The freshest crab experience usually happens around a newspaper-covered table, wielding crackers and picks to scoop out sweet meat from steamed, brick-red shells. But at Solbar, the sun-drenched restaurant at Solage, Auberge Resorts Collection, executive chef Gustavo Rios offers a delightful alternative: cracking open his signature Canned Crab.
The playful dish arrives in an actual tin, filled with sweet chunks of Dungeness crab meat doused in chili-lime vinaigrette with pickled and fresh Persian cucumbers, garnished with a sprinkle of matcha and fresh herbs like mint, cilantro, and basil. Guests open the lid while gathered around outdoor firepits with panoramic views of the Vaca Mountains in the heart of Calistoga. The vibe is “a little more whimsical, creative, and fun,” says Rios. The dish is only available in season (generally from February to April).
The chef, who originally hails from Baja, Mexico, has long had an affinity for all varieties of crab—including stone and blue claw—inspired by a childhood spent on both the East and West Coasts of the U.S. for his father’s job as a marine biologist. Now, he celebrates the local Dungeness crab, which he sources from his favorite seafood supplier, Monterey Fish Market.
The nearly 50-year-old market is a mainstay of San Francisco’s Pier 33, having long lured the region’s iconic chefs, such as Alice Waters and Thomas Keller, with its consistently fresh seafood straight from the source. Rios was introduced to the venerable company in 2005, when he worked at Keller’s Bouchon in Yountville, California, and has been a devoted client ever since.
The market comes alive before the sun rises. There, hauls from all over the Bay Area converge, with workers in long orange aprons processing seafood that ranges from tiny pink smelt and slim, silver razor clams to massive bluefin tuna that require a wheeled trolley to maneuver.
Rios sources a range of seafood from the market, including black cod (which he marinates in sake), rockfish (served in an aromatic coconut-lemongrass broth), and, of course, Dungeness crab for his Canned Crab. “The meat is sweet and firm, and just has this nice umami flavor to it,” he says.
So enamored with the Dungeness is Rios that he features it in other dishes. It goes into his Crabonara, a play on spaghetti carbonara that’s inspired by Crab Backs, another acclaimed dish served at the historic San Francisco seafood counter Swan Oyster Depot. At Solbar, Rios gives the delicacy a twist with traditional cheese-and-butter sauce.
“We clean the crab and save all those juices and all that butter, and then we blend it with the eggs and cream,” Rios explains of his Crabonara. “So now you have this concentrated crab flavor.”
The sauce goes atop tender strands of bucatini pasta—made from scratch—all of which is stuffed back into the crab shell and garnished with breadcrumbs, flecks of bacon, and a flurry of parmesan. Rios’s fluffy sourdough Parker House rolls are served on the side as a vehicle for scooping up every last ounce of the rich sauce. The rolls also pair well with the Canned Crab.
In fact, from the early morning Monterey Fish Market bustle to the serene evening service at Solbar, Rios’s Canned Crab represents something quintessentially Californian—fresh, local ingredients transformed by creativity.
At any given time, the menu at CanoeHouse—the open-air, oceanfront restaurant at Mauna Lani, Auberge Resorts Collection, set on the Big Island’s Kohala Coast—features maitake, shimeji, and king oyster mushrooms. The ingredients aren’t just local; they’re deeply personal for the restaurant’s executive chef, Rhoda Magbitang.
“I just love mushrooms in general,” says Magbitang, whose résumé also includes working for chefs like José Andrés and Josiah Citrin and overseeing the culinary program at The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern, Auberge Resorts Collection, in Los Olivos, California. “They are one of my favorite things to cook, because they are a blank canvas. You can really influence the flavor so easily, but at the same time, they have their own distinctness.”
But one local mushroom was an intriguing mystery to the chef when she arrived at Mauna Lani in 2024: lion’s mane, a spherical white fungus that sprouts with long, delicate tendrils so magical they almost appear like something conjured from Jim Henson’s imagination. That is, until they appeared in her kitchen.
It all began when Benjamin Lillibridge, founder of the Big Island’s Mālama Mushrooms farm, was dining on Magbitang’s seasonally focused, Japanese-inspired cuisine at CanoeHouse and noticed a preponderance of mushrooms on the menu. “I knew that whatever genius was behind the creation of it was a mycophile,” he says.
Lillibridge founded Mālama Mushrooms in 2015, after studying environmental science and learning about the myriad benefits of fungi for health and the environment. It was inspiring enough to urge him to start growing mushrooms in a lava-tube cave in South Kona, Hawai‘i. Today, he operates out of temperature-controlled warehouses 30 miles from Mauna Lani. On an island with year-round warmth and sun, the stable, ambient environment with a consistent temperature and humidity helps cultivate consistently perfect mushrooms.
In the warehouse, the mushrooms grow in a highly controlled fruiting area—more scientific lab than idyllic Hawaiian locale. But the result is a steadfast, sustainably grown ingredient. To harvest the mushrooms, farmers walk through dark rows of shelves, using a knife to cut and gently twist off fully grown fungi before boxing them up for delivery.
