Mark Hopper Opens Vignette in the Barlow, Brings Napoli to Sebastopol

Slow Food in Action at a Sebastopol Pizza Restaurant

November 20, 2014

©Copyright 2014: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

Mark closed Vignette mid-April, 2018

Don’t Call it Gourmet

“I don’t want to say I make gourmet pizza.  What is that, anyway?  Let’s call what I do ‘Elevated familiar’” 

After two hours of interviewing time with Mark Hopper, I came away with a feeling I had been with a Zen master.  From the basic principles of Zen one learns that there is no separation between subject and object.  The quality of our experiences depends on the interrelationship between the two.  A good example would be the symbiosis of trees and bees.  Take away one and you take away the other at the same time.  In the case of Mark Hopper and his penchant for quality, it is not possible to experience his pizza without experiencing the quintessential Mark Hopper.  Perhaps it is not possible to understand what he has accomplished without understanding him as a person.

Analogies from the World of Music

Let me jump backwards in time to when people bought devices called gramophones

to listen to music.  Live music has not changed, only the way to record and reproduce it.  By comparison to today’s electronic evolution, the first recorded music was muffled, scratchy and severely restricted by the crude methods used to capture the sinusoidal vibrations emanating from the voices and musical instruments being recorded.  As much of a titanic breakthrough as it may have been to convert sound vibrations to a hard surface that could be recovered by a vibrating needle transmitting those vibrations to a sound horn, the actual fidelity of the emitted sound was 100 times less than a cheap car radio of today, something more along the lines of a real bad phone connection. (Fidelity in sound refers to accuracy in the reproduction of the original sound.)

Fidelity became the buzzword of the 1950’s as record players came to market in a new genre referred to as “High Fidelity”.  The improvement over what came before was self-evident; things had improved and we thought we had achieved sound accuracy.  

But the sound systems of today make the old Hi Fi systems seem as rustic as the Hi Fi systems made the gramophones seem.  Stereophonic digital music played on highly sophisticated amplification and sound delivery system equipment is convincingly close to the real thing.  We all agree the quality bar has been raised significantly.

Mark Hopper, in his own personal development as a chef, has evolved through developmental and sequential growth from his first attempts to do what he saw his family do in the kitchen to the absolute pinnacle of culinary success.  His movement forward resembles the development of sound reproduction in that he has transformed his crude childhood attempts at cooking into a refined art taken to heights that would be the envy of every single beginner in the kitchen.

Sebastopol Blessed by a Legendary Chef

Sebastopol, our little town of 7000 people in the Wine Country of California, has been blessed profoundly by the fact that Mark Hopper chose this place to nest while embarking on his latest voyage: the application of his years of the most engaging, demanding, thrilling and character-building mind-blowing-restaurant management and cooking experiences to the simple medium of Neapolitan style, oven-fired pizza.

If you Google Mark Hopper Chef, you will end up with a lot of reading material on your desktop.  Mark is the culinary equivalent of famous musicians who dazzle audiences, silence them into intensely focused concentration and then see them burst forth with a resounding “BRAVO!” when they re-achieve the equilibrium they began listening with.  Why?  Because he studied with some of today’s ultimate masters of the fine art of food preparation and brought his deepest passion to his lessons.

Mark Hopper and Thomas Keller: willing student
learning from a most cogent teacher

In an interview with Decisive Magazine, Mark answered the question about how he got started like this: “I graduated from Newbury College in Boston. From there, I went to work in New York City, then St. Croix, followed by San Francisco. While working in San Francisco, my boss asked me if I had ever been to Thomas’ The French Laundry. I said no; he took me there the next Sunday for dinner. At the end of the meal, I was in love. I started working there on my own time. Soon I was working at The French Laundry full-time, slowly working my way up.”

The French Laundry isn’t just some job to jot down on your resume.  It is a credential that turns heads, a palate moistener.  Mark ended up being an executive chef for Thomas Keller and, as a result, was like the proverbial superior seed planted into the richest imaginable soil.

