Editor’s note: This article has been updated to better reflect the relationship between Café Vivant and Corvus Farm, which was mischaracterized in a press release.
It’s all about chicken and wine at Menlo Park’s newest restaurant, Café Vivant.
Created by wine professionals Jason Jacobeit and Daniel Jung, Café Vivant aims to preserve and highlight the flavor of heritage chickens, as well as offer an extensive selection of bottle-aged wines. Located in the former Le Boulanger downtown, Café Vivant also has an attached bottle shop, Somm Cellars, offering wine and a small daytime menu. Both the restaurant and bottle shop opened Oct. 28.
Heritage chickens are selectively bred to mature slowly, resulting in a “beautiful richness and depth of flavor,” according to Jacobeit. Industrial hybrid breeds, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of natural flavor, so chefs often look to build flavor through marinades, sauces or high-heat cooking techniques, he explained.
The Café Vivant team is working closely with Corvus Farm in Pescadero, created by Rob James and his son more than 15 years ago. The 65-acre farm raises heritage chickens, guinea hens, ducks, rabbits, pigs and sheep alongside heirloom produce. Compost from the restaurant goes back into the soil at the farm.
At the Menlo Park restaurant, heritage chickens undergo a multiday process in which they’re brined, then air-dried to concentrate the flavors further before being roasted. Whole chickens serve two and come with foraged mushrooms, roasted farm vegetables and lemon thyme jus. Jared Wentworth, who’s worked at Michelin-starred restaurants in Chicago, is the chef behind Café Vivant.
Three types of heritage chicken are available at a time, with new chickens rotated in each month. On Café Vivant’s opening menu, find California Golden ($96), Pescadero Black ($116) and Delaware ($128) varieties. The California Golden has the lightest flavor, while Pescadero Black, which is raised on Corvus Farm, is dark meat-forward, and the Delaware is a balanced mix of the two.
In addition to whole-roasted heritage chicken, Café Vivant offers heritage chicken nuggets, topped with Keluga caviar and dill creme fraiche (two pieces for $38). The egg salad ($15), served with house focaccia and salmon roe, uses eggs from heritage chickens, which “tend to have much darker yolks and a considerably punchier flavor,” according to Jacobeit.
The dessert program is overseen by executive pastry chef Almira Lukmanova, whose experience includes Michelin-starred Jungsik and The Modern in New York and Sketch in London.
Continuing the chicken theme, Café Vivant offers a fried chicken ice cream, which combines housemade vanilla ice cream with extra crispy chicken skin ($15). It’s served with honey brioche toast, hot sauce caramel, bell pepper-raspberry jam, speculoos-tahini crunch, milk chocolate-miso ganache, marshmallow fluff and a crisp orange tuile.
“When you eat it, you get this nice, salty vanilla ice cream flavor, and then the actual richness of the chicken starts to creep up on the finish,” Jacobeit said.
Café Vivant’s Camembert cheesecake even resembles a bird’s nest ($15). The base of the nest is made from calamansi curd and is covered with crispy strands of dough. The nest’s eggs are made from Camembert cheesecake with a yolk from pineapple-pumpkin compote. A quenelle of hay ice cream also adorns the nest.
Jacobeit expects Café Vivant’s lunch service, as well as a reservation-only tasting menu ($235) with an optional wine pairing ($115) to launch early next year. Celebrating every part of the chicken, the tasting menu could include chicken consommé made from bones, a dish highlighting chicken skin, chicken liver mousse served with homemade Parker House rolls and a fully-plated main course featuring white and dark meat chicken.
“We’re essentially starting with one chicken for each tasting menu, and we’re showing that chicken’s full comprehensiveness, the full impact of that chicken in many different preparations,” Jacobeit said.
Beyond the chicken
While Cafe Vivant’s menu is particularly poultry-focused – there’s squab with braised endive ($35), fried quail with duck fat cornbread ($33) and seared Guinea hen with thigh pot pie ($45) – there’s also a variety of seafood dishes ($22-$48) and even grilled A5 Miyazaki wagyu with Yorkshire pudding.
Café Vivant’s wine program offers about 20 wines by the glass and features at least 3,000 bottles, the majority of which are bottle-aged at least 20 years, resulting in “a lot more earthy, mushroomy, deep, savory complexity…that works beautifully with heritage chicken,” Jacobeit said.
“Daniel and I always wanted to create the kind of wine program that we would love to see if we were coming as diners for the first time to that restaurant, the kind of list that you open, and you look across the table at the person dining with you, and you say, ‘I literally want to drink everything on these two pages that I have open right now,’” he added.
Most bottles come from Burgundy, France, and the Santa Cruz Mountains, with more than 120 bottles from Ridge Vineyards. Jacobeit said Café Vivant’s prices “are often literally a third of what you would find for similar wines at other restaurants,” with bottles ranging from the upper $50s into the $6,000 range. Rather than trying to maximize on one particular dining experience, he hopes the lower prices will increase the volume of guests participating in the wine program.
“I think the classic Café Vivant experience is coming in and drinking a wine from the ‘70s or the ‘80s and spending $150 to $225 a bottle, at a price point that oftentimes, especially here in Silicon Valley, may be a well-made but very young line and at Cafe Vivant gets you an experience,” he said.
Nonalcoholic wines plus low-proof and nonalcoholic cocktails ($12-$17) are also available.
Café Vivant’s ambiance is clean and minimalist, with neutral tones, wood paneling and a floating gridded ceiling. The dining room seats 45, with a 10-seat bar facing a glass-walled rare and fine wines room.
Jacobeit envisions the attached bottle shop, slightly smaller than the restaurant itself, as a community gathering space. Described as having a “living room feel” by Jacobeit, Somm Cellars has a couch as well as indoor and outdoor tables and chairs. During the day, guests can order pour-over coffee, tea or small bites from the kitchen, such as house-marinated olives, homemade terrines, artisanal cheese and pickled farm eggs. And at dinner, Somm Cellars becomes a semi-private dining room for Café Vivant.
This is Jacobeit and Jung’s second retail shop, with the first opening in 2020 in New York City. Prior to opening Somm Cellars, the pair met while working for Myriad Restaurant Group. Jung was the head sommelier at Tribeca Grill, and Jacobeit was the wine director at Michelin-starred and James Beard Award-winning Bâtard. Both restaurants have since closed.
The name Café Vivant is a nod to the phrase “bon vivant,” referring to a person who lives life to the fullest, and to Romanée-Saint-Vivant, a famous vineyard in Burgundy, France.
The goal of Café Vivant is to “reimagine what poultry, and in particular chicken, can be,” Jacobeit said. Most people think of chicken as a very ordinary protein, he added, but Café Vivant wants to show that it can be extraordinary.
“(Heritage chicken) itself has everything it needs for a premium dish,” Jacobeit said. “And when you treat that thing in a simple but thoughtful way, you can get a set of flavors and textures from that bird that I think a lot of people will find very surprising.”
Café Vivant, 720 Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park; 650-557-2244, Instagram: @cafevivant. Open Tuesday to Thursday from 5-9 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 5-9:30 p.m. Somm Cellars is open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Instagram: @sommcellars.
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Esoteric and very expensive. I’m a middle class Menlo Park resident, feeling increasingly displaced by escalating wealth in the area, though this is nothing new. I miss Le Boulanger and other affordable less exclusive options.
I don’t want to be a nay-sayer, but $128 for a whole chicken plus 5% mandatory “health care” charge, plus 20% tip = $161.
That is going to have to be one amazing chicken.