The founder and owner of the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano, Evan Marks, is a certified Deadhead.
A tape listening station and Grateful Dead posters reside in a room at the farmhouse visitor center on campus.
There’s a certain irony in that, because the 28-acre Regenerative Organic certified farm and education center feels so alive.
Jonathan Zaidman, vice president of community at the Ecology Center, talks about the new Hearth outdoor dining experience.
(Don Leach/ Staff Photographer)
This year, the Ecology Center began offering monthly intimate dinners with acclaimed chefs at Hearth, a 36-seat live fire pavilion near the farmland toward the back of the property.
“Evan calls it the backstage pass,” said Colleen Culhane, engagement manager for the center, keeping with the music analogy.
Each month, the center welcomes a chef as part of the Jennifer and Anton Segerstrom Pavilion Chef in Residence Program. The chef is able to spend time with the growers, and cook with the team at the source using the unique bioregional ingredients from the farm.
Portland-based Chef Joshua McFadden was the resident chef for the first Hearth dinner at the Ecology Center on April 18.
(Laura Austin)
The result is an intimate experience where ticketed guests go behind the scenes, eating a meal with the chef as the food transitions from nature to nourishment.
Portland-based Chef Josh McFadden, who wrote a book called “Six Seasons,” took charge of the first Hearth dinner at the Ecology Center in April.
“It’s kind of like every chef’s favorite cookbook,” said Jonathan Zaidman, the center’s vice president of community. “It’s really about cooking within the seasonality, so it made a lot of sense for us. The last one was [prepared by] a chef named Marcelo Hisaki, who comes from Mexico City. He has Japanese parents, but was born and raised in Mexico. So [it was] a really interesting infusion of Latin and Asian cultures, with French training.”
Meals at Hearth at the Ecology Center are made using ingredients from the surrounding farmland.
(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)
The Hearth dinner for July, scheduled for July 18, will feature New York-based food writer, teacher and recipe developer Peter Barrett. The eight-course dinner is open to the public, with tickets available on the Ecology Center’s website, theecologycenter.org.
The new offering can be seen as a different take on the center’s successful Community Table program, a larger gathering and meal that happens twice a month.
“The intimacy here is the feature,” Zaidman said of the new Hearth dinners. “At the Community Table, it’s more about the energy.”
Hearth is a 36-seat live-fire farm dinner experience at The Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano.
(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)
The Ecology Center started in 2008 on a single acre on the property owned by the city of San Juan Capistrano. In 2018, Marks and his team consolidated with South Coast Farms on the remaining 27 acres, multiplying not only its land space, but the programs it offers.
“We think about our work in these three pillars: model, mentor and nourish,” Culhane said. “There’s so much that happens here, and all that is integrated, but big picture is that we’re really trying to transform this local culture here. The food is the lever, but the community is kind of the way. Just being a place where people can come and learn and be together and celebrate, and children can grow up, yeah, this is a special place.”
Zaidman pointed to loaves of sourdough bread in the farm stand co-op as a good example of the interconnections. The Ecology Center has its own bakery.
“The sourdough bread is at the farm stand, in the cafe, at the Community Table dinners and in the Hearth,” he said. “It’s just kind of building some economies of scale. We make our own pantry products, like jams and salsas, ferments and various other things, which are also tastefully sprinkled throughout the offerings.”
Fresh plums and grapes add to the dining experience at the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano.
(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)
Dining and Cooking