24 Hours at One of the Country's Best Restaurants

I am spending the next 24 hours at one of the best restaurants in the U.S. We're eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner here, and getting a special behind-the-scenes look to find out what makes a restaurant like this so special. This place is creating some of the most mind-blowing food and is literally redefining what luxury means, so let's dive in. So we are here at Harbor House Inn in Elk, California. It's a pretty remote restaurant, about three hours north of San Francisco, and you can actually stay here overnight. The restaurant has two Michelin stars, which basically means that the food here is incredible, but the philosophy, service, and the food itself is very different from your typical fine dining restaurant. Now, we only have 24 hours here, so we have a pretty tight agenda. First, hotel breakfasts are notoriously bad, but something tells me that this one will be a little bit different. Second, we'll visit the farm where most of the produce is grown for the restaurant. This is something that most guests don't get to do, but we're lucky enough to get a little behind-the-scenes look. Third, we're going to have a whopping five-course lunch in the main dining room. Fourth, we're going to have a chat with the chef to find out a little bit more about this place and explore the grounds while we're at it. And lastly, we'll get a peek into the kitchen during service and sit down for our 15-course dinner finale, which shows the true magic of Harbor House Inn. So, we started off with a bang because the breakfast that arrived was beautiful. I don't normally eat breakfast, so the fact that we got this much food was actually a bit overwhelming in the best way possible. Everything on this tray was fresh, local, gorgeous, and hopefully delicious. We got a variety of fruits from the farm, like blueberries and peaches, some crunchy toast with sweet jams, bacon, a yuzu pound cake, and some potatoes, one that was paired with leeks, and the other that was prepared like patatas bravas. But the stars of the show were the congee with a silky, runny egg yolk that was warming and good for the soul. Oh my goodness. Eggs cooked perfectly. A lot of times, breakfasts are really heavy. This is quite delicate, quite light. It's just a really beautiful sort of warming flavor. And an egg custard with mushrooms and onions that was earthy, grounded, and a hearty way to start the morning. I mean, to have this kind of meal first thing in the morning is an absolute dream. Okay, it's time to visit the farm. This is the most coastal Californian thing. The chef actually gave me instructions printed out on Google Maps, and he wrote down the actual directions on how to get there. But I haven't gotten directions like this in forever. I love it. So we're at about a half acre here. Everything kind of is companion planted. Essentially, every crop gets a buddy. In this case down here, I have beans and sunflowers. And so the beans set tendrils, and they can kind of cling to the sunflower. So they're less in the row, and you can kind of see it's growing up through the sunflower there. So you've got stability, and you're also shading that soil. So you're, you know, retaining moisture in the shade. It's also companion planting. We've got tiny corn, and tiny corn is companioned with lettuce. There is an equal number of silks as there are kernels on every ear of corn. Corn facts! For the chef part of this, there's always something new happening. Every couple weeks, there's something new to put on the menu, and you never have to have anything. It's what's available, and that's what goes on the menu. We're never like, oh, I wish I had this. So in here, we have things that are getting ready to go out, things that just got seeded. And so all of this starts here, and then it's transferred to either this farm or the other farm? Yep, and I do everything from seeds. So same with perennials. And perennials are great for the farm, because you want to diversify and create habitat for pollinators. And the more of those species that are around, the happier the ecosystem is. I think sometimes, too, it's really nice to try things. And I kind of refer to that as like experimentals. That's something that maybe you don't know how it's going to grow, or how it's going to produce, or how the kitchen could utilize that thing. You know, look through the seed catalogs. Are there things here that are interesting to you? What I love about this restaurant is that there's a huge emphasis on sustainability. I feel like a lot of fine dining is characterized by excess and waste. But here, the produce and the ingredients are all hyper local. And on this farm itself, everything is used in the restaurant. If they don't use something for dinner, they'll put it on the lunch menu. If it's not on the lunch menu, they'll put it on the breakfast menu. It doesn't mean that there's lower quality. What it means is that they're using the freshest produce available to create all of these different meals. Even though we had a large breakfast, this farm tour made me really want lunch, just to see how they're actually using ingredients from the farm in the dishes that they wind up creating. So we strapped in for a five-course lunch that would hopefully wow us. We started off with a salad, which was composed of vegetables from their garden, radishes, coriander flowers, and a