Laguna Beach’s Most Creative Culinary Connoisseurs
Written By: Elena Khury Favorite Chefs in Laguna Beach
We polled them, and you picked them! Here are the Top 5 Favorite Chefs of Laguna Beach. Chefs Alessandro, Ryan, Marc, Craig, and Ron all have their own unique style, flavor, and ingredients which bring your most favorite dishes to the table. With its amazing waterfront views and decadent designs, Laguna Beach has the most stunning dining atmospheres and delicious cuisines making you want to come back for more. Check out these chefs and all their creativity in Laguna Beach.
Chef Alessandro Pirozzi: Alessa
Q: What inspired you to become a chef?
Alessandro Pirozzi: Well I think it all started back in the day when I was just a kid, with a lot of persistent teaching from my sisters and my grandmother, Nonna Ida, who took me with her to help her and she taught me all the secrets of Neapolitan kitchen. I think that is when my passion started and decided to go to the culinary school where my uncle Ugo d’Orso was a teacher and chef and he taught me all the professionalism of the Italian cooking technique.
Q: What are your favorite and least favorite ingredients?
AP: My most favorites are those fresh and unseasoned. I love salts, all kind and I love flours because based on that, you can pretty much cook a lot of things.
What I don’t like? Mmm, anything in a pre-mix, anything coming out from a box and I don’t like anything I can’t pronounce the name of. If I can’t say it then I’m not gonna use it.
Q: Is there a chef you admire the most? Who and why?
AP: Well there is more than one. My first is of course is my uncle, godfather and my mentor who taught me everything I know back in Italy since I was 8 years old. And here in Orange County, a chef who has always challenged me, as far as not knowing what is going to come out of his hands and his brain, is Chef Alan Greeley. He is one of the craziest Chefs (in a good way).
Q: Where did you get the ideas for your menu?
AP: Most of the ideas come from a combination of experience throughout 34 years of culinary Italian heritage, family recipes, fresh ideas and a lot of them come to me in a spontaneous way, and in very strange places. For example; when I am mountain biking. I always keep a notebook next to my bed, and I always wake up in the middle of the night thinking about an old recipe from my grandmother or from my uncle or something that just came to my mind and I need to write it, After I wake up, I start making it.
Q: How do you stay on top of food trends?
AP: Easy, you make the trend! Either you follow “the trend” or you make “the trend” follow you.
Q: What does it mean to you to be voted one of OC’s favorite chefs of Laguna Beach?
AP: Makes me proud and makes me think about what I tell to my employees every day. “Persistency and consistency will give you positive results,” so here I am.
Chef/Restaurateur Ryan Adams: Three Seventy Common Kitchen+Drink
Q: What inspired you to become a chef?
Ryan Adams: Early in my life, it was my mother and grandmother who inspired me. I enjoyed working with them in the kitchen – especially when preparing foods I really liked to eat. Also, the first couple of chefs who I worked under were inspirational.
Q: Where did you get the ideas for your menu?
RA: Some of the flavors and menu ideas came about from my childhood eating memories. But mainly, I find my ideas and inspiration by looking around at what nature provides. I can literally just walk around outside and gather great ideas. For example, I may walk past a pine tree that just gives off that fresh, piney scent and I may feel inspired to somehow incorporate that smell into a particular dish.
Q: How long have you been cooking for?
RA: I’ve been cooking for about 38 years if you count when I started cooking in the kitchen with my family when I was just a kid. But I’ve been working in professional kitchens for 28 years.
Q: What is your best cooking tip?
RA: Acid can be a good substitution for salt. Using a small amount of lemon juice or vinegar can help bring out the flavors of a dish without having to use as much salt.
Q: What has been your biggest challenge?
RA: Finding a personal balance between being a restaurateur and a chef has been a very big challenge for me. It’s tough to find and tow that line between being a business owner and thinking analytically and then maintaining my creative side as a chef.
Q: What does it mean to you to be voted one of OC’s favorite chefs of Laguna Beach?
RA: It’s a privilege to be recognized by the community—really quite a gratifying honor.
Chef Marc Cohen: Watermarc Restaurant
Q: What inspired you to become a chef?
Mark Cohen: Growing up in Baltimore, I watched how hard my mother worked (she was an attorney) and my next door neighbor was an Executive Chef and I worked with him a lot on off days and weekends and I really liked the work ethic and the things that were involved. My father was an artist and I think the food just became an art to me. I was inspired by my mother’s hard work and my ideology of being able to create things every day.
Q: How long have you been cooking for?
MC: I started when I was 13.
Q: What is your favorite thing to cook/eat of yours?
MC: I’m an east coast guy so I love soft shell crabs. We fly them in every year from the Chesapeake Bay. My favorite thing about Southern California is the availability of the different ingredients and the seafood. So to me, whatever is in season and whatever is the freshest, that’s what I really enjoy working with the most.
Q: Who is your favorite audience to cook for?
MC: I really love the opportunity to teach and educate and I love the diner that loves to learn; who loves seafood but doesn’t necessarily understand “opakapaka” or has never had certain types of seafood from all over the world and is willing to grow their culinary dictionary. I really love the opportunity to teach about cocktails, wine, and food, and the customer who is wanting to learn and grow through that—those are the ones that you love.
