Larry Mindel – Marin Restaurateur and Industry Pioneer

Restaurateur Larry Mindel has lived in and loved Marin for 41 years. These days he is the director of Il Fornaio restaurant group, with the corporate offices in Town Center in Corte Madera, and owner of Poggio Trattoria in Sausalito. He and his wife Debbie live in a Tudor-style home overlooking Sausalito harbor.

One of his greatest accomplishments is that he changed how Bay Area people perceived Italian food.

Through his Spectrum Restaurant Group he opened such ground breaking Italian restaurants as Prego and Ciao in San Francisco and Chianti in Los Angeles. His restaurants were hip and served cutting edge Italian food, much like the fare you could enjoy in Italy.

Until then, in San Francisco you had continental cuisine, a mishmash of French and Italian dishes and Italian American food. He could have called any of his restaurants, “Beyond Spaghetti and Meatballs.”

A visit to Ciao in the late 70s was an eye opener in more than one way. The place was sparkling white and partially decorated with dowels draped with pasta. Better yet they served freshly made pasta.

At Prego, there was one of the first wood-burning ovens, before it became the rage.

He also launched MacArthur Park and Guaymas, each unique in their own way. Guaymas was not opened until 1987.

In 1984 he sold his Spectrum Company to the Irvine-based Saga Group. Looking for another challenge he eventually bought the Il Fornaio group in 1987. At that time it was just four bakeries, with no restaurant component. Il Fornaio was in trouble.

His brilliant idea was to add a restaurant to the bakery formula. But the rub was he had signed a covenant to not build a restaurant in any of Saga-Spectrum’s markets.

“I wish I could say the building of the Il Fornaio was more romantic, but Palo Alto and San Francisco were out,” says Mindel.

“The one place that didn’t have a Spectrum restaurants, was where I lived, Marin County,” he explains.

“I kicked a lot of tires in Marin and ended up building the first restaurant of my whole career, not only in Corte Madera, but in a shopping center – until then, I didn’t think it was appropriate; how things have changed.”

Town Center was opened in 1984 and as Mindel tells it, it wasn’t terribly upscale. There was a JCPenney’s and some other stores. Mindel took over the space, which had housed a failed French restaurant.

On a personal note, my boy friend and I would travel from the City to Il Fornaio because no restaurant there was offering Italian-style rotisserie duck and rabbit. 

Marin wasn’t and isn’t a hotbed of new restaurants. People in Marin sometimes bemoan the fact we don’t have more restaurants, but the deciding factor is that the whole county has less than 300,000 in population. San Francisco has over 800,000 in population and 17 million tourists a year.  That’s a lot of people to fill restaurant seats.

Today, Il Fornaio has 20 restaurants across the nation, including the original in Corte Madera, which still offers rotisserie duck and rabbit to this day.