New chef at Estéban likes to let good ingredients speak while crafting a patio-friendly menu.

There are a couple of reasons Ben Hillan uses “exciting” to describe his first few weeks as executive chef at Estéban Restaurant. 

To start with, he was just becoming familiar with his new setting as the onslaught of Car Week rolled into Monterey County. The restaurant’s renovated and expanded patio opened shortly after his arrival, as well.

Most importantly, however, is that the popular Spanish kitchen in Monterey’s Casa Munras Hotel welcomes Hillan’s approach to cooking, which gives full reign to local, seasonal ingredients.

“Seasonality is the best,” Hillan says. “You get items at peak season at peak flavor. Why do it differently?”

The chef believes that, for the most part, less manipulation in the kitchen turns out better on the plate. So when he finds oyster mushrooms and pippara peppers at their finest, they only need the richness of burrata to provide a creamy depth. Fresh beets in a special meet up with goat cheese. The only effort necessary to transform it into an irresistible dish?

“I was at the farmers market and a purveyor had basil,” Hillan explains. “I turned it into vinaigrette.”

Yet the chef is not averse to playing. He is drawn to the goal of using ingredients from Monterey County and giving them a Spanish theme. Hillan plans to build on the menu of small and shared plates, allowing guests to bask on the patio, ordering as they feel the desire—four or five tapas plates throughout an evening.

And he takes the idea of seasonality further than many chefs. For Hillan, it applies not only to ingredients, but also to cooking technique.

“You look back at how they used to do it,” he observes. That means more cured meats during certain times of the year, or pickling vegetables for use throughout the winter. If fresh tomatoes were scarce, he points out, they weren’t on a menu.

Hillan became adept at improvisational cooking while in high school. His parents had corporate jobs in the Santa Cruz area and he would often beat them home. Hungry, he’d try his hand in the kitchen from whatever was available.

He was studying marine biology at San Francisco State when the notion of becoming a chef took hold.

Fortunately, Hillan had an example to follow. His uncle, Robert Wall, is a longtime chef (“he has been cooking my entire life,” Hillan says). But Wall works in unusual circumstances, as chef for the Rahal Letterman Lanigan IndyCar racing team, where he often cooks from portable kitchens for the drivers, crewmembers, as well as perhaps 400 guests of the team and sponsors on a given evening.

In 2005, when I was a critic and ne'er-do-well food columnist with the Dallas Observer, I wrote a story on race team chefs. By coincidence, Wall was one of the kitchen hands I spoke with at the Texas Motor Speedway all those years ago.

Wall insisted that Hillan attend culinary school. So he attended the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, finishing at the top of his class.

From there, he joined the team at Seascape Beach Resort in Aptos, followed by a stint under Chef Roy Yamaguchi at Roy’s in Pebble Beach. Hillan helmed the kitchen at Humble Sea Brewing Company in Felton before joining Estéban.

Not everything on the menu will change under Hillan’s charge. He’s already assessed the guest favorites, such as the empanadas.

“Last year we sold 10,000 orders,” he says. “We’re not touching that.”

Estéban Restaurant is located at 700 Munras Avenue, Monterey. 375-0176, estebanrestaurant.com.