At the very end of our interview at his Oakland restaurant, Paul Einbund picks the napkin off his lap as if he were noticing it for the first time. It’s a simple white one, with a blue stripe on one edge.
“It looks just like a tallis!” he exclaims. “What a Jew-y napkin!”
Like some other food-scene folks who have been featured in this column, Einbund has followed a career path without a whole lot of Jewish flavor. He’s a great storyteller, though, and his sense of humor is 100 percent Jewish.
“Sometimes I think I am a bagel,” he said, given the frequency with which he eats them, several times a week. “I am probably 50% bagel.”
Einbund, 54, is co-owner of The Morris, a 9-year-old restaurant near San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, and Sirene, a restaurant on Oakland’s Grand Avenue that opened in January. Just a few months later, the San Francisco Chronicle named Sirene the “Bay Area’s best new restaurant of the year so far.”
Before his current renown, Einbund made a name for himself as a largely self-taught sommelier, working at fine-dining restaurants in San Francisco, such as Coi, Octavia and Frances.
Both The Morris and Sirene — co-owned with chef Gavin Schmidt, whom Einbund met while they were both at Coi — are elevated neighborhood restaurants with a reputation for excellent food, super-lengthy wine lists and an emphasis on service.
“They’re both very quirky places,” Einbund said, when asked what the two have in common besides their ownership.
They both “polish up the food and make it a little bit finer,” he added, “but they’re still casual, comfortable neighborhood-y restaurants.”
Main courses at The Morris start at $42, but it is best known for its whole smoked duck entrée at $180. Sirene leans more on seafood, with main courses starting at $25.
Einbund definitely takes pride in the personal touches at his restaurants, whether that’s joking with customers as they arrive or adding his father’s signature to the custom-made wooden handles for the knives at The Morris.
“A restaurateur friend of mine came to town recently from the Pacific Northwest, and he dined all over the place,” Einbund said. “He said something like, ‘If I were blindfolded and brought into one of your restaurants, I would instantly know, based on the service.’ That’s the thing I care most about.”
The Morris is named in memory of his father, but that’s not because he instilled in his son a love of food. In fact, it was just about the opposite.
Once Einbund worked his way up to finer restaurants, he would invite his father, only to hear him complain.
Morris Einbund, who went by Mike, “was addicted to smoking and gummy bears and mints, and not to food,” he said of his father. He didn’t live long enough to come to the restaurant named in his memory, but he visited other restaurants where his son worked and would say, “There’s no flavor.”
“I’d be thinking, ‘You just can’t taste,’” the restaurateur said.
Einbund called it a “posthumous elbow to the ribs” to name The Morris after his father.
His childhood memories of food revolve around his mother cooking mostly with boxed mixes. However, like many Southern Californians of a certain generation, we bonded over memories of frequenting Diamond Bakery on Fairfax Avenue in L.A., an iconic Jewish establishment that closed in 2023 after nearly eight decades in business.
When Einbund was growing up in the city of Orange in Orange County — not a bagel mecca, he said — his parents always bought lox spread for their bagels rather than slices of lox.
“Now I have lox constantly, and I think I do that because of that Depression mentality my dad had.”
Though he remembers a wine rack in his house, the bottles were never touched. The first time he got drunk, he joked, was probably with Manischewitz.
One of the food-related memories that he cherishes happened in his 20s when he tasted an heirloom tomato for the first time. It was picked straight off the vine in Napa, and the flavor blew his mind.
When Einbund was attending college, his father told him to get a job either waiting tables or selling shoes because he felt that both were fairly lucrative jobs in those days. That early introduction to restaurants and the hospitality industry took hold.
“I remember my first waiter trainer at Bobby McGee’s in Newport Beach saying to me, you know, if you work hard, kid, this could be a career for you,” he recalled. “I remember vomiting in my mouth and thinking, no way. Yet here I am, 36 years later.”