Caviar and a $45 cocktail. Take a tour of Fresno’s newest high-end restaurant
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- Bulle opened March 26 at corner of Marks and Herndon in a bank remodeled over three years.
- The menu emphasizes farm-to-table sourcing and changes frequently.
- The Bulle Signature Martini is a $45 cocktail topped with caviar and stuffed olives.
These are just several of the ways the newly opened Bulle is aiming to be a luxury restaurant.
“I’d like to think that we’re the highest end, most upscale restaurant in Fresno, in the Central Valley,” said Tom Miller, who owns the restaurant with wife Davita Miller.
They call it California modern cuisine made with European cooking techniques.
At the northwest corner of Marks and Herndon avenues, it opened March 26 in a former Blockbuster and Chase Bank building that took two years to renovate.
How to pronounce Bulle
But before we get into the farm-to-table menu or the $45 cocktail, how do you pronounce the restaurant’s name?
Bulle is French for bubble. Most people at the restaurant say “bool” (though technically, French speakers elongate the L sound so it’s almost a second syllable). But it’s not Boo-lay. Not Bully. Pretend you speak French and emphasize those vowels.
Walking into Bulle is a bit like walking into a bubble, as the traffic rushing by on Herndon quiets and you enter a room with velvet pink seats, a chandelier and flowers on the ceiling.
Years went into crafting the decor of this restaurant, mostly by Davita Miller. She scoured lighting websites in the middle of the night and gilded that giant mirror herself.
TV screens are lit up with Monet paintings. There’s a twinkling tree in the middle of the dining room. The countertop on the bar glows and the orb lights above it cost well over $35,000.
The menu
The Millers “real jobs” are in real estate, Tom Miller said. They also own the three Press Box Sports Grill locations in town.
They like to dine out — a lot, everywhere.
“We love the food culture. We love knowing what we’re eating,” he said.
They want to know if the rib eye or the fish they’re eating was sustainably raised and where it’s from.
So they decided to create a sustainable, farm-to-table restaurant here in Fresno. They source from local or California farms whenever possible. And they use as much as the protein or vegetable as they can.
The duck breast from Mary’s Ducks out of Sanger, for example, gets served to diners. The remaining duck fat and other parts get used in sauces and other dishes.
Bulle’s menu is short. Diners can expect to pay an average of $125 a person.
Last week, entrees included a $69 grilled rock fish and a 40-ounce bone-in prime rib eye that was dry-aged for 30 days and served two to four people for $275.
Smaller dishes are also available from the hot and cold sections of the menu, including a fire-roasted eggplant that’s getting attention. (That one is gaining fans among people who don’t like eggplant, Miller said, and involves an 18-month-aged Parmesan whose scent reaches across the kitchen like an octopus tentacle to find you).
Meats are cooked on an Argentinian grill. It’s basically a fireplace that takes up the back wall of the open kitchen, with vertical stacks of burning wood.
Kevin New’s job is to scoop the embers and ashes to a spot where the massive cuts of beef – and petite ones, too – can be cooked above them on an iron grate.
In a European technique, sauces are cooked on a French top. Instead of an open flame, or a flat-top grill used by many restaurants, a French top produces heat in concentric circles, with pans often placed on the edge to get the chef’s exact preferred temperature and texture of sauces.
The Chef
Executive chef Max McCarthy leads the kitchen. He graduated from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York. He has experience at several restaurants honored by the Michelin Guide, including the three-starred Quince in San Francisco.
He came to Fresno, in part, because his mom was from here. He remembers going to his grandparents farm in Sanger as a kid.
His food is a play on the familiar, like that eggplant, or a crispy farm egg served with Iberico ham, spinach and Parmesan.
“The dishes sound very simple and once you get them, they’re very, very complex,” he said. “There’s a little bit of discovery behind it.”
Even the cocktails here get the five-star treatment. The chef and beverage director Conner Jessop hit the farmers markets together. The “farm-to-glass” cocktails (and zero-proof drinks) include housemade bitters, tinctures and syrups.
Certain premium drinks come with ice cubes carved into the shapes of diamonds, a skill Jessop learned working at a Japanese speakeasy.
That $45 cocktail is the Bulle Signature Martini. It’s made with the high-end Belvedere 10 vodka and a Mediterranean gin and vermouth. It’s topped with three olives hand stuffed with Point Reyes blue cheese and topped with caviar. Little dollops of Meyer lemon olive oil float atop the drink.
Can Fresno support such a high-end restaurant?
Reservations are recommended. They can be made online or by calling 559-375-1288. Bulle is open from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.
Walk-ins are allowed if there’s seating available.
Bulle has a dress code. “Smart-casual attire” is requested. No athletic wear, shorts, flip-fops ripped jeans or hats in the dining room (the bar’s dress code is looser).
The Millers have sunk a huge investment into Bulle in Fresno.
A few naysayers will always openly question whether a city known for its poverty can support such a high-end restaurant, despite the city hosting a Rolex store that just expanded and a Mercedes-Benz dealership that just finished a $4 million upgrade.
What does Miller say to those doubters?
“I shut ‘em down,” he said.
Fresno is the fifth-largest city in the state, he notes. With its low cost of living, the middle class has discretionary income to spend, he added.
“We were going out of town all the time to get something we were craving, something we were missing,” he said. “We want to keep people from having to leave town to go do this.”
