The inaugural Arroyo Seco Weekend took two of our favorite summer activities—picnicking and music festivals—and combined them into one scenic Pasadena affair. The picnic-friendly fest found attendees rolling out their blankets and feasting on chef-curated picnic baskets and a mouthwatering selection of bites from the on-site pop-ups. While we were there, we caught up with some of L.A.'s top chefs for their go-to picnic ideas and picnic spots.
All photographs by Rozette Rago.
Phillip Frankland Lee
Chef Phillip Frankland Lee has brought three restaurants to an Encino shopping plaza, with an unannounced fourth on the way. It's a homecoming, of sorts, for Lee. "I'm a Valley boy, born and raised," he says. "There's a carousel in front of the plaza—I grew up riding that carousel. Scratch Bar is where the Ben & Jerry's was that I used to eat at when I was a kid. Woodley Proper is where M.Fredric was that my mom would drag me into when I was a child." Lee brought his latest, Frankland's Crab & Co., to Arroyo Seco: "Doing peel-and-eat shrimp, king crab rolls, things like that where you can eat it with your hands, it's a fast pickup. It's like, you want a sandwich? Here you go."
Picnic essentials: "If my wife and I do a picnic, we're going to bring cheese and charcuterie, and bread, usually some smoked fish, usually some caviar. A picnic, to me, is not anything besides going and eating an awesome lunch while sitting down in grass. Why diminish the quality of food you're going to have just because you're sitting in grass?"
Go-to picnic spot: "Usually it's either to the beach or on a hike somewhere. If we're out of town on vacation we'll find a cool mountain, something with a cool view. But we don't picnic very much these days: we have four restaurants and two of them are brand new."
Dakota Weiss
Lancaster native Dakota Weiss can devise some stunningly decadent dishes, perhaps most notably the Rolling Stone at Estrella, a poached egg inside of a bacon-wrapped avocado. But for Arroyo Seco Weekend, chef Weiss kept things a bit lighter with poke bowls from Sweetfin Poke—which currently has five L.A. locations, with three more due by the end of the year. "It's great for a festival like this," she says. "It's refreshing, it's not heavy, it's not going to make you feel like 'oh god, I just ate all of this food.'"
Picnic essentials: "Packing my own picnic would definitely be poke, without a doubt. But not just fish—I think also vegetable pokes are really good and bright and fresh and light. But you've got to have fruit, right? Some sort of watermelon, something fun like that. Cold, cold beer. And definitely some rosé."
Go-to spot: "When I go to the Hollywood Bowl—that's my most exciting picnic ever. I pack it with the most insane fun stuff. I'll do steak lettuce wraps. Otherwise, Malibu, I think. I try to pick stuff that won't get infused with sand. I took my mom and my dad and a friend of mine last year and I just kept pulling stuff out of the bag. The people next to us were like, 'When's it going to stop? How much food did she bring?'"
Jason Neroni
Before Jason Neroni strung together a bicoastal culinary pedigree, he found himself stepping into the world of culinary arts inside the kitchen of Disneyland's private speakeasy, Club 33. "One day I got a chance to get a tour of it, and it's a beautiful ornate restaurant with with classical French cuisine," he says. "I saw the ability of what you can do with food when serving masses, so I petitioned to work there." A couple of decades later, and following a 15-year stint in New York, chef Neroni has found himself in the kitchen in Venice, formerly at Superba at now at the helm of the long-running Rose Café. "I figure if I'm going to live in L.A., I'm going to live by the beach. Venice is beautiful and peaceful but there's a lot going on—and I like to be able to walk to work."
Picnic essentials: "We like to cut up salami, cheese and fresh fruit and usually a bottle of rosé champagne."
Neal Fraser
At Arroyo Seco Weekend, chef Neal Fraser was behind both curated picnic baskets from his signature restaurant, Redbird, as well top-notch fried chicken sandwiches from the booth at Fritzi Coop. Though the two restaurants' brick-and-mortar locations may look wildly different, Fraser approaches both outposts with the same eye on quality. "That's kind of the whole idea with Fritzi Coop: it's great ingredients just simply prepared," he says. "Redbird is the same ingredients, but more complicatedly prepared. Chicken is chicken—we use the same chicken." As for festival-specific culinary ambitions, well, let's just say Fraser has some ideas kicking around. "I've had this crazy idea that I've never been able to execute for Burning Man of doing a super fine-dining restaurant with a Bonnet stove, Bernardaud china, Riedel crystal and all of the servers are naked but they're serving these really crazy amazing meals. But I've never been able to have anybody sign off on it yet. That would be my ultimate picnic food: fine dining in a dust bowl."
Picnic essentials: "A bottle of bourbon, ice, cups: those are my picnic necessities. But I like to eat stuff that lasts well in the car. That's kind of why we did cold fried chicken—something you often eat the day after that still tastes good. The farro salad that I've been making on and off for almost my whole career, so something that's hearty and fresh and will last long in the trunk of your car for a while."
Go-to spot: "The Bến Thành Market in Saigon, I like to eat there outdoors. I like to eat at, uh—I don't know, I don't picnic. I'm more—working in the restaurant all day, I like people to wait on me hand and foot. [laughs] So if there was picnicking that involved somebody carrying stuff for me 50 miles on their back and then serving it to me, that's where I want to go."
Andrew Gruel
Andrew Gruel started serving sustainable seafood out of a food truck in 2011. Since then, the Orange County chef's Slapfish brand has grown from a mobile grub stop to a half dozen brick-and-mortar locations in Southern California, with a handful of international expansions on the horizon. But working the booth at Arroyo Seco brought Gruel right back to his food truck days. "I'm still hands-on with all this stuff, but we were cooking and I was like, 'This is literally like being back in the food truck,'" he says. "It's the exact same feeling."
Picnic essentials: "I start with the drinks: white wine for a picnic and Coors Light—the appetizer would be the Coors Light. No, best picnic for me? Honestly, as much as it's a cliché, it's just dried sausages, dried meats, cheese, fruit. I don't really give it to much thought, it's just always whatever ends up in my tupperware."
Go-to spot: "I live in Huntington Beach and there are great spots there. But actually a really cool picnic spot is down in Orange County, right above Pelican Hill golf course is a park at the top of the hill and it overlooks the ocean, but you can also see Saddleback Mountain and it's this huge open green park. There's never anybody there, there's tons of parking around it and really manicured grass, so if you want the classic, cliche grass picnic and roll it out, it's there."
Bruce Kalman
If you've visited Pasadena's Union or Grand Central Market's Knead & Co., then chef Bruce Kalman's menu at Arroyo Seco Weekend probably comes as no surprise: some damned good meat and carbs. Kalman's duo of Italian sandwiches at the fest came from looking at his menus and "tailoring it to more fit this environment, this vibe, with doing a couple of sandwiches, which is not something we normally serve [at Union]," he says. "It's the same idea: serving our porchetta into a sandwich." The porchetta is one of his signature dishes at Union; it's often off the menu only a couple of hours into dinner service. "I want everything to be fresh. I don't cook a whole roast and hope to sell the whole thing by the end of the day. We cook it like five portions at a time."
Picnic essentials: "Some good fruit, vegetables, a little charcuterie and some bread. And some booze. You know, a good bottle of wine or some beer."
Go-to spots: "I haven't picnicked much here, but when I used to live in Chicago we would go up to Ravinia, which is a big music venue and a bunch of us would take the train up there and do a whole setup."
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