The Tasting House team makes a pointed move into award territory with the opening of their latest restaurant, Vicinity, on Tuesday, February 3. Led by chef Julian Silvera, this new venture is the culmination of the success of the Los Gatos restaurant’s tasting menu led by Silvera since 2023. Those dinners first launched with a five-course menu, before exploding into 13 courses. Now with Vicinity, Silvera says, “We wanted to expand on that and have it be a full vision.”
Silvera’s menu at Vicinity is personal. Before landing at Tasting House, he launched his career in New York City, working at Alder under Wylie Dufresne and Jon Bignelli, Jones Wood Foundry, Morimoto, and Luthun, before helping the team at Orlando, Florida’s Knife & Spoon land a Michelin star in 2022. Vicinity pairs all of Silvera’s experience with California’s local produce for a cuisine agnostic menu. Dishes speak to the chef’s history and ethos, he says. “When I built this tasting menu, it was very much ‘California through the lens of somebody from New York,’” he says. Born and raised in the Empire State, Silvera says visiting more naturalistic spaces changed his perspective. “When I came to California, it was really inspiring because there’s so much stuff to see here, and so I wanted to portray a lot of the stuff here with basically the techniques that I learned in New York… and then trying to figure out ways to present it from my view, which is not so traditional in California cuisine.”
Befitting the 30-plus farms that both Tasting House and Vicinity work with, the menu will shift with the seasons. But to get a sense of just how the dishes lean into Silvera’s history, take for instance the NYC Delicatessen, a beef tendon puff that Silvera plans to bring to Vicinity. Growing up in a Jewish American household in New York, Silvera says he ate “a lot” of pastrami on rye sandwiches. Wanting to put something on the tasting menu that reminds him of home, the beef tendon puff is dusted in caraway salt and served with an emulsion of pastrami with beef garam made by the team. The pastrami is also dehydrated and microplaned on top to create a meat floss, then the dish is finished with caraway pickles. It’s a play on the pastrami and rye from the iconic Katz’s Deli, and if that doesn’t already drive home the ties to Silvera, the plateware will: The serving plate is a replica of Silvera’s old neighborhood, taken from a 3D scan of the streets and buildings, then 3D printed as a dish.
NYC Delicatessen Jesse Cudworth
Tomales Bay Bloom, a skate dish with an ogo beurre blanc, fermented gooseberries, and caviar Jesse Cudworth
Silvera speaks to his cooking in terms of life experiences, rather than a specific cuisine, calling his background “ambiguous in a lot of ways.” His food skews global for a reason. “I know what I am, but I don’t have a specific culture to latch onto: I’m Irish, Italian Portuguese, Guyanese, Jamaican, and British, but the style of food has always been a sense of home in a lot of ways because my mentors have always cooked very eclectically based on influence and where they’ve lived,” Silvera says. “And I’ve always gathered inspiration [from] experiences rather than cuisine and I think that’s really important for me.”
Secondarily, nature plays another big part, with many of the dishes based on specific areas Silvera visits with the team. “If somebody comes from around the world or comes from New York and they want to experience what Northern California’s like, we should be able to cook like that here and people should be able to experience what that means,” he says.
A dish dubbed Pillar Point is an homage to a foraging trip to that same location where Silvera collected mussels, goose barnacles, and invasive species like purple sea urchins. Silvera’s resulting dish uses those purple sea urchins and pairs it with avocado-bergamot puree, squid from Half Moon Bay, and snail roe with papadam and a “sand” made with ice cream cones and baby anchovies. Silvera also went with the food runners to Pacifica for fishing, and the chef took inspiration from the trip for his dish and its name. Having used hot dogs and squid as bait for Dungeness crabs, Silvera says the team decided to make an XO sauce out of dehydrated squid from Half Moon Bay and Chinese sausage, mixed with local Dungeness crab. House tortillas made with red corn form the base of the bite, with the tostada carved into the shape of a crab, and — thanks to some inspiring beers consumed on the trip — a yuzu kosho IPA foam to finish. “I really love building the experiences around the team and what we do,” Silvera says, “because then when they go out … and they talk about [the dishes], it’s not only personal to me, but it’s personal to them.”
Pacifica Jesse Cudworth
Pillar Point Jesse Cudworth
With the tasting menu there will be two wine pairings offered, a locally focused program, and one that’s globally influenced, along with a Champagne pairing. For the Vicinity restaurant space itself, Tasting House took over the adjacent hair salon, demolishing the building and rebuilding it with a different design and atmosphere. Vicinity remains tied to Tasting House, with diners entering the new restaurant space through Tasting House, Silvera shares, with a side door that requires a code given at the time of booking reservations. Silvera’s favorite styles of interior design include organic modern and Brutalism, but there’s still room for some art moments, such as a taxidermied pheasant from artist Alicia Good and ceramics from Phoebe Deutsch.
Silvera has embraced his time in California, and he’s putting that into his menus, as a firm believer that one should always be cooking ingredients from the area that one’s in. “Representing this area and showcasing what we know by our knowledge and experience and the nature that’s here, and showcasing that to the guests, is a really important duty of ours to support the local farmers, for one, but then also two, being able to represent the area through our lens — and that should be able to be universal no matter where you go.”
Vicinity (368 Village Lane, Los Gatos) opens on Tuesday, February 3.
Correction: January 20, 2026, 2:35 p.m. This article was corrected to show that Silvera also identifies as Guyanese.
Jesse Cudworth