Here’s to Grandmothers

The Spirits Behind Three East Bay Restaurants

By Anna Mindess

Grandmothers hold outsized places in many people’s food memories. Here are stories of three award-winning East Bay restaurant entrepreneurs who named their spots in honor of their grandmothers, not necessarily for their recipes, but rather for their spirits: feisty, indomitable, and unceasingly supportive of their grandchildren.

 

Juanita & Maude

Scott Eastman named his restaurant after his grandmother Juanita Longshore for her charm, vivaciousness, and powerful spirit, and his mother Maude Eastman for her steady, compassionate voice of support.

Juanita was born in Los Angeles to a Black American mother and an Irish father. “Even though he was very much in love with her,” says Eastman, “they never married, because his parents did not approve, and the social pressures in the 1920s were too much to overcome.” Juanita grew up with her mother and two older sisters, became a registered nurse, married, had three kids, and worked in the Catholic church.

Chef Eastman also grew up in LA. When he was born, Juanita was living in Hawai’i, but she came back to California to care for him. “We had an early bond,” he said. “As I’ve gotten older, I realize she was very special. She helped me a lot in my life, but looking back now, I’m more impressed with who she was.”

He describes Juanita’s personality as “bold, a little vain, flirtatious in a charming way, confident, and self-sufficient. She had a great spirit of adventure, an interest in other cultures, and wasn’t wary of other people. I knew her as a strong, independent woman who got around and was never cowed by anything.”

She traveled solo to Japan, Egypt, and China during the 1960s–‘80s, which later inspired Eastman on his own travels.

After attending Columbia University for a degree in sociology, he knew he needed a skill. But for several years, he was unsure of his next step. Meanwhile, he fell in love with New York City restaurants. “I was always very curious and interested in culture,” he says. “It wasn’t until I was living in New York that I started to discover food and culture. I realized this is what I was missing! I would explore different restaurants and then try to replicate things at home, like Thai soups, risotto, congee.”

Eventually, Eastman attended the Culinary Institute of America and traveled in Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and all over Europe.

On opening his own restaurant in 2017 in Albany (after nine years as the chef at Corso, the acclaimed Italian restaurant in Berkeley), the big question was what kind of food he was going to feature. He was stymied. “It’s such a statement of identity,” he says. “I didn’t know which direction to pick.” He had grown up in what he called, “a dark period where people had stopped cooking. We went to franchises; there weren’t so many independent restaurants.”

When he recalled his grandmother’s bold, cosmopolitan spirit, he decided not to be pinned down to any one cuisine but to give himself a worldwide playground. His dishes are inspired by French, Latin American, Japanese, Italian, and Eastern European cuisines. The restaurant makes dishes from all corners: chowder, charcuterie, borscht, gnocchi, chile rellenos, meatballs, sausage, strudel, gumbo, and chicken paprikash.

“Food is something that people feel almost a religious fervor about how they make things,” he says. “This restaurant represents that, because I have such a love for it all. And I like to make the connections between everything. My grandmother is still my ally in all these travels. A biracial woman born in the 1920s, she was ahead of her time, an original with great taste. My mother has a strong sense of faith in doing what feels right. Juanita would speak her mind unabashedly, my mother doesn’t.”

Eastman’s restaurant manifests his grandmother’s spirit by going after what’s beautiful. Juanita loved going out to nice dinners but never had the chance to dine at a restaurant where her grandson was cooking. “If she were alive,” he imagines, “she would be here all the time. She would have absolutely loved it all—with some opinions, of course.”

Juanita & Maude | 825 San Pablo Ave, Albany | juanitaandmaude.com

 

 

Burdell Soul Food

Diners entering Burdell Soul Food in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood are transported to another era, one steeped in nostalgia, just as Chef Geoff Davis intends. While seated within coral-hued walls, hearing ‘70s music on an era-appropriate sound system, one can’t help but notice the small touches: wooden church pews, an old Spark range in pristine condition, olive-green flowered TV trays, even an antique Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle that holds maple syrup for cornmeal waffles at Sunday brunch.

This singular creation was recently named the #1 restaurant in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the 100 Top Restaurants in California by the Los Angeles Times.

Chef Davis, wearing a homey, orange flowered apron, completes the picture when he serves diners his carefully constructed dishes, often on Corelle plates—with classic patterns such as Spring Blossom, Woodland Brown, and Butterfly Gold—which he remembers eating on as a child and has painstakingly collected for years. Their hardiness and resilience could be an apt metaphor for the type of Soul Food the chef creates.

When I interviewed Davis for Oaklandside in 2023, just before Burdell’s opening, he shared that his new restaurant was named for his maternal grandmother, Burdell Demby. “The accent is on my grandmother’s cooking as it expresses earnestness, honesty, and simplicity,” he said.

