Inside the Most Immersive Restaurant in the U.S.

There is a chef that is creating one of the most immersive dining experiences anywhere in the world. A place that goes beyond what a restaurant has ever done, with outfits designed by an experimental fashion designer, a soundtrack produced by an award-winning indie music producer, a building created by a futuristic architect that has completely transformed the Los Angeles landscape, and produce grown by a farmer literally trying to recreate the jungle in his backyard. And the food itself is, at the same time, avant-garde modern art, while also being closer to the earth than ever before. This is Jordan Khan, and today we have the incredibly special opportunity to go behind the scenes, peel back the layers, and take an increasingly wild journey through space and time into his culinary universe. There's Destroyer, where Jordan has completely reinvented brunch food to make you focus on the present. Meteora, his one-Michelin starred restaurant that takes us back in time to our hunter-gatherer days. And finally, Vespertine, the two-Michelin starred crown jewel where floral space rocks and iridescent pools show us what food might be in the year 3000. It's gonna be crazy. Vespertine and Meteora may be case studies in crazy world-building, but Destroyer is where you can have a surreal experience without expecting it. It's a casual brunch spot, but it's just as experimental as his other restaurants, and everything isn't what it seems. A work lunch in the U.S. is a sandwich or a salad or something that you can sort of eat while you're talking about what happened at work or while you're actually working, whereas Destroyer is sort of hard to do that. We have conventional things like sandwiches, but they're not so basic that you forget what you're eating and you're just talking to somebody eating a turkey sandwich. We like to put together compositions of food that require your investment of presentness, so we hide things. Jordan gets us to rethink our relationship to food in subtle ways by injecting a little fun into the mundane. So just when you think you've ordered a familiar dish like a yogurt parfait, Jordan surprises you with this sugar cube melon bowl with chewy tapioca pearls and the best, most intensely flavored melon you'll ever have. As exotic as some of Jordan's creations seem, the common denominator is that they're all delicious and rich and hearty, exactly what you'd want from your lunch, like this soothing and peppery sweet corn porridge with an egg yolk you have to crack open yourself. Sometimes we find humor in doing some of these very, very trite overdone things and to offer it in a way that is a different perspective on how to eat a salad. The American way to eat a salad, for the most part, is to get a bunch of ingredients, chop it up, toss it all together. The way that I like to eat salad is more capricious. Separate all the ingredients and eat through it. You just, you just are excited to eat because you're learning new things as you're eating it. This is kind of a very common Destroyer dish where the more you dig, the more you discover. There's a lot of stuff hidden. It's food that brings you and makes you more present and I think that ultimately that's what I'd like to see in the future, which is us being more present during our meals so that we can actually engage with the ingredients in a deeper way. Every single one of these dishes has layers to it where what you see on top is not really what's going to be underneath. In this case, you see a lot of these beautiful little chips on top. Underneath you have a beef tartare. It's about surprise. It's about discovery. It's about enjoying flavors and just being that little bit more present in your meal. Jordan's known for immersive dining experiences that border on live theater, which we'll get to explore later. But what makes his restaurant special is their emphasis on style and substance. He believes food shouldn't just look or taste good, it has to be good for you. So we headed to the Biodynamic Farm, which is like his revolving pantry of some of the most unique produce you wouldn't even associate with California. Biodynamic Farming tries to replicate what nature does in the wild. You get this integration of different species. You get things working together the way it happens in a forest or a prairie or a jungle. Any natural ecosystem has a balance between plants and animals and insects. Look up on the hillsides, nobody's irrigating. Fertilizing, pruning, disease controlling, none of it. And it's thriving year after year after year, century after century after century. Let nature take its course for generations and reap what you sow. It's an idea that we've become estranged from in a food system that's mostly reliant on industrial agriculture and monocultures. Normal healthy organic soil has about 10,000 different types of bacteria in one gram of soil. He's had a billion. As a chef, my primary objective is to just find the best tasting things, right? The other half, which is the more important half, the vitality of the ingredient, the physiological impact of that ingredient. If you have a healthy ecosystem, anything you eat from there, you eat the health of that ecosystem. It now becomes part of you. When you have a closed ecosystem where the animals feed the plants and the plants feed the animals, you get a sanctuary of diverse species and interesting ingredients