Selva and Got Your Back had a formal collaboration dinner. It was beyond the residency the pop-up has every Monday and Tuesday at Selva’s space on Anaheim Street. And it was beyond Selva’s own, admirable pursuit in elevating its own space.
It is the reflective power of two entities shining. On one hand, Got Your Back, being handed a space that gives them the tools, resources, and actual physical capacity to flex beyond a pop-up grill. And for Selva, the allowance to show its own community that there are others worth uplifting.
These characteristics could easily be exuded in other Long Beach food spaces—but it is Selva where they shine brightest.
The Got Your Back residency at Selva has proved Chef Brennan Villarreal and Sasha Schoen are glorious hospitality underdogs proving their own.
There’s been a truly beautiful quality to witnessing Got Your Back’s leaders—Chef Brennan Villarreal and Sasha Schoen—and their evolution as they have the resources of a full kitchen: Damn, they can cook and host.
“We’ve been cooking outside all the time,” Sasha said, laughing. “Nice to come indoors and have the ability to really explore things. And not just in the kitchen, but through the front-of-house as well. We’re able to host vitner dinners like we did earlier this week with Chateauneuf de Fargosonini.”
And it’s not just the wild breadth of Sasha’s love of natural wine. Chef Brennan’s food evolution across the residency—from stellar sinigang wings to what is possibly my favorite dish he’s ever made me, this dinner’s cod sinigang—has proved he is a force to be reckoned with.
The worlds of Filipino and Colombian cuisines work beautifully together…
Chef Carlos Jurado’s food is undeniably his, especially over the past year as he’s perfected his craft to steer Selva toward seasonal menus: acidic. Smoky. Savory. And definitively Colombian in spirit.
Take his chicken empanadas, inspired by his mom’s sancocho soup recipe: dumpling-like in their juicy smoked chicken filling, Paraguayan-style in their fried empanada wrapping, it is a street food gone simultaneously nostalgic and elevated. Or his insanely savory lamb belly dish, where a brined, sous-vide’d, seared strip of the lamb’s belly meat sits atop stir fried forbidden rice that is layered with pesto and stock. A salt lover’s dream that is cut with earthy mushroom and bright bursts from biquinho peppers.
Chef Brennan shares a similar identity: umami galore. Hints of sweet. Savory. And definitively Filipino in spirit.
Take his hamachi crudo: Sitting atop a European-style salsa verde and a cucumber-coconut water vinaigrette doused in basil seeds and sprinkled with Aleppo pepper, it’s a wonderful step away from overtly simple crudos with wonderful hints of sweet and earthy. But perhaps there is no stronger flex than his black cod sinigang, a reincarnation of a dish he did at a pop-up at the now-shuttered Compound years back. Bright. Umami. Funky. Tinge of sweet. Savory as hell. The crisp of those green beans. The softness of the fish… Just an absolutely beautiful dish.
In a world of constant pissing contests, the Long Beach food community and collaboration should be more like Selva and Got Your Back.
And then it all ties in the end: a vinegar-doused hunk of pork from Chef Brennan atop Chef Carlos’s stellar sofrito rice, layered with crispy bits of puffed rice and a side of house pickles. Gloriously, concommitantly Colombian and Filipino, two cultures that share a love of the humid and a history of Spanish colonialism that each rightfully broke away from.
And let’s not skip their masterful play on the Filipino bibingka, where plantain is layered into the cake to make it somehow simultaneously light and dense in all the right ways, topped with an ultra-bright calamansi crema. It oozes with Chef Brennan and Chef Carlos, tying up a night where each of the talents seamlessly blended with one another.
This should be a reflection of the Long Beach food scene more. Genuine collaboration. Uplift from our larger personalities and spaces onto our smaller, bourgeoning talents. The idea that strong-willed students be given the opportunity to lead as well as be led by our masters.
And the result of this collaboration? One of the best dinners of the year so far.
