Queer SLO recently sat down with San Luis Obispo restauranteur and all-around beautiful human, Robin Covey, the creative mastermind behind Robin’s Restaurant in Cambria and San Luis Obispo’s Novo, Luna Red, Mint + Craft and Cafe Fiero. Robin walked us through his global inspirations, commitment to local farmers’ produce, coming out in SLO, the importance of LGBTQ+ support groups, and much more. If you take away nothing else from this fascinating, behind-the-scenes exchange with such a treasured member of our local LGBTQ+ community, remember, accept others and try the paella.
What’s your background and the passion behind each of your restaurants?
I’ve always loved to cook, and probably as early as third grade I daydreamed of owning a restaurant. I’m from the San Joaquin Valley, just between Coalinga and Fresno, out in the middle of nowhere. So my idea was a Mexican restaurant because I lived and went to school and my father worked with 70% Mexican-American folks. I moved to the coast when I was fifteen and I’ve just worked in restaurants. Got married in 1980 and we opened up a health food store for four years in Cambria, and shortly after opened Robin’s in ‘85. Fast forward to 2002 – we opened the French Corner Bakery in Cambria, then Novo in San Luis Obispo a year later, then Chow in 2009. Chow failed, so we turned it into Luna Red and moved it to its current location by the Mission. Then we recently opened Mint + Craft in 2017.
So those are the restaurants. The passion for me is about spaces and food. I like to take empty spaces and sort of fill them; I love cooking and I’m really into produce. I love buying from the markets, so we buy from the markets for all the restaurants. Each restaurant is a separate entity. So just for clarification, I was married 22 years, I have two children and five grandchildren and Robin’s is owned by my ex-wife, who is my business partner, and we’re best friends and see each other five days a week. She owns Robin’s, I own Novo, and then together we own Luna Red, Mint + Craft, and then our commissary kitchen by the airport, Cafe Fiero. So that’s the logistics behind the whole thing – she’s the business person, so she oversees the finances for all of them and then I’m more the visionary that has the ideas. But (he says with a great laugh), somebody else has to pull off making them happen.
Can you talk about the vibe or atmosphere you’re trying to create in each of those spaces?
With restaurants and bars, one may have an idea of what they want to do, but once you open, sometimes the public shifts what you want to do because of who they are or who first comes there. So it doesn’t always happen the way you want it to or expect. For instance, with Robin’s, it was sort of a locals’ restaurant at first because it was on a side street, and has since established itself as a true mainstay of Cambria. The theme behind all the restaurants is farmers’ market fresh produce – basically clean, bold flavors and global flavors. I’m very into not working in a box, so in that sense they’re all global.
With Luna Red, we have changed our theme from global to Latin-inspired, specifically Spain and all of South America. Novo has a couple of grandfathered-in dishes like nachos and sopes, but other than that, because of the close proximity of the restaurants, we try to focus on the rest of the world, and then Luna Red is going forward as more Latin-inspired with your ceviche and paellas and things like that. It blows my mind, speaking of paella, it’s really amazing. We have some friends who like to eat there a lot and so we end up eating there with them quite a bit and I have to say the paella is just really consistent and excellent. (Queer SLO agrees – the paella is phenomenal)
So, what about Cafe Fiero and Mint + Craft?
They happened at the same time. Mint + Craft is so tiny that Cafe Fiero functions as the commissary. With such a small space devoted to actually cooking and serving people, and little-to-no storage or walk-in refrigeration, much of the pickling, desserts and some heavy prep for meals are all made at Cafe Fiero. There’s a pastry kitchen to handle most desserts for all of the restaurants and a savory kitchen that does most of Mint + Craft’s savory items and some of Luna’s heavier prep – birria, beef for the tacos, pickled Vietnamese vegetables, etc. Then six days a week we have a refrigerated truck that delivers to each of the restaurants. There’s a lot going on.
