Getting to the bucolic college town of Ashland, Oregon, 15 miles north of the California border, can be a little hair-raising. Highway 5 rises from the Central Valley up past Mount Shasta and a formidable phalanx of rock formations known as Castle Crags. The drive is a slow climb, and the descent into the valley is downright precipitous, marked by perilous turns and special ramps for runaway trucks. No wonder so many wayfarers who make it to picturesque Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, never want to leave.
When Vernon and Charlene Rollins—proprietors of New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro, a restaurant just outside of town that has been called “one of the best-kept secrets in the Pacific Northwest fine-dining frenzy”—first came here, nearly 15 years ago, they had no thoughts of staying. They were fugitive chefs at that point, fleeing from the spectacular failure of their world-renowned Northern California restaurant, the New Boonville Hotel, and headed for France. Charlene was eight months pregnant, and they were traveling north in an old Valiant convertible with a top that wouldn’t close.
“There was a nice feeling about the town,” Vernon recalls. A tall, bespectacled man with a great cloud of white hair, he would look like a displaced academic were it not for his Hawaiian shirt, one of a closetful. “We thought, ‘Gee, if we ever come back to the States maybe this would be a place to try.’ ”
Within a year, the couple’s French sojourn was over; they couldn’t get visas to stay on. Charlene’s mother, who had recently moved to Ashland, was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, and the Rollinses wanted her to meet her grandson. They also thought they could find work there. Thanks to the annual influx of a hundred thousand or so theatergoers, there are more than 200 places to eat in Ashland, everything from stuffy faux French to Burger King. It’s not the first place your average person would think of opening a restaurant. But Vernon Rollins—who went to UC Hastings and passed the California bar only to discover he didn’t want to practice law, and who ran an ill-fated wine importing business before opening the New Boonville—is not your average person. Former friends and business associates describe him variously as a genius and a fool, a visionary and a conniver. And Charlene, a lean and intense woman who has shared his life and his dream through two restaurants (she cooks while he runs the dining room), has been called both his soul mate and his fellow schemer.
But 14 years after opening New Sammy’s, their restaurant is an unqualified, albeit quiet, triumph, a manageable success in contrast to the New Boonville’s meteoric rise and fall. To persevere in the wake of that food mecca’s flameout, which made headlines from Los Angeles to Rome, is something most people couldn’t imagine. The Rollinses, however, could have imagined little else.
“It’s not that we couldn’t do anything else,” says Charlene, sharpening her knives in preparation for the evening’s service. “It’s just what we do. It’s what we are. And during the times we didn’t have a restaurant, we were always looking for one.”
Like so many California food stories from the ’80s, the saga of Vernon and Charlene Rollins begins at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. Charlene—who studied philosophy in graduate school but says a critical part of her education came from dining in France—was working in the kitchen under the famously temperamental Jeremiah Tower. Vernon, a close friend of both Tower and owner Alice Waters, was supplying the restaurant with fine French wines, enlightening his customers and their clientele in the bargain. Describing his role in the creation of the nascent California Cuisine movement, Vernon says, “My only contribution was to keep people focused on wine. In that, I was pretty influential.”
The two met at Chez Panisse’s seventh anniversary bash, in 1978, and it was love at first sight. “We spent the afternoon, right in the middle of the party, talking and drinking wine, comparing ideas,” recalls Vernon. (“He gave me a lot of wine, let’s put it that way,” says Charlene.) “She wanted to do a restaurant in the country, and that’s what I wanted to do.”
Vernon wasn’t troubled by his lack of experience. It was the age of self-invention: Waters started as a Montessori teacher, Tower had been an architect. Within six months of meeting, Vernon and Charlene were married, and within a year they were in Boonville, about two hours north of San Francisco, and being bankrolled in their experiment by a host of eager investors.
Ask anyone who knew Vernon Rollins in those days, and they will tell you that his great skill was getting people to share his enthusiasm for good food and wine. As co-owner of the M.V. Wine Company, he had persuaded gourmet groupies in Berkeley—doctors, lawyers, and professional people drawn to the burgeoning food scene—to invest in the Bordeaux and Burgundies he imported. (One of Vernon’s favorite gambits was buying the wine cellars of failing French restaurants such as Paris’s Chez Denis, the site of Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey’s notorious 31-course, $4,000 dinner, in 1975.) At least one of those investors claims the returns never materialized. Don Stanford, a Berkeley psychiatrist, estimates that he ended up with several cases of wine that, although of excellent quality, were worth only about 20 percent of his original investment. “I got what I paid for, though,” says Stanford. “It enriched my life to be involved with him and with what he was doing.”
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.”
