Margaret Grade, a neuropsychologist from California who made a sharp career turn to open a welcoming, eclectic inn near the Point Reyes National Seashore that was known to treat farmers and fishermen with the same attention as stars and the film writers who sought refuge there. , died on February 28 in San Francisco. It 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 from complications related to her injuries, said her brother Matthew Grade, a doctor.
The introverted Mrs. Grade recognized that she was a very unlikely innkeeper.
“If they put me up front, I would be bad for business,” he said in a 2003 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. She also admitted that when she opened her inn, Manka’s Inverness Lodge, she didn’t have the first idea about running a shop. “I didn’t know the term ‘working capital’ and therefore had none,” he said.
Yet Manka’s, an old hunting lodge built in the woods two hours northwest of San Francisco in Inverness, Calif., was at the forefront of hyperlocal dining, a haven for chefs and celebrities and a national media darling.
Mrs. Grade (pronounced GRAH-dee) was more than an innkeeper. He had a preternatural ability to anticipate the wishes of visitors and sometimes had unusual ways of fulfilling them.
“She’s not what I would call warm, but you always felt the touch of her hand in every room,” actress Frances McDormand, who vacationed there with her family for years, said by phone. “He had an old-fashioned sense of what true luxury is. Part of her real gift was making a fantasy you just fell into. It was magical.”
The fourth of 11 children, Margaret Major Grade was born on December 9, 1951, in Elm Grove, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee. Her mother, Shirley Agnes (Bothwick) Grade, worked for a time as a journalist and became well known in international knitting circles. Her father, John Oscar Grade, was a popular family doctor who hunted, fished and cultivated amazing gardens.
Mrs. Grade, known to her family as Peg, inherited his love of fast cars and food.
“He taught me by example that eating well, and the prelude to it, is part of life lived fully,” he said in 2003.
Like many of her siblings, Ms. Grade chose to study medicine, going first to nursing school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then to the California School of Professional Psychology at Berkeley (now part of Alliant International University), where she graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology. Her thesis, published in 1984, was on ennui.
He established a clinic with lupus patients and conducted clinical brain research at the University of California, San Francisco. In the mid-1980s, he joined the San Francisco AIDS Advisory Board and initiated global AIDS research.
Mrs. Grade was looking for a second home in 1989 when she discovered the inn, named after its longtime owner, Manka Prokupek. She partnered with her brother Thomas to buy it, and their younger brother Benjamin, a chef, took over the kitchen.
Mrs. Grade’s sister, Johanna Perkins, helped her transform the inn’s four rooms and main-floor restaurant into a quirky Arts and Crafts gem with an aesthetic that favors massive floral arrangements, foraged tree branches and a cute use of taxidermy: deer hooves. which serve as clothing. hooks, a squirrel greeting guests at the front desk, 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 a mentor to a generation of Northern California chefs and food writers, to ask her if she should dedicate her life her in cooking. Mrs Cunningham told her to read the work of food writers Richard Olney, Jane Grigson and MFK Fisher before making up her mind.
Mrs. Grade never looked back, but running through both the kitchen and the inn was terrifying. In 1998, he hired Northern California chef Daniel DeLong. Together they upgraded the kitchen and were soon romantically linked. The two never married, but in 2008 they became parents to twins.
Using only food that Ms Grade described as “nearby”, the pair crafted mushroom dishes from mushrooms local children foraged in the forest, seafood plucked from the surrounding waters hours before it was served and notable local produce such as bread from the baker. Chad Robertson and cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.
The descriptions on her daily menu were poetic. “The 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 something like “a tiny raft of local sea urchin floating in a bay of creamed corn”, which her son devoured when he was 10, endearing him to the notoriously prickly Mrs Grade.
Ms Grade spoke in a voice that seemed just above a whisper and was private about her personal life, which delighted the celebrities. they knew he would respect their privacy as well. Robert Redford shared the dining room with a local kid celebrating a birthday. Sean Penn made chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. Chef Thomas Keller came for his birthday dinner.
But the real stars were the people who brought the raw produce to the tailgate.
“If a duck farmer showed up and sold us sausage, that was akin to King Charles at our store,” Luc Chamberland, who cooked at Manka’s for seven years, told The Point Reyes Light newspaper.
Mrs. Grade did have Charles in her shop. In 2005, when he was still a prince, he and his wife, Camilla, traveled to the United States in part to fuel his interest in organic farming. Visited restaurateur Alice Waters at her Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, then headed to Manka’s.
“She made the most beautiful luncheon 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. “I thought, when I looked at the menu, ‘Oh my God, is he going to like this?’
He did, including a dish Mrs. Grade called “a duck fit for a prince.”
In addition to her brother Matthew, Mrs. Grade is survived by her children, Coco and Django Grain de Long, and six other siblings, Johanna Perkins, Mary Kathryn Greynolds and Benjamin, Andrew, Charles and Jean Therese Grade. He lived in Inverness.
Early on December 27, 2006, the inn, built of redwood, burned after an oak tree fell and severed a propane line during a storm. Chef Elizabeth Falkner and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal slept upstairs. Mr. Gyllenhaal joined the rush to save as much of the burning building as possible.
Zoning laws prevented Ms. Grade from rebuilding. She and Mr. DeLong continued to operate cabins nearby and bought other properties, including Olema, a historic inn with a restaurant they called Sir and Star, which opened to rave reviews in 2013. But the couple never recaptured the Manka magic. and Olema’s has since been closed.
“Her basic modus operandi was to be willing to make laws and rigid structures evaporate,” her brother Matthew said.
This was seen once when Mrs. Grade was trying to add high ceilings to a room she was renovating. The county’s zoning administrator insisted they could only be eight feet tall, Jim Emmott, who worked on its building 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’d plan to fit the imagination under an eight-foot ceiling. Does Disney World have an eight-foot ceiling?’
