Thursday, February 26, 7:00 pm
Members $90, guests $115

Sia Moshk is, by all accounts, an extraordinary restaurateur. A native of southern Iran, Moshk arrived in the United States in the late ’70s to study mechanical engineering. But a series of entry-level jobs in various food services left Moshk hungry for a life in the restaurant business. He earned a business degree and forged a name for himself in restaurant management. After 21 years overseeing other people’s operations, he decided it was high time he opened his own restaurant. With his name (literally) riding on the venture, Moshk handpicked Scott Serpas to run his kitchen.

A Louisiana native, Serpas left for Dallas after culinary school to work with Kevin Rathbun at Baby Routh’s, where he added the intricacies of Southwestern cuisine to his Bayou background. Four years later he accepted the sous-chef position at Atlanta’s NAVA. He was back in New Orleans, working as chef de cuisine at Mike’s on the Avenue, when Moshk hired him to be Sia’s executive chef.

Together, they’ve established a “cocoon of luxury,” Christiane Lauterbach wrote in Atlanta magazine. She praised Serpas’s “balance of complexity and enthusiasm for excellent ingredients.” In his three-star review, Atlanta Journal-Constitution critic John Kessler wrote that “each rich mouthful is a small happening”; he has continually ranked Sia’s among Atlanta’s 50 top restaurants.

Serpas’s brand of contemporary American cuisine is eclectic, as evidenced by a menu where Southwestern and Asian influences play peek-a-boo in dishes like a fire-roasted beef tenderloin with caramelized onion–portobello quesadilla and red chile–thyme glaze, or roasted duck and cabbage crispy roll with sambal syrup. In lesser hands than Serpas’s that might spell fusion disaster, but at Sia’s, Lauterbach wrote, “the journey through a large number of flavors is well worth undertaking.”