It was the summer of 1978 and I got word that Bob Larman, the new chef in town at the soon-to-be-opened Palace Bar & Grill, was looking for a kitchen manager.
I was qualified. The restaurant business was in my blood. As a young girl, I spent many summers in Magda’s kitchen at my aunt and uncle’s place in upstate New York; during college I waitressed at the Concord and Grossinger’s in the Borscht Belt; in the mid 1970s I moved to Ukiah with Round Table Pizza as the assistant manager; and afterward owned my own restaurant just up the street from the Palace Hotel.
I interviewed with Larman and was hired on the spot for about $550 per month, soon to discover that, within a month, I would be managing the whole kitchen operation at the Palace Bar & Grill, doing the profit and loss analysis — measuring labor and food costs as percentages; ordering large cuts of meat that the kitchen staff would portion for prime rib, sirloin, filet mignon and double cut lamb chops to be fired on the state-of-the-art mesquite grill on the front line; fresh produce; dry goods; frozen food; and non-alcoholic bar supplies with some hiring and firing thrown in.
Fred Baker, Jr., Dusan Mills and the soon-to-be-famous-restaurateur Pat Kuleto from Ice-A-Boxa Company began the renovation of the Palace Hotel in late 1977.
Kuleto, the creative force and architectural commander-in-chief behind the restoration, had a vision for the decaying, condemned building and he refurbished her in the grandest style, from top to bottom — including the grape leaves which decorated the etched glass on the carved oak wood, the gold leaf covering the staircase and the hand painted wallpaper — inside and out, seemingly with a limitless budget — actually about $3.2 million which was at the time a whole lot of money. And it showed.
Restored without blueprints, “Kuleto blended Victorian Ukiah with Mendocino County culture. Décor and design motifs include the county’s Pomo Indian heritage, redwood forests, wine industry and quality craftsmanship.”
“When visitors check in at the reservation desk in the ornate lobby, they were handed a map to guide them through the one-and-one half acres of restaurant, bar, nightclub, ballroom, gift shop and hallways leading to the 90 hotel rooms and roof gardens.”
Kuleto with Chef Larman, General Manager Tom Rafter and Manager William Frost hired everybody in town — cooks, wait people, hostesses, seamstresses, artists, laborers, carpenters, fine word workers, etc. According to one newspaper article from the files at the Historical Society of Mendocino County, they hired 150 locals.
I worked at a small desk in a little room across from the kitchen, down the hallway a bit, and behind me was a walk-in freezer where I would receive all the perishables from the delivery men during the week. I’d never dealt with such large cuts of meat.
One evening with the dining room starting to fill and the dinner service ready to begin, the coffee machine — one main machine with a number of pots on electric burners in various stages of brewing fresh coffee — stopped working.
We were selling Thanksgiving Coffee and I had developed a working relationship with Paul Katzeff. I called him and asked him what to do. Right there, for the next 20-25 minutes, with small tools in hand, he talked me through it, over the phone, and I fixed the damn machine in time for the dinner rush.
The kitchen was gleaming, absolute state-of-the-art, back and front. If I stood in the middle of the line, facing outward toward the counter where the wait people would pick up their food, directly behind me was the deep fat fryer, to my right the mesquite grill and to my left the sauté station with eight large burners on top and an oven below.
There were times I would have at least six of those burners going at the same time pan frying sole, red snapper, mushrooms and prawns all with clarified butter; calamari with a lemon mustard sauce; a sea sauté with a cream sauce and steak with a black pepper sauce. Further to the left, and a bit separate, was the pantry where all the salads were prepared by one person, even during the busiest of times.
Just prior to the grand opening on the night of Aug. 12, 1978, an elaborate party was held for the staff, an extensive buffet with a centerpiece of prawns on ice and everything else you could imagine. With liquor flowing freely and the compelling beat of the Stones’ Miss You at top volume, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. What more could you want?
I worked at the Palace for about three years, on and off, quitting and then getting rehired. I worked my way out of the small office across the hallway into the kitchen and became the sauté cook on the line — a high energy job I was well-suited to.
We all wore the black-and-white checkered pants, white button-down chef’s coats, white waist aprons and the classic, white toque chef’s hats with a straight-sided base and a floppy, pleated top.
I learned to defrost packages of frozen calamari in cold water. Prior to that I took a hard lesson from one of the sous chefs who let me know in no uncertain terms that defrosting the sole in hot water would cook it.
For each calamari, hundreds of them, I severed the tentacles from the body, squeezed out the guts and cut the empty body tube into rounds. Then I breaded, deep fried and sautéed them in a lovely lemon mustard sauce. The tentacles were exquisitely crisp and crunchy.
