Ojai Restaurant Review: The Dutchess

One of Ojai’s most anticipated restaurant openings, The Dutchess is a joint venture from a dream team of restaurateurs, bakers and chefs and brings innovative Burmese food to this little town.

The Dutchess main dining room. Photo by Mariana Schulze.

If there’s been a buzzword going around Ojai lately, it’s definitely been “The Dutchess.” The most highly anticipated restaurant opening in recent memory, it’s been the talk of the town for months. And for good reason: It is after all a collaborative project from a dream team of restaurateurs, chefs and bakers. But can it live up to the hype?

A joint venture between celebrated Los Angeles restaurateurs Zoe Nathan and Josh Loeb (Rustic Canyon), Ojai baker Kate Pepper (Kate’s Bread), pastry chef Kelsey Brito (Milo + Olive) and chef Saw Naing (Tallula’s), The Dutchess is a café cum bakery by day and a buzzing bar and Burmese restaurant by night.

Housed in a 1920s building on Ojai Avenue that was once home to the town’s very first bakery and more recently Azu, The Dutchess is named not after royalty but a century-old brick oven, which remains now serving as the dining room fireplace. With room for up to 180 guests, the restaurant is sprawling, with a café-bar at the front, a main dining room in the middle and a second bar, complete with lounge seating, pool table and access to a generous outdoor patio at the back.

Now Burmese food is not commonplace in Southern California and the few restaurants that serve it tend to focus on noodles and curries. Not The Dutchess. Here head chef Naing has given the menu his own, personal slant, inspired not just by his Burmese roots but also by the cooking of his Indian grandmother and his California upbringing.

Everything on the menu is sourced as locally as possible, with the majority of ingredients purchased within 50 miles. Seafood comes from the Channel Islands; pasture-raised beef is from Ojai’s Watkins Cattle Company; poultry from the Santa Ynez Valley; and fresh produce and herbs from a variety of local farms, including Ojai Roots and Earthtrine Farm as well as Nathan and Loeb’s very own 50/50 Farms.

A selection of dishes from The Dutchess in Ojai. Photo by Elise Freimuth

The menu kicks off with Finger Foods and Small Plates that are ideal to share or nibble on while sipping a cocktail. There’s a gorgeous, pillowy naan bread ($11) served with garlic herb butter that has a perfect crisp exterior, fluffy core and that distinctive charred flavor you only get from a tandoori oven. In early February there is a seasonal salad of Chanterelle mushrooms, radishes and confit leeks soaked in tea leaf oil, which Naing preserves in-house for a month. Served with a drizzle of spicy anchovy aioli, the salad ($18) beautifully balances the delicate flavors of the vegetables with a punch of umami.

Nothing says Burmese food more than a Tea Leaf Salad and at The Dutchess it is served with all the trimmings ($19). But the pièce de resistance is Naing’s signature dish, a lamb biryani ($30), which I’m told sells out each night. A dish traditionally cooked in a clay pot by sealing layers of rice and meat with a lid of inedible dough, Naing serves it with a cover of puff pastry. The moment you break through the pastry you’re hit with the fragrant aromas of cinnamon, cloves and cumin and it’s a pure, spicy indulgence after that.

Pastry chef Brito’s desserts continue the Burmese theme, with inventive adaptations to Southeast Asian classics like kulfi or lassi, an ubiquitous Southeast Asian yogurt drink that here takes the form of a passion fruit pie ($11); or a coconut crème brûlée ($10), a vegan reinvention flavored with lemongrass and lemon verbena and finished with toasted coconut and poached quince and pear.

Naing and Brito effortlessly marry the bounty of the local farming community with a complexity of Burmese-Indian flavors, resulting in a menu that is not just innovative but also unique to Ojai. Living up to all the hype and expectation and then some, The Dutchess has elevated our little town’s dining scene to impressive new heights.

The Dutchess
457 E. Ojai Ave, Ojai
805-640-7987

This article first appeared in the Ojai Valley News.