Restaurant Beck
If you haven’t heard about the local foods movement, you must have been living in a cave. But that’s OK, because the next big trend in food could be growing right outside your cave, on the forest floor. You’re welcome to pick some wood sorrel, forage a few mushrooms and pick a wild arugula blossom, on your way to Restaurant Beck.
Right now, Chef Justin Wills is having fun with foraged foods, making pastas with chickweed and garnishing Wagyu beef with pickled ramps.
“In the past three or four years, the local foods movement has pushed from the farms into the forest, and now those ideas are coming together. We’re getting great stuff from local farms and from local foragers,” Wills said. “In one case, the farmer is also our forager. I’m amazed by what she brings in. Some of the stuff I’ve heard of, and others I haven’t. I’m always happy to use it, to see what applications I can find.”
Right now, as the Pacific Northwest heads into its most bountiful season, 90 percent of the chef’s ingredients are coming from Oregon. Wills has forged relationships with fishing families from Newport, with farmers on the coast and in the Willamette Valley, and with all-natural Northwest beef producers.
He brings it all together in the small kitchen at Restaurant Beck, located inside the Whale Cove Inn, just south of Depoe Bay. This dinner-only restaurant, owned and operated by Chef Wills and his wife Stormee, has a menu that is as small as the view is expansive. The daily list has four to five entrees, and a few salads and appetizers, based on what’s fresh that week. More than half of the customers, however, ignore it completely and ask for the chef’s “tasting menu.” Wills creates these small, artful plates for each table, on the fly, based on the customer’s requests and his own imagination. They’re available in five-, seven-, and nine-course options, with paired wine by request.
At Restaurant Beck, they call it “chef-driven cuisine.” The restaurant’s rural location also means that this chef drives, nearly every week, to shop farmers’ markets, visit producers and discover new ingredients.
“I’m in the valley at least once a week, and I often stop by the Newport Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. I was just out at (Barking Dog Farm) today, getting a bunch of new stuff like baby fennel, pea shoots, micro arugula, purple broccoli and radishes,” Wills said. “We don’t have a set menu, and that’s by choice. It’s a good way to be a chef and a business owner, to support your local economy even while you’re doing really cool food, palate-pleasing food, aesthetically pleasing food. If that means running a few errands, that’s OK.”
Last week’s menu, for instance, included a salad of torn arugula, wild arugula blossoms and local strawberries, topped with sherry vinaigrette and bacon powder ($12). The chef praised the flowers’ “really nutty” flavor that blended well with the sweet berries and the salty bacon powder, and the white petals streaked with brown.
“It’s not just good on your palate, but it’s aesthetically very pleasing. We don’t build just by colors, but also by flavors and textures. It all tends to work out.”
His Pork Belly Confit, which is requested so often that Chef Wills tries to have it on the menu whenever he can, is served with sweet corn ice cream and smoked salt ($14). Alongside this rich treat he places pickled “sea beans”; this is the common name for a crunchy, dark green vegetable the size of a shoelace that tastes a bit like salty asparagus. The web site foodandwine.com, which recently nominated Wills for The People’s Best New Chef-Northwest, called the pork belly his “must try dish.”
The forests around Depoe Bay are full of wild oxalis, also called wood sorrel, which tastes like a tart green apple. It adds a sweet-sour note to Chef Wills’ smoked Moulard Duck, which is served with a chimichurri made from young garlic scapes and crispy puffed Dauphine potatoes ($29). The fiddlehead red deer fern, still tight in its spiral, decorates a plate of ling cod in brown butter, preserved lemon farro and basil froth ($27).
“There are two types of these ferns that you can eat. We like this type because it’s a little more sweet, and obviously the color is pretty cool. You toss with butter and salt and they’re ready to go. Simple.”
The couple opened Restaurant Beck, named after their young son Becker, in the summer of 2009. It’s already made a name among gourmand travelers, with top marks in Frommers Oregon and Food & Wine Magazine, as well as newspapers statewide. Earlier this year, Chef Wills was nominated for Food & Wine’s The People’s Best New Chef, in the Northwest region. In the coming months, you may see Wills on Starchefs.com – a writer and photography crew paid a visit to the restaurant last week.
Wills grew up in Iowa and earned his degree from the Culinary Institute of America, then honed his art at restaurants like Toscana in Dallas, Oba! in Portland, The Pelican Pub & Brewery in Pacific City and The Bay House in Lincoln City. Nothing he learned in those kitchens, though, prepared him for this culinary foray into wild foods. He uses reference books, Internet searches and the foragers’ knowledge to unlock each stem’s potential.
“It’s trial and error. I’ve never worked in a restaurant that used wild foods, or had any experience in it, really. It helps to be a food geek, really,” he said. “Things can become monotonous, as far as ingredients go. You can serve them different ways, but at the end of the day a butternut squash is still a butternut squash. So wild foods are very exciting.”
Restaurant Beck is located inside the Whale Cove Inn, 2345 SW Hwy. 101, just south of Depoe Bay. They serve dinner starting at 5 p.m. daily. Reservations are recommended, especially if you have dietary restrictions. To learn more, log on to restaurantbeck.com, become Facebook fan, follow Chef Justin on Twitter @RestaurantBeck, or, call 541-765-3220.
