San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Protégé puts Palo Alto on the map
When I asked Dennis Kelly why he decided to locate his new restaurant, Protégé, in Palo Alto, he said that he thought the area was ready for what he had to offer.
Kelly, the wine master at the French Laundry for nearly a dozen years before leaving to open this new restaurant, started his career in Palo Alto, and he thought two of the biggest names to come to the city in the early 1990s, Stars and Spago, were ahead of their time. Chef Jeremiah Tower opened Stars on Lytton Avenue in 1995, and two years later it became an outpost of Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, which lasted about a dozen years.
It was a telling commentary that Kelly had to go back more than a decade to find a comparable restaurant to his Protégé. Of course, the city has Evvia and Baumé, the two-Michelin starred restaurants across California Avenue from Protégé, but the pickings are still meager for such a densely populated, affluent area. (See Jonathan Kauffman’s story on Baumé on Page 6.)
It’s a question I’ve been asking for decades: Why don’t folks on the Peninsula support cutting-edge concepts? The region may not have the tourist appeal of San Francisco, but with Stanford University and all the tech headquarters nearby there is a continual influx of visitors that should augment the locals — a formula that contributes to the success of many quality San Francisco restaurants.
If Protégé doesn’t thrive then I figure there’s no hope, for it has excellent food, a well-tailored interior and good service.
Kelly says he has 50 investors, and 43 are local — which should go a long way to keeping the diners coming. For many who invested, it wasn’t just for monetary return but for the opportunity to have a nearby restaurant they could be proud of.
Kelly has further stacked the deck for success. His partner in this venture is Anthony Secviar, who also worked at the French Laundry for six years before moving to San Diego in 2012 to work at Addison in the Grand Del Mar Hotel.
Together they’ve created a stunning restaurant with all the attention to detail but little of the pretense of the French Laundry.
Designer Jon de la Cruz was trying to walk the line between formality and the warehouse feel that dominates design these days, which drove his vision of the new Che Fico in San Francisco. In Palo Alto, the designer had an empty canvas to work with, so he was able to install multilevel ceiling heights to define the different areas, floor-to-ceiling windows, wide-planked wood flooring and tactile tufted velvet banquettes to soften the hard surfaces.
Both Kelly and Secviar are schooled in fine dining, and it’s obvious that style is central to their vision. They did hedge their bets by creating two concepts under one roof: There is a 40-seat lounge that includes a comfortable bar and an a la carte menu. Then there is the more intimate 20-seat dining room with its walnut wainscoting, massive image of trees along the back wall and a faux bois-motif carpet. Here they offer a four-course tasting menu ($95) with two choices in each category. They also have a private dining room that seats up to 10, which is destined to be a popular place for business meetings and celebrations.
The “lounge” is really a fully realized restaurant, and the a la carte menu rises miles above your typical bar food with appetizers such as three pillowy ricotta dumplings ($18) surrounded by a broth with tiny beach mushrooms, peas and nutty Parmesan.
Just how personal this restaurant is becomes obvious when diners see two pieces of