Dad’s Luncheonette going strong

“The first year is a blur, it was crazy. I was a chicken with my head cut off,” he said. “But this half-year I feel more organized, more well prepared.”

Much has been written about Clark’s fine dining background — he was a three-Michelin star chef de cuisine at Saison in San Francisco before opening Dad’s Luncheonette with his partner, Alexis Liu. It’s the first restaurant he’s owned.

“We didn’t know what to expect at first. We were getting pummeled every day,” he said. “It’s hard to gauge in a new restaurant how much of something you need and it was always a game of catch-up. There were so many people and we had no idea — we didn’t even have water cups [when we opened].”

Dad’s is open four days a week — Thursday through Sunday— as Clark transitioned out of fine dining, in part, to spend more time with his family: he and Liu have a 2-year-old daughter.

His new life at Dad’s has meant a relatively relaxed schedule, but the cafe — with just three people working in the kitchen and 18 seats — serves about 250 to 300 people on a typical Saturday. Father’s Day drew 400 people.

And they come from all over. On that day, the first guests were from China and said they heard about Dad’s Luncheonette there and had to try it.

Clark warmly engages everyone who walks in, bantering with them as if they were all close friends. And many of them are. He is at once host, server and chef, with Liu providing backup on weekends. She runs a cafe of her own in San Francisco the rest of the week.

Clark said Dad’s, which is located along Highway 1, was inspired, in part, by road trips and Americana.

“And the train car also brings it’s own life,” he said. “It has a lot of soul, another nostalgia thing that hopefully transports you to a place where you forget about pretty much anything. You’re just beside the road having a good time.”

Clark described the menu offerings as American roadside classics with a California focus, so hamburgers were an obvious choice. Dad’s offers a beef as well as a mushroom burger — the two top sellers. Both include a soft egg, melted cheese, red onion pickles and lettuce sandwiched between two slices of locally baked white bread.

“We were a white bread family growing up,” he said.

For Clark, proportions are crucial to a sandwich, and both feature Dad’s sauce — a mix of mustard, Meyer lemon, black pepper, honey and salt — but not ketchup. Clark hates ketchup.

Moving forward, he said he’d like to experiment and offer new items like fish tacos, and lately he’s taken to firing up a smoker on weekends to prepare meat. Dad’s did offer cocktails for a short while, but the small kitchen within a train car was too small to keep that up.

A few collaborations with friends are also in the works that could result in new specials before long.

And while everything offered at Dad’s is under $15 — a far cry from the $400 tasting menu at Saison — Clark said there’s plenty in common between the meals he’s prepared at both spots, for example “simplicity” and “not doing a number” on dishes.

“Understanding flavor is understanding ingredients,” he said.

Clark grew up in Virginia and was always interested in cooking and fascinated by the lifestyle of chefs. But it wasn’t until after he dropped out of college and moved back in with his mom that he seriously pursued the profession.

“[When I moved in with her] she said get a job, so I just Googled the best restaurant in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “I lied to them and said I was a chef. They hired me and quickly realized I was full of shit, but they still kept me on and put me on the path to righteousness.”

He learned on the job and said it “started off pretty rocky,” but worked his way up in the fine dining world and landed his first Bay Area job at Benu in San Francisco. He still lives in San Francisco, but said Half Moon Bay and the coast were always a draw.

“The coast has always called me and my family, we’re outdoors people and we drive up and down Highway 1 constantly,” he said. “Something that was alluring about Half Moon Bay is we’d always go to the farmers’ market and everything you’re buying is from down here. Instead of being in the city and searching it out, be in the place where it grows.”

zachary@smdailyjournal.com

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