These 4 Salads Capture the Essence of California Cuisine Right Now

Pluots topped with pistachio suya, heirloom tomatoes dressed with a fish sauce vinaigrette: The state’s chefs are taking a freer yet more curated approach to global flavors.

Anchoring a bright corner of the historic, fast-changing West Adams neighborhood, Alta Adams reopened at the end of May, and fans wondered whether it’d be the same. The Los Angeles sun, unfiltered by trees, still fills the dining room with a honey glow. A first-date energy still runs among the tables filled with cool diners, turned by even cooler servers, and they all still reflect the city’s diversity.

What’s changed is the menu: The chef Keith Corbin turned Alta Adams’s original “California soul food” lineup into “seasonal California cuisine.” So you can’t order his fantastic fried chicken and oxtails anymore, but you can get the same depth of flavor — miraculously, unsurprisingly — in cucumber ribbons and charred melon, wedges of stone fruit and tomatoes.

Mr. Corbin describes this evolution as a personal one, the shifts at Alta Adams a mirror to his kitchen journey. But he’s also redefining California cuisine, along with other chefs throughout the state, and nowhere is that more evident than in salads that taste like endless summer.

The foundation of California cuisine — pretty embarrassing riches of fruits and vegetables — hasn’t changed. The state produces nearly half of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts. Those good things come year-round, and in California, not only at farmers’ markets but also falling free from neighbors’ trees. These days, the ways of preparing them are as abundant as the produce itself.

What we now consider California cuisine started when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971 and championed local, seasonal produce, preparing it with a French sensibility. For years after, chefs up and down the state did the same, drawing largely from Western European cuisines and leaning heavily on Italy.

In those same decades, and the decades since, a lot of people moved to California and brought a world of foods with them, while longtime locals, especially those Indigenous to the land and those farming the produce, created and recreated dishes with the changing environment. Following more recent labels of “fusion” (marrying different cuisines), “diaspora” (tracing foods with migration) and “third culture” (layering personal backgrounds into dishes), there’s now a less-defined approach for what may be the most delicious iteration of California cuisine yet. It’s no longer largely Mediterranean nor is it mash-ups or anything goes. Instead, it’s at once freer and more curated, as chefs loosely take inspiration from around the globe but with care and restraint.

“When putting together a dish, you can put too much,” Mr. Corbin said. “The produce still has to be the star, and that takes discipline.”

When Mr. Corbin picks up a beautiful fruit from the farmers’ market, he asks himself what ingredients and techniques would bring out its best, while keeping his roots in mind. In the case of taut tomatoes and stone fruit like pluots, he decided to apply West African suya. Mr. Corbin took apart the traditional blend of ground spices and peanuts, swapping in whole California pistachios and coating them with suya’s ginger, garlic and onion powders. He then tossed in a bit of sugar to lightly candy the nuts into a crunchy sprinkle.

That suya crunch alone is enough to highlight the fruit’s tang, but Mr. Corbin makes this dish spectacular by bringing in more pistachios, blending them into a rich yogurt sauce. Spread onto a plate to cradle the fruit, the swoosh adds creaminess to each crisp, juicy bite.

Like Mr. Corbin, the chef and author Melissa King builds a tomato salad by prioritizing the tomato and not by reflexively drizzling it with a French vinaigrette. Drawing inspiration from her travels, she stays grounded in her Northern California cooking ethos and Southern California childhood.

“When I think of tomatoes, I think of S.F. life, going to farmers’ markets,” she said. “You can smell the tomatoes, the tomato vines, fresh basil as you’re walking. A lot of this dish was inspired by the beauty of summer, capturing those flavors.”

She douses wedges in a fish sauce vinaigrette, inspired by the Vietnamese nuoc cham she grew up with in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. The flurry of peanuts and fried shallots on top came from the green papaya salad she learned to cook in Thailand. Altogether, this salad showcases how she embraced what she calls “Asian flavors” after training professionally in “Italian, French and Eurocentric” restaurants. Now, she leans into “the fun you can have with it” and suggests tossing everything with toasted bread to turn it into panzanella.

“It’s become quite global, influenced by wherever I’ve been,” she said of her cooking. “Everyone’s influencing each other, and it’s beautiful to see.”

With the spread of farmers’ market culture, the diversity of flavors applied to California-grown produce exploded. And once chefs born in California found peace with changing the dishes of their heritage while staying true to their spirit — and adopting others’ cuisines respectfully — the food simply became more delicious.

Like Ms. King, Elijah Deleon grew up in the farther reaches of Los Angeles County and trained in the Northern California style — but without heading up the coast. After years of working in Santa Monica with the chef Jeremy Fox, author of the seminal “On Vegetables,” Mr. Deleon is now the executive chef at Rustic Canyon.

He first learned to cook birria and albondigas from his mother and grandmother, who are originally from Jalisco, Mexico, and then “became obsessive with heirloom varietals” of fruits and vegetables at his local farmers’ market in Torrance, Calif. He now integrates Mexican cuisine into most of his restaurant dishes, as with this charred corn dish.

Growing up, he would buy esquites after soccer games at the park, and he turned that snack into a salad, topping aioli-coated corn with slices of fresh shishito peppers.

“Shishitos are underrated raw,” he said. “They add a nice green pepper complexity and a lot of freshness.”

When they’re not available, Mr. Deleon swaps in any mild, thin-skinned peppers that look good, and he encourages home cooks to do the same. He’s as flexible with the cheese, which is sometimes a housemade queso fresco but more often a nutty, sweet Cheddar for a rubble of salty richness over smoky sweet corn.

But you don’t need California roots to cook new California cuisine, especially since part of its identity is the influx of new styles. Sarah Hymanson and Sara Kramer arrived in Los Angeles from New York, with Brooklyn farm-to-table sensibilities, and they now run their flagship Kismet and its expanding group of fast-casual offspring.

Their vegetable dishes often fulfill out-of-state fantasies of peak Los Angeles produce. And that’s not a bad thing. Take this spoon salad, modeled on Middle Eastern-style tomato-cucumber salads, but filled with a cool monochrome dice of melon, cucumber and avocado. A gloss of lemon juice and olive oil binds their natural juices, with basil and dill to perfume it all.

It’s easy — they’re all easy — and that’s the point. The new California cuisine doesn’t demand excessive seasonings, modernist techniques or rules around crossing cultures. It grows naturally, organically if you will, from everything here, the vegetables, fruits, cultures and most of all, the people.

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