New gourmet brunch series comes to Laurel Mill Lodge
By Suzanne Cristallo
Anyone with a yen for the mountain culture will want to save Aug. 6 for Sunday Brunch at the Laurel Mill Lodge. It's a 20-minute drive on Highway 17--up the mountain, down into a valley, among the redwoods and into a setting Mountain Charlie would recognize. There, on 27 acres complete with creek, meadow and forest, is a 100-year-old retreat that once was a mill supplying redwood to an earthquake-ruined San Francisco.
Today, it is the lifelong restoration project and dream of owners Esther Seehof and Bob Kundas. They are known to locals for the many firewalks, retreats and camp-overs they have hosted for the past nine years in the big lodge with its four-foot high fireplace and hot tub, its green belt for outdoor camping, and the cozy cabins and A-frame dorms for guests.
This is the second year the two are offering Sunday brunches. The Aug. 6 feast, and two planned for Aug. 27 and Sept. 10, will be catered by Craig Ponkey, a mountain neighbor several ridges over who brings his 18 years of culinary expertise to the a-la-carte menu with entrees starting at $12.50.
Ponkey will bake salmon fillets for the first brunch, along with salmon benedict and tapenade benedict, roast pork loin, a variety of omelettes, sourdough pancakes, stuffed bell peppers with tomato sauce, couscous and several vegetable dishes. There will also be a wheeled cart featuring a selection of side dishes such as hummus with pita chips, roasted garlic on crostini, sausage and Canadian bacon, roasted red potatoes and pasta salad.
New this year is a children's menu that challenges the mundane choices usually offered in restaurants: "green eggs and ham," pigs-in-a-blanket and "Barney's friends"--chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs.
Ponkey, 37, started learning about cooking as an 8-year-old when his grandmother grabbed him by the ear and hauled him into the kitchen "where you can learn something useful."
The love of cooking he gained led him to cook for the Marriott and Radisson hotels, the San Jose Country Club, California Cafe and, most recently, the Sea Cloud Restaurant in Santa Cruz.
Now Ponkey caters for friends and neighbors in the mountain community under the auspices of his Rest-U-Want Catering Company. He sustains his kitchen art with a night job at the NUMMI truck assembly plant in Fremont. The hour and a quarter commute starting at 3 p.m. with his return at 2 a.m. is worth it, he says, "for the awesome benefits and the freedom is gives me to be with my family"--wife Shannon and two children with another "still in the oven." Ponkey's life is varied between assembling Toyota trucks, building horse stalls, caring for his girls, two horses, four goats, three dogs and cats and whipping up special sauces.
Laurel Mill Lodge, 16770 Redwood Lodge Rd, Los Gatos. Call 408.353.5851 for brunch reservations and directions. For information on Rest-U-Want Catering Company, call 408.268.0291.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
Bob Kundas and Esther Seehof take a work break.
