As I wander into the Ecology Center, a 28-acre regenerative farm and education center and an oasis of good vibes in Orange County’s San Juan Capistrano, Tyler Wells is tending a fire.
A steamship round—a chunk of beef roughly the size of a lawn mower—dangles from hooks over burning logs of San Diego County oak that are breaking down into a ring of white coals. Below the meat Wells has placed a paella pan full of red potatoes so that the melting fat can drip all over them. “Can I put you to work?” he asks. “I just need you to splash this with my magic concoction.” He holds a wine bottle that he’s filled with water, salt, garlic, and chiles—a beef marinade that gauchos passed along to him once when he traveled in Argentina.
He winds up doing the splashing on his own. “Should be ready in another 10 hours,” Wells says. By then, more than 100 guests will be gathering for a Saturday feast at the Ecology Center: some of them locals and others traveling from points north and south, some of them tasting his cooking for the first time and others devotees of All Time, the Los Angeles neighborhood joint with which he has recently parted ways.
It’s not lost on Wells, who is 47 and grew up in West Virginia, that spending a day with his face right next to a fire carries a fair amount of symbolic resonance. Last December, the chef opened a restaurant called Bernee on Mariposa Street in Altadena. On January 2, he moved out of a home that he’d shared with his ex-wife and former business partner, Ashley, and into a place of his own in Altadena. On January 7, fire swept down from the foothills of Altadena, destroying thousands of homes in the neighborhood, including his. Bernee managed to remain structurally intact, but the chef’s belongings had been reduced to rubble and ash. “My life just burned down,” he says. “I got divorced. My restaurant closed.”
Now on a Saturday morning he is gazing into the cinders at the Ecology Center. “Fire can destroy things,” he says. “But it also cooks things and warms your house and feeds you.” Not long after that catastrophic day in January, Wells moved into a new residence.
“You wanna see my house?” he asks me as he gathers ingredients for that night’s Ecology Center repast. “This is me over here.” We walk a few steps from the fire to a flimsy green tent perched on the edge of the farm’s rows of ripening produce. The tent is nearly empty, though there’s a small vase full of fresh flowers. It looks like the sort of tent a reasonable individual might use for a two-night campout before giving up and renting a motel room. Wells has lived in the tent for weeks. (To be fair, he also has a small house in Silver Lake, but he can’t shake his deep attachment to the tent.) After the Altadena fire, he got daily calls from his friend Evan Marks, the Grateful Dead–loving founder of the Ecology Center. “Brother, come home,” Marks would tell him. “You know we’re here.”
After a few months, Wells accepted the invitation from his friend. For a while, he tried sleeping in the furrows of the field—before realizing that when you sleep directly on top of the soil, without a waterproof scrim, the nightly marine layer will give you a thorough soaking. Now he sleeps in the tent; at night, he’s usually the only person on the property. “Just me and the coyotes,” he says. “They party, man. They’re so vocal and loud.” He communes with barn owls, too, and a couple of red-shouldered hawks. He has befriended an orb weaver spider that lives next to the tent.
By the way, if you’re waiting for Wells to begin bemoaning the sad state of his existence, give up. “I’ve never been happier than I am living in this tent,” he tells me. “I’m so free. Life’s so rich. It’s a pretty simple existence. Dude, I am a different man—I am the best version I’ve ever been of myself. I don’t have any anxiety. I don’t have any stress.” Like a controlled burn in a patch of overgrowth, the wholesale devastation of his life seems to have liberated him in unexpected ways. As he puts it, “I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been without all this bullshit clogging up the forest floor.”
The Los Angeles restaurant scene was struggling, of course, long before the January fires. Then ICE raids brought extra turmoil into the mix. In the past year, Wells’s friend Lien Ta closed both of her acclaimed places, All Day Baby and Here’s Looking at You. She and Wells have developed a professional comradeship as they seek to navigate respective paths forward. “Seeing Tyler is personally inspiring,” she says. “I love how loose Tyler is. We’ve both just realized that we don’t need a lot, but we can create goodness with the people around us.”
In the wake of the fires, Wells considered following his path of liberation to its natural end point by letting Bernee fade away. “Time to go,” he remembers thinking of his Altadena restaurant. “Guess I don’t live in L.A. anymore.” Gradually, though, people pulled him back—the community of Altadena as well as the team who’d originally committed to working at the restaurant, all of whom wanted to give it another go. “He felt a calling,” says Ta. He redubbed the space Betsy—his mother’s name—and previewed a late-summer reopening with a series of free Sunday suppers at which guests were encouraged to leave donations.
On a Sunday evening in August, I drive to Altadena to attend the last free supper before the opening of Betsy. Entering the space, it’s impossible to ignore the roaring grill fire, its orange flames and coals radiating a blaze so fierce that a few couples sitting next to me at the bar decide to retreat to nearby tables. Across the street from Betsy are vacant lots and stapled-up signs that say, “This property’s Hazardous Materials removal is complete.” Betsy is a neighborhood restaurant in a place where much of the neighborhood has been obliterated.
Wells comes across as cheerful and unbowed, dispensing hugs and working the room. The full arc of the future is impossible to predict, but right now he’s throwing a party amid the wreckage, and every song on his playlist—from Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” to Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” to the War on Drugs’ version of the Grateful Dead’s “Touch of Grey” (with its chorus of “I will survive”)—seems to speak to the spirit of the moment. “That’s my childhood,” he says, pointing to my skillet of berry cobbler and explaining that it’s the same cobbler his mother used to make for him at home in West Virginia.
It’s hard to predict how many people will make the trek to a corner of Altadena: The restaurant has been at almost full capacity since opening, though Wells says he’s not sure how long the surge will continue. But these days—both at Betsy and at the Ecology Center—Wells has a sense of where he needs to be. “I think I know what I’m doing now,” he says. “I was put on earth to do this.”•
Over the years, Jeff Gordinier has contributed to publications such as Esquire, Food & Wine, and the New York Times. He recently won the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing.
