Margaret Grade, a California neuropsychologist who took a career turning point by opening a cozy and eclectic inn near the Point Reyes National Seashore, known for caring for farmers and fishermen with the same attention she gave to movie stars. cinema and the writers who sought refuge there. , died on February 28 in San Francisco. She was 72 years old.
Ms. Grade was injured in a car accident in Marin County on January 11. She spent several weeks in the hospital before dying from complications related to her injuries, said her brother Matthew Grade, a doctor.
The introverted Mrs. Grade admitted that she was a most unlikely innkeeper.
“If they put me first, I would be bad for business,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle of San Francisco. She also admitted that when she opened her hostel, Manka’s Inverness Lodge, she didn’t have the first idea of running an establishment. “I didn’t know the term ‘working capital’ and therefore didn’t have any,” she said.
Yet Manka’s, a century-old former hunting lodge nestled in the woods two hours northwest of San Francisco in Inverness, Calif., was at the forefront of hyperlocal cuisine, a haven for chefs and celebrities and a national media darling.
Mrs. Grade (pronounced GRAH-dee) was more than an innkeeper. She had an uncanny ability to anticipate guests’ desires and sometimes had unusual ways of satisfying them.
“He’s not someone I would call warm, but you could always feel the touch of his hand in every room,” actress Frances McDormand, who spent years vacationing there with her family, said by telephone. . “She had an old-fashioned understanding of what true luxury is. Part of his true gift was creating a fantasy that you just fell into. It was witchcraft.
The fourth of 11 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 famous in international knitting circles. His father, John Oscar Grade, was a popular family doctor who hunted, fished and grew prodigious gardens.
Mrs. Grade, called Peg by her family, inherited his love of fast cars and food.
“He taught me by example that eating well, and the prelude to that, is part of a life lived fully,” she said in 2003.
Like many of her siblings, Ms. Grade chose to study medicine, heading first to nursing school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then to the California School of Professional Psychology at Berkeley ( which is now part of Alliant International University), where she obtained her degree. a doctorate in psychology. His thesis, published in 1984, was on boredom.
She established a practice working 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 Council and initiated global AIDS research.
Ms. Grade was looking for a second home in 1989 when she discovered the inn, which was named after its longtime owner, Manka Prokupek. She teamed up with her brother Thomas to buy it, and their younger brother Benjamin, head chef, took over the kitchen.
Mrs. Grade’s sister Johanna Perkins helped her transform the inn’s four rooms and ground-floor restaurant into a quirky arts-and-crafts gem with an aesthetic favoring enormous floral arrangements, foraged tree branches and a casual use of taxidermy: deer hooves serving as coat hooks, a squirrel welcoming 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 served for years as an advisor to a generation of Northern California chefs and food writers on whether she should devote her life to cooking. Ms Cunningham told him to read the works of food writers Richard Olney, Jane Grigson and MFK Fisher before making a decision.
Mrs. Grade never looked back, but managing both the kitchen and the inn was daunting. In 1998, she hired Northern California chef Daniel DeLong. Together they raised the kitchen and quickly became lovers. The two never married, but in 2008, they became parents to twins.
Using only food that Ms. Grade described as “at hand,” the couple prepared dishes from chanterelles that local children foraged in the woods, seafood pulled from the surrounding waters just hours before be served and remarkable local products like bread from the star baker. Chad Robertson and cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.
The descriptions of his daily menus were poetic. “Local king salmon on a throne of succulent bolina beans defended by a close cousin,” one explained. “Another sole rescued from the surrounding seas,” said another.
Ms. McDormand remembers a dish called something like “a little raft of local sea urchins floating in a bay of creamy corn chowder,” which her son devoured when he was 10, endearing him to the notoriously prickly Ms. Grade.
Ms. Grade spoke in a voice that seemed barely above a whisper, and she was private about her personal life, which attracted celebrities; they knew she would respect their privacy as well. Robert Redford shared the dining room with a local child celebrating his birthday. Sean Penn made chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. Chef Thomas Keller came for his birthday dinner.
But the real stars were those who brought in the raw products through the back door.
“If a duck farmer showed up and sold us sausages, it was like having King Charles in our establishment,” Luke Chamberlandwho cooked at Manka for seven years, told the newspaper The light of Point Reyes.
Mrs. Grade actually had Charles in her establishment. In 2005, while he was still a prince, he and his wife, Camilla, traveled to the United States in part to fuel his interest in organic farming. He visited restaurateur Alice Waters in her edible schoolyard in Berkeley, then went to Manka.
“She prepared 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’s, said in an interview. “I thought, when I looked at the menu, ‘Oh, my God, is he going to like this?'”
He did, including a dish that Ms. Grade called “a duck fit for a prince.”
In addition to her brother Matthew, Ms. Grade is survived by her children, Coco and Django Grade-DeLong, as well as six other siblings, Johanna Perkins, Mary Katherine Grade Reynolds and Benjamin, Andrew, Charles and Jean Therese Grade. She lived in Inverness.
On December 27, 2006, the inn, built of redwood, burned after an oak tree fell and a propane line was cut during a storm. Chef Elizabeth Falkner and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal were asleep upstairs. Mr. Gyllenhaal joined the rush to salvage as much of the burning building as possible.
Zoning laws prevented Ms. Grade from rebuilding. She continued to operate nearby cottages and purchased other properties, including Olema, a historic inn with a restaurant she named Sir and Star, which opened in good reviews in 2013. But she never recaptured the magic of Manka, and Olema has since closed its doors.
“His basic modus operandi was to be willing to break down laws and rigid structures,” his brother Matthew said.
This manifested itself once when Ms. Grade was trying to add high ceilings to a room she was renovating. The county zoning administrator insisted they could only be eight feet tall, Jim Emmott, who worked on his construction projects, told The Light. She pushed back.
“I don’t know if you realize this, but I’m in the fantasy business,” he remembers telling the administrator. “I wonder how you would expect me to place fantasy under an eight-foot ceiling. Does Disney World have an eight foot ceiling?
