Quick Take
After closing in December 2022, Manresa is reopening to host a series of luxe pop-ups featuring international chefs at the Los Gatos restaurant. It's a collaboration between Santa Cruz chef David Kinch and entrepreneurs Juan and Luis Caviglia.
A year after chef David Kinch closed his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Manresa will be revived. Throughout 2024, the Los Gatos restaurant will host some of the world’s most renowned chefs in a series of monthly pop-ups.
Ritual at Manresa is a new collaboration between Kinch and entrepreneurs Juan and Luis Caviglia. The Caviglia brothers are originally from Uruguay, and moved to Palo Alto in 2018 after launching a restaurant software company. They entered the hospitality business in 2021 when they founded Ritual, a business that created unique, private dining experiences by bringing chefs from around the world to California.
This new dinner series is a blend of the Caviglias’ and Kinch’s business concepts. At Ritual at Manresa, chefs from a different globally acclaimed restaurant will take over the kitchen at Manresa each month in a revolving format. “Every month, a new restaurant,” the website promises.
Kinch, as the culinary ambassador, curated a list of 12 restaurants from around the world, each with at least two Michelin stars. January kicks off with chef Ángel León of Aponiente, one of Spain’s finest seafood restaurants, with three Michelin stars. The next residency is in March, with chef Junghyun Park of Atomix, a Korean restaurant based in New York City, which boasts two stars and is in the top 10 of the world’s 50 best restaurants. Other months feature chefs from Spain, Belgium, France, England, Brazil and Singapore.
Reservations for the first two residencies are available now and are limited to 48 diners per night. Tickets start at $450 per person, with add-on wine pairings and nonalcoholic cocktail pairings.
A Santa Cruz resident, Kinch is internationally recognized as one of the best chefs in the world. He attempted to sell and then finally closed Manresa at the end of 2022, citing the rigorous demands of maintaining one of the best restaurants in the world and a desire to focus on his other restaurants, including Mentone in Aptos and The Bywater in Los Gatos.
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