Portola Hotel & Spa: Fresh Brews and Blue Zone Cuisine

Did you know that the Portola Hotel & Spa has been under the same ownership for the past 45 years? The name has changed a time or two: it was originally branded as a Doubletree Hotel, then the name was changed to Portola Plaza, which got confused with the Monterey Plaza Hotel, hence it became Portola Hotel & Spa. 

Executive chef Carl Ashurst knows this, because he’s been here for all of those years, except for a brief hiatus during the pandemic. Now he’s proudly putting together new menus for Jacks and Peter B’s, the first and only hotel restaurants to be Blue Zones Project approved in Monterey County. 

Blue Zones Project is designed to help people live longer, happier lives with lower rates of chronic diseases, by making wiser food choices. Participating restaurants add vegetable-forward dishes to their menus to give diners healthier options.

Assisted by food and beverage director Brian Hein, Ashurst updated Jacks Monterey and Peter B’s Brewpub menus with new plant-based dishes that meet Blue Zones guidelines. Among them is the Garden Bowl, available for dinner at both restaurants and made with brown rice, black beans, zucchini, onions, bell peppers, pico de gallo, and avocado. There’s also Javier’s Skillet, available for breakfast at Jacks Monterey, that combines scrambled egg whites, tofu, spinach, black beans, salsa and corn tortillas. 

They’ve also priced plant-based entrées lower than their meat counterparts, removed salt shakers from tables, replaced fried food side dishes with fruit, vegetable, and whole grain selections, eliminated refined grains from the menu, and are sourcing more fresh ingredients from local producers. 

Ashurst says they also have a grilled veggie sandwich at Peter B’s, with Portobello mushroom, onions, avocado, zucchini and bell pepper on a pesto aioli ciabatta bun. They recently added a vegetarian pizza with a cauliflower crust that has been quite popular. Their gas pizza oven cooks pizzas in less than two minutes, which was handy when they recently did a pizza party for 400. 

“It’s surprising how people are reacting to the food in Peter B’s,” says Ashurst. “You can’t take away the fatty fried stuff many of our customers crave, but at least we can offer them a choice!” 

He admits he’s really cutting down on red meat himself.  Guests seem to be trending this way also. “We are serving a lot of surf and turf, chicken dishes, wild king salmon and sanddabs,” says Ashurst, a Marina resident, who was born in Fort Lewis, WA, but grew up in the Monterey area. 

“Our event business is really coming back,” Ashurst notes. “We are doing events for 400 to 600 people: mostly corporate, like AAA and Kaiser. We’re not afraid of numbers! We used to routinely handle 800 before the pandemic.”  

As the spring produce starts coming in, the chef is excited to add lighter fare, including a variety of salads. “We have a new strawberry fields salad for spring with arugula and goat cheese.” Plus there’s the Whitaker beet salad with mixed greens, red beets, golden beets, poached pears, gorgonzola cheese, red onions and balsamic vinegar.

All ingredients for both restaurants are sourced within 100 miles of the Monterey Bay. He’s still working on changes to Jacks menu, including additional Blue Zones items. “People don’t so much care about vegan as they do vegetarian choices. We’ve got an asparagus salad over greens with crispy onions, paella, and eggplant parmesan.” He’s also working on a new vegetable risotto.

Whether you’re vegan, keto or flexitarian, he says the smartest strategy is to always eat a good breakfast. “Most of our problems with eating habits stem from not having the right breakfast. If you don’t, then you’re going for the donuts and candy bars. You don’t crave sweets if you eat right!” That said, he does love a good sharp New York cheddar cheese and says of The Cheese Shop in Carmel, ”It’s a pretty dangerous place!”  

Brewer Natalie Mika of Peter B’s praises the longevity of the Portola Hotel & Spa, its longstanding restaurants, and most of all, people like Ashurst. “My grandparents used to come here and hang out regularly at Peter B’s!” says the Greenfield and Salinas native. 

Although her life took a nomadic turn after graduating from Cal Poly with a degree in viticulture and enology, it was the desire to have some stability in her life that brought her to Peter B’s for a job. 

