Chef Jeremy Fox Has Left Legendary Restaurant Rustic Canyon
Quietly, one of the most influential chefs of his generation is stepping away from the restaurant he built into one of the greatest of the century.
Jeremy Fox, after 13 years at the helm of Santa Monica‘s Rustic Canyon (No. 95 in the rankings of the Greatest American Restaurants of the 21st Century), announced via Instagram that he was leaving the farm-to-table spot. This comes in the wake of Fox closing his restaurant Birdie G’s this month as well, which was owned by the same hospitality group as Rustic Canyon.
Rustic Canyon opened in 2006, featuring head chefs like Evan Funke before Fox took the reins in 2013. While he didn’t open the restaurant, Rustic Canyon’s identity is largely entwined with Fox’s eclectic, farmers market–driven sensibilities. Known for his facility and creativity with vegetables (he wrote the celebrated cookbook On Vegetables), he crafted signature dishes at Rustic Canyon like beets and berries as well as his pozole verde. But there were a lot of ups and downs before he arrived in Southern California.
After working under David Kinch at Manresa, Fox became the chef at a vegetarian restaurant attached to a yoga studio that opened in 2007. On the surface it was an odd move, but with the aid of a dedicated garden, he turned Napa Valley’s Ubuntu into a sensation, earning a Michelin star along the way—almost unheard of at the time for a vegetarian-only restaurant.
The restrictive nature of Ubuntu actually expanded his creativity. In the kind of carnivore-friendly cooking that’s taught at culinary schools, meat is the center of a plate and the produce is relegated to sidekick. Fox had to make satisfying dishes with vegetables and fruit as the star, and he did it with creations such as his heirloom tomato salad with juniper, basil and black bread, and a creamy cauliflower dish seasoned generously with vadouvan. People loved it. Along with the Michelin star, there were features in Oprah’s magazine, best new chef accolades, New York Times raves and James Beard nominations.
But the sudden notoriety fed into anxiety, depression, and an unhealthy reliance on prescription drugs. After Fox left the restaurant he got his car impounded, then moved south to L.A. where he bounced from job to job until hitting rock bottom. Eventually, he took a job at Rustic Canyon, a restaurant serving farm-to-table California cuisine in Santa Monica.
White Yams at Rustic Canyon
Jakob N. Layman
Fox kept his head down, kicked the habit, and focused on cooking. The Ubuntu experience had been formative in unexpected ways. He learned what he didn’t want to do—which was cook over-complicated food to impress his peers and critics. Instead, he created food that wasn’t flashy, but straightforward and soulful, and driven by seasonal produce. “At the time, I almost wanted to not make much noise,” Fox told us in 2019 as he prepared to open Birdie G’s. “Nothing was over the top.” It was still creative, though. In his hands, simple-yet-unexpected combinations such as beets with berries or polenta with a savory strawberry sofrito didn’t just make sense; they were amazing. When the Michelin Guide returned to L.A. in 2019, Rustic Canyon earned a star (which it lost in the 2022 edition).
He wasn’t looking to blow away fellow chefs, but he did it anyway. “I don’t know if suburban housewives or house husbands know him, but everyone that works in restaurants loves Jeremy,” Lee Wolen of the Michelin-starred Boka in Chicago said back in 2019. “He’s a chef’s chef. Not that TV is bad, but I think why chef’s love him is because he really just cares about cooking and product. His only goal in life is to cook, as opposed to just be famous.”
This is certainly far from retirement for Fox. In his Instagram post he said he had plans to share with the world at a future date: “Please stay tuned for updates on what I’m going to be when I grow up.”
Authors
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Jeremy Repanich
