The Tahoe couple who chose a life over a career -- and built both anyway

May 21-Rays of sunlight streaming through branches. Delicate wildflowers pushing up from a pine needle-strewn forest floor. I know the signs of spring in Lake Tahoe well, yet I'd never actually tasted its flavors until a recent evening at Trokay, a restaurant in downtown Truckee that is the creation of chefs and co-owners John and Nyna Weatherson.

The dish before me was a work of art. A wreath of spring peas and greenery was gently placed atop a ring of fir needle curry. Squash blossom petals curled around house-made sausage. USDA prime beef tenderloin was seasoned with salt and pepper and roasted perfectly. Cloudlike Jasmine rice crisps hovered above the blue ceramic plate. Every element was intentional, thoughtful. But it was the zing of fir needles in the curry that had me daydreaming about the forest.

I know the smell of pine needles yet my neural pathways couldn't make sense of such a nuanced flavor. Memories rushed in to fill the void: walking out my front door and inhaling the citrusy pine-scented air; riding my mountain bike on a dusty sun-baked trail; and hiking to a wildflower-studded meadow.

Somehow, Trokay had conjured experiences that are quintessential to Tahoe and incorporated them into a dish. Just then, Nyna walked by the table, and I snapped out of my daze. I asked her: How did you do that?

"Wizardry and magic," Nyna said, laughing. Then she spilled the secret: Every spring, she and John go into the woods near their home to forage the needles, when they're at their peak and brightest green. They use them to add depth to the curry and to make a vibrantly green, herbaceous and citrusy sorbet. In Trokay's quest to discover new flavors and create a culinary style that's unique to Tahoe, the sorbet, in particular, was an achievement: "The moment that we spun the white fir needles into the sorbet, that was a big, big breakthrough," John said.

Fifteen years ago, John and Nyna moved to Truckee with stellar culinary resumes and a skill set honed in some of the best kitchens and food businesses in the world. They could have gone anywhere, but they chose Truckee, a place they'd fallen in love with. Opening a restaurant was a means toward building a life in the mountains. John and Nyna's vision is embedded in the name, Trokay, a Paiute word and the origin of the name Truckee. It's a peaceful greeting and means "all are welcome."

The Weathersons sought to do something more than the average restaurant. They wanted to discover a culinary identity for Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada. It's an audacious goal, an undertaking no other chef or restaurant has pursued in the same way, but after years of pushing themselves creatively - the menu changes constantly; they never repeat a dish - they've homed in on a style and flavors that are evocative and intrinsic to this region.

One of the ways they do so is with a handful of ingredients foraged in the mountains, sourced from local farms and purveyors: fir needles, juniper branches, wild woodruff, trout from Mount Lassen and strawberries farmed in a Nevada valley that have five to six times the sugar compared with a normal strawberry.

"We like soulful restaurants," John said. "Part of what makes a restaurant soulful is having an identity that is unique to its time and place. For us as chefs, you have to ask yourself: We know how to cook at this level. What does that mean, being ourselves? Who are we?"

In New York City, one of John's mentors was French celebrity chef Daniel Boulud. He told John: Work for the best restaurants you can, then take what you've learned somewhere else. "The best thing you can do for food in the United States is to go somewhere it doesn't exist and do it there," John said.

When they first arrived in Truckee, a handful of long-established restaurants lit up downtown's commercial row, like Moody's and Pianeta, and up on the hill, Cottonwood. In the Tahoe Basin, Wolfdale's and Christy Hill had been serving fine dining since they opened over 40 years ago. But nobody was doing what the Weathersons sought out to do, speaking so evocatively about a sense of place and scouring the mountains for ingredients. Trokay also quickly became the most expensive restaurant in the region, and it still is, charging $305 for a chef's 10-course tasting menu. Today, Trokay is one of the most established restaurants in town and has blazed a trail for destination fine dining in Lake Tahoe for other restaurants to follow, like Smoke Door, Tangerine and the highly anticipated Savoie, opening soon in Tahoe City.

The restaurant business is notoriously difficult in a seasonal mountain town. But over the years, Trokay has withstood record-breaking snow and record-breaking heat, the chaotic years of the pandemic, slow shoulder seasons and the crush of summer tourism. It has achieved the kind of longevity that defines success in a fleeting, finicky industry.

And yet, the mountains continue to hide Trokay away from the rest of California's culinary scene. No restaurant in Tahoe has achieved a Michelin star. How does a restaurant like Trokay achieve so much success locally, but stay hidden from the rest of the world, for so long?

