Tyler Wells, the celebrated chef and restauranteur, lives in a tent. Part-time, anyway.
The last seven months have been a whirlwind of profound loss and newfound beginnings. After selling a successful coffee company and co-founding the popular Los Angeles restaurant All Time, the 47-year-old, auburn-haired chef turned his focus to a new venture. But it nearly all came crashing down after the Eaton Fire torched over 14,000 acres, destroying his newly purchased home.
Fresh off a divorce. Reeling from the wildfire. A restaurant in limbo. A move south to Orange County. This year has been his most transformative yet. And it all led to the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano where he’s now the new chef-in-residence.
Wells’ turning point came in a flash of orange and red, a day scorched into the souls of all Angelenos. It was on Jan. 2, 2025 that he moved into a new home in the Eaton Canyon neighborhood, ready to take on the next stage of his life following a split from his former wife. Then, five days later, on Jan. 7, the Eaton wildfire swept through the area. Wells’ home was destroyed.
Later that same day at his restaurant, Bernee, his Altadena space that opened only a few weeks earlier, he saw the air was thick with smoke and collective unease. Despite the chaos, his eatery remained open. “People still turned up,” he said in an interview from the farm. As service went on, a customer pointed out a glow in the distance. A few minutes later, a text from a neighbor clarified the situation: “Dude, get your (stuff) and get out,” he recalled the message. An accompanying photo showed “an inferno” on Glen Allen, his street.
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Wells got in his car, started the engine and just sat there. “I’m not leaving, I’m not leaving the restaurant. I’m not leaving this crew,” he thought. What followed, as his house fell to ruin, was a surreal, communal night of service. Bernee turned into a refuge where staff stopped charging people and packed up food for guests who needed to leave posthaste. “This is something else,” he said. “This was just all of us here together. We’ll break some bread, we’ll pack it up and get home safe.”
The staff, as Wells explains, stayed to see the night through. They had glasses of wine, cooked a small dinner and tried to process the in-progress devastation.
The next morning, Wells woke up in a hotel (“They were so kind and so caring,” he said of the hotel staff) to “175 text messages” telling him his home and his restaurant were gone. (Luckily, the latter info proved false; Bernee remained structurally unharmed.) He spent two hours believing everything he had was gone. “I guess I don’t live here anymore,” he remembered thinking. “My life literally and figuratively burned up in that last month.” While the restaurant remained standing, the bulk of the community it was supposed to serve had vanished. With no plan, he got in his car and started to drive.
Wells’ connection to the Ecology Center, San Juan Capistrano’s 28-acre regenerative farm, extends for at least a decade. He had cooked there, bought produce and felt a deep connection to the land. He described the farm as “the most meaningful ground in America for me,” a place where he would often visit “to put my feet in the dirt and take a walk and get reconnected.”
In the fire’s aftermath, the Ecology Center’s founder, Evan Marks, turned into a source of support. The farm extended an open-ended invitation to Wells, a chef residency where he would cook, create and heal. Marks, who Wells described as a kindred spirit, called him nearly every day following the fire, saying, “Brother, just come … just come home. We’ve got you.”
Initially hesitant, Wells was “reeling” and “definitely running from something,” he says. But after traveling to Ojai and Mexico, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed to return. And so he did, back to the farm and couldn’t let go of a powerful feeling he had felt for years — namely, the Ecology Center’s hospitality program needed to match its high-caliber farming.
For Wells, cooking and running restaurants isn’t solely about making food, it’s an obligation and responsibility to represent the hard work of farmers. “The farming here is the absolute tip of the spear, the most important work that anyone can do,” he said. In contrast, the hospitality could also use the same amount of care, likening it to having “the greatest band in the world, and you’re putting it in a Casio tape deck with one speaker.” He decided to step in as chef-in-residence, giving him the creative bandwidth to amp up the farm’s already stellar reputation among gastronomes, educators, farmers and residents.
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With a renewed sense of purpose, Wells began building his team: He called his old cook from Bernee, Joey Messina, and asked “Hey man, do you want to be a chef on a farm?” Joey’s response, according to Wells: “I’m packing right now.” Wells later persuaded his former front-of-house manager, Tom Oakes, to join as well. “The entire crew is coming back,” he said. “Ever single person that worked at [Bernee] has held out to come back and work together. And that, to me, is more powerful than anything.”
The most notable change has been the launch of the seasonal dinner program, happening Thursday through Saturday nights. Held at the farm’s Campesino Cafe, the dinners showcase the farm’s bounty. For these evening suppers, Wells and his team made a “commitment to only use produce that’s grown here.” The menu, he explains, is “so thoughtful and so focused and so simple and passionate, but it’s done so well.”
Recent menu items include a farm lettuce salad with Spanish white anchovy, parmigiano reggiano and bread crumbs, farm-made sourdough focaccia with cultured butter, ceviche tostadas, local halibut with blistered cherry tomatoes, cavatelli with confit tomatoes and ricotta salada and a regenerative steak dinner described on the menu as “changes frequently, let’s talk.” Dinners will also stregthen the farm’s mission of eating locally.
“We made a commitment to only use produce that’s grown here for the dinner, so if you can’t pull it out of the ground here, then we don’t cook with it at night,” he said.
The cafe has also obtained a beer and wine license, with a beverage list honing in on California producers Wells knows personally — people who, like him, have “had to scrape to get where they are today.”
Indeed, this is the hardest thing Wells has ever done, yet it’s also the most meaningful. He’s found solace in the simple routine of farm life, spending time outdoors and enjoying the still fields after dark, especially from the tent that he still uses for slumber on the farm’s soil, a home away from his new L.A. residence. Internally, the team has branded this era “dirtbag summer camp” — an affectionate riff on the Ecology Center’s “Summer of Love,” a series of events held at the farm this summer focusing on food and community.
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The fire, for all of its devastation, became a form of “cleansing” for Wells, gratitude that he recognizes, especially in light of so many others losing their homes, livelihoods and lives. “I would never have chosen it” on my own, he said, “but for me it burned away so many things that had just accumulated, both physical and emotional stuff, when you just have no choice but to say, ‘Well, all of that’s gone.’”
As he stays on at the Ecology Center, Wells will split his time in Altadena with the upcoming reopening of Bernee, which will be rechristened Betsy.
As the universe has a way of shifting us where we need to be at times, especially dark ones, for Wells that shift brought him from the ashes of his past to the fertile soils of the Ecology Center where he is now, quite literally, at home.