Despite the hardships of the pandemic, plans are in the works to open Farmhouse Kitchen, a Thai restaurant, in a big Menlo Park location, and a new outpost of Sweet Orchid gelato shop just opened its doors on El Camino Real. At Palo Alto’s Town & Country shopping center, Mayfield Bakery & Cafe has closed down for good. Read more about the latest news from the Midpeninsula dining scene.
Farmhouse Kitchen
Farmhouse Kitchen, a San Francisco-born string of Thai restaurants, is opening its newest location at 1165 Merrill St. in Menlo Park this fall.
The 4,000-square-foot space space across from the Caltrain station has been vacant since 2017, when chef Bradley Ogden closed his eponymous Bradley’s Fine Diner. A new restaurant called Starfish was slated to open there but never did.
Kasem Saengsawang, a native of Thailand, opened his first Farmhouse Kitchen in San Francisco in 2015. The restaurant was created in the image of the food he ate growing up in Loei, a rural province in northeast Thailand. He learned to cook from his grandparents, who made nearly everything — including curry paste and oyster sauce — from scratch. He recalled taking early morning motorcycle trips with them to local produce markets.
After moving to the United States to attend City College of San Francisco in his early 20s, Saengsawang started working in restaurants to make ends meet. He rose up from dishwasher to line cook and eventually opened a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, which he later sold before opening Farmhouse Kitchen.
Saengsawang now runs five restaurants, including one in Portland, Oregon.
The Menlo Park Farmhouse Kitchen will serve the same menu as the San Francisco original but with more “formal” service, including a wine program and cocktails, he said. The restaurant will be open for takeout and outdoor dining only. Given the dining room’s massive size, Saengsawang isn’t worried about creating a socially distanced layout when indoor dining is allowed.
Saengsawang described his style of cooking as contemporary. The Farmhouse Kitchen menu includes dishes such as Bangkok-style herb rice in a tamarind dressing; grilled Wagyu flank steak with broccolini and sticky rice; and slow-braised, bone-in short rib served with panang curry, a dish the menu says is “reminiscent” of the large childhood meals Saengsawang would cook in Thailand for the entire family.
Saengsawang said his restaurant sales dropped to 40% the first two weeks of the pandemic shutdown. With the shift toward takeout, he told his team that they had to think of it as opening a brand new business geared toward to-go. They created new menu items, including a D.I.Y. pad thai kit and the “mini Lao table,” a chef’s choice meal set for two to three people that includes numerous dishes and drinks.
Farmhouse Kitchen also now sells a kit with the ingredients to make the restaurant’s blue rice, which gets its color from anchan, or butterfly pea flower. Saengsawang recorded home cooking videos, posted to the Farmhouse Kitchen Instagram.
Saengsawang said he’s requiring his employees to get tested for the coronavirus every two weeks. New precautions for outdoor dining at Farmhouse Kitchen in San Francisco include checking customers’ temperatures and limiting their time at the restaurant to 90 minutes.
“It’s a lot of pain,” Saengsawang said. But, “it turns out that people understand and are appreciating us.”
The Menlo Park location is also personal for Saengsawang: He’s moving to the city with his wife and young child.
“It’s going to be a real chapter (for) Farmhouse Kitchen,” he said. “I’m going to be there all the time.”
He said he hopes to open the restaurant in early September.
Sweet Orchid
Sweet Orchid, a Fremont gelato and pastry shop, is now scooping dozens of flavors of gelato from a new location in Menlo Park.
Sweet Orchid opened on Saturday, July 25, at 403 El Camino Real, according to a Facebook post. The space was last the longtime home of Yogurt Stop, which closed in 2018 after more than 30 years of business.
Sweet Orchid did not respond to several interview requests. According to the website, owner Leslie Wong opened the Fremont shop in 2009, inspired by gelato she had tried in Rome, Italy.
The Fremont location serves more than 60 flavors of gelato that change daily, from almond and lavender to durian, lychee and chocolate-cayenne. There are also gelato buns (a scoop of gelato inside a flat, warm bun), gelato sandwiches, gelato cakes and gelato milkshakes.
Sweet Orchid also makes sorbet and a variety of baked goods, including taro-vanilla sponge cake, tiramisu, German chocolate cake, hand-piped macarons and mochi, plus coffee and tea. Customers can add boba pearls to any iced drink.
Mayfield Bakery & Cafe
The owners of Mayfield Bakery & Cafe in Palo Alto, unable to sustain the business due to the coronavirus shutdown, have closed the Town & Country Village restaurant for good.
“Like many restaurants throughout the area and across the country, the impact of the COVID-19 virus and the subsequent shelter-in-place orders have reduced revenues to an unsustainable level,” Tim Stannard, founding partner of Bacchus Management Group, which owns Mayfield, said in a statement. “I would like to share a heartfelt thank you to all of our team members, as well as our loyal guests, for 11 wonderful years.”
Signs announcing the closure appeared in the restaurant’s windows this week. On Tuesday afternoon, Mayfield’s dining room sat empty while a man filled a moving truck with carts of baking trays and other items from the next-door bakery.
Bacchus Management Group, which also owns The Village Pub and The Village Bakery in Woodside and Selby’s in Redwood City, opened Mayfield in 2009.
Mayfield temporarily closed after the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order took effect but soon became a pickup location for Bacchus Management’s “family meals” program, ready-to-eat takeout meals with proceeds going to support the restaurant group’s employees. Mayfield later offered its own menu for takeout and delivery and reopened for outdoor dining in June.
Jim Ellis of Ellis Partners, which owns Town & Country, said Bacchus Management communicated to him that the cost of doing business in Palo Alto — including utility rates, minimum wage and labor requirements — compounded by the shutdown and ongoing lack of indoor dining made it impossible for the full-service restaurant to stay open. He said they were not currently paying rent on the 5,300-square-foot space and were in discussions to extend rent abatement.
“We were informed that that just wouldn’t solve the problem for them. Not having to pay rent basically didn’t close the gap enough for them to justify continuing the operation,” Ellis said.
He described the closure as a “huge loss” for the shopping center.
Ellis said Town & Country has provided rent relief to the majority of its tenants, including coming to dozens of rent abatement or deferral agreements. The shopping center also helped Town & Country Village restaurants build parklets “at our own cost,” Ellis said, to expand outdoor dining areas.
Ellis said he hopes the space will be occupied by another restaurant and bakery but is “fearful” about how long it will take to find an operator able to afford the prominent corner space with a large indoor dining room.
“To be completely honest, I think that the communities all over the Bay Area are really going to have to make a conscious effort to give their local businesses business,” he said. “They need the community support and the customer support to survive this period.”
Email Elena Kadvany at ekadvany@paweekly.com
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