Determined not to repeat past mistakes, Vernon and Charlene ran New Sammy’s by themselves for the first few years: Charlene did all the cooking while Vernon waited tables. They toiled from nine in the morning to eleven at night, cutting back only during the theater’s winter off-season. Charlene worked through treatment for breast cancer, and Vernon waited tables after surgery for a detached retina. His doctor had reservations for the following evening, says Vernon: “I told him, ‘If I don’t get checked out of this hospital, you’re not getting dinner tomorrow!’ ”
Once the restaurant had built a following, they added waiters, and Charlene found an ideal prep cook in Heather Hoskins—someone who could meet her standards and stand her style.
“I’m really tough on people in that position,” Charlene admits. “I can’t help it, I just ride them because I want things done the right way.”
As tough as Charlene can be in the kitchen and bakery (New Sammy’s Cowboy Bakery provides bread made with wild yeast for a number of local markets), the more easygoing Vernon is equally precise in the dining room. Glasses line up, napkins are straight and pressed—but the two waiters who now work with him are informal and informative. “Customers know they’ve had good service when they leave here,” Vernon says, “but they can’t say exactly why.”
Where the New Boonville was light and spacious, New Sammy’s, which was built years ago as a gas station, is far more intimate (there are only six tables). But the food, say both Vernon and Charlene, is part of a continuum. “We’ve always been interested in organic food; that’s always been our concept,” says Vernon. “It just tastes better.” Indeed, the dishes on the menu during my visit—a blue cheese flan the consistency of a soft-boiled egg, beef short ribs falling off the bone into a gazpacho of garden-fresh vegetables—are extraordinary, on a par with L.A.’s Campanile, if not Chez Panisse. In summer, Charlene grills squid marinated with rosemary and layers it on garlic toast with sautéed bitter greens and green garlic mayonnaise. A slice of chicken liver terrine is placed on a pile of crumpled cress and giant purple orache that’s been grown on the property. “People will come in here and not know we’re connected to the Boonville Hotel and they’ll say, ‘This tastes a lot like that food we had fifteen years ago,’” says Vernon.
“It’s kind of depressing that my food hasn’t changed that much in all that time,” Charlene counters with a laugh. Giving me a tour of the restaurant’s young garden—three kinds of lettuce, herbs, onions, broccoli, leeks, cardoons, and beans (garbanzo, romano, cannellini, and green)—she reinforces the sense that this world is their refuge. “The most important thing about the restaurant is that we live here, on the property,” she says, walking around a giant fig tree, and pointing out plantings of apples, persimmons, quince, and at least five other fruit varieties. “Our son is home-schooled; everything we do is right here.” As in Boonville, where Charlene’s father regularly tended bar, New Sammy’s is also a family affair. Young Sammy washes dishes, and Charlene’s brother delivers bread.
In the kitchen that evening, Charlene covers the range the way Elvin Jones plays the drums: eight skillets going at once, all by herself, with flawless precision and timing. Vernon entertains the theatergoers in the front of the house, walking them through the menu—first courses from spring green salad to giant chive and goat cheese ravioli with smoked ham, sugar snap peas, and basil; main courses such as wild Columbia River sturgeon grilled and served with polenta in a saffroned shellfish broth with poached sea scallops and a ragout of a mile-long list of vegetables; three pages of teas, a list of around 2,500 wines. (In summer, Vernon was partial to Château Thivin Côte de Brouilly Beaujolais and Bandol rosés, Drappier Champagne, Bugey Cerdon, and J.J. Prüm’s Wehlener Sonnenuhr Kabinett ’89 and ’92.) The rest- room’s walls are a collage of wine labels, with little room for addition. “These are only wines that Charlene and I drank together,” Vernon says, pausing a beat. “We didn’t drink ’em all at once.”
A tour of New Sammy’s is like a travelogue of the Rollinses’ life. There is a satirical painting of the Tintin comic book character; there are photographs of les gardiens, the French cowboys that New Sammy’s salutes; but most importantly there are menus from restaurants that inspired the couple: Auberge du Beaucet, La Table du Comtat, and, of course, Chez Panisse.
Vernon is pushing 60, and Charlene is just a few years younger, but they feel like they’re at their stride. For Vernon especially, this squat wood building with its rainbow of pastels and an arrow of bulbs flickering like a movie marquee, as mysterious to the naked eye as any stop in an episode of The Twilight Zone, is an embodiment of their romance. “It’s love,” he rhapsodizes. “It’s just what it’s all about. It’s how to preserve love. You’ve got to find that one person in your life and you’ve got to make it work. It works for us because we have this joint venture, we built this thing together.”
For the travelers that they feed—those who have sought out the restaurant for its reputation and those who are amazed at their good fortune in having stumbled onto such a meal—Vernon hopes New Sammy’s will trigger fond memories. Like the menus with which he has covered the walls, he would like this evening’s meal to be remembered the way the New Boonville’s are: as a remarkable detour on life’s bumpy journey. “And then maybe you’ll come back and it will be important for your life and the other restaurants you go to,” he says. “A restaurant is just a small portion of what real life is all about.”
New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro
2210
South Pacific Highway
Talent,
Oregon
541-535-2779