Culinary Statesman for the Information Age

John Sedlar

John Sedlar, the man behind Rivera (photo by Jordan Hall)

By Catherine Wagley

John Rivera Sedlar and his Food-focused Vision of Los Angeles

"I always tell my cooks to look at what's on the plate, that one square foot that belongs to the guest," Chef John Rivera Sedlar explains. "It's a sensory and very, very visual experience."

I am sitting at the low, wrap-around bar in the Playa Room at Rivera, Sedlar's still-young downtown restaurant, watching one of those sensory visual experiences take shape. A nonchalantly attentive cook is arranging a dish called Melon del Mar on white china. Two delicate, orange and green squares of cubed melon hold down the bottom right corner, while the red lobster shell at the top of the plate angles toward a circle of pink poached lobster meat at the bottom left. Three small, green chili cubes line up on the dish's right side. The result is a satisfying composition that I'm happy just to look at. Sedlar has cited the brazenly lush art of Georgia O'Keefe as an aesthetic influence, but this dish reminds me more of abstractionist Sam Francis – a collection of distinct, loosely open-ended dashes of color carefully organized on a plain white surface so that each "dash" has more than enough room to breathe.

If you add "expository" to "open-ended" and "carefully organized," you'll have a pretty accurate description of Sedlar's enterprise. Dining at Rivera is an educational experience as much as a culinary event. Every dish tells a specific story and every server on staff knows how to tell these stories – their training actually involves lessons in annunciation, pronunciation, and eye contact. It's rare to finish a meal at Rivera without knowing where your food comes from and how it fits into the sprawling, 3,000-year history of Latin Cuisine. The restaurant has three menus for three different dining rooms – the Playa, Samba and Sangre rooms – as well as a fourth, inclusive menu featuring overlaps and connections in Latin food. If you call a hotline before dinner, you can hear a recording of Sedlar cheerfully and thoroughly explaining the lineage of certain dishes.

Before arriving tonight, I spent nearly 20 minutes on the phone with Sedlar's voice, learning about ancient princesses and the legacy of gazpacho. Then, once here, seated and equipped with multiple menus, I was treated to further exposition on tamales, bread pudding, and tequila from my server, who was vigilant, charming, and clearly conscious of his responsibility.

This knowledge-dense, multimedia approach to dining makes Rivera feel like the restaurant equivalent of a Wiki, a decidedly 21st century venture obsessed with interlinking ideas, branching, and information sharing. The deep historical roots of Rivera's menu actually reinforce its information-age fluency, making its linking seem all the more complete and ambitious. "It's all intertwined now," explained Sedlar when I spoke with him two weeks ago in Rivera's stately Sangre Room. "It was a very big world, 10, even 20 years ago. The world's gotten smaller and smaller, so instead of looking at what's 100 miles away, we're looking across the ocean, asking, how does it all link in?"

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