July 5, 2016 – The wildly creative Ben Spungin is returning late this month to Post Ranch Inn’s Sierra Mar restaurant as its pastry chef after stints at Bernardus Lodge and, most recently, Restaurant 1833 and its parent, Coastal Luxury Management.
At Sierra Mar, Spungin will replace fellow local pastry rockstar Yulanda Santos, who recently left to take the top sweet spot at Aubergine vacated by their talented colleague Ron Mendoza, who is opening his own ice cream shop, Revival Ice Cream, in Monterey. Read our preview of Revival Ice Cream here.
“It’s pretty epic, it’s almost surreal for me,” says Spungin, who has a deep love for Big Sur as well as the Post Ranch property and a great respect for its owners’ approach.
“The company itself s a thoughtful company. They care about the stewardship of the land. They want to show that to the guests, they want the guests experience it,” Spungin says. “That’s one thing I’m looking forward to, telling that story.”
Spungin, who now resides in Carmel Valley, spent his first 15 years in the area living in and raising his children in Big Sur.
Following a degree from the French Culinary Institute in Vermont and opportunities to cook at Durham, North Carolina’s Magnolia Grill and later, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, Spungin first held the role of pastry chef at Sierra Mar from 2000 to 2003.
There, he became known for using foraged and savory ingredients in his desserts before the practice became as common as it is today, wowing guests with desserts like ice cream infused with oak wood and bark, as well as one of his favorites, honeysuckle ice cream—a dessert the North Carolina native first made in 1999 for a family wedding for a friend who would later become his wife.
“At the Post Ranch in 2000, the menu changed every day,” Spungin recalls, and that gave him a chance to constantly experiment with ingredients inspired by his surroundings. For example, he says, “I tried to do crazy ice creams all over the place, with any and every kind of herb.”
From Post Ranch, he took some time off, helping care for his first newborn as well as working for the Big Sur Bakery, before joining the renonwed chef Cal Staminov at Bernardus Lodge in 2005 and Coastal Luxury Management in 2013.
Over time, Spungin has become know for his inventive environmental pieces like his chocolate terrariums and chocolate gardens, and novel candy collections, such as his “illicit sweets” (chocolates designed to look like recreational drugs to have along with your coffee), and more recently, candies modeled after lipsticks, compacts and other makeup that he created for the 2016 iteration of Pebble Beach Food & Wine.
“I think I passed a makeup store and all the colors and all the velvety textures in the photographs kind of looked like food,” Spungin said, noting that he’s always thinking about how his surroundings relate to what he does as a pastry chef.
At CLM, Spungin probably became best known for the desserts he created at the group’s local property, Restaurant 1833. But he also had the chance to spread his wings, helping hire and train pastry chefs and develop menus for the group’s other restaurants, Faith & Flower in Los Angeles and Rose. Rabbit. Lie. in Las Vegas.
The Sierra Mar Spungin is returning to is a fairly different place from the one he left in 2003, but for the better he says, as the restaurant, previously leased out, is now being run by the hotel itself, allowing for greater collaboration between the kitchen and the rest of the property. The gardens were expanded under previous executive chef John Cox and current gardener, Anton Tymoshenko. (Cox recently left Sierra Mar to take a sabbatical from the kitchen and pursue new projects, such as becoming a consulting partner in Cultura — bebida y comida in Carmel, and Elizabeth Murray, his former chef de cuisine, has taken over as executive chef.)
“It will be great to have a garden, great to have the energy of that property,” Spungin says.
For more on Spungin, Santos and Mendoza, see Edible Monterey Bay’s story on our local pastry chefs, A Passion for Pastry.
For a recipe for Spungin’s honeysuckle ice cream, go to: https://ediblemontereybay.com/recipes/honeysuckle-ice-cream/
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.
