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Tamir Ben-Shalom, owner of Bull Valley Roadhouse in Port Costa, seeks to transport diners to another place, another time, another mindset.
“I still remember doing the drive for the first time and thinking, when is it going to end?” he said. “And then you arrive. Any thoughts and dreams you had about what you wanted to eat beforehand will all change once you walk in the door. You’re somehow trapped in this other world.”
Though it serves American farm-to-table fare like other restaurants across the Bay Area, Bull Valley Roadhouse is truly something different. Located in a village along the Carquinez Strait in northwestern Contra Costa County, it was built as a hotel in 1897. Much of the dining room decor comes from when it was known as the Bull Valley Inn. Like a pre-Prohibition saloon, it’s moody and dark. The walls are decorated with antique photographs and taxidermy. Vintage chandeliers give off a warm glow. It almost feels a bit haunted, and one night not too long ago, the power went out, forcing my dinner party to finish by candlelight.
The place has changed hands and names numerous times, reopening in its latest incarnation in 2012. Ben-Shalom came on as bar manager in 2013. Earlier this year, he became 100 percent owner.
Raised in Albany and Berkeley, the 47-year-old restaurateur is the product of an Israeli father of Yemenite descent and an American Ashkenazi mother. They met on Kibbutz Ein Harod in the early 1970s and were in Israel during the Yom Kippur War before coming to the U.S.
After marrying on the East Coast, his parents hitchhiked their way across the country, settling in the East Bay. In the late 1970s, his father was a partner in Mella’s, a falafel business near the UC Berkeley campus that also catered for the Greek Theatre. Ben-Shalom felt at the time that he only got to eat Yemenite or Israeli food when the family visited his father’s relatives back home.
“You couldn’t get good hummus or pita here then,” he said.
I became super geeky about it. There was this knowledge that people were craving, going back in time from when cocktails were really good
Once he graduated from high school, Ben-Shalom bused tables to earn extra cash. Plenty of his friends worked in the food industry too. Through them, he got exposed to different kinds of restaurants.
“It wasn’t so much what you’re eating, but the whole environment,” he said. “I fell in love with the dining-out aspect of it.”
Through those friends, he got to know the owners of Lalimes, then a mainstay of Berkeley restaurants. When they opened Fonda on Solano Avenue, Ben-Shalom got a busing job there.
One day, when it was slow, his bartender friend was working on a recipe for a caipirinha, the national cocktail of Brazil that features fresh lime, sugar and a distilled spirit made from fermented sugarcane juice. Ben-Shalom realized she was making it wrong and told her what to do instead. That was all it took.
“The next day I was picking mint behind the bar,” he said. He quickly moved up the ladder from there to bartending and then bar managing.
His interest in cocktail culture came around the time when bartenders who memorized drink recipes were becoming mixologists who created their own. Around the same time, the farm-to-table ethos was crossing over into the craft cocktail movement. All herbs, juices, syrups, shrubs and other mixers had to use the freshest local produce, too.
“I became super geeky about it. There was this knowledge that people were craving, going back in time from when cocktails were really good, before Prohibition.”
He also worked at the Slanted Door, a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco, for a number of years before he came to Bull Valley.
The Bull Valley cocktail menu includes original cocktails such as Lost Costa, Moss of the Moors, Smoke & Daggers and Blood in the Water, as well as nonalcoholic cocktails like its Elderflower Spritzer and Ginger Shrub.
Ben-Shalom, who lives in Walnut Creek, said he hadn’t planned on buying a restaurant until later in life. But he now owns an establishment well worth the trip.