STUART DEAN DENEVI
June 1, 1961 - August 15, 2025
Stuart Dean Denevi, 64, of Fort Bragg, California, passed away peacefully on August 15, 2025, surrounded by his loved ones.
Born in Fort Bragg to Gerald and Lina Sue (Miles) Denevi, Stuart spent the majority of his life in the community he loved so deeply.
He is survived by his wife, Cheryl Denevi; children, Jeremy and Kymber Denevi; stepchildren, Kristy and Kevin Gomez; and many extended family members and friends.
Stuart will be remembered for his hardworking spirit, love of the outdoors, and his warm, generous heart.
A lifelong hard worker, Stuart spent more than 20 years Millwrighting at Georgia Pacific before continuing his career at Universal Plant Services. He was also a dedicated volunteer firefighter for over 20 years, proudly serving his community.
Though a big man, Stuart’s heart was even bigger. He had the kindest smile and was often the happiest person in the room. He was a selfless father, husband, and friend whose legacy of love, generosity, and hard work will continue to inspire all who knew him.
A celebration of life will be held on Saturday, September 6, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. at the Fort Bragg Fire Department. All who knew and loved Stuart are welcome to attend.
MABLE FRANCES CAITO
Mable Frances Caito passed away at her home July 28, 2025, on her 96th birthday surrounded by family.
Mable was born in Manchester, California to George Dewey and Rose (Bavo) Stornetta on July 28, 1929.
Mable was preceded in death by her loving and devoted husband John, her brothers Norman, Henry and her sister Dora. She leaves behind her sister Carmel Gilroy, her four children Joe, Jim (Karen), Jeanette, John (Aimee), nine grandchildren, 10 great grandchildren, and many other loving family members.
Mable’s greatest joys were being with all her family and attending their many sporting events, dance recitals, and cooking dinners especially her Sunday menu of pasta and meatballs. Her favorite hobbies included working 1000-piece puzzles, playing cards, crocheting blankets, working crossword puzzles, making her Italian breadcrumbs, watching old westerns and pro tennis matches, tending to her orchid plants, and feeding her many feathered friends. Mom (Noni) was loved by all and will be greatly missed.
A Funeral Mass will be held at 10:00 a.m. Wednesday, September 17th at St. Patrick Church, 114 King Street, Larkspur, CA 94939. Donations may be made to By the Bay Health, Attention Donations, 17 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Larkspur, CA 94939 or donations to a charity of your choice.
DONALD PENMAN MADOLE
Donald (Don) Penman Madole passed away at his home surrounded by family after his courageous battle with cancer. He was a loving husband to Carolyn Madole and wonderful father to Edie McCord, Butch McCord, Pamela Terrill and Dustin Madole. He was dedicated to his family and friends.
Don was born in October 20,1942 in Whitefish Montana to Herbert Harry Madole and Elizabeth Wright Penman Madole. He grew up in Whitefish Montana and at age 17 joined the Navy Nov. 1959 until Jan. 1964. After the Navy he began a successful career as a bread delivery driver for 38 years. He enjoyed fishing, reading, westerns, playing pool, watching sports, camping on the Colorado River and spending time with his family. Don took immense pride in instilling a strong work ethic in children, he was known for his kindness, sense of humor and his compassionate nature, which touched the lives of everyone he met.
Don is survived by his wife Carolyn Madole of 44 years, his children Edie McCord, Butch McCord , Pamela Terrill (Norman), Dustin Madole (Stephanie), 14 grandchildren and 18 great grandchildren and wonderful brother Chuck Madole. He was preceded in death by his parents Elizabeth and Herbert Madole, brothers Jim Madole, Bill Madole and son Dusty Teeter.
At Don’s request there will be no memorial service, in lieu of flowers the family request that donations be made to the veterans.
He will be greatly missed
FRENCH LAUNDRY FOUNDING FAMILY TURNS TINY NORCAL TOWN INTO A DINING DESTINATION
They're transforming a stretch of Highway 128 in Mendocino County
by Anh-Minh Le
Chef Perry Hoffman’s first job was at the French Laundry when he was just 5 years old. And, yes, he is aware of how wild that sounds.
A typical day started with vacuuming the iconic Napa Valley restaurant before turning to “The Perry Prep List”: roasting bell peppers, cutting baguettes for crostini, zesting citrus, picking and chopping Italian parsley.
