I ’m heading to the Crêpe Place to find my buddies Rhan Wilson and Rick Zeek, who take care of the stunning Crêpe Place garden. I park 50 feet from the door, which is amazing because the Crêpe Place is abuzz with 30 construction workers, kitchen staff workers and bar staff workers.
The place is turned as upside down as an Escher painting, and they are all laughing and shouting—“We open in four hours!” … ”Hey, does this painting work over the John Lennon poster?”—while a band of musicians are setting up who look so young they must be carrying fake IDs.
It’s been an epicenter for the independent music scene since returning owner Adam Bergeron started the music in 2007. The place feels as comfortable to me as a friend’s back porch but serves food as good as home, or better. There are small, separate tables in the bar for those who want to chill by themselves, but it is hard not to jump up on a stool at the bar to listen to the stories of trials and tribulations of longtime Santa Cruzans. I’m a pothead and don’t drink much, but for some reason at the Crêpe Place I can drink a Dr Pepper at the bar and get a contact drunk off the infectious, positive vibe.
Adam 2.0
After a seven-year hiatus, former owners Adam Bergeron and wife Jaimi Holker have repurchased The Crepe Place, but this time they also bought the property and the new remodel goes deep: flooring replaced; ceiling rebuilt; windows, kitchen and garden bar all remodeled, all new—but with the intent to make it look like the same Crêpe Place I’ve been walking into for 20 years. The garden in back predates the building. Adam estimates the garden has been there since the 1890s.
Rhan and Rick are off somewhere building the back bar, so I join the new owners and new general manager Amy Di Chiro at the round table on the back garden stage. We bathe in late afternoon sunlight that makes the surrounding array of succulents glow.
Adam explains that he and Jaimi came back because they missed it from the moment they sold it to Chuck Platt on Jan. 26, 2018. They feel magic in the Crêpe Place. “It’s one of those kinds of places that is either special to you or not. A lot of people find it special, and we’re two of them.”
That’s Crêpe!
When general manager Amy Di Chiro smiles, she goes wide, displaying a healthy set of teeth and a spirit in her eyes that laughs.
I say that I would like to ask about her restaurant food. She beams that smile and says, “That would be crêpe.”
“So, Amy Di Chiro, what does a general manager do?”
“You plunge toilets and scrub them. In that order.” Amy beams, “This is our house. We want you to feel welcome, all of you.
“We want to feed you, we want to entertain you, and we want to keep you safe. And I think that that’s what young people and older people are looking for, especially now.” She says that she is lucky, “because we have a great bar manager doing the liquor orders, Nick Gyorkos.”
‘Crêpes in the Womb’
To bar manager Nick Gyorkos, the Crêpe Place feels like the last bastion of the Santa Cruz he grew up in—a place for everyone, where all are accepted, that is colorful both in personality and actual spectrum of light. “My Santa Cruz is quirky and old, unabashedly gripping its ways, resisting the changes that are going on in the world. And for me, the Crêpe Place continues that forward. It’s all of those things wrapped into one, in an old Victorian building, clinging to Mid-Town.” He laments that so many of the old Santa Cruz restaurants are gone. “We still have the Shadowbrook, the Crow’s Nest and Little Tampico.”
Nick grew up going to the Crêpe Place when it was down by the Clock Tower. “I’ve always loved the Crêpe Place. My parents would go there often. I was fed crêpes in the womb.” He has worked for all the owners—a fixture at the Crêpe Place since Marlene and Gary Keeley owned it.
Nick sees returning owner Adam as a savant, in communicating with people, in booking music and in knowing the way things will work. He admires Adam’s ethos: If you build it, they will come. “Sure, Adam hustles and gets shit done, but I think the big plus that Adam brings is a magnetism and an ability to communicate what he wants. It all gets done, well done.”
