Narsai David Chats About Grasing’s and Chalone

July 26, 2022 – At Josh Jensen’s funeral, Dan Karlsen (former winemaker at Chalone, Talbott, Dehlinger and Domaine Carneros) and I were reminiscing about the old days, of which there are very many between us now. I cannot be certain what thread led to this topic, but he mentioned that the Chalone label had been originally printed by a restaurateur who had ties to the Monterey Peninsula. Karlsen mentioned that this person also had a wine label: that was just the clue I needed to realize he was talking about Narsai David—best known to most in the Bay Area as the food and wine commentator on KCBS radio. 

To many in the Carmel area, he’s also known as one of the owners of Grasing’s Restaurant. David used to have a restaurant in Berkeley called Narsai’s, and a wine label that featured his Assyrian mother’s name in a red script. You can find some of Narsai’s wines on the Grasing’s wine list. After his eponymous restaurant closed, David maintained a toehold in the culinary business by operating the café at I. Magnin in San Francisco, until the lease on the building was sold to Macy’s. 

We caught up with David recently and he gave us the backstory on his affiliation with Grasing’s. “Kurt grew up in Oregon and had gotten a job at The Clift Hotel in San Francisco: this was about 100 years ago! It was a cook’s training program, and when he completed that, he needed a job, so I hired him for my Berkeley restaurant. He became a saucier and then a chef there. He was very hard working and creative, and he became like a favorite nephew. We treated him like family. He was quite far from home, so we sort of adopted him. ”

After Narsai’s closed, Grasing went off to see the world, doing stints at Michelin-starred Le Gavroche in London and then at the Four Seasons in Boston. David recalls, “Kurt moved back to California and started a restaurant called 231 Ellsworth, in San Mateo. It was short-lived and basically, I felt he had gotten the short end of the stick. He went to Carmel and took a job at a café owned by a woman who eventually put it up for sale. In my protective, avuncular way, I stepped up to the plate and helped him with the financial end of things. We structured it so he owned 2/3 and I owned 1/6, and another friend, the other 1/6 share. Well, it was a struggle at first, but then he started doing catering on the side. When he began doing meals for the Monterey airport, things were really looking up! Rupert Murdoch would fly in for a golf tournament and order a week’s worth of steak dinners and the finest wines. Nobody like that asks for the price on a bottle of Lafitte or Dom Perignon!” 

At one point, Kurt came to him and said, “You know, after 23 years, we are finally an overnight success!!” 

Grasing also developed a love for older wines and is always looking for private collections to sell, keeping some of the treasures for his restaurant cellar. “He will generally have most of the wine pre-sold. He knows his clientele. He’s also gotten really into wine auction. My son Danny is helping him.”

David says he’s happy that chef Cal Stamenov is making changes to the Grasing’s menu, but is just floored at the way the prices have increased. He says that the lease on the building keeps going up and finding help is unbelievably hard. Eating out is becoming a serious investment. He wonders how the restaurant industry is going to survive with the labor shortages. 

But back to the Chalone story. David met Dick Graff of Chalone fame, courtesy of being in the restaurant business, which automatically means you’re in the wine biz, too. David was an early member of the Berkeley Wine and Food Society, along with folks like Graff, as well as Barney Rhodes and his wife Belle, who originally developed a vineyard on the Rutherford Bench in Napa that they sold to Tom and Martha May. Winemaker Joe Heitz had exclusive access to what was known as Martha’s Vineyard, and made it famous. David says the Rhodes then went to Oakville, where they planted the first Merlot vineyard in the state. “There were test plots of Merlot at Inglenook and Christian Brothers, but this was the first 100% Merlot vineyard. He sold the fruit to Louis Martini for about 10 years.”

He mentions this because he is quite a fan of Merlot and produced it with success until “some idiot made a movie that trashed Merlot, and suddenly it went from being $50 per bottle, to where you couldn’t give it away, literally overnight.” He’s still making wine and just replanted a vineyard in Napa to Cabernet. 

But back to the Chalone story, which has nothing to do with Merlot, or Cab. David was in the printing business for many years and still owns a 10×15” Heidelberg letterpress. When Dick Graff took over the Chalone property in 1964, he needed a logo and a label, and David just happened to know a friend in Oakland who was a calligrapher. His name was Arthur Baker Jr.  He asked Baker to come up with a wine label for Graff. 

“How he did the label is interesting. Arthur sat up on the ridge looking at the Chalone property and began to draw the outline of the range of mountains he saw in the background with a pen. That sketch literally became the Chalone logo and then the label. I printed the originals on my Heidelberg press.”

What happened to Baker? “Oh, he’s long dead and gone. He moved to New York City after a while and got involved in all sorts of magazine work and logos for big companies. He was so brilliant. He ended up doing the Coke logo and label. It’s odd, when you think about it.”

From Chalone to Coke is definitely a big stretch, from every possible angle. But now you know a very unique connection.