How tri-tip put a town on the map
The scene has played out countless times, yet never ceases to amaze John Pickerel.
Whether he’s on a plane to Prague, climbing Mount Shasta or visiting another far-flung locale, strangers will naturally ask where he’s from. When Pickerel pipes up, “Winters,” it invariably invokes the same ravenous response: “That’s where that steak house is…”
Indeed, it is. And Pickerel can only smile back proudly when he reveals he’s the founder of that storied establishment, the Buckhorn Steakhouse, as well as 15 other Buckhornbranded restaurants in Northern California and New York City, including a new local food truck and the Putah Creek Cafe across the street from the original meat mecca.
The 300-seat restaurant that started it all is housed in a historic hotel on Main Street in an off-the-beaten-path town that’s less than 3 square miles. But its reputation has spread far and wide. Japanese visitors to the nearby UC Davis campus make a beeline to it.
Tourists tote home the restaurant’s famed charred seasoned tri-tip in their suitcases. Even the town’s mayor knows all too well that officials from outside the area will always request an afternoon meeting with her just to have an excuse to dine afterward at the dinner-only Buckhorn.
This isn’t necessarily a town that one restaurant built. But many in Winters consider Pickerel, 63, and his wife, Melanie Bajakian-Pickerel, 58, the community’s backbone.
“They are the mainstay of our downtown. We call their restaurant ground zero,” says Mayor Cecilia Aguiar-Curry. “They have been so visionary and forward-thinking.”
To say it took great vision to open the restaurant in 1980 in a building that was coming apart at the seams and had bats living inside is an understatement.
The son of an Idaho and Washington state cattleman who was a star rodeo bull rider, Pickerel grew up in the beef business. He got his start at age 21 when he was hired as a butcher’s assistant when Cattlemens steak house opened in Dixon.
“I loved learning how to fabricate steaks from large cuts. I was fascinated by how you could add value to it,” says Pickerel who eventually moved up to butcher, then general manager. “I was also fascinated (that) when people go out to celebrate, they don’t get a pizza, they get a steak. I thought there was status attached to that. I still do.”
So much so that when a real estate
agent and fellow Dixon Rotary Club member suggested they team up to open a restaurant in Winters, Pickerel was game. There was only one problem.
“I said, ‘Where’s Winters?’ ” Pickerel recalls. “I’d never been there. It was a town that everyone had forgotten, a town in which everything had left.”
With $10,000 — half of it borrowed from his father, who made him pay it back — Pickerel opened the restaurant when he was 27.
He purchased used equipment from shuttered San Francisco restaurants and hauled it to Winters. He hired guys to help renovate, paying them in beer. He tracked down Vic Mentink, the most recent owner of the former restaurant, blind and living in a trailer in Napa, and cajoled the 83-year-old into teaching him how to make the prime rib and German potato soup still on the menu today.
In the beginning, Pickerel would arrive early to make the soup, butcher the meat, then drive to Sacramento to pick up other supplies because vendors didn’t yet deliver to Winters. After a quick nap, he would return to the restaurant to cook, before closing up the bar for the night.
“He’d have employees park out front to make the place look busy,” his wife says. “Now, we have to beg them to park elsewhere.”
These days, when happy hour commences at 4 p.m., people start piling into the expansive restaurant, done up with deer and elk heads on the walls, framed hunting rifles and roomy wooden booths.
“People like coming to Winters. They just needed an excuse to do so,” Pickerel says of the many cyclists who pedal from Davis, and the wine aficionados who stop in on their way to Napa and Sonoma. The restaurant’s best-seller may be the 24-ounce, 40-day aged, bone-in rib eye. But the Pickerels’ empire is one that tri-tip built. Nowadays, the company goes through 700,000 pounds of Midwest, corn-fed, certified Angus tri-tip annually at its restaurants.
“It marbles very well, so it’s juicy in every bite,” Pickerel says. “It’s tender, but has an aggressive sirloin flavor and luxuriant fat. When you roast it correctly to medium-rare, it’s like a poor man’s prime rib.”
Pickerel credits his wife, who does interior design, hiring and community outreach for the company, for spreading the gospel of the tri-tip. Bajakian-Pickerel, a former caterer who met her husband when she was dining at his restaurant, would help Pickerel sell tri-tip sandwiches at the Davis farmers market. One day, she spotted a flyer in a garbage can, touting a new Chef ’s Market in Napa. Her husband was not interested. But she wore him down, and along with her father, the three started selling tri-tip sandwiches there, drawing the longest lines of any vendor.
That prompted the couple to consider opening a restaurant built around that sandwich. When San Francisco’s Metreon went searching for a local restaurant specializing in beef, the first Buckhorn Grill was established there in 1999.
The Pickerels now employ 500 people nationwide with 150 in Winters, a town of just 7,000.
For the past 12 years, all the money raised from sales of their tri-tip sandwiches at the Davis farmers’ market has gone to funding local athletic programs, which would have difficulty existing otherwise. Bajakian-Pickerel also founded the town’s Farm-to-School program, which provides breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack for school children, made up of the bounty grown by local farmers.
“If not for John and Melanie, we wouldn’t be as successful as we are in becoming a tourist destination,’’ AguiarCurry says. “They took that first step to fix up that building, which inspired others to follow. The success of the downtown is because of the Buckhorn. It really is.”
“People like coming to Winters. They just needed an excuse to do so.”
John Pickerel, Buckhorn Steakhouse