Flavors Without Borders - Chef Charlie Ayers

by Sean Elder, Posted Dec 9th 2009 @ 11:00AM

Photo: Charlie Ayers

When Google held its first analyst day in February 2005, the investors who had come to kick the tires of the already exploding search-engine company probably expected to hear from the CFO -- if not from founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Instead they got a lecture from the company's chef, Charlie Ayers, on the proper way to grill pork tenderloin, the centerpiece of that day's lunch.

Granted, Google always did things its own way. But when Ayers was hired in 2000 to bring "eclectic, high-flavor, low-fat food" to the engineers and data crunchers that made up the staff there, he had already logged time working as a personal chef for members of the Grateful Dead: Unorthodox was relative. But where the band might have started off at the crunchier end of the food spectrum, the geeks at Google were used to thinking of food as fuel, the more high-octane (Jolt, pizza) the better. It was up to Ayers to wean them of frozen fish sticks and introduce them to the pleasures of grilled striped sea bass. His menus became the stuff of legend and the Google cafeteria was the envy of Silicon Valley.

Ayers left the company in 2005 with a boatload of stock and the dream of starting a chain of organic fast-food restaurants. Today the first Calafia ("Slow food cooked fast") is nestled in the midst of the Town & Country Village, across from the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif. The tasteful interior of the 120-seat eatery is all wood and stainless steel, a far cry from the sort of interactive video-game environment he had envisioned. (One investor told him his original concept sounded like "an adult Chuck E. Cheese, and I wanted to kill myself.") It's also become the new go-to lunch place for the local digerati.

Maybe it's the handheld wireless devices the waiters use when taking your order, making that run to the kitchen unnecessary; maybe it's the free WiFi and self check-out -- or maybe it's all that pizza on the dinner menu (Vegan Love Fest Pizza, Sunshine Daydream Pizza, Wolfgang's Pizza -- hey, you're in California!). The place just feels like home to the geeks from Apple and yes, Google, who keep coming back for dishes like the Fiery Bottom BBQ Pork Rice Bowl, and has caused at least one customer to say, "This is my virtual office."

This endeavor is the first restaurant business that Ayers has owned as well as run. And he's done his share of 18-hour days: on the line, in the trenches, answering the phone. ... "I didn't expect it to be such an adult daycare center," he says of his adventures in management. "People apply as adults and then act like children."

Calafia waitress Amy Raichert pauses in the middle of her demonstration of the wireless order-taker to explain how she got hired: "I knew a few Grateful Dead songs so I had an in."

Ayers would still like to expand; he's in talks now about opening a Calafia II in Northern California, though he would be less hands-on there. He just doesn't want it to be, well, cheesy. As Ayers puts it, "I don't want to be the TGIF for the eco generation."

Filed Under: Chefs
Tags: Calafia, Charlie Ayers, Grateful Dead, Silicon Valley, west coast