“Chef Thomas Keller visited Yountville, California, in the early 1990s to find a space to fulfill a longtime culinary dream: to establish a destination for fine French cuisine in the Napa Valley. In his travels, he came across a rustic two-story stone cottage. As he walked into the restaurant’s quaint courtyard, he knew it was where he had been headed throughout his career.

The French Laundry, a 1,600 square-foot structure constructed of river rock and timbers, was built as a saloon in 1900 by a Scottish stonemason. The building later served as a residence, and during the 1920s operated as a French steam laundry. In 1978, town mayor Don Schmitt and his wife Sally renovated the structure into a restaurant, which Keller then purchased in 1994.

The French Laundry has received numerous honors and accolades. Most recently, the Michelin Guide San Francisco awarded The French Laundry their highest rating of three stars for the sixth year in a row, making Thomas Keller the only American-born chef to have two three-starred Michelin restaurants. In 2006, the James Beard Foundation gave The French Laundry the highly coveted “Outstanding Restaurant Award” and awarded Chef Thomas Keller “Outstanding Restaurateur” in 2007.

The French Laundry is a member of French-based Relais & Chateaux, Relais Gourmands and Traditions & Qualité; organizations recognized for their dedication to maintaining the highest international standards for hospitality and culinary excellence.

Through The French Laundry’s menu, which changes daily, the restaurant commits itself to creating classic French cuisine with the finest quality ingredients, along with a similarly intense focus on impeccable guest service.”

Mark picked up other “credentials” along the way as he helped Keller open new restaurants and played an integral role in elevating the eating experience everywhere he went.  His last work experience was in Larkspur where another former executive chef for Keller opened his second restaurant and made Mark his executive chef.  By the time he was ready to leave the Larkspur location, there was no mystery to him in the kitchen, hardly any dish he could not prepare with flair, well enough to satisfy even the most discriminating taste buds on our planet.

After French Haut Cuisine, Why Pizza?

In spite of his ability to whip up dishes with names most of us would be humbled even trying to pronounce, much less prepare, Mark’s focus turned to pizza as he realized that he was launched, more than adequately prepared to do anything in the world of restaurants, ready to be on his own.  

He loves pizza. 

Millions of people love pizza and eat it every day.  Well, there’s pizza, and then there’s pizza.  There is the kind you get in the supermarket, frozen, the kind you get delivered to your backyard swim party, the kind you get at a pizza parlor and slices you can get at country fairs and so on.  Mark Hopper making a pizza is a transformation of expectations, an event that leads to a surprise the equivalent of Mozart playing Happy Birthday for you on your piano.  After being open just a little while here in Sebastopol, Jeff Cox, the restaurant reviewer whose words can burst all the bubbles of an eatery, whose effusive and complimentary praise is more rare than Burmese rubies, came to visit and had this to say about what Mark has brought to the preparation of authentic pizza:

“You have to understand that chef Mark Hopper at Vignette in The Barlow marketplace in Sebastopol is obsessed with making perfect pizza. But not just any pizza. He makes pizza like the best pies in Naples, Italy, replicating their style but improving on their taste.

The obsessive part probably developed from, or at least was exacerbated by, his work as executive chef of casual dining for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group (The French Laundry, Bouchon, Per Se, etc.). Keller’s intense fixation on detail and perfection is legend.

So to fully appreciate Hopper’s pizzas, you have either fallen in love with the Neapolitan style of tomato pie, or realize that what you will get at Vignette is a classic Napolitano pizza improved in flavor by the quality of the toppings available from the farms and gardens of our incomparable region. You will also be delighted with the chef’s knack for combining flavors in unique and intriguing ways, not just on his pizzas, but with his appetizers, too.

The focus at Vignette is the pizzas, which are cooked in a blue-and white- tiled, wood burning oven imported from Naples. The temperature is a blazing 800 degrees Fahrenheit, so the pizzas cook in about two minutes.

