Win This Restaurant: Pace Could Be Yours

The Snyder family of Pace food + drink is so good at the restaurant game, their eldest son, Ryan, was born on trade. Back when Jeff Snyder owned San Francisco’s RSVP Restaurant, people would exchange services for dinners — even ob-gyns. “Not in our day and age,” recalled his wife, Kim Snyder, “but 29 years ago, it was possible.”

The Snyders’ latest baby has been the 50-seat Pace itself, which they opened at 413 State Street in February 2012 to instant acclaim, including a Foodie Award from this newspaper. Prior to that, Jeff worked at L’Auberge del Mar in San Diego, but the family wanted a spot of their own. After some false starts, this property came on the market and was ideal. “An open kitchen, right on State Street, and who doesn’t want to live in Santa Barbara?” said Jeff. “We were doing it as a family and wanted to set the boys up.” Those boys, Ryan and Cole, “poured their hearts and souls into it for two years,” said Jeff, but it turns out restaurants are not what they want to do.

Instead of just selling the business, though, the Snyders are going to give it away. “We want to find someone passionate about this business and give them an opportunity of a lifetime,” said Jeff. That opportunity includes the restaurant and beer and wine license; the lease paid for a year; insurances paid for a year; $20,000 in working capital to help cover expenses; and mentoring from the Snyders. “After 35 years in this business, this is our opportunity to give back — it’s like Pay It Forward,” insisted Jeff. “If we can come downtown in a year or two and walk into the restaurant we used to own and it’s a success, then we did our job. I can’t even imagine how we’ll feel.”

Want to read the rest then do so at the Indy's site.

Or enter the contest and learn more at Pace's site directly.

Top of the Scallops

Not to go on and on about a place, but we've been totally taken with Pace food + drink, and this plate last night embodied all the restaurant does well. Those scallops are perfectly cooked, and anyone who has ever tried that at home knows how tricky that is. Sure, they have to cook fast, but you can sear them so quickly you end up with scallop sashimi in the middle. Not these. Instead they have that nice surface crisp but then are actually cooked, too, but not a bit over. They play very well with the shiitakes sliced over the top, the mushrooms' earthiness meeting the scallops' sea. The sauce is sake based, and that gives another kind of sweet, but more importantly another kind of off-sweet sweet (so unlike, say, vanilla, which however pleasant inevitably pushes a dish towards dessert).

The rest of the plate works well, too, the saffron rice bringing back childhood memories of, and this is going to sounds like a bad thing but it isn't, Rice-a-Roni, but sans the MSG, and buttered, not margarined. (I am a child of the '70s, I can't help it. At least the rice isn't stuffed into a Cornish hen.) And then the care of cooking that met the scallops also was brought to bear on the asparagus, just at the point where it's soft and not a bit stringy, and really taking on the almost-down-to-caramel onions and the red pepper flavors. Perhaps there's a bit of broth at work there, too, making sure the side dish isn't just a sideshow.

Wash it all down with a Cismontane Citizen, a California Common lager that is anything but common (thanks for re-inventing this old style, guys), and you have a perfect dinner, so much so we blew off buying stuff at the Farmers' Market as what could we do at home to compare?

Pace Is the Place

The space at 413 State Street has been home to so many establishments during the past few years — Lettuce B. Frank, Billies, Momma Donna —it’s easy to wonder if the place is jinxed. But the latest occupant to give it a go-round — Jeff Snyder, owner of Pace food + drink with his wife, Kim Snyder — isn’t buying any notions of a curse. “Too many people get into the restaurant business that shouldn’t,” he said. “We’ve been in this business so long we knew what we were getting into.”

Want to read the rest then do so at the Indy's site.