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By Elena Kadvany
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I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in journalism. Though my first love is journalism, food is a close second. I am constantly on the lookout for new restaurants to try, building an ever-expanding "to eat" list. As a journalist, I'm always trolling news sources and social media websites with an eye for local food news, from restaurant openings and closings to emerging food trends. When I was a teenager growing up in Menlo Park, I always drove up to the city on weekends with the singular purpose of finding a better meal than I could at home. But in the past year or so, the Peninsula's food culture has been totally transformed, with many new restaurants opening and a continuous stream of San Francisco restaurants coming south to open Peninsula outposts. Don't navigate this food boom hungry and alone! Feed me your tips on new chefs and eats and together we'll share them with the broader community.
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Menlo Park's Bistro Vida gets a Michelin-starred French chef
Uploaded: Jun 2, 2015
Here's a first: A Michelin-starred chef from Paris is coming to Menlo Park this month to work a two-year stint at downtown French restaurant
Bistro Vida.
Marine Thomas of
La Rollange, a French tapas bar in Montmartre (sister restaurant to a well-known restaurant named La Table d'Eugène), will touch down in the United States June 5.
Chef Marine Thomas. Photo courtesy of Thomas.
Almost two years ago, on a friend's recommendation, Bistro Vida owner Ali Elsafy went to La Rollange and "left blown away," he said.
"I went almost every night to eat," he recently recalled.
Elsafy has since returned many times and became friends with Thomas, who for many years had wanted to work in the United States, she said. She was initially looking for a job in New York, but then met Elsafy and the stars aligned.
More than eight months ago, as Elsafy started plotting changes for the Santa Cruz Avenue restaurant, they started a laborious visa process to get Thomas here. Outside of menu tweaks, the most significant change for the restaurant in ever-sleepy downtown Menlo Park might be a plan to keep Bistro Vida open until 11 p.m., serving wine pairings and simple late-night food.
Thomas started working at La Table d'Eugène in 2009 with chef Geoffroy Maillard. After two years, Maillard opened La Rollange and asked her to be the chef there.
Thomas said her philosophy in the kitchen is to always cook with love "because if you cook with love, we always get good food," she wrote in an email. She "does not have a special way of cooking" but instead develops dishes based on seasonal produce. She'll fit right in in the Bay Area. She plans to offer a menu "suited to the region" that highlights California products, she said.
"She's going to be something really good for Menlo Park," Elsafy said.
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