Elk

Elk's dining record is inseparable from the timber economy that built it. The town, earlier called Greenwood, grew around a lumber port, and the Harbor House was raised in 1916 by the Goodyear Redwood Company — which had bought the L.E. White mill — as a showcase for the prized heartwood of its own mill and, in the company's phrasing, "a place for entertainment and repose." Architect Louis Christian Mullgardt drew the redwood house. When logging failed, lodging replaced it: the Griffin House and the Greenwood Pier Inn both opened in the 1970s.

The modern chapter dates to 2005, when Edmund Jin and Eva Lu bought the Harbor House property; after a long renovation it reopened in 2018 with the restaurant as its centerpiece. Chef Matthew Kammerer, previously executive sous chef at San Francisco's Saison, built a multi-course tasting menu around foraged and hyper-local material — sea urchin, seaweed cut from the adjacent coastline, lace lichen, sake-poached abalone — with Japanese inflections. It earned a Michelin star in 2019 and later two stars plus a Green Star for sustainability.

The town remains thin in seats: press accounts count only two restaurants, and Greenwood Restaurant, a 22-seat room at the Sacred Rock Inn, closed in June 2025. Elk lies at the seaward end of Anderson Valley, and the Harbor House cellar is documented on Star Wine List.