house-made sesame togarashi. Super light, really delicious flavors, and prepared honestly the way that a salad should be, where you can really taste the vegetables instead of just a dressing. After this, we had their bread and butter, which was probably one of the most unique breads I've ever had. Both the bread and butter were made with sea lettuce, which was harvested by hand, filtered through seawater, and then dried. It's got a really nice exterior, and then the interior is nice and squishy. I mean, I'm excited to try this. Oh my god. You can actually taste a lot of that sort of sea lettuce, that ocean-y feel, which I've never had in bread before. Phenomenal. Next up was their local raw fish preparation, which was rockfish with umeboshi, wakame, cucumbers, and wild radish flowers. I will admit, I was worried about having a five-course lunch, but each of these dishes felt really light and refreshing, and kept me wanting more throughout the meal. This dish was quickly followed up by their cooked fish dish, which was a local black cod with dungeness crab and uni butter sauce, beans, and grilled scallions. I mean, everything there just comes together. It basically just like melts in your mouth. The uni butter, the black cod, the beans, And the last main was a slow-cooked confit pork belly with grilled summer squash, buckwheat leaves, and flowers. I mean, you start off the lunch light, then you move into this rich, fatty, glorious pork belly. It's exceptional. We literally saw these squash growing in the farm when we were there, so now we're going to try it with this pork. It's so juicy. And the squash is so fresh, so delicious, and farm-grown. Finally, we had one of the favorite desserts that I've ever had, a panna cotta topped with donut peaches and a peached strawberry kombucha. After those hearty mains, it was great to come back to reality with something that just refreshes the palate. Just such a simple yet delicious dessert. Now, I wanted to find out a little bit more about the restaurant, the space, and the concept, so I figured who better to talk to than the chef himself, so I sat down and chatted with him in search of some answers. My name is Matthew Kammer. I'm the executive chef and director of the Harbor House Inn in Elk, California, and I've been here for about six years. The idea for this started probably 2016. I traveled a bunch and worked at remote restaurants, Australia and Belgium, and kind of got the idea for a remote restaurant. Ten rooms near the ocean, historical building. I wanted to grow food. How are you thinking about the lodging and hospitality side of things with the food? The lodging aspect of a dining experience like this in a place like this plays such a pivotal role because I think once you're here and immersed in the location, you're going to taste things differently. You know, drive three hours and pass a bunch of the ingredients that they're going to be eating that night eventually ends up creating a different experience for them. Can you talk a little bit more about the farm and the foraging that you guys do, like how you get your produce not from vendors and how you start to do a lot of it on your own? We have complete control of when it's harvested, but now even where it's planted, so we can pinpoint those microclimates where the plant is going to do best, and then we can really control the overall taste. Taste versus flavor. Taste is the original product before you've done anything to it, and the flavor is after you've cut it, you've cooked it, you seasoned it. So you create flavor, but you start with taste, and if we start with taste first, we're always going to end up with a better product. Giving people a singular experience in a place that they have to travel to and they can't get anywhere else is kind of our focus, and a byproduct of that is what ends up on the dinner plate. Okay, this is the moment we've been waiting for. This is why we're here. A seafood-focused 15-course dinner that's world-renowned. I was recently at the World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards and every one of the chefs there was saying that they needed to come out here and try Harbour House Inn specifically, so clearly people are wanting to come here and I'm very excited. So without further ado, let's eat! You start the night off with a welcome infusion of sea vegetables to prepare your palate. It's umami and it gives you a sense of what the night will be like because you get these flavors that are reminiscent of the sea right away. But you quickly move into their raw fish dish with a rockfish cured on kelp with anise hyssop vinegar and a garnish of cucumber flowers and kombu. We start to see that same pattern from lunch of light, refreshing dishes at the beginning of the meal to ease you into the menu. This was followed up by their dungeness crab dish, which was served with a mung bean miso and paired with their smoked claws, which were finished with a bit of clarified butter. It's a delicious preparation that contrasts hot and cold between the claws and the body meat. Oh, really light, really floral from that courgette flower. You got some peas, you got the crab itself, which is beautifully tender and buttery and just absolutely delicious. And if you thought that the seafood stopped there, you'd be wrong because immediately after we got one of my favorite dishes of the night, which was this red sea urchin from Fort Bragg