For The Love of Bread

Westlake Village restaurateur Graham Harris didn’t set out to establish a hot new restaurant—he just wanted to bake and sell homemade bread. Inspired by cooking with his family as a child, what started as experimentation with bread dough in his home kitchen has led Harris on a culinary adventure he barely dreamed of three years ago.

Harris is chef/owner of Decker Kitchen, an intimate café, wine bar and wine shop in Westlake Village, where he serves from-scratch cuisine and deceptively simple comfort foods. Whenever possible, Harris sources locally and Decker Kitchen has garnered a loyal following since opening last fall. The homemade bread, made from Harris’s own starter, regularly sells out. No wonder: The warm bread, slathered with exquisite butter and sprinkled with crunchy salt, could be a meal in itself.

It was Harris’s love of bread that started it all. The Southern California native was drawn to the kitchen at an early age. “My aunt worked at a bakery and would go in early in the morning to bake. She’d make me fresh ham and cheese croissants, and they were the most incredible thing I’d ever had,” he recalls. “Going with her got me interested in baking.”

His early culinary lessons involved family as well. “My family always revolved around Sunday dinner, and everyone had to contribute.”

While living in Northern California, Harris became obsessed with Chad Robertson’s loaves at San Francisco’s renowned Tartine Bakery. “Chad’s bread is probably the best I’ve ever had. I would get those loaves and I would hoard them. Even when I lived in LA I would go up there [to San Francisco] and wrap and freeze them and bring them home and eat them out of my freezer. When I moved back to Westlake Village, I found myself in dire need of good bread. It seemed like in the Conejo Valley there wasn’t anyone producing that style of bread.”

So, Harris started baking his own. “There was rigorous testing,” he admits. “At one point, I had 32 starters going and I was maintaining each one three times a day—all different types of flour, different feeding schedules, different ratios. I found a couple formulas that really started to work for me and I was shocked that it was actually good bread,” he says with a smile.

Harris developed a heavenly rustic-style loaf—perfectly simple, with artisan flour, salt and water as the only ingredients—and began looking for commercial bakery space.

“My whole goal originally was to start with Sunday delivery of bread,” he says, but the evolution to full-fledged restaurant happened quickly. A nearby location became available, and Harris made an offer, named the space after one of his children (and his favorite canyon road) and Decker Kitchen was launched.

Pulling from his experience consulting for wineries, Harris designed the open kitchen and dining space to feel like someone was in his own home. Over the years, “Friends would tell me, ‘I just like eating in your kitchen, sitting at your bar—it’s our favorite place to eat.’ I wanted to go for that comfortable and open feel.”

Harris started testing recipes and put an “Open” sign on the café door last September thinking, “We’ll just see what happens.” He didn’t know that a neighbor had posted a Yelp page for the restaurant. “Within a week, we had a flood of customers and I was by myself cooking and serving for all these people,” he recalls. “Very quickly I realized that I definitely needed some staff,” and he built a team around his dream.

Harris’s experimentation with dough brought a life of cooking seasonally and creating locally inspired dishes all together for his guests. Produce from Country Fresh in Somis, Underwood Family Farms and the local farmers’ market inspires many Decker Kitchen dishes, including the roasted Red Bliss potatoes and the house favorite: Feta Mousse Toast with local heirloom tomatoes on his delicious bread.

Harris takes pride in the high quality of the food, small-lot wines and local beer he serves, his team and the friendly rapport he shares with his customers. The café is “inviting and happy,” he says. “The goal is to bring a comfortable neighborhood vibe, where people can enjoy some great food and wine and even get to meet more of their neighbors.”

With Decker Kitchen, “I felt that there was a lot of opportunity for me to have fun with it, engage with people and bring my passion to the table.” Which he has done, literally. Now, please pass the butter.

For more info see DeckerKitchen.com. For Graham Harris’s Cubano sandwich recipe, turn the page.