SF Chef Returns Home to Launch Tahoe's Hottest New Restaurant

On a Monday evening in June, I found a version of Tahoe City I hadn't seen in a while - one that came with a feeling of hope and possibility, of newness and revitalization. I walked up the sidewalk, passing beneath tall pines that filtered views of Lake Tahoe before crossing the street and stepping inside a small restaurant in the middle of town called Sylva.

Inside, the restaurant was readying for another night of business before opening its doors. Servers polished glassware. Cooks prepped ingredients in the open kitchen, which faces a row of bar stools. Amid the bustle, co-owners Chata Villa and chef Andrew Shimer stepped out of the back kitchen and greeted me in the middle of their new restaurant.

Sylva, Latin for forest, is a food-lovers restaurant where the menu changes often, the music plays loudly, and diners are encouraged to relax with friends and family. Shimer describes it as fine dining without the white table cloths. Behind a row of tables on the far wall, a mural depicts light streaming through trees. It's a perfect representation of Tahoe, minus the overdone wood cabin look or the endless plays off the big blue lake. The forest vibe is serene - and then you go into the bathroom, where the speakers blast their own soundtrack of punk rock.

Shimer and his staff make everything in house, including cured meats, fermented and pickled vegetables and all of the desserts. They source ingredients from local ranches, farms and foragers - they have "a guy" who forages all over Northern California and comes back with chanterelles, ramps, morels, wild asparagus or whatever he finds. Shimer and Villa sometimes forage locally in Tahoe, too. The wine list features small-batch, organic, biodynamic wines from craft wineries in the United States and Europe with a selection that you will rarely see on any other wine menu in Tahoe, Villa said.

Shimer and Villa know the ins and outs of the restaurant business in Tahoe as well as anyone. They're Tahoe residents who live on the West Shore and have spent years working in restaurants near and far. When they opened Sylva last fall, they set out to create a restaurant they'd want to go to. They aspired to open a restaurant that's not just good for Tahoe - a qualifier you'll often hear about restaurants here - but good, period.

I sat down with Shimer and Villa at a table outside, in front of the restaurant and next to the sidewalk, where pedestrians strolled by. Shimer grew up in Tahoe City. I did, too. We both know that this town has experienced ups and downs over recent decades. Tahoe City once was the beating heart of North Lake Tahoe - full of restaurants, bars and shops, a lot of which have become distant memories. It still has a lot of well-respected, iconic restaurants, but they've been around for awhile and haven't necessarily needed to evolve. What the town has needed are new businesses with fresh energy that can make it for the long run in a seasonal economy. But Tahoe City has struggled to compete with the villages at Palisades and Northstar. Truckee has surpassed Tahoe City with newer, innovative restaurants and nightlife.

Still, Tahoe City has something those places don't: the lake.

Five years after the start of the pandemic, life seems to be settling into a new phase for Tahoe City. Sylva isn't the only new business in town. The newly renovated evo hotel and Sierra Surf Club, located a block down the street in the old Blue Agave building, are also generating buzz. Tahoe City is also seeing a resurgence of younger residents and second-home owners who are looking for vibrant and different places to eat, Shimer said.

"The clientele in Tahoe City has definitely changed," Shimer said. "People going out to dine are younger and looking for a little more excitement in restaurants. We wanted our restaurant to be lively. We don't want it to feel like you have to behave yourself."

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Early in his career, Shimer left Tahoe City for San Francisco to pursue a culinary education in some of the city's well-known restaurants, like Aqua and the Waterfront, before becoming the executive chef at Oakland's Mezze for five years. Eventually, the mountains called him home. "I love San Francisco, I love the whole culture, I love the whole restaurant scene, but I'm a small-town kid at heart," he said.

He moved back to Tahoe City to work at a restaurant called Fiamma's, which coincidentally was housed in the same building that Sylva now occupies. Eventually, Shimer landed at Christy Hill, one of Tahoe City's standout restaurants on the lakefront. He worked there for 12 years. When the opportunity came to start his own restaurant, Shimer was ready for a change: "I wanted to step back from fine dining," Shimer told me, "but still do innovative fun food, but more casual so people aren't thinking about it as a special occasion place but a place they can go weekly and see what we're doing."

Villa is from Peru. She visited Tahoe for the first time in 2002 to snowboard and work at a ski resort. Five winters later, she decided she was staying for good and Tahoe has been her home ever since. In 2009, she started tending bar at the Bridgetender, a Tahoe City landmark overlooking the Truckee River that serves pub fare.

