A wild dream in the wild

BEHIND an antique two-pump gas station on the seaward side of Highway 1, up a path of stone steps laden with native plants and the fog-driven ghosts of Henry Miller and Anais Nin, before a stretch of enormous redwoods, sits a 1930s wooden farmhouse that for the last five years has been home to Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant.

You watch condors wheel through the lower atmosphere and hear the deep symphonies of surf somewhere, below layers of earthbound clouds, and think -- who wouldn’t come here if they could? Exchange the hot clutter of city life for perfect air, a wild ocean? Quit your job to paint in a grotto, write sonnets under a redwood, play a piano in the back of a flatbed truck like Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces.”

Five years ago, Michelle Rizzolo, Philip Wojtowicz and Michael Gilson did just that: quit Los Angeles to move up to Big Sur to open a restaurant. No plan, no ownership experience. Just the high romanticism of youth and maybe that thought: Who wouldn’t come here if they could?

Dodge a school of parked motorcycles, a listing RV, a pair of pristine BMW convertibles, and you’ll hear the espresso machine and smell the asiago bread before you see the restaurant’s cozy, cabin-like interior. Through an open doorway into the kitchen, you can glimpse pizzas going into the enormous wood-burning oven. As the servers prepare for the dinner crowd -- a mix of devoted locals, passers-by surprised by the exquisite menu and the BMW-owning set referred by the nearby resorts. White tablecloths flutter in the breeze rising off the coast. A waiter, one of the kids who comes up for the summer to surf or paint on his days off, lights candles. Wild quail scatter before approaching weekend cars. Mount Manuel looms to the east, through wild blackberry bushes and the broken shards of old-growth forest.

You have a palpable sense of discovery, like you’ve stumbled upon a sudden clearing in a tangled world.

Inside the restaurant, Rizzolo, a tiny brunette with wide blue eyes, arranges the bread she bakes every morning on wooden trays for the tables while chef Wojtowicz, an intense man with a surf-burnt face and Rizzolo’s husband of a year, partner for over 10, starts dinner service. The old building hums with conversation and the music of glassware and cutlery; the rising smells of roasting vegetables and simmering sauces roll in from the kitchen like scarves of evening fog rolling in from the Pacific. It seems like an idea of dinner more than dinner, the way Big Sur often seems like a Platonic ideal of place, too refracted through the cathedral of sky and branches to be real.

But the food is real: a marriage of local ingredients and serious technique. Wood-grilled wild King salmon or Niman Ranch rib-eye are paired with mix-and-match vegetables -- roasted carrots, baby beets and fennel; fingerling potatoes with fresh garbanzos, peppers, onions and arugula. A pair of quail roasted in the wood oven leans into a succotash of favas, green beans, corn, peas and dried cranberries. Grilled fat sardines, fresh from Monterey Bay, top herbed frisee and cherry tomatoes.

And then there’s the pizza -- large pies with beautiful crisp crusts that are paper-thin in the middle, and thick and blistery on the edge. One, with a bright, golden sauce made from summer squash, is topped with zucchini, prosciutto and sage. Campers and bikers tend to go for the house-sliced pepperoni, sometimes raising eyebrows at the $14.50 price tag.

The gas station makes it real too, as do the his-and-hers wooden outhouses. The first few months after Rizzolo, Wojtowicz and Gilson moved up here, the floor was very real -- that’s where they slept until they could find housing. Two Culinary Institute of America-trained chefs who had moved to California from their native New Jersey to work in some of L.A.’s top restaurants -- Melisse, Joe’s in Venice, the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, and then Campanile when Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton both ran the kitchens. And their friend from Joe’s, a long-time server with dreams and, now, the means to open a place of his own. Who wouldn’t if they could?

At the time, the decision hadn’t seemed so momentous: Rizzolo and Wojtowicz had been driving a loaner car (theirs had just been stolen outside of Campanile) when they saw Gilson standing on a Venice corner, in overalls from his day job as a landscaper, holding two chain saws. He’d just quit the landscaping job to move north and open his own place; did they want to come? Imagine: the landscape, the sea, the miles of opportunity. The three of them ate dinner that night at Campanile (it was Thursday, grilled cheese night), drove to Big Sur over the weekend. Rizzolo and Wojtowicz gave notice at Campanile two days later.