without detracting from the land. Tree spinach, chaya, they make this medicinal herb. They make drinks out of it. No one sells this. No one even knows what the hell it is. So we're picking oranges 12 months a year. Just so you understand, this is out of season. A farm like this, just practicing biodynamic principles and the fact that it incorporates so much of the native ecosystem here, seasonality becomes much more paradoxical. Sapote is an Aztec word meaning soft, sweet fruit. The white sapote, this was considered medicinal to the Aztecs. When they had an acid condition and sores in the mouth and you just can't stand anything too sweet or too acidic, you can eat this. White sapote is the only fruit that I've never been able to bring to a chef, even a masterful one like Jordan, and they can figure out something to do with it. You know what? You know what? We'll take him. The biggest misconception about Jordan's restaurants is that they're completely futuristic, but he wants the purity of incredible ingredients to take you back to a simpler time where we hunted and gathered and ate what we found. So before we journey to the future at Vespertine, we need to first revisit the past. The more we advance in the digital age, in many ways, we become further away from our source code. Meteora, much like Destroyer, helps you be more present for what you're ingesting. It is really thought of as a sacred ritual and less of a mundane thing that we take for granted. First off, the vibe of this place is insane. It's got all this greenery, a lot of smooth curves, very naturalist kind of feel to it. You've got an opening in the ceiling so that this fresh air comes in. It's one of the coolest designed places that I've ever been. These are the raw weather vane scallops coming from Alaska. They've been marinated in calamansi juice. This is called assin sabut. It's a vessel of salt that comes from the Philippines. Only one family in the world still collects salt in this manner. They take these clay pots and then fill them with the ash of burnt coconut husk and then sift seawater through continuously and collect the salt. Jordan Khan and his whole team, I feel like, are all about finding these one-off producers, these one-of-one type people that are really, really interesting but so dedicated to their craft. It shows in everything that they do. The yam is a dish that we took kind of an ancient technique called rescoldo, which is essentially cooking vegetables in ashes. The ashes on the skin create a secondary skin that creates a bit of a leatheriness to it. The interior is this ultra luxurious, silky, sweet texture. Every ingredient has its own rich history and story to tell, and Jordan sources each from one-of-a-kind partners. For dessert, we had wild cacao that Jordan gets from a special supplier in Brazil. She goes along the river systems of the Amazon meeting different families and basically teaches them where to find and how to harvest and process wild cacao. The genetic purity of this cacao is actually where all cacao comes from. And these are trees that are actually several millennia old. What an experience this place is. Really, this is about holistic cooking. It's about taking you back to how we ate before where we were eating very natural foods. So they don't use a lot of things that we would normally find. No refined sugars, no white flour. It's honestly not what I was expecting coming in. I'm just like so giddy with how good the food is. You're just feeding really clean foods that come from the earth and it hits that right balance of like trendy, but also has tons of substance to it. So I'm super excited for Vespruccin tomorrow because I can't even imagine how different and potentially how much better it could get. Taken together, Jordan's restaurants make up an epic tapestry that tells a story about where we come from and where humanity should go. But crafting a narrative this immersive takes a village. Every single detail in Jordan Kahn's universe is part of a larger vision. From the wardrobe of his servers, to the sound design and architecture of his spaces, and each requires a different partner to help bring his vision to life. I wanted to try to make with this brand the capacity to walk out looking like a Jedi, but also the capacity to walk out looking just under the radar. Like people, if they look at you, they're like, you know, they can't really categorize. So this is a piece that's part of our collection that we originally had designed for Vespruccin. It's very minimal. Doing things like hiding buttons, eliminating superfluous details actually take things sometimes to another world. People's brains are so used to seeing those things. The absence of them is sometimes what circumvents the prefrontal cortex of like, I know what this is. This is the shirt that the chefs wear right now. I wanted them to go apronless. It does two things. One is when you don't have an apron, you become more mindful. You're getting closer to mastery. When you have a very busy day, you get through an entire service and you look and you're perfectly clean because every gesture that you made was a thoughtful, intentional one. Jordan's built a community of craftspeople who are as obsessive about detail and purity of raw ingredients as he is. It's a movement that extends beyond food, of different artists trying to help us see beyond obvious surfaces and appreciate beauty in the depths. This is wool, but