Rebecca Sterlin doesn’t usually helm the line at her restaurant, Eleven, for the Monday afternoon burger shack. But, short-staffed for the day, she deftly filled in, grilling patties, frying eggs and warming buns for the first patrons of the afternoon.
Ms. Sterlin, who has a background in catering, art and graphic design, opened the restaurant with her sister in the summer of 2017; it’s a comfortable yet refined space with a small bar and intimate nooks for customers to dive into a menu that centers on Neapolitan-style pizza and natural wine. Though her catering career involved an array of cuisines, the choice to focus on pizza was deliberate: pizza leans affordable, relaxed and splittable.
“This is not a fancy place…. We made sure of that,” Rebecca said. “I didn’t want this to be a place where you just go for an anniversary. I want people to come here all the time…. I knew I could elevate it by having oysters and different things, but I wanted it to be a very approachable menu.”
Ms. Sterlin, who spent the first six years of her life in England (British mother, Haitian father), has moved between the West and East Coasts multiple times (Mom actress, Dad psychologist). After a stint in Olema, she went back to New York and then to Bolinas 12 years ago. Though she studied art and worked in graphic design, she gradually found herself in catering. “I kind of fell into the food thing a little bit,” she said.
Rebecca loved doing events and dinner parties, at first throwing birthday celebrations for friends. In Bolinas she began hosting suppers at Gospel Flat Farm with a friend, Heidi, who worked the farm truck at Star Route, and soon they were hired around West Marin and the city, cooking food focused on organic produce and meats.
She took a brief catering hiatus in hopes of returning to her art, but returned to food, managing the café at the Sweetwater, in Mill Valley.
Then, at her sister Kate’s wedding—Kate was living on the East Coast and also involved in events—the two began to wonder if they could do something together, for themselves. When the landlord at 11 Wharf Road heard the sisters wanted to collaborate on a hotel wine bar—perhaps in Mexico—he asked if they would do it in Bolinas instead.
“So we took this on,” she said.
The room rentals upstairs were ready to go when they took over the space in 2015, but the restaurant needed work. Rebecca’s brother, Matt, did the interior, and she and Kate designed it.
To fund the venture, Rebecca’s reputation as a caterer and time living in Bolinas helped find initial investors. Still, starting a restaurant is a challenge. “We were raising money and using it and raising it and using it—it kept going as quickly as we got it,” she said.
One investor is Dan Schaaf, a co-owner of the Napa-based winery Deux Punx, whose low-intervention wines—wild yeasts, minimal sulfites—are featured at Eleven. “We often get people who said, ‘We had the [pinot] noir at Eleven, can I buy a bottle from you?’… It’s definitely something I take pride in, investing in a small business, people making a go of it,” he said.
After renovating through one summer, they decided to open the next, in June 2017, although finances were slim. “That’s always been a bit tricky and we’ve always struggled with that. But we’re still here,” Rebecca said.
For her, sourcing is critical; the beef comes from BN Ranch, the veggies from local farms and certain key ingredients—flour, olive oil, parmesan, anchovies, sea salt and vinegar—from a small Italian purveyor. The menu features local oysters on the half-shell, a cheese plate, salads, arancini, meatballs, fries and a selection of thin-crusted pizzas. There are special menus on Mondays—for instance, fried chicken, lasagna, enchiladas or tacos—and the occasional popup. The wine program leans toward natural or low-intervention wine, reflecting Rebecca’s personal taste and the spirit of the food. Currently, Eleven has keg wines from Deux Punx—a rosé and a cabernet franc—from which people can have a glass at the restaurant or fill growlers to take away.
When they opened, the sisters felt strongly about the business being run by women, a fact that will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen their Women are Life totes, their female-empowerment Instagram posts or the framed pair of painted breasts on a high shelf in the restaurant. “We’ve always had a very strong woman presence,” Rebecca said.
It was also important to minimize the division between the front of the house and the back of the house. “There was no difference—the culture here is that everybody is treated the same, very much like family,” Rebecca said.
Many of the employees, she went on, had never worked in restaurants. That was true of Mariah Gardner, who previously worked as an education coordinator at the San Francisco Maritime National Park; she started as an oyster shucker a year and a half ago.
“The more I was here and became friends with people, I found this place to be a really lovely, welcoming, fun spot to come down by myself and drink wine and meet people,” she said. “And in the course of that, I thought, well shit, what If I was part of this specific community? And then one day….[Rebecca] was like, ‘Do you want to shuck oysters?’”
Last October, two major events shook the restaurant: the departure of Rebecca’s sister Kate, and the sudden death of the restaurant’s 37-year-old head cook, Miguel Angel Hernandez Salazar, whose framed picture resides above the bar. “Literally the same day,” Rebecca said.
Afterward, all the restaurant’s employees “just worked so hard together. They were amazing… Everyone stepped in and stepped up,” she said.
Mr. Salazar’s girlfriend, Karina Borjes, who was on the line with Mr. Salazar, became head cook, and Ms. Gardner took on Kate’s managerial duties, handling staff schedules and helping with wine ordering.
Last Monday afternoon, Rebecca mused on the particular challenges of running a restaurant in Bolinas: consistency of customers, the unpredictability of foot traffic, the resistance of some people to paying $14 for a pizza.
The next Monday, in the evening, carne asada and pinto-and-kale tacos were on offer, as was a bountiful salad and a well-known buffalo milk gelato. If you ordered the carne asada and drank two glasses of wine—a glass of dry rosé and a cabernet franc whose heady bouquet might make you sniff again, and again—you wouldn’t exactly have had a cheap bill. But it wouldn’t have been expensive, either.
At Eleven, you pay what you should pay when the meat and veggies are local. And even when you come on a whim, alone, you may very well pull up to the bar next to people you know, and catch up under just-dim-enough lights over mouthfuls of beans or meat or fries, and talk about trips to L.A., or that couple who went missing but were miraculously found, or whatever. And maybe someone offers you a sip of blood orange vermouth, and it is really tasty, too, and you kind of want to write down or think about how to describe in some taste-bud way what all of it tasted like, but instead you just take another sip.