Restaurateur Sondra Bernstein of The Girl & the Fig extends her successful Sonoma County run with the palate-pleasing Estate.
To help pay for law school, I took a year off to work in food service management as part of the dining hall team at the University of San Francisco. Being half German, I hated always having to catch up, never getting even, much less ahead, of the game. Running a successful restaurant is tougher still.
Sondra Bernstein’s executive chef and partner John Toulze (pronounced tool-zee) has no such problem. “That’s the challenge—that’s what makes it so much fun,” he says, enthusiasm overflowing. “Maybe it’s because I have such a short attention span that this job suits me to a tee, but I love the idea of solving the problems that invariably come from running a kitchen. We know we have to get better each and every day. I’m a highly competitive person, and I love having that challenge. When I get up each morning, I’m already in the kitchen working on the next challenge. The great thing about cooking is, when you put that pig on to braise, it’s ready in a relatively short time. If it’s not instant gratification, it’s the next best thing!”
Bernstein and Toulze have just opened their newest restaurant, called Estate, in the extraordinary old home that most recently housed The General’s Daughter restaurant. Understand, if Bernstein were to be known solely for her original restaurant, The Girl & the Fig, that would be reputation enough. That would have legs, in and of itself. You remember your Latin? Res ipsa loquitor: The thing speaks for itself.
But Sondra Bernstein is much more than just that. She does catering, she’s written a cookbook, and she’s extremely active in the Sonoma Valley community, supporting local events and, especially, drawing upon local purveyors for the freshest, tastiest ingredients—including fruits, vegetables and herbs Toulze’s mother, Judy, tends in Estate’s own gardens.
Finding a clear focus
“I started out wanting to be a photographer,” says Bernstein, who was born in Washington, D.C., but raised in the City of Brotherly Love. “I actually earned my bachelor’s of fine art from the Philadelphia College of Art. I wanted to travel, take pictures and have gallery shows. But those who knew me [teachers, gallery owners and some fellow students] laughed at my work and told me to come back once I had more experience. It wasn’t what I had expected.”
Rude awakening. What actually happened, then, was she took a job at T.G.I.Friday’s. “I had all these marvelous cameras, a fully equipped darkroom, and here I was, living at home and making my living as a waitress. Funny, how you can look back with the perspective of time and see how it was meant to be. I had a job that I enjoyed. I got paid and it was a fun, sociable job. It was like getting paid to party.
“When they told me I needed to take the job a bit more seriously, I pitched in and eventually became the person who traveled the country training the serving staff in their new restaurants. That was even more fun. This was in the mid 1980s. I had more responsibility. I helped write their training manuals. It was still socially invigorating, and I learned I could make things happen, that I could produce!”
That’s always an empowering point to arrive at, and arrive she did with a sense of responsibility, competence and confidence. “When they stopped their expansion and focused on revamping their stores for their next growth period, I decided to go back to school. The Restaurant School in downtown Philadelphia [near Temple University] had a one-year program that led to an associate degree in culinary and restaurant management. It was very intense…and I loved it! We had classes in everything, from costing-out recipes to buying wine, from creating menus to basic and advanced cooking classes.
“I can’t say I loved the cooking part, but I found all of it fascinating. Working in the restaurant from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. every afternoon and evening was real, and there’s nothing like practical, hands-on experience to let you know where you stand. My class started with 26 students and ended with 13. My advice to anyone who wants to get into this business is simple: Start out washing dishes, then move up to prep cook, and so on. Work your way up.”
Bernstein then went to work for a couple of years at The Fish Market, a Philadelphia seafood venue with five dining rooms on three floors. “It was a funky place, and I was the manager. I was very committed, I worked all the time, and I learned a lot. I then went to a high-volume Italian restaurant where I managed three sous chefs—each of whom wanted to be head chef! At that point, I needed a little sunshine. My father was living in Los Angeles, so I put my stuff in a moving van and hopped on a train headed west. I worked as floor manager at Alice’s Restaurant in Westwood, then Tavern on Main, where I was general manager and also helping the owners to design a new restaurant called Rusty’s Surf Ranch on the Santa Monica pier.”
