Author: punchwpadmin

Bluestone Lane Café

Los Altos

Bluestone Lane Café strives to generate human connections within its large, detailed space in downtown Los Altos where mint-green tiles meet coastal beach prints as neutral timber tones and wooden furnishings round out its 1,667-square-foot layout. Founded in Australia by a Melbournian who sought to enhance the café experience, Bluestone Lane’s Los Altos location, which opened in 2013, was developed with a laidback klatch in mind. The menu features the popular Avocado Smash, which combines avocados, feta cheese and cherry tomatoes before it’s spooned onto toasted bread—with premium coffee on the side. 288 1st Street, open Monday through Sunday from 7:30AM to 6PM.

Three Bees Coffee

San Mateo

A staple of downtown San Mateo for nearly 20 years (even predating the movie theater), Three Bees Coffee is a homey, independent coffee shop brewing strong while surrounded by nationwide chains like Philz and Pete’s Coffee. Its secret, according to owner Rafat Haddad, is simple: quality coffee matched by a welcoming atmosphere. “People come here to meet each other for coffee—they want to see each other here,” he says. “That’s the environment we’ve created.” The blackboard menu behind the counter offers straightforward coffee-based drinks while a satellite location on the third floor of the local library shows just how entwined with San Mateo Three Bees has truly become. 224 East 3rd Avenue, open Monday through Thursday from 6:30AM to 6:30PM; Friday and Saturday from 6:30AM to 8:30PM; Sunday from 7:30AM to 6:30PM.

Coffeebar

Menlo Park + Redwood City

If Apple has its “geniuses” and Subway its “sandwich artists” then come to Coffeebar for the “hospitalians.” Inspired by the congenial café culture native to Italy, Coffeebar is a community hub that transitions from morning espressos and coconut chai lattes (with eats like a Harvest Brunch Bowl) to an evening wine bar for winding down the day. The Menlo Park location has become a hit since opening in 2018 and their growth continues with the debut of Coffeebar Redwood City in September with plans for a second Menlo Park café plus a Palo Alto shop. 1149 Chestnut Street, Menlo Park; 2020 Broadway, Redwood City; open Sunday through Wednesday from 6:30AM to 9PM; Thursday through Saturday from 6:30AM to 10PM.

Off the 101 in East Palo Alto, in the shadows of large retail and commerce structures ranging from IKEA to Amazon, is a small-yet-prominent, family-owned pepper farm. But you’d be hard-pressed to find Happy Quail Farms if you’re just driving by.

Though their peppers are revered by locals at farmers markets and restaurant chefs alike, the private farm hides in plain sight.

Owner David Winsberg started Happy Quail Farms in 1980, not surprisingly, to raise quails to sell their eggs. Initially coming to the Bay Area as a glassblower apprentice, he pivoted into agriculture. Along with quails, David was growing basil and other herbs, delivering them by way of his Vespa scooter.

About the time he married and started a family, he decided that he needed a more durable produce with a higher demand to make a living as a self-sufficient farmer on small acreage on the Peninsula. Calling upon his past from his father’s green bell pepper farm in South Florida, he settled on growing peppers in the clay, silt and loam-based soil of the Bay. The Happy Quail moniker, a vestige of his past, remained in name and represented the intentionally small, family nature of his farm.

Nearly four decades later, Happy Quail Farms produces a large variety of fresh peppers with some of the most sought-after produce in the country. It’s also the last-known independent farm in East Palo Alto.

“We didn’t intend to get big,” soft-spoken David explains. “We wanted to become a small, specialty farm.”

Longtime residents might recall the area’s agricultural history but new neighbors may be surprised to learn how fruitful the ground is in East Palo Alto. How a fertile farm hides among the tech giants of Silicon Valley.

Happy Quail Farms grows many specialties of bell, poblano, shishito and padrón peppers—the largest assortment of any one pepper farm in the U.S. Famed food writer Calvin Trillin once remarked that the padrón is the only pepper he’d travel to Spain for and wondered why no one grew them in the U.S. According to David, Happy Quail Farms was the first to jump in, and lo and behold, these specialty Spanish peppers can be found in East Palo Alto.

David notes that Americans are just acquiring a palate for very hot peppers; therefore, the majority of his crop is sweet and red. While many pepper producers wax the vegetables to maintain their color and firmness for a longer shelf life, Happy Quail Farms decided to forego that preservation step to instead sell the produce quickly so customers can enjoy the freshness.

Restaurants as far away as Miami and Boston order directly from Happy Quail Farms with San Francisco’s La Mar Cebicheria buying 80 percent of Happy Quail Farms’ unique ají amarillo peppers for their ceviche.

The two main factors that determine the spiciness or heat of the peppers are temperature and length of season. Farmers in hotter climates, such as New Mexico and the Yucatán, grow spicier varieties. The Peninsula’s cooler climate and shorter season is more suitable for a sweeter variation of pepper. The peak season for local peppers is between June and mid-October but can run all the way to February, depending on the amount of rain and cold weather.

Happy Quail Farms has become an institution at local farmers markets and even predates when East Palo Alto was incorporated in 1983. Over the years, the farm has grown and adapted with the times. New technology ushered in solar panels to defray energy costs to help run the water pump system and 20 years ago, David upgraded to a retractable roof greenhouse for passive climate control.

The greenhouse is tucked behind David’s home and upon opening the large sliding door, the rows and rows of green leaves and peppers are magically revealed. Happy Quail Farms was the first to use this new roof technique for vegetable growing. The adjustable roof allows the greenhouse to cool the confines without the need and expense of fans. Peppers like it hot and David’s greenhouse can maintain an internal temperature of approximately 100 degrees.

One of the disadvantages to the Peninsula is the familiar pangs of escalating real estate prices. Happy Quail Farms has expanded into other plots outside of the main farm but this past year, the owners of the lot where he grows rhubarb decided to develop their land. Not surprisingly, rhubarb can’t compete with those returns.

While they won’t have as much rhubarb, Happy Quail Farms plants a variety of other crops to help rotate what’s grown in the farm’s soil, such as cucumbers, strawberries, watercress and tarragon. In recent years, David decided to extend his pepper season and products by offering a popular line of powders, relishes and sauces, including Ají Amarillo, Habanero and their top-selling sauce: Smoky Cayenne. The processed peppers have grown to make up 20 percent of Happy Quail’s business.

Any kind of farming is hard work, but the life of the pepper farmer can inherently sting. David and his team avoid touching their eyes when cutting peppers and while producing their pepper powder, use a respirator and gloves along with a ventilation system. David recalls the time he broke a bottle of habanero pepper powder in the back of his truck. “It was so potent, I couldn’t drive for a month without sneezing and crying,” he says.

What should you do if you eat a pepper that’s too hot? David’s tip is either bread or dairy. He says peppers have a sticky quality that latches onto our taste buds. While water provides little to no relief, David recommends something abrasive like bread or products with lactose such as milk or ice cream to help extinguish the inflaming pepper.

You’ll find Happy Quail Farms at farmers markets in Menlo Park (Sunday 9AM-1PM), Marin County and the San Francisco Ferry Building. Look for the amazing variety (red, orange, yellow, white, green, purple and chocolate) of fresh and bottled peppers to add color and flavor to your dishes. You can also buy sauces and relishes at happyquailfarms.com. And if you’re a pepper neophyte, keep a pint of ice cream nearby just in case.

make it

DAVID’S SECRET SAUCE RECIPE

Ingredients

• 2-3 lbs long Cubanelle peppers
  (vine-ripened if possible)
• ½ cup high-quality olive oil
• 1½ lbs tomatoes, cubed
• 2 onions
• salt
• ciabatta bread
• pinch of sugar (optional)

Instructions

Slice the onions and brown them in the olive oil on low heat in a large, shallow pan until they are caramelized. While the onions are cooking, seed the peppers, slice them thinly either by hand or food processor. Add the peppers to the caramelized onions. They will first produce a lot of liquid. Let the liquid slowly evaporate. Add salt to taste and if you want, a pinch of sugar. Before it starts to burn, add cubed tomatoes and quickly stir. The tomatoes should not cook all the way. When the mixture is about done, cut the ciabatta thinly and toast. When you are ready to serve, drizzle the toasted bread with olive oil and put a spoonful of David’s Secret Sauce on it. Makes for a great appetizer! If used alone, it makes a wonderful sauce for pasta, as well as a side dish along any main entrees like fish or meats.

If you find yourself out and about in the evening, looking for a cool place to stop in, Burlingame is a good bet—with two bars setting the bar for Peninsula nightlife. One is Barrelhouse Bar, across from the Burlingame train station. Attracting a packed after-work crowd, Barrelhouse features reclaimed wood decor, steampunk lighting, craft cocktails, beer, wine and a city feel. Also on tap here: an outdoor patio, occasional live music, a happy hour, and if you’re hungry, a small menu of charcuterie and a variety of empanadas.