They had no idea what they were doing, really, sleeping on the floor of the old building Gilson had leased, half house, half-abandoned pizzeria. Until that afternoon on a Venice street, Rizzolo had never even heard of Big Sur; Wojtowicz only knew of it from reading Kerouac. Gilson, a sandy-haired, wind-burnt man from Manhattan Beach, had been going up there to surf for 20 years (“it was my own New Zealand”), but he’d never cooked, never owned a restaurant. Nonetheless, six weeks later, they opened for business.

“We felt so disconnected,” says Rizzolo. After all the camaraderie from chefs in Los Angeles, they’d escaped, they thought, maybe too far. They began in a kind of vacuum, with no one to give them advice or feedback, working around the clock to open so that they could make rent on the property. “You start with bread,” says Rizzolo, a pastry chef and baker, “it’s flour and water.” And you start with fire. In their case, a massive Alan Scott wood oven, which the previous tenant, the pizzeria owner, had had built for $14,000. The first thing they put on their nascent menu, after the morning breads, was pizza.

That initial year was difficult, between learning the ropes and trying to strike a balance between the locals, sometimes a hard sell, and the inexact science of gauging the appetites and frequency of tourists. Staffing was difficult, so many would come and go, lured by the seasons. But they learned while they cooked, baking pastries for the morning crowd and burnished pizzas for the campers and tourists, and evolving a sophisticated dinner menu for resort-goers and local patrons with deep wine cellars.

Still, they wondered, especially in the winter, which “can get kind of crazy and weird,” after weeks of rains, no cell service, the power suddenly out, the winding highway impenetrable. “The road,” says Gilson, “is a big issue. It collapses every once in a while and no one can get through.” Such isolation can drive you a little nuts -- think Jack Nicholson with a repeating typewriter instead of a beautiful piano.

“Who would know,” Rizzolo asks rhetorically, “if we were cooking bad food? We’re in the middle of nowhere.” This feeling of playing to an empty room repeats when you talk to the trio for awhile, and you can feel a tension just below the surface, like a current under slow waves.

It’s the flip side of the vacation ideal, of the beautiful notion of a great escape -- the sudden unsettling thought that you’re off the radar, your boat possibly adrift. “You really can’t get away from yourself,” observes Gilson. “It’s a myth that a lot of people have.”

And you can’t get away from your food either, at least if you’re a driven chef with a lot of ambition and not much distraction besides coastal weather and the occasional electrical blackout. Far from trends and direct competition, with the urban world pursuing questionably high-minded notions of cuisine, Rizzolo and Wojtowicz have cooked. And gotten comfortable in their own kitchen. “It makes you really confident,” says Rizzolo, “in a roasted chicken.”

Roasted, that is, in the wood-burning oven and served with a garlic gravy and mashed potatoes with sauteed salsify, mushrooms and wilted greens.

Or in the candied ginger scones that locals line up for in the morning at the bakery counter. Or the pains au chocolat. Or citrus sticky buns. Or the potato-herb frittata that’s put out in an enormous cast iron skillet and sold by the slice for breakfast.

None of this is cheap -- dinner for two can easily run $125 without wine. But that’s par for the neighborhood, where the competition is Nepenthe, Ventana and Post Ranch Inn.

When not riding the surf or playing in his rock band at open-mike night at the Miller library, Wojtowicz is most at home above his wood-fired grill. And he’s got plenty of local bounty to play with: “Everybody has fruit trees,” he says. “In season, people will come by with 20 pounds of chanterelles, or we’ll get a call from the wharf from somebody with a boatload of salmon.”

Rizzolo likes to play too, roasting apricots for a rich sorbet and including hazelnuts in a deeply-flavored flan. The food seems to show intense concentration, in both the flavors themselves and in the chef’s notion of what the dish is in the first place.

As if someone had a lot of time and space to think -- maybe in a pre-dawn kitchen, the ocean fog breathing on the windows, the trees and sky bearing down -- of what they were doing and why they were there. If they had gone too far off the map. If it had been worth it. Or if they hadn’t gone far enough.

Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant, Highway 1, Big Sur. (831) 667-0520.

