On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Steve from Mendocino
When we first moved to Mendocino, within the first couple of weeks we concluded that Café Beaujolais was the best restaurant fit for us. We booked a standing 6:00 reservation for every Thursday going forward. Many years later, Margaret Fox had decided to sell, and we knew, from descriptions of the two sets of prospective buyers, that everything we loved about the restaurant was about to be lost. My mother had been badgering me to be doing something in business, and I ended up buying the restaurant with the overarching goal to keep it at or above its then current level of dining. We succeeded in this. I had the experience of directing a restaurant as I’d once hoped to do. The restaurant lost money, but the property appreciated so I was able to exit without too much damage.
This photo shows the gardens decimated by the people who bought the restaurant from me. They made money, but the food, décor, and service became generic tourist fare. Sad, but the six years that I owned it were sufficient to leave me happy enough to abandon my restaurant addiction.
Café Beaujolais has two dining rooms, the main one where the diner is greeted by the receptionist, and the atrium which is accessed around back through the garden and up these stairs.
The business office in the garden, converted to an apartment by the new owners.
A glimpse of the gardens before they were torn up for cost reduction.
The Mendocino Art Center. On the first day after I bought Café Beaujolais, someone from the Art Center dropped a contract for me to donate total revenues from a Saturday dinner to the Art Center. Nobody asked to meet with me. Just the contract. I discarded the document and have harbored ill will for the directors of the Art Center ever sense. Small town politics.
The Mendocino Hotel from the garden side of the building.
This and the next photo are of local private gardens, of which there are numerous in the area.
eclare
That garden before the cost cutting is lovely, what a shame.
sab
McGarrigle Sisters had a Mendocino song I loved. Being a Luddite I can’t link.
sab
Our yesterday snow storm split my young serviceberry in half. Full of leaves. Full of blossoms. Got to start it off at the trunk and start all over.
JR
@sab: which variety? Looking at a Saskatoon serviceberry for our back yard. Do you ever manage to harvest?
gkoutnik
@sab:
Ah, the McGarrigles. Just the sound of their voices can life my spirits.
Steeplejack (phone)
Kate and Anna McGarrigle, “Mendocino.”
Sir Douglas Quintet, “Mendocino.”
sab
@gkoutnik: @Steeplejack (phone):
Thanks.
sab
@JR: Squirrels planted it so I don’t know. Probably Ontario. Plan is to tape it together to save the harvest, then chop it off come fall. Does that mske sense?
sab
@JR: It’s a new tree. Maybe three yesrs old. Planted by squirrels.
sab
@JR: It’s a new tree. Maybe three yesrs old. Planted by squirrels.
@sab: We had a bunch of berries last year.
sab
Also too, very rude of me to not say how much I love the photos from Steve that reminded me of Mendocino.
Albatrossity
Wow, that’s quite a story about the restaurant! Glad that it scratched that itch and you didn’t lose your shirt in the process.
Thanks for these pics of the northern CA coast life. It’s a lovely part of the world, and these images reinforce that opinion for me.
kindness
Is the Hot Tub house still open? I would go there every time I passed through town. Loved the huge Redwood communal tub. I guess it is out of vogue in these covid times but back then it was sweet.
susanna
Lovely pictures, reminding me of visiting the area fairly often back in the day when we brought our large dog to “Sheep Dung Ranch” – vacation spot for dogs with cabins for dog and human travel companions sparsely spread out for the dogs to run and roam.
Anyway, I think we ate at your restaurant, around early 2000s or late 1990s. It always had a good, if not best, recommendation from various sources. Did you leave the restaurant business when the place sold?
arrieve
I used to think I could live in Mendocino if I ever went back to California.
That seems less and less like a possibility but it’s still one of my favorite places. Thanks for the lovely pictures and many memories.
JanieM
The garden pictures, especially the second-to-last one, inspire me to take a welcome deep breath as I meet the day. All the pictures make me feel like I’ve been there, which, sad to say, I have not.
Is/was the restaurant connected to the hotel? I ask because of the color scheme.
And as to the art center: I would be right there with you, champion holder of grudges that I am. Somewhat separable from that, fund-raising for non-profits is…well, a big topic. It’s a shame that obscene concentrations of wealth make it even more necessary than it might be, and a different kind of shame that the fundraising is often so…shameless. /rant
Bottom line: love the pictures. How many owners has the restaurant had since you sold it? Did the very next one remove the garden and downgrade the quality, or has it been gradual?
Steve from Mendocino
@kindness: Just checked the internet (since I don’t pay attention to these things very well) and, yep, it’s still going: sweetwaterspa.com/
Steve from Mendocino
@susanna: Didn’t want to be in the restaurant business when I bought it, but, even more, I didn’t want to be without that restaurant. I knew the business well enough that I was confident that I could keep the quality there, and I did. I retired, once I sold it, and have been lounging around working on personal projects since.
Steve from Mendocino
@JanieM: The first owner who followed me did all the cost cutting. Can’t blame him, really, because a restaurant is first and foremost a business, and Cafe Beaujolais didn’t make money for the twenty years before me, and it didn’t make money for me. It was, rather, a work of love and art. There’s a new owner since then, who’s tried to bring quality back, and then the virus hit. He’s now doing a great takeout business, and seems quite content with his lot. It’ll be interesting to see what he does after the hospitality returns to “normal”.
WaterGirl
Thanks for the stories. Love the look of the restaurant from the outside, love the gardens, love all these photos except the ones documenting the neglect of the new owners.
Kristine
Lovely photos. Thank you for the story.
Quicksand
Oh, wow. My wife and I had a memorable meal at Cafe Beaujolais in 2002. The sturgeon dish was really excellent and it’s still a highlight among my lifetime fine dining experiences.
Dan B
Your gardens had wonderful textures between the Gunnera, Flax, and what looks like Aucuba it’s dramatically interesting and calming at the same time. Great job!
Was the garden so expensive to maintain? My experience is there are many “reasons” people find to devalue view things they don’t understand.
JPL
@Quicksand: It’s a small world after all. That is very cool.
Mary G
Late to the thread, but love the photos. People who rip out gardens are evil.