Harbor House

Growing up on the New Jersey Shore, Kammerer spent time on the beach every day, and was used to eating wild seafood, from raw clams and oysters to steamers and sushi. His first memory of preparing food is helping his father cook lobsters in beer.

After a few months working in a restaurant, he decided to pursue a career in cooking, and enrolled at the Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island to study culinary arts. After graduating, he worked in restaurants in Boston and Australia before gaining valuable experience at the three-Michelin-starred RyuGin in Tokyo and another Michelin-starred restaurant in Belgium, the now defunct In de Wulf. He returned to the US to work at the then three-Michelin-starred Saison in San Francisco, where he rose to the rank of Executive Sous Chef. After three years there, he was ready to create his own restaurant, the Harbor House Inn, up the Californian coast in Mendocino County.

Kammerer won the Food & Wine Best New Chef award in 2019 and was a James Beard Awards Semi-Finalist in 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023. In 2023, he was chosen by his peers for inclusion in the Robb Report’s list of the 50 Most Powerful People in American Fine Dining.

Restaurant

The Harbor House Inn is located 150 miles north of San Francisco in the remote town of Elk on California's Mendocino Coast. Originally built as a logger’s retreat, the building served various roles before closing for refurbishment in 2013. Kammerer and his team—including his partner Amanda Nemec—moved in at the start of 2018, spending four months landscaping the garden and refining the interior, before re-opening it as the fine-dining destination it is today. In addition to the 20-seat restaurant with its sweeping ocean views, the Inn boasts 10 guest rooms, extensive gardens, and its own private cove, not forgetting the nearby farm where much of the produce Kammerer uses is grown. The farm’s output is complemented by local seafood and vegetables, animals raised sustainably by local farmers, and other ingredients foraged from nearby forests and along the shore.

The Harbor House inn picked up its first star in the Michelin Guide for California in 2019, a year after opening, and earned a second in 2021. In 2020, it became one of the first restaurants in California to receive a Michelin green star, in recognition of its dedication to sustainable gastronomy.

Recipes and dishes

The eight-to-12-course tasting menu Kammerer serves at the Harbor House Inn is created using sustainably sourced local ingredients from Mendocino County’s rugged coastline and inland forests, many of them gathered personally by Kammerer and other members of his team. The menu changes daily but is always built around local seafood and vegetables, from fresh sea cucumber and abalone to wild ginger, horseradish, and espelette peppers. Kammerer even makes his own salt by collecting sea water in buckets from below the Inn and evaporating it slowly until large salt crystals emerge.

All his dishes are cooked simply using fire, steam, and smoke, with familiar ingredients often prepared and presented in original ways. A good example is the albacore tuna, which is aged for four to five days in a cedar box, then smoked over dried calendula flowers and served with salted plums from the Inn’s own garden.

One signature dish that is a near-constant on the menu is maitake mushroom tempura with a lace lichen broth, made with locally foraged ingredients. Lace lichen only grows in places where the air quality is exceptionally high, and was discovered by Kammerer during the Covid pandemic, a period when he used his spare time to expand his knowledge of local plants.