If you’re the type who makes the rounds at the hottest restaurants in town, you’ve eaten Bobby Silva’s food. He’s cooked at RM Seafood, SushiSamba and Momofuku, and helped open Sake Rok on the Strip and Hatsumi Downtown. Now he’s joined the Sparrow + Wolf team as chef de cuisine.
“I’ve always been a big fan of what Brian [Howard] has been doing there, and for him to reach out and pull me in was really exciting,” says Silva, who joined the team in late November. “It’s wild to me, because we are like-minded as far as our approach to food, so we’ve been bouncing ideas off each other.”
Silva has been acclimating to his new post and working with new kitchen collaborators, so it makes sense that he’s focused on inspiration and education right now. He says he’s “learning the place and letting it influence me more,” and that includes Sparrow’s approach to old-world techniques and detailed processes, which often result in seemingly simple yet richly delicious dishes.
An early result is a new take on sunomono, the familiar Japanese appetizer of cucumber salad. Silva adds citrus-cured albacore as an umami-laden highlight, but the treatment of the cucumber is the real story. “This is a dish that looks like not a lot of thought goes into it, but it’s a process,” Silva says. “The cucumber must have the proper texture and flavor. I do a cure on the cucumbers to extract moisture, because when you season them they release a lot of water, and that will dilute your dish. Then I’ll marinate them in a rice vinegar solution, and that’s a whole other process, because the vinegar has been aged with kombu [edible kelp] for at least 48 hours.”
Small details make a big difference when the plate hits your table—a shared philosophy between Sparrow + Wolf’s crew and its new chef.
