A film strip of wine-drinking soon-to-be risotto-makers moved about in their kitchens above Chef John Wayne Formica’s head.
“Risotto is all about technique,” he tells the camera recording the Zoom cooking class as he runs through some of the ingredients on the afternoon’s to-do list. Mushrooms, stock, wine, onion, and more.
It’s the second virtual class Pico’s new chef has taught since the pandemic started. Formica said 65 people registered for the risotto class, and between 30 to 40 home chefs were streaming from and into their kitchens on April 23.
“We’re definitely generating that buzz, and it’s great having patrons of the restaurant who follow us joining,” Formica told the Sun. “We felt that we could support our community. [It] keeps us relevant and going at the restaurant, keeps us top of mind: ‘Hey, we’re still here, we’re still doing things.’”
Formica and his wife, Liz Formica, moved to Northern Santa Barbara County from Los Angeles in February. After a hiatus at the beginning of 2020, Pico in Los Alamos reopened with Formica’s new menu on March 5. Three weeks later, the pandemic happened.
Now, the couple is doing what they can to keep things moving at the restaurant in the General Store, Liz in the front of the house and behind the cooking class camera with Formica in the back of the house and in front of the camera.
The Italian-Lebanese chef is from Chicago and grew up eating Mediterranean-style food. He’s a classically trained French chef who studied at The Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (a Le Cordon Bleu affiliate) and learned to make classic Italian fare on the Amalfi Coast. Formica said he’s been doing Asian cuisine for the past 12 years and was most recently the executive chef at Tao in Los Angeles.
“My background is very diverse. Global cuisine is my wheelhouse,” he said. “I always wanted to diversify my portfolio so I would be more valuable as I moved up in the ranks.”
The menu at Pico reflects those global influences and showcases them with local ingredients, either from the backyard farm at the restaurant or local meat producers and seafood purveyors.
Crispy Vietnamese-inspired Brussels sprouts salad, braised veal osso buco, and matcha panna cotta are on the short to-go menu these days, alongside a pasta kit, burgers, and bourbon-braised beef. If anything, he said, he’s influenced by the Middle East (Lebanon), Mediterranean (Italy), and Asia, but is inspired by seasonality.
“I bring a lot of my heritage, how I grew up eating, and just kind of refined it. And then as I traveled all over the world,” he said, “I’ve brought a lot of those experiences and brought them into the menu.”
A peek at what restaurant patrons can look forward to in a post-pandemic world includes a look back at that menu inspired by Formica’s past and present. Grilled octopus with diavolo sauce, basil, and grana padano. Crispy cauliflower served with smoked pea butter, cumin paprika, and chickpea. Channel Islands spiny lobster with squid ink risotto and local uni.
Formica also touted a locally caught whitefish, grilled and served with a parsnip puree.
The Formicas spent two years in Los Angeles, and it just wasn’t for them, Formica said. After traveling to Santa Barbara for pleasure, they were hooked on the Central Coast, and eventually Clark Staub—who knew Formica through the restaurant industry—from Full of Life Flatbread invited them up to Los Alamos for a wedding. Staub mentioned that Pico was searching for a chef, and Formica drove up for a “great nine-hour conversation with the owners,” Will Henry and Kali Kopley. Formica put in his notice to Tao that day.
“We just wanted something different,” Formica said about him and Liz. “We barely saw each other, and we wanted to kind of downshift from that and start a family and kind of get a little more laid back.”
But the coronavirus has been a big challenge, he said.
At the moment, Pico is featuring a shorter menu that people can order from online and pick up at the restaurant. Formica’s offering a three-course menu for $32 that comes with a baby kale salad, braised veal osso buco with polenta, and the matcha panna cota. He said the three-course menu will change regularly. House-made pasta kits with two portions of pappardelle pasta and a half pint of Formica’s family’s red sauce are $15. Burgers and fries are also on the menu, including a surf-and-turf burger that comes with blue crab, a yuzu and calamansi vin, and uni cream.
In addition, Formica said Liz has revamped the restaurant’s cocktail list and is offering cocktails to-go. Of course, you can also grab a bottle of wine or various items from the General Store. Lumen—Henry and Kopley’s—wine label, is also available for purchase. Formica said he’s also thinking about offering up house-made chocolate bars and some other items that people can grab from the store or add on to their meals.
“We’re just trying to see what works, what doesn’t work,” Formica said.
The cooking classes were always part of the plan at Pico. And Formica enjoys teaching them, as teaching has been a part of his career. In the kitchens he grew up and moved through during his life, he’s been the teacher, a mentor for less experienced cooks, he said.
Plus, he’s new to the area and is still trying to introduce himself to residents. The Zoom classes are a great way to do that. And so far, he said, the feedback has been great.
Guests, he said, will post their dishes on social media with a video snippet or their kitchen setup, which is really cool.
“There’s a lot of positive feedback, so it’s really great to see people learning new things,” he said. “It just reinforces what we’re doing.”
For the first virtual cooking class, he taught watchers to make pasta from scratch: a pappardelle. Then came the risotto. Really, Formica said, it’s about teaching technique, giving students a foundation from which to work and potential variations that they can add to the dish. Next up on April 30 is kung pao, focusing on the sauce and veggies.
“I teach you a base, and then you kind of make it your own, at home with your own flavor profiles or whatever you’d like,” he said. “Just teaching people the basics of cooking so they have what they need to survive.”
Editor Camillia Lanham could go for a surf-and-turf burger right about now. Send uni cream to clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 7, 2020.