Q: Where did you get the ideas for your menu?
MC: Pick a restaurant, they are all different. Watermarc grew when economy was at its worst. Our customers based in other restaurants told us they don’t mind spending money for good meals but they don’t want to consume the whole meal tasting the same. So they don’t want an entrée that is just one piece of meat or fish on a plate, necessarily. They want to have different flavors and textures so we took that and kind of went from there. That’s where I came up for the idea of grazing plates so you can graze and try different types of foods. Many of the dishes have a lot of different flavors to them so even though you might be having filet mignon, you are having it prepared three different ways served on one plate. We do a lot of trios so you can try different things.
Q: What does it mean to you to be voted one of OC’s favorite chefs of Laguna Beach?
MC: For me it’s all about relationships—I have been here for over 20 years now and I have made a lot of them. I think it’s enabled me to cook and create a trust between the guests and myself. I appreciate them having that trust in me and I think they appreciate the fact that I care about them and I want to give them the best quality and the best price no matter what. I am not in it for today or tomorrow but we are here to do this together for a long period of time and I think that comes across on the plate and when we discuss different things that I am happy to go the extra mile for them and I try to do that every day. I sit around with my chefs and I tell them that you proved it today, that’s great, but our goal is prove it every day.
Chef Craig Connole: La Casa del Camino
Q: What inspired you to become a Chef?
Craig Connole: I started working at Gina’s Pizza in Corona Del Mar when I was 15 and I worked with Gina, it was just the two of us in the morning. It was quite the experience and I really learned a lot of my basics and work ethic from her. I really enjoyed it and had fun with it.
Q: What is your favorite thing to cook/eat of yours?
CC: When I am here, at K’Ya, I like to experiment. There are so many things I like to do like bake, barbeque. The fun thing for me is going home and seeing what is there and taking what we have and making something out of here. My favorite thing to eat is a really good sandwich.
Q: Where did you get the ideas for your menu?
CC: They all just come up. Originally it was a rustic French small plates bistro and what happened was it had been a Cal-Asian type of restaurant like pacific rim/California cuisine. So there were some favorites, like the poke and Hamachi salmon, when I took them off the menu, our regular customers wanted them back. The customers kept telling me what they wanted back on the menu so I started adding some things and it actually became a lot of fun to experiment so it really became an eclectic world cuisine—a little bit of everything.
Q: What is your best cooking tip?
CC: Don’t try too hard. You got have to just let it flow.
Q: How do you stay on top of food trends?
CC: Reading magazine such as Bon Appetite and Food and Wine. What I started doing more is, I am not really techy, but I just started looking at Pinterest and Thrillist.
Q: What does it mean to you to be voted one of OC’s favorite chefs of Laguna Beach?
CC: It’s flattering because I wouldn’t believe it. I think it means trying to be nice to people and spreading a little bit of good will has paid off. If I have made some people happy, they are rewarding me with this acknowledgment. What you put into this world is what you get back.
Executive Chef Ron Fougeray: Surf & Sand Resort
Q: What inspired you to become a chef?
Ron Fougeray: I’ve loved to cook since I was a little kid. My mother wasn’t a professional but she loved baking home style like pies and cakes. I took an interest really young. I took a lot of culinary classes as early as high school and from there I knew I loved the field and it’s grown more over the years when you start getting used the kitchen, it’s fun.
Q: What is your favorite thing to cook/eat of yours?
RF: That’s really a tough question because it changes with the seasons. I am a big fan of mushrooms. When the first mushrooms come out of the season, you haven’t seen them since the previous year, it’s kind of exciting. I am a big fish person, which fits really well with Splashes, we are on the sea so we specialize in fish. I can really go for a charred rib eye too with a glass of Cab. I grew up on New Jersey and went fishing with my dad. Fresh fish from the boat on the grill that night, there’s really nothing better than that.
Q: How do you stay on top of food trends?
RF: I read a lot of books, of course. I have a lot of friends both here and on the east coast, I’m sure we follow each other’s menu to see what we are doing. Now a days, you can see a lot on social media as far as pictures, and not to say that they are copied at all, but you see something or a flavor pairing and you wouldn’t have thought of it and you try it out—you put your own twist on it. And maybe some trends I have started, I am not sure.
Q: Is there a chef you admire the most? Who and why?
RF: There’s a lot of chefs I have had the pleasure of working for and met in my life. Georges Perrier is one of the chefs I have worked for six years. He had a 40 year reign of French cuisine in the country, he is still a close friend. I had the opportunity to meet Chef Gouraud in France who’s really the ‘Godfather’ of healthy cuisine, which fits really well with Splashes.
Q: What is your best cooking tip?
RF: If you have a great ingredient to start with, don’t get too crazy with it.
Q: What does it mean to you to be voted one of OC’s favorite chefs of Laguna Beach?
RF: It’s awesome. It means a lot to me. I know a lot of chefs on the list and they are all really great.
You Voted, Here are Laguna Beach’s 5 Best Culinary Geniuses Favorite Chefs in Laguna Beach