A short vacation trip with a boyfriend to Sonoma County in 1992—“he visited the Irish pubs, I took in the restaurants and the wineries”—led to her move north in 1993. “Vicki Sebastiani hired me to manage the deli at Viansa Winery. I was making $9 or $10 an hour. I made sandwiches, ordered food for the next day and oversaw the hospitality program. I learned so much about marketing and brand management. When I started, we were getting maybe 50 or 100 people a day. When I left, I was the director of operations—managing 100 employees—and we were handling 20 buses full of visitors a day!”
The young man destined to become her partner was also working there. “John was in the midst of college, and he was there in the shipping department and as a jack-of-all-trades. He’s like a sponge. He takes in everything and learns it quickly; he’s a real go-getter. He was studying accounting, but was unsure of what he wanted to do. So he just went to work doing a little of everything. He learned a lot from the chefs we hired and, when he decided he wanted to be a chef, I figured we might be on to something. His father’s heritage was French, and he was a pretty good cook. John and I had worked together at Viansa for about three years, and I admired his work ethic.”
What happened next came from the confidence that had been growing in Bernstein. “While the growth and volume of what we were doing at Viansa—all those people, all those buses—kept growing, that put a constant pressure on me. What I was beginning to learn was, one, I’m motivated by that and I can handle it; and, two, I began to realize that if I was going to work that hard, I might as well be working for myself!”
Taking the leap
With her father’s support, she took a week in Sedona and a week in Santa Fe to “unravel,” to step back and figure out the next step in her life. It was a big one. As the kids like to say, ginormous. “This was April of 1997,” she says, almost breathless in her explication. “I met with a business broker. A couple of weeks later, we found the location in Glen Ellen, locked it in in July, and opened the restaurant in August.” The restaurant. No, the restaurant. The Girl & the Fig. The restaurant. That restaurant.
“John and one other person who had worked for me at Viansa joined the project. John, especially, helped me paint, tile and build things. I don’t really know where the name came from. I was sitting in Piatti, in Sonoma, doodling on a napkin, writing down names. I wanted something sing-song, like The Fox and the Hound, although that sounded too much like a British pub. I love fresh figs. And the fig just seems a symbol of my feelings for Sonoma County. There’s a versatility about it. It signifies bounty. It’s simple and yet can be complex. It’s erotic, yet biblical. It can be done as a sweet or as a savory.”
Simple. Complex. Sounds like Sondra herself. “I hired a chef from San Francisco. John worked a couple of days in the kitchen and two or three days on the floor. I told them what I wanted, they would create dishes, and I’d decide what worked and what didn’t. It didn’t take long for John to decide he wanted to become a chef. The chef. We had high expectations, and we wanted to try to take care of everyone. That’s what hospitality is all about, isn’t it? Taking care of people.”
It is, and it worked. The Girl & the Fig became the hot spot in the county. “I was glad John gravitated toward the kitchen, because it wasn’t where I wanted to be. It takes so much effort to make it work, and John has an ease—an ability to slide with things—that’s quite remarkable. I have a good palate. I know when something needs more texture, or if the acidity is too high or low. I have a good sense for the visuals, for how it would look on the plate. When we had an idea for a recipe, he’d show me three versions, we’d tweak it a bit, and then we’d have it.”
In December 2000, space became available at the Sonoma Hotel, on the northwest corner of Sonoma’s plaza. “What an opportunity that was,” she enthuses. “The owners came to us and offered us the ground floor. We were able to knock a hole in the wall between the bar and the dining room, which really changed the flow and opened things up nicely. It makes a huge difference in the ‘feel’ of the place. We also really like having the patio.” (There was also The Girl & the Gaucho at her Glen Ellen location, a sort of Don Quixote blend of tapas, sherry and almonds—sexy and spiritual at the same time, and a Petaluma project in the old River House, “that had a great patio, but it was too windy to really work.”)
