Big Sur’s Fernwood is many different things to many different people. It’s the favored longtime watering hole for Big Sur locals. For tourists, it’s an affordable option for campsites, cabins or motel rooms. It has also – quite surprisingly – become a venue for performances by some of the nation’s hottest up-and-coming music acts including Joanna Newsom, Dawes and Forrest Day.


With so much happening there, it’s been easy to overlook the fact that Fernwood has been serving up food since it opened in the 1940s – from “Tassie” Bob’s All-You-Can-Eat barbecue in the late ’90s to David Dildine’s Redwood Grill, which started out promisingly enough in ’03 before dipping in consistency by the time he left in October.


With executive chef Tommy Noel now running the Redwood Grill – he took over this November – Fernwood should no longer be overlooked as a destination for a quality meal on the South Coast. Two recent visits to Fernwood’s Redwood Grill revealed that this is bar food that sets the bar high.


On a Saturday night packed with people taking in an NFL playoff game and others waiting to see a performance by Big Sur musician Levi Strom, I had dinner with two Big Sur pals. With the current menu being a hybrid of bar food staples like wings, jalapeño poppers, burgers and the sort of fare found in a Mexican taqueria – tortas, burritos, quesadillas – my ranger friend opted for the tri-tip nachos ($12.95). When it arrived, he realized that the appetizer was going to be all he needed for the evening. This hearty serving of nachos was a fiesta of refried beans, cheese, diced tri-tip, lettuce and chunks of fresh avocado the size of peach pits.


Meanwhile, my other friend went with a burrito stuffed with the housemade pork chorizo ($10.95). Delivered by the server, the burrito was almost as big as a rolled-up Sunday newspaper. I was able to get in a couple quick bites of the tasty (but not spicy) chorizo before it was devoured and realized that I’d have to revisit the item at a later date.


As we drank draught beers from the bar – locally brewed English Ales are on tap for $5 a pint – I polished off a tri-tip torta ($9.95) with a messy but complimentary smear of salsa, guacamole, beans and cheese on its accompanying roll.


During a return visit at lunchtime, my girlfriend and I walked into a cool-as-a-cave Fernwood on an unseasonably warm Friday afternoon. There was just one other table of diners in the bar, but the food took a bit longer to arrive at our table than on the packed Friday evening.


Once the food was served, though, there were no complaints. We shared a plate of the “Big Sur Mellow Greens” ($11.95), a salad of baby spinach leaves, dried figs, blue cheese and pepitas, which are toasted pumpkin seeds, covered but not overpowered by a homemade pomegranate vinaigrette. A few days later, I learned from Noel the inspiration behind the menu item’s creation. “It just reminded me of Big Sur,” he says. “Nice and fresh.”


My girlfriend also snacked on a plate of quesadilla wedges ($8.95 to $10.95) stuffed with barbecued chicken, caramelized onions and a melted cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese mix. Though the triangles were thin, they were way more flavorful than other quesadilla competitors with more girth.


Needing to further investigate the housemade chorizo, I ordered the burrito stuffed with this inviting variation on pork sausage. Grilled on the outside – nice touch! – the burrito had more rice than I usually like but luckily the chorizo’s taste charmed its way into the rice. Noel admits that he doesn’t use all the pig parts that make some American diners uneasy when they eat the Mexican version. “I just basically use the same spices with fresh ground pork,” he says.


Though the Redwood Grill’s kitchen is fairly small, Noel and his crew are utilizing the space and an outdoor grill to cure and smoke their own pastrami and bacon. (The house-cured pastrami sub topped with honey mustard caramelized onions for $11.95 sounds worth the drive back to Big Sur.) In another example of Noel’s attention to detail, the Redwood Grill smokes its own salt, which is used to season the tasty fries.


Noel’s current menu sounds like it is just the first draft of an evolving vision. He’s planning weekend breakfasts that include an in-house smoked salmon wrap and a twist on Southern grits that will feature hot pastrami and eggs. There’s also a late-night appetizer menu in the works for the summer months (right now it runs until 10pm, pending crowds).


While Noel’s Redwood Grill currently fills a much-needed void in Big Sur for more moderate-priced dining, he admits that an expanded dinner menu, which he hopes to get up and running by spring, will have pricier fare like pork chops, hickory-planked fish and steaks. “For Big Sur,” he says, “we’ll be comparable with everyone else.” 


FERNWOOD’S REDWOOD GRILL 47200 Highway 1, Big Sur. 11:30am-9pm every day. 667-2129.