Homegrown goodness
Couple create a life of sustainable and delicious fare in Sebastopol
In the early stages of their relationship, Sebastopol chef Natalie Goble and restaurateur Lowell Sheldon went kiwi picking. It wasn’t a date — they were harvesting an acre of neglected kiwi vines at the Goble family orchard a few miles outside of town. The two spent a chilly December afternoon picking more than 300 pounds of fruit.
Far from discouraging them, the shared labor deepened their love for one another — and inspired them to start farming 2 acres next to the vines so they could grow what they served at Sheldon’s restaurant, Peter Lowell’s, where they had met. (In October, the restaurant is shortening its name to Lowell’s.)
In the 10 years since, the couple have launched a few other projects: They are parents to 2½-year-old Jack; and they have a hip new eatery called Handline, also in Sebastopol, which has already received its share of accolades.
Goble and Sheldon grew up in Sebastopol and their commitment to sustainable eating is deeply rooted in their ties to this farming region and the ideals they were raised with. “We grew up with awareness of environmental concerns starting from childhood,” Sheldon says, “so the restaurants have been an exploration of those issues. The food is a natural expression of the local produce, meats and ingredients that we source.”
While running two restaurants — both are open seven days a week and have a combined staff of about 80 people — is grueling work, they’ve created a rural utopia for themselves, building upon a foundation established by their families. They live on the 2-acre property where Sheldon spent his childhood; his parents moved here from Los Angeles in the mid 1970s.
A short drive away is Two Belly Acres Farm (a riff on “two bellyachers”), which supplies a chunk of the produce for Peter Lowell’s and Handline under the oversight of Goble’s brother. Goble’s parents came here in the mid-’80s to make a go of apple farming; her father, an integrated-circuit engineer, would travel back and forth to San Jose for his work.
Sheldon’s father, Steve, an architect, designed the couple’s modest straw-bale house. It is coated in a rich brown plaster made from the soil on-site. It has a light-filled living area with a “truth window” in one wall — a fun feature that lets you see the straw bale construction of the house — and built-in benches with live-edge redwood seats. The open kitchen with a backsplash of Heath tiles would fit perfectly into a sleek contemporary home; the bathroom has a shower that opens luxuriously to the outdoors.
In lieu of a lawn, there’s an enormous kitchen garden that supplies much of their produce. This summer, it is groaning with tomatoes, onions, peppers, zucchini, eggplant, cucumbers, rhubarb and raspberries. A thriving patch of mint supplies both of the restaurants as well.
Sheldon got started in the restaurant business first. He studied philosophy at the University of Washington and participated in the 1999 Seattle protests against U.S. involvement in the World Trade Organization. After school, he worked for several restaurants in Seattle before returning to open Peter Low-
ell’s in 2007. The mix of Northern Italian-inspired dishes and hippie fare — think pizza topped with Gravenstein apple slices and a “macro bowl” with a choice of tofu, seitan or tempeh — quickly developed a fan base.
Goble entered the picture a couple of years later. After traveling in Central America and graduating with a degree in psychology from UC Santa Cruz, she came back home to regroup and walked into the restaurant looking for work waiting tables. “I was really impressed by all the details of the restaurant and how much there was to learn,” Goble says. “It was a time in my life where I just ate it all up.”
Over the next few years, she went from assisting at the salad station to becoming head chef. As her relationship with Sheldon grew, the couple worked out a way to be together but have some professional separation. After Jack was born, the couple took advantage of the break in their normal routine to brainstorm the concept for a more casual counter-service restaurant. They decided to buy an old Foster’s Freeze, and worked with RareField, the design-build operation of San Francisco’s Paxton Gate, to transform the space into Handline. With Goble at the kitchen’s helm, it offers dishes from up and down the California coast, including fish tacos, oysters and burgers, as well as organic soft-serve.
“Each specialty ingredient at the restaurants is a product of the relationships we have with various local farmers,” says Goble, whose most recent triumph is getting a local supplier to produce organic Kennebec potatoes for the fries at Handline. “It feels good to make this food easily accessible.”