It was the late 1980s and his grandparents, Don and Sally Schmitt, still owned the French Laundry, which they founded in Yountville in 1978.
“She had a crazy amount of trust,” Hoffman said of the tasks his grandmother gave him at such a young age. “It hooked me. I loved it.”
He wound up cooking in a Napa restaurant during high school, and, upon graduating, headed to his uncle Johnny’s Boonville Hotel and Restaurant, a modern roadhouse set on 4 idyllic acres in Mendocino County. In 2009, at age 25, while helming Domaine Chandon’s Étoile in Napa, he became the youngest chef in the U.S. to garner a Michelin star. The next year, the San Francisco Chronicle named him a Rising Star Chef. In 2012, he won Food & Wine magazine’s People’s Best New Chef in California.
Fast forward to 2019: Nearly two decades after his initial stint at the Boonville Hotel, Hoffman returned. Today, he is the executive chef at the hotel restaurant, known for seasonally driven cuisine with California and French influences. And earlier this year, just across the street in this tiny town of 985, he officially launched Offspring, a pizza and pasta joint.
Of course, much has happened between these milestones — for Hoffman and the Schmitt family.
The Next Yountville
In 1994, the Schmitts sold their esteemed French Laundry to Thomas Keller. That year, Don, once mayor of Yountville, told the Napa Valley Register that his kids grew up with a pioneering spirit and were searching for the next Yountville.
Clearly, they found it in the Boonville vicinity. Today, the family seems to have ties to practically everything food- and drink-related there, including the 32-acre Apple Farm in Philo, which Don and Sally purchased in the mid-1980s, in anticipation of post-French Laundry life. Karen Bates, the Schmitts’ daughter and Hoffman’s aunt, continues to run the heirloom apple orchard with her husband, Tim.
The Schmitts’ son, Johnny, who had cooked in France as well as alongside his mother at the French Laundry, started Floodgate Cafe in Philo with Jerry and Kathleen Cox in 1985. Three years later, they teamed up for a restaurant in the Boonville Hotel, a venture that also involved Schmitt’s then-wife, Jeanne Eliades.
While the others have since departed the hotel/restaurant, Schmitt remained as proprietor and chef. About seven years ago, wanting to step away from the stove, he approached Hoffman, who by then had honed his skills as sous chef under Robert Curry at Michelin-starred Auberge du Soleil in Rutherford, earned a star at Étoile, and gained acclaim as culinary director of Shed in Healdsburg.
He said yes. Hoffman, 41, always figured he would come back to Boonville — just not this soon. “It was my retirement spot,” he said as we settled into Adirondack and butterfly chairs in the hotel’s garden, where herbs and other ingredients for the restaurant are grown. “I thought I’d be back here in my mid-50s, after my kids were raised.”
But on the heels of Shed, which shuttered in 2018, a change of pace and scenery beckoned. Hoffman’s return echoed his grandparents’ move to Anderson Valley — that desire for better work/life balance — and his food style now more closely hews to his grandmother’s.
“She wasn’t trying to do fine dining,” he said. “I don’t think we could pull that off here, nor do I want to.”
Culinary Buzz in Boonville
Invoking the adage that “you can’t make a good apple pie with bad apples,” Hoffman characterized his approach at the hotel’s restaurant as “ingredient-first. You start with tasty things first. Then you just use little ingredients and techniques — some are new, that you may have invented, and some are 500 years old.”
Dinner at the Boonville Hotel is prix fixe — five courses ($125) on Friday and Saturday, and four courses ($75) on Sunday and Monday. From Memorial Day through mid-October, the Sunday supper revolves around paella, made in a custom 42-inch-diameter pan in the garden.
On a Monday in July, I savored an alfresco meal with the hotel’s cat-in-residence, Robin, beside me and a view of Hoffman and his cousin, sous chef Michael Hoffman, in the kitchen. The dreamy courtyard setting was a bonus.
The evening began with Ukiah’s Grainsong sourdough, followed by a mix of little gems, endive hearts, Filigreen Farm plums and avocado. Creamy corn polenta, prepared like risotto, featured Little River lobster mushrooms and stracciatella. Crisp chicken leg confit, finished in the wood-fired oven, was accompanied by Sungold tomatoes and Lungo Bianco squash, all atop a roasted red pepper sauce. For dessert, cherries garnished a luscious duck egg crème brûlée.