The other hot spot is a short walk down Burlingame Avenue and a left turn at the Apple store. Here, you’ll find the Vinyl Room—a drinks-only retro lounge fitted out with old-school album covers, a bar, dance floor, live music and DJs spinning playlists for customers who shake it as fast as the bartenders mix drinks.

Both are popular stops on the annual Burlingame Halloween pub crawl and costume contest. And though the two locations may have different vibes, they share the same owners: Juan Loredo and Jose Natividad, two young men who started out even younger, and who’ve successfully worked their dreams into reality.

It all started when Juan and Jose met while fraternity brothers at San Jose State. They were studying advertising when they both got jobs working at a local bar and grill. The money was good, they liked the environment and they did very well. A seed was planted.

After college, Juan got a job with Nielsen doing media research, and Jose jumped into an assistant role at Morgan Stanley. But at night, they continued working behind the bar. They would work their full-time jobs and go straight into bartending at night. And at some point, both realized it was the best part of their day. “I looked forward to working at the bar at night, interacting with people on that level. It just seemed natural,” Jose says. “I got captivated by it; I just wanted to stay in the business.” And as it turned out, so did Juan. The seed took root.

From that realization, it was a three-year slog of working full-time by day and bartending at night so they could open up a place of their own, without needing an additional partner or investor. “We didn’t really care about getting a day off,” Jose recalls. “We just wanted to save money and open up our own bar.”

Flash forward to 2006. Just 25 at this point, Juan and Jose had accumulated enough savings. It was time to make it happen. “We both grew up in San Jose so we wanted to get out of San Jose. San Francisco was definitely the benchmark,” Juan says. Still, the two were realistic. “At 25, we’d helped our managers, but operations is completely different, being an owner. We thought, if we go to San Francisco, we’re just gonna get eaten alive and we’re gonna fail, so let’s not do that.”

Instead, they set their sights on a “small bar in a small town.” They ruled out Campbell, Los Gatos and Willow Glen. “We decided that we were going to try to find something closer to the City that met that criteria: a small town that had a bar for sale that we could possibly buy.”

At last they heard about a closed bar and disco in Burlingame. It was a mirror ball in the rough, but Jose and Juan agreed—this was the place. Rolling up their sleeves, they started peeling off the layers of what had been Rocket’s Nightclub. Long before that, it was the Polo Club, reportedly an old haunt of the legendary late Hillsborough resident Bing Crosby. Finally, when the hammering was over and the dust settled, what emerged was the Vinyl Room. With DJs playing hip dance music and bartenders serving up great drinks, the buzz started to grow. “Everyone just gravitated towards it; everyone was excited for something different and new,” Jose says.

By 2011, the duo felt the time was right to open a second bar, and Barrelhouse was born. This time, the concept was the “Peninsula’s Neighborhood Bar.” Offering beer, wine and spirits (which all come in barrels), the name “Barrelhouse” captured their intent of having selections appealing to everyone. Eight years later, the joint is still jumping. And even though Juan and Jose make success look easy, in the unpredictable world of hospitality, it definitely is not. “We dedicated ourselves to doing it. We committed,” Juan reflects. “People will come in and they know we have two bars, and they ask, ‘Is this all you do? You probably have another job, right?’ And I just look at them… ‘What?’ Because it’s a lot of work. You’re here sometimes until 3,4,5 in the morning.”

At the end of the night, they love what they do and it shows. “We’re always happy to be here, to take care of the customer, to take care of our business,” Jose says. “Even when it’s difficult sometimes, we persevere. We are all-in to make it work, no matter what.”

make it

THE CORTEZ KILLER

From the Barrelhouse Specialty Cocktail Menu, the Cortez Killer is the creation of Barrelhouse manager Jesus Partida. Crafted with Mexican Mezcal, the Chile de Árbol (Mexican red chili pepper) garnish gives the drink its final kick.

Ingredients

• 1½ oz. Mezcal Unión      
• 1  oz. lime
• ½ oz. Agave nectar
• ½ oz. Aperol          
• Slice of serrano pepper      
• Chile de Árbol (garnish)   

Instructions

Add all ingredients into shaker and shake. Put one large ice cube into an English highball glass rimmed with smoked cherrywood salt. Double strain cocktail into the glass and garnish with Chile de Árbol.

BAR HOP:

Vinyl Room

221 Park Road

Barrelhouse

305 California Drive

words by Silas Valentino

Slightly secluded from the bustle of El Camino Real, hidden within the southern edge of San Mateo’s Hayward Park neighborhood, is a restaurant worth the seek.

Down a short alley that splits from the main road and bordered by an insurance service and a boutique shop, stands a cream-colored Victorian well into its hundreds with a kitchen reserved for evocative Californian cuisine. If it’s the mid-afternoon, chef and owner Sachin Chopra is in there delicately prepping the evening’s prix fixe menu as a local rock radio station provides a backbeat to his rhythmic chopping.

Approaching the front door to All Spice, you’ll notice the burgundy trim outlining both the bay and dual upstairs windows. By the time you reach the foyer, Shoshana Wolff is there for the greeting. The restaurant’s wine director and general manager makes herself accessible throughout the meal and is so omnipresent, that even All Spice’s front page photo on Google shows her readily available at the host’s stand.

The charming three-room cottage went through several iterations prior to housing All Spice; originally erected in 1906 as a gatehouse for the prominent Borel Family Estate that once held this chunk of the Peninsula, the building previously served as a maternity store before the more recent Chef Jon Sears’ The Dining Room during the first decade of the current century. Sachin and Shoshana, a husband-wife restaurateur duo, took over in 2010, adding their own distinct flavoring to the premises.

Today, the three dining rooms are designed in colors and ambiance to reflect ginger, cinnamon and basil spices. An avocado-green fireplace provides warmth during the winter. Tables once decked in white tablecloths are now bare, more casual and comfortable. The restaurant feels less like a Michelin-star-worthy pursuit and more as though Shoshana and Sachin have invited you into their family home in Montara for an evening of fine dining.

“We had no idea what this restaurant was going to be, but we kind of molded it to this particular location,” Shachin explains. “This building lent itself to the restaurant. I thought it would be a good place for fine dining and this is what it was supposed to be.”

As fine dining undergoes a transition in modern cuisine, where the number of closures seem to outweigh the openings, All Spice remains a staple of deluxe cookery on the Peninsula, largely due to the couple’s drive for innovation. The menu is so often adapted or modified that certain recipes from years past are lost or abandoned. Sachin uses his kitchen as an exploratorium for unearthing striking flavor profiles; the slow-roasted venison currently on the menu is accompanied by a mixture of juniper, cabbage jus, miso, green peas, turnips and hearts of palm to create savory bites that are hard to pin down.

“Something that gives me a lot of joy is when people taste something of Sachin’s creation, and it’ll remind them of something their mom used to make,” Shoshana says. “The flavors are there but they’re presented in a way that’s out of context or unusual. Sometimes people can’t tell what vegetables they’re eating—is it an onion or a radish?”

Sachin is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in New York who worked the line at the four-star restaurant Daniel in Manhattan before impressing palates with his melding of Indian flavors and French classics. He came to California in 2003 to work as the executive sous chef of Amber India in San Jose, where he met Shoshana, a Santa Cruz native with a background in mechanical engineering and a passion for viticulture and enology. The two married and envisioned a restaurant where Sachin’s talents were no longer constricted to his Indian heritage or limited by their own ambition.

“I wanted to give him a platform to do something beyond traditional Indian food with a little tweak,” Shoshana says. “He would get hired to do Indian food in a different way but the minute they were not growing astronomically, he had to go back to making butter chicken. There was no joy in it for him.”

For Sachin, any time spent focusing on traditional Indian cuisine meant less attention on creating new dishes and blending flavor profiles. “The whole purpose of coming to America was to work in modern French food,” says Sachin, who was born in Sonipat near New Delhi. “I don’t see any fault in those dishes; they’re very delicious, but as a chef, it was really frustrating because you’d make tons of tikka masala while your other modern dishes would be a little languid.”

Sachin’s profile on Instagram is ripe with examples of his boundless imagination for food. (It’s also a great preview for what to expect on a future All Spice menu.) Scrolling down his Instagram page becomes a carousel of visual delights for foodies. His posts reveal how bite-sized treasures offer a bounty of colors and shapes. At All Spice, your feet remain in San Mateo while your tongue embarks on an epicurean excursion.

Sachin updates the menu with seasonal adaptations or variations on fan favorites. One such favorite is his series “Ode for Wife” now in its seventh edition as a dish rooted in beets, a vegetable adored by Shoshana but abhorred by the chef: “Oh my God,” Sachin laughs. “Beets are horrible!”

Shoshana runs the front of house where she greets every customer who passes through the burgundy-framed door. She says a majority of their clientele are from Burlingame down to Palo Alto but All Spice often attracts foodies from San Francisco, the East Bay or business types in town for a few days.

