Chef Maegen Loring

One cannot write a review of Chef Maegen Loring’s cooking without talking about Maegen herself. Her personality, style and sheer love of cooking are infused in every dish she prepares.

Maegen Loring grew up in a family of “fearless eaters.” In first grade, the youngest of three, with brothers ahead of her, she remembers puzzling out their mother’s instructions: oven on 350° at 3:30, bake casserole for 1 hour. While her mother worked and later went back to school for her Master’s degree, Maegen learned about cooking. Her adventurous family loved to try anything. Though she found that waffles with spaghetti sauce did not go over well, at nine years old, she was learning her market pretty quick. She would open cookbooks and experiment, read more and get it right. Even then she told her brothers and mother that someday she would have a restaurant. She had discovered the heart of cooking. It makes people happy.

She moved to Canada for her high school years, living with her dad, a math professor. Where cooking in her mother’s house was guided by creativity, availability and spontaneity (she tells of her mom’s surprisingly successful onion and mayonnaise pie developed from what was left in the house right before a vacation), cooking with her father consisted of tackling complex recipes, sauerbraten, spaetzle or cassoulet from scratch.

Maegen’s adventurous nature has oft taken her out of the kitchen and around the world. Her grandparents lived in Indonesia and she spent time with them, learning the culture. She would continue her travels, Mexico, Central America, all around the Mediterranean, finding that she would come away with a new vocabulary, not the usual please, thank you and goodbye, but the names and memories of everything she ate.

Maegen’s far reaching travels have influenced her dishes at The Park Restaurant, but it is thrilling to find that she doesn’t follow any one cuisine. Her dishes burst with the joys and flavors of many different cultures, yet with a refinement that Maegen can claim all her own.

At The Park, Maegen seeks out the highest quality of ingredients and the bounty of the Central Coast affords her just that. She has developed strong ties with local organic farmers, artisan cheese makers, winemakers and bread bakers. The menu decisions that Maegen makes are determined by the seasons. She loves to cook within the challenges of produce availability or pairing food with wine. Her innate sense of taste guides her winery dinner menus as well. “If you close your eyes when you taste the wine, it will tell you where to go with the food,” she notes.

And if you close your eyes when you first experience Maegen’s cooking, your heart and soul will tell you to come back again and again.

Architect Jeff Loring

For Jeff Loring, architecture is a passion. He loves to determine the ultimate possibilities of what a place could be; and then to create that place. Satisfaction is found in turning an idea into something, well, concrete (or wood or metal), that people can respond to and enjoy. Having a restaurant has been an ambition of Jeff’s since he began in architecture. “Every architect wants a restaurant,” he muses. “It’s a place that pleases people... food and shelter—the expression of life”

The location of The Park Restaurant is one that Jeff had loved for years, he appreciated the urban quality of trim tables seen through the windows that beckon to passersby. When it came to designing the interior, Jeff hoped to design to Maegen’s cuisine style, while Maegen had thoughts of designing her menu around Jeff’s architecture. As often in this partnership, a balance was struck and Jeff set out to design an interior that is the expression of what Maegen does. When asked about favorite items on the seasonally changing menu, a tender smile lights up Jeff’s face. “Maegen always has something I’m crazy about.”

In his architectural influences, Jeff credits Italian Renaissance architect Brunelleschi and Secessionist Otto Wagner. Those influences can be interpreted in his arches and columns and in the sculptural elements of The Park’s interior spaces, structures that may appear simple, but rest on underlying systems of proportion. Brunelleschi often began with a unit of measurement whose repetition throughout the building would create a sense of harmony. Harmony can be found in the focal wall where Jeff utilized polished birch and stainless steel to create an intriguing pattern. The rustic wood is polished to a high sheen and the polished metal becomes the rustic, utilitarian element.

Having traveled together extensively, seeking out and finding inspiration in new experiences, Jeff sees a similarity in Maegen’s approach to food and his approach to architecture, a lot of influences that coalesce to become a new composition. When the intrigues of cooking combined with the passion of architecture at The Park Restaurant, the dream of Jeff’s — to create an environment that makes the world a better place — came true.