At least once a month, Hoffman offers his grandmother’s coffee pot de crème, a dessert she served at the French Laundry. The recipe appears in “Six California Kitchens,” her award-winning cookbook/memoir that came out a month after she died in 2022 at age 90. (Don passed away in 2017.)
For Johnny Schmitt, the middle child of Don and Sally’s five kids, the memories and influence of the French Laundry also endure. “I remember working on the building,” he said of the circa-1900 fieldstone venue. “The whole family jumped in and started tearing it apart.”
Over the years, it had reportedly been a saloon, residence, brothel and French steam laundry. Under his parents’ purview, from 1978 to 1994, it was a one-seating, fixed-menu restaurant. Since Don and Sally had developed a following through their previous Yountville establishments, the Vintage Cafe and Chutney Kitchen, the French Laundry was an instant hit.
“People were lined up,” Schmitt said.
The menu consisted of a choice of appetizers, a soup, the main course, a salad, cheeses and dessert options. In the early ’90s, toward the end of the Schmitts’ ownership, dinner at the French Laundry was $46. Three decades later, with three Michelin stars, Keller’s tasting menu starts at $425.
“It was a huge relief for my parents to walk away from the French Laundry and have someone not just live off their legacy, but take it to a whole ’nother plane,” Schmitt said. Since selling it, family members have continued to enjoy dining there, including for his father’s 80th birthday. “It was 29 courses; it just went on and on and on,” Schmitt recalled with amusement. “Thomas pulled out all the stops.”
These days, Schmitt is focused on the design-and-build side — which was a passion for his parents, too. “My mom and dad loved to remodel,” he said. “We would get home from school and my mom would give us a sledgehammer and say, ‘We’re taking that wall out.’ They always made a beautiful home.”
When Schmitt bought the Boonville Hotel, the 1880s two-story structure that originated as a hotel had been vacant for two years. The previous owners operated a fine dining restaurant with a garden and animals, including goats, on the premises, but no accommodations.
After opening his restaurant in 1988, Schmitt renovated the eight rooms above it and began welcoming overnight guests in 1991. Lodging has since expanded to 17 unique rooms and cottages featuring wood tones, patterned rugs, corrugated metal, striped textiles and whimsical accents such as wallpaper that mimics bookshelves. (My room had a deck with an outdoor tub.)
Tripling Down on the Same Block
In addition to Hoffman and Schmitt, the managing partners are Schmitt’s husband, Marcus Magdaleno, and general manager Melinda Ellis. She came on board in 2010, but goes way back with the Schmitts — she cooked at the French Laundry in the early ’90s. Today, she said, “The notion of family and food continue on here at the hotel — that life should be beautiful every day.”
In 2010, across the street from the hotel, Ellis opened Paysanne. The darling ice cream and sweets shop is part of the Farrer Building complex, which dates back to the 1800s and is also home to the Farmhouse Mercantile (co-founded by Karen Bates of Apple Farm renown) and Hoffman’s pizzeria, Offspring.
The latter started as a pop-up and became a permanent eatery in February, drawing crowds for its housemade pastas and wood-fired pizzas.
When I dined in July, I couldn’t resist a pizza topped with sweet corn, cherry tomatoes, crème fraîche, mozzarella, stracciatella and basil. But the sleeper hit was the cauliflower “Caesar” — florets in a velvety Caesar dressing, showered with parmigiano, bread crumbs and black pepper.
With their various entities, Schmitt and Hoffman are continually responding to what the community needs and wants. For example, when Schmitt debuted his restaurant in the Boonville Hotel decades ago, the lack of dining options in the area meant “we had to be everything to everyone; we had to be casual and fancy,” he said, pointing to the burgers served early on. “When new restaurants open, we all readjust to find our customer base.”
Offspring has been a welcome development for not only their lodgers, but also locals. The repeat diners seated next to me — former Bay Area residents who moved to Mendocino to be closer to family — were happy to share their recommendations.
Although Hoffman sometimes misses fine dining, he has no Michelin ambitions in Boonville. “Modern Michelin is not really us,” he said, distinguishing it from “Old Michelin — the original concept of getting in your car and driving on a windy, curvy road, that spirit of adventure, to go to a small country inn with a family, a garden, a great meal.”
More important than stars is creating a place where his daughter Charlie, 7, and son Teddy, 6, relish spending time, whether folding napkins or coloring books. “My kids can’t play Lego here when the Michelin inspector comes in,” Hoffman quipped. “My brothers and I were all raised in my grandmother’s restaurant, running around. It was like magic and it’s really cool to see that come full circle.”
