After making the Penny Ice Creamery and Picnic Basket a Santa Cruz sensation with co-owner Kendra Baker, Zachary Davis is teaming with her again for the upcoming Assembly.
When it opens, the Assembly will be a throwback of sorts. Zachary Davis and Kendra Baker, co-owners of the Penny Ice Creamery and Picnic Basket, will open up their new venture on Pacific Avenue. Davis, who promised some friends it would be open for Valentine’s Day, wants the business to bring in people from all walks of life. “I wouldn’t mind if it turned into the kind of place where Thomas Jefferson or George Washington would walk in and say, ‘Yeah, here’s a place I can sit down with some people and figure some things out,’” Davis says. “Maybe Jefferson would sit down next to some farmer that had grown some of the ingredients for his meal, and they’d talk about the way the world works.”
Can you give us a hint about the price range or menu items?
You would go with your family, with your friends, on a date. As far as price, something reasonable. The menu, rustic California cuisine. But really we’re setting out to define Santa Cruz cuisine as its own thing, drawing on the amazing agricultural bounty of Santa Cruz County in a way that you’ll definitely recognize ingredients, and you’ll recognize some of the dishes, but what ends up on the table will be a little more interesting.
Do you have any goals for the new joint?
Rather than just making another Penny and another Penny, and [going] that cookie cutter route, if we wanted to grow, we always had this idea of having a complementary ecosystem of food businesses that would share a common philosophy of locally sourcing seasonal ingredients, using organics. But they would not necessarily be the same thing—each would have its own identity and would support each other but allow us to be creative in different ways.
Cool. Then what’s next?
[Laughing] This is enough for right now. This has been a lot of work and will be a lot of work to fully realize what we want to do.
Do you and Kendra work on separate projects?
When it comes to the food, that’s her domain, and she has all the skill. For me it’s a lot of fun because I get to enjoy the food from a real outside perspective to discover those things without any preconceptions.
