A Lofty Experience
The Loft restaurant at Montage Laguna Beach serves up tasty seasonal cuisine with an impressive selection of wines and cheeses to boot. – By Micaela Myers
Located on the fourth floor of Montage Laguna Beach, The Loft restaurant features a welcoming environment, complete with stunning panoramic ocean views and creative American cuisine made simply with fresh, seasonal ingredients. “It is very fun and gregarious—somewhere you want to be,” Chef de Cuisine Casey Overton says of The Loft. “We embrace food as our life.”Montage Laguna Beach employs its own forager to go out and find the best seasonal offerings. Our recent meal at The Loft started with a fairytale pumpkin salad with pomegranate vinaigrette. Chef Casey was inspired to create the salad after the forager brought in fairytale pumpkins. The result is a singular taste and texture experience.“It’s all about different tastes because that’s how I like to eat,” chef Casey says of his cuisine. “I like to try different things.”Other standouts on our menu included lentil soup with carrot foam, heirloom Italian wheat pasta with porcini cream and scallops, and butter poached lobster with veal sweet bread and black truffle sauce. Chef Casey strives to bring in different taste sensations—rich, sweet and savory. The spring menu will showcase seasonal ingredients such as spring garlic, Chino Farms radishes, white asparagus, chanterelle mushrooms, fava beans, artichokes and Harry’s Berries strawberries.
The Loft is home to it’s own 6-foot wood-burning rotisserie, has its own charcuterie and makes its own sausages. Another standout element is the interactive cheese gallery. “We have around 90 different cheeses from around the world,” chef Casey explains. “This program is specific to The Loft. What makes this experience so different is the fromagier. We concentrate on pairing the cheese with the perfect complement.
“We also have about 70 different honeys,” chef Casey adds. “We love to pair honeys with cheeses.” His personal favorite is a wildflower honey from France.
The Montage Laguna Beach also employs a team of certified sommeliers and a wine list boasting 45,000 bottles and 2,100 labels from around the globe. The sommeliers are happy to suggest wine pairings and introduce guests to new wines. The Loft also hosts The Artistry Of Wine series select Sundays from 2 – 4 p.m., featuring different varietals and vintages from wine regions around the world. With all it offers, The Loft promises a truly bespoke experience day or night. LBM
