Is the Bay Area ready for a restaurant this obsessed with chicken?

Even in the Bay Area, a region whose food culture is defined by its farm-to-table convictions, it appears that no local restaurant dedicated to heritage chickens has existed — until now. 

Café Vivant, which opens Oct. 28 at 720 Santa Cruz Ave. in Menlo Park, is all about heritage chickens, most of them raised for the restaurant at a coastal farm in Pescadero. There will be whole roasted chickens, caviar-crowned nuggets, fried chicken ice cream and eventually, a tasting menu highlighting all parts of the bird. 

The Café Vivant team — owners Jason Jacobeit and Daniel Jung, chef Jared Wentworth and farmer Rob James — hope to spark a heritage chicken renaissance, a lofty goal that’s fraught with challenges, from labor to the expectations of American diners accustomed to the taste and price of commercial poultry. “Chicken is such an overlooked, almost abandoned ingredient for fine dining,” Jung said.

Heritage chicken breeds are defined as slow-growing, longer-living birds that were developed before the mid-20th century, when the industrialization of the poultry industry prioritized speed and quantity. Café Vivant will open with three kinds of heritage chickens with distinct tastes and textures, though the owners plan to rotate in other breeds, both to educate customers and sustain a high-volume restaurant. Pescadero Black and New Hampshire Red birds are raised by James of Corvus Farms in Pescadero. The former, a cross of two heritage breeds the team created to withstand Pescadero’s coastal climate, “leans toward the darker-meat side of the spectrum,” Jacobeit said. 

The New Hampshire is an intensely flavored bird, Wentworth said. “They’re what I would consider the quintessential heritage chicken,” Wentworth said. “When you eat it you’re like, ‘That is not Purdue Farm chicken.’” (The team alternately uses, and then eschews, the descriptor “gamey.”)

The third breed, Delaware, which will come from pioneering heritage farm Good Shepherd Conservancy in Kansas, has more nuanced, sweeter meat, Wentworth said. (The owners said a restaurant premised on heritage chicken would not be possible without Good Shepherd founder Frank Reese, who is known nationally for his poultry preservation efforts.)  

Café Vivant’s whole chicken for two ($48 to $64) will come with foraged mushrooms and vegetables grown at Corvus Farms. Sides ($13 to $16) include mac and cheese with porcini mushrooms, a green salad or fries with yuzu aioli. 

Wentworth has spent a year figuring out the best way to cook each breed, including testing numerous brining techniques and length of time. (He landed on a brine with shio koji, made from fermented rice.) 

The high-end chicken will also go into nuggets ($38), made from spiced, ground dark meat and served with caviar atop a chicken claw. For dessert, triple-fried chicken skin is folded into homemade vanilla ice cream for a sundae that Jacobeit likened to dipping French fries into a vanilla milkshake. 

Eventually, Café Vivant will serve a reservation-only tasting menu ($235) that showcases every part of the bird, from eggs to offal paired with fresh-baked Parker House rolls to bones used to make a triple consommé broth. 

The menu includes other kinds of local poultry, such as fried quail with duck-fat cornbread and roasted duck from Pescadero’s Root Down Farm, as well as butter-poached lobster and grilled Wagyu steak. Many of the vegetables will be grown at the 80-acre Corvus Farms.  

This is the first restaurant from Jacobeit and Jung, both sommeliers who currently run Somm Cellars, a rare wine retailer in New York City. Wentworth worked previously at Michelin-star restaurants in Chicago, including a brewery that earned two stars. In interviews, the team made no bones about their desire to win a Michelin star at Café Vivant, though they want it to have a lively, unpretentious vibe. “We don’t want people to come here and sit in awkward silence and pay homage to heritage chicken,” Wentworth said.

Jacobeit and Jung’s long-simmering idea to start a business focused on heritage chicken, inspired by dishes the sommeliers ate on trips to Europe and Japan and in New York City, came to fruition over the last several years. After searching the country for a chicken source, from professional farmers to backyard breeders on Craigslist and Facebook, they found James, whose poultry is sought after by many top Bay Area chefs. Together, they studied and experimented with chicken genetics and eventually honed in on the New Hampshire Red, an American breed with auburn feathers that was developed in the 19th century. Later, they developed the Pescadero Black.

James said he was initially skeptical of the viability of a business dedicated to heritage chicken, which take more time and money to raise and can be difficult to sell. He charges $8 per pound wholesale, yielding a slim margin, compared to brands like Tyson that cost closer to $4 per pound. Root Down Farms, also in Pescadero, for instance switched to a faster growing, part heritage breed after several years of struggling to convert customers to pricier heritage chickens, according to its website. 

“A lot of farmers who start with this very pure, passionate commitment to heritage, they abandon the enterprise after a year or two because they’re sick of sitting at farmers markets and having to explain why the chicken’s expensive or why it looks different,” Jacobeit said. But James was ultimately convinced by Wentworth’s cooking and the team’s commitment to a goal that’s “necessary and valuable and important to the food conversation.” The Bay Area restaurant world is taking note, too. “All of my chefs are watching, calling: When can we get those birds?” he said. 

Given the owners’ background, they invested heavily in a deep wine list: close to 3,000 selections, with capacity for as much as 8,000. Cafe Vivant is focused on bottles from the Santa Cruz Mountains and Burgundy. (Somm Cellars is known for the latter.) They claim to offer the largest restaurant selection of Santa Cruz Mountains in the world. The list leans heavily into Ridge Vineyards, arguably the Santa Cruz Mountain’s most famous producer, with more than 120 bottles. 

There’s also an uncommonly strong presence of older vintages “rarely seen outside private collections or auctions,” according to a press release. The wine list spans five decades, reaching back as far as a 1938 bottle of La Questa Cabernet from Woodside Vineyards that costs $2,450. Jacobeit and Jung said it was interest from Somm Cellars’ local wine customers that brought them from New York to the quiet Silicon Valley suburb of Menlo Park. 

They transformed what was once a former café chain into an airy space filled with white oak and wall-to-wall wine storage. The 10-seat bar, which will be reserved for walk-ins, looks into a glass-walled rare and fine wines room, controlled for temperature and humidity to the one-hundredth of a degree. Next-door to the restaurant is a wine shop and lounge, called Somm Cellars, and a retail market stocked with chicken and produce from the restaurant’s farm and boutique food products like French butter and artisanal cheese. The lounge will also serve a small food menu, coffee and tea.

While a single farmer may struggle to successfully sell heritage chicken, the owners are betting that investment in dishes served by a fine-dining chef in a flashy dining room will pay off.

“In various European capitals and in some places like Tokyo, chicken is very much eventized,” Jacobeit said. “It’s served alongside a dry-aged, premium cut of beef — not as a subordinate, vaguely healthy alternative, but something that’s equally worthy of an event.”