Coq Au Vin The Premium Way In Menlo Park

No matter how much money a restaurant owner spends on china, glassware or other items, and no matter how a dining room sparkles, the bottom line is how special is the menu - is the food something you enjoy and would recommend to others?

I mention this as a new restaurant (opened in October of this year) called Café Vivant in Menlo Park, California, has taken a unique approach to attract customers. Heritage chickens will be among the featured items on the menu, and if you aren’t familiar with these specific chickens, you’re not alone.

Café Vivant co-founders Jason Jacobeit and Daniel Jung, who both have strong backgrounds in high-end wines, especially those from Burgundy - Jung is the former head sommelier at Tribeca Grill in New York City - made numerous trips to France, studying not just the wines, but also the cuisine of several regions in the country; what they learned was eye-opening. “Poultry is given the spotlight there in a way that just isn’t the case in this country,” remarks Jacobeit. He explains that this situation is also true in several large cities around the world, such as London and Tokyo. “In those cities and other developed areas of the world, poultry tends to be served on the basis of the genetics of the animal, the breed of the animal (such as Sussex or Dorking in England),”

Jacobeit contrasts that with America where suppliers and chefs focus on the lifestyle of the chickens, such as organic or free-range," he comments. “We’re not actually looking at premiumness from the lens of genetic quality. We’re looking at what happens when the animal is alive.” For Jacobeit, the chickens from France and much of Europe have much greater inherent character and texture than the “fast-food broiler chickens” of America.