In 2006, she had a chance to get into the old Von Sydow’s grocery store at Napa Road and Eighth Street East. “It was a great opportunity, a real change of pace for us,” says Bernstein. “There was 3,000 square feet of general store and four rental units out back, which we called Les Petites Maisons. It took me three minutes to decide I wanted it. My stomach was aching, so I knew it would work. When my stomach talks to me, I listen.”
So, in May 2006, she and John opened The Fig Pantry: deli, wine shop, gift store. “We saw a lot of people there, but I could never figure out how to make a profit. Our permits didn’t let us cook on the premises, so it was pretty much ‘grab and go.’ Worse, people couldn’t picnic! They couldn’t consume alcohol on the premises. In April of last year, a drunk driver ran into the deli in the middle of the night. [Damage from the crash resulted in the deli’s closure.] At least five people a day tell me they miss it.”
In January 2007, they opened a catering facility just south of the deli on Eighth Street East. “That’s still doing very well,” says Bernstein. “We do catering for the wine tours; we do winery and corporate events. We do events at private homes. We can handle lunch or dinner for six; we can handle lunch or dinner for 300.”
Home grown
The Girl & the Fig, LLC, was originally a partnership between Sondra and her two brothers, Edward and Ronald, but each of the three later gave some of their shares to include John in the partnership out of respect for his manifest hard work and dedication. The new restaurant, Estate, is the flagship of a whole new company, Sonoma Hospitality Management, of which Sondra, John and Edward are partners. “This is a wonderful place, a beautiful property,” Bernstein says of the building and grounds. “We can seat 100 inside and 200 outside! We grow organically—I say ‘we,’ but it’s John’s mother—many of our herbs, vegetables and fruits on the property, which is the reason we chose the name Estate, We mean it in the same sense that wineries use the term.
“This past summer, we had 20 types of tomatoes, six types of squash, all sorts of different peppers. We have pomegranate, persimmon and olive trees to draw from. She grows parsley, basil, Brussels sprouts, leeks, radicchio, kale and other greens. We have a couple citrus trees that have been wildly grafted to have about 10 different types of fruit on them. There’s nothing like produce fresh from the garden.”
“Estate’s cuisine is about local products with a strong Italian accent,” laughs Bernstein, trying to put a handle on something that’s clearly freeform and fun. “How does food become what it is? There has to be some philosophical grounding. I love the natural foods we’re blessed with here in Sonoma County, but I also love what Italians bring to the table. We do a leg of lamb, roasted in the oven, with white beans. It doesn’t scream Italian, but…”
The décor—Bernstein cannot get away from her love of photography—makes strong use of black-and-white photography created by friend and filmmaker Christopher Butler. “He took some of my favorite scenes from old Italian movies, manipulated and enhanced them with warm colors and interesting effects using traditional film methods and computer technology. These large, oversized photographs soften the rooms and, I think, set an interesting mood.”
The next chapter
Having written for Bon Appetit and Santé magazines, Bernstein was approached by a literary agent who proposed she do a cookbook based on the success of The Girl & the Fig. “I was laid up at home after gall bladder surgery and had already written most of the book—I was planning on self-publishing—when she called me up out of the blue. She was amazed at how much I’d already done, and she went and sold the idea to Simon & Schuster. [the girl and the fig cookbook] is in its third printing now. The only hard part was the time it took to kitchen-test each recipe, send each one out to friends to test and comment on, and then re-test each one to make sure everything was clear and understandable.”
That is, one must suspect, the secret to all the adventures of Sondra Bernstein, our modern-day Doña Quixote: Everything she does is clear and understandable. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza once said, “To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.” Bernstein has become what she was best capable of becoming, and her works clearly speak for themselves. In the absence of being greedy, it’s hard to ask for much more than that.
Hinkle is the author of nine wine books, the latest being Clos Pegase: The Architecture of Wine, due out soon. You can find his work at www.RichardPaulHinkle.com.