served on a chawanmushi with seaweed from their cove. This is a massive amount of uni in this dish and I am a huge fan of uni, so here we go. The uni is super smooth, chawanmushi is super smooth, you get a little bit of the warmth from the chawanmushi but the coldness from the uni, I mean, that is a really delicious bite. What was surprising was actually how quiet the kitchen was. I feel like you always imagine a hectic, chaotic, intense kitchen, but here everything felt almost orchestrated. The team worked perfectly together. They'd have two or three people assembling every single dish and all of their steps were incredibly synchronized. It was like watching the ballet. I love watching people work and this was an extremely well-run kitchen. Here we go. That's so good. I'm such a sucker for bread. To start the Nagualik pairing, I'm going to pour what I call a garden mocktail. This is made from verjus, which is pecan variation on quinoa grape juice. We have citrus marigold, which is the main aromatic component, and that's kind of the star leaf here. We have some lemon verbena, a little bit of locally grown fennel, and then seaweeds, which we've harvested in the cove here, mostly wakame. After this, we had probably the signature dish here at Harbor House. We had always kind of done abalone here since day one. Abalone is such a major product to this area, even from Pomo tribe and the natives that used to live here. The actual rock that shows up looks just like the rocks from the beach down there and it's abalone cooked in its environment with the kelp, a dough that's made with sand from the beach below Harbor House, but also ash that's left over from the grill at the end of the night. Combining these two things together and creating a cooking vessel that's not just for show, I think it actually adds a lot of flavor too and helps with the texture. Whoa. I mean, everything has been great so far, but this abalone is probably my favorite. I was not expecting it to be this soft and this tender. It just melts in your mouth. I never thought that abalone could do that. I genuinely was thinking about titling this something like I ate the ocean because every single thing had some element of the ocean in it. From the drinks, to the bread, to the dishes themselves, everything was imbued with this ocean concept and it was really stunning to see. We continued with a maitake mushroom and lichen dish. Crunchy, tangy and sour, spicy. It's delicious. I've been saying everything is delicious. It's because everything is delicious. Next, I have a noodle. This is made from lace lichen that you see adorning your plate. Inside of your cups here, we have some chives from the farm. You'll smell them right away. We've made a mushroom broth. We start off with flavors of the sea with the seaweed tea, and now we have mushroom tea. I rarely talk about drinks in my videos, but here, they were incredible. I got the non-alcoholic pairing, and the drinks were as creative and thoughtful as any normal pairing that I've ever seen. It's rare that you see this much intention put into every single drink. They throw seaweed into drinks, create their own homemade non-alcoholic pinot noir, kombuchas, shrubs, spritzes, everything. And there genuinely was not a weak drink here. For me to even comment on the drinks here just shows how incredible the beverage program really is. And finally, we had our last seafood dish with a black cod, which was aged in a cedar box, cured on kelp, and then placed on top of locally grown rice with some salted shiso and a scallion glaze. This dish was nearly perfect in balance. It's buttery and savory, yet grounded with the rice and the shiso. The scallion glaze gives it that deep flavor. Just wow. We finished the main section with a squab dish that was smoked over cypress before we moved on to the desserts. Also, just look at how beautiful their sunset was when we were there. Just pink skies overlooking their dazzling little bit of the sea. Desserts kept that same ethos of local, sustainably produced ingredients with their palate cleanser with amazake and raspberries, but the main dessert blew my mind. This was exactly what I was hoping for in a dessert. It's like an evolved version of the peach dessert at lunch, where you get the beautiful floral ice cream, the sweet honeycomb candy, and then one of my favorite fruits, peaches. We finished the night with an assortment of little treats that were paired with a Douglas fir infusion, served with a flower bundle and grilled honey that you stir into the tea to sweeten it. So you start with an infusion, end with an infusion, and with that, this amazing dinner day and night was over. Wow, what a day that was. But I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is, was it worth it? Dinner is $275 per person. Rooms start at around $700 a night. It's a hefty price tag, but it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. What the chef and his team are doing out here is extraordinary. They are changing the definition of luxury. There's no caviar, no wagyu beef, but you're going to have products here that you've never had anywhere else in your life. And at the end of the day, the food is delicious, the service is nearly perfect, and the location is stunningly gorgeous. If you want to see more of the craziest food anywhere in the world, definitely subscribe below. Let me know where I should go next, but for now, see ya.