Margaret Grade, a California neuropsychologist who made a dramatic career change by opening a cozy, eclectic inn near Point Reyes National Seashore that was known for caring for farmers and fishermen with the same attention given to the to film stars and writers who sought refuge there. He died on February 28 in San Francisco. She was 72.
Ms. Grade was injured in a car accident in Marin County on January 11th. She spent several weeks in a hospital before dying there as a result of her injuries, said her brother Matthew Grade, a doctor.
The introverted Ms Grade admitted she made a most unlikely innkeeper.
“If they put me at the top, I would be bad for business,” she said in a 2003 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. She also admitted that when she opened her guesthouse, Manka’s Inverness Lodge, she didn’t even have the idea of running a place. “I didn’t know the term ‘working capital,’ so I didn’t have any,” she said.
Still, Manka’s, a centuries-old former hunting retreat hidden in the woods two hours northwest of San Francisco in Inverness, California, has been a pioneer of hyperlocal cuisine, a haven for chefs and celebrities, and a darling of the national media.
Ms. Grade (pronounced GRAH-dee) was more than an innkeeper. She had a preternatural ability to anticipate guests’ wishes and sometimes found unusual ways to fulfill them.
“She’s not someone I would call warm, but you always felt the touch of her hand in every room,” actress Frances McDormand, who vacationed there for years with her family, said by phone. “She had an old-fashioned understanding of what true luxury was. Part of her true gift was creating a fantasy that you just fell into. It was funny.”
The fourth of eleven children, Margaret Major Grade was born on December 9, 1951 in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. Her mother, Shirley Agnes (Bothwick) Grade, worked for a time as a journalist and became known in international knitting circles. Her father, John Oscar Grade, was a popular family doctor who hunted, fished and planted wonderful gardens.
Ms. Grade, called Peg by her family, inherited his love of fast cars and food.
“He showed me by example that good food and the preparation for it are part of a fulfilling life,” she said in 2003.
Like many of her siblings, Ms. Grade chose to study medicine, attending nursing school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley (now part of Alliant International University), where she earned a doctorate in psychology . Her dissertation, published in 1984, was about boredom.
She established a practice with lupus patients and conducted clinical brain research at the University of California, San Francisco. In the mid-1980s, she joined the San Francisco AIDS Advisory Committee and began global AIDS research.
Ms. Grade was looking for a second home in 1989 when she discovered the inn named for its longtime owner, Manka Prokupek. She teamed up with her brother Thomas to buy it, and her younger brother Benjamin, a chef, took over the kitchen.
Ms. Grade’s sister, Johanna Perkins, helped her transform the inn’s four rooms and downstairs restaurant into a whimsical arts and crafts gem whose aesthetic favors huge floral arrangements, foraged branches and a jaunty use of taxidermy: deer hooves used as clothing Hooks, a squirrel greeting guests at the reception, a framed tarantula hanging in a bathroom.
After her brother Ben returned to the Midwest in 1996, Ms. Grade visited cookbook author Marion Cunningham, who for years served as consigliere to a generation of Northern California chefs and food writers, to ask whether she should devote her life to cooking. Ms. Cunningham told her to read the works of food writers Richard Olney, Jane Grigson and MFK Fisher before deciding.
Ms. Grade never looked back, but running both the kitchen and the inn was daunting. In 1998, she hired Northern California chef Daniel DeLong. Together they improved the kitchen and soon developed a romantic relationship. The two never married, but became parents to twins in 2008.
Using only foods that Ms. Grade described as “within reach,” the couple crafted dishes from chanterelles that local children foraged in the forest, seafood fished from surrounding waters hours before serving, and notable local products like bread from celebrity baker Chad Robertson and cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.
The descriptions on their daily menus were poetic. “Local king salmon on a throne of bolinas beans, defended by a close cousin,” said one. “Another sole rescued from the surrounding seas,” said another.
Ms. McDormand recalled a dish called “a tiny raft of local sea urchins floating in a cove of creamy corn chowder” that her son devoured when he was 10, endearing him to the notoriously prickly Ms. Grade.
Ms. Grade spoke in a voice that seemed just slightly louder than a whisper, and she spoke privately about her personal life, appealing to celebrities; They knew she would respect their privacy too. Robert Redford shared the dining room with a local child celebrating a birthday. Sean Penn was baking chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. The chef Thomas Keller came to his birthday dinner.
But the real stars were the people who brought the raw materials through the back door.
“When a duck farmer came along and sold us sausage, it was like having King Charles in our place,” Luc Chamberland, who cooked at Manka’s for seven years, told The Point Reyes Light.
Ms. Grade actually had Charles at her facility. In 2005, while still a prince, he and his wife Camilla traveled to the United States to stimulate his interest in organic farming. He visited restaurateur Alice Waters at her Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley and then headed to Manka’s.
“She made the most beautiful lunch in his honor,” Ms. Waters, who attended the meal and whose Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse served as a model for Ms. Grade, said in an interview. “When I looked at the menu I thought, ‘Oh my God, is he going to like this?'”
He did, including a dish Ms. Grade called “duck worthy of a prince.”
In addition to her brother Matthew, Ms. Grade is survived by her children Coco and Django Grade-DeLong and six other siblings, Johanna Perkins, Mary Katherine Grade Reynolds and Benjamin, Andrew, Charles and Jean Therese Grade. She lived in Inverness.
Early on December 27, 2006, the redwood inn burned down after an oak tree fell during a storm and severed a propane gas line. Chef Elizabeth Falkner and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal slept upstairs. Mr. Gyllenhaal joined the rush to salvage as much as possible from the burning building.
Zoning laws prevented Ms. Grade from rebuilding. She continued to operate cabins nearby and purchased other properties, including Olema, a historic inn and restaurant she called Sir and Star, which opened in 2013 to great reviews. But she never recaptured the magic of Manka’s, and Olema has since closed.
“Her basic approach was to be willing to let laws and rigid structures go away,” said her brother Matthew.
This was evident once when Ms. Grade attempted to add high ceilings to a room she was remodeling. The county’s zoning manager insisted they only be eight feet tall, Jim Emmott, who worked on their construction projects, told The Light. She pushed back.
“I don’t know if you realize this, but I’m in the fantasy business,” he recalled her telling the administrator. “I wonder how you want me to put my imagination under an eight-foot ceiling. Does Disney World have an eight foot ceiling?
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2024-03-17 22:21:55
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