The duo debuted a satellite All Spice location in San Francisco in 2015 that was awarded with a Michelin Star in its second year. The feat allowed them to share their kitchen with a larger audience; however, they recognized a dwindling demand for fine dining and closed their second location to focus on the flagship. Shoshana says customers aren’t prioritizing formality—they’re seeking experiences that eschew white tablecloths and waiters whipping out crumbers.

“There’s really a movement towards a comfortable, casual-feeling dining even if the food is really on point. If you look at the restaurants that are getting Michelin Stars—take State Bird Provisions [in San Francisco], for example. I heard they laughed when they got the call; they thought it was ridiculous. It’s so casual and relaxed there. It’s not what you think of for ‘fine dining,’” she says.

“We are really fortunate that on the Peninsula, there is a demand for special occasion restaurants. People want somewhere appropriate to celebrate events. There are a lot of delicious foods but not as many places with an ambiance.”

foodie delight

allspicerestaurant.com

@allspicexbranch

Taqueria de Amigos

Pescadero

You might not have noticed this spot for any attribute other than its low gas prices—and yes, it is located inside of a gas station market on Pescadero Creek Road. Without a recommendation, the natural inclination is to stay away from gas station hot food, but you’d be missing arguably the cheapest and greatest Mexican food on the western edge of the Peninsula. Your pocket change will cover the cost of fish tacos (the chips and salsa are free) and with a quick ten-minute drive, you’ll soon be relishing a perfect California day at the beach. 1999 Pescadero Creek Road, open every day from 9AM to 9PM.

El Palenque Taqueria

San Mateo

Located on an unassuming block a dash from Highway 101 is this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it local favorite, infamous for luring foodies from up and down the Peninsula to explore an otherwise sleepy suburban quadrant of San Mateo. El Palenque Taqueria offers traditional favorites at a cut-rate price (a super burrito is just $7.25, avocado included) but this popular take-out joint distinguishes itself with its refined dinner plate menu. The bell ringer: the alambre, a beef scramble that sizzles with bacon and bell peppers topped in a coat of cheese. The only decoration on the walls are a few ornamental roosters suggesting that when you’re at El Palenque, the focus is on the flavor. 15 North Kingston Street, open every day from 10AM to 8:45PM.

Taqueria la Cazuela

Palo Alto

Taqueria La Cazuela in East Palo Alto is bright with traditional papel picado décor and booming with sounds of grilling meat and crowd chatter. This popular Mexican restaurant is simple, to-the-point and easily loveable. Grab your meal of choice and eat outside the green-colored building under the hanging lights and canopy of trees. La Cazuela’s prolific menu and one-to-three-dollar tacos are especially intriguing, but the real proof is in the flan. All of the traditional Mexican meals you could crave at a taqueria are available at La Cazuela. 2390 Clarke Avenue, open Monday through Saturday 8AM to 8PM; closed Sundays.

Jeff Roller draws green curlicues on a porcelain grater with a wasabi rhizome. Circular pressure against the grater’s tiny bumps unlocks the heat of the wasabi plant’s chemical reaction; simply slicing the thick stem won’t work.

Green paste builds up on the grater. Jeff sets the stem down, reminding me to wait a few minutes for the chemical reaction to take place. The ground wasabi’s heat level peaks between five and twenty minutes, no sooner and no later. We talk for a few minutes, and then Jeff swipes his finger against a lump of wasabi, puts it in his mouth and nods his head. It’s ready.

I put a hunk of fresh wasabi in my mouth, smelling its earthy scent, noticing its moist consistency and light green coloration. A moment after contact with my tongue, the vegetable’s heat warms my upper chest and tingles up my sinuses. The actual taste is sweet, hitting the taste buds in the back and sides.

I’m here at this farm in Half Moon Bay to learn more about a plant-based condiment I usually avoid at the typical local sushi restaurant. Surprises abound, including how two electrical contractors came to be the Peninsula’s wasabi kings.

In 2011, Jeff Roller and Tim Hall were searching for a niche business they could call their own. They wanted to do something where they wouldn’t be constantly underbid for work. Then Tim discovered that the bright green wasabi paste he enjoyed with his sushi wasn’t the real thing. The majority ingredient in a tube of wasabi is horseradish dyed green with little to no actual wasabi plant content.

Both Jeff and Tim became fascinated with the wasabi plant. Its medicinal potential, the challenge of growing it and the fact that wasabi was being faked in the marketplace contributed to their decision to found Half Moon Bay Wasabi. “Nobody else was growing wasabi in California. Some people tried, but nobody was successful,” Jeff says.

After comparing wasabi’s native growing conditions in Japan to resources available in Half Moon Bay, Jeff and Tim decided that growing wasabi in greenhouses might work. They leased a few dilapidated greenhouses and used their construction skills to rebuild them. As Jeff tells it, “The greenhouses weren’t being used, and the weeds inside were as high as trees.”

The pair began growing plants in one of the greenhouses. Tim had previous agricultural experience, and both have degrees in biology. “Tim tends to deal with building things, setting things up and repairing things when they break because things break all the time,” Jeff says. “I’m generally the one who’s going out and scouting for bugs and just going through the greenhouses looking at all the plants for disease.”

It takes 20 months to grow one wasabi plant, so when Jeff sees signs of bug infestations or disease, it’s a big deal. In the beginning, the farm experienced multiple crop failures, mostly due to bacterial and fungal infections. “It’s a weird plant. It’s semi-aquatic with unique needs from other greenhouse crops,” Jeff explains. Creating the right balance between dry and wet conditions is a big challenge for wasabi growers.

After a virus wiped out two greenhouses and an instance when bugs came in and destroyed a bunch of crops, Jeff felt like quitting. “I was fed up. I would help Tim throw away all the plants and do what we needed to do to clean up,” he recalls. After those losses, Jeff spent a few weeks away from the farm to clear his head. “Tim would have some ideas, a new way to do it to prevent it from happening again. I’d buy in and come back.”

When the wasabi plants started to look good, Jeff and Tim expanded their farming to more greenhouses. They took their first decent wasabi rhizome to the sushi chef at Sushi Main Street in Half Moon Bay for validation: “The chef looked at it, then looked at us, and asked, ‘Where’d you get it?’ We said, ‘Right here in Half Moon Bay.’ He stared at us in disbelief.” Then, the chef sampled the fresh wasabi and gave his thumbs up, to Jeff and Tim’s delight.

Nine years later, Half Moon Bay Wasabi’s five greenhouses are producing long rows of healthy wasabi plants. The greenhouses capture the sun’s heat while the cool coastal breeze rustles in under the plastic-sheeted ceiling. Walking between rows of thigh-high wasabi plants, pebbles crunch underfoot and a musty earth smell permeates the space. Over the years, Half Moon Bay Wasabi has delivered fresh wasabi to 50 Bay Area restaurants. Ongoing orders from 12 local restaurants speak for the 60 to 70 pounds of wasabi harvested every Monday. Jeff is a hero to the San Francisco restaurants where he hand-delivers fresh wasabi and is often greeted by an uproarious cheer of “Wasabi!” from grateful staff.

Each part of the wasabi plant is edible, not just its nub-covered rhizome. The wasabi plant’s multiple long-stemmed veiny leaves add flavor to green salads and make great sashimi wraps. Its delicate flower blossoms are a favorite garnish for chefs looking to add beauty and heat to their dishes.

Local foodies can get Half Moon Bay Wasabi on their plates one of two ways: dine at a high-end restaurant with Half Moon Bay Wasabi on the menu, or place an order through the farm’s website to have fresh wasabi, rhizome or stems and leaves, delivered in a chill pack to their door. A half-pound order of wasabi rhizomes is currently $70, shipping included, and is enough to satisfy the curiosity of wanting to try the real thing. A partially grated rhizome will last about ten days if kept in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator. Jeff says that you can’t freeze wasabi, but you can submerge it in water, changing the water every few days, with the wasabi lasting about two weeks.

Now that Jeff and Tim are on the cusp of having created a predictable farming method for growing wasabi in Half Moon Bay, they are looking for investors to help them ramp up production. Proud of their innovations and discoveries, they have cracked the intricacies of wasabi farming. “We’ve developed a growing methodology to scale up production, drop the price and bring authentic wasabi to the masses,” Jeff says. hmbwasabi.com

ON THE MENU

Bird Dog, Palo Alto

Wood-Grilled Avocado (with fresh wasabi)

Old Princeton Landing, Half Moon Bay

Norcal Salad (with wasabi leaves)

Rintaro, San Francisco

Sashimi (with fresh wasabi)

words by Silas Valentino

The painting in question, hanging on the barroom wall of Selby’s, is at eye level for whomever snags the last leather chair at the left end of the bar. But its minimalism could easily deflect focus.

There are many other references to 20^th-century Modernism gracing the room, designed in tribute to Gertrude Stein’s cluttered-yet-orderly salon in Paris. So a black tie loosely wrapped around the neckband of a laid-out white-collared dress shirt is hardly an attention-grabber—especially  when juxtaposed with the allure of a nearby John Coltrane painting, rare photographs of Audrey Hepburn and Gloria Vanderbilt or any of the other 150 original artworks that adorn these restaurant walls.