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Roasted quail with ginger garlic sauce

Total time: 1 hour, 25 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From chef Philip Wojtowicz of Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant

2 tablespoons minced ginger

6 tablespoons chopped shallots, divided

6 tablespoons chopped

scallions, divided

3 tablespoons canola oil,

divided

1 tablespoon brown sugar

2 cups white wine

4 cups veal stock

Salt and pepper

8 California quail

4 tablespoons chopped

parsley

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1. For the sauce, saute the ginger, 2 tablespoons of the shallots and 2 tablespoons of the scallions in 1 tablespoon of canola oil over medium-high heat until they turn a rich brown, about 3 minutes. Add the brown sugar and cook until caramelized, about 1 minute. Add the wine and reduce until the wine is only about 2 tablespoons, about 20 minutes. Add the veal stock and reduce to 1 cup liquid, about 45 minutes. Season with one-quarter teaspoon salt and one-eighth teaspoon pepper.

2. Butterfly the quail by using scissors to cut through the cavity down one side of the backbone of the birds. Place the quail on a cutting board and gently press down with the heel of your hand to flatten them slightly. Pat dry. Season the quail with salt and pepper.

3. Mix together the remaining scallions, parsley and remaining shallots and stuff the mixture into the cavities of the quail. Press the sides together to hold in the herbs.

4. Heat a cast-iron skillet over high heat until hot. Add the remaining canola oil and heat until smoking. Place the quail in the pan, front-side down. Add the butter and cook until caramelized, about 2 minutes.

5. Flip the quail and caramelize the other side. Cook until just heated through, about 3 minutes.

6. Remove and pat dry with paper towels. Cut each quail in half. Arrange 4 halves on each plate. Spoon about a quarter cup of sauce around the quail.

Each serving: 730 calories; 48 grams protein; 10 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram fiber; 46 grams fat; 12 grams saturated fat; 181 mg. cholesterol; 604 mg. sodium.

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Hazelnut flan with roasted apricots and roasted apricot sorbet

Total time: 1 hour, plus steeping, baking and chilling time

Serves: 4

Note: From pastry chef Michelle Rizzolo of Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant. This recipe calls for four (3 by 1 3/4 -inch) ramekins.

Hazelnut flan

1 cup sugar, divided

1 tablespoon corn syrup

1 cup hazelnuts, plus additional for garnish

1 cup whole milk

1 cup heavy cream

3 egg yolks

1 whole egg

1. Place one-half cup sugar with the corn syrup in a pot with just enough water, about 2 tablespoons, to wet the sugar to a wet sand consistency. With a pastry brush dipped in water, clear off the edges and sides of the pot to be sure there are no loose sugar crystals. Cook the mixture over medium-low heat until it turns a dark amber color. Pour it into the bottoms of the four ramekins and allow to cool.

2. Heat the oven to 500 degrees. Toast the hazelnuts until golden brown. Remove and allow to cool. When cooled, put the nuts into a food processor with one-quarter cup sugar and process until finely ground.

3. In a medium pot, bring the milk and cream to a boil. Add the hazelnut mixture, cover and steep for one hour off the heat.

4. In a large bowl, whisk the yolks, egg and remaining one-quarter cup sugar. Reheat the milk mixture to boiling. Pour the milk mixture into the egg mixture in a steady stream, whisking constantly. Strain through a chinois or cheesecloth-lined strainer.

5. Heat the oven to 300 degrees. Pour the mixture into the ramekins, then place the filled ramekins into a baking pan. Fill the pan with a one-inch water bath of boiling water.

6. Cover the pan with foil and bake for 25 minutes, or until the edges are set but the centers still jiggle. Let cool and refrigerate for at least 3 hours or overnight.

Roasted apricots

20 small apricots

1 vanilla bean

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup Sauternes wine (can substitute another sweet wine such as a Muscat from France or California)

1. Cut the apricots in half, remove the pits, and place them skin-side down in a ceramic or glass baking dish.

2. Split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and with the back of a knife, remove the seeds. Mix the seeds and bean with the sugar and sprinkle it over the apricots. Roast them uncovered at 350 degrees until they are soft and begin to caramelize, about 45 minutes.

3. Add the wine, which will deglaze the pan and form the sauce. Discard the vanilla bean. Reserve half the sauce and 8 apricot halves for presentation; the remainder is used for the sorbet.

