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Word of Mouth

Photo by Erin N. Calmes

Doyenne of Dough: Local queenpin of Rebecca's Mighty Muffins, Rebecca Campbell, has big plans for her downtown mothership that include late-night hours, hot entrees and live music.

Midnight Musings:
Rebecca's Mighty Muffins now cooks till the last chime

By Christina Waters

The headline sorta gave it away, but yes, it's true--now, Rebecca's Mighty Muffins stays open until midnight seven nights a week. Let's make that perfectly clear: Rebecca's is now open until midnight every night of the week, with live music enhancing the dinnertime experience on weekends starting at around 8:30pm.

I caught up with owner/founding matriarch/muffin queen Rebecca Campbell last week to check up on this latest development, and she said that the newest evolution of her empire of baked bounty would include "live music on Friday and Saturday nights--jazz, bebop and world beat. Plus, we're offering new dinner food," Campbell added, "to capture the downtown movie crowds."

Never resting on her considerable laurels, Campbell's response to the booming downtown Santa Cruz nightlife scene is just the latest in a long, delicious line of ways she's kept her empire growing. While it may seem like only yesterday that she started populating our fair county with enormous muffins, it was, in fact, more than 12 years ago that the Mighty Muffin thing got started. Today, that empire extends from here all the way up to Redwood City. "We're in about 100 stores," Campbell said, "with the bulk of our business in Menlo Park, San Jose and Redwood City."

So the newest concept at the 514 Front St. mothership in downtown Santa Cruz (429-1940) is to extend the coffee, pastry and light food options all the way through dinner and beyond. "We've just hired a pastry chef from Stars," Campbell continued, "and we're going to be developing a whole pastry line with 20 to 30 desserts--vegan, low-fat, non-fat, everything." Some hot dinner items also will be added to the celebrated listing of enormous (nothing is tiny in Rebecca's world) sandwiches and salads. "We'll do things like a house eggplant Parmesan, a house lasagna and a nightly house pizza," Campbell said. "And we're going to keep it cheap--dinners under $5."

Now that sounds like a plan that has "popular" written all over it. For the record, I just discovered two more reasons to stop by Rebecca's Mighty Muffins: the beyond-mighty pumpkin nut muffin, and the dill pickle-spiked red potato and artichoke salad.

I also fell for the hummus lavosh sandwich, which, at a full six inches in diameter and four inches tall, is an affair for two hands. In an experimental mode, I actually unwound the protective "band" of hummus-frosted lavosh bread, and out popped enough designer baby lettuce and grated carrots to fuel at least two full-sized salads. This is not a lavosh sandwich to be taken lightly.

Wine Alerts

Of course, everyone knows you can pick up terrific, little-known wines at extremely friendly prices at the famous cheapo wine bin at Shoppers Corner. And, of course, you also can pick up wonderful not-so-cheap wines from all over California, France and Italy in the wraparound wine selection that lines the walls of that landmark gourmet grocery. But now, wine aficionados can also pick up a de rigueur tasting accessory: the Riedel wine glass, made of Austrian crystal and priced at $6.95. The special bell curve of Riedel's bowl has been designed by experts to maximize bouquet, trapping all the olfactory detail of the winemaker's art and then front-loading it, so to speak, directly to the nostrils. In other words, with this stemware, you lose not one iota of aromatic character. Santa? Are you listening?

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