Nevertheless, this unassuming painting was in fact the pièce de résistance for Tim Stannard and Stephen Brady as the duo conceptualized Atherton’s newest elegant eatery. The fancy shirt tousled against a black backdrop is a felicitous blend of opposing directions (luxury vs. leisure) but it’s precisely where this team from the Bacchus Management Group wanted to take Selby’s: where contemporary fine dining intersects with classic hospitality and care, where timeless décor blends into the fray of the modern day.

“Developing a restaurant is a process—it’s not linear. It’s multi-faceted and things fold over and land on top of each other,” Tim says of Selby’s, which opened at 3001 El Camino Real in late July.

“This is our sixth project working with Rob [Delamater] from Lost Art Salon [a commercial art gallery in San Francisco] and we’ve developed a rhythm. We’ll set aside an entire day on a weekend to sip green tea and look over thousands of paintings, photographs and sculptures. That picture [of the shirt] was the one where we were flipping through images and Stephen said, ‘Stop! This is exactly what we’re going for.’”

Tim is a founding partner of Bacchus, which manages several award-winning restaurants throughout the Bay Area, and he’s lived in Woodside for the past 11 years. Stephen is an interior designer who has worked with Ralph Lauren Home and Williams-Sonoma and the two have collaborated since opening The Village Pub in Woodside.

That project was in 2000 when Stephen lived in New York, forcing the duo to improvise with phone calls and postage stamps to envision the restaurant. Tim would snap photos with a disposable camera of the Village Pub site and FedEx them across the country for Stephen to mark up with ideas using a pen.

Two decades later, following Bacchus’s debut of restaurants such as Spruce and The Saratoga in San Francisco and the Mayfield Bakery & Café in Palo Alto, Tim and Stephen plotted Selby’s with much greater ease now that Stephen is local. Alongside chef Mark Sullivan, they’ve crafted a club that serves continental American cuisine in a glamorous dining atmosphere. Selby’s is the continuation of classic 1930s and 1940s establishments like Chasen’s, the Brown Derby and Romanoff’s.

Their intention was to repurpose the towering, ornate wooden doors at the entrance of the restaurant (the sole remaining artifact from the previous tenant Chantilly, which shuttered in 2017) as a portal to lead into the lavish world of Selby’s.

“We wanted to first develop the ‘felt sense’—how does it feel when you open the door to the restaurant?” Tim explains. “We want all our restaurants to be a 3D experience. Everything you come into contact with—whether it’s your eyes, ears, taste buds or fingers—it should all be harmonious. From the music to the candles, it all has to be in sync. That’s a big part of how we start a process. It’s standing in what usually is an empty building and figuring out the felt sense.”

This obsession for detail is visually evident across the 10,000-square-foot, two-story building where signature light fixtures and a Modernistic chandelier in the main room from San Francisco artist G. Magnus Schevene literally shine.

Patrons will quickly pick up on the acoustic padding on the walls that promotes civilized conversation while they’re treated to concierge service from an inspired staff. Scott Kennedy, director of private dining, will only have to learn your name once before remembering exactly how to best serve you.

The menu lifts inspiration from modern, global continental cuisine that shifts with the seasons. (Bacchus runs a ranch in Woodside where much of the produce used in their restaurants is sourced.) The summer menu begins with a few delectable bites of Kaluga caviar complemented by cured Hokkaido scallops from Japan and Olivier’s Salad, a traditional Russian starter that trades lettuce for diced vegetables.

A glass of Chardonnay pairs with the wild mushrooms en papillote alongside a dry-aged roast crown of duck sourced from 38 North All-Natural Poultry in Petaluma. The meal concludes with sips of Madeira and a slice of chocolate cake that executive pastry chef Janina O’Leary tops with salted caramel and fudge sauce.

Selby’s largest feat in terms of size is their dual wine cellars (located on the ground level for all to see), capable of holding up to 20,000 bottles focusing on vintage Italian, Spanish, French and California wines.

Among the multitude of challenges involved in opening a restaurant in the Bay Area today is securing sufficient staffing, given the high cost of living. Bacchus, however, has a unique advantage due to their commitment to cultivating a group of employees who believe in the company.

“It was my biggest fear. It is an incredibly tight labor market and I’ve heard horror stories from friends who weren’t able to open restaurants,” Tim says. “But many employees have been with Bacchus for 10 or 12 years. When we decide to open a new restaurant, we have people in the pipeline who have been growing and are ready to take the next step. Lauren [Kemp, general manager of Selby’s] started as a dining room server. We spend a lot of time and frankly, money, investing in people.”

Although Selby’s has adopted Atherton as its home, the address is within a six-block stretch of El Camino Real that’s technically an unincorporated area of San Mateo County. Reminiscent of their desire to celebrate yesteryear influences with today’s style, Selby’s itself is caught in the middle of dueling forces.

“We’re betwixt and between,” Tim laughs. “An intent for the restaurant was to honor what came before us. We’ve heard great stories about Chantilly from people popping in and it’s important to continue that legacy of being a clubhouse for the greater Atherton community.”

RESERVATIONS RECOMMENDED

3001 El Camino Real, Redwood City

650.546.7700 • selbysrestaurant.com

The bar is packed; the crowd roars. All eyes are focused on the fierce competition playing out on TV. But it’s not the Dubs, the Giants or the Niners who emerge triumphant—it’s Peninsula chef Eric Keppler.

Such was the scene when the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley hosted a viewing party last June to root for Eric, its own executive pastry chef, who beat out eight other professional contestants to win the Food Network title: Best Baker in America.

“I was just happy to be there,” he says. “To show the world how much I love what I do and I hope that it came across in what I made—apparently, it did!”

Eric’s road to sweet victory began in his small hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania, where he absorbed his grandmother’s work ethic and passion for creating. “She grew up on a farm during the Depression. She knew how to sew her own clothes; she used to embroider and make quilts and she cooked and baked and just did everything well,” he says.

In fact, it was Eric’s adaptation of his Nana’s chocolate cake that won him the “Best Baker” title in the final round.

“She was like Superwoman to me and I learned all these things from her. We were always baking cookies or baking bread and her ability to just make anything was magic to me,” he remembers. “If we were shopping and I’d see some popcorn balls, I’d say, ‘I would love a popcorn ball.’ And she’d say, ‘Let’s go home and make popcorn balls’—and we would! So baking was always something I loved but I never thought it could be a career, because most pastries in small towns were pies and cookies and supermarket cakes. There wasn’t a ‘pastry world’ per se that I knew about because it was so rural.”

But as the years went by, Eric was always the guy at school and at work who’d be asked to make desserts for special events, family and friends. One day, a coworker was complimenting one of Eric’s treats and suggested he go to school for baking.

Armed with Nana’s inspiration and his own raw talent, Eric did just that. He enrolled in Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduation, Eric made his way to San Francisco and began his ascent up the tiers of professional pastry and baking, eventually landing at the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley in 2011.

A towering structure at the intersection of University Avenue and Highway 101 in Palo Alto, the hotel aspires to create an authentic local feel. Eric, according to a representative from the hotel, is an outstanding ambassador for the business. From day one, he wanted to share his passion, telling other staff members to “Come into the kitchen, see what I do.”

You can find Eric’s warmth and passion literally on the plate—Nana’s Chocolate Cake is prominently featured on all the menus at the hotel. He and his team create a wide variety of desserts every day, from sweet comfort treats like date walnut sticky buns to pistachio lemon tortas and house-made savories like their parmesan fennel crackers or an intriguing item called a smoked salmon cruffin.

“Everything is made from scratch,” Eric says. “I think a lot of people don’t know that.”

Desserts featured at the Four Season’s coffee bar and restaurant Quattro run the gamut from indulgent cakes and cookies to ice creams and even homemade chocolate bars and French bonbons, often with fanciful names. The Jasmine Masters, for example—a lemon olive oil cake with fromage blanc, strawberry gelee, jasmine tea gelato and confit strawberries—was named for a famous drag queen because, Eric says, it’s “a little bit extra.”

Then there’s the Super Moon, a play on a key lime pie, which highlights the sea buckthorn berry, a fruit said to have more omega antioxidants than salmon. Who knew? Eric is also the mastermind behind the massive dessert buffet extravaganzas for major holidays, plus a sold-out gingerbread house decorating class at Christmas that’s become an annual tradition for many local families.

“I want to give that sense like my grandmother gave to me,” he says. “That what I do is an extension of my loving and caring for people. I want them to feel that through my work. I want locals to know that you can feel that, too. You don’t have to stay here to feel that. You’re our neighbor, come on in! Grab a coffee and a pastry and have a great day. If you’re stuck in traffic, swing by and grab a drink at the bar; chill out. We’re part of the community and we’re here for you, too.”

