The perfect Mendocino trip revolves around 4 new restaurants

Mendocino County’s strength is its disconnect from busy, noisy, forward-marching urban life. But being trapped in time has drawbacks.

Among them: a food culture that, until recently, had evolved little in decades. That began to change in the last few years as Mendocino has seen an influx of young, motivated chefs eager to remake the culinary landscape. 

This new school of restaurants reflects the groundedness of the place. While the styles of food vary widely, the restaurants share an impulse toward approachable meals. Spend enough time in these comfortable yet ambitious dining rooms, and you get the sense that this next generation of Mendocino chefs is driven not by status but by a desire to feed themselves, their friends, and their family the food they hadn’t been able to find in their new home. 

Scott Baird had grown tired of slinging drinks after working for years at high-end San Francisco cocktail bars, including Trick Dog and 15 Romolo. The James Beard-nominated bartender knew Mendocino from childhood summers and weekend escapes with his wife, Molly.

In 2020, Baird and his family moved to the Anderson Valley, the growing wine region in southern Mendocino County, though he still moonlights as the beverage director for Starlite in Union Square. In August, he opened Jumbo’s Win Win — Jumbo is his son’s nickname — in a 120-year-old former saloon in Philo, a hamlet of barely 300 people. 

Baird describes the restaurant as a “burger joint,” and his food reflects that approachability. There are burgers, yes, as well as hot dogs, three kinds of sandwiches — fried fish, fried chicken, and an open-face veggie melt — and the usual accompaniments (fries and pie). The food is familiar but uncommonly well-made, organic when possible, and at prices local families can afford. (The most expensive items, the chopped and wedge salads, are $15.)

The soft serve is Straus with toppings like churro crunch and locally made olive oil from Filigreen Farm with honey, fleur de sel, and fennel. There is the obligatory Anderson Valley wine and beer, along with sophisticated, grown-up slushies like the frozé of red wine with hibiscus, passion fruit, blood orange, and cinnamon. 

While Baird compares the simplicity of his menu to In-N-Out Burger — a place that does only a few things and does them well — the food at Jumbo’s Win Win defies fast-food expectations. The fried chicken sandwich is a “Tokyo-seasoned” organic patty topped with cabbage, sweet onion, and Kewpie mayonnaise with chile crisp. The burgers (either “Jumbo’s” or smash) are made with M3 Cattle Company’s organic beef. The meat enters Jumbo’s as a whole steer and is processed in-house. The hot dogs are from Oakland’s Cream Co. Meats, made with organic dry-aged beef stuffed in natural lamb casings, which Baird describes as the best he’s had outside Scandinavia. 

Baird’s hope is that Jumbo’s will become Anderson Valley’s public house, a place where the eclectic community of “rednecks, old-timers, and Michoacanos” can come together for 49ers games, movie nights, and holidays. 

In recent years, the unincorporated community of Elk has made national news as home to the Harbor House, one of only 33 U.S. restaurants with two Michelin stars. But this tiny enclave is also home to a wonderful, if lesser known, restaurant that doesn’t require a reservation months in advance or cost $325 per person (plus a $250 drink pairing): Maritime Cafe.

Opened in August by Rodney Workman and Alexa Newman — just weeks after the birth of their second child — the bistro-style restaurant is less a jet-set destination than a community living room in the former space of the locally beloved Queenie’s Roadhouse. But its warm-wood hominess — shoulder-to-shoulder tables, fireplace in the corner, umbrella-covered picnic tables out front — makes the refinement of its food a bit surprising. That is, unless you know that Workman and Newman worked as chefs in some of the Bay Area’s most revered restaurants —  Chez Panisse, Camino, State Bird Provisions, and Pizzaiolo — before moving to Mendocino County.

Maritime’s menu is printed weekly with dishes that sound more ordinary than they are: grilled cauliflower, roasted carrots, pork meatballs. The eggplant-and-tomato soup tastes like a marriage of southern Italy and India — a vibrantly seasoned, subtly spicy purée topped with glistening lines of a tadka-like spiced oil and crispy coriander seeds — while the black cod toast is a smoky schmear of tender fish spiked with green onions on earthy sourdough. When the couple at the next table oohs and aahs at the albacore sandwich, announcing it the best tuna sandwich they’ve ever eaten, you know you’ve landed somewhere special. 

Fog Eater Cafe, which opened in 2019, was the restaurant that sparked Mendocino’s current moment, convincing other Bay Area chefs that this backwater might welcome something new. A project from Haley Samas-Berry, who grew up on the coast, and chef Erica Schneider, originally from Nashville, Fog Eater is a bright, eclectic space serving vegetarian, Southern-inspired food that’s not defined by either description.

If a restaurant can feel like a friend’s dining room, this friend is both talented and inordinately stylish, with a swaggering, New Orleanian sensibility and an appetite for the saucy and spicy. Highlights include boiled peanuts with a kick and tart green tomatoes beneath a blanket of savory, somehow dairy-less gravy. Everything about this food is sexier and more fun than it has any right to be, especially since many dishes are straight-up vegan. In Mendocino, a town with such strict Historical Review Board rules that painting one’s house is an exercise in frustration, Fog Eater is effortless: a warm breeze, a tropical colorscape, an easy yacht-rock soundtrack. 

If you hear “vegan” and want to run for Mendocino’s cattle-running hills, don’t. The dishes are so soulful and flavorful that you’d be forgiven for not noticing there is no meat on the menu. It’s food that eats easy and doesn’t demand explication: grits, hominy, red beans, rice. Wash it down with a low-ABV sherry cocktail of sweet corn, black tea, and chicory bitters at the kitchen-facing turquoise bar.

Miles Asher McCreary, a ceramicist and cook (formerly of Oakland’s Ramen Shop), came to the coast for an arts residency and stayed. Last year, he opened Good Bones Kitchen (serving lunch Friday to Sunday and on nights when a band’s playing) in the dark wood confines of the former roadhouse Caspar Inn, a boot-stomping, rock’n’roll institution. 

When Good Bones isn’t serving, the space hosts markets and pop-ups, including the thrilling Petite Percebes (which translates to “little barnacles”) from Natallie Avitia and Lucas Dai Pra, chefs who have worked in Michelin-starred restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The couple came to Mendocino from Southern California for roles at Harbor House in Elk, which included foraging and experimenting with vegetables from the on-site garden. 

“All that technique we’ve learned in the last 15 years, now we get to apply it to something that’s a little more us, a little more casual, something that’s attainable for people,” said Avitia, who grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. “Good food doesn’t have to be these insane ingredients.”

Petite Percebes serves seafood-forward dishes in an “attainable bistro” style that pays homage to the chefs’ heritage. (Dai Pra is from São Paulo and moved to San Francisco at 20 to work at Atelier Crenn, then Saison.) 

The two, having come from the competitive world of high-end dining, appreciate the collaboration of a small, remote community. Their food is unpretentious but  sophisticated: The fish fry is a pan-fried mackerel with herbed tartar sauce and salad greens from Manchester’s Wavelength Farm. The corn chowder, vegan without making a point of it, comes accented with herb-infused chive oil. Humboldt Bay oysters are served with a celery mignonette and fermented tomato coulis but somehow sell for just $2.50 each.