Right now, Chef Justin Wills is having fun with foraged foods, making pastas with chickweed and garnishing Wagyu beef with pickled ramps.
“In the past three or four years, the local foods movement has pushed from the farms into the forest, and now those ideas are coming together. We’re getting great stuff from local farms and from local foragers,” Wills said. “In one case, the farmer is also our forager. I’m amazed by what she brings in. Some of the stuff I’ve heard of, and others I haven’t. I’m always happy to use it, to see what applications I can find.”
Right now, as the Pacific Northwest heads into its most bountiful season, 90 percent of the chef’s ingredients are coming from Oregon. Wills has forged relationships with fishing families from Newport, with farmers on the coast and in the Willamette Valley, and with all-natural Northwest beef producers.
He brings it all together in the small kitchen at Restaurant Beck, located inside the Whale Cove Inn, just south of Depoe Bay. This dinner-only restaurant, owned and operated by Chef Wills and his wife Stormee, has a menu that is as small as the view is expansive. The daily list has four to five entrees, and a few salads and appetizers, based on what’s fresh that week. More than half of the customers, however, ignore it completely and ask for the chef’s “tasting menu.” Wills creates these small, artful plates for each table, on the fly, based on the customer’s requests and his own imagination. They’re available in five-, seven-, and nine-course options, with paired wine by request.
At Restaurant Beck, they call it “chef-driven cuisine.” The restaurant’s rural location also means that this chef drives, nearly every week, to shop farmers’ markets, visit producers and discover new ingredients.
“I’m in the valley at least once a week, and I often stop by the Newport Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. I was just out at (Barking Dog Farm) today, getting a bunch of new stuff like baby fennel, pea shoots, micro arugula, purple broccoli and radishes,” Wills said. “We don’t have a set menu, and that’s by choice. It’s a good way to be a chef and a business owner, to support your local economy even while you’re doing really cool food, palate-pleasing food, aesthetically pleasing food. If that means running a few errands, that’s OK.”
Last week’s menu, for instance, included a salad of torn arugula, wild arugula blossoms and local strawberries, topped with sherry vinaigrette and bacon powder ($12). The chef praised the flowers’ “really nutty” flavor that blended well with the sweet berries and the salty bacon powder, and the white petals streaked with brown.
“It’s not just good on your palate, but it’s aesthetically very pleasing. We don’t build just by colors, but also by flavors and textures. It all tends to work out.”
His Pork Belly Confit, which is requested so often that Chef Wills tries to have it on the menu whenever he can, is served with sweet corn ice cream and smoked salt ($14). Alongside this rich treat he places pickled “sea beans”; this is the common name for a crunchy, dark green vegetable the size of a shoelace that tastes a bit like salty asparagus. The web site foodandwine.com, which recently nominated Wills for The People’s Best New Chef-Northwest, called the pork belly his “must try dish.”
The forests around Depoe Bay are full of wild oxalis, also called wood sorrel, which tastes like a tart green apple. It adds a sweet-sour note to Chef Wills’ smoked Moulard Duck, which is served with a chimichurri made from young garlic scapes and crispy puffed Dauphine potatoes ($29). The fiddlehead red deer fern, still tight in its spiral, decorates a plate of ling cod in brown butter, preserved lemon farro and basil froth ($27).
“There are two types of these ferns that you can eat. We like this type because it’s a little more sweet, and obviously the color is pretty cool. You toss with butter and salt and they’re ready to go. Simple.”
The couple opened Restaurant Beck, named after their young son Becker, in the summer of 2009. It’s already made a name among gourmand travelers, with top marks in Frommers Oregon and Food & Wine Magazine, as well as newspapers statewide. Earlier this year, Chef Wills was nominated for Food & Wine’s The People’s Best New Chef, in the Northwest region. In the coming months, you may see Wills on Starchefs.com – a writer and photography crew paid a visit to the restaurant last week.
Wills grew up in Iowa and earned his degree from the Culinary Institute of America, then honed his art at restaurants like Toscana in Dallas, Oba! in Portland, The Pelican Pub & Brewery in Pacific City and The Bay House in Lincoln City. Nothing he learned in those kitchens, though, prepared him for this culinary foray into wild foods. He uses reference books, Internet searches and the foragers’ knowledge to unlock each stem’s potential.
“It’s trial and error. I’ve never worked in a restaurant that used wild foods, or had any experience in it, really. It helps to be a food geek, really,” he said. “Things can become monotonous, as far as ingredients go. You can serve them different ways, but at the end of the day a butternut squash is still a butternut squash. So wild foods are very exciting.”
Restaurant Beck is located inside the Whale Cove Inn, 2345 SW Hwy. 101, just south of Depoe Bay. They serve dinner starting at 5 p.m. daily. Reservations are recommended, especially if you have dietary restrictions. To learn more, log on to restaurantbeck.com, become Facebook fan, follow Chef Justin on Twitter @RestaurantBeck, or, call 541-765-3220.
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