Continuing, he says, “I’ve lived in every part of the Bay Area and I love the Peninsula. It’s got a nice mix; you can really find a little bit of everything here. It’s been a huge influence on me as a chef, our diversity of Latin, Asian and other cultures. Coming from here makes me a better chef.”

Following 20-plus years as a professional capped by a “best baker” title, what does Eric think it takes to become a great pastry chef, even in your own home? Just three things: patience, measuring and reading.

“Patience and measuring is key. If you weigh everything, your recipes will suddenly just become so much better. And reading the whole recipe all the way through is super important.”

But he also emphasizes that even if things go wrong, there’s nothing to be afraid of. “You didn’t cause an earthquake and no one got hurt, right? Okay, your brownie didn’t come out, but you know what? It’s still yummy and you can try again.” Wise words from a local culinary hero. 

make it

Pistachio Lemon Madeleine Cake with Strawberry Jam

serves 10-12

ingredients

• 195g all-purpose flour
• 3.5g baking powder
• ½ tsp kosher salt
• 5 whole eggs
• 150g granulated sugar
• 45g brown sugar
• ½ of a lemon’s zest
• 28g pistachio paste (to make, take ½ cup lightly toasted
  pistachios, grind in a spice or coffee grinder until a paste forms)
• 170g unsalted butter

instructions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and prepare a cake pan by lightly spraying the bottom of the pan with nonstick spray and adding a circle of parchment.

• Sift all the dry ingredients together to combine.

• In the bowl of a stand mixer with the whip attachment, add in the eggs and sugars with the lemon zest and whip until light in color and a thick ribbon forms.

• Gently melt the butter, remove from heat and add the pistachio paste until combined; let sit until room temperature.

• Remove the whipped eggs when ready from the mixer and gently fold in the dry ingredients.

• Fold in the room temperature butter mixture last, and mix until well combined but not deflated.

• Pour into prepared cake pan and bake for 25-30 minutes or until the cake is lightly browned, slightly pulling away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

• Let cake cool completely and remove from the pan by running a paring knife gently around the edge of the pan to release the sides of the cake and tip the cake gently out, removing the parchment paper from the bottom of the cake.

to serve

Dust the top of the cake with powdered sugar. Cut a slice of cake and serve with a spoon of strawberry jam (preferably homemade, but store-bought is fine), sweetened whipped cream and sliced fresh strawberries.  For an extra touch, top with lightly toasted chopped pistachios.

Quality Bourbons and Barbeque

Mountain View

Quality Bourbons and Barbeque flips the script on deep-flavor dining. QBB adapts BBQ with a couple of tried and true tricks: Pair the meats with corn-bred whiskey and don’t skimp on the process. The brisket shines thanks in part to its taking up to 16 hours to smoke for that maximum taste and QBB breaks from the Peninsula BBQ pack by grinding and stuffing their sausage in-house. Plus, they carry over 150 bourbons. Keep an eye out for their monthly five-course dinners that partner with different bourbons such as Jack Daniels and Sonoma Distilling Company.

216 Castro Street, open Monday to Thursday from 11AM to 2PM, 4:30PM to 9PM; Friday to Sunday from 11AM to 9PM.

Gorilla Barbeque

Pacifica

Two characteristics immediately pop out about this Pacifica barbeque joint: First, it’s located inside a 1940s-era Southern Pacific railroad car and secondly, owner Rich Bacchi specializes in a homemade sauce that unites two of the country’s best barbeques. “Some people ask if it’s Texas or Carolina sauce? I call it Californian sauce,” he says. “It’s more savory and gets away from the spice. It’s a Texas-Carolina hybrid where you get the blast of pepper and vinegar before the sweetness hits the tip of the tongue.” It’s no wonder that Gorilla Barbeque found itself on the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with such mouthwatering multiculturalism.

145 Coast Highway, open Monday to Sunday (closed on Tuesdays) from 12:00PM until sold out.

Emergency Barbeque

San Carlos

Find yourself in a culinary pickle this summer and need help feeding the masses at your next backyard soirée? Call on Emergency Barbeque for all catering needs, from ribs to tri-tip to pulled pork with a side of mac-n-cheese. These grill masters slow smoke their brisket with hickory and apple woods for over 18 hours—creating such tastiness that you’re advised to always call ahead to ensure there’s still some meat left to share. Centrally located on Old Country Road in San Carlos, consider Emergency Barbeque your summer lifeline.

765 Old County Road, open Tuesday to Friday from 11AM to 3PM; Saturday from 12PM until sold out; closed Sundays and Mondays.

During a recent holiday party for the workers of B Street & Vine, a personalized game of Jeopardy! broke out in which owner and founder Steve Spieller quizzed his employees with a list of detailed questions only a restaurant embedded into the soul of a downtown could muster.

One column was dedicated to the regulars, the folks who come into the San Mateo wine café weekly for a bite from their extensive bruschetta menu that’s paired with an equally ample wine list. Questions included “Who orders the Italian sausage panini with a bowl of red pepper soup on Wednesdays?” and “Which 91-year-old customer asks for extra croutons with their kale salad?”

Recalling the game during a tranquil weekday afternoon, Steve chuckles at the memory and calls upon an employee passing by to help remember some of the other questions. “It goes back to the Cheers theme song,” he says. “People like to be recognized and treated the same way. When you’ve been here for as long as we have, you know the people and the things they like.”

Since 2006, B Street & Vine has nestled itself into the downtown San Mateo dining scene to become a popular fixture for a pre-movie rendezvous (the Century 12 theater is across the street), light lunches and weekly live jazz. The wine bar with a shaded back patio is located in a century-old building, originally the city’s first library, where golden walls are adorned with painted artwork of musicians and models. Akin to the cross-streets suggested in its title, B Street & Vine is where Italian themes like paninis intersect with specialty salads to create tapas with an Americanized flair.

“When we first started, it was all about introducing the combination of the food, the music and the wine. That seemed to be the big attraction,” Steve says, explaining that the core concept is a social, shared plate experience. “When my wife and I go out, we have multiple plates to try different flavors and enjoy the essence of the whole restaurant—especially appetizers, so often the appetizers are more fun to try than the entrée.”

Some B Street & Vine menu items are especially meaningful for Steve. For example, he credits the bread pudding to a recipe crafted by his 95-year-old mother who lives in San Mateo.

“Most restaurants pull from their roots,” he says. “It was fun to introduce the coffee ice cream pie because it was my birthday dessert growing up—we still use Oreo cookie crust with chocolate ganache. People will say they love it and I’ve been having it my whole life!”

Yet the star of the menu is the bountiful bruschetta, with 16 selections to choose from to make a plate of four, each sliced into fourths for premium sharing. At the top of the column listing each variety is a short phonic reminder: “bruschetta (brew-skeh-teh).” It’s not a pet peeve for Steve, rather, a gentle prompt. “You wouldn’t say chee-anti,” he reasons, referencing the classic Italian wine.

Popular choices include the brie with apples and spiced pecans, the gorgonzola with honey and the brie with pear, basil, honey and dried cranberries. “When people see the presentation with all the different colors, I’ve heard some customers describe it as the sushi of Italian restaurants,” Steve says.

The dessert bruschetta is where customers have the ability to get creative and choose from a spread such as Nutella or fruit jam, pairing it with a fruit or cheese and then topping the concoction with caramel, coconut, cookie crumbs and more.

The bruschetta menu has been a runaway hit, drawing fans from around the world; Steve says that when his cousin was visiting New Zealand, she told her Uber driver that she was from the San Francisco Peninsula. His response: “Have you ever had the bruschetta from B Street & Vine?”

“We’re famous in New Zealand!” Steve laughs. “Someone asked me recently if I ever thought this would be successful—who would have thought I’d make a living cooking a bunch of toast and putting toppings on it?”

Helping to add to the café’s casual ambiance is a packed music program where various forms of jazz music is scheduled from Wednesday to Sunday, beginning at 7:30PM. (KCSM broadcasting from the nearby College of San Mateo fills in the aural gaps during the day.)

B Street & Vine has become a tucked-away venue for finding local rhythm and bass duos and Calypso jazz. Moreover, on Sundays in the fall, Steve opens the stage for high school acts. Students from the likes of Aragon High School, St. Ignatius College Preparatory and El Camino High School have performed in the past. The school’s music departments retain all the tip money and Steve adds a personal donation following each show.

Although B Street & Vine has cemented itself as a favorite for San Mateo locals, it doesn’t mean the restaurant hasn’t drawn a few bad apples over the years—as was the time the bar momentarily shielded a criminal.

“There was one instance when a gentleman had pulled a knife at North Beach Pizza around the corner from us and it just so happened, not long after, someone came in to sit at the bar and ordered a beer,” Steve says. “The police were chasing him and spotted the guy sitting at the bar. The music kept playing, and I don’t think a lot of people noticed. And I think he still paid the tab.”

