On a December night in 2020, as Austin adjusted to life in a pandemic winter, ten diners enjoyed a multi-course meal in a pop-up serving sushi out of a borrowed space. Word had already started to spread, they were sold out for three weeks, but no one could have predicted what happened next. At 12:30 a.m., one of the ten diners, Joe Rogan, who himself had newly relocated to Austin, snapped a photo of Chef Phillip Frankland Lee in front of the restaurant’s sign and posted it to his millions of followers with a caption saying, ‘Best sushi I’ve ever had in my life.’
“Within four minutes we were sold out. By morning, there was something like 25,000 on the waitlist,” Phillip tells Austin Lifestyle, adding, “Margarita likes to remind me that we are overnight successes - at year eleven.”
That moment put the couple on a path that would lead them to relocate to Austin, but their story began long before—in middle school!
Their Love Story
Phillip was in eighth grade and Margarita was in sixth when their paths first crossed. “We were in the same friend group,” Phillip recalls. “I was in a band and her and her friends would come watch the bands play, including mine.” They weren’t especially close then, just kids who happened to orbit the same circle.
Life took them in different directions. Margarita became a model, spending time in Italy, Germany, Latvia and Ukraine before settling in New York for a while. Phillip went straight into restaurants, rising the ranks from a dishwasher at 18. By his early twenties, he was sous chef at Stefan Richter’s The Farm in Los Angeles, logging a hundred-hour workweeks for $27,000 a year. “It would be illegal now, but then that’s what you were supposed to do,” he says without animosity or regret, adding, “I would have done it for free.”
Back in New York, Margarita was thinking about her future after modeling and said she really wanted to get into the restaurant industry. She’d grown up surrounded by nature—raised on a farm in Latvia—and felt a pull toward food and hospitality. It was the early days of Facebook and she posted a casual update that she was considering going to culinary school. Phillip saw the post and messaged her. “I told her not to go to school,” he says. A short back-and-forth led to more conversation, and then Phillip says, “We randomly ran into each other at a pool party in the Valley at 2am”
Phillip says that about a week later, he invited Margarita to come by The Farm, the restaurant where he was working around the clock. “I told her to show up at midnight, after I closed and sent everyone home. And I told her to bring a friend.”
For days, he secretly prepped a tasting menu. That night, he set a table by the open kitchen, opened a bottle of wine, and cooked one course at a time, delivering a dish, sitting for a glass of wine, and going back to the kitchen to fire the next course. Their next date would be to play pool and Phillip says, “We moved in together two or three days later.”
That was 17 years ago.
Collaborating in the Kitchen
When asked if he taught Margarita to cook, Phillip is quick to answer, “Not at all whatsoever. She is a natural. You know how some people can just paint, or just play piano? She can just make desserts and bake. I had to have it beaten into me by angry chefs for a decade. She just walks the earth and crushes it.”
That dynamic—his relentless drive, her intuitive artistry and their mutual admiration became the foundation of their collaboration. Shortly after they were engaged, Phillip landed his first executive chef job at D’ Cache in Toluca Lake. The restaurant didn’t a pastry chef, so he was tasked with writing a dessert menu – Margarita had some critical feedback. “I told her that if she could do better, she should. She could, so she did.” Phillip then went to D’Cache’s owner and said they had to hire Margarita as a pastry chef and was told it was part of his job to do the desserts. “I said I needed her, and he said he wasn’t paying her, so I just split my salary with her,” Phillip shares. “We were living together at the time, anyway. So, the two of us split a $32,000 a year salary and we revamped a restaurant that had been there for 30-40 years.” Together, they garnered ‘Best New Restaurant’ and accolades usually reserved for new restaurants.
Starting from Scratch
They also impressed a guest who asked them to consult on his Hollywood coffee shop. “We went and checked it out and it just had a little chef's counter because he only did breakfast and closed at 2pm,” Phillip says. “He asked what we’d charged to hire us and I said, ‘Nothing.’ I told him we’d work for him for free until 2pm each day, but at 5pm, we’d open our own fine dining restaurant here, rent-free. That's where Scratch Bar started, early spring 2013,” a reservation-only tasting menu where they made everything right in front of you – from the butter to the charcuterie.
