Offspring Wood Fired Pizza
Homestyle Italian Cooking with a California Touch
by Torrey Douglass
There are many reasons to stop by Offspring restaurant in Boonville. The light, airy interior is California zen—rustic, modern, and spare. The easygoing vibe and friendly staff make guests feel genuinely welcome. But first and foremost there’s the food—mindfully sourced, kissed by fire, and served with an easy-going, no-frills simplicity that belies the exceptional skill behind its execution.
Offspring is the creative offshoot of The Boonville Hotel, overseen by its Executive Chef Perry Hoffman and helmed by Chef de Cuisine Ben Ehlhardt. Ben is an upbeat, good-natured fellow who responds with quick attentiveness and gives the impression that he’s a moment away from rolling up his sleeves and diving into whatever task is closest at hand. Ben grew up in Chico, with a soil scientist for a dad, a gifted cook for a mom, and a bountiful home garden out back. Between accompanying his dad on farm visits and helping his mom in the kitchen make good use of the garden’s output, young Ben was exposed early and often to the joys and possibilities of agriculture at different scales, as well as to the deeply satisfying pleasures of well-made, garden-fresh cooking.
Ben helped his dad in the fields, gathering samples and doing whatever little jobs were needed. When Ben was 15, his dad’s employer officially hired him as an assistant. The position was only for the growing seasons, so as he got older, he took jobs cooking in restaurants over the cold months. “I love that I’ve seen both sides,” he shares, referring to working both on farms and in kitchens. During these same formative years, he watched his sister—ten years older and an admired role model in his life—pursue her own culinary career, eventually landing work in Napa Valley’s fine dining world, along with her husband. Originally, cooking was a versatile and convenient way for Ben to make a living, providing both the funds and flexibility to travel. But his exposure to fine dining through his sister and brother-in-law eventually inspired him to aim higher.
So in 2008, Ben attended Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Portland, Oregon. He opted for the 18-month program, which provided a solid foundation in essential culinary skills, knowing he could learn anything beyond that on the job. He practiced knife skills and butchery techniques, made “mother sauces” and stocks, but the rigidity of the French approach didn’t appeal to his more improvisational cooking style. The better fit, he found, was farther south. “I love wood fired, rustic regional Italian cuisine, where ten different towns in the same region can make the same sauce ten different ways,” Ben reflects. As a result, of all the Napa restaurants where he cooked, a clear favorite was Oenotri, known for its wood fired pizzas and house-extruded pastas.
Ben eventually relocated to Healdsburg and became a sous chef at The Shed under Perry in 2016. The Shed was an ambitious establishment envisioned as a “modern grange,” with cafe, fermentation bar, retail area, and community meeting spaces, all devoted to local farms and sustainably produced local food. Its menus were crafted around the best ingredients available from the area’s farms and ranches—a more expansive and elevated version of cooking garden vegetables in his childhood kitchen next to his mom. It was the perfect environment where Ben could explore ever-more creative ways to use the cornucopia of local ingredients available.
The Shed shut its doors in 2018, closing down all but the retail portion of the business, which still remains online. Perry relocated to Boonville to take the helm of the restaurant at The Boonville Hotel, and Ben joined him as sous chef soon after. Besides an enduring friendship, the pair had developed a seamless professional rhythm, sharing a passion for cooking, a penchant for experimentation, and a similar nose-to-tail, leaf-to-root approach that uses the entire plant or animal. They continued to center dishes around premium local/seasonal ingredients, this time in the hotel’s prix fixe format.
In 2021, Ben felt ready to take the next step in his career and head up his own operation, yet he was reluctant to leave both the area and the hotel, whose values and cooking style harmonized so well with his own. As fortune would have it, there was an empty restaurant space across the street, complete with wood fired oven. Even more fortunately, it was located in a multi-use building owned by hotel partners.
So Ben took the plunge, opening doors in December of 2021, populating his menu with homestyle southern Italian dishes rendered with a light California touch, usually slightly reimagined from their previous incarnation. As an offshoot of The Boonville Hotel—under its auspices yet with its own pared down, fast-casual style—Offspring was the logical name for this next-generation endeavor.
As Perry sees it, “It was time for Ben to take it and run with it. I needed someone who spoke the same language, understood how to cohabitate in the same small town. The restaurant needs to feel different while offering the same clean, delicious ‘Boonville food.’“ The hotel and Offspring share resources, from staff to ingredients. “There’s a lot of back-and-forth across the road,” adds Perry. “We have a ‘no pizza dough left behind’ policy.” The team has worked hard to create a delicious, consistent dough with their premium Central Milling type 00 flour. Any that is left over at the end of the night becomes focaccia for the hotel, served alongside rillettes and dips the following day.
The menu is fluid, integrating gems from his favorite farms—strawberries from The Boonville Barn Collective, squash and fresh greens from Lantern Farms in Cloverdale, and whatever grabs his eye on the MendoLake Food Hub that week. There are truly outstanding pizzas, like a wonderful carbonara with crème fraîche, charred onions, speck ham, and parmigiano reggiano, topped with grated garden cured egg yolk and black pepper. Other favorites include a mushroom and white sauce pizza with oregano, and a lovely margherita interpretation with charred tomato and fresh mozzarella. And the indulgence of pizza feels entirely justified when it follows a few vegetable starters—the oven roasted broccoli with garlic aioli or a delicate green salad with tangy vinaigrette were both excellent.
True to his ever-curious, ever-expanding nature, Ben is looking forward to adding house-made pastas to the menu, and perhaps an oyster station on the back deck. And with the ice cream shop, Paysanne, next door now making its own ice cream, “pizza and a pint” (the cold, sweet kind of pint) will be available before long. Flavors include seasonal fruit sorbet, mint chip, meyer lemon and lavender, fresh cinnamon, and more.
The open plan of the restaurant, designed by Johnny Schmitt, is spacious and spare with large front windows, high ceilings, and an open feel. A rolling industrial door opens onto an outdoor deck with more seating. Works from local artist Katie Williams line the walls, including an oversized depiction of California poppies layered over an older painting promoting The Dark Carnival, a community Halloween party from some years back. The piece fills the wall behind the bar, the bright whimsy of the poppies set off by the muted and moody gothic elements that peek out from behind it, the weathered burnish of the background balancing the poppies’ delicate bursts of color.
It’s an apt metaphor for the restaurant itself: something refreshingly new standing on the shoulders of the distinguished elder. Offspring possesses its own personality, connected to its roots but standing apart at the same time. It’s early days and the staff is small, so the fast-casual format works well. Sure, you have to place your order at the counter and fetch your own water from the dispenser on the corner of the bar, but when the food arrives, you can taste the care that went into it. And maybe that care is the “home” in homestyle cooking—the vegetables brought in from the garden, the sauce just a little different from last time, and a food as common as pizza made uncommonly, scrumptiously good.
Offspring Wood Fired Pizza
14111 Hwy 128, Boonville | (707) 972-2655 | OffspringPizza.com
Open Tuesday – Friday, 5PM – 8:30PM | Saturday, 12PM – 8:30PM
Ben’s baby girl, Addison Alida Ehlhardt, was born July 17th. Our heartfelt congratulations!
Photos by Torrey Douglass. Other photos are courtesy of Offspring.
Torrey Douglass is a web and graphic designer living in Boonville with her family. Her life’s joys include reading by the fire, cooking something delicious, and inspiring her dogs to jump into the air with uncontained canine happiness.