SHARE A PLATE

320 South B Street, San Mateo • bstreetandvine.com

behind a staff favorite

INGREDIENTS

• Brie
• Pear
• Basil
• Honey
• Dried cranberries

A simple bruschetta recipe that’s adaptable for any season. Exchange basil with mint and pomegranate for cranberries to make this a wintertime treat. Steve counsels that a crusty sourdough works best on the bottom.

As for the mixture of ingredients? “One of my waiters was with his mom at the doctor’s office and he was looking through a magazine,” Steve recounts. “It was holiday-themed and he saw a photo of people eating a bruschetta with brie, pear, pomegranate and mint. He brought that in and we tried it with basil instead of mint. And since pomegranate was not in season, I tried it with dried cranberries. If you’re ever looking for a new recipe, someone has probably already figured it out.”

Courtney Peters had ordered her wedding dress six months ago, and the big day was finally approaching. As the seamstress helped her into the gown for her fitting, the two looked at each other in bewilderment. It wouldn’t fasten. Thinking back, Courtney immediately identified the culprit: caramels. However, the issue wasn’t that Courtney had been lazing around eating them—she had been hard at work making them.

“We were stirring all of our caramel by hand. We were pouring it all by hand. We were cutting it all by hand,” she says, recalling the days before an electric kettle came into the picture. “My shoulders had grown at least a dress size. I call them caramel lady shoulders.”

Courtney is actually one of two caramel ladies. The other is Celia Glowka. Together, they are the founders of Caramel Caravan Co., a craft confections business launched in 2017 in Redwood City. Operating out of a commercial kitchen, they make up to 30 large batches or 7,000 caramel pieces a week, selling them online and through customers like Farmgirl Flowers and nearly 100 specialty retail markets around the country.

Although both are graduates of Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, the pair came to the caramelizing sugar business in different ways. Raised in Morgan Hill, Courtney grew up stirring bubbling batches in her family kitchen. “My mom and I have been making caramels forever, probably 20 years now,” Courtney says. “It was always bonding time with my mom.”

Through numerous moves and living in four countries, Celia enjoyed the constant of baking—especially the German tradition of “kaffee und kuchen,” afternoon coffee and cake. When she met Courtney in business school, they naturally bonded over their shared love of food.

After getting her MBA, Courtney knew exactly what she wanted to do. “I wanted to start a food business and build a brand,” she says. “That was my big dream.” And under the guiding principle of ‘do what you know,’ caramels came to mind. Courtney dove in and soon recognized that she needed help. That’s when she ran into Celia at an event.

Here’s how Courtney tells the story: “I don’t really know how I got her to do it. I’m telling her, ‘We’re not going to make any money, we’re gonna be slaving in the kitchen, it’s going to be hot.’ It’s like the worst possible thing that I could ask her to do, but I somehow convinced her to do it.”

This is how Celia remembers it: “I had decided before that event that I wanted to do my own business, but I didn’t know what I wanted the business to be about. And then a few days later, Courtney walked into my life and said, ‘Do you want to go into business with me?’ And I said, ‘Uh….yes!’ I have to say, I got super lucky.”

And although Celia would have described herself as more of a cake person, she happily embraced Courtney’s favorite creamy confection. “I am definitely a caramel convert,” she says. “It’s rich and indulgent. I actually don’t really eat candy, but you can just savor a little piece so it’s more like a dessert.”

With complementary skills, Courtney and Celia fell into natural roles building their new business, even as they found themselves expanding their own lives. Along with planning a wedding, Courtney, now living in San Carlos, took on production oversight and operations. Celia, now in Palo Alto, handled marketing, sales and content-related work—not to mention giving birth to her first daughter.

Given that they were bootstrapping their company, working out of a commercial kitchen made the most sense, but Celia and Courtney agreed they needed their own creative space. The answer came in the form of a renovated vintage 1957 Cal Craft trailer. “We’ve named our caravan Lucy in reference to the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are trying to keep up with a chocolate production line and they stuff their faces,” Celia says. The vintage trailer also inspired another business milestone. “We rebranded and named ourselves Caramel Caravan to tie the trailer and the company together.”

The two say to keep an eye out for Lucy at craft fairs, pop-ups, wineries and private events, but all the behind-the-scenes cooking happens in their Redwood City kitchen.  First, they start off with heavy whipping cream from Clover Sonoma and butter from Gilt Edge in San Francisco. Sugar, glucose syrup, a natural emulsifier and salt wrap up the six base ingredients. Courtney describes their giant electric mixing bowl as a magical copper kettle: “It helps us create a more consistent batch because it automatically checks the temperature.”

It takes about an hour to cook up a batch—about 1,500-1,700 pieces—with the caramel bubbling and steaming a bit, before turning silky smooth. The caramel is then scooped out and poured into sheet pans where it is smoothed out with spatulas and left to set for four to six hours. Next, toppings are added—like Guittard dark chocolate and sea salt. After that, it’s on to cutting, wrapping and packaging.

“We score all of our caramels so they are the correct shape and then we hand-cut all of them,” Courtney says. “You get some resistance training when you’re pushing the knife through over and over and over again.”

The two also invested in a 1952 double-twist wrapping machine, which both sounds and looks like it comes straight from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Consistent with the company’s vintage vibe, they’ve dubbed her “Betty.” Freshly-cut caramels are dropped into the machine and within seconds, out pop perfectly wrapped treats.

Packaging comes next—into two-piece samples, four-piece bags, four-piece favor boxes and 10- and 20-piece variety boxes. Flavors range from coffee and cashews to seasonal offerings. “We like to think about California and what agriculture grows here,” Courtney says. Examples include orange rosemary, honey lavender, strawberry basil and banana. “Banana isn’t from California—I just really like bananas,” she jokes.

While starting a business is a thrilling venture, the two acknowledge that the caramel making lifestyle is inherently repetitive. Monotony sets in around the 1,000^th bag made, and thus, ‘Would You Rather (WYR) Wednesdays’ was born. To spice things up, the team poses thought-provoking questions that stir heated debate, such as, ‘Would you rather eat six teaspoons of salt or drink a whole bottle of soy sauce?” And no—you can’t say ‘neither.’ Instagram followers of @caramelcaravan know to anticipate weekly highlights of their antics.

Even as good-natured banter is thrown back and forth across the kitchen, the partners are focused on growing sales and expanding their product line. The days can be long and tiring, but they’ve learned to keep their sights on the bigger picture. “We have a great crew, we’re bringing something that consumers love, that we’re passionate about and we’re changing the way business operates,” Celia says. “I’m so glad that we did this.”

Courtney emphatically concurs. “I don’t ever want to go back to a day job and I will work 14-, 16-, even 20-hour days to avoid that.”

Plus, there’s always that added perk—sweet, creamy caramels. How many do they eat?

“A decent amount,” says Courtney. “It’s hard to say,” Celia adds, “because we only sample little pieces.” Courtney ponders it some more. “I don’t really want to know,” she sighs. “Let’s just say it adds up to one caramel per day,” Celia suggests, and Courtney nods in agreement.

savor some sweets

caramelcaravan.com

St. James Gate Bar and Restaurant

Belmont

An impressive collection of 350 bourbons, 40 rotating beer taps and two stages help fashion this Belmont bar and restaurant into a live music destination for the upper Peninsula where Friday and Saturday nights feature a variety of cover bands and dance rock party starters. The music begins outdoors at 6PM where the back patio is decorated in island-vibe greenery and is lush with lighting but as the night progresses, the indoor stage erupts around 9:30PM and lasts until no one is left standing. A few of the recent acts to swing open the Gate were Latin rock ensemble Pure Rhythmz, the Beatles cover band Ticket to Ride and new wave rockers Neon Velvet. Situated alongside the Caltrain line, this bar is on the right side of the tracks.

1410 Old County Road, open Monday and Tuesday from 11AM to 1AM; Wednesday to Saturday from 11AM to 2AM; Sunday from 10AM to 1AM.

Vino Locale

Palo Alto

Downtown Palo Alto’s neighborhood wine bar offers several pairing events with their rosés, whites and reds—such as their paint parties and educational Flight Nights where a winemaker explains the marvel behind each sip—but it’s their coupling with live outdoor music that sets this bistro apart from the other bottle houses in town. Vino Locale maintains an active calendar of programming where you can unwind alongside acoustic classical guitar, jazz, folk, flamenco and bluegrass from Tuesday through Saturday at 7PM. You can expect the acoustic guitarist and composer Jorge Faustmann and the Latin guitar instrumental jazz band Blue Flamingo Quartet to enliven the patio. Keep an eye on Vino Locale’s online calendar for the schedule of musicians and special events. 431 Kipling Street, open Tuesday to Saturday from 4PM to 9PM.

