With a Side Garden Turned Shangri-La, This Quietly Elegant Bistro Serves Up Some of Mendocino’s Best Eating

by Anna Levy

Trillium Café—a local favorite housed in a small, white building on Kasten Street—has always had a loyal following. But it seems that lately the Mendocino restaurant’s fan base has only grown. With delicious food, a well-crafted wine list, and an emphasis on California sourcing, this isn’t a surprise.

Still, there’s something special about Trillium. In pre-pandemic times, it was a restaurant chosen for special occasions, or to simply make an everyday meal feel like a celebration. And with the ways it has navigated the changing parameters of life with Covid-19, perhaps people have flocked to it in droves because of the way the restaurant managed to make this time in life feel a little less scary. With picnic basket offerings and a reinvented garden space, Trillium was able to transform into a restaurant that could still make dining out not just possible, but delightful.

Regardless of how the world has changed, for Sandra and Saul McElroy, Trillium has become the kind of place they hoped it would be when they opened in 2014. “It’s exactly how we envisioned it,” Sandra says. “Every time someone comes, they leave having eaten something really healthy and that has a lot of flavor, and we’ve done the best we can on it. We don’t have anything that’s not high-quality.”

To ensure that all guests experience this at the restaurant, Sandra highlights the importance of using the best ingredients possible. Describing the cuisine as “farm-to-table, lots of fish, and seasonal,” she credits excellent ingredients as one of the reasons why diners return time and again. “About 90% of our menu is organic,” she says, and notes that for the wine list, “everything is from Northern California except for one sparkling wine from France.”

Sandra also credits the team running the restaurant for making it a place where tables are fully reserved days in advance. As the head chef, Robert Tamayo designs the menu, and Michelle Fagerroos is the head pastry chef. “I’m lucky to have them,” Sandra comments, before outlining some of the consistent best sellers: an onion tart, any type of fish, gnocchi, risotto that can be made both vegan and gluten-free, each of the desserts. “I feel really good about what we serve.”

The remaining staff, including both back-of-house and front-of-house workers, are also key to Trillium’s success, particularly in recent months. “It’s been a whirlwind of an experience,” Sandra explains. At first, they didn’t know if they would be able to financially weather the uncertain future. At this point, though, she says, “We’ve never been so busy.”

She continues, “One of the reasons we were able to re-open last summer is because we had so many high school kids who wanted to work.” In a time when schools were not yet open for in-person learning, Sandra believes that work became a place of connection. That has impacted their staff’s profile on an ongoing basis. “Half of our staff now are high schoolers.”

In some ways, that is a reality that personally resonates with Sandra, who grew up locally and has worked in many of the most well known restaurants here, taking inspiration from those experiences. “My first job was working at The Moosse Café,” she says, naming the restaurant that formerly occupied the space she now owns. She moved on and eventually added experience to her resume at the Little River Inn, Albion River Inn, and Café Beaujolais. For his part, Saul had a history at former local restaurant 955 before they opened Trillium.

All of that helped shape the idea of what they wanted in their own restaurant. Sandra says Trillium was intended to be “casual fine dining” from the beginning. Even more important, Sandra and Saul’s wealth of experience certainly played a role in Trillium’s ability to adapt to a changing landscape because of Covid-19. “We used to sit 40 inside and 15 on the deck,” Sandra says, as she discusses the challenges that emerged when restaurants had to close. “We were wondering if we’d even be able to re-open, so I was sitting in the restaurant by myself and thinking we needed to do something else.”

Part of the path forward involved taking diners out of the restaurant and into the garden, where they had previously strolled while waiting for their table, or lingered after their meals were done. “We took places in the garden where we could spread tables out,” Sandra says, noting that they worked to nestle diners in among the plants, to ensure both privacy and social distancing. The result was a flip of the restaurant, eventually giving Trillium the ability to seat just about 40 outside. It was something more, though, as well. Under the tall white tent, the tables offered a particular charm that appealed to guests—small nooks surrounded by citrus trees, alstroemeria, nasturtium, and more.

Sandra and Saul also looked for ways to cater to customers who wanted to support the restaurant but didn’t feel comfortable eating in public. Inspiration arrived in the form of a picnic box, which allowed diners to order off the menu and then carry their meal somewhere in town where they felt safe eating. Conscious of the amount of waste such a project could generate, Sandra and Saul opted to use standard dinnerware, with the expectation that guests would return the boxes and dirty dishes when finished. “We’d use wine glasses, a wine opener,” Sandra says, so that people could “take it to the beach or whatever and have the picnic.”

In some ways, the experience has given diners the chance to experience the best of this area. “The climate in Mendocino is great,” Sandra says, noting that it would have been impossible to shift gears into outdoor dining in a place with less hospitable weather. Beyond that, though, “I love being on the ocean. I love the fact that we’re in a small place where we have little farms that bring us the things they grow for us to use on our menu.”

This past year has resulted in some of the busiest times the restaurant has seen. “It always feels like a holiday weekend these days,” Sandra explains. It’s easy to see why. The tables are seamlessly blended into the greenery, surrounded by plants and somehow private, even as they make it possible to watch passers-by peeking over their shoulders to see inside the garden’s tent. The meals are sublime—for lunch, perhaps an Aperol spritz or apricot-raspberry shrub to start; a grilled cheese sandwich made with rich fontina, or the onion tart, marked by creamy goat cheese and a crumbly crust; and an affogato or plum rose Victoria sponge cake to finish. The service throughout is attentive and smooth.

On a recent afternoon, the sun was bright overhead, and there was a line in front of the restaurant. No one seemed to mind the wait, and maybe that’s because word has gotten out. Though the formula for success is simple, it is expertly executed. After more than seven years since it opened, Trillium still manages, with ease, to make a simple meal feel like a celebration.

Trillium Café

10390 Kasten St, Mendocino
(707) 937-3200 | TrilliumMendocino.com

Indoor and outdoor tented seating
Fri - Tues, 11:30am - 2:30pm & 5pm - 8:30pm
Closed Wed & Thu

Food photos courtesy of Trillium Café
Exterior photos by Holly Madrigal