Buvons Verified listing

After experimenting in the kitchen (while also hosting a stellar coffee popup), Buvons Wine Bar, the restaurant expansion from the neighboring Buvons Wine Shop, has opened under the watchful eye of owner and chef Alicia Kemper. With a sleek, French-meets-Californian menu that beautifully highlights the seasonal and vegetal, it is a reflection of a Long Beach small business owner with the resilience to move forward.

Perhaps there is no better representation of Buvons Wine Bar that Chef Alicia’s stellar sunchoke dish featuring different textures of the root vegetable. A beautifully savory sunchoke purèe. Sunchoke chips. Brunoise of sunchoke—fried and tossed in brown sugar, smoked paprika, and cayenne—that has just enough moisture in it to make a bacon-like quality. All surrounded by a ring of radicchio—a gorgeously pink Weiser Farms Rosalba radicchio variety that echoes Veneto and Castelfranco but with much more subtlety on the bitterness—tossed in a house-made vinaigrette with pickled pomegranate.

The result is a radical return to something that used to be ubiquitous throughout California as Chef Alicia partners with her kitchen manager, Zoe Unverferth: the bistro that focuses on seasonality, using their tiny-but-mighty garden to every extend they can, and elevated simplicity.

Written and photos by Brian Addison.

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