. There’s a reason why when I turned 13, I wanted to be a sushi chef when I grew up – because I ate sushi every day. We’ve got the sushi capital of North America here in the Valley. And we have Lebanese, Ethiopian, Mexican and Korean — absolutely everything. How would you describe L.A. cuisine? In a lot of cities, the culinary identity is the dish or the style. In Los Angeles, and specifically in the Valley, there wasn’t an identity. What’s L.A.? It’s tacos, it’s sushi, it’s Korean, it’s Thai. Some chefs and I who are also from here started trying to coin the term “Angeleno.” To say, our pantry is all of this is. We’re not taking our pantry and mixing it with another ethnicity. How did you start in the restaurant business? When I was 18, I got a job as a dishwasher for a catering company. From there, I went to work at a sushi bar in Hollywood called Emperor Sushi. After that restaurant went out of business, as most restaurants in L.A. do, I got a job at BLD working under Neal Fraser. At that point I was also playing music. I dropped out of school when I was 15 to live on the road as a drummer. I got the job dishwashing because I loved food and I knew that was what I wanted to do, but I also really enjoyed doing music. In between tours, instead of going to work at Starbucks or Jamba Juice, I wanted to go work in the kitchen. I tried to get a job as a cook, but I had no experience. How did you work your way up? They said I could start washing dishes, and the faster I washed, the faster I could start to cook. I worked my way up until finally I went to BLD and then I went to the Viceroy, and then I decided this is what I want to do. I quit all three of the bands I was in and fully dove into cooking. I’ve been at it for the last 13 years, and for the past six years my wife and I have run our own restaurant in Encino as well. Why open restaurants in the Valley? Like I said, I grew up in the Valley, and when it came time for me to take cooking seriously, I had no choice but to go over the hill. At that time, I lived on Victory and Sepulveda and if I wanted to work in a nice restaurant, it was a 45-minute drive. There was no option. I went over the hill and learned how to cook for many years. But the idea was always to go over, learn how to cook and then come back to where I grew up and open a restaurant. Growing up here, you know, it’s not that we don’t have good food, it’s that the majority of it is mom-and-pop. There was no chef-driven restaurant. It was really important to me to come back to where I’m from and say, “We don’t have to go over the hill anymore, we’re going to try to make food that I think everybody will appreciate and enjoy and we’re going to do it here.” What are the challenges of running a restaurant in L.A.? It has become even more difficult over the past three years because a lot of laws that have come into play that didn’t exist three years ago, in terms of how you’re allowed to pay people. And not just the minimum wage, but how you’re allowed to handle salary, how you’re allowed to nonexempt employees. But we’ve always had an ethos of we cannot fail, and therefore we just continued to push forward no matter what happened. What else? The second part is the talent pool isn’t what it used to be with how many restaurants have opened and the decline of the work ethic, for lack of a better term. When I started cooking, if you gave a verbal commitment to spend a year at the restaurant, you did. Because that was your word. The newer generation isn’t quite as in tune with sticking it out. The next cool place opens and they jump over there for a buck more. Why has that changed? When I was coming up, the Michelin Guide was still in L.A. It was important to me and other cooks to go work for the best. It didn’t matter about money. And since we’ve lost any sort of ranking system in Los Angeles, the young cooks now don’t have much to be motivated besides the money and how much fun they have at work. It used to be, “I got to work there, they’ve got two stars. I got to work there, they got three.” How have customer expectations changed? I would say nine or 10 years ago, you could count on one hand the tasting menu-only restaurants in Los Angeles. It really had a lot to do with the fact that L.A. started to become known as a place where you order your egg white omelet with no butter and avocado on the side. A lot of chefs felt like, forget it. If that’s all they want, I guess I’ll just make that. And then about nine years ago, a place called Test Kitchen opened in West L.A. That helped bring about the resurgence of chefs doing what they wanted and knowing that their voices would be supported. It was a restaurant that had a front-of-house staff and no back-house staff, so it that was treated sort of like a concert venue. What was the dining experience? Every night there would be a different chef and team and as a consumer, you could just go to the place three or five nights a week and have a completely different menu. I actually got to cook there and do a night as a chef. I was a sous chef at the time at Hatfield’s, and it was the first time that I got to put my food on a menu. I remember thinking, “This is going to change Los Angeles. Because now all these chefs are getting super excited about being able to cook whatever they want.” And it sold out every night. It took four or five years, but now you can cook whatever you want, which is what makes Los Angeles a top dining city. What’s an important piece of advice that you’ve received? There was a piece of advice that my first chef gave me that I’ve carried with me my entire career. He said, “Never stay anywhere more than a year. Never go anywhere that you’re not going to put a year into, but never go anywhere for more than a year. Because if you can’t learn it in a year, you’re not going to learn it.” That’s if you’re going to give it your all, your 110 percent every single day of that year, but when that year comes, go work somewhere else. Anything else? And don’t go from Italian restaurant to Italian restaurant. Go from fine dining to the breakfast. Go from breakfast to tacos, go from tacos to sushi and go from sushi to French so that you can build up a big repertoire. It’s sort of a blessing and a curse, the idea of being a jack-of-all-trades. But I think as a young cook, you want to become that. Now that I know all this, and have been exposed to all this, I’m going to take everything I like and put it in this pocket and everything I don’t agree with in this pocket, and now I’m going to start creating my own way.
