The closing of Bar Becky was many things: Infuriating. Heartbreaking. Another sobering reminder of how brutally difficult it is to operate an independent, chef-driven restaurant—particularly when landlords, leases and unrelenting occupancy costs enter the equation.
But it was never the end of Chef Johnathan Benvenuti in Long Beach.
Barely a month after Bar Becky served its final dinner at Long Beach Exchange, Chef Johnathan has returned to the kitchen—this time beside Chef Carlos Jurado of Selva for a two-night collaborative dinner that feels both bittersweet and celebratory. Originally scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 26 and Thursday, Aug. 27, the dinner was shifted to Thursday, Aug. 27 and Friday, Aug. 28, allowing me to advertise that Long Beach has one additional opportunity to experience Chef Johnathan’s food in a way the city has not quite witnessed before.
Yes, Bar Becky participated in collaborations. And yes, Chef Johnathan has been deeply involved in the increasingly interconnected nature of Long Beach’s culinary community—from welcoming rising pop-ups into his former restaurant to helping reshape the menu at The Breakfast Bar.
But here, outside the restaurant built around his mother’s name and the family history that shaped it, Chef Johnathan’s food is entering Chef Carlos’s distinctly Colombian world. The result is not Bar Becky simply popping up inside Selva. Nor is it Selva handing its kitchen over to a visiting chef. This is a genuine mingling of two highly personal culinary languages.
Bar Becky and Selva meet through the market—not ego.
The Thursday menu opened with one of Bar Becky’s defining staples: its focaccia, made with a two-year sourdough starter and served here with peach jam and koji butter. The bread has always acted as a kind of thesis for Chef Johnathan: Nostalgic. Comforting at first glance. But backed by patience, fermentation, and technique.
Beside it sat a ceviche unmistakably born from Selva: yellowtail paired with coconut, passionfruit and, pea blossom leche de tigre.
It is bright, tropical, and distinctly Chef Carlos, continuing the chef’s fascination with pushing Colombian and broader Latin American flavors through the lens of California’s seasons.
The Bar Becky greens followed with heirloom tomatoes, farmers market lettuces, shiitake “bacon” and dill ranch—a rather straightforward description for a dish that captures Chef Johnathan’s ability to make something familiar feel carefully considered. Ranch. Tomatoes. Greens. Bacon—albeit made from mushrooms. It reads like the bones of an American steakhouse salad before veering directly into Bar Becky territory.
Pastas truly merge the world of Bar Becky and Selva…
The bridge between the two chefs becomes clearest in their pastas. Chef Carlos—borrowing from his weekly, dedicated pasta night, Fuego Lento—wok-fries noodles Peruvian-style with Long Beach-grown mushrooms, market vegetables, and fermented ají panca. It is a particularly Long Beach plate that should honestly make the space’s permanent pasta menu: Chef Cameron Slaugh’s pasta from Nonna Mercato entering Chef Carlos’s Latin American pasta cosmos.
Then you have Chef Johnathan’s beautifully pillowy potato gnocchi. It leans into the waning days of summer with squash, pecorino, pink peppercorns, and basil oil. It is Bar Becky at its most recognizable: handmade pasta driven by the market, Italian in foundation but Californian in spirit.
Chef Carlos ends the savory side with Colombian-style mazamorra as an anchor for his smoked duck leg dish—yes, I know he’s famous for the smoked pollo but, please, just try the duck—joined by market onions, roasted chanterelles and ají Colombiano served on the side.
Dessert offers a choice between the two distinct voices. Bar Becky’s corn panna cotta pairs blueberries with rosemary candy corn, while the Selva sundae combines caramelized plantains, house-made Bonita Farms strawberry ice cream, and candied pistachio crumble.
Together, they form a tasting menu to share priced at $125 per person.
Friday’s menu might not be exactly the same—and that is the point
There is an important caveat for diners attending Friday’s service: The menu Chef Carlos and Chef Johnathan serve might not perfectly mirror the one presented Thursday.
Both chefs are genuinely market-driven. “Seasonal” is not simply a bit of menu language for either of them; it determines how they cook. Ingredients shift. Produce disappears. Something better arrives or an idea ferments. The chefs adjust.
Chef Johnathan’s strongest work at Bar Becky increasingly leaned into handmade pasta and constantly evolving seasonal plates, while Chef Carlos formally moved Selva away from a largely static menu and toward four seasonal menus each year.
So perhaps Thursday’s pasta shape changes. Perhaps the salads shift. Maybe the precise market vegetables tossed with the tallarines are different. That does not make Friday’s meal a lesser version of the dinner—it makes it another expression of it. The menu is a snapshot of what these two chefs found, wanted and felt compelled to cook together at a particular moment. That slight unpredictability—just like its shifts in days—is part of its appeal.
Chef Carlos continues to make Selva Long Beach’s collaborative kitchen
This dinner also reaffirms something Chef Michael Flores of Marlena once perfectly said about Chef Carlos: “There is no one more willing to open his doors for collaboration than Carlos.”
It is difficult to argue otherwise.
Chef Carlos has smoked pastrami for Marlena’s brunch menu. He partnered with Sura Korean BBQ for Long Beach Food Scene Week. Then he welcomed Ojai’s Chef Saw Naing of The Dutchess and Joplin’s for a Burmese-Texan-meets-Colombian dinner. He brought in Chef Waldo Stout to help launch Fuego Lento. Selva’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays became a home for the Got Your Back residency, giving Chef Brennan Villarreal and Sasha Schoen access to a full kitchen and dining room in which to expand what their food and hospitality could become.
And now, at a moment when Long Beach could have easily lost access to one of its most talented chefs, Chef Carlos has offered Chef Johnathan a stage.
That matters.
Collaboration is easy to celebrate when it produces a fun special or a packed dining room. Its deeper value becomes clear in moments like this—when one chef’s restaurant disappears and another chef says, essentially: My kitchen is open. Come cook.
For diners, the Selva x Bar Becky dinner is an opportunity to eat focaccia, gnocchi, and panna cotta from Chef Johnathan once again. For the chefs, it is a chance to explore what happens when Bar Becky’s contemporary Italian-American sensibility collides with Selva’s Colombian soul. But for Long Beach, it represents something larger: A food scene learning that its talent does not have to exist within isolated dining rooms. Restaurants may close. Leases may end. Spaces may disappear.
The cooking, with the right community behind it, continues.
Selva is located at 4137 E. Anaheim St.