Inspired by Magbitang’s apparent obsession with mushrooms, Lillibridge brought in his own samples—including the striking lion’s mane—for the chef to try. The gift was an opportunity for her to flex her creative muscles. To enhance the mushroom, she created a new barbecue sauce incorporating koji, a fermented rice product, with Maui pineapple, onions, chili, and maple syrup. The lion’s mane has its own distinct flavor, while soaking up all the flavors of the tangy barbecue sauce. “It really took on this amazing flavor profile,” she says. The dish was a revelation, and today, lion’s mane is exclusive to Magbitang’s kitchen.
Every week, Lillibridge personally drops off the shaggy white pom-poms to the CanoeHouse kitchen. “He knocks on the back door of the restaurant and delivers everything himself, which is so cool,” says Magbitang, who then transforms them into her signature side dish, Local Mushrooms, which also happens to be vegan. The lion’s mane is prepared with Ali‘i (king oyster) mushrooms for texture, plus aromatics like shallots, garlic, and thyme, and sake and olive oil. She finishes it off with her house-made koji barbecue sauce, toasted cashews, and pickled shallots.
Of course, CanoeHouse is also known for more widely expected seafood specialties—Kona kampachi and Kauai shrimp, for instance—but it is beloved mushrooms that add something delightfully unexpected to the menu.
The AT Ferrell Clipper at Barton Springs Mill, located 22 miles outside of Austin, Texas, in the agricultural town of Dripping Springs is a relic. The 1930s-era machine removes harvest debris from corn, exactly the way it was done 100 years ago. Despite its long tenure, the heritage apparatus does its job—preparing the grain for use as cornmeal, grits, and polenta—in a way that modern equipment has yet to fully replicate.
“The kind of production and variety that you get from Barton Springs Mill is just nothing I’ve ever seen before in Texas,” says Bradley Nicholson, executive chef at Commodore Perry Estate, Auberge Resorts Collection. Nicholson is a regular around the mill, frequently visiting to pick up grains for the dishes he’s been creating at the hotel’s destination restaurant, Lutie’s, since it opened in 2020.
Before the corn can make the journey from Dripping Springs to Austin, it must first, in a sense, go back in time. That was the idea behind Barton Springs Mill’s creation: First opened in 2016 by Texas native James Brown, the granary mills heirloom grains like wheat, corn, rice, rye, and spelt, as well as lesser-known heritage grains like Red Fife wheat and Mediterranean flour—the latter a revived Colonial-era wheat that was grown all over Texas in the early 20th century. The commitment to these grains isn’t just for the sake of flavor; it also benefits local communities by connecting small farmers with chefs like Nicholson.
Nicholson is partial to Barton Springs Mill’s cornmeal, rice flour, and blue corn meal, as well as a few rarer whole wheat grains, such as Yecora Rojo—a bread flour with a buttery, malty flavor profile—and Rouge de Bordeaux, which is prized for its deep, nutty character and standout fermentation properties.
While Barton Springs Mill’s grits remain a Lutie’s menu staple, reflecting Nicholson’s Southern upbringing in Jackson, Mississippi, they also appear in more innovative dishes that harken back to the chef’s time in kitchens in San Francisco and Denmark, including the Chickpea dish, flecked with blue corn that the chef puffs into corn nuts, and the Blue Crab Custard made with eggs and smoked fish broth, lacquered with a seaweed glaze and set atop grits. But the granary’s grits feature most deliciously in Lutie’s signature Estate Bread, a collaboration between Nicholson and his wife, executive pastry chef Susana Querejazu.
At Commodore Perry Estate, Auberge Resorts Collection’s destination restaurant, Lutie’s, executive chef Bradley Nicholson prepares his Chickpea dish with heritage grains from Barton Springs Mill, plus green corn and fermented herbs.
Nicholson’s Blue Crab Custard, a version of the Japanese dish chawanmushi featuring grits from Barton Springs Mill.
The estate bread draws inspiration from Nicholson’s days at chef Matt Orlando’s acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant, Amass, where the potato bread was made using fermented potatoes folded into the dough. When he thought about what Lutie’s version should be, a base of grits made sense, both as a Texan dish and an ode to his Southern roots.
Nicholson’s bread starts with grits, cooked in buttermilk and salt and fermented for about a week at room temperature before they’re folded into sourdough English muffin dough. “There’s this really awesome sourness that you get from the corn and a little bit of the texture as well on the outside,” he says. “It gets charred on the grill—it’s super delicious.”
Most of all, for the chef, sourcing grains from nearby fields isn’t about convenience at all; it’s about creating a menu that celebrates the Texas terroir and agricultural heritage. The journey from field to mill to Lutie’s kitchen is short, but it connects diners to the land, history, and community of central Texas. As Nicholson puts it, “quality of ingredients and freshness of ingredients go hand in hand.”