Growing up with both sets of grandparents in Modesto meant family meals based on abundant local produce: vegetables, legumes, cabbage, and collards with a little meat. Davis acknowledges that this runs counter to general assumptions about soul food, and he often points out that soul food is not synonymous with Southern food. He says his goal is to serve “a distilled version of grandmother food.”

One way he accomplishes this is by steadfastly tying his dishes to the seasons. For example, spring salads, starring crunchy asparagus, make way for a summer salute to tomatoes and chicory.

The menu features “for the table” plates that reinforce the hominess of communal family meals. These might be boiled peanuts cooked in the shell with peanut miso, crispy mushrooms and spring onions with a smoked maple dip, or broccoli cheddar croquettes.

Before Burdell opened, Davis clarified his concept in a Resy post, envisioning recipes and methods he describes as “tweaks of family recipes…my sense of nostalgia and childhood, a link to my past and present.”

His main dishes carefully incorporate top-notch ingredients from local farms and purveyors: pork neck smothered with wild chanterelle mushrooms, a cornmeal waffle served with chicken liver mousse and crispy chicken skin, “barbecue” shrimp with brown butter and Worcestershire, dry-aged duck with cherry “drippings” and dirty rice, and always, greens, perhaps slow cooked with ham hock and cider vinegar and seasoned with berbere from Oakland’s Brundo Spice Company.

Even though Chef Davis has fond memories of grandmother Burdell’s lemon meringue pie made with Meyer lemons and zest in the curd, he tends toward more nuanced desserts like a coconut banana pudding with fig leaf oil or a grapefruit curd tart with rose geranium meringue.

Presenting the bill adds a last grandmotherly touch: a gift of classic Arcor Strawberry Bon Bons, those hard candies with chewy strawberry-flavored centers that come covered in shiny red and green wrappers that generations of grandmothers always seemed to have ready in a candy dish.

Burdell Soul Food | 4640 Telegraph Ave, Oakland | burdelloakland.com

 

 

MAMA Oakland

Her family hailed from Abruzzo, Italy, but Maria Germano Stacionis grew up in Rockford, Illinois, where she worked for decades as a gracious and spirited hostess in restaurants that catered to blue-collar workers and businessmen. Her granddaughter, Stevie Stacionis, dedicated her Italian restaurant to her grandmother to embody her warm-but-impish spirit.

“She was a four-foot-ten-inch mischievous troublemaker with a commanding but playful presence who might inform her male customers, ‘You better shut up and eat that,’” says proprietor Stacionis.

Mama was the consummate hostess both in the restaurants where she worked as well as at her home, where she would happily put several tables together to regale a crowd of her friends and relatives with homemade dishes, many featuring her sugo (tomato sauce).

The compact menu at the Oakland restaurant, which is owned by Stacionis and her husband, Josiah Baldivino, always offers a single three-course meal with a choice of soup or salad, a main dish with two pasta options, and a pair of desserts. Why? “Just like when you are eating at someone’s home, there aren’t unlimited choices,” says Stacionis. Another passionate aim of her abridged menu is eliminating waste.

Dependably on the menu is Mama’s sugo, which Stacionis aims to recreate. “It starts with salt pork, which is fatty and salty, and then adds in beef, vegetables, olive oil, and tomatoes.”

When Stacionis was in her early teens and made the trip back to Abruzzo with her grandmother and her aunt, she was surprised to find that it smelled like home. “It was crazy to be abroad and still smell and taste that same sugo. That recipe got passed down from Ma, my great grandmother, to Mama, to my dad, and then my sisters and me,” she says.

Stacionis admits that she was a picky eater as a child. When Mama would make chicken soup with the seed-like acini de pepe pasta, Stevie would always pick out the teensy pasta and eat them sprinkled with cheese. In that spirit, one value that Stacionis has instilled in her staff is a warm willingness to accommodate food allergies or preferences. “Just like at Mama’s house, if you told her something would make you ill, of course, she would be happy to accommodate.”

Stacionis has worn an impressive number of hats, including restaurateur, certified sommelier, food and beverage writer, wine shop owner, and founder of a nonprofit promoting women in wine. She describes herself as a “serial hospitalitarian with a passion and penchant for cultivating community.”

Even though Mama passed away in 2021 at the age of 101, her influence is still alive in the restaurant that bears her name. Current chef Priscilla Przygocki aims to evoke her spirit in special dishes that celebrate seasons and holidays, posing the question “What would Mama like?” Chef Priscilla recently delighted Stacionis when she made that chicken soup from Stevie’s childhood, the one with the tiny acini de pepe pasta.

MAMA Oakland | 388 Grand Ave, Oakland | mama-oakland.com

 

Anna Mindess is an award-winning journalist who writes on food, culture, and travel for numerous publications including the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Berkeleyside. Follow her on Instagram @annamindess and find her stories at annamindess.contently.com.