We’re working this year on bringing more things out to Fiero, like all of our spices and herbs that we order, having it on hand at that single location. We’ve also just started a catering side to Cafe Fiero. It’s more of a “drop-off” catering situation right now, like for Mindbody or for different large or small group office catering scenarios as opposed to weddings. We don’t do weddings right now, unless they just want the food and they’re gonna make everything else happen. The catering menu has some items from Novo, Luna and Mint + Craft.
Above Fiero, up the staircase, is a large office which houses another of our companies called Blue Mango Management. We have a bookkeeper and HR person, and our executive chef and operations director also mostly work out of Fiero. My produce person for the past two years just moved on to a new job running a commissary, so in the meantime while somebody else is being hired, just myself and a couple of people are making it happen. I’m just starting my produce list for tomorrow for the market, in fact.
We have a van for produce, the refrigerated van for delivering desserts and the different prepared foods in SLO. We go to the Baywood Park market on Mondays, drive up to Cambria and drop off the Robin’s order, Wednesday morning market in AG, Thursday Morro Bay market, go back up to Cambria for a drop off, then hit the Saturday Morning Market here in San Luis. So we do five markets a week and then deliver to all the different restaurants.
Do you have certain vendors or booths that are go-to’s?
Right. So we have some pre-orders of stuff, like Bautista Farms; we get a lot from them, their Bloomsdale spinach, baby carrots, kale and chard from either them or Big John’s. We spread it out a little bit but there’s, you know, probably six to eight vendors that we use the majority of the time because we use a lot of the same produce – a lot of those greens and then baby carrots, beets, fennel, winter squash, different things like that.
I would love to hear more about your experience being an out restaurateur.
Sure. I haven’t really faced anything major. There’s a couple of us, and mind you, I came out when I first moved here to San Luis Obispo. But that was after many years in Cambria, you know, not being out but being married to a woman. There’s actually, I think, a pretty substantial number of downtown businesses that are gay-owned and run, and so I guess on that side I’ve never had any problems. I want to say zero. Yeah, I can’t think of anything anywhere along those lines. The only flack that I’ve gotten is from political things to do with anti-Trump and pro-immigration, where I’ve spoken up or whatever, so they haven’t necessarily been LGBTQ-related. Another one had to do with supporting a certain measure to do with the environment. Those are the only things I’ve gotten flack for.
If you feel comfortable, I’d love to hear a little bit about your coming out story.
Everything sort of worked for me; everything’s been very serendipitous actually. With all the restaurants, with coming out, moving to San Luis – it all just happened. For me there was just a lot of fear around it. I was in an Evangelical Christian atmosphere in Cambria and all of those people are still really good friends of mine, but that would have been really difficult for me had I stayed in Cambria. So I lived alone for six years; I was single, very single, and so I got to know myself a lot better than if I had gone from relationship to relationship. I slowly came out to myself, then slowly came out to other people and then found out that one of my managers was gay – there was no flack anywhere and a lot of acceptance. I feel like a lot of it was me projecting fear from others, projecting what they were thinking when it was just my projection. And then my kids, they’re both boys, 40 and 39, and they were both very accepting immediately, so it’s actually been really easy for me in that sense. Even my father, he’s 96 and he has accepted it also. I feel like I’ve been really blessed, every which way, all the way around. No confrontations, unless they were with myself.
Yeah, it was a long journey. And the fact that my business partner, who is my ex-wife… we have Christmas together with our significant others, my partner and her husband, we go on family vacations all together with all of our kids. Our two partners are very accepting of having to share us and our kids and grandkids and everything – they’re really amazing. I don’t know why that is – maybe we all want to get along, too, you know what I mean? Prefer to get along rather than be combative. Very interesting. Yeah, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, we’re all there. We’re incredibly diverse in the sense that my ex-wife is a Chinese Singaporean, so one son is that mix, and my other son is adopted from Brazil, and then my niece married a Burmese. So when you see all of us together, you know, there’s every mixture imaginable.
That kind of vibes with your brand…
Yeah, that’s funny. (Smiling and reflecting) Huh, I’ve never thought about that.
You’ve been a big supporter of Pride and the local LGBTQ+ community. Can you tell me from your perspective how the community has changed over time?