it is, it's extremely breathable and it is so resilient that we have tunics that are six years old that look brand new. They're very, very, very particular about the materials that they work with and a lot of ancient looms, so a lot of the stuff is handmade. It's more natural product and therefore it lasts longer. These actually get better with age, so. You see this isolated and you might say that's a dark gray, but then when you see them next to each other, they're actually both warm grays, but this starts to suddenly become red. This starts to suddenly become blue. It's like a optimization of sensitivity, we might say. We're so inundated with noise and color that I think people have become very desensitized just by necessity. From destroyer to meteora, each world is a unique way to experience Jordan's purpose, which is to feel present and grounded and in tune with nature. But Vespertine is Jordan's genre-bending masterpiece. It's not just a restaurant, but an artistic medium to explore food with more than just the sense of taste. And you get what you want out of the experience. On its surface, Vespertine can just be a very good restaurant. And at its deepest, that can go back eons. Moments of your consciousness that help you remember things that you had forgotten, feel things that you never felt, pathways for people to access those memories that they didn't know that they had inside of them. Vespertine exists in the very center of this Venn diagram of art, but it's centered around eating, which is our most important sacred practice. A sanctuary where that very simple ritual can be felt in its most deep and profound way. So first up are the weather vane scallops. These are from Alaska. So you have some slices of raw scallop. It's seasoned with concentrated passion fruit juice and some aji embryo chili. You also find these beautiful golden raspberries and impatient flowers. And then on top, there's these coarse radish buttered squeals the kitchen makes. Each dish requires the full engagement of your senses and is as architectural as the building we're in. Nothing forces you to savor the moment like an ice cube bowl that's been painstakingly carved and polished just to melt before your eyes. These are raw prawns caught by a father and son off the coast of Hawaii and served in a fruity and fragrant broth of quince, plum vinegar, and aerated prawn mousse. The architecture of our space is so significant as a character, but it's made using very conventional building materials to make extraordinary things. The waffle is the brainchild of Eric Owen Moss, a legendary LA architect known for his whimsical and futuristic designs. Jordan first saw it when it was under construction and became obsessed with it and just knew he had to house Vespertine in it. Each of the columns kind of do their own thing and then there's a facade which is made of steel and glass and actually is attached on the four corners on the roof but the rest of it just hangs. So the building actually wiggles with seismic movement and it's set on a rubberized pad. Jordan's spaces bring together beauty and functionality in a revolutionary way. They aren't just for show, they're intentionally designed to make you feel certain things. The high ceilings here in the waffle allow the airy and at times unsettling music to echo and envelop you when you're eating. It's more similar to immersive live theater than a restaurant thanks to the work of Jordan's longtime collaborator and sound architect. Another interesting thing about this particular medium and working with Jordan is it's not like a traditional song where you have to do you know verse chorus we've got to get to get to it real quick to keep people's attention. It's the opposite. It's like how do we make people lose track of time entirely and it's like a three-hour experience. Yeah. You know it doesn't feel like that. If you think of one of the best bites of food that you've ever had, it doesn't matter where it is. Maybe it was your grandmother's, maybe it was in Southeast Asia. If you were to somehow have a magic wand and transport that exact bite to the corner of Hollywood and Vine, it would not taste the same. Taste is no longer a singular thing. Taste is now connected to all of these other things. And we're not even really using synths here. We're using mainly just natural elements and then adjusting frequency bands and that's just the sound of ocean finding a frequency that we carve and pulling it up 24 db so it creates a tone and then washing it out with reverb and then stretching it and slowing it down. This is the bulk. More moving frequencies basically taking these bands and just kind of adjusting them down. This is a tremolo effect that's kind of automating in and so you can see if I pull it up the track is really cutting yeah and then you know we find a little home for over here. So there's rhythm but you're not really thinking about it. We wanted to have the bass, we wanted to feel it but we realized that just a little bit too much of bass all the wine glasses start rattling. Oh. It's just little moments like that where it flourishes and we're like oh wait did I hear something? No. Continue eating this amazing food. I don't know if it was part of a dream or part of a past life or part of somebody else's life but I remembered experiencing somebody laying in a meadow of flowers and when they stood up it left the impression of their body in the flowers but