The small, coastal village of Mendocino is getting a little gust of fresh air from Fog Eater Cafe, which opens for vegetarian southern food, natural wines, and cool, low-ABV cocktails on June 12. The roughly 25-seat restaurant occupies a cozy wooden building and garden patio just off Main Street in the picturesque, unincorporated town. Owners describe its aesthetic as a “whisper of grandma,” complete with mismatched saucers and the occasional doily.
Haley Samas-Berry, a Fort Bragg native, and chef Erica Schneider, originally from Nashville, have tested Fog Eater’s fare with local diners at a series of successful pop-up dinners: Items like hush puppies with pepper jelly aioli, pimento cheese, grits with veggies, and Rancho Gordo red beans and rice.
“We’re not vegetarian for health purposes,” says Samas-Berry. “Its really rich southern food, it just doesn’t have meat.” And while replacing meat with veggies isn’t their goal, they’ve got lots of hearty shiitake mushrooms on the menu, courtesy of Samas-Berry’s uncles, who run a shiitake farm.
Samas-Berry and Schneider met working at vegan NYC bakery Babycakes (now Erin McKenna’s Bakery); Schneider also brings experience from famed New York vegetarian restaurant Angelica Kitchen. Samas-Berry, a cocktail expert, was most recently a drinks and spirits lecturer-in-residence at San Franciscos’ Battery Club. While Fog Eater won’t serve liquor to start, she’s been “tincturing up a storm” with wild, seasonal herbs for the beverage program and its low-ABV cocktails, concoctions made with sherries and sake from Oakland’s Den sake.
In close-knit Mendocino, Samas-Berry wasn’t sure how her project and non-local partners would be received. “A lot of the time, small towns get a bad rap for ‘not being ready for something new’,” she says.
But she, husband Nathan Maxwell Cann (a partner at Fog Eater previously of SF’s cocktail bar SRO and now of the Little River Inn), and chef Schneider “have been pummeled with kindness.”
“We’re not carrying a lot of the Anderson Valley wines [that are common], and we thought people would be freaked out. But honestly, people are so excited for something different.”
Instead of the usual classics, Fog Eater’s wine list emphasizes natural and biodynamic wines from the area and slightly beyond — they’ll include Broc Cellars, for instance, since the Berkeley winery uses fruit grown in Mendocino. By-the-glass options include Lichen Estate Blanc De Gris (2014, Anderson Valley, Mendocino) and Moon Juice Zinfandel (2017, Poor Ranch, Mendocino).“
“I was nervous about people tasting deliberate secondary fermentation for the first time, and they totally loved it,” Samas-Berry says.
Fog Eater Cafe opens June 12 at 45104 Main Street (with its entrance on Albion Street) in Mendocino. Hours are Wednesday to Sunday, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., with a Happy Hour from 4 to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Friday and Sunday brunch from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.