Okay, I moved to San Luis Obispo when Novo opened in 2003, and that’s actually when I came out. I was in my mid-40’s and moving to SLO helped me through that transition – I was in a new environment, I was recently divorced and I got connected with GALA. At that time they had a men’s group and I remember going; it really helped in the whole area of coming out and feeling comfortable with myself. In 2004 or 2005, we hosted an after-Pride party for the first time. It’s been sort of a mix of food and alcohol, but it’s a very difficult event to host because we’re sort of set up more like a restaurant at Novo.
In those first years, much of the older community came and would sit at the tables overlooking the creek after Pride, enjoy dinner and pretty much leave by 7pm or 8pm. You know, they either lived in Atascadero or AG or Paso, they came for Pride, many were married or partnered, and they’d just want to go home and go to bed because they had work the next day. The younger crowd hung out longer, danced longer and had a great time. Over the past 3 years, there’s been a lot fewer of the older community that’s come and mostly a middle-aged and younger crowd. I don’t know if it’s just because it’s also the last night of a very big weekend – from events on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and then Sunday – and if you’re there all day and it’s hot, which it usually is, you know, you’re pretty wiped out. And especially, I think a lot of the people who actually work the events, work in the booths, they’re sort of ready to go home. So a change that I’ve seen is that the after-Pride party has become more of a young people’s event than it was in the past.
What are your favorite queer supportive spots in the county?
That’s a little hard for me to identify because I’m sort of a workaholic; I don’t really go out much so there really aren’t many spots that I’ve gone to. There’s been different pride celebrations and fundraisers that used to happen where you’d go see a comedian at the PAC. We’ve been invited to some Facebook things, like “oh, let’s all meet at Mason Bar and Grill” or whatever. My partner is more involved so he belongs to a gay garden group. There’s probably 20 to 40 people, women too, although it’s predominantly men. They get together like four times a year. I went to more the six years I was single – I would go to almost all of the GALA events. I don’t drink so if they were only drinking events, I would be drinking water, which gets old. There used to be a weekly, either Friday or Saturday, LGBTQ night at the old Cornerview restaurant, where Eureka is now.
I don’t see a lot of that, LGBTQ+ nights at local bars, and would love to see more. What do you think is missing in the SLO County LGBTQ+ scene?
If you go back years, it was much more difficult feeling comfortable in your own skin or feeling comfortable where you work or where you shopped or whatever. Now it’s becoming a lot more accepted by the general public. I feel like in San Luis Obispo itself, with the college being here, us being in California, and on the coast of California as opposed to Fresno or Bakersfield, there’s a lot more general acceptance. And with younger people, it seems they’re feeling comfortable whether they go to Mother’s or Frog and Peach. So there’s not that fear factor that there was before because there isn’t as much of the judgement factor.
I think support groups are super important, like the ones they have at GALA for all the different LGBTQ+ identities. I belong to a gay AA group and I have for 16 years. Support groups are especially needed for our queer and trans youth – those people still have to deal with their parents, whereas people my age, nobody’s paying our way anymore and we may not care as much if people judge us. It’s a different feeling when you’re young.
What can the queer community do to support you (besides coming to your restaurants) and also do to support other local LGBTQ+ business owners?
I think the thing that most people can do is just accepting others, whether it’s at a restaurant or in the street or in the bank, just being accepting of differences and not judging somebody. There is a trans person who lives in town who walks a lot and it’s pretty dangerous for her. In particular for trans people I think it’s really dangerous because people fear what they don’t understand. They just don’t know because they haven’t walked a mile in that person’s shoes. That’s the most important thing people can do for me, not as a business owner but as a person – just be more accepting of others’ differences because they’re not trying to impose them on you. They’re just trying to live their life. Even in the meetings I go to, it’s easy for people in communities to judge each other and I think it’s a lot more important to just not. Accept other people, and if you enjoy being with them, great, and if you don’t, don’t, but don’t demean them. Accept them.
We love that. We love you. Robin, thank you.