Josh Dorcak’s niche on Will Dodge Way was named one of the top 50 restaurants in the U.S. by the N.Y. Times last year

By Morgan Rothborne, Rogue Valley Times

Chef Josh Dorcak looks at his nomination for the prestigious James Beard Award as an “insane recognition” for his restaurant in Ashland — MÄS.

Dorcak is a finalist for the Best Chef award — in the Northwest and Pacific category, which covers Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. The James Beard Foundation annually issues awards to restaurants, chefs and others in the food industry throughout the United States. The awards are intended to “recognize exceptional talent and achievement in the culinary arts,” according to the nonprofit’s website. 

This recognition is not the first for MÄS. Last year, the New York Times chose the celebrated space on Will Dodge Way as one of its favorite 50 restaurants in the United States. According to the MÄS booking page, it was also awarded a “four diamond” score by a Triple A inspector in 2019.

The restaurant space is intentionally small — MÄS offers only counter seating and three tables. There are no accommodations for dietary restrictions. The menu is ever-changing according to seasonal availability, Dorcak said.

There are no walk-ins, reservations are a must not only for the size of the space, but as a mechanism to create the experience Dorcak envisions, he said.

There is no bill at the end of the evening. Guests pay at the time they book the type of experience they want — a four-course lunch, the private dining room tables, or dinner at the counter with the chef.

All those eating at the counter will have a complete experience with the food, watching and talking to the chef and his staff as they create it.

“People say you can taste love, that ingredients are the most important thing. It’s a beautiful saying, and it sounds great, but the practicality of what that means — that’s really what MÄS is all about,” Dorcak said.

“Everything we serve is touched by me or my staff who care deeply about it. Here, you’re in it. We’re looking right at you, we’re plating it right in front of you, talking to you. And we’re not trained service pros. We’re talking like normal humans,” he said.

MÄS began with a trip to Tokyo six years ago, Dorcak said.

He planned his trip around visiting high-end traditional Japanese restaurants. There, food was served in a style traditional to Japan — Dorcak equated it to a sushi counter.

“I was always told you have to have some 60 seats to serve so many people to make so much money to barely get by as a restaurant. That just never made sense to me. In Tokyo, they had just a chef and an owner operator, and they were cooking and serving the food. It was just exacting. It changed my entire perception of the restaurant business,” he said.

He returned home with a transformed sense of his own style as a chef and new ideas about how a restaurant could be run rather than how it had to be run. Ready to buck convention, he quit his job.

Jamie North, owner of Ashland’s Mix Bakeshop, offered to let Dorcak use the basement of Mix in the afternoons two days a week.

“The bakers got done at a certain point in the day, and the place would be empty, so she let me use it. As a pop-up, I had no overhead to worry about. I was working only two days a week. That gave me time to really think,” he said.

He spent this time going for long walks through the natural beauty of the Rogue Valley. He visited farms and began his new tradition of “touching everything and self-sourcing.” 

The pop-up featured one table where 12 guests would be seated together. Every night, he said, guests would come to his restaurant as strangers and leave adding each other on Facebook. He enjoyed seeing them bonding over a shared love of food and an appreciation for what he had to offer.

In 2018, he was encouraged enough to move into his current space on Will Dodge Way. Still, he worried whether the relative void of high-end dining in the valley was a sign there was no audience to support what he had to offer.

Now, he said, he sees the valley as a Wild West kind of emerging food scene. Not to mention what he described as the “bounty” of Southern Oregon, from morel mushrooms to the spring greens now coming in from local small farms.

“Southern Oregon is like a utopia for food, rather than a desert for food,” he said.

Before MÄS, Dorcak was a chef at other high-end restaurants in Ashland such as Amuse and Lorella. But cooking as an employee rather than an owner is an entirely different endeavor, he said.

“When you’re cooking for someone else’s restaurant, you’re cooking to brand. It’s a question of how much do you want to give, when it’s not yours. With this, I have ownership. With ownership, you can delve deeper into what you want to speak,” he said.

“With MÄS, it’s free — it’s mine.”

Dorcak said he and his wife will be in Chicago June 5 for the James Beard Foundation awards ceremony.

Reach reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected]. This story first appeared in the Rogue Valley Times.