Chef Melissa Ortiz has done what many consider impossible at Bamboo Club. Not only is she redefining what bar food can be—it certainly helps she has a full kitchen, unlike most bar spaces—but she is getting folks from not just Long Beach but above the 10 to make the venture to Long Beach’s just-opened tiki space in Zaferia.
Tea-brined fried chicken sandwiches that are the best in the city. Steeping loose Thai black tea leaves from a local Cambodian market, Chef Melissa presses the tea to concentrate it, and then throws in the chicken breasts with plenty of salt and ice. The next day, the chef toasts additional tea leaves and adds them to buttermilk to brine the chicken yet again. The result? The best chicken sandwich in Long Beach and certainly one of the best in the region.
Her shitake mushrooms? One of the finest vegan dishes around, these meaty mushrooms are dehydrated, rehydrated, and then fried. It’s a glorious umami bomb.
Freshly shucked oysters. Scallop tostadas. A perfectly crafted burger. This is the food Chef Melissa Ortiz is creating at The Bamboo Club—and it is marvelous.
The Bamboo Club melds local watering hole with stellar grub.
Ever since the city’s beloved tiki space quietly rolled out a chef-driven, all-day menu, people have been rightfully doing double takes. Our go-to haunt for rum drinks—that was once a proper dive featured on Bar Rescue, those recalling the flies swirling around the liquor bottles and genuinely, naïvely wondering if that was normal—were suddenly being served freshly shucked Baja oysters with tepache-pickled radish mignonette.
And it is even prompting those above the 10 to venture down.
It makes sense: After spending years in the orbit of James Beard Award–winning chef Michael Cimarusti, working at Best Girl inside the Ace Hotel before heading to Mèlisse and the Peninsula Bevery Hills. And, later, returning to Cimarust running the kitchen at Connie & Ted’s, his lauded seafood spot. Along the way, she was mentored by executive chef Sam Baxter, absorbing a style of leadership rooted in discipline, consistency, and care.
An Army veteran’s discipline with culinary curiosity: How Chef Melisa Ortiz defines the food and kitchen culture at The Bamboo Club.
Ortiz is an Army veteran, an Orange County native, and a fine-dining lifer who landed in Long Beach more than a decade ago after returning from service. Her résumé runs deep—staging at Michelin-starred Melisse, leading kitchens in Santa Ana, even cooking for Snapchat’s corporate headquarters—but for years, her professional life existed almost entirely outside the city she called home.
That started to change this year.
After leaving Connie & Ted’s and facing a delayed deployment during the government shutdown, Ortiz found herself unexpectedly grounded in Long Beach. She began hosting fermentation-focused pop-ups with fellow chef Remy Bisharat under the name Pyru After Dark—experiments that introduced her, sometimes abruptly, to the city’s laid-back dining culture and still-evolving palate. Since then, she’s consulted on menus at Rose Park Roasters downtown, crafted seasonal dishes at Berlin, and slowly embedded herself into the fabric of the local food community.
But Bamboo Club became the real canvas. And for the first time in 11 years, Ortiz built a menu specifically for Long Beach.
“I just don’t want to do a cliché menu, let alone a cliché tiki menu,” she told Sarah Bennett while we were sampling the menu. “Long Beach deserves better.”
Bamboo Club is located at 3522 Anaheim St.
