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As restaurants close—some temporarily, some permanently—chefs and bakers are taking their talents to private homes, ghost kitchens and street stands, meaning Los Angeles is seeing a renaissance of pop-ups and limited-run specials while some of the city’s top talent finds new ways to cook and serve food. And in Highland Park, one of the best of these new items can be found with a sustainable bent.
Primed for summer heat and brimming with flavor and color, Jonathen Liu’s chirashi bowls are a blend of consciously-sourced seafood and a range of cooking techniques, a Taiwanese- and Japanese-inspired meal offered only twice a week and one that’s been selling out within two hours.
The bowls mark a pivot for the chef and restaurant consultant, whose Tiger & the Horse pre-pandemic dinner series skewed more toward Taiwanese-inspired fine dining, albeit with a relaxed and punk-rock ethos. Now, Liu’s embracing ultra-casual dining during the flux of coronavirus and spinning Tiger & the Horse to something a bit more affordable than his $70-and-up dinners—but something no less inspired.
Each Saturday at noon the Tiger & the Horse website opens up chirashi reservations for bowls that can be picked up the following Friday or Saturday and come brimming with tempura okra, fresh uni, a fermented kelp with ikura, sheaths of kombu-cured Ora King salmon or ocean trout, half of a finger lime for citrusy pop, and a slightly sweet and incredibly craveable house soy blend all served over California-grown koshihikari rice at around $35 a pop.
Nearly everything in the bowl is sourced locally, whether it’s from the nearby South Pasadena Farmers’ Market or as far as Santa Barbara, with a focus on farm-raised salmon and ocean trout.
“The goal of Tiger & the Horse has always been sustainable-fish only,” Liu says. “The work itself is a lot, but I love making food accessible, particularly when people are worried about, ‘Are we going to be able to pay rent?’”
“Farmed fishing is getting more and more respect as an alternative to trawl catching,” he says, and he’s right: Advancements in technology, coupled with more regulation than in decades past and a growing global interest in marine aquaculture, have made for a boom in farmed, sustainably harvested seafood. While many chefs still swear by line-caught and trawled fish, others, including Liu, are embracing the farmed variety for both its sustainability and lower cost.
“There’s a stigma and I think that stigma exists like how when we were kids we were told eggs are awful for you, but now that we’re older and more dystopian, it’s like ‘Oh this was just Big Agriculture fucking with us,’” Liu says. “But [King Ora] is an award-winning salmon—and it’s an actual company as well—so being able to support that farmer is important.”
Sea urchin is by nature hand-caught and tied directly to farmers; Liu prefers to source his uni from Santa Barbara’s Sea Stephanie Fish, a trailblazer in sustainable uni harvesting, but if for any reason it’s unavailable he’ll opt for uni from the coast of Mexico 400 miles south as opposed to importing from Japan and adding even more plane mileage to his eco-minded bowls. The mercurial nature of uni diving, based on aspects such as weather conditions and recent harvesting in the area, can make a week’s sourcing a challenge for Liu but he’s not phased.
“I think that’s a pretty cool thing,” Liu says. “It’s a reminder that this is something that requires actual work; it’s not just someone dropping a box down like a claw machine. It’s very meticulous.”
The uni, regardless of provenance, is served raw and whole; whichever fish he sources for the weekend gets filleted and processed, at which point he cures it by wrapping it in kombu for around 24 hours. Once it’s ready, Liu slices it at a harsh nearly–35-degree angle—a variance from a typical sliced-straight-down-on-the-block chirashi cut—which he credits for giving his fish a silken, almost butter-like mouthfeel.
He portions morsels of the precious salmon or trout belly, just a few bites per bowl, and brushes them with miso for a bit of sweet umami before grilling them and adding a fire-cooked component to the box. Okra, dredged in a secret starch before its dip in tempura batter and the fryer, makes for an especially crunchy bite.
The starch is more than just the secret to the okra; it’s Liu’s heritage subtly peppered throughout what might be misunderstood as a Japanese-only dish. “There’s Taiwanese influence people might not recognize right off the bat,” Liu says. “The cooking methods are more Taiwanese because of the starches used, and a lot of people don’t realize that Japan colonized Taiwan for like 50 years. There’s a lot of Japanese influence on Taiwanese culture in general.”
In the future, Liu says, he might like to experiment with a more traditionally Taiwanese bento, as well as supplemental fish cuts for his chirashi. He also offers sushi omakase upon private request and with advance notice.
Long term, the Kitchen Mouse and Estela vet says he’d like a restaurant of his own for Tiger & the Horse, or at least the ability to get back to the rush of a busy restaurant and a pre-pandemic kitchen.
“I would eventually love to go back into dinner service,” Liu says. “For those who don’t know, being in a kitchen and leading it, and that chaos—there are definitely some people who don’t like it, but then there are the crazy people like myself, where there’s 20 tickets up on the board, things are going the wrong places and then all of a sudden you get this moment of zen. And it’s this sense of community and seeing people eat and be happy: I think so many people right now have realized how much it sucks not to see your friends, and food is the ultimate community-based get together. I want to be able to do that again.”
Tiger & the Horse usually releases chirashi reservations online every Saturday at noon for pickup the following Friday and Saturday. Ticket sales and dates can vary, so follow along on Instagram for weekly updates.