Menlo Tavern

Menlo Park

Since the Menlo Tavern acquired the space previously held by the Menlo Grill inside the Stanford Park Hotel, the American restaurant and bar has reestablished itself as an excellent addition to the city’s cocktail circuit. Now the Menlo Tavern is gunning for a spot in your nightlife repertoire with its seven-days-a-week Summer Music Series. Through October 13, the Tavern’s patio is booking solo, acoustic artists performing trusted modern pop and classic rock songs to complement the slow-braised short ribs and Cabernet Sauvignons. Reserve a table for dining or cozy up around the circular fire pit and let the Tom Collins do the talking as another summer on the Peninsula replenishes the spirit. 100 El Camino Real, Sunday to Thursday live music 6PM to 9PM; Friday to Saturday live music 5PM to 9PM. The bar is open daily from 11AM to Midnight.

Some 20 years ago, Chef Grace Nguyen was running a restaurant in San Francisco when a customer placed a particularly picky order. At the time, the pickiness irritated her, until she learned that the woman had celiac disease. Noticing an increasing number of special requests, Grace started researching gluten and what foods would accommodate a gluten-free diet. Back then, she had no idea that this would lead to co-founding Asian Box in 2011, and more recently, launching Gracie Jones’ Gluten-Free Bake Shop, a small, thriving business in midtown Palo Alto.

At the time Grace sought to learn more, most people had never heard of gluten (a protein found in wheat and cereal grains), much less considered eating gluten-free. Today, 1% of Americans are affected by celiac, an autoimmune disease with potentially serious health complications that requires a gluten-free diet. Another estimated 18 million Americans suffer from some level of gluten intolerance—with side effects like stomachaches, bloating, joint pain and headaches.

When Grace and her partners were preparing to open Asian Box, they met a family with a four-year-old son who had celiac disease, giving yet another face to the health issue. An idea sparked: Why not launch as a gluten-free restaurant? Inspired by street stalls in southeast Asia, Asian Box’s menu naturally lends itself to gluten-free offerings, since they lean heavily on ingredients like meat, vegetables and rice noodles. Over the past eight years, the business has expanded to 10 locations throughout California, including the original Town & Country Village shop in Palo Alto and another in Burlingame. But how did running an Asian restaurant chain lead to opening a bake shop?

“We were growing rapidly, and I was tired of jumping from one restaurant to the next to teach new cooks how to do the recipes,” Grace explains. The team decided to open a commissary kitchen to make all of Asian Box’s sauces, with a driver delivering them to the different restaurant branches. Catering had also expanded too much for any of the restaurants to accommodate individually, so this became the catering kitchen as well. Always experimenting, Grace also started to use the kitchen for baking. “I’ve always needed to create. I’ve always needed to do something,” she says.

And that’s how a gluten-free bake shop came to be the public storefront to the commissary kitchen. “I’ve always loved baking, but I knew that I couldn’t not do gluten-free, because the kitchen is already gluten-free for Asian Box,” says Grace. Everything in the kitchen is gluten-free in order to prevent any potential cross-contamination. Even her two employees know they cannot bring in lunch or snacks that contain gluten, in order to keep the kitchen clean.

And the name? Apparently it’s a thing in the food industry for cooks to have nicknames, and “Gracie Jones” earned her moniker from her husband, a chef and culinary director for Asian Box. She liked it, and it stuck. (You might even notice “Miss Jones’ Sriracha” on the Asian Box menu, named in honor of you-know-who.) When the bake shop opened, it seemed only natural to keep Gracie Jones in the title.

One of the biggest challenges in gluten-free baking is creating an appealing texture. “Because I am not gluten-free and I know what things should taste like, I would feel so guilty if I made something and I couldn’t even eat it myself, and I had to go and sell it!” laughs Grace. Gluten is what makes dough elastic, so a lot of gluten-free baked goods are dense and crumble easily. To counteract this, Grace developed her own flour mixture that produces more palatable pastries.

When she first started researching gluten-free baking, most sources recommended mixing five or six different flours—more hassle than Grace was willing to undertake. “That’s too much work,” she says. “So I created my own flour blend, and then after a few tweakings I found the flour blend that works for me.”

Grace has taken it on as a challenge to develop gluten-free recipes that are also on the healthier end of the spectrum. She often uses psyllium husk as a binder, which adds a lot of fiber to her products. Brown rice, sorghum and millet also provide a lot of nutrients, including protein and fiber. The friend whose son inspired Asian Box to go gluten-free happens to be a professor and doctor, and she taught Grace about low-sugar, low-fat eating. “I just wanted to bake!” Grace shrugs. “Because of her, I switched my mindset to bake gluten-free but also things that are sugar-free and vegan to make it healthier.” To do this, she uses coconut oil and coconut sugar, which she says she actually prefers to cane sugar.

Vegan, dairy-free and grain-free items at the bakery contain less sugar. The granola recipe is sweetened with coconut sugar and honey. Grace uses coconut sugar as a substitute upon request for special orders, like birthday cakes, but using it in all her products is price prohibitive. It’s important to her that customers can purchase high-quality items without breaking the bank; she believes people’s wallets shouldn’t suffer just because they aren’t able to consume gluten. “If I could afford it, I would switch it all over, but it’s too expensive,” she says. “I don’t want to have to charge $7 for a cookie!”

Grace is now four years into her dedicated baking kick. She continually experiments with new recipes, having employees and partners test her products and give honest feedback before offering them in the bakery display. Some of the more popular items at the bake shop include breads, bagels and doughnuts, which many customers said they’d missed since going gluten-free. The chocolate chip cookies are also big hits.

Bake shop visitors can choose from a large variety of baked goods, and they can also stick around for lunch. The menu includes a variety of banh mi sandwiches, an Asian salad, a number of protein-rich bowls and daily specials testing out Gracie Jones’ newest recipes—all gluten-free, of course.

tasty treats

2706 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto

graciejonesbakeshop.com

If summer had a flavor, wouldn’t it be something cool, sweet and fleeting? Licking the drips off a melting ice cream bar on a hot, sunny day. A plump, juicy berry popped into the mouth. That first crisp, mouthwatering bite of a slice of watermelon. Here are a few of our favorite flavors and traditions of summer to help jump-start the memories and entice the taste buds.

The Ice Cream Truck is Coming!

The ice cream truck is so often preceded by the archetypal tune “Turkey in the Straw.” It’s a jingle unlike any other—with a melody in the key of summer—casting a sweet spell to lure neighbors onto the street like a pied piper of dessert. Although this song may evoke summer to us, for Jim Alkhatib, who owns the mobile ice cream vendor Golden Ice Cream, it was once a slight occupational hazard.

“In the beginning, it was hard; I used to wake up in the middle of the night hearing the music,” he says. “But now my brain will ignore it and sometimes I won’t even know if the music is on or off.”

Jim has delivered delight to doorsteps for nearly 30 years, first by working for an ice cream vendor in Palo Alto before purchasing his own truck in 1996. He immigrated to the Bay Area from a small village in Jordan when he was 27 and is now a father of three with a house in Lathrop.

His selection includes all the staples—Drumsticks, Crunch Bars and 50/50 Creamsicles tend to be top sellers—and Jim prefers IT’S-IT, partly because the company is based in Burlingame. Besides his route, he’ll pull the truck up for private events such as company picnics and graduation parties. However, nothing is as sweet as the view from inside his mobile parlor as the community he treasures grows up.   

“One day, a lady came to me and said her son was a one-year-old and sleeping so she asked me to turn the music down whenever I came by,” Jim says. “I kept doing it for years; whenever I came by I turned the music down. Fifteen years later I saw her with her son, who was now taller than me, and she told me how she appreciated that I always turned down the music.” goldnicecream.com

Ode to Olallieberry

When it comes to summer flavors on the Peninsula, there is perhaps none more tantalizing than the olallieberry. If your response is “The oh-what-a-berry?!” then you’ve been missing out on one of our home-grown tastiest treats. While it looks like a classic blackberry, genetically the olallieberry (olallie is a Chinookan word meaning berry) is also about one-third raspberry, making it both sweet and slightly tart. Originally developed in Oregon, it turns out that the olallieberry prefers our coastal California climate. Yay for us! But here’s the catch. The olallieberry season is super short—as in a four- to six-week span sometime between late June and early August. So, go pick! Eat! Right now!