Laurence Bedford, owner-operator of the Rio Theatre, up the street from the Crêpe Place, says that Adam has a boundless energy of “can do.” Laurence sees him bringing that to the staff: “In the 10 days since Adam’s return, he’s changed the entire physical space, he’s already got the bands lined up, and you can already feel how the staff is energized. The dude is like running four movie theaters. He really is like The Dude. You can feel his charisma.”
Quintessentially Santa Cruz
Gary and Marlene Keeley opened the Crêpe Place in February 1973, in a small building on the corner of Ocean Street and Soquel. Adam Bergeron started doing salads at the Crêpe Place when he was 20. “I got trained by Marlene Keeley, the original crêpe person, the one who thought of it all.” Adam believes her spirit of “let’s just make this work” still flows through him and the restaurant.
His tenure at the Crêpe Place had a quintessentially Santa Cruz beginning.
Marlene was smoking a cigarette when he came to her with his hippie beard to be interviewed. She said, “Dude, want a beer?” Adam was not yet 21 and of course said yes. She asked him if he wanted a piece of hot chocolate cake. She asked him if he wanted it with whipped cream.
“She put like a shitload of whipped cream on it. Then she took me to the back, and we got stoned. We never spoke about the job. Then she said, ‘Go home and shave that stupid beard and come back tomorrow. Dude, you got the job.’ That was March of 1990.”
The Mission
Adam sees Santa Cruz transforming into the future really fast. He wants the Crêpe Place to be like a time machine to let people travel backwards to hold on to something that’s really special about Santa Cruz. “What if they could get a taste and appreciation for what Santa Cruz is at a restaurant, with entertainment and events that make it a gathering place for Santa Cruzans?”
All the new high rises don’t align with where he’s at. “I essentially escaped LA to come to Santa Cruz 20 years ago. This intense, dense, high-rise growth is what happened to my little town of LA. Ha! You know, this feels like that did, all over again. But, when you find a place that preserves the magic of a community, I just want the people who are moving into these new high-rise buildings to know about it…to feel the magic that makes this town special.”
Amy thinks it’s great to see that there’s a younger generation coming in and is excited that they have the Grateful Dead community coming together every Sunday. “We’re celebrating Grateful Sundays with the Hartle Gold Band, something that’s, like, really precious to this community.”
Amy says they’re updating the menu offering with new fare for the younger crowd, staying true to their crêpe roots, but looking toward fresher salads.
“I call them high vibe salads, something that appeals to the more gluten-free, organic folks. And expand the menu beyond what we’ve been doing for 52 years.”
They’re also excited about burgers, chicken sandwiches and tacos. “The cooks have been feeding the staff tacos for 20 years, and now on Mondays we serve them to everyone,” she says.
Whole Experiences
Adam is in charge of the entertainment and says that his two stages, the garden stage in back and the bar performance space in front, are stages for all artists, not just musicians. They want to bring in vaudeville, comedy, visual art shows, burlesque, book fairs. Adam says, “Hit me up with your idea—we want to create a community space, a place where you could have a little light in your life right now.”
Even the Crêpe Place background music has changed. No more Spotify playlist; they use two turntables to play complete vinyl albums, so people get a whole album, not just the hits. Adam says, “We want you to experience the whole album of what Stevie Wonder has to say, on the vinyl that he created his sound for. You get all of him, the way he recorded it.”
Much like the old KPIG radio, or the new K-SQuiD, where the jocks bring albums from home, Adam told his staff, “If you have a vinyl record collection, maybe bring a bag with you when you come to work. Maybe today’s your day.” Adam grins as he says his turntables have recently graced the Mantles (a band Adam tells me is ‘Old Crêpe), Kelley Stoltz and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. “People recognize that they are listening to a vinyl album and will stop eating to talk about the artist.”
My wife Julie said, “You can move away for twenty years and whenever you come back, the Crepe Place is where you want to go, someplace where people know your name.” As for me, I’m a fool for this place. I think you ought to be a fool and try it.
The Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-429-6994. Open seven days a week. thecrepeplace.com.
