Margaret Grade, whose California Inn was loved by the stars, dies at 72

Margaret Grade, a California neuropsychologist who made a sharp career change by opening a cozy, eclectic inn near the Point Reyes National Seashore, which was known for catering to farmers and fishermen with the same attention it gave to the movie stars and writers who lived there sought refuge, died February 28 in San Francisco. She was 72.

Ms. Grade was injured in a car accident in Marin County on January 11. She spent several weeks in a hospital before dying there from complications related to her injuries, said her brother Matthew Grade, a doctor.

The introverted Mrs. Grade recognized that she was a most unlikely innkeeper.

“If they put me up front, it would be bad for business,” she said in a 2003 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. She also admitted that when she opened her inn, Manka’s Inverness Lodge, she didn’t have the first idea about running an establishment. “I didn’t know the term ‘working capital,’ and as a result, I didn’t have any,” she said.

Yet Manka’s, a century-old former hunting lodge hidden in the woods two hours northwest of San Francisco in Inverness, California, was a trailblazer in hyper-local dining, a haven for chefs and celebrities, and a darling of the national media.

Mrs. Grade (pronounced GRAH-dee) was more than an innkeeper. She had a preternatural ability to anticipate guests’ wishes and sometimes had unusual ways of fulfilling them.

“She’s not someone I would call warm, but you always felt the touch of her hand in every room,” actor Frances McDormand, who spent holidays there with her family for years, says by phone. “She had an old-fashioned understanding of what true luxury is. Part of her real gift was creating a fantasy that you had just fallen into. It was witchcraft.”

Margaret Major Grade, the fourth of eleven children, was born on December 9, 1951 in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. Her mother, Shirley Agnes (Bothwick) Grade, worked for a while as a journalist and became famous in international knitting circles. Her father, John Oscar Grade, was a popular general practitioner who hunted, fished and planted wonderful gardens.

Mrs. Grade, called Peg by her family, inherited his love of fast cars and food.

“He taught me by example that eating well, and the prelude to it, is part of life lived to the full,” she said in 2003.

Like many of her siblings, Ms. Grade chose to study medicine, first attending nursing school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then attending the California School of Professional Psychology at Berkeley (now part of Alliant International University), where she graduated with a doctorate in psychology. Her dissertation, published in 1984, was about 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 conducting global AIDS-related research.

Mrs. Grade was looking for a second home in 1989 when she discovered the inn, which was 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 Johanna Perkins helped her transform the inn’s four rooms and ground-floor restaurant into a quirky arts and crafts gem with an aesthetic that favored enormous floral arrangements, frayed tree branches and a cheerful use of taxidermy: deer hooves serving as clothes hooks, a squirrel that greeted guests at the reception hangs a framed tarantula in a bathroom.

After her brother Ben returned to the Midwest in 1996, Ms. Grade visited cookbook author Marion Cunningham, who served for years as consigliere to a generation of Northern California chefs and food writers to ask whether she should dedicate her life to cooking. Ms Cunningham said she had to read the work of food writers Richard Olney, Jane Grigson and MFK Fisher before making her decision.

Mrs. Grade never looked back, but running both the kitchen and the inn was a huge challenge. In 1998, she hired Northern Californian chef Daniel DeLong. Together they raised the kitchen, and they soon became romantically involved. The two never married, but became parents of twins in 2008.

With only food that Mrs. Grade described as “within reach,” the couple built dishes from chanterelles that local children gathered in the forest, seafood from the surrounding waters hours before it was served, and notable local produce such as bread from the star baker. Chad Robertson and cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.

Descriptions on her daily menus were poetic. “Local king salmon on a throne of Bolinas beans, defended by a close cousin,” said one. “Another sole rescued from the surrounding seas,” said another.

Mrs. McDormand recalled a dish called something like “a little raft of local sea urchin floating in a bay with creamy corn chowder,” which her son devoured when he was ten, endearing him to the infamously prickly Mrs. Grade.

Ms. Grade spoke in a voice that seemed only slightly louder than a whisper, and she talked privately about her personal life, which appealed to celebrities; they knew she would respect their privacy as well. Robert Redford shared the dining room with a local child who was celebrating a birthday. Sean Penn made chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. The chef Thomas Keller came for his birthday dinner.

But the real stars were the people who brought the raw produce to the back door.

“If a duck farmer showed up and sold us sausage, it was like having King Charles in our establishment,” Luc Kamerlandwho cooked at Manka for seven years, told the newspaper The Point Reyes Light.

Mrs. Grade did indeed have Charles in her establishment. In 2005, while still a prince, he and his wife Camilla traveled to the United States in part to fuel his interest in organic farming. He visited restaurateur Alice Waters at her Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley and then went to Manka’s.

“She made the most beautiful lunch in his honor,” Ms. Waters, who attended the meal and whose Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was a model for Ms. Grade, said in an interview. “When I looked at the menu I thought, ‘Oh my God, is he going to like this?'”

He did, including a dish that Mrs. Grade called “duck fit for a prince.”

In addition to her brother Matthew, Mrs. Grade is survived by her children, Coco and Django Grade-DeLong, and six other siblings, Johanna Perkins, Mary Katherine Grade Reynolds and Benjamin, Andrew, Charles and Jean Therese Grade. She lived in Inverness.

Early on December 27, 2006, the inn, made of redwood, burned down after an oak tree fell and severed a propane line during a storm. Chef Elizabeth Falkner and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal were sleeping upstairs. Mr Gyllenhaal joined the rush to save what he could from the burning building.

Zoning laws kept Mrs. Grade from rebuilding. She and Mr. DeLong continued to operate cabins in the area and purchased other properties, including Olema, a historic inn with a restaurant they called Sir and Star, which opened for great reviews in 2013. But the couple never recaptured Manka’s magic, and Olema has since closed.

“Her basic modus operandi was to be willing to let laws and rigid structures disappear,” said her brother Matthew.

That was reflected once when Mrs. Grade tried to add high ceilings to a room she was remodeling. The county zoning administrator insisted they could only be 8 feet tall, Jim Emmott, who worked on her construction projects, told The Light. She pushed back.

“I don’t know if you realize it, but I’m in the fantasy world,” he remembered her telling the manager. “I wonder how you would plan for me to fit a fantasy under an eight-foot ceiling. Does Disney World have an 8-foot ceiling?”