“In the wine business, you work a harvest in one hemisphere and then go to the other. It’s very disruptive. After a while, as much as I learned from each experience, I was ready for a change.” She did not imagine herself trading wine for beer, but that grit and discipline and respect for cleanliness has made her an excellent brewer. “Being in winemaking prepares you for beer: it’s all about dragging hoses, constantly cleaning and sanitizing.” 

She’s been there since 2019, starting as the #3 person on the totem pole, and when #2 left, she asked the head brewer if he would teach her how to brew. From her very first batch, a barley beer, she was hooked. After the pandemic, Peter B’s asked her back to take over the brewery. Subsequently, she’s had the fortune of passing her knowledge on to her assistant, who brewed his first batch in 2021. “He came from Starbucks, but you don’t need a fancy degree to make beer. You just have to listen well and follow instructions!”

Peter B’s always has 15 beers on tap, ranging from blonde ales to IPAs to stouts, so it keeps her busy. “There’s a ‘light & fruity’ section with blonde ales, raspberry wheat and Mexican lager, plus 3 or 4 IPAs, (among them Legend of Laguna, a long-standing Peter B’s specialty), then some higher alcohol aged beers and couple of malty beers: something that will make everyone happy,” says Mika.

She’s constantly reading and researching to find new yeasts, malts and grains, sourcing a lot from Proximity Malting in Colorado.  She’s even experimented with the first perennial grain, Kernza, a cross between wheat and a forage grass created in Kansas to avoid tillage and increase carbon sequestration. Unfortunately, it arrived in flour form, which was a real challenge to brew with (she added rice hulls), but she hopes to try again this fall. 

When stone fruits start arriving, she looks forward to making the seasonal darling, Peach Crate Ale. Another favorite is “Day Dream” German style pilsner. “It’s a lager beer that is really simple,” says Mika. You can’t make mistakes because there’s nowhere to hide! I love brewing pilsner.” 

In September, she’ll start brewing an Octoberfest malty lager to complement sausage and sauerkraut. “When I can get grapefruit, I make a double IPA with the zest from 5 or 6 cases of them. It’s a lot of work, but when you throw the zest into the boil, you get this nice bitterness.” She freezes and pasteurizes the juice, which is then thrown into the fermentation tank.

When the prickly pear cactus fruit ripens near Rustique Winery in Greenfield, she’ll once again brave the nasty spines to make a beautiful seasonal beer that is as fresh as it is pretty. The effort required to make this beverage is almost not worth it, but, as she says, “It was an adventure the first time, until I learned to use a blow torch and welding gloves!”  

Before she started brewing, Mika used to drink mostly IPAs, but now she also goes for lagers and seasonal sour beers, including kettle sours. She admits that making beer is way less risky than making wine. “Wine requires you to be an agriculturist. With beer, you buy the ingredients. With wine, you get one chance to get it right per year. With beer, you are brewing all year long. You have much more freedom and it’s far less costly to make a mistake!”

That she has found a career in brewing after studying enology, seems highly fitting. “As one of my Cal Poly professors always told us, ‘Winemaking is 40% moving heavy equipment, 40% cleaning and 20% drinking beer.” 

About the Portola Hotel & Spa 

Portola Hotel & Spa is California’s premier family-friendly destination offering easy access to Monterey’s most popular attractions. Leading the way as the Central Coast’s first LEED® Certified hotel, Portola reflects unparalleled modern coastal luxury in downtown Monterey. The AAA Four Diamond hotel is the perfect coastal-inspired escape, featuring 379 guest rooms and suites, and 60,000 square feet of meeting space with the adjacent Monterey Conference Center. The serene environment and pet-friendly accommodations offer several on-site, award-winning amenities including, Spa on the Plaza, an outdoor pool, exceptional dining, a craft brewery, a children’s loyalty program, and more. Happy Hour at Peter B’s is available Wed-Sun from 4pm to 6pm and 9pm to 10pm.

For more information on Portola Hotel & Spa at Monterey Bay, Jacks Monterey, and Peter B’s Brewpub, please visit https://www.portolahotel.com/.