Chef Residencies Continue to Shift the Lens

On a relentlessly sunny July day in California’s wine country, my car wound its way around undulating hills, neatly covered in endless rows of grape vines. Arriving at J Vineyards and Winery, my sister and I are ushered out of the dry heat and past a foyer lined with shrines to the projects of J Winery’s chef residents, such as a display of Jenny Dorsey’s ceramics that support her non-profit, Studio ATAO (which stands for All Together At Once and is on a mission to make social justice in hospitality relevant and actionable). We’re led into a hushed bubble room, decorated in burnished silver leather, silver velvet, and blown glass chandeliers that resemble cascades of enormous bubbles.

Then, a succession of perfect dishes, befitting the luxurious space. A duck-fat-brushed and torched kusshi oyster. I somewhat surreptitiously bring the bowl to my lips to slurp every remaining drop of corn juice the oyster languished in. It’s one of the best bites of food I’ve had in recent memory. There’s a chicken poached in water infused with smoke. A pinot gris with bright green notes is paired with a corzetti dish with bright green pea shoots and marinated crab that make the pinot gris seem even greener.

Dorsey’s dishes are intensely thoughtful and taking the time to consider the wide-ranging sources of each makes one realise how she strings seemingly unrelated chords into a cohesive melody. “I’m a sheeted pasta kind of gal, and corzetti has always been one of my favourite shapes,” she says. “It hails from Liguria in Northern Italy and has a grooved exterior that’s perfect for capturing sauce. This sauce is based in two important flavours – cai zi you is roasted rapeseed oil that is difficult to source stateside, but offers some of the je ne sais pas of Chinese cooking with its complex nuttiness. Pea tips are the absolute best vegetable in the world in my eyes, the reason I never complained about eating vegetables as a child. Put together with fennel, they form a lovely trio that feels both familiar and new. Similarly, the marinated crab in a scallion, ginger, and garlic sauce is built from the version typically served with Hainanese chicken but mingled with some grains of paradise (a spice in the ginger family that’s also related to cardamom, hailing from West Africa – it’s another common one in my kitchen) to take it a very different direction.”

_{Corzetti, photo by Kiki Aranita}

Zongzi is wrapped in bamboo leaf and comprises rice, beef tongue, and Chinese wood ear mushrooms. Okra stands up like small stout soldiers next to the zongzi. “This is like a tamal,” the server tells me. I laugh – zongzi are more familiar to me than tamales, and the composition is interactive and fun, the penultimate dish on a thoughtful menu that balances flavours inherent to ingredients extraordinarily well. The bitterness of radicchio here is matched with a savoury beef jus there. After I dip the okra soldiers in the beef jus, I drink the rest like a shot. As a diner, I feel like there are no rules.

It’s an exciting project to witness and I could feel the energy emanating off the chefs as they occasionally dashed around the dining room, greeting guests. The team also spent long hours pairing and re-pairing Dorsey’s dishes with J Winery’s wines, laying out their entire portfolio.

The pandemic-born chef residency is evolving. Residencies continue to emerge around the U.S., as collaborations garner excitement among resident staff and regular customers. Residencies – I hesitate to call them a trend, but they are trending. In their temporary nature, they invite new ideas, simultaneously minimising risk, such as the overhead in starting a new concept, and opening entities up to risk. Right now, residencies are opening establishments to more diverse voices and cooking styles, hosting chefs who wouldn’t normally cook there, or serving an audience that doesn’t normally come.

^{Zongzi, photo by Kiki Aranita}

Collaborations shake things up, they keep things interesting. Being an itinerant chef can be a fascinating way to explore not only unfamiliar culinary terrain for both host and guest, but address necessary social change.

A year ago, I wrote about how invitations for my own chef residencies came from unexpected institutions. Kitchens opened their doors to me and other itinerant chefs (personally I was displaced by the closure of my restaurant due to the pandemic), seeking to celebrate our styles of cooking. I cooked at fine-dining restaurants in Philadelphia, served a multi-course meal at a pub in Atlanta, Georgia, concocted vegan meals that nourished thousands of meal kit subscribers around the Northeast, and set up shop inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a week.

And I finally found myself sitting at a table underneath the physically improbable bubble-shaped chandeliers of J Winery in Healdsburg, tucking into the temporary residence food of a chef far more talented than me, Jenny Dorsey.

Dorsey was the first chef in a residency series entitled Shifting the Lens, a concept by J Winery with these intentions: “We hope to facilitate purposeful conversations that will help change the industry, uncover new perspectives, and create pathways for women, gender nonconforming, Black, Latinx and other historically marginalised communities.”