(SFGate.com)
“TO BOLDLY GO…”
‘Art of Wonder' panelists discuss new approaches to artmaking
by Roberta Werdinger
On Thursday, Sept. 11, from 7 to 8:15 p.m., the Grace Hudson Museum presents “Artists Talking Wonder,” a virtual panel featuring four artists who have contributed to the Museum’s latest exhibit, The Art of Wonder. Antoinette von Grone, Micah Sanger, Jazzminh Moore, and Red Wolf are all Mendocino County residents and seasoned artists who combine formal innovation with bold and uniquely personal visions that draw on the past to craft new futures.
It’s no surprise, then, that Micah Sanger founded and runs the Visionary Arts Gallery in Mendocino village. Visiting the gallery, one can almost feel the paintings on the walls buzz with movement. While struggling to capture the outward forms of a landscape in a plein air painting session, Sanger realized the truth of Unified Field Theory as formulated by Albert Einstein who believed that all forces of nature and fundamental particles exist as part of a single physical field. This transformed Sanger’s vision, leading him to create landscapes and portraits experienced from the inside out. Since then, he has created large, light-saturated paintings wherein people’s bodies are shown saturated by cosmic rays, and landscapes that layer, in vertical rectangles, realistic colors and shapes with simplified outlines. Gratified that 20th-century scientists have echoed the insights of ancient mystics, Sanger celebrates that people who visit the gallery “get a sense of deeper mystery and wonder in terms of how awake the world really is.”
Willits artist Jazzminh Moore was on the fast track for showing her paintings in New York City galleries when she decided to return to the rural West, where she had been raised. Working in collage and layering it over paintings helped her to enter new artistic and personal territory-- confirming Curator Alyssa Boge’s point that many artists in the exhibit like to “push the boundaries of their mediums.” Indeed, Moore allows that “I am always challenging myself technically.” She was also challenged in other ways, when the COVID crisis spurred the shutdown of public institutions in 2020 and she found herself unemployed. “I was allowed to be the introvert I truly am,” she recalls. “I just sat in my studio and made art and walked in nature.” The result was “Setting Sail,” in which a brightly colored sailboat navigates roiling waters, on top of which sits a house with “a little acrobat” and a small patch of clear sky. Producing this painting helped Moore realize that “no matter what is going on underneath, there’s going to be blue skies overhead.”
Raised in Northern Germany and long-time resident of Anderson Valley, Antoinette von Grone portrays whimsy as well as wonder, in her richly painted canvases of animals both common and endangered. Her “Animal Ancestors” series has appeal for both children and adults, as cats, birds, goats, deer, and other species, dressed in pre-20th century European aristocratic attire, appear against the backdrop of a country estate. Leaning against a fence or poised pertly on a blanket, resplendent in red jackets, lace collars, and voluminous skirts, von Grone’s animals pose for portraits while often cavorting with other animals. The result is at once playful and loving, breaching the gap between humans and non-humans. Aware that many animals are now endangered or have gone extinct, von Grone’s intentions are serious as well. Her portraiture of humans and animals treats them equally, imbues them with dignity, and brings out their inherent life force. “This is joie de vivre with every stroke of the brush,” she declares.
As to crafting new futures, Red Wolf seems to be the artist in the exhibit who is the most interested in doing so. Based in Potter Valley, he has created art installations internationally and shown work in galleries in Silicon Valley, where California’s flourishing tech industry influenced his materials and outlook. Red Wolf is fascinated with recent discoveries of structural color--diffraction of light rays as seen through an electron microscope. Created when light bends, or refracts, through a material; or diffracts, by passing through it and dispersing light in many directions, structural color has numerous possibilities for artwork that is optically generated, not by pigments. Several of his artworks use special effects films and acrylic paint layered in epoxy and laid on treated metal substrate that create illusions of depth. Red Wolf states, “Today’s photonics nano particle research in physics enables new abilities to mimic and create Structural Color materials that have never, in all of prior human history, been possible to achieve.”
‘The Art of Wonder,’ featuring 15 Mendocino County artists whose work highlights the fantastical and the spiritual, will be on display through October 19. To access the event, visit the Museum’s website at www.gracehudsonmuseum.org, and go to the Events page. For more information, call the Museum at (707) 467-2836.
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