French Flair with a Modern Twist
Alameda’s Moxie Steak House serves up memorable flavors with a warm welcome
By Cheryl Angelina Koehler | Photos by Scott Peterson
“Moxie” is a good descriptor for Donna Meadows, the spunky executive chef of Moxie Steak House, which opened at 1640 Park Street in Alameda last summer. A native of Richmond, California, Meadows was a young teen in 1981 when she got herself hired by Chef Robert Gerguy at Le Marquis restaurant in Lafayette. The white-tablecloth establishment was distinctly French, and it set this budding young chef’s roots down firmly in classical French cooking.
“I absolutely loved it,” Meadows says of Le Marquis. “I was an apprentice, starting at the bottom and ending after four years as the sous chef doing practically everything, because every time I got promoted, [Gerguy] never hired another person.”
When Meadows finished high school, Gerguy sent her to the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas to work for a friend. But as the season ended, adventure called, as it often does for the young.
“I met somebody with a sailboat—a 65-foot schooner—who needed a cook, so I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and then traveled through Europe,” she says.
On a stop in Ballintoy, Northern Ireland, Meadows met a pub keeper who let her make fish and chips in his pub kitchen for a few months. “I didn’t get paid,” she adds.
When she came back home, Meadows enrolled in the culinary science program at Contra Costa College and took a job at Skates on the Bay.
Next came a position at Chez Panisse. “I was lucky enough to work there as a prep cook for four months, but I thought, ‘I know how to make French food, so I’m not going to be a line cook picking peas’…You know how you are at that age,” she says.
Her next gig was at Auberge du Soleil in Rutherford, a fine-dining establishment that was just then putting Napa Valley on the culinary map. “I got to be a line cook and worked every station in the kitchen,” she says. She became friends with Albert Tordjman, the executive chef, who decided he wanted to open his own restaurant. “He took me on as his partner at Flying Saucer in San Francisco,” she adds.
Next was a stint with David and Anne Gingrass as the executive pastry chef at San Francisco’s Hawthorne Lane. And then she found her way to Alfred Schilling’s Chocolate Pastry Shop, where there were bigger plans. “We opened a restaurant called the Chocolate Argonaut on Grant Street in San Francisco,” she says.
When Meadows was offered the opportunity to work as the pastry chef at Brooklyn’s River Café, she headed off to New York, but before long, she was back home running Alameda’s Bonaire Bakery. “It was one of the oldest bakeries in the state at the time,” she says.
Settling into island life in Alameda, Meadows got married and had kids. As the little ones were starting school, she became acquainted with Christopher Seiwald, founder and CEO of Alameda-based Perforce Software. He had opened Little House Café as a place for his employees to eat, and he asked Meadows to run it. She stayed at Little House for 15 years until Seiwald sold Perforce. “He had another space on Park Street, and he said to me, ‘Let’s open our own real restaurant,’” says Meadows.
As she got to work envisioning menus and doing tastings, Meadows thought about her local clientele. “People in Alameda can be a little old school,” she puts it sweetly. “I wanted to be super modern and hip, but they’re not super foodies like in Berkeley or San Francisco.” At Little House, she says, she might make a roast beef sandwich and a “comfy sandwich with fig jam,” but “everybody would order the roast beef.”
Meadows recalls saying to Seiwald, “You know, there are no steakhouses in the East Bay except Ruth’s Chris, so we should just open a steakhouse.” She adds that Fogo De Chão, the Brazilian place in Emeryville, wasn’t yet open at the time.
As plans moved ahead for Moxie Steak House, Meadows thought about the boredom of having to cook steak and potatoes, creamed spinach, and asparagus with Hollandaise every day.
“While those things are absolutely delicious, if I had to do them every day, I’d probably go crazy,” she says. “So I decided that all the sides for the steakhouse were going to be modern and different and international and seasonal and in my own style. I love vinegar, I like texture, I like sweet and spicy combinations: all the things that make a lot of today’s cuisine different from the old days.”
And because not everybody’s a steak eater, Meadows decided to give equal care to her seafood and vegetable entrées. Sweet potatoes are often on the menu, sometimes with chile and lime, and sometimes in a luxurious mash with toasted hazelnuts, panko, and sage, all whipped up with more brown butter than a person knows they should eat but gladly will anyway. Her April menu introduced mussels prepared with fennel, leeks, garlic, cream, white wine, and Pernod in the true French style of Meadows’s roots. ♦
Moxie Steak House | 1640 Park St | Alameda | moxiealameda.com
The Golden Beet Cocktail
“We make all our own juices,” says Moxie Steak House Chef Donna Meadows. Her bar manager, Kat Tomas, used three of those fresh juices to create this cocktail.
- 2 ounces Fords Gin
- 1 ounce fresh carrot juice
- 1 ounce fresh golden beet juice
- 1 ounce orange juice
- ½ ounce simple syrup
Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into an ice-filled Collins glass. Garnish with carrot tops or mint.
