{"id":142719,"date":"2026-01-21T06:08:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T06:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/142719\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T06:08:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T06:08:18","slug":"new-los-gatos-restaurant-vicinity-reimagines-a-surfside-day-of-seafood-foraging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/142719\/","title":{"rendered":"New Los Gatos Restaurant Vicinity Reimagines a Surfside Day of Seafood Foraging"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Tasting House<\/a> team makes a pointed move into award territory with the opening of their latest restaurant, Vicinity<\/a>, on Tuesday, February 3. Led by chef Julian Silvera, this new venture is the culmination of the success of the Los Gatos restaurant\u2019s 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, \u201cWe wanted to expand on that and have it be a full vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silvera\u2019s menu at Vicinity is personal. Before landing at Tasting House, he launched his career in New York City, working at Alder<\/a> under Wylie Dufresne and Jon Bignelli, Jones Wood Foundry<\/a>, Morimoto, and Luthun<\/a>, before helping the team at Orlando, Florida\u2019s Knife & Spoon<\/a> land a Michelin star in 2022<\/a>. Vicinity pairs all of Silvera\u2019s experience with California\u2019s local produce for a cuisine agnostic menu. Dishes speak to the chef\u2019s history and ethos, he says. \u201cWhen I built this tasting menu, it was very much \u2018California through the lens of somebody from New York,\u2019\u201d he says. Born and raised in the Empire State, Silvera says visiting more naturalistic spaces changed his perspective. \u201cWhen I came to California, it was really inspiring because there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201ca lot\u201d 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\u2019s a play on the pastrami and rye from the iconic Katz\u2019s Deli<\/a>, and if that doesn\u2019t already drive home the ties to Silvera, the plateware will: The serving plate is a replica of Silvera\u2019s old neighborhood, taken from a 3D scan of the streets and buildings, then 3D printed as a dish.<\/p>\n

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NYC Delicatessen Jesse Cudworth<\/p>\n

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Tomales Bay Bloom, a skate dish with an ogo beurre blanc, fermented gooseberries, and caviar Jesse Cudworth<\/p>\n

Silvera speaks to his cooking in terms of life experiences, rather than a specific cuisine, calling his background \u201cambiguous in a lot of ways.\u201d His food skews global for a reason. \u201cI know what I am, but I don\u2019t have a specific culture to latch onto: I\u2019m 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\u2019ve lived,\u201d Silvera says. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve always gathered inspiration [from] experiences rather than cuisine and I think that\u2019s really important for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secondarily, nature plays another big part, with many of the dishes based on specific areas Silvera visits with the team. \u201cIf somebody comes from around the world or comes from New York and they want to experience what Northern California\u2019s like, we should be able to cook like that here and people should be able to experience what that means,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201csand\u201d 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 \u2014 thanks to some inspiring beers consumed on the trip \u2014 a yuzu kosho IPA foam to finish. \u201cI really love building the experiences around the team and what we do,\u201d Silvera says, \u201cbecause then when they go out … and they talk about [the dishes], it\u2019s not only personal to me, but it\u2019s personal to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Pacifica Jesse Cudworth<\/p>\n

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Pillar Point Jesse Cudworth<\/p>\n

With the tasting menu there will be two wine pairings offered, a locally focused program, and one that\u2019s 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\u2019s favorite styles of interior design include organic modern and Brutalism, but there\u2019s still room for some art moments, such as a taxidermied pheasant from artist Alicia Good<\/a> and ceramics from Phoebe Deutsch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Silvera has embraced his time in California, and he\u2019s putting that into his menus, as a firm believer that one should always be cooking ingredients from the area that one\u2019s in. \u201cRepresenting this area and showcasing what we know by our knowledge and experience and the nature that\u2019s 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 \u2014 and that should be able to be universal no matter where you go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vicinity<\/a> (368 Village Lane, Los Gatos) opens on Tuesday, February 3.<\/p>\n

Correction: January 20, 2026, 2:35 p.m. This article was corrected to show that Silvera also identifies as Guyanese.<\/p>\n

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Jesse Cudworth<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tasting House team makes a pointed move into award territory with the opening of their latest restaurant,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142720,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,3176],"class_list":{"0":"post-142719","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-san-francisco-restaurant-openings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}