Chaya Brasserie Celebrates 25th Anniversary

Chaya Brasserie celebrates it’s 25th anniversary in Beverly Hills with a special October 25 charity cocktail party.  Tickets for $25 include drinks and appetizers.  Chaya will “adopt" three schools in the C-CAP program by funding the program at each for a year.  The funding is especially appreciated during this year when the school board was not able to provide its usual funding due to the economy.  C-CAP is a program that provides culinary arts programs to high school students in at risk neighborhoods.  C-CAP also organizes and oversees annual student competitions and raises money for student scholarships at national culinary schools.   

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Corporate Executive Chef Shigefume Tachibe can consider himself and his tuna tartare creation very flattered indeed.  It has become a fixture on many menus, much like Los Angeles originals, such as the Cobb salad from the Brown Derby, the French Dip sandwich from Cole’s and Phillipe’s, the tartare cone from  Chef Tachibe first put the dish on the menu at Chaya Brasserie in 1983, and now it’s served just about everywhere, made with everything from mango to pears, prunes and butternut squash–but the original still tops our list.

Chef Shigefume Tachibe created the dish to please a dinner guest who wanted “something healthy and fresh with fish.”  So he mixed cubes of fresh, raw tuna with egg, chopped pickles and onion. Chef Tachibe began training in formal French technique at the age of fifteen at the Hotel Ban Show Row in Nagasaki, Japan, and to honor his Franco-Japanese cuisine, he named it "tuna tartare."  The rest is history.

The original version remains purist in Beverly Hills, still served with avocado and a squeeze of lemon. At Chaya Venice, the tartare is spiked with wasabi; in San Francisco, it’s with apple and chile-miso vinaigrette.  Chaya still sells more than 35,000 orders a year.

Chaya is especially proud to serve this signature dish during all  25^th Anniversary celebration in Beverly Hills this season.  It honors an unprecedented history of restaurants owned and operated by the same family both in Japan and California for 390 years. To mark the occasion, CHAYA Brasserie is launching a new menu, a new charity partnership with the C-CAP (Careers in culinary Arts Program) and a month-long anniversary campaign in October. 

He then served as an exchange chef at the restaurant Gannino in Milan, Italy, at the age of 21. Upon returning to Japan, he was named Executive Chef at La Marée de Chaya in Hayama, Japan. His experience with French and Italian cooking coupled with Japanese cuisine became the fusion that is now synonymous with Chaya Restaurants.

 

In 1981, Yuji Tsunoda, whose family has owned restaurants in Japan for over three hundred and ninety years, invited Chef Tachibe to accompany him and his family to Los Angeles to open the acclaimed La Petite Chaya, bringing a new style of “la nouvelle cuisine, which is now referred to as Franco-Japonaise.”  Chef Tachibe continues to direct the menus and kitchens of the four California eateries, including Chaya Brasserie Los Angeles, Chaya Venice, Chaya Brasserie San Francisco and Chaya Downtown Los Angeles which just opened in March 2009.

 

Chef Tachibe also created and directed the launch and expansion of M Café, the cafeteria- style restaurant, featuring contemporary macrobiotic cuisine that first opened in 2005.

 

Chaya Brasserie’s Tuna Tartare
(Makes 6 to 8 servings)

1 pound sushi-grade bigeye or ahi tuna, cut into 1/4-inch dice
2 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon finely chopped sweet pickles
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
1 pinch finely chopped tarragon
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives
1 tablespoon finely chopped green peppercorns
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 avocado, thinly sliced cross-wise
Melba toasts or crostini, for serving
In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the Dijon mustard. Slowly whisk in the olive oil until emulsified and mayonnaise-like. Stir in the pickles, onion, tarragon, chives and peppercorns. Stir in the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Fold the dressing into the tuna, spread on toasts or crostini and top with a slice of avocado.

Chaya Brasserie, 8741 Alden Dr., Beverly Hills; 310-859-8833 or thechaya.com