When the ocean is your kitchen pantry, nature decides what’s on the menu. And that’s precisely why chef Matthew Kammerer left San Francisco for a slip of a town on the blustery Mendocino coast.
Since 2018, Kammerer’s two-Michelin-starred Harbor House Inn has gained a reputation in haute dining circles for its obsessive sea-to-table ethos. He collects sand, seawater, kelp and lace lichen in a small private cove just steps from the kitchen. Fishermen come to his back door with their daily catch, and Kammerer keeps an Instagram diary of foraged ingredients like nettle and purple cress for curious diners.
Harbor House Inn sits in a remote town of just 208 people, two hours from the closest restaurant supply store, so Kammerer is forced to rely on what’s available from his immediate surroundings. The 10-course menu doesn’t depend on specific ingredients. Instead, it morphs to include the best of what Mother Nature has on hand at any particular moment.
“Every day is different. Nature is in charge. Nature decides what we cook and how,” Kammerer said. “If I look out the window and it’s really stormy and no one is fishing, there are things we can’t get, so we’re not serving it. If something’s not available, that’s OK.”
As a sustainability champion, Kammerer’s sea-to-table ethos requires constant pivots — subbing out purple for red urchin, serving Dungeness crab during its short season, adding more produce from the restaurant’s small farm and not wasting anything. Charcoal ash and sand, stems and leaves, ocean salt, fir needles and wild coastal flowers all have a place on the menu.
“It’s our ecosystem on a plate,” he said. And that’s why people worldwide pilgrimage to the 20-seat dining room, perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific, for a taste of the wild and unspoiled Mendocino Coast.
A changing environment
Since opening the restaurant in 2018, Kammerer has seen the environment change in noticeable ways — first slowly and then more quickly. Salmon season has been canceled for three years due to perilously low numbers of young fish. “And we may not have one again. The damage has been done,” he said.
Kelp is dying off, abalone is harder to find, fishing seasons are delayed or closed, and beaches are strewed with plastic and other garbage, affecting birds and marine life.
“You just realize that everything is connected and, as a chef, you’re paying attention to these things,” Kammerer said.
In 2020, the Harbor House Inn, which includes 10 guest rooms, was awarded a Michelin Green star for its sustainability efforts and ethical stewardship of the environment.
For Kammerer, that meant eliminating plastic wrap, saving gray water for watering plants, composting and sourcing 90% of the restaurant’s ingredients from Northern California. The electricity on the property is produced from renewable solar and geothermal sources.
It’s not for everyone, and that’s OK
Before launching Harbor House, Kammerer was executive sous chef at San Francisco’s critically acclaimed Saison. But he knew the bustling city, where beautiful food had to be trucked from farms and ranches, wasn’t his ultimate calling.
So the chef spent his days off driving up and down the Pacific coast with a particular rubric for a restaurant he wanted to create — it should be near the coast, with just a handful of rooms for guests to stay, ocean views and the ability to use hyperlocal ingredients from sea and land.
Ironically, the location he found — the Harbor House — was built in 1916 by the Goodyear Redwood Company to showcase the beauty of redwood from the nearby lumber mill. According to historical accounts, it produced 40,000-50,000 feet of lumber daily at its peak.
At $325 per person for the 10-course experience, dining at Harbor House isn’t for everyone (the abbreviated lunch experience is $150 per person). Though the cost is Michelin-level, the restaurant attracts a different brand of guests compared to other star-studded establishments. It seems to resonate particularly well with those who enjoy geeky deep dives into the minutiae of Kammerer’s painstakingly detailed process.
The food
I am one of those geeky food people intently curious about Kammerer’s single butter-poached Dungeness crab leg wrapped in kombu and baked inside a rock-shaped loaf of ashes and sand.
“Think of it like salt-baking,” explained Kammerer of encrusting seafood inside a salt crust to evenly cook and keep the meat moist.
In a dramatic tableside flourish, the bread “rock” is cut open, the seaweed unfolded and the leg delicately revealed. It is part of a trio of crab dishes that also includes a broth made with the crab carapace, and a finger bowl of body meat in buttery foam topped with tiny edible flowers.
Then there is celery root pasta with uni. The root is blanched, smoke-dried and rehydrated in uni sauce from Fort Bragg red sea urchin. The dish, presented in locally made pottery, is the size of a coaster. It made me weep a little.
Black cod from Noyo Harbor in Fort Bragg is cooked using ambient heat above a charcoal grill, then brought to the table in a custom-made wooden box that opens to reveal the thumb-sized white fish bathing in wisps of smoked bay laurel that lend the scent of witchy smudging to the room — begone bad vibes.
A final tableside tea service includes a glass mug of pine needle tea and local honey stirred with a bouquet, and an array of mignardise (bite-sized desserts) — including a candy cap mushroom macaron.
After three hours, which included brilliant wine pairings ($250) and a 1997 Raymond Lelarge Champagne that I savored, it was hard to leave Kammerer’s carefully crafted world of culinary perfection.
That’s the whole point of a proper Michelin meal — to elevate food to a level of artistry rarely found in daily life.
Whether you’re someone who wants to know the exact poaching temperature of the kombu or you’re just punching a Michelin-restaurant bingo card, Harbor House is the essence of Mendocino at this exact moment, from ocean to plate.
Harbor House Inn, 5600 Highway 1, Elk, 707-877-3203, theharborhouseinn.com
You can reach Dining Editor Heather Irwin at heather.irwin@pressdemocrat.com. Follow Heather on Instagram @biteclubeats.