For Alder & Sage owner Kerstin Kansteiner, the restaurant had outgrown two things: a mornings-only mindset and its approach to food. As sunset hours and nighttime events started to click—and a literally-in-its-backyard farmers market—it was clear that evolution was needed.
“The restaurant demanded more. The neighborhood demanded more,” Kerstin said. “We had an amazing time with our previous chef—he helped define us—but it was time to evolve.”
When the space’s former chef chose to step back and move on, Kerstin began quietly scouting—popping into pop-ups, competitions, and collabs around town. One name kept showing up: Matthew Roberts.
“I’d see him everywhere—helping Got Your Back, popping up at Kitchen Lingo, working the chef competition. The dude can cook with a toaster oven,” she said, laughing. “Even more rewarding was how Chef altered the kitchen the moment he stepped in: They are more engaged. Less disconnected. And they deeply, deeply respect him. He literally hasn’t had a day off in a month straight—and it’s beginning to have ripple effects in how staff treat their work.”
Chef Matthew Roberts finds Alder & Sage’s new voice—with restraint and a lil’ larder magic.
“I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Chef Matthew said. “It’s humble food. Fresh produce. A little larder work. And some restraint.”
“Larder work” might’ve meant coating meat with fat to preserve it back in the day. But today, it is a chef’s modern pantry program. Fermenting. Pickling. Curing. Confiting. Dehydrating. Infusing oils, vinegars, syrups… Making pastes and powders to capture peak-season flavor. It’s zero-waste: stocks, garums, citrus preserves from trim… It’s shelf-stable mise that speeds service and cross-season consistency.
Done with tight labeling and small R&D cycles, it gives a kitchen agile, high-impact accents without heavy technique on the line. And it could explain why Chef Matthew’s overhaul has been quietly successful: Without so much as a pre-tasting, Kerstin signed off on his menus, launching straight into the Figuring It Out that many spaces spend weeks, if not months, on.
That confidence in expediting Chef Matthew’s work is likely due to how he stepped into the kitchen in the first place. He saw a solid neighborhood menu, one that could be “any good breakfast spot.” And his first move wasn’t shock therapy. It was subtraction.
“How do we lighten this up? How do we bring more produce to it? More seasonality?” he asked.
A produce-first philosophy centers Alder & Sage’s newest iteration.
Chef Matthew is re-centering Alder & Sage around the farmers’ market that literally happens at its doorstep. Citrus, pomegranates, persimmons, quince for seasonal jam: the team is pulling from market regulars and building plates that read like the stalls outside—vegetable-forward, bright, and simple.
“It’s not rocket science,” Roberts said. “It’s simple food with good ingredients—treated with a little love.”
That shows up everywhere, like in a house duck hash, whose livers turned in pâté, bones turned into stock. Or eggs sourced directly from Chino Valley Ranchers. It’s a menu rewritten to maintain a sense of identity while upgrading the inputs. The result is brunch and lunch that feel like Alder & Sage. And not a generic template or a coarse replacement.
Roberts talks about restraint the way other chefs talk about technique. He’s removed black pepper from most stations—“a clumsy ingredient,” he said, which, well, indeed—leaning instead on olive oil and salt. Of course, there are accents—dukkah, Aleppo chile oil, boquerones—but the bulk of the menu revolves around simplicity.
“Start with good ingredients and go from there,” he said. “A tomato at the height of summer? Kissed by the sun, a little salt, and call it a day.”
The cooking is intentionally legible. You can look at the plate and see what’s happening. Even the polenta—cooked with a light house stock made from trimmed greens and root scraps—lands as comfort without heaviness. Mushrooms from Long Beach Mushrooms are sautéed and brightened with a touch of vinegar and butter. Nothing more, nothing less—and genuinely great food.
The larder as compass
Roberts works from a larder the way some chefs work from a plancha. He has 25 pounds of lemons in process for preserved lemon, folds citrus into shakshuka, and keeps ramp oil from spring at the ready for winter dinners. Expect ferments and preserves to surface all over the menu, thoughtfully sparingly.
Some items ebb and flow with the season—yes, Turkish eggs will return in spring. Right now, the food leans heartier without getting heavy. Same goes with brunch. Roberts shares a pet peeve with most diners who go out every weekend: brunch that forgets the restaurant’s identity.
“We kept the classics—potatoes, toast, the staples—but we focused on the quality. Organic when it should be, direct from farms when we can. It needs to feel like Alder & Sage.”
The road here: Chef Matthew Roberts has a wonderful culinary pedigree that puts any food lover at rest.
Chef Matthew’s résumé arcs through fine dining and farm dinners.
After years with Union in Pasadena—“working around my kids’ schedules”—he burned out on the restaurant grind. He, instead, dove into farm-to-table wine dinners across California, landing in Paso Robles during COVID. The result? Elevated food with serious wine programs.
“I’d do six courses for twenty guests—solo in the kitchen—with one person out front,” Chef Matthew said. “Not working with a team, I realized I missed the mentorship.”
Long Beach pulled him back to a brigade: first a guest-chef dinner at Alder & Sage in September, then the helm. He’s four weeks in, still on the stove “90% of the time,” according to Kerstin, and building a kitchen culture that reads like the plates: steady, ego-free, team-first. “There’s not a job below me in the kitchen,” he said. “The departure from ego—that’s the work.”
What’s next? Dinners, collaborations, and a Dec. 4 paired dinner
Alder & Sage won’t flip to nightly dinner service—space and walk-in constraints make that unrealistic—but Chef Matthew and Kerstin are carving out focused evening moments, including a (hopefully) monthly food-and-wine dinner he runs solo, plus a future collab dinner with guest chefs and more nighttime-focused events.
The first big one lands December 4 with Chris Cherry of MAHA in Paso Robles. While the menu hasn’t been finalized one can think single-origin courses—with ingredients like abalone and purple urchin—possible neck-cuts of land protein, maybe a pasta…
It’s very Chef Matthew: ingredient-led, edited, and built to match wine without pyrotechnics.
Alder & Sage is located at 366 Cherry Ave. For tickets to the MAHA wine tasting dinner, click here.
You didn’t mention the wonderful aioli that comes with the fries. Unlike any I’ve had!