A new restaurant that will serve up a mix of playful fusion and well-prepared standards is opening at the Tomales Bay Resort on Saturday, Sept. 24, said the restaurant’s owners, Amber Driscoll and Roger Tschann.
Fog’s Kitchen—named after the couple’s cat, Fog—is owned by the two Petaluma residents, who opened their first restaurant, The Speakeasy, in Petaluma in 2012 and The Big Easy, a music club, in 2014. The new restaurant will feature small plates, tacos, sandwiches, entrées, desserts—and even caviar.
“I thought, why not? No one else is doing it,” said Ms. Driscoll, who also co-owns a Petaluma retail shop, the Opera House Collection, with Point Reyes Station resident Terra Livingston.
Finding their niche in West Marin’s restaurant scene is important to Ms. Driscoll and Mr. Tschann. The two are not trained chefs—she has a business degree and nonprofit experience, and he is a sound engineer—but they work with their restaurant crew, which includes a group of sous chefs instead of one head chef, to create menus.
“We’re going to try to offer some things that are different than other local restaurants,” she said. “What we try to do in the kitchen is take traditional dishes and add some interesting flavors.”
Many of the items listed on the restaurant’s website are inflected with Mediterranean and Asian flavors: panko-crusted halloumi with a tomato masala sauce, sweet potato with ginger miso butter and pistachios, pork banh mi. There are also traditional dishes like fish and chips, steak, ribs, wings and a burger, but they created vegetarian versions of the latter two. And there are other inventive no-meat options, like jackfruit tacos, inspired by an L.A. restaurant that used the melon, which is bitter and fibrous when unripe but which easily soaks up flavors. Veggie offerings are important to Ms. Driscoll, who is a vegetarian.
“It makes me sad when you go to restaurants and no one has made an effort to be creative with the vegetarian options,” she said.
Fog’s Kitchen will offer beer and wine on tap, as well as a few “cocktails” using ingredients like champagne, sherry and port, since they do not have a liquor license. “It’s kind of an old-fashioned cocktail list,” she said.
Before getting into the restaurant business, Ms. Driscoll, who earned her business degree at the University of California at Irvine, spent years in the nonprofit sector. She worked for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, as a liaison to dairy farms on animal welfare standards. She later spent time at the Humane Society, where she focused on fundraising and event planning. Mr. Tschann owns a recording studio called Grizzly Studios.
Opening a food business—perhaps a food truck—had been in the back of her mind, she said. When the space in Petaluma popped up, she said they made the “quick, crazy decision” to start the restaurant.
The space at the boatel had intrigued Ms. Driscoll for some years; in fact, she used to eat at the former Thai restaurant regularly when she visited friends on the coast.
When she heard this year that the space had become available, she moved swiftly to meet with the building’s owner, Jeff Harriman.
After securing a lease, she and Mr. Tschann made some minor renovations to the restaurant space, including painting the walls, modifying the bar to create more leg room and installing light fixtures sourced from an old boat from India.
Fog’s Kitchen is set to open seven months after The Privateer, an upscale seafood-centric restaurant, closed after just three brief months in business. The space had been empty for about five years before that.
And although they are opening as the winter season draws near, the couple believes the move will give the restaurant time to find its footing. Ms. Driscoll also said she is open to ideas to lure people in, such as a movie night in the clubhouse that has a big-screen TV. “I was thinking ‘Jaws’ to start,” she said.
Fog’s Kitchen will initially be open Fridays through Mondays, from 5 to 9:30 p.m. Thursday dinner hours will come soon, and eventually weekday lunch and weekend brunch.