In Portola Valley, Webb Ranch’s U-Pick season is underway from 8AM to 1PM on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The price is $4 for entry and then $5.50 per pound of berries with baskets provided. Show up early for the best selection. Call 650.854.5417 for weekly U-Pick updates. 2720 Alpine Road, Portola Valley. webbranchinc.com

To pay full homage to the olallieberry, Pescadero is the perfect place for a pilgrimage. About a half-hour south of Half Moon Bay, you’ll find R&R Fresh Farms, with five acres of different berry varieties. Owner Jose Ramirez introduced his olallieberry crop three years ago. “The big farmers don’t like them because there are only six weeks for picking. They want berries to stay longer, so they gave up on them,” he says. Not only did Jose not give up on olallieberries, he grows enough to freeze, so he has them for sale year-round. U-Pick certified organic berries are priced at $4 per pound. If you’re in a hurry, you can buy $2.50 baskets at R&R’s Farm Stand. 2310 Pescadero Creek Road. rnrfresh.com

And finally, for all things olallieberry, swing by Duarte’s Tavern in Pescadero, renowned for its #1 selling olallieberry pie. Made with a recipe perfected in the 1930s by Emma Duarte, it’s $8 a slice or $35 for an entire pie. Duarte’s grows their own berries, and during the olallieberry’s blink of a season, you’ll also find offerings like fresh olallieberry cobbler and even margaritas. And when the picking is done, Duarte’s extends this treasured taste of summer, drawing from its own frozen stashes to keep olallieberry pie on the menu year-round. 202 Stage Road, Pescadero. duartestavern.com

Mouthwatering Watermelon  

If you had to pick just one flavor, what’s the quintessential taste of summer? Here at PUNCH, we put it to a vote and came up with a clear winner—that dark green, awkwardly heavy, spherically-shaped, sweet, juicy, beloved behemoth of a fruit (which we surprisingly learned is also a vegetable), watermelon.

With that decided, we gave our resident foodie/photography director Paulette Phlipot a challenge: create a simple, refreshing watermelon drink to help us savor these sweet summer days. We think you’ll agree that she delivered the goods, along with some helpful tips for watermelon wrangling.

Picking the Right (Ripe) Watermelon

+ Look for “bees stings” – brown, web-like spots or lines

+ Melon should be heavy for its size

+ Try the thump test – if a watermelon has a hollow bass sound when you tap the underbelly with a finger, that’s a good sign.

+ A yellow spot on one side is good (this is from lying in the field)

+ Shape counts – go for uniform instead of wonky

+ Forget the shiny (not ripe) finish – dull will be more delicious!

make it

Create the Base: Watermelon Juice

Cut a watermelon into chunks, take off rind and remove seeds if your watermelon has them.  Place the chunks into a blender and puree until smooth. Strain and serve chilled over ice. Add a little lime juice or fresh mint leaves to enhance flavor.

Watermelon Strawberry Basil Juice

One serving

Take one cup of strained watermelon juice and place in blender. Add 5 large basil leaves (or equivalent if using smaller leaves) plus 2 large strawberries (or equivalent if using smaller strawberries). Blend until smooth. Strain and serve chilled over ice.

Liven up your Sunday Brunch!

Watermelon Strawberry  Basil Mimosa

One serving

Fill a champagne glass ⅔ full with your favorite prosecco or champagne, top off with chilled Watermelon Strawberry Basil Juice. Enjoy!

tips

Don’t Toss Out the Rinds! They’re full of nutrients. In fact, they contain a higher concentration of certain antioxidants, minerals and vitamins than the fruit. Try pickling the rind or simply blend a bit into your next smoothie.

Seedless? Forget that childhood myth that if you eat the seeds, you will grow a watermelon in your stomach. The seeds are edible and actually contain healthy fats and protein and are full of nutrients.

Whether you’ve lived here forever or have only just arrived, one gauntlet of Peninsula life is the expectation that at some point, you’ll learn how to make your way around a proper wine list. It just comes with the terroir-itory, if you catch my drift. So, where to begin: Napa, Sonoma or even Safeway? Or maybe you’re not interested in fighting the traffic, tourists and shopping carts. Then welcome to Velvet 48, a new wine bar in Burlingame designed for aficionados and newbies alike.

Owner and Burlingame resident Jason Cooper is decidedly a wine person, though his customers don’t have to be. With over 20 years in the wine industry, he observed what worked and what didn’t in the marketplace and came up with a concept aimed at two customer bases: people in the know about wine who want a better selection, and people who aren’t and just like to go out and drink wine.

“I wanted to put together familiar names but not like the grocery store. And then I also wanted to carry ones so that any wine industry or wine-savvy person would walk in and say, ‘Wow! I can’t believe they have that!’ I’m in the middle of those two people,” Jason relates. “I know a little bit about wine, more than probably the average person, but it takes a lot around here to really know about wine. The bar is pretty high.”

Jason also saw an opportunity for a place where people could come enjoy a glass of wine without sitting at the bar of a restaurant. “I would like this to be a real wine destination for people who love wine and a gathering place for locals,” he says. “I haven’t seen that anywhere else, that feeling of ‘I’m in a special place and I’m learning something, and isn’t it nice to be here?’ It’s how this place came together and became more of a tasting room kind of vibe and feel.”

The Velvet 48 experience starts the moment you slip down their speakeasy-like narrow entrance: everyone is greeted with a complimentary glass of Velvet 48’s private label sparkling rosé. Hundreds of bottles of the stuff even decorate a large wall. “I just felt like when you go to a restaurant or a bar, it’s not until you actually get your drink that you kind of settle in,” Jason notes. “So I wanted to take away that waiting period and just give people something so that as soon as they got here, they’re comfortable. It’s something to have while you’re browsing an admittedly very large list.”

The private label sparkling rosé is also a bestseller at $30 per bottle. However, Jason emphasizes, “I want to sell high-end wine at a value, but I’m not selling five-dollar glasses of wine.” The lowest prices are three $11 glasses offered per day—a white, a red and the sparkling—but they also serve glasses of MV Krug Grande Cuvee and Moet et Chandon Dom Perignon for $45. As far as Jason knows, his is the only establishment to do so besides the French Laundry.

As for the rest of the list, prepare to be dazzled: about two-thirds are domestic and the rest are imported, mostly from Europe. With a selection of 400 bottles to purchase, 50 by the glass ($11-$55) and thousands in storage, the options are seemingly endless. If you’re looking to learn and experiment, Jason suggests you come in with an idea of what you like to drink, whether it’s by brand or varietal, and the knowledgeable staff will suggest a taste-alike or improvement. Or, just follow your fancy.

While 90% of Velvet 48’s bottle sales come from wines by the glass, patrons can also browse the standing racks to find inspiration. “One thing we do that’s a little different is that we don’t take a typical restaurant markup. We’re sort of in between a restaurant and what a retailer would charge,” Jason points out. “And if you buy six bottles or more you get 25% off. The idea is that it doesn’t matter if you drink them here or take them with you.”

If Jason has one overall goal for Velvet 48, it’s that the wines he carries should be, well, velvety. “I wanted wines that were soft and supple and wouldn’t rip the enamel off your teeth,” Jason vividly describes. “And then 48 was the year my mom was born. She passed away a couple of years ago. I wanted to do something that would make her proud, with a little nod to her too.” Jason’s mom is not only in the name, her spirit carries over to the décor. One whole wall displays some of her collection of signed Hollywood memorabilia.

Another aim was to serve food that matched the quality of the wine. “Our food menu is really small but it’s really thought-out and we’ve sourced some really cool things,” Jason says, including cheese puff-like gougères made with gruyere. “One of my pet peeves is when they give you cold bread and butter, and the butter is rock-hard, so I wanted to do warm bread and give you soft, really good, salted butter.” A cheese plate and charcuterie are among Velvet 48’s more substantial offerings. The wine bar also serves four sweet dishes: macarons, creme brûlée, broken pieces of Guittard chocolate and tiramisu.

If you’re accompanying an oenophile and wine isn’t your thing, Velvet 48 carries 10 local craft beers in cans, plus a calorie- and alcohol-free rice lager, a best-seller in Japan. They also have a hidden TV with no plans to have it on regularly. Jason says they may make an exception for the Oscars or Super Bowl in the future, but for the time being, it’s off. What a relief. Visit Velvet 48 while it’s still TV-less and discover a sophisticated, neighborhood spot that’s reimagining what an American wine bar can be. 310 Lorton Avenue, Burlingame  velvet48.com

Jason’s Summer Wine Picks

Velvet 48 Rosés, Robert Sinskey Vin Gris of Pinot Noir, Carneros

They call it Vin Gris/gray wine because it’s sort of in between. It’s not white and it’s not red. Dry, aromatic, a reliable favorite. $45

Figuiere Premiere Rosé, Cote de Provence, France

A little wine that when we tried it, it was amazing. Dry, lighter-styled, more delicate. An easy, light summer quaffer. $36

Montes Cherub Rosé, Chile

A little bit on the fruitier side. From one of the better known producers in Chile. Maybe a little bit more of a food wine. $25

Velvet 48 Dry Whites Cade Sauvignon Blanc, Napa

One of my favorite Napa Sauvignon Blancs. Classic, with tropical fruit, nice acidity, crisp. Great with or without food. $45

Hirsch ‘Hirschvergnügen’ Grüner Veltliner, Austria

If you remember the old Volkswagen slogan “Fahrvergnügen,” which means for the joy of driving, this hirschvergnügen means for the joy of Hirsch. Crisp, floral, very drinkable. $26

Vietti Roero Arneis, Italy

Arneis is a grape indigenous to the Piedmont region, more obscure. You don’t really see it in a whole lot of other places. It’s really floral and crisp with more minerality. This is probably the most foodie of all these wines, though you can drink it on its own. $35