Inside Lilo, the New Carlsbad Tasting Menu Restaurant From Eric Bost

Chef Eric Bost wants to bring the world to the quaint seaside town of Carlsbad, Calif.

Next month, he and restaurateur John Resnick will open Lilo, a 22-seat tasting-menu experience nestled inside an old boogie board factory. The Michelin-starred duo’s fourth restaurant together will be rooted in local ingredients but take inspiration from around the globe—and the ambition of this project may have diners from the world over heading their way, too.

“In northern San Diego County, there’s ton of great small family farms that have herbs and flowers and produce, and we also have people diving for sea urchins and spot prawns and fisherman, so we have this cool blend of farmland and ocean,” Bost says. “The food is influenced France and Europe in general, but also Japan and Asia—we’re looking for the inspiration from our kindred spirits of coastal regions around the world.”

Bost arrived in Carlsbad after a peripatetic journey in food. He grew up in North Carolina, running around the back of his grandparents’ restaurants before deciding to make cooking his career. After culinary school in New York, he went to Paris and just started asking Michelin-starred restaurants if he could work there, eventually landing a stage inside Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée for four months. After further stops around Europe, Las Vegas, and Singapore—including working for Guy Savoy—Bost landed in Los Angeles. In 2019, he opened Auburn, a promising restaurant shuttered by the pandemic in 2020.

Around the same time, the founding chef of Resnick’s Carlsbad restaurants Campfire and Jeune et Jolie left, and Bost agreed to relocate to take the role. The partnership clicked, and by 2021 they were touring a 10,000-square-foot building they felt could be the next step in their budding empire. “John and I walked this space about two months after I moved here, and that was four years ago and I didn’t know exactly what the food was going to become, but we had a personality,” Bost says. Phase one of the plan—the all-day restaurant, bakery, and bar Wildland—finally opened late last year and occupies the bulk of the space. The much smaller Lilo will kick off phase two of this ambitious project next month.

While the two restaurants occupy the same building, they’ll have different entrances, offering a sense of separation between them. Lilo will be immersive, beginning outside and moving in from the patio to the 14-seat counter or one of two chef’s tables. The meal will unfurl over 12 courses with cooks serving the food. While the restaurant will draw on local farms extensively, Bost doesn’t feel wedded to being strictly SoCal when sourcing ingredients—with one dish, for example, they’ll use wild-caught turbot from France.

“We want to find the most exceptional products and make them interesting and define what we value when it comes to cooking: preservation, seaweed, umami, flavor building, muddling with lime leaves and finger limes, and things like that,” Bost says.

An emblematic dish to Lilo’s approach of the sea mixing with the land will be the locally caught spot prawns served with a sauce of muddled sea buckthorn, lime leaf, and gooseberries, as well as serrano to give it some heat. “I feel like it’s fruit forward and [has] a decent amount of spice and warmth in it and very high acid,” Bost says. “The muddling of this sauce feels very comfortable and old-homey technique to build a sauce. Fruit. Ocean. Vibrant. Alive.”

And just because the restaurant is inspired by the coast doesn’t mean that it will stick only to seafood. The final savory course will be a 28-day dry-aged beef that the team will cut into chops and then age in beef tallow for another eight to 10 days to mitigate moisture loss. That meat will be served with mushrooms confited in oil and grilled over almond wood and then accompanied by two types of seaweed—kombu from Japan and blade kelp from California—that will show of their differences in flavor and texture. “There’s not a lot of richness in the menu, and when there is richness, we push the gas pedal down,” Bost says. “Marrying beef with seaweed with mushroom is a nice rich way to finish this menu.”

The beverage program is being crafted by wine director Savannah Riedler and beverage director Andrew Cordero; it’ll have a variety of pairings, including a full non-alcoholic offering as well as a mix of wine and booze-free drinks for those who want to partake, but not too much.

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Bost and his team are putting the finishing touches on the restaurant now ahead of its opening on April 17, but reservations go live today. Between Michelin three-star Addison not too far away, Bost and Resnick’s Michelin-starred Jeune, and now Lilo, northern San Diego County is turning itself into a culinary destination.

Click here to see more photos of the new destination restaurant.