New book spotlights Marin restaurateur behind Poggio, Copita

Restaurateur extraordinaire Larry Mindel remembers when he called his father and told him he was going into the restaurant business.

“He said, ‘Oh, Larry, don’t. Don’t do that,’” Mindel said.

As a young man, Mindel had operated Caswell Coffee, a successful coffee company that sold its products to restaurants, and he planned to use the money he made from selling it to acquire an Italian restaurant named Chianti in Los Angeles.

“’Dad, I want to do it,’” Mindel told his father. “He was in New York, and so he said, ‘Do me a favor, come to New York for a couple days. Let’s talk about it.’ I know he was thinking that he would convince me it was a bad idea.”

Mindel ignored his father’s advice and purchased the restaurant. It was a disaster at first.

“I put all the money I had made by selling my coffee company into this restaurant. And we waited for people to come flocking through the door. Only, they didn’t flock. And so, I’m saying to myself: Two bad things are going to happen. No. 1, all the money I made selling the coffee company is going to go down the drain. But worse than that, my father is going to say, ‘I told you so.’ And, boy, those two things just kept me awake at night, especially my dad.”

A chance dining review in the Los Angeles Times turned everything around. The legendary Lois Dwan wrote in her review that not only was Chianti the best Italian restaurant she had ever dined at, but quite possibly it was the “best restaurant of any kind.”

“After that, there was just a flood of people. The phone never stopped ringing. And so that one thing cemented my life in the restaurant business and saved me,” said Mindel, now 87 years old.

His career would include co-founding Spectrum Foods: Chianti, MacArthur Park, Ciao, Prego and Guaymas in California. The nationally acclaimed Italian restaurant chain Il Fornaio followed, before he began scaling back his involvements around 2008 and focused on Poggio Trattoria and Copita Tequileria y Comida, with chef Joanne Weir, in Sausalito, where he lived. Copita has since opened a second location in San Jose.

Mindel’s story is legend. But now the legend himself is telling it in a memoir, “Lorenzo! The Restaurateur Who Revolutionized an Industry,” co-authored by his son-in-law, Steve Reinertsen, a longtime Marin resident who coaches high school baseball and cross-country. The book is available in a limited hardback release by San Francisco publisher Solficatio.

“He has had a pretty interesting life,” Reinertsen said. “It started with the core audience, at least in my head, of all the grandkids. We even hooked him up with a couple of writers, but he was too busy living life, doing restaurants. So then four years ago, in 2021, his first wife, Mimi, died in the spring, and I was trying to help out. I got all this stuff together for the obituary. And the book really grew out of that.”

“That was the main selling point,” Mindel said. “I have five kids and 11 grandkids already and am probably going to have even more. I wanted them to know what their grandfather did for all those years, and he captured it all in a book that I really like.”

Memoirs and autobiographies are notorious for being one-sided, but Reinertsen has expertly blended Mindel’s recollections along with his own remembrances. (He’s had a front-row seat for more than 40 years, knowing Mindel’s son, Michael, since high school and marrying Mindel’s daughter, Laura, with whom he has two sons). Reinertsen even added interviews with Mindel’s associates and friends for depth and clarity.

“He didn’t want a tell-all,” Reinertsen said. “As you can imagine, there are a lot of stories. But he’s had an incredible life. There have been a lot of breaks. He’s had a lot of wonderful people help him out. And he wanted to share that without the ‘come into my house and look in every closet’ aspect.”

“With a book, you lose some of the privacy of your life, and that made me a little fearful,” Mindel said. “But this is my story, as written by Steve. Really what I like most is living at home with my wife and raising kids and doing restaurants. I’m not as comfortable with the notoriety.”

Mindel relates that during the process there was a reliving of many happy memories of things that had taken place years ago.

“This led to that, and then another thing and another thing,” Mindel said. “It was exciting for me to relive it all in that way. Before, I had a corporate life, where I managed people and businesses, but there wasn’t a lot of contact with people. As I changed my views on what I’d like to do, I wanted to be around people, and that’s what really drew me to the restaurant business. Every facet of restaurants is about people, whether they’re working here or they’re guests. And I love them all. Every day I’m happy.”

And all of that is documented in the book.

Eventually even Mindel’s father came around.

“Coming from New York, I think he had a particular concern for his son with Italian restaurants. In his mind, it was going to be a tough business, which it was and is, but we got over it. And the restaurants, as they succeeded, I think taught Dad a lesson. He sure enjoyed it when they were successful,” said Mindel, who tears up slightly. “You know, I still talk to him every day in my head.”

Mindel’s book started out as a memoir just for friends and family, but as it turns out, if you work long enough in the restaurant business, that becomes a lot more people than you might initially suspect.

Mindel and Reinertsen will appear at a special book event at Sausalito Books by the Bay at 6 p.m. Oct. 15. Hardcover books are available there as well as through Poggio and on IngramSpark. There’s also a Kindle version available on Amazon.