By Elena Kadvany
E-mail Elena Kadvany
About this blog:
Get the latest food news with the biweekly Peninsula Foodist newsletter.
I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in journalism. Though my first love is journalism, food is a close second. I am constantly on the lookout for new restaurants to try, building an ever-expanding "to eat" list. As a journalist, I'm always trolling news sources and social media websites with an eye for local food news, from restaurant openings and closings to emerging food trends. When I was a teenager growing up in Menlo Park, I always drove up to the city on weekends with the singular purpose of finding a better meal than I could at home. But in the past year or so, the Peninsula's food culture has been totally transformed, with many new restaurants opening and a continuous stream of San Francisco restaurants coming south to open Peninsula outposts. Don't navigate this food boom hungry and alone! Feed me your tips on new chefs and eats and together we'll share them with the broader community.
(Hide)View all posts from Elena Kadvany
Five months after closing its doors on El Camino Real near Atherton, Bonsai Japanese Cuisine has reopened in a new location at the Ladera Country Shopper on Alpine Road.
Bonsai closed in August after more than 25 years of serving sushi at 3401 El Camino Real. The restaurant reopened in late January at the Ladera shopping center.
Bonsai's new location on Alpine Road. Photo by Elena Kadvany.
"With great pleasure we wanted to announce the soft opening of our new location on 3130 Alpine Road in Portola Valley," a Jan. 24 post on Bonsai's Facebook
page reads. "Please come by as we settle in and work out the kinks of our new location!"
(Two kinks include a lack of a phone line, still to be installed, and accepting cash only, according to the Facebook post.)
Signs posted in the restaurant's windows indicate Bonsai is serving dinner daily, from 5-9:30 p.m.
Bonsai took over suite 240, formerly occupied by Rusty's Roadside BBQ, which originally opened as Rusty's Roadside Grill. Russell Deutsch, owner of Old Port Lobster Shack (which also has a location in the Ladera shopping center), opened Rusty's in November 2015. Deutsch was
arrested last year on sales tax evasion charges, to which he pleaded not guilty.