Phillip admits it was high concept for their first restaurant, but says, “I’d spent my career chasing Michelin stars,” with Margarita adding, “I knew that’s the only way I wanted to cook.”
The restaurant quickly drew attention, earning “Best New Restaurant” in under six weeks. But, the attention backfired with the landlord, who said he wanted them to scale back to two nights a week and focus more on his breakfast crowd. Phillip, admittedly young and headstrong, refused. “The conversation ended with me telling him we were out,” he says. They were already sold out for the coming weeks, so rather than cancel, they improvised.
At the time, the couple lived in a one-bedroom apartment just off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. With nowhere else to go, they gutted their living room, Margarita’s dad built an improvised chef’s counter and they reopened Scratch Bar in their own home. One of their cooks donned a valet jacket and guests were ushered into a tiny space that could seat 30, including a balcony that doubled as an outdoor dining room. And for a few weeks, their apartment transformed into one of the city’s most buzzed-about restaurants. Until, in another twist of fate, a guest who owned a shuttered restaurant space that shared a parking lot with Matsuhisa on ‘Restaurant Row” made them an offer to open in his space as 50-50 partners.
The next year they’d all also open The Gadarene Swine, a 15-course vegetable tasting menu. But behind the scenes, the business partner who brought them into the La Cienega space left Phillip personally liable for debts and disappeared. So, they closed Scratch Bar on La Cienga and reopened near their home in Encino, taking over a restaurant next door and turning that into a cocktail lounge called Woodly Proper. “And there was a shoe store that was never open, so we took that over and turned it into Franklin's Crab and Company and behind that, the first Sushi Bar,” Phillip says. *They changed the name of all of the Sushi Bars to Sushi by Scratch after they sold Sushi Bar ATX, including the three they had in LA before the pandemic.
A Pandemic Pivot
By 2020, Phillip and Margarita were running multiple restaurants in Los Angeles and their Sushi Bar in Montecito had earned a coveted Michelin star. But when the pandemic hit, California’s shutdowns loomed for months at a time and Phillip says, “There were enough people on our team who needed jobs, that we said we'll find another state that will let us work.” They’d done a pop-up in Austin previously during SXSW and said they loved the city’s energy and people, and because the restaurants were permitted to operate, they chose to temporarily relocate here. They shared the news in a newsletter they’d been sending out to primarily LA residents since 2013. “We said we were trying to stay afloat during the closures so were going to Austin and asked if people had any friends there to please tell them to check us out,” Phillip shares. And that’s how Joe Rogan’s wife’s best friend got the email and told her they had to go check out “the best sushi” while the pop-up was in Austin. “I didn’t even know he had a podcast,” Phillip admits. “I just thought he was the guy from Fear Factor.”
After the meal, after Rogan suggested Phillip and Margarita move to Austin, and Phillip said it was impossible because they still had five restaurants in California they planned to reopen, he gave them a proposition, saying that if they stayed at least one more month, he’d personally guarantee every seat was sold out. And the rest is history. They woke up to a wait list of over 25,000 people. “We’d had celebrities post about us before, but nothing like this,” Phillip says. “What really struck us, though, was how Austin showed up for us. We were at our lowest point, about to lose everything, and suddenly this community embraced us.”So, the couple decided to stay until everyone on the waitlist had a chance to dine. “We kept saying one more month, one more month,” Phillip says. “Before we knew it, we’d been here for over a year.”
Building Roots in Austin
By February 2021, they sold the Austin pop-up location to a private equity firm. That deal allowed them to buy out partners in their California ventures, gaining full ownership of their restaurants for the first time. It also freed them to think bigger in Austin.
Within a year, they launched Sushi by Scratch in Cedar Creek and Pasta Bar downtown. Margarita worked on the line at Pasta Bar until just two weeks before giving birth to their daughter in April 2022.