Roasted apricot sorbet

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup water

32 roasted apricot halves and sauce from the previous

recipe

2 tablespoons orange juice

1. Bring the sugar and water to a boil. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove it from the heat and cool (this is the simple syrup).

2. In a blender, place the 32 apricot halves, half of the apricot sauce from the roasted apricots and one-quarter cup simple syrup and blend until smooth, adding more simple syrup if necessary.

3. Freeze in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions.

Assembly

Unmold the flan by running a butter knife around the edge of each ramekin and inverting the flan onto a plate. Tap the ramekin against the plate if necessary. Slightly warm the roasted apricots with the sauce and place two warmed apricots on a plate next to the flan. Drizzle apricots with the sauce and add a scoop of ice cream on top of the flan. Sprinkle a few hazelnuts around the flan. Serve immediately.

Each serving: 1,060 calories; 14 grams protein; 149 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams fiber; 50 grams fat; 18 grams saturated fat; 294 mg. cholesterol; 259 mg. sodium.

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Monterey Bay sardines with frisee salad

Total time: 45 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From chef Philip Wojtowicz of Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant. Check Santa Monica Seafood, King Fish in Glendale or Los Angeles Fish Co. for availability of sardines.

5 basil leaves

2 parsley leaves

1/4 cup golden balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Salt

1/8 teaspoon white pepper

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons

canola oil

8 fresh whole sardines (about

1 1/2 pounds)

Freshly ground black pepper

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons chopped

parsley, divided

1 head frisee lettuce (about 3 cups)

1/2 pint cherry tomatoes, sliced

1 tablespoon minced chives

1 tablespoon chopped

scallions

1 tablespoon minced shallots

1 cup torn basil

Fennel fronds for garnish

1. To make the vinaigrette, place the basil leaves, parsley leaves and balsamic vinegar in a blender and blend until the mixture is bright green. Add the mustard, 1 teaspoon salt and the white pepper and blend until combined. Add the oil and blend until the vinaigrette is emulsified. Set aside (it should be used the same day).

2. Prepare the fish by first removing the heads. Remove any large scales and slit open the fish along the belly. Rinse them under running water, removing the intestines with your finger. Lay the fish open flat and with the tip of a knife, lift up the head end of the backbone; hold the fish down while gently lifting out the backbone, along with any small bones. With scissors, snip the backbone at the tail end, leaving the tail intact.

3. Season the fish with salt and pepper. Brush them with olive oil and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley and cook them on a hot grill, skin side down, until the meat turns translucent, about 4 minutes.

4. In a bowl, mix the frisee with the sliced cherry tomatoes, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, the chives, scallions, shallots and torn basil. Lightly dress with the vinaigrette just before serving. Place the salad on a plate, arrange two grilled sardines next to the salad and garnish with a frond of fennel. Serve immediately.

Each serving: 735 calories; 26 grams protein; 11 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams fiber; 67 grams fat; 9 grams saturated fat; 73 mg. cholesterol; 768 mg. sodium.

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Fava bean succotash

Total time: 45 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From chef Philip Wojtowicz of Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant. If you can’t find fresh English peas, you can omit peas from the recipe.

Fresh corn from 2 cobs

1/2 pound fresh English peas

1/2 pound fava beans, hulled and peeled (about 2 pounds unhulled)

1/2 pound string beans

1 tablespoon canola oil

12 button mushrooms, halved

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup dried unsweetened

cranberries

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

2 tablespoons sliced chives

2 tablespoons sliced scallions

Salt and pepper

A handful of pea shoots

1. In a large pot, boil salted water. In separate batches, blanch the corn, peas, favas and string beans until tender, about 3 to 5 minutes for each batch, then shock and drain. Cut the string beans into one-inch pieces on the bias and reserve.

2. Heat a large saute pan with the canola oil, add the mushrooms and cook until softened and the water is drawn out, about 4 to 5 minutes. Add the 2 tablespoons of butter, the blanched vegetables and the cranberries and saute the mixture until warm, about 1 1/2 minutes.

3. Add the parsley, chives, scallions, salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with pea shoots and serve immediately.

Each serving: 418 calories; 23 grams protein; 71 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams fiber; 12 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 15 mg. cholesterol; 69 mg. sodium.