Jesse Branstetter’s mantra may as well be simple, good food, period.
When Café Q opened in January 2012, Thu-Huong Nguyen and her brother Minh Nguyen, an architect, envisioned nearby Alameda High School students as a primary customer base for the Encinal Avenue fast-casual service restaurant offering a healthy-choices concept.
Those clients, however, proved fickle and tricky to anticipate, so food costs soared, prompting some necessary rethinking. Ultimately Jesse Branstetter, 39, a restaurant veteran (notably, one of three chef founders of Oakland’s popular Chop Bar) with experience on the operations and kitchen sides and a restaurant biz consultant, stepped in and recommended ditching the market retail component of the restaurant and also streamlined and simplified the menu.
The result from the consultant-turned-partner’s advice is a new and improved Café Q, more of a fine-dining restaurant, though its strategy still adheres to the Nguyens’ original vision of serving high-quality, simple, good food.
“We were on the same page about a lot of things,” says Branstetter, a Palm Desert native who started cooking at age 14 at Doug Arango’s. Café Q marks his 20th working establishment, so Branstetter has had time to perfect his MO, one of accentuating simplicity. “I like to make approachable food,” he says
Branstetter credits his late Irish grandmother, Mary Branstetter, an original locavore with a Midwestern palate and sons who raised and slaughtered animals for family sustenance, and a friend’s mother, DeeDee Robles, who embraced her Mexican, Italian, and French heritage in her cooking style, as inspiring his love for food and influencing what he puts together.
Branstetter, a thoughtful guy and a fast thinker, sips RoastCo Coffee—he’s pals with founder and master roaster Alex Roberts and credits Roberts with hooking him up with Minh Nguyen—while espousing his food philosophy from a window seat at Café Q in a recent afternoon interview. To Branstetter, food crosses all cultures and unites people. “Everyone eats,” he says, admitting his own penchant for familiar food that “makes people happy.”
Been to Café Q lately? Gangbusters weekend brunches plate up the uncomplicated daily breakfast items plus corned beef hash and poached eggs, chilaquiles rojos, and eggs Benedict. But what Branstetter is most excited about is dinner, where patrons can dig into comfort foods like meatloaf, baby back ribs, mussels and fries, and steak and fries. On the horizon: family-style meals and takeout. What are you waiting for?
Café Q, 2302 Encinal Ave., Alameda, 510-521-8848,
7 a.m.–10 p.m. Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–10 p.m. Sat., 8 a.m.–3 p.m. Sun.
www.cafeqalameda.com.
This article appears in the July-August 2013 issue of Alameda Magazine
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