Austin quickly became not just a base for their restaurants but their home. “We love the food scene here,” Phillip says. “I argue often that it might be the best in the country. In New York or LA, you’ll have meals that make you want to call a friend overseas and say, ‘Fly here for this dinner.’ But you’ll also find the opposite. Here, the consistency is remarkable. I don’t think we’ve ever had a bad meal in Austin.”
Starry Future
Phillip and Margarita now have more than two dozen restaurants across the country that they own 100 percent, as well as three NADC (Not a Damn Chance) burgers with close friend Neen Williams, one of them in Jelly Roll’s Nashville bar! Looking ahead, Phillip says, “Sushi by Scratch will continue to expand. Our goal with that concept is to one day become the most one-starred concept.” He explains, “We grew up with chain restaurants, and chain restaurants had a terrible rap because they were terrible. But I've never thought there was anything wrong with having more than one of something in other cities.
So we’ve technically become a chain, but we've become a chain of one Michelin-starred restaurants. The goal for that is to hold that title.”
And now they’re in the throes of planning their most ambitious culinary project yet, in Dripping Springs, just a few minutes from their home. “We’re working on our final act,” Phillip says, with a sparkle of excitement in his eyes. “It’s really our pièce de résistance.”
Phillip and Margarita purchased almost four acres in Dripping Springs that includes a Pioneer Airlock cabin that’s 150 years old. They’re renovating it and adding multiple one-bedroom cottages on-site guests won’t only eat there, they can sleep there.
Guests will dine on a multi-course menu built primarily from what is raised, grown or hunted on the property. An acre-and-a-half garden will supply vegetables, while cows fed on a proprietary blend will provide milk for butter. Twice a year, those same cows will be used for meat on the menu. Honey will replace sugar in Margarita’s desserts and the olive oil will come from a collaboration with nearby Texas Hill Country Olive Co. “This will be our attempt at three Michelin Stars and top ten in The World’s 50 Best,” Phillip says.
It's a natural segue for a couple rooted in nature. “Margarita grew up on a farm in the middle of the forest and I grew up visiting my grandparents farm. So, farming for us is in our blood,” Phillip says, “My dad still wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat in the house in LA. He’s a cowboy from Council Bluffs, Iowa. My grandfather made cowboy boots. He had his own cowboy boots shop in Tuscon, AZ, so I was born in LA, but my heritage isn’t.” And now their daughter will grow up up on the property and they say, “and when people come to dine, it will feel like they’re visiting our home.”
And, if Phillip didn’t have enough on his plate, earlier this year he launched the NADC Podcast, which he shares grew out of a desire to improve his conversational skills. “I felt inadequate around friends who were great talkers,” he says. “Then I realized, of course they’re good—they do it for hours every day. I thought maybe I could get better if I practiced too. They’d be as good at cooking as I am if they cooked for 10 hours every day for ten years. So Neen and I came up with this idea, which is not about food, but called NADC Podcast. It’s an opportunity to raise awareness of the brand, but it's supposed to be inspiring. I like the idea of inspiring people, and not through my stories, but through the guests on the podcast.”
They’re nothing if not inspiring…And passionate, talented and innovative and we can’t wait to see the fruits (and meat and vegetables) of their labor at their Hill Country dream currently being built into reality.
QUICK FIRE
Favorite sushi restaurant (that they don’t own) Sushi Yume in Round Rock
Go-to Austin restaurants Sammie’s, Jeffrey’s, J Carver’s and Canje
Favorite things to cook? Margarita: Bread Phillip: Pizzas
If you could have one superpower
Margarita: Extend the time of the day
Phillip: Manipulating time, slowing down time
Dream podcast guests? Phillip: I’d love to have Rogan on, but I’m just too shy to ask. I have a list. Leonardo DiCaprio would be a great person to interview about all the grittiness of growing up having to deal with that fame while contining to create.
History-making fact: This year, Phillip and his brother Lennon Silvers Lee became the first brothers in American history to each hold their own Michelin stars. There have been brothers who worked together in a restaurant who got stars, but not who have each owned their own restaurants, and each got their stars separately.