May 30, 2017 – Lots of changes are in the works at Il Grillo restaurant in Carmel as new executive chef Quinn Thompson’s cooking style begins to show itself in the food, differentiating the restaurant from its elder sibling—the popular La Balena—and as he prepares to present new menus and start serving breakfast in July.
“It’s time for it to have its own identity,” says Anna Bartolini owner of Il Grillo, which she and her husband Emanuele opened two years ago as a smaller, more casual version of La Balena, offering its own distinct dining experience. “We are so excited!”
Until now, Il Grillo has been supervised by La Balena’s executive chef, first Brad Briske, and since last year Adelfo Barragan.
The Bartolinis have been thrilled with Barragan’s job taking over La Balena following Briske’s departure last year, and now their plan is to allow him to focus on La Balena, which will continue to offer traditional Tuscan cuisine.
Il Grillo, by contrast, will be “the California playground” where Thompson will have the opportunity to follow his creativity, Bartolini says.
New menus for Il Grillo aren’t expected to debut until the week of July 4th, but from the start Thompson, who most recently was sous chef at Post Ranch Inn’s Sierra Mar, says he’s been using his own recipes for his sauces, pastas and other dishes. He’s also been hard at work fermenting, dehydrating and pickling the ingredients he’ll need for the new from-scratch menu items that he’ll be cooking. He’s even making fresh cheeses and eventually will be curing charcuterie.
Gradually, he’s been trying out some of the new dishes on guests. Those he shared with this one last week were gorgeous in composition and complex in their layers of flavor—characteristics that aren’t surprisingly for a chef who worked for former Sierra Mar executive chef John Cox for six years—first at La Bicyclette in Carmel and then at Sierra Mar.
A pickle of ramps, radishes and artichokes that was used, along with fresh bay leaves to infuse a champagne vinegar, for example, was savory-sweet and ornately arranged with radish and fennel flowers.
An equally beautiful ravioli made with pureed Serendipity Farms fava beans and bathed in a sauce made from fresh tomatoes and topped with an herbaceous and spicy garnish of yerba buena leaves and nasturtium oil kept true to the light, fresh spirit of the fava beans. In contrast, a slow-cooked wagyu beef ragout sprinkled with nasturtium flowers and served over gnocchi was intensely rich, but impossible not to finish.
One of Thompson’s first projects has been to start an artisanal bread program, and thus far he’s making a variety of breads including a ramp semolina loaf together with La Balena and Il Grillo pastry chef Emily Chinaglia. Eventually, he’s eager to experiment with new grains and local wild yeasts.
Thompson, who lives in Monterey and whose family on his mother’s side were the Plasketts of the eponymous Plaskett Creek who came to Big Sur in the mid-1800s to mine gold, is inspired foremost by his ingredients. As a result, he plans to build his dishes around the best ingredients from the region that he and the Bartolinis can find.
But instead of the mix and match choice of pastas and sauces of the longtime Il Grillo menu, the new menu will likely have more composed dishes that Thompson creates to best compliment the ingredients that the restaurant procures. And in keeping with the original concept of Il Grillo (cricket in Italian) as a casual place, there will likely also be lots of sharable small plates.
And for breakfast, the intention is to start simply, with housemade jams and housemade butter to go with the breads and pastries baked on the premises, along with frittatas, omelets, and, of course, coffee that can be enjoyed on the restaurant’s patio as well as inside.
“I just want it to be the best that we can be,” Thompson says.
Il Grillo • Mission Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues
831.238.9608 • www.ilgrillocarmel.com
About the author
SARAH WOOD—founding editor and publisher of Edible Monterey Bay—has had a life-long passion for food, cooking, people and our planet.
She planted her first organic garden and cared for her first chicken when she was in elementary school in a farming region of Upstate New York.
Wood spent the early part of her career based in Ottawa, Canada, working in international development and international education. After considering culinary school, she opted to pursue her loves for writing, learning about the world and helping make it a better place by obtaining a fellowship and an MA in Journalism from New York University.
While working for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, she wrote stories that helped farmers fend off development and won a state-wide public service award from the New Jersey Press Association for an investigative series of articles about a slumlord who had hoodwinked ratings agencies and investment banks into propping him up with some early commercial mortgage securitizations. The series led Wood to spend several years in financial journalism, most recently, as editor-in-chief of the leading magazine covering the U.S. hedge-fund industry.
Wood now lives with her family in Washington, DC, where she is a freelance writer and manages communications for Samaritan Ministry, an antipoverty and antiracist nonprofit that provides struggling Greater Washington residents with highly personalized and compassionate life counseling and coaching.
