Stanford visited the newlyweds in Boonville. “It was the same thing there,” he recalls. “Meticulous and special and completely unrealistic.”
First there is Boonville itself. A rough-and-tumble logging town, it has a history of xenophobia and “is a magnet for strange people,” according to Charlene. The Moonies once had a camp there, and serial killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng were once residents. The local talent pool was such that Ng washed dishes at the New Boonville and Lake waited tables. “What a creepy man,” Vernon recalls. “Though, actually, he was a pretty good waiter.”
Most Boonville dreamers did not fare as infamously as Lake and Ng—or, for that matter, the Rollinses—but few fared well either. “We’d seen a lot of people come and go, so we were not that excited when we heard about this couple coming in,” says longtime Boonville resident David Colfax, who, along with his wife, Micki, became friends with the Rollinses.
“What impressed us immediately about them was their obsessive attention to detail,” Colfax says. Taking a page from Chez Panisse’s menu, the New Boonville aspired to be the ultimate regional, organic restaurant. A riot of vegetables, including Italian “wild” arugula, puntarelle, lettuces, fava beans, sugar snap and snow peas, and flowers were grown in the garden, where guests were welcome to stroll. The restaurant featured bird’s-eye maple tables, handmade wineglasses, contemporary California art—and a modern, metal sign accented with a scribble of pink neon.
“That sign offended everyone in the valley,” recalls Colfax. “It wasn’t funky, it wasn’t oaky.” The Rollinses didn’t fit in either. Having invited locals to hang out in the restaurant’s bar, Vernon then had to invite them to leave when rowdies threatened to kill the couple and torch the place. And though the food wasn’t complicated—grilled rabbit, chicken, and lamb were always on the menu, as were pizzas topped with fresh vegetables—it was beyond the means of most natives of the valley (dinner for two was about $55 in 1985). “Vernon had this populist notion that workingmen would come in from the fields and the hills and, because they appreciated good food, would pay what it costs,” says Colfax.
The Rollinses didn’t need the community’s support for long. In 1983 Patricia Unterman, writing in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle, said the New Boonville “may be the only example of & an authentic, truly local California restaurant,” and by the end of the weekend there were cars lined up on both sides of the highway. David and Micki Colfax had just returned from a trip out of town. “We walked in and Vernon came running up to us and said, ‘You got any food up at your place?’ ” recalls David. “They had run out of food; they were totally unprepared.”
Looking back, it’s easy to see the restaurant’s demise as the natural outcome of various forces—a sort of epicurean perfect storm. Begin with some investors with a worshipful attitude toward the nascent California Cuisine movement and its practitioners—“food gods and goddesses,” as the starstruck Stanford calls them. Introduce them to a cultured and charming bon vivant with fantasies of a French-style country inn in California. Add some hostile townspeople and season with a profound lack of business acumen—or even common sense—and voilà! A recipe for disaster.
Even as other ecstatic reviews followed Unterman’s, the whispering campaign began among Bay Area food lovers. The dream of self-sufficiency was not sustainable, they said. The New Boonville’s books were a mess, and customers waited hours (without apology) for their entrées. “It was like a food museum,” recalls one apostate. Charlene’s dishes were presented with a reverence that might seem laughable now.
In 1983, Vernon’s partners (led by well-known East Bay restaurateur Narsai David) sued to remove Vernon and Charlene as general partners and demanded an accounting for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they had invested to date. Rather than become hired help in the restaurant they had created, the couple found new investors to pay off the old investors—but no one was getting rich. “Vernon’s whole strategy was to get people to invest in his vision,” says Colfax. “He and Charlene worked harder than anybody I’ve known.”
But hard work was not enough. In August 1986, responding to an employee’s complaints, an investigator from the California Division of Labor Standards served Vernon with a search warrant and accused him of, among other things, failing to carry workers’ compensation insurance. The Rollinses panicked, borrowed Colfax’s 1965 Valiant, and headed north, leaving their investors—not to mention their waitstaff and quite a few disappointed diners—to fend for themselves.
In retrospect, it would have been easy,” Charlene tells me as she preps in the kitchen at New Sammy’s. “Our partners were willing to buy us out. We said no.” Seventeen years later, recounting the Boonville saga still gets her agitated; the color rises to her neck and face as she aggressively dices vegetables. “We were really dumb,” she continues, but insists they never once thought of selling. “Our whole thing is to do things our way.”
Doing things their way has included home-schooling their son, Samuel, who was born in France less than a month after the couple abandoned Boonville. Charlene teaches him French; Vernon concentrates on math and the humanities. Their own lessons have been equally strenuous; learning from the past, they have sought no investors for New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro (“We saw that as the source of our problems,” says Charlene) and have established credit with area growers and ranchers by paying as they go. The restaurant itself, along with the surrounding seven acres and the mobile home the Rollinses live in, was paid for on the installment plan. The couple say they made good on money owed to New Boonville employees, a contention disputed by some of the former workers. And the second round of investors? “They got the hotel,” says Charlene, referring to the foreclosure auction of the New Boonville. “We walked away with nothing.”
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