Saratoga News

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Michael McBride takes a break from cooking, outside the newly painted Sweet Peas in Los Gatos.

Sweet Peas façade offers a clue to fresh flavors inside

By Suzanne Cristallo

Curious passersby on N. Santa Cruz Avenue in Los Gatos have been watching the blossoming of Sweet Peas. The façade of the small restaurant across from Safeway, which opened May 1, has been transformed by East Bay artist "Georgio" into a garden of curling vines, peapods and flowers.

Inside, long before the front doors opened, a staff of four led by owner/chef Michael McBride has been busy keeping up with catering orders from a business McBride started nine years ago in Woodside. They've also been keeping up with changes to the black-and-white decor of previous owners, now warmed up with terra cotta colors and an intimately low counter.

What once was Vertigo Cafe, then Santorini Cafe, then Perko Cafe is now named for McBride's first harvest of peas from his backyard garden--an organic garden he cultivated to provide the fresh herbs, zucchini, tomatoes, strawberry beets, eggplant and peppers he uses in his cooking.

Sweet Peas offers soups, sandwiches, salads, coffee and juice along with sweet and savory crepes prepared Parisian style on stoves shipped from Paris. Each day, six fresh salads are displayed, including pasta, vegetable and tabouli, the latter a mixture of fresh mint, bulgar wheat and tomatoes.

Soups vary from vegetarian recipes and gumbo to chowder. For sandwiches, McBride, 35, and assistant chef Rod Davis, 35, prepare roast beef and turkey and grill chicken, eggplant and vegetables to go with their fresh-baked rosemary garlic, sun-dried tomato and whole wheat breads. Besides the fruit smoothies they whip up to accompany the solid fare, they also offer a house blend of chai--a tea brewed from a mixture of whole herbs, spices and seeds. Chai is served hot or iced; the mixture can also be taken home in a jar for brewing.

McBride, a native of Washington, D.C., went to high school in Bethesda, Md. During those years, it was his job to cook for his family. His mother was busy in real estate and his father in engineering, so young Michael created what he thought was a balanced meal, influenced in part by his Sicilian grandmother. "I got scolded for not having any vegetables," he says with a laugh, referring to his meal of spaghetti and meatballs.

At 15, he started work as a bellhop for Holiday Inn. That association resulted in an interest in the hospitality management field, in which he earned a degree from Florida International University. The unusual degree was in demand and led to jobs as restaurant manager for Jimmy's at Squaw Valley and executive chef for San Rafael's Moveable Feast, which catered large dinners for clients such as the Red & White Fleet on San Francisco Bay and the George Lucas Technical Center. Adding variety to his career, McBride also worked for a while as a whitewater rafting guide and a stock trader.

In 1989, he started McBride's Catering, with the bankruptcy of his employer at the time providing the impetus he needed. Sweet Peas is his first opportunity to cook for in-house and take-out customers while continuing his catering business.

"It's all good," he says of his food, using his restaurant's slogan. It might well apply to the classic Banana Nutella crepe with a hazelnut-chocolate spread, or his spinach, feta and mushroom crepe for adventurous breakfast-seekers.

Sweet Peas, 453 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos. Open weekdays 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; weekends starting with breakfast, 8 a.m.- 9 p.m. 354-3144.

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