March 22, 2016 – Get ready for one of the biggest area restaurant openings of the year: Locally loved Bill Lee’s new restaurant, Billy Quon’s Sur, starts serving dinner to the public tonight.
The restaurant’s name is a reference to Big Sur, but Lee has taken his theme and made it more accessible and informal than present-day diners are used to getting in Big Sur itself.
Not only is Lee’s 10th restaurant conveniently located at the Barnyard Shopping Village—in the exact spot where Lee opened Bixby Martini Bar nine years ago—the food, prices and atmosphere are on the casual side of many of Big Sur’s own restaurants.
“We love the flexibility of the seating” Lee, a consummate host, said at a special preview on Monday night for more than 180 Barnyard merchants and other guests of Lee and his wife, Teresa. If surprise friends arrive, for example, he said, the restaurant will be there to accommodate with its capacity of 130 seats spread among comfy banquettes and clutches of couches as well as more standard tables and a spacious bar.
With the help of longtime collaborator Rudy Reate, Lee transformed the space that was most recently Namu Asian Cusine in two short months. The relaxed mood is set with a muted palette of terra cotta, indigo and gray, and the Big Sur feel comes across in the reclaimed wood, tree branches, sepia photographs and Big Sur landscapes by Big Sur native Chelsea Belle Davey that decorate the restaurant throughout.
Pulling it all together is a black and white historic photograph of the working barns that now make up the Barnyard, but were once a more rustic gateway to Big Sur.
Sur’s biggest draw, however, is the food, and on Monday night, Lee and another longtime collaborator, chef Herman Hernandez, and their crew were firing on all cylinders.
There were no opening-night glitches—these guys are pros. So the sand dabs, fish tacos and the fried chicken, that comes with waffles, were all delectably moist and tender on the inside and robed in crisp, non-greasy crusts.
A server said the fried chicken and waffles, made with famed Mary’s Chicken, were one of the evening’s big favorites, but at our table, it was the baby back ribs, coated with a well-balanced and spicy barbeque sauce.
Lee himself expects the jumbo tempura prawns and the B&B, an appetizer of glazed, thick applewood-smoked bacon served with Sur’s signature cheese bread and a special garlic spread, to be among the new restaurant’s hits.
“Every table that comes is going to have it,” he said, referring to the B&B.
Guests looking for vegetarian options and organic ingredients will find plenty, as will devotees craving popular standards from Lee’s past restaurants, like the spicy Szechuan green beans.
We didn’t get to try the intriguing “Sur’s Famous Flaming champagne,” but we did try the Sur-ita, a tangy grapefruit Margarita, and took note of the nice representation of local wines, several of them sparkling, on the wine list. Bottled and draft beer options are also on the menu.
For dessert, we sampled the Smor’s Mud Pie, a frozen taken on the iconic campfire treat—just one of a number of delectable-looking choices on the dessert menu.
Sur will be open to public for dinner all this week. It will close for Easter and reopen the next day, serving lunch and dinner seven days a week.
Click here for more photos of the preview event.
Billy Quon’s Sur at the Barnyard • 3601 The Barnyard, Suite A21 • 831.250.7188 • www.surcarmel.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.