The item was called Calamari Lombardi in honor of Marty Lombardi from the Savings Bank, who I assume helped the Palace procure a loan or something like that.
Some of the pan prepared dishes required finishing off in the oven and I cannot tell you how many times, in the height of the rush, I reached into the oven, barehanded, to grab the handle of the pan.
After some period of time, it became obvious that business was not going to be what they had hoped for. So, they arranged to bring busloads of people up from SF. We would serve 100 lunches in about an hour and a half. A chef in the middle orchestrating, me on sauté, another cook on broiler and Kathy Shearn in the pantry.
The pace was so fast, so intense, so crazy, that afterward Shearn and I would collapse, incoherently jabbering and laughing, to relieve the pressure we had just endured.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Dana Crumb Kaldveer was hired to make desserts. She prepared some at home which meant she took home all the ingredients including 25-pound bags of almonds. One Friday afternoon, after finishing the end of her shift, after she had just completed baking trays of cheesecakes, chocolate cakes with mocha icing and tortes, the chef fired her.
I don’t remember what precipitated it but knowing Dana, one could only imagine. She acknowledged him, picked up a tray and started for the kitchen door saying, “Don’t send me my check; this is my last paycheck.”
A struggle ensued and he had enough sense to finally let go of the tray but not without telling her to leave her white chef’s coat behind. She put down the tray, took her coat off, threw it down on the floor and marched down the hallway, tray in hand, in all her zoftig glory, out onto School Street in her blue lace bra, calling out, “I’m gonna’ feed the almonds to my chickens.”
The place went through so many chefs and managers it was impossible to keep track. One short-lived chef discussed the attributes of Hitler during a staff meeting; Steve the manager wore a necklace that said Superman and when the chef could not be found for lunch service one day, it was discovered she was upstairs visiting with him in one of the newly renovated rooms.
Jimella, the hotshot chef from Seattle who was going to turn the place around, brought the peanut butter pie recipe to Ukiah; I marketed those pies around town for a number of years after the Palace closed.
She explained to me that the big, heavy burner tops on the stove needed to be washed in hot soapy water on a regular basis. I resisted but did it.
She settled in and soon enough, a scandal ensued. I did not see it happen but I know for a fact that her tenure ended the day after she had a pot of soup dumped over her head in the back kitchen. I forgot who came next.
At some point I became the sous chef working with Chef Samantha Christ who started as a cocktail waitress there. She would stand in the middle of the line captaining us through those hideous lunches, calling out orders to the cook on broiler and to me on sauté, putting the finished dishes up on the counter and calling out names of wait staff to pick up the plates. Those lunches happened pretty regularly until they didn’t.
I learned to make desserts, sauces from bones. We coordinated large banquets for events in the 300-seat ballroom. We worked long, hard hours, back-to-back shifts. It was an addiction, a real high, especially when the place was on fire with diners.
There was the narrow, skylit Back Door that Kuleto said changed from its daytime identity as a mellow garden restaurant to its after dark persona as a kind of bordello-nightclub. Old monthly fliers advertise well-loved performers, from near and far: Hansen & Raitt, David LaFlamme, Mixed Nuts, Kate Wolf, Ed Reinhart, Nancy Teeling and Dirty Legs, Gene Parsons, Colonel Wingnuts, Paula Samonte, Mark Ford, Tommy Tutone, Charlie Musselwhite and more.
On many Sunday mornings, after a long Saturday night shift, I would return to the kitchen to roll out the dough for the brioche, dust it with cinnamon and sugar and bake it to warm perfection, serving it hot from the oven.
I made the Hollandaise sauce; it was memorable and remarkable, preparing enough for maybe 30-40 servings of eggs Benedict.
I cracked egg yolks, many of them, into a very large bowl which would go over a simmering pot of water and very, very slowly dribble in the oil, hoping, since food service was about to begin, that it would not break. Then gently whisk in just the right amount of lemon juice and tabasco sauce to taste. Sometimes it broke and I had to start all over again with dozens more egg yolks.
On those Sunday mornings, I would make breakfast for 16-year-old David Post, outfitted in his Philip Morris-like bellhop outfit, after which he would show the guests to their rooms riding the classic Otis elevator to the upper floors.
I quit for the last time before the Palace closed its doors in January, 1983, with Kuleto and company packing up and leaving town. Ukiah just couldn’t support the grand dame’s need, after the glow wore off.
Special thanks to Alyssa Ballard, archivist and historian at the Historical Society of Mendocino County, who shared a couple of very-full file folders of old newspaper clippings with me, some blueprints of the building and some really cool photos of the dining rooms, other interior shots and a few of Pat Kuleto, Mimi McCarthy and even Jimella.
(courtesy, the Ukiah Daily Journal)
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