Millennium’s dining room in 2003. (Photo: John Storey/The Chronicle.)
We rarely get a chance to say farewell to a restaurant. If we’re lucky, we spot a blog post warning us the restaurant has closed before passing by an apologetic sign in the door or finding a 404 message where the website used to be.
So I wasn’t surprised that, when my partner and I ate at Millennium’s San Francisco location for the last time, about a month after the 21-year-old vegan restaurant announced it was being forced out of the Hotel California, reservations were short and the room was filled with other celebratory mourners.
Of course, Millennium isn’t going away — it’s just leaving San Francisco.
Chef Eric Tucker and GM Alison Bagby said goodbye last week, but are moving the restaurant, under the same name, to Rockridge, with all luck taking just a month off to renovate their new space. But the departure of the city’s highest-profile, most successful vegan restaurant is a loss for San Francisco, and one that reverberates as strongly in certain circles as the closure of Capp’s Corner or Empress of China.
Before Millennium, there was Millie’s in San Rafael, a smaller, more casual vegetarian restaurant owned by brothers Brian and Dennis Malone and Dennis’s wife, Margaret. Eric Tucker started at Millie’s in 1991, moving to California from New Jersey to do his culinary school internship. Restaurants on the East Coast didn’t give a damn about produce, the chef remembers. At Millie’s, he says, the cooks would drive to the farmer market and hash out the night’s menu at the produce stalls. It was inspiring. He had no desire to train elsewhere.
Over the course of Tucker’s three years at Millie’s, the menu grew in complexity, shedding the macrobiotic heartiness — brown rice, aduki beans, kombu — that characterized the vegan cuisine of the time in favor of Asian and Latin flavors, which suited the traveler in Tucker just fine. In 1994, Joie de Vivre hotels CEO Chip Conley invited the Millie’s owners to move to the ground floor of his Abigail Hotel on McAllister Street. Tucker says Margaret jumped at the chance; if Greens could do such good business, she argued, there should be room for a high-end vegan restaurant. Tucker came along as head chef, and the Malones were soon replaced by current owners Larry and Ann Wheat.
Margaret Malone and Eric Tucker in Millennium’s original location, 1994 (Photo: John O’Hara/The Chronicle.)
The Millennium that opened in the Abigail was as grand as Greens, though without the view: With its black-and-white tile floors, white tablecloths and menu of colorful, culture-jumping entrees — if Instagram had existed back then, it would have been flooded with dish pics — it captured the attention of every vegetarian and vegetarian-supporter (like me) in the Bay Area.
“It was an exciting period before people understood what vegan cuisine could be,” says cookbook author Miyoko Schinner. Schinner now runs a vegan cheese company, but in the early 1990s, she operated a small vegan bistro in Japantown called Now & Zen. “When Millennium came onto the stage it was wonderful. I think there were a handful of places [in the country], but Millennium was one of the first, if not the first, white-tablecloth, gourmet, vegan restaurant.”
The reach of Tucker’s 1998 and 2003 Millennium cookbooks was national. Particularly inventive were the egg- and dairy-free pastries that Sascha Weiss (now at the Plant Cafe) and later Amy Pierce were concocting.
Eater national critic Bill Addison discovered the cookbook at his last cooking job in 1999, when he spent six months as the pastry chef at a vegan restaurant in Atlanta named In the Shade Cafe. “The recipes not only worked but had a level of sophistication that I had not found in any other vegan cookbook,” he says. “I would say prayers of gratitude to Sasha Weiss at 6 a.m. when I was whipping up Chocolate Midnight Cake and galettes with dairy-free, nut-enhanced crusts.”
Word began to spread outside of vegan circles. “We got some good press,” says Tucker. “It took a while to be busy enough to figure out our break-even point, but we got that that settled.” The opera and symphony crowds found Millennium, and would storm the dining room on performance nights.
Sean Baker, last the chef at Verbena and Gather, moved from Portland to cook at Millennium in 2002 and stayed until 2006, rising to sous-chef. “I had zero understanding of vegan food when I started,” he says. “I had never cut up five gallons of shallots and caramelized them all day, then added a burned-vegetable stock, dried porcinis and red wine to make a super-complex sauce that was remarkably good. That was the beginning of my understanding of how the different expressions of vegetables can allow you to layer interesting and complex flavors without adding animal proteins.” Tucker taught Baker to build up the umami of a dish — a real challenge for vegan cooks — with ingredients like miso, preserved black beans and Chinese fermented tofu.
In 2003, Millennium moved to an even more impressive, century-old space in the Hotel California. The Wheats warmed up the room with gauzy light fixtures and curtains, but left the high-ceilinged grandeur and carved-wood walls largely untouched.
The crusted oyster mushroom at Millennium, a menu staple.
Just as Greens has remained true to the vegetarian cuisine of the 1980s as it has endured, vegan — sorry, plant-based — cooking has moved in different directions since Millennium opened, most notably since the Michelin-star-awarded Ubuntu opened and closed in Napa. Restaurants like Veg in Philadelphia — currently Addison’s favorite vegetarian restaurant in the country — and Dirt Candy in New York have brought it into the era of deconstructed-nature-hike plates and faux-farmhouse cooking.
I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what the move frees Tucker to do — what dishes he shakes off, or new directions he moves into. What has impressed me on my last few dinners there is how busy the restaurant has remained after 20 years, and how put-together the clientele is. Besides being a required stop for any of my vegetarian friends visiting San Francisco, Millennium draws conference attendees, business travelers, symphony subscribers and Bay Area diners in their 50s who have been patronizing the restaurant since the days when they could barely afford it.
There is no other place in San Francisco like it. Yes, there is Greens, but as Margaret Malone decided 21 years ago, this town continues to be big enough for two, three, even five high-end vegetarian restaurants.
For most vegetarians, let alone vegans, going out for a special occasion still means picking through the menu to find the one or two dishes they can eat, or quizzing the waiter for five minutes about the stock the rice was cooked with, or being stuck with the pasta once again. Lest you think that this doesn’t happen in San Francisco in 2015, you haven’t been dining out with vegetarians. With Millennium’s move to Oakland, the city loses a place where vegans can open the menu and order every thing on the page, no concessions made. That shouldn’t feel like a luxury, but it does.
My last dinner at Millennium was typical of so many meals there: vivid, colorful and carefully executed. As usual, half of the dishes could have shed a couple of elements, but a spectacular nettle pipian sauce accompanying one of the most tender mushroom tamales I’ve eaten there in years reminded me why the dining room was packed after January’s announcement. What Millennium is doing still resonates.
Sean Baker agrees. “Any restaurant that stays open for 20 years,” he says, “shows that there’s a whole lot of validity to that restaurant. It could have gone on for another 10 years in that space.”
