In her last year at UCLA, alumna Jill Bigelow dreamt of having a sit-down restaurant on campus.
Now, nine years later, she is pursuing that dream of accessible fine dining with her newly opened restaurant Provecho.
Provecho is Spanish for “enjoy” or “enjoy your meal.” This name tastefully describes the environment Bigelow and her husband, executive chef Gabriel Morales, have created in the new modern fine-dining Mexican restaurant, located in the Financial District of downtown Los Angeles.
“Gabe and I both come from hotel and restaurant backgrounds,” Bigelow said. “Five-star, five-diamond hotels … have a different outlook on how you see the guest. So we felt that it embodied the way we wanted people to feel when they come here.”
The restaurant offers small plates of food so that friends and families can order a variety and share each dish. Morales modernizes and embellishes traditional Mexican cuisine with an attention to quality fresh seafood and farmers’ market produce.
It is not surprising, then, that Bigelow and Morales’s own relationship began with food.
The couple met at Mi Piace, a classic Italian restaurant in Old Town Pasadena, when Bigelow was in high school and Morales was beginning culinary school. They’ve now been married almost three years and just last week welcomed a new baby into their family.
Morales admits that when he hangs up his apron after work, he is usually done cooking.
“We have our usual In-N-Out like everyone else,” Bigelow said. “(But) we’re kind of foodies in general … We just like fine food.”
Morales’s fine dining training and experience prepared him well for the new restaurant’s kitchen. He graduated from UC San Diego and trained in Paris and northern Italy before working as executive chef at five-star restaurants in the Four Seasons Hotel and the Beverly Hills Hotel.
One of Morales’s creations at Provecho is the coffee mole-crusted foie gras “parfait,” an interpretation of the French delicacy made with tomato jalapeño jam and topped with fresh cilantro. The menu also boasts black truffle mushroom and halibut ceviche, lobster chili rellenos, and beef sopes with house-made black beans.
“We’re really using top-notch stuff,” Morales said. “It’s making all the restaurants in the local area kind of step up to the plate.”
Next door is Provecho’s counterpart, the Remedy Lounge, which Bigelow describes as an “upscale urban watering hole.”
Remedy shares the same kitchen with the restaurant, but offers American-style fare with special drinks like a blueberry crush and a cucumber and gin martini.
The restaurant and lounge were designed with a nod to the environment, using recycled glass and reclaimed wood for the decor and furniture. Across the top of the entire length of the bar are glass cases displaying Morales’s personal tequila collection.
“We didn’t want the whole velvet rope, people waiting outside, Hollywood look-you-up-and-down type of place. We wanted it to be welcoming to people,” Bigelow said.
Behind the 3-foot-long sushi bar is a ceiling-high glass waterfall that offers a view into the kitchen. This transparency allows guests an inside look at how their food is made and fosters an environment of openness between the chefs and the guests.
Both Provecho and Remedy boast a popular happy hour, offering drink specials and a small menu at almost half the price of the regular menu.
The drink menu has an extensive variety of tequilas and creative specialty drinks made from freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juices. The Provecho margarita, the top-selling drink, is a fusion of cucumber and agave nectar, with a chile lime rim.
The restaurant’s red-carpet grand opening gala last weekend served family and friends hundreds of miniature menu items, house-made pastries (like empanadas with sweet apple and a hint of goat cheese), and freshly made drinks throughout the evening.
Bigelow said Provecho has significantly improved from its opening in December 2008.
“Day one (was) far from perfect,” she said. “But today I would be proud to welcome even the toughest food critic inside the restaurant.”
She and Morales created training and operation manuals to prepare Provecho as a blueprint for future restaurants, which will include restaurants like Provecho and other cuisines as well.
Her ambition is encouraging for students who wish UCLA offered a straight undergraduate business degree.
“(Students) can see that there are other entrepreneurs out there that take what they learned at UCLA and applied it to real life,” Bigelow said.
For the rest of us at UCLA who are fine-dining lovers, Bigelow’s success with Provecho can inspire us to dream as well. We can dream that she and her husband will return to create that long-awaited sit-down restaurant on campus.