They turned down the French Laundry to move to a ski town

John and Nyna met in high school. They competed on rival debate teams and then followed each other to college in Iowa before moving to New York. There, John graduated top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and went on to work for acclaimed chefs, including Boulud at Restaurant Daniel when it held three Michelin stars (it now has one star) and was a four-star New York Times restaurant.

Nyna also has an enviable career that began in the world of gourmet cheese. In New York, she worked for importer Cheese Warehouse and Sprout Creek Farm in Poughkeepsie. Notably, she was the former head cheesemonger at Murray's Cheese, the world-renowned artisanal cheese shop, in Greenwich Village.

Living in New York City and working in prestigious kitchens gave them invaluable experience. But it demanded punishing schedules and obscenely low wages. John recalled working 60 to 90 hours a week and making $10.50 an hour at one of the best restaurants in the world. Then, John's mom got sick, and he knew he had to make a change. "I can't do this while my mom is dying," he said. "That's not a thing."

John's mom was his original inspiration in the kitchen: "I wanted to be able to cook at home as well as my mom did." They moved to New Hampshire to be with his family at the end of his mom's life. After she died, John and Nyna realized they were ready to move across the country. They'd visited Truckee often, starting with ski trips in college, and they had a destination wedding there in 2007.

They headed west and staged at several renowned restaurants in Napa Valley before coming up to Truckee. That winter, in 2011, was one of the snowiest in recent years, with UC Berkeley's Central Sierra Snow Lab measuring 565 inches of snowfall. "I got more powder days that season than my entire life combined up until that point," John said.

They were hooked on the dream of living in a ski town. So, when the French Laundry called to offer John a job that summer, he turned it down. He and Nyna were already making plans to open their own restaurant in Truckee.

Trokay opened on July 1, 2011 as a cafe serving breakfast, lunch and dinner in a tiny spot downtown, next to the train station. For breakfast and lunch, they served sandwiches, salads and Viennoiserie such as croissants, pain au chocolats, pain aux raisins and scones that quickly developed a following. "Nyna's scones are ridiculous," John said. They also brought third wave coffee to Truckee, serving Blue Bottle-roasted beans with microfoam, latte art and siphon coffee that would have been notable for San Francisco at that time but was yet unheard of in a mountain town. For the dinner hour, they started the refined, elegant tableside service that they're known for today.

"Some places need to exist so that you can rediscover what is real," wrote one customer in a Yelp review at the time.

The cafe was a "fun way to introduce ourselves," John said, but they soon outgrew the location, and about 18 months later, they moved to a larger space across the street, reopening Trokay as it exists today in 2013. By then, the Weathersons were fully committed to making food that embodies the Sierra Nevada.

Crafting a sense of place

Trokay is located in the heart of downtown Truckee, tucked between a clothing boutique and a bookstore. I'd never been inside before. Truthfully, the restaurant is more expensive than my usual haunts, but on a recent Saturday night, my husband and I were on our first date in a long while. With a toddler and an infant at home, every chance to get away and dine out - to have a conversation that's uninterrupted - is a special occasion. So, we booked a two-top and signed up for Trokay's less expensive four-course prix fixe dinner, at $150 a person.

We pushed open the glass door and stepped into a light-filled foyer. When John and Nyna moved in, they renovated the restaurant top to bottom. An exposed stone wall runs the length of the restaurant. Reclaimed wood from the old Chinese herb shop across the street, by the railroad, and from the previous tenant, an Irish pub, is used throughout. The bar top is a single piece of Lodgepole pine with a live edge, and the tabletops are made of Douglas fir reclaimed from an old sawmill. A bare manzanita branch is mounted above the bar, like a sculpture. Lantern-like fixtures glowed warmly.

After we sat down, the sommelier poured two glasses of sparkling wine, and the server delivered a stainless steel Tiffin box - a lunchbox used to transport hot meals in Asia - with bite-sized buttermilk biscuits, gougères stuffed with gruyere and Mornay sauce, and grissini, a thin crisp dusted with Hatch chiles. We popped the baked goods in our mouths, which were perfectly warm, flaky, salty and light. Burnt onion jam served for the biscuits had a smoky, sweet taste. The Hatch chiles had a mellow kick of heat that lingered.

