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Lifestyle

A Tasy and Historic Part of Emeryville

Roger Brigham
Connection Staff
November 2007

Blink, and you’ll miss it. Miss it, and you’ll be sorry you did.

Townhouse Bar and Grill is a longtime Emeryville institution, a lively enterprise with a storied history. But its rustic bare wood exterior and raised boardwalk leading to a tire-track entry, belie its spunk and funk interior and elegant but unpretentious cuisine.

Located at 5862 Doyle Street, Townhouse Bar and Grill was built by Emeryville fireman Frank Mesnickow in 1926. During prohibition its lack of windows were part of its success. Later it ran as a bar, but in the 1940s Joe Vernetti added a restaurant and created the East Bay Society of Gentleman Chefs, whose closest claims to being chefs were wearing chef hats and eating food. Vernetti retired in 1977 and sold the Townhouse to Tom Wenaas and Jim Carnitato, who expanded the restaurant still further. It offered a rowdy cowboy atmosphere in a quiet urban setting, but struggled in the 1980’s and closed twice before chef Ellen Rosenberg and restaurateur Joseph LeBrun bought it in 1989. They remodeled and restored the restaurant, sandblasting walls and making other upgrades. In early 2001, Rosenberg assumed sole ownership.

Rosenberg makes monthly adjustments to the menu, but customers can always count on finding familiar chicken, steak and seafood offerings, and of course the legendary garlic fries.

“After 17 years, the place almost runs itself,” Rosenberg said. “The hardest part is probably keeping the building itself up. It wasn’t very well built to begin with.”

Upgrades she has made include replacing a worn zinc bar with a copper one and utilizing items from Parisian flea markets and local salvage yards to create furnishings that combine rusticity with sophistication.

A Bay Area native, Rosenberg went to culinary school in Paris. She was working with Wolfgang Puck at Spago’s in West Hollywood when the chance to own her own place arose.

“I was working really hard and asked myself why work for someone else when I had a chance to work for myself,” Rosenberg recalls. “I had an opportunity because Joseph was a friend and he found this place.”

She called the partnership “tumultuous” but said that dynamic was responsible for much of the restaurant’s success. “It seemed that every time we agreed on something, it really worked.”

Rosenberg and real estate developer Douglas Rosenberg have been married 12 years. She shares her restaurant career with their daughters – Julia, 10, and Lauren, 7 – whenever possible.

“I think the best example I can for my daughters is to keep running it as long as I can,” she said. “When I had the chance to buy the restaurant outright, I thought about selling. One of the reasons I kept it was I wanted to make sure they were old enough to remember it.

“Whenever they have a day off from school, I always bring them in here. When we go out to a restaurant they feel at home. I always have to remind them it’s not the Townhouse. “

The restaurant draws what Rosenberg calls a “sophisticated crowd” of Emeryville workers for lunch and is a destination restaurant for Bay Area diners meeting up for dinner or afterward for drinks.

“I really like the balance we get here,” she said. “We get people of all ages, gay people, old and young, people of all different groups. I like to see that. We try to have something for everyone, whether they’re vegan or carnivore.”

She said she’d like to run the restaurant for five more years before retiring.

“I do it because I want to do it, not because I have to. I’m always amazed that we grow 10 percent every year all these years, but I don’t want to grow it anymore.”

Ellen has adopted the Emeryville community, and she demonstrates her generosity in a variety of ways. She hosts the Annual Art Exhibition Volunteer Kickoff Event each year at the restaurant, and several years ago, when celebrating her 15th year of ownership, underwrote, at her own expense, the complete cost of sending all Anna Yates 3rd graders on a weekend trip to the San Francisco Zoo. “I was more than happy to do it,” Ellen says. Just one more example of a generous Emeryville business person contributing something extra to the community.

Roger Brigham is a writer for The Emeryville

Connection. If you have a question or comment, please contact him at ecocnews@gmail.com