The pies start as dough made from extra fine flour from Italy infused with Sonoma County’s naturally-occurring yeasts. The chef hand-spreads the dough into rounds about 10 inches in diameter with a thicker edge around the rim. The emphasis in Naples isn’t on loading them with intense sauce and lots of different toppings, but on a light swirl of fresh tomato sauce, good cheeses — including buffalo mozzarella — and toppings that make culinary sense together. Hopper strives for that, even using locally- produced buffalo mozzarella when it’s available, which is not always. In a departure from tradition, Hopper will cut the pizzas into quarters — but he will serve them unsliced, as in Italy, when requested.”

When I first met Mark, he had just finished making one of his creations for my family.  I took only one bite and, after the surprisingly mouth-watering treat filled me in ways no pizza ever had before, had to congratulate him and shake his hand.  I looked into his face and experienced his boyish grin, one which I later found out comes from deep inside him, but masks the character of a possessed, mad-man-in-the-kitchen who is blessed with the exact right amount of humbleness to keep one from ever suspecting there to be arrogance or haughtiness behind the smile.

Born in Yonkers, New York, 1967

Mark is the youngest amongst his siblings who have excelled in their chosen pursuits in life, siblings who paved the way for Mark to do the same. You can tell when speaking with him about his past, that his family provided him a classic foundation of love and care that inspired confidence and determination keeping him ever in touch with where he came from.  He puts it this way: “I am obligated to honor my past”.

The details of pizza making elude most of us since we think of it as such a simple food.  Not for Mark, a man who is so much into honor and the truth, that if he were staying at a hotel that advertised they had an Olympic sized pool, would probably get out a tape measure to make sure it was exactly the right size.  As he was putting his business plan into effect, it came time to get the dishwashers needed for the kitchen.  Mark researched the equipment available for restaurants and decided that what he was ready to purchase did not make the water as hot as a model he found that cost SIGNIFICANTLY more money.  But the more expensive model allowed him not to have to use chlorinated water to truly clean the dishes.

The Devil is in the Details

The dishwasher decision Mark made is representative of his thinking.  He approaches things in the spirit of timeless refined truths about living that, when compromised, yield less and less perfect products and services.  His stories about how many hours it takes to make the dough and when he has to do it, what ingredients he must have that none of us would ever know exist in order to make the simple dish that is not simple at all, paint a picture of a man who has learned he must be extremely flexible with the medium of pizza in order to achieve what he referred to as “The beauty of repetition, doing the same thing over and over.”

But the simple dough that turns into pizza crust is never quite the same because it is affected by cold, hot, dry, humid, practically any environmental change.  Mark said that once when they were crushing grapes at a local winery, the yeast floating around in the air made all his dough rise almost out of control.  To get the pizza consistent on his restaurant tables, he has had to learn to form sets of habituated responses to changes, subtle or not, to tame what has changed and bring the dough back to what he thinks of as correct.  As he says: “My hands are like little sensors with dough.”

While Mark got busy during our time together, I wandered over to talk with his assistant, the only other person in these parts who knows how to do what Mark does and asked him about the wood he was putting into the pizza oven. “Almond wood.  It is by far the best."
He continued: "See that grayish cast on the top of the coals?  This is how almond wood maintains an even temperature and allows us to make the pizzas with consistency.”

According to Mark, there is only one way for a Neapolitan style pizza to come out of the oven and that would be the way Jeff Cox, the restaurant reviewer described a Margherita he tried:

“Pizza Margherita ($14 ★★★★) featured that swirl of San Marzano plum-tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and grana padano cheese, basil and olive oil. The thin-crust center of the pizza is wet and floppy — just as they like it in Naples — so don’t complain about the center. The thicker rim has puffed beautifully and is dotted with little blackened burn spots, just as it should be. Appreciate what Hopper has gone through to bring you this fine facsimile. Just pretend The Barlow center is somewhere in Campania.”

In Cox’s rating system, 4 stars is the highest.  Personally, using his system, I would give Mark Hopper 5 stars.  If you visit the Barlow in Sebastopol, don’t miss Vignette, an opportunity to benefit from the new love of a man who brings to your table a wealth of experience and a natural talent that you can really only expect to come across a few times in life.