Margaret Grade, a California neuropsychologist who took a pointy profession turn by opening a comfortable, eclectic inn near the Point Reyes National Seashore, known for caring for farmers and fishermen with the same attention that was given to movie stars and writers who sought shelter there, died on February 28 in San Francisco. She was 72 years old.
Ms. Grade was injured in a automobile accident in Marin County on January 11. She spent several weeks in the hospital before dying of complications from her injuries, said her brother Matthew Grade, a physician.
The introverted Mrs. Grade admitted that she was a totally unlikely innkeeper.
“If they put me in the spotlight, I would be a bad influence on the business,” she said in an interview with The Times in 2003 San Francisco Chronicle. She also admitted that when opening her inn, Manka’s Inverness Lodge, she didn’t have the first idea for running a spot. “I didn’t know the term ‘working capital’ and that’s why I didn’t know it,” she said.
Still, Manka’s, a century-old former hunting lodge tucked into the woods two hours northwest of San Francisco in Inverness, California, was at the vanguard of hyperlocal cuisine, a haven for chefs and celebrities, and a national media darling.
Mrs. Grade (pronounced GRAH-dee) was greater than just an innkeeper. She had a supernatural ability to predict the desires of her guests and sometimes had unusual ways of fulfilling them.
“She’s not what I would call a warm person, but you could always feel the touch of her hand in every room,” actress Frances McDormand, who spent years there together with her family, said by phone. “She had an old-fashioned idea of what true luxury was. Part of her true gift was creating the fantasy you just fell into. It was magical.
The fourth of 11 children, Margaret Major Grade was born on December 9, 1951 in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. Her mother, Shirley Agnes (Bothwick) Grade, worked for a time as a journalist and became famous in international knitting circles. Her father, John Oscar Grade, was a popular family doctor who hunted, fished, and cultivated magnificent gardens.
Mrs. Grade, called Peg by her family, inherited his love of fast cars and food.
“He taught me by example that good nutrition and the introduction to it are part of a life lived to the fullest,” she said in 2003.
Like many of her siblings, Ms. Grade chose medical school, attending nursing school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then attending the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley (now part of Alliant International University), where she graduated with a doctorate in psychology. Her doctoral dissertation, published in 1984, was on boredom.
She built a practice with lupus patients and conducted clinical brain research at the University of California, San Francisco. In the mid-1980s, she joined the San Francisco AIDS Advisory Board and began global AIDS research.
Ms. Grade was looking for a second home in 1989 when she discovered the inn, named after its longtime owner, Manka Prokupek. She teamed up with her brother Thomas to buy it, and their younger brother Benjamin, a chef, took over the kitchen.
Mrs. Grade’s sister Joanna Perkins helped her transform the inn’s four rooms and ground-floor restaurant into a quirky arts and crafts gem whose aesthetic favors enormous floral arrangements, foraged tree branches, and carefree use of taxidermy: deer hooves serve as clothes hangers, a squirrel greets guests at the reception, a framed tarantula hanging in the bathroom.
After her brother Ben returned to the Midwest in 1996, Ms. Grade visited cookbook author Marion Cunningham, who for years served as consigliere to a generation of Northern California chefs and food writers, questioning whether she should dedicate her life to cooking. Ms. Cunningham advised her to read the works of food writers Richard Olney, Jane Grigson and MFK Fisher before making her decision.
Mrs. Grade never looked back, but running the kitchen and inn was intimidating. In 1998, she hired Northern California chef Daniel DeLong. Together they raised the level of cooking and soon became romantically involved. The two never married, but in 2008 they became parents of twins.
Using only food that Ms. Grade described as “at hand,” the couple made dishes using chanterelles that local children foraged in the forests, seafood caught from the surrounding waters hours before serving, and notable local products such as bread from the star baker Chad Robertson and cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.
The descriptions of her daily menu were poetic. “Local king salmon on the throne of Bolinas shelling beans, defended by a close cousin,” one said. “Another salt rescued from the surrounding seas,” said one other.
Mrs. McDormand remembers a dish called something like “a little raft of local sea urchin floating in a bay of creamy corn chowder” that her son devoured when he was 10, earning the sympathy of the notoriously prickly Mrs. Grade.
Ms. Grade spoke in a voice that seemed only barely above a whisper and kept her personal life private, which pleased celebrities; they knew she would respect their privacy too. Robert Redford shared the dining room with a neighborhood child celebrating a birthday. Sean Penn made chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. Chef Thomas Keller got here to the birthday dinner.
But the real stars were the individuals who delivered raw materials through the back door.
“If a duck farmer came and sold us sausages, it would be like having King Charles in our factory” – Luc Chamberlandwho cooked at Manka for seven years, told the newspaper Point Reyes light.
Mrs. Grade actually had Charles in her establishment. In 2005, while he was still a prince, he and his wife Camilla traveled to the United States, partly to pursue his interest in organic farming. He visited restaurateur Alice Waters at her Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, then went to Manka’s.
“She prepared the most beautiful lunch in his honor,” said in an interview Ms. Waters, who attended the meal and whose Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley was the model for Ms. Grade’s. “When I looked at the menu, I thought, ‘Oh my God, is he going to like this?’”
Yes, including a dish that Mrs. Grade called “a duck fit for a prince.”
In addition to her brother Matthew, Mrs. Grade is survived by her children, Coco and Django Grade-DeLong, in addition to six other siblings: Johanna Perkins, Mary Katherine Grade Reynolds and Benjamin, Andrew, Charles and Jean Therese Grade. She lived in Inverness.
In the early morning hours of December 27, 2006, the redwood inn burned down after an oak tree fell and a propane line ruptured during a storm. Sleeping upstairs were chef Elizabeth Falkner and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Mr. Gyllenhaal joined the effort to save lots of as many individuals as possible from the burning constructing.
Zoning regulations prevented Ms. Grade from rebuilding. She continued to operate nearby cottages and purchased other properties, including Olema, a historic inn and restaurant she called Sir and Star, which opened to great reviews in 2013 yr. But she never regained Manka’s magic, and Olema has since been closed.
“Her primary modus operandi was to want to evaporate laws and rigid structures,” said her brother Matthew.
This was revealed once when Mrs. Grade tried so as to add high ceilings to a room she was remodeling. As Jim Emmott, who worked on its construction projects, told The Light, the zoning board insisted they might only be eight feet high. She pushed herself away.
“I don’t know if you realize, but I’m in the fantasy industry,” he recalled her telling the administrator. “I’m wondering how you would like me to suit my fantasy under a seven-foot ceiling. Does Disney World have an eight-foot ceiling?
