Nearly an hour from the Reno airport, past the winding mountain roads of the Humboldt–Toiyabe National Forest and along North Lake Boulevard, it’s easy to miss the small black building whose walls straddle the California–Nevada border. Windows down, you catch the wood smoke first. Inside, a wall of stacked logs frames an open kitchen where four heads of cauliflower hang above glowing embers, beneath racks of drying fish bones, daikon, and watermelon. At Smoke Door Tahoe Saryo, scraps become ingredients, and the fire is the throughline.
Dining at Smoke Door feels Michelin-caliber, an experience more often found in major cities. The dissonance is part of its spell. How can a restaurant with such exquisite ingredients, such precise technique, and such deeply informed service exist in a remote mountain town?
Fire in the Bones
Chef Tyler Burges explains that the now-fragrant heads—listed as “sky-grilled cauliflower”—are flash-fried, then suspended over smoke for three days and regularly spritzed with ember oil, yielding a crackly exterior and a tender, juicy core. In service, the vegetable appears on the ten-course tasting menu, brushed with brown butter and white tamari and finished with fried shallots.
Wood-framed window banquettes set a warm tone, but the counter—front-row to the choreography—feels like the move for a restaurant with so many tricks up its sleeve. Those “tricks” are really a repertoire of nuanced ember-fire techniques that run from cocktails through dessert, led by Burges, a Saison alum who rose to prominence at Saison and Angler in Los Angeles. He now splits his time between Smoke Door’s Yokohama, Japan, location and Lake Tahoe.
“Tyler was a California boy, so he is my brand. He is the brand of our company,” says owner-partner Ryu Amemiya, who oversees all properties and recruited Burges. That California DNA shapes Smoke Door Yokohama (opened 2022), which channels West Coast flavors in Japan—right down to an In-N-Out-inspired Double-Double.
Tahoe, by contrast, stages imported Japanese ingredients alongside Sierra foothills produce, composed into a ten-course tasting menu. For Burges, it’s a welcome reason to root himself back in his home state.
“The ingredients, the clientele, everything is perfect,” Amemiya says of Tahoe. “I think this place has to be more gastronomic in the future, and we felt the potential to pioneer it.” Despite the region’s popularity, he describes the dining landscape as long dominated by bistros and pizza, though, he notes, “after we opened, there are some other restaurants in Truckee that are interesting.”
Amemiya is hands-on during service, carrying trays of amuse-bouches: cold-smoked avocado toast half-soaked in brown butter and tamari; microgreens and dried wakame crisps; and glistening spheres of smoky tomato concassé stuffed with barbecued tomatoes in tomato water and miso. Each bite lands like a small reveal, and it’s only the beginning.
