We cook for other people for a living. Where We Eat is the other side of that — the places on the Mendocino coast we go on our own time, when someone else is running the kitchen.
These aren’t reviews in the star-rating sense. They’re the things we’d tell a friend who asked: what to order, what to skip, whether the dog can come, whether the kids can come, and the one detail that would have changed your evening if you had known it before you walked in.
How this works
- We pay. Everywhere in this series is somewhere we go and settle the bill like anyone else. No comps, no arrangements.
- We only write about places we actually return to. If we went once and shrugged, it doesn’t get an entry.
- The practical details get their own box. Hours, dogs, kids, parking, whether you need a reservation — the stuff that decides whether a night works.
- We say the awkward part out loud. If a place is 21-and-over, or cash-only, or impossible on a Saturday, that goes near the top and not buried in paragraph nine.
The entries
Patterson’s Pub, Mendocino — Dog-friendly garden with two of the seven TVs out in it, a specials board worth ordering off blind, and the mussels and clams in pesto cream when they run it. Twenty-one and over, so read before you bring the family.
The Elk Store, Elk — A general store running the middle of its town since 1927, a hundred years old next year. The tuna melt SFGATE put on its best-in-California list, the right way to order the Grinder, and a warning: nothing here’s fast.
More entries coming. We eat out constantly — it’s the occupational hazard of cooking for a living.
Get the next one
New entries in this series, what’s good on the coast this month, and first word when we announce a pop-up — they sell out fast, and the list hears first. No more than once a month.
Eating well on this coast
If you’re planning a trip and want the seasonal picture — what’s actually being landed and harvested when you visit — start with our September seasonality guide, Point Arena to Ten Mile. And if you would rather not go out at all, that’s the day job: we cook in your home or rental anywhere on the coast and inland through Anderson Valley.
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