Michael Cimarusti

* The chef at the downtown seafood restaurant Water Grill also worked at the original Spago.

Old Spoons and Wacky Spatulas: Many times, my family and I have gone to the Rose Bowl flea market in Pasadena, which is the second Sunday of every month. We’ve gotten all sorts of things there. I’ve picked up some old albums and we’ll find things for our kitchen. Being a chef, I collect funky little utensils like automatic spatulas that flip things over by pressing them or old spoons or knives. It’s also a great place for people watching.

Logging Town With Hippies: We opened a new restaurant last year in San Diego, and I was away from the family for a couple of months, except for maybe one day a week. So, what we decided to do when I had some free time was rent a house in Guerneville, which is a logging community that’s a little bit north of the wine country. It’s really rustic with a lot of hippies. The house was beautiful and located right next to the Russian River with a big deck. So, we just completely withdrew for 10 days. We made day trips to Sonoma and Napa.

Dining for Scenesters: In San Francisco, the restaurant scene is much more of an organic experience in that it’s not so much about the style or the scene-like attributes of a restaurant. It’s more about people finding places where they feel comfortable, which they choose to frequent. Whereas in Los Angeles, or in many cases, in New York, you need to be hot, you need to be a scene before you really become successful. If I think about the restaurants in San Francisco that have been there for years like Chez Panisse or Zuni, it’s definitely not a scene. They’re just heartfelt, sincere restaurants. They’re built more out of a real affinity for dining.

Fancy Foods: I love Surfas. It’s a restaurant supply store, but it’s open to the public. It’s between Venice and Washington on National in Culver City. They have a lot of large equipment that wouldn’t be interesting to an avid home cook. But they also have this gourmet section in there with dry goods and groceries that’s just amazing. There are things there that you can’t find anywhere else, just amazing quality olive oils, vinegars and sea salts, beautiful stuff.

Sicilian Cuisine: I like to go to a place called La Fornaretta in Pasadena. It’s a Sicilian restaurant with good, simple Italian food, sort of like a mom-and-pop place with the wife running the kitchen and the husband looking after the front of the house, which is a lot like what it would be like in Italy.

No Pesticides: The Sunday-morning farmer’s market in Hollywood is awesome. It’s my favorite. We go to the one on Wednesdays for the restaurant in Santa Monica and then there’s also the one on Saturday in Santa Monica. But the one in Hollywood, I just love. It’s fun to spend a couple of hours there looking around. That usually leads to a nice Sunday-night dinner cooked at home.

Adam Bregman