Shimer and Villa met through mutual friends and from working in restaurants in the same small town. When they were first getting to know each other, after Shimer's shift ended at Christy Hill, he'd go to the Bridgetender on the nights Villa worked behind the bar. Now, they're married, pursuing a dream they'd sketched out together and running a restaurant.

The time was nearly 5 p.m., and both Shimer and Villa had work to do. We walked inside and I slid onto a stool at the end of the counter facing the kitchen, where I watched the cooks assemble artful dishes and stoke the wood-fired oven. Diners ambled inside - mostly couples or groups of friends. Shimer worked the expo, eyeing each plate that left the kitchen, while Villa ran the front of the house.

The menu lists an array of dishes with a word of advice for ordering at the top: "To share or not to share." I decided to let Shimer take the lead on what I should try - there were too many decisions to make, and everything looked delicious. Soon, a small plate of pillowy sourdough focaccia slid across the counter. The sourdough starter is a family heirloom: Sylva chef de cuisine Kiana Cash sourced it from her mom's kitchen in southern Oregon. The bread is served with a side of house-churned, salted butter and a side of bagna cauda, an Italian dipping sauce that maximizes the use of all my favorite things: garlic, olive oil, anchovies. Shimer called it "Italy's version of ranch." I, for one, was just happy I didn't have to share.

The food reflects a bit of both Shimer and Villa. His passion for cured meats and charcuterie showed up in dishes like the maiale tonnato - where rose-shaped curls of house-cured pork loin seem to bloom on a plate smeared with tonnato, a tuna conserva and anchovy mayonnaise. The dish is topped with arugula salad, capers and cured egg yolk. The house-cured pork is like "carpaccio on steroids," Shimer said. The way he spoke about food - it was like watching a kid's excitement bubble up to the surface, hardly containable and very contagious. To me, the dish was savory and satisfying, more creative and original than the typical salad or charcuterie dish seen on so many menus. It's one of the many dishes that add up to make Sylva not just a good restaurant but a great one.

Villa's influence can be seen in the several Peruvian dishes on the menu, like Sylva's version of tequeños, a traditional food served in Peru. Sylva's version stuffs duck confit and cotija cheese in a wonton. The menu changes frequently, but the tequeños are so popular, they've become a Sylva mainstay.

Villa and Shimer had just returned from a brief visit to Peru in May, where they ate a lot of ceviche. Sylva's version is the hamachi ceviche tiradito, served in a bowl of leche de tigre, a lime-based fish sauce. Shimer added cantaloupe to the leche de tigre and pureed hamachi into the broth to give it more depth. Tiny cubes of crunchy vegetables topped the dish, alongside cancha chulpe - which Shimer described to me as Peru's version of corn nuts. The whole dish was a spread of color, flavors and textures.

Each dish arrived with an entirely different flavor profile: A dayboat scallop sat atop squash, peas, mushrooms and fava beans with a lemongrass coconut sauce. It was rich, light, with a bit of a peppery kick - "It's like summer is here," Villa said, stopping by while I was mid-bite.

Another medley of infused flavors: the pork belly, which is cooked for eight hours in a sous vide and finished in the wood oven, served with a sweet-and-spicy glaze and scallion pancakes. Infusing meats with flavor, watching them change over time - Shimer said these are the things that bring him joy and why he has so much passion for house-cured meats, charcuterie and sous vide-cooked meats. His license plate has an abbreviated version of "I heart pig."

For dessert, I had the restaurant's take on a Kit Kat bar for adults - deep, velvety chocolate with a crunchy, light crust of feuilletine, or crumbled crêpes, and hazelnuts, finished with a raspberry coulis.

Sylva opened its doors for the first time last fall, on the day after Thanksgiving. Already, the restaurant is generating buzz in local publications and giving Tahoe City something to be excited about on the brink of summer. Tahoe Quarterly named Sylva "Tahoe's best new restaurant," while Truckee's Moonshine Ink says Sylva is a place "that keeps you wanting to come back."

Going into their first summer at Sylva, Villa and Chata are finding the joy that comes from owning and building something of their own, despite the whirlwind of running a new restaurant and balancing a marriage and a life outside work. They're encouraged by the support of their community in Tahoe City - the key to survival in a resort town where tourists ebb and flow.

"I think we did build something that our little town needed," Shimer said.

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