The Tiffin pot is Trokay's nod to the influence of Chinese immigrants who built the transcontinental railroad that runs through town, across the street from the restaurant. The miles of rail that traverse the Sierra Nevada were the most grueling to build; thousands of Chinese laborers arrived in Truckee in the late 1860s to blast granite boulders apart and build tunnels through the mountains.

The Tiffin pot is a subtle yet powerful homage to the artisans and craftsmen who came before. Trokay bookends every meal with them: biscuits in the beginning and cookies at the end.

Evolutions

Dinner unfolded like a play on a stage, each course arriving with a bit of whimsy. An amuse bouche appeared before me: the tiniest purple-white alyssum flowers perched above a delicate foam that spilled over a cube of pineapple. Then came a bowl filled with a small garden of herbs and huge white asparagus stalks, imported from Holland, over which the server poured a vegan white asparagus bisque.

Trokay never repeats a dish twice, but the Weathersons rely on the pantry of ingredients they've cultivated over the years to design each dish. One pairing they come back to often is juniper and trout. John and Nyna go to the top of Martis Peak to forage juniper branches. On clear days, they can see far to the north, where Mount Lassen hovers on the horizon.

At the restaurant, smoky wafts of juniper enveloped a filet of hot, smoked trout. Charred dandelion leaves and fiery orange and red calendula petals gave the dish a sculptural element. On a smaller dish, trout roe crowned a stamp of trout tartare.

"This has been a constant progression, a constant learning," John said. "That's part of the beauty of it. When you don't cling to any dish creatively and you just try to approach each season and each ingredient with fresh eyes and try not to repeat yourself, it really pushes you in good directions."

Long-standing relationships with farmers are another key to their success. Trokay has worked with farmers Dan and Rachel McClure in Smith Valley, Nevada, for years. "Dan was bringing us really ridiculous things, like Douglas fir trees that were three days after emergence from the ground," John said. They use those ingredients to push themselves to new creative heights. This week, Trokay is expecting its first delivery of strawberries from the McClures, which he plans to use in the amuse-bouche. John just created a new apricot dish using fruit from the McClures' farm and honey sourced from the same valley that's been infused with anise hyssop. Produce like these specialty apricots and strawberries represent a moment in time. As soon as the season changes, Trokay's menu will evolve, too.

They've come a long way since their New York days. John and Nyna are still the sole owners of Trokay, rare for a fine dining restaurant in a small town, and they are ever-focused on their craft and mission. But they've still achieved an enviable work-life balance that lets them ski in the morning on powder days and still get to work on time to prep for the night. They've also raised two children, who are on the local ski teams.

In many ways, Trokay has achieved what it set out to, raising the bar for culinary artistry and hospitality in the region. Trokay has more competition now than ever before, but the Weathersons have fine-tuned their business to become leaner, stronger and more stable.

Still, they're not infallible. Like every other restaurant and business in Tahoe, Trokay is at the mercy of the elements. This past winter was especially brutal for businesses in the region. Record-breaking heat, excruciating dry spells and a bizarre pattern of snow combined for a big hit to visitation and the economy. (Nationwide, skier visits plummeted 14% compared with last year.)

"We've seen enough seasons to not worry too much," John said. "... But that was quite the doozy in terms of expectations."

Weather changes quickly in the mountains, however, and summer is once again at their doorstep. "We've been here for 15 years, and it never ever gets less awesome," John said.

A discovery in the mountains

The dinner took a detour from the four-course prix fixe when John and Nyna sent over two plates of brioche topped with caviar from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Pinecone bud syrup drizzled over the top for a salty, sweet and dreamy bite. The sommelier poured us two glasses of a 1996 Sauternes, with deep caramel notes.

The last dish of the night was inspired by a flowering perennial: woodruff. It's spicy and bitter, with vanilla aromatics. John steeps milk with woodruff, which is churned with eggs, sugar and a dash of salt. The end result is a vanilla-like ice cream with not a single drop of vanilla.

It was the simplest dish of all, and yet I sat mesmerized. Trokay lets this dish stand on its own - an almond-shaped scoop in a ceramic dish, a stem of woodruff placed on a separate dish at the center of the table. It's a story of how this became that, and it capped off an impactful evening.

Culinary talent, warm and welcoming service, artistry and creativity - you'll find it all at Trokay. Certainly, more exposure and accolades from the culinary scene would give Trokay a boost and likely help it stay busier in shoulder seasons. But more than all that, John and Nyna have figured out something truly special about Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada, and that discovery makes Trokay as rare as gold.

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