Spring Fling

California's Bacchus Group of fine restaurants shares a dinner party menu of farm-fresh flavors

- OWEN DUGAN

WOODSIDE, CALIF. A SMALL TOWN ABOUT 30 MILES SOUTH OF SAN FRANCISCO, MAY NOT HAVE THE NATIONAL MARQUEE RESTAURANT NAMES OF BIGGER CITIES, BUT IT IS WELL-KNOWN AMONG FOOD AND WINE LOVERS.

Woodside is home to Wine Spectator Grand Award winner the Village Pub, which opened in 2001 and was the first restaurant from the Bacchus Management Group. Nearby are the group’s Village Bakery and Selby’s. In San Francisco is the company’s Grand Award– winning Spruce, home to some 2,500 wine selections and a 15,000-bottle inventory. All told, Bacchus has over a half-dozen restaurants from Mill Valley to San Jose.

The Bacchus properties exude the easy charm and sophistication of the West Coast’s best restaurants. The venues are comfortable and the service warm, but the food embodies a friendly yet cosmopolitan version of California cuisine. Some of the dishes are disarmingly simple. “The food that I do has a rusticity, but it’s still elegant. It’s really ingredient-focused,” says executive chef Mark Sullivan, who oversees the cuisine for Bacchus’ restaurants.

One dish might be a bowl of just pasta, egg yolk, Parmigiano and truffles, while another is straight-up meat and potatoes—but the meat is a rib eye cap and the sauce has a classical pedigree, similar to the roast lamb recipe, with a citrus-olive jus, found on page 60.

Ingredients are highly seasonal and owe greatly to the group’s exclusive partnership with SMIP Ranch, a 5-acre farm in the hills above Woodside that grows produce exclusively for Bacchus restaurants. Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the farm also introduced direct-to-consumer sales through a CSA program, and they are planning to supply the restaurants again.