Fog Eater Cafe
Mendocino’s Favorite Flashback
by Anna Levy
It doesn’t take long to feel charmed by Fog Eater Café, the near-vegan restaurant that’s tucked away in a weather-worn building on a side street in Mendocino. With its light-filled dining room and ten-seat bar, its teal-and-rose color scheme and backyard dining, it’s easy to see why this newcomer—open since June 2019—has drawn locals and tourists alike.
That, of course, is before tasting the food, which, with its vegetarian spins on traditional southern cuisine, is even more beguiling than the restaurant itself. Paired with drinks from a carefully-chosen list of natural wines, local beers, inventive wine-based cocktails, and teetotaler standouts, it’s evident that everything that goes into this little gem is done intentionally, thoughtfully, and well.
For Haley Samas-Berry and Erica Schneider, the duo behind Fog Eater, this labor of love has been a long time coming. In some ways, they’ve been preparing for the restaurant since they met back in 2010, when they were hired on the same day to work at a bakery located on the Lower East Side of New York City. “We worked very, very hard and developed a work crush and a friend crush on each other,” Haley says, laughing, “and then became very close friends and stayed in touch throughout moving to New Orleans.”
A few years later, when Haley and her partner, Nathan Maxwell Cann, moved to San Francisco, within striking distance of Haley’s childhood home on the Mendocino Coast, it only made sense to drive Erica up to Mendocino when she came to visit. “She brought me on a tour here,” Erica notes, nodding towards Haley, “and was like, ‘I’m going to show you all the best things’.”
The introduction to Northern California worked. By the next summer, Erica, a Nashville native, was ready to move to Mendocino. “We agreed that Erica would live here a year before we opened the restaurant, because she had never lived anywhere small before,” Haley says. Fortunately, Erica fell in love with the remote village, making the adjustment to small-town life. “I love it here,” she explains. “The community’s so good, people are so supportive. I always thought I would hate going to the grocery store and seeing people that I know every time, but I actually love it. It’s really fun.”
Both Erica and Haley have also felt buoyed by the support for the restaurant, which grew through a series of pop-up dinners well before Fog Eater was ready to open. They reached out to local farmers, like Nye Ranch and Fortunate Farm, to host the occasional events. “These are good people,” Haley says in talking about the community members that cheered them on. “They’re really, really helpful.”
Building that buzz and the sense of community meant that, by the time they opened, they had a solid group who were ready to become regulars, though it took longer to open than either Erica or Haley had anticipated. After a year of searching for the space, they needed nearly another year to navigate the process of permitting, renovations, menu design, and other preparations. “It gave us time to make it perfect,” Erica notes.
That time allowed Erica and Haley to design and realize their dreams for the restaurant, and it shows. In the bustle of the dinner rush, for instance, there’s a sense of camaraderie that pulsates through the evening, from the servers who put down a small bowl of boiled peanuts at each table to welcome diners, to Nathan happily chatting away with customers from behind the bar, to the buzz of conversation that lifts above the room, mixing stories together from each of the tables.
And though the restaurant exudes warmth, it would be impossible to sustain without the food that brings people back again and again. With everything from hush puppies and deviled eggs to biscuit sliders and banana pudding, the menu is designed to appeal to a wide range of people, all done in a way that can honor the traditions of Southern food. Top sellers include the pimento cheese appetizer and the grits and grillades at brunch, though other standouts—such as the beignets, or the red beans and rice complete with shiitake bacon—have garnered a loyal following. With its vegan, Cajun roots, the menu has surprised some people. “The whole point for me, for all of this, is to make food so delicious that people don’t think about it being vegan,” Erica explains. “They just think about having really delicious, nutritious, beautiful food.”
The beverage program is similarly built, so that drinkers of all types can enjoy carefully selected and crafted pairings with their meals. Fog Eater has chosen to focus on local, organic, and natural beer and wine, which was a challenge in some ways for Haley, who has a long history of working with cocktails. But she did her research and became increasingly interested in what they would be able to do. Eventually, she says, “We were able to roll into this idea, like how Erica has a limited selection of farmers and producers to work with on the food; we can get as creative [with the bar].”
Haley now talks about how fun it’s been to focus only on beer and wine, particularly when it comes to their cocktail program. “We wanted to work with the herbal bounty of the area,” she explains, “so we had a drink with seaweed in it that Nathan harvested. And we opened with a drink that had coastal herbs that are normally found in gin, but we infuse them into sherry.” They regularly feature four alcoholic cocktails that focus on creative flavors, local sourcing, and careful execution. The same intention and care are also infused into the non-alcoholic drinks.
That focus on local and organic is part of a deep sense of awareness for the larger world that walks hand-in-hand with just about every angle of Fog Eater. Choosing to open a vegetarian restaurant, for instance, was a conscious choice made in part to honor their commitment to the environment. Though Erica has been mostly vegan for years, Haley and Nathan are omnivores. Other decisions—such as using vintage dishware and glasses, and choosing to buy even their office supplies locally rather than from a large distributor—similarly speak to their interest in building a business that keeps sustainability very much at the forefront of all they do.
In that spirit, they say that cultivating an organic and highly-local menu was a straightforward decision. “With the world in the state that it’s in, buying tomatoes from your neighbor instead of some place like Michigan is obvious and easy,” Haley says, “and much more delicious.” And when there is more than enough, the local connections mean that Erica can put food up for the winter as well. “We have hundreds of pounds of produce canned for the winter,” she explains. “We’re so lucky.”
An added bonus of buying from within the county is the symbiotic relationship with others in the area, which has become a theme of the restaurant overall. “We have all these people that make beautiful things pop out of the ground,” Erica says, “and then we get to play with them.” Haley finishes, “And then they come in and get to eat and drink, and it just fills your whole heart.”
That symbiosis similarly spreads to the ways in which the kitchen and the bar complement one another within the restaurant. Haley points to a cocktail Nathan created as an example. “Erica made a maque choux with corn and had all the corn bones left. Nathan boiled the corn bones to make a broth, then infused sherry with Palo Santo and sage and made a cornwater-sage-Palo Santo sherry cocktail that was unreal.”
“And it’s so fun,” Erica continues, “to marry our programs in that way.” She gives an example of smoking carrots for a round of cocktails, and another of preserving lemon rinds for drinks. “We can use each others’ waste,” she says, “so that we don’t actually throw that much away.”
Though the restaurant is still months away from its first birthday, there has been a lot to celebrate. “We have amazing regulars,” Haley notes. “We have a group of people that comes in every single brunch, and they have a great time, and they’re ideal people, and they like to drink and eat a lot of French toast.”
As they look toward the future, Erica and Haley are excited to find more ways to involve the community in their success. From working with new farmers and producers to encouraging locals to pop in for a quick snack or drink at Happy Hour, and from hosting private parties to making Fog Eater a place where people dive into festive holiday cheer, this sweet, cozy, and satisfying spot is well on its way to becoming a local institution. Though the building’s weathered exterior may make it seem like Fog Eater has been part of the landscape for a long time, it’s clear that what’s happening inside is completely, deliciously new.
Fog Eater Cafe
Open for Happy Hour Wed–Fri 4–5pm, Dinner Wed–Sun 5–8:30pm, and Brunch Sun 10am–2pm
45104 Main St, Mendocino | (707) 397-1806 | www.FogEaterCafe.com
Anna Levy writes, cooks, and plans travel of all sorts whenever she can. She lives on the Mendocino Coast with her husband and two dogs.
