Chef Josiah Citrin isn’t quite sure why his pair of California French restaurants in Santa Monica are so fancy. “I didn’t choose to be this elitist. When I started cooking, this is what there was,” he says. “People weren’t going to put up with casual. We were playing rock and roll and people were like, ‘What the fuck?’ But this is what I like.”

The 56-year-old chef — who charges $395 per person at his two-Michelin-starred Mélisse and $47 for a plate of lobster Bolognese at his Michelin-starred restaurant Citrin next-door — sports multiple bracelets and necklaces, like a bohemian surfer who emerged from the beach and put on a chef’s coat. Some of his accessories are from his late son Augie who passed away a few years ago, while a shiny green-dialed Cartier Santos watch is a gift from his girlfriend. Citrin’s wirey head of wind-blown hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and assertive lisp belie his status as one of Los Angeles’s most decorated chefs.

The inner tension between the chef’s upscale restaurants and his everyday persona comes to a head on Mélisse’s nine-course menu riddled with luxurious ingredients like wild turbot, spot prawn, and caviar. The dinner culminates in a hay-smoked chicken dish that was a pricey add-on in years past but is now the bombastic fulcrum of the tasting menu.

Before the dish is served, a captain presents it to the entire dining room, opening the Dutch oven and dramatically releasing the chicken’s sweet pastoral fragrance. (Diners are unaware that what they’re seeing is a half-cooked “show chicken,” a bird whose sole purpose is to pique appetites.) It’s an elegant yet familiar dish that Citrin believes defines his culinary perspective.

After the success of Citrin’s first restaurant, JiRaffe, which he opened with his childhood friend chef Raphael Lunetta in 1996, the chef debuted Mélisse in Santa Monica in 1999. At the time, the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila wrote that Mélisse was the “first new serious French restaurant to open in the LA area in quite a while,” as if the likes of L’Orangerie and Ma Maison had already become old hat. Over the years, Mélisse has been transformed numerous times and was whittled down to just a handful of tables serving 28 diners nightly in 2019.

Now tucked inside a space cordoned off like the Jerusalem Temple’s Holy-of-Holies, Mélisse has a Hi-Fi stereo system that plays classic rock records while the tables are arranged so that every diner has a prime view into the intimate kitchen. The rest of the building is occupied by the less formal a la carte restaurant Citrin. The chef wants a coveted third star for his flagship but isn’t quite sure what it takes to get there, so he’s just refining what he’s been doing for the past 25 years. (Citrin chuckles when I joke that he already has three Michelin stars across two restaurants.)

Mélisse’s signature roasted chicken takes cues from an old family recipe. Growing up, Citrin’s grandmother prepared a hay-smoked leg of lamb using a method she learned in France. “She’d cook it for seven hours, and it came out tender and beautiful,” he says. Citrin tasted hay-smoked chicken for the first time at Alain Passard’s Parisian restaurant L’Arpège in the late ’80s, which inspired him to serve it at his restaurant.

In the past, the best chicken that Citrin could source was Jidori, a brand of “beyond free range” birds raised in California. Today, Mélisse purchases its chickens from a farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whose name the distributor won’t reveal. “He doesn’t want to get screwed out of his chickens, and doesn’t want other purveyors trying to get it,” says Citrin. “It’s clear visually that this isn’t an ordinary supermarket bird. The skin is yellow because they’re fed corn and milk.”

The chickens are wet-brined for three hours in chicken stock, lemongrass, chile, vinegar, cracked peppercorn, rosemary, thyme, and parsley; Citrin lists each ingredient by memory in rapid succession. The brined birds are air-dried for 24 hours, placed into individual Dutch ovens, and buried in a heap of timothy hay procured from local animal feed shops. “I like the aroma, the flavor is subtle, it’s not too smoky,” he says. A splash of water goes into the pot before it cooks for 50 minutes at 350 degrees in the restaurant Citrin’s larger kitchen. When the chef removes the chickens from the oven, their skins are brilliantly golden and shining like a religious artifact.

Back at the Mélisse counter, Citrin breaks each chicken down into perfect portions of white and dark meat: the breast slice laid on its side and a knob of thigh meat topped with crisped skin. Sous chef Shazad Bhathena, a veteran of chef Corey Lee’s Benu and In Situ in San Francisco, has been at Mélisse for three years and prepares the dish’s other elements. Bhathena sautes pink oyster mushrooms in butter, creams spinach just like at Dear John’s, and makes egg-yolk-filled ravioli. The side dishes are laid out in quadrants before a server spoons over a velvety Albufera sauce of stock and butter tableside.

The second-to-last savory course, there’s a harmony between the fragrance of hay and the plate’s regal presentation that could’ve been plucked out of an Alain Ducasse cookbook. The plump chicken pairs with the earthy mushrooms, while the creamed spinach adds a freshness. For a certain kind of diner who splurges on meals of this caliber, it’s a refreshingly simple throwback to France’s most iconic homestyle dish, the roast chicken. Mélisse will serve it for a few more weeks, then switch over to a dry-aged roast duck for the fall. Then the hay-smoked chicken will make a grand return next year.