Building the Ultimate Picnic Spread on the California Coast

Chef Scott Clark of Dad’s Luncheonette stops by a few of his favorite purveyors for a produce-forward beach lunch.

Published on April 3, 2025

This piece originally appeared in SAVEUR’s Spring/Summer 2025 issue. See more stories from Issue 204 here.

When people outside California imagine summertime on the Central Coast, they’re probably thinking of blue skies and ocean breezes grooming perfect surfing waves. In fact, it’s usually about 60 degrees here and the ocean is gnarly, the clouds like dark stubble on an unkempt sky. Ever the optimist, though, I keep a surfboard in my truck.

Not that I have much time for surfing: Thursday through Sunday at Dad’s Luncheonette, my restaurant in Half Moon Bay, my team and I are cranking out hen of the woods sandwiches—topping the griddled mushrooms with pickled onions and a gooey fried egg—or we’re snipping herbs into seasonal salads. We’re frying potato chips by the gazillion and slamming them with so much umami-packed nutritional yeast that they taste almost meaty. We’re doing it all in a train caboose parked in a strip-mall lot. Wednesdays are spent prepping for the week.

But today’s a rare, sunny, summer Monday, and I have two days off. My dog, Boon, and my kid, Frost, are waiting for me in the truck—both of them, I’m sure, eating fistfuls of the popcorn I packed, tossed in butter and homemade furikake. Frost is a rambunctious elementary schooler with a love of road trips as fierce as her father’s, and we have a campsite reserved at New Brighton State Beach, just over an hour south in Santa Cruz. We’re meeting buddies to fish, surf, and cook over a campfire.

On the way down the Pacific Coast Highway, we’re collecting ingredients. Like the rest of California, the coast between the San Francisco Peninsula and Santa Barbara is vulnerable to fires, mudslides, and other climate crisis-induced calamities. Sometimes the highway is inaccessible around Big Sur; portions of it have fallen into the Pacific. It’s a place we want to care for in its fragility, but celebrate for its power: The Central Coast, the part of the state I celebrate in my new cookbook, Coastal: 130 Recipes From a California Road Trip, is also a gem-studded belt of microclimates. Here, scrappy, organic farmers tend wind-blown plots, raising fruits and vegetables so beautiful and hard-won, you could weep just slicing into them. I pack my kitchen tools and hop in the truck. With a mouth stuffed with popcorn, Frost mumbles, “Dude! What took you so long?” We pull out of the drive.

Furikake Popcorn — *Cheyenne Ellis (Courtesy Chronicle Books)*

First, we pop by Dad’s to pick up the riches that Bryan Jessop has left there for me. I met Jessop, the forager behind Morchella Wild Foods, when he showed up at the caboose one day with a basket of porcinis from the woods on the Monterey Peninsula. Today, he’s dropped off tender dandelion greens and a messy load of huckleberries. I pack up the greens for a campground salad and let Frost stain herself purple gobbling the berries on the road.

Halfway there, in Pescadero, I find the salad’s star ingredient. Corn isn’t easy to grow on the Central Coast—the window of adequate warmth is just August and September—but Fifth Crow Farm does it right. The moveable tractor coop is in the field today, and the heirloom hens are inside, fertilizing the organic soil and eating insects. Like the other growers I work with, Fifth Crow’s Mike Irving, Teresa Kurtak, and John Vars believe in farming for social justice. They donate crops to gleaners, community nonprofits, and schools.

Meetup Brisas Ranch — *Cheyenne Ellis (Courtesy Chronicle Books)*

Plus, their corn is super sweet. I decide to roast half of it and toss the rest right into the bowl to marinate along with the sugariest, tangiest Sun Golds. We grab those right down the road from local tomato legends Mathieu Simms and Jennifer Jepsen at Simms Organics. I’ll wait until the last minute to toss in Jessop’s bitter, young dandelion greens, so they’re still crispy-crunchy when we finally dig in.

Hopefully we’ll catch some halibut off New Brighton’s pier this afternoon, which I’ll grill on the fire slathered in herb butter. While the fish cooks, I’ll have sweet potatoes roasting right in the embers. To top those off, we hit up Harley Farms Goat Dairy for some of the Central Coast’s finest cheese. When we pull up at the barn, cheesemaker Dee Harley greets us, an Anatolian shepherd at her hip. This time of year, Dee’s massive herding dogs have their work cut out for them: The spring kids have grown into rowdy teenagers. The pasture behind the barn is a blur of adolescent goats bleating, bolting, and knocking one another down. Frost goes to pet the goats through the fence.

Coastal Roadtrip — *Cheyenne Ellis (Courtesy Chronicle Books)*

Just a few miles from the beach, the briny sea fog hangs over the pasture. There’s a unique saltiness to their milk because the goats eat that grass. Dee fetches a couple of blocks of aged feta, and I bite into one like it’s candy: Creamy and deeply savory, it’ll taste like heaven crumbled over the charred, honey-drizzled sweet potatoes.

I like to pair hearty foods with something ethereal. My friends at Brisa Ranch grow elegant, emerald zucchini, just right for shaving and dressing with a vinaigrette I made the day before—fragrant with salted cherry blossoms and brightened up with puckery umeboshi. Boon and Frost run between Brisa’s strawberry rows as I chat with the folks who supply my restaurant with 100 pounds of Désirée red potatoes each week for our chips. Since 2018, I’ve watched Cristóbal Cruz Hernández and his partners Veronica and Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou grow this farm from a small patch of earth to 40 acres of row crops and orchards. Just across the highway at Año Nuevo State Park, elephant seals loll lazily on the beach.

Surf — *Cheyenne Ellis (Courtesy Chronicle Books)*

The sun is still high when Frost, Boon, and I climb back into the truck. In 40 short minutes, we’re at our destination. As I start pulling out gear, the two of them bound out of the truck to greet our pals, who’ve been waiting for us to arrive at the campsite. We’ll catch some waves, and in a few hours, we’ll have a fish in hand and the camp all set up. I’ll be prepping all this beautiful stuff—wrapping sweet potatoes in foil for the fire, shucking corn, and slicing thin ribbons of zucchini—as the ocean is bathed in an off-the-hook sunset and the farmers of the Central Coast call it quits for the night.