The Coast Café has operated at the heart of Bolinas for decades, offering warm meals and a hot fire in the winter, cold beer and a jovial atmosphere in the summer. Spirited and intentional, the restaurant’s owner, Roseanne LaVoy, runs the establishment with support from local ingredients and a dedicated community. Her guile has served her well in wine and recipe pairing, and in navigating the challenges brought by Covid.
Roseanne has many dimensions. Though she’s a business owner, she’s also worked in tech for almost 40 years. She is a certified sommelier and she is charity-minded. A trained physicist, she left Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom in pursuit of the homey business life the Coast Café provides. Now the sole proprietor, her role is primarily behind the scenes. Although she leaves recipe building to her chef, Enrique Hernandez, Roseanne keeps a chef coat in a closet in case she needs to jump in.
“When you have your own business, you need to be prepared to do anything that’s necessary to fill in,” she said. “You may be doing dishes, taking out the garbage, making coffee or you may be going to Olema to get the restaurant’s mail and then down to Stinson to get it instead!”
While she was growing up in Tupper Lake, a small lumber village in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, Roseanne’s family supplied most of their produce from their garden and hunted for their meat. In the fall, they would make chocolates and cookies and homemade wine from elderberries and dandelions just in time for Christmas gift-giving.
“The holidays were a really nurturing period for me growing up,” Roseanne said. “It was a time when food and wine was eaten and drank and turned into gifts for our friends and family and so on.”
In high school, she excelled at math and science, calling herself a proud nerd. When she later studied physics at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., she also pursued her sommelier certification. By the time she graduated with a master’s in solid state physics in 1985, she had already secured a position at Intel. She moved to San Jose, where the tech industry was beginning to take off.
Roseanne said that for those in her hometown, California seemed like a foreign country. Her move to the tech frontier was thrilling. “I’m really a geek,” she said. “It was a really exhilarating change and it felt like we were doing the
impossible.”
Roseanne worked her way up through Intel, where she still holds a part-time job as a quality and reliability labs manager for a team that analyzes software. But in the late ’90s, the excitement wore off, and Roseanne began searching for something more relaxed. She wanted to be in a smaller community where she could serve her customers directly.
“I felt like that side of my brain was neglected,” she said.
Her love for the ocean and Northern California drove her to search for bed and breakfasts she might operate. She learned about Bolinas through fisherman David Liebenstein, who said a restaurant there was on the market. At that time, the Coast Café was called The Shop and had been put up for sale by Buddy and Gwenn Spangler. Though the idea of owning a restaurant did not appeal to Roseanne at first, a weekend trip convinced her. Roseanne and David joined forces as business partners and bought the restaurant in 1998.
The restaurant went through several iterations as chefs and recipes rotated in and out. Roseanne managed the restaurant while David ran a fishing operation out of a boat they docked at Fisherman’s Wharf. Roseanne said that as David began leaning more into fishing, her duties grew, and eventually David left in 2011. She bought out his half and continued to run the restaurant, with Brindasy Greene working as the manager until the pandemic prompted her move to Hog Island Oyster Company.
Patrick Sullivan, the restaurant’s manager since 2021, said the working environment at the Coast Café is unlike any other he’s experienced since he started working in restaurants 15 years ago, and he credits Roseanne’s leadership.
“She’s extremely settled and sort of maternal in the restaurant,” he said. “She makes sure we’re personally and professionally managed and has always provided moral support and constructive criticism that makes the environment work.”
The café has always maintained a good relationship with local fishermen, Roseanne said. Even when David was getting his own catch, they still bought crab, salmon, rock cod, black cod and lingcod from local commercial fishermen. Roseanne says all the fish she serves is locally caught by hook and line. “When there’s a big storm or when local guys can’t get out of the lagoon, we might just not serve fish that day,” she said.
Produce comes from local farms, and local foragers bring in a diverse selection of mushrooms. The café used to buy chicken, duck and goat from Bolinas resident Bill Niman before he sold to Blue Apron in 2017; now they get chicken and duck from Sonoma County ranches, and beef and pork from a co-op near the Oregon border.
Roseanne’s love for wine has grown as she’s developed pairings for her chef’s recipes. After a few years managing the café, she began studying wine with David Glancy, a master sommelier and certified wine educator—one of only 12 people in the world to hold both credentials. She called his philosophy of teaching disarming and anti-snooty, with a focus on the customer.
“He really imparted the idea that you should follow what you like,” Roseanne said. “If someone wants a cabernet with their fish, let them do it!”
Though Roseanne does not spend a lot of time in day-to-day management, she still pays close attention to the wine list, which she separates into roughly three categories. One third of the list consists of crowd-pleasers—uncomplicated wines that most customers are familiar with. One third contains a selection of obscure varietals and regions, and the rest are seasonal wines.
“The restaurant has evolved like any human does,” Roseanne said. “You get taller, change your hair color and the clothes you wear, gain weight, then lose it. Our recipes and operations have changed in a very natural and mature way.”
The pandemic was tough on the business, but Roseanne said the community turned out to support it with takeout orders. Indoor seating only returned in November and live music is still coming back. Great Plates, a FEMA-funded program that connected meals with Bolinas residents who were particularly vulnerable during the pandemic, was monumental for the restaurant’s survival. Roseanne was able to provide cooking and food delivery shifts to her staff, all while feeding the community. New dishes like the sesame-crusted tofu, the stuffed portobello mushroom and the chia seed pudding have since become local favorites.
Roseanne has always been generous with her business, donating meals to volunteer firefighters and first responders. She never lets a person in uniform pay for their own coffee.
“My mother was a paramedics instructor,” she said. “If they’ve got a fire in the middle of the night, we try to have breakfast ready for them by the morning.”
Her staffers mostly live in Bolinas and Point Reyes Station. “We’re just a little too far for people to come from Sonoma or southern Marin,” she said. But the high cost of living and limited housing means that hiring is hard.
Every year, the business goes through a winter lull and a summer explosion. But Covid made these cycles less predictable. Now, post-pandemic, Roseanne is tracking the recovery of the restaurant industry at a time of economic uncertainty and rising costs. “Managing a business in West Marin is about foresight,” she said. “You can do it in the high season, and you can do it in the low season. The trick is, how do you prepare for the rest of the year without blowing a whole bunch of money?”
Her restaurant’s food is praised by locals and travelers. Weekend surfers sometimes won’t leave without a stop at the café, and Andrew Marantz once wrote in the New York Times that the blackberry pie was outstanding. Of the many celebrities who have visited her tavern, she said the only one who caught her off guard was a Nobel laureate in physics, Arno Penzias.
“I don’t really get starstruck,” she said. “But that was a special moment for me.”
The Coast Café is currently open for lunch and dinner Thursdays through Sundays, and for dinner on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.