|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
A restaurant offering “consciousness altering” chicken is coming to Menlo Park.
Cafe Vivant will focus on California heritage breed chicken, farm-to-table cuisine and an extensive wine program featuring “hard to find, interesting (and) sought-after wines,” co-owner Jason Jacobeit said. An attached retail component will offer tastings, seminars and educational events with world-class winemakers and a small grocery section with items produced in the kitchen. The restaurant and shop, replacing Le Boulanger along Santa Cruz Avenue, are expected to open in early 2025.
“We have high qualitative ambitions for the restaurant, but we want it to be capital F fun,” Jacobeit said.
Jacobeit and co-owner Daniel Jung noticed that restaurants in America often tout high-quality steaks, but few feature high-quality chicken. While traveling and eating around the world, the pair found themselves shocked by just how good chicken can be.
“It’s so inspiring because I think there’s something about looking in the most familiar of places, something you’ve been conditioned to expect a certain kind of experience from, and getting something that not just over delivers, but overdelivers by like two standard deviations,” Jacobeit said.
Most chicken, even those labeled “free range” or “organic,” are typically from one breed that puts on weight quickly. Heritage breed is a selectively bred stock that matures slowly, developing a “far more complex and interesting flavor,” Jacobeit said. Cafe Vivant’s goal is to source chickens of the highest quality as close as possible to Menlo Park, so Jacobeit and Jung found a poultry farmer near Pescadero to partner with.
“We’ve developed a slow, multi-input technique that produces superbly flavorful birds,” Jacobeit said.
The menu at Cafe Vivant will be more than just chicken – vegetable and fish dishes will also be featured.
“Our experience in top New York restaurants has fueled our belief in ‘fewer, better things’: find the best possible ingredients, keep things simple and execute with relentless consistency,” Jacobeit said.
Cafe Vivant will offer a by-the-glass program with about 20 wines, as well as a by-the-bottle program with wines from major growing regions in Europe and the United States. While there won’t be a priced out wine pairing since the food menu is a la carte, staff will help guide guests through suggested pairings.
“I think it’s very fair to say that people will be finding a lot of savvy, very sought-after wines that are…available at really reasonable prices,” Jacobeit said.
Cafe Vivant will be Jacobeit and Jung’s debut restaurant, but they’re no strangers to the restaurant industry. The two met in New York City while working for Myriad Restaurant Group. Jung was the head sommelier at Tribeca Grill, and Jacobeit was the wine director at Michelin-starred and James Beard award-winning Bâtard, a restaurant that closed last year.
In 2020, the pair decided to open a retail shop called Somm Cellars Wine & Spirits in New York City.
“We really are champions for French wine in particular, and we wanted to bring that specialization to a wider audience and in our world of e-commerce and email marketing etc., running a fine wine and spirits retailer allowed us to really bring our passion to just a larger platform,” Jacobeit said.
Jacobeit and Jung share a passion for wines that come from Burgundy, one of the oldest wine regions in the world.
“There’s a saying in wine, ‘All roads lead to Burgundy,’ which on the surface probably sounds a bit pretentious, but it really is not at all,” Jacobeit said. “It’s just kind of a way of saying that people who really get into Burgundy wines…tend to stay there once they’re there.”
And while Jacobeit and Jung have loved the reach the retail shop allows them to have, they missed the interpersonality of the restaurant industry.
“I say this smilingly, but I still feel like a few years into retail, we kind of play at retail…and still think like hospitality professionals, and we always wanted a restaurant,” Jacobeit said.
Jacobeit and Jung wanted to open a restaurant with an attached retail component, but New York state law doesn’t allow for that type of hybrid business, so they set their sights out west. Jacobeit and Jung will be bi-coastal, running both Somm Cellars and Cafe Vivant, and Somm Cellars’ general manager will be relocating permanently to East Palo Alto to oversee the new restaurant.
“I do think that we will have a Michelin star standard in terms of ingredients sourcing, but in terms of both price point and ambiance, accessibility and inclusivity is really at the heart of what we’re doing,” Jacobeit said.
The name Cafe Vivant is a nod to the phrase “bon vivant,” referring to a person who lives life to the fullest, and to Romanée-Saint-Vivant, a famous vineyard in Burgundy, France.
“We both want it to be the name to convey just an informal social convivial space, a community-oriented space, a place where the good life is happening hopefully uninterruptedly…for people who are wine interested, they’ll recognize that it’s also a nod to our favorite wine region,” Jacobeit said.
Cafe Vivant will have a wine bar at the center of the restaurant and outdoor dining, and the retail component will have “a really interesting and dynamic roster of in-store events,” Jacobeit said.
“Expect to see a lot of first-rate tastings and world-class winemakers from all over the world descending into Menlo Park sooner than later,” Jacobeit said.
Cafe Vivant, 720 Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park.