none of the flowers were crushed. And so we created a dish that was eating a moment of the delicate nature of flowers and we had to figure out a way to create depth with life. I'm not really going to describe the taste I feel like I can describe the taste you can come here you can find out what that's like instead for this meal I'm going to react it I'm just going to say what kind of emotions these dishes evoke. The emotion that comes to my head is just joy because it's so colorful it's so bright it's so happy it really does feel like you're almost like frolicking through a garden. This is gorgeous. In Hawaii there are a rare group of fish that are of the utmost cultural importance referred to as the members of the deep seven. Our chefs have a direct relationship with the fishermen all over the Hawaiian islands. We are proudly serving the kinki fish one of the members of the deep seven. Obsidian mirrors were used in ancient Mexican culture as pathways of divination. Shamans would be able to look at their reflection in the obsidian mirror they would gain access to the ancestral realm. You're essentially accessing the wisdom of everybody that came before you so that you can live a better more fulfilling life in this moment. When we talk about Vespertine taking you into the future this is an exact example of it. There are very few dishes that I come across now where I'm genuinely like how on earth did they do that? This is one of them and it's just such a unique dish that feels almost ephemeral. Every single time you look at it it's going to be different. Everything has just kind of gotten better and better and better and weirder and more interesting in the best way possible. This is gorgeous. Of course the ethereal almost otherworldly feel of Vespertine is designed to transport you but that doesn't always mean to a different place in time. Some of these dishes force you to take in the present moment and enjoy the pure bliss of a truly sublime bite. That is one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth. We had quail prepared four ways. First the quail breast, then the quail egg emulsion, and now a quail egg wrapped in an ohasanta leaf and a quail donut. You think it'd be too much but at each turn he's making you see the same ingredient from different angles appreciating its smokiness and its herbaceousness its savoriness and its sweetness. When Jordan basically said that he wanted me to be present in this meal, this dish is the epitome of that. I cannot think of anything else other than how incredible this is. Well I'm gonna cry. I'm not actually but almost. That is in my mind as close to a perfect bite as you can get. Live in the moment, be present, and enjoy. It's a emulsion on top made of magnolia blossoms and the plate itself gets painted with a toffee made of roasted yeast. Garnished around them are some dried husk cherries and some bugonia leaves. One of the most fascinating things about our medium is it's a time travel device. It can awaken memories but it can also awaken memories from past lives. Embedded in our DNA are thousands of years of memories, our behaviors, our instincts, and food was there throughout the whole time. So the final few courses we've moved downstairs into the lounge. We started off with a really hot bowl. The idea here is that we eat it slowly just to come savor the experience. It is really sort of calming. I feel like you end on such a high upstairs of just these whirlwind of crazy dishes and you come here and you get this dish that just slowly creeps on you. It just feels like a warm heart. It feels like something is embracing you as you're eating it. Unexpected but a great start to the hurt. I have never had a dessert with uni on it. It's a little bit frightening as a combination. It's a bit unsettling when you kind of first look at it but I am really curious about this combination so the feeling I'm getting here is unexpected. Surprise. The white chocolate is so smooth and the uni is so smooth as well so they kind of meld together. It's kind of like the same principle of like salted chocolate where it's like sweet and a little bit salty. This is kind of the same thing and those preserved walnuts are beautiful. From destroyer to meteora to vespertine to even running a successful covid takeout operation serving comfort foods inspired by his southern cuban and mexican heritage it's clear that Jordan's capable of immense versatility. But why go this far at vespertine? What is its potential impact on the culinary world? In fine dining menus and meals are highly structured. Service is hyper attentive. But Jordan asks you to sit with your disbelief. In a time of mindless consumerism art like this opens the door to having more uncomfortable and adventurous experiences in general. Not to mention being an incubator for innovation. The way Jordan and his team are able to weave together not only different mediums from fashion to music to architecture but also different time periods from the past to the present to the future shows their unique versatility. It's weird and thought-provoking and challenging at times but isn't that the point of all great art? In Jordan's culinary universe he taps into something innate to all of us. A curiosity for what lies beyond or beneath the surface of our everyday reality. You arrive as a skeptical guest then you become a wanderer on an odyssey across millennia and you leave with a new taste for adventure.