Collection context
Summary
- Title:
- Cindy Pawlcyn Papers
- Dates:
- 1945-2021
- Creators:
- Pawlcyn, Cindy and Pawlcyn, Cindy
- Abstract:
- The Cindy Pawlcyn Papers document the career of James Beard Award-winning chef and cookbook author Cindy Pawlcyn. Her first restaurant, Mustards Grill, has been in operation for over 40 years and has earned the Robert Mondavi Award for Culinary Excellence. Pawlcyn is known and loved for her elegant but unfussy, locally focused food philosophy. Pawlcyn has written five cookbooks: Fog City Diner Cookbook (1993), Mustards Grill Napa Valley Cookbook (2001), Big Small Plates (2006), Cindy Pawlcyn's Appetizers (2009), and Cindy's Supper Club (2012).
- Extent:
- 19 boxes
- Language:
- English .
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Cindy Pawlcyn Papers, D-696, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
This collection chronicles Pawlcyn's career and contains publications, articles, photographs, award letters, recipes, and menus from 1945-2021. Also included are materials related to Pawlcyn's restaurants Mustards Grill, Fog City Diner, Miramonte, Meadowood, Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen, Go Fish, Rio Grill, Tra Vigne, Buckeye Roadhouse, Bistro Roti, Bix, and Brassica. Restaurants throughout the U.S. and abroad are also represented.
- Biographical / historical:
-
James Beard Award-winning chef Cindy Pawlcyn first carved her indelible mark on Northern California cuisine during the 1980s with her first three restaurants: Mustards Grill in St. Helena (1983), Rio Grill in Carmel (six months after Mustards), and Fog City Diner in San Francisco (1985).
She was raised in Minneapolis by parents who kept a family garden and cooked using their home-grown seasonal vegetables. Encouraged by her parents to gain experience and an education in the cooking industry, Pawlcyn worked for a combination restaurant supply house and cooking school by the age of thirteen and by high school was running her own catering business. She started collecting cookbooks around this time, the contents of which would come to include signed first editions by James Beard and Julia Child. After high school, Pawlcyn attended Hennepin Technical Institute followed by a degree in hotel and restaurant management from the University of Wisconsin.
After some culinary training at Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne in Paris, Pawlcyn returned to the U.S. and worked in Minneapolis and Chicago restaurants, including serving as sous chef at the Pump Room in Chicago. Pawlcyn met business partners who encouraged her to move to California, which she did in 1979. Her first job in Napa Valley was the opening chef for Meadowood Resort, which went on to become a world-renowned 3-Michelin Star restaurant.
In 1983, a few years after Pawlcyn's move to St. Helena in Napa Valley, she and her business partners opened Mustards Grill. In 2000, Pawlcyn sold her shares in the partnership that included Fog City Diner and Buckeye Roadhouse but kept her flagship restaurant Mustards Grill, and it continues to flourish over 40 years later.
She published Fog City Diner Cookbook in 1993 and Mustards Grill Napa Valley Cookbook in 2001, which was a 2002 James Beard Foundation Award winner and 2002 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) finalist. Pawlcyn published three more cookbooks: Big Small Plates (2006), Cindy Pawlcyn's Appetizers (2009), and Cindy's Supper Club: Meals from around the World to Share with Family and Friends (2012).
Not too long after the dissolution of the partnership in 2000, Pawlcyn opened Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen, a restaurant she described as "most like being in my home." Pawlcyn's trailblazing of the Napa Valley restaurant scene earned her the title "Queen of Napa Valley Cuisine" in a 2010 Sacramento Bee article. In addition to the iconic Fog City Diner, Pawlcyn was involved in other San Francisco and Bay Area ventures: Bix, Bistro Roti, Betelnut, Buckeye Roadhouse, and Tra Vigne. She was the opening chef for Meadowood Resort which went on to become a world-renowned 3-Michelin Star restaurant. Pawlcyn also brought her expertise to television shows, having appeared on Top Chef: Masters and other cooking-related shows.
From eating fresh produce from her parents' garden to growing the Mustards Grill culinary garden, Pawlcyn's farm-to-table ethos is her fundamental approach to food that customers and critics appreciate. The legendary Mustards Grill earned the Robert Mondavi Award for Culinary Excellence, and Pawlcyn received the Fine Beverage and Food Federation's Career Achievement Award while also being nominated twice for the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in California. She is one of the Who's Who of Cooking in America and is in the Distinguished Restaurants of North America (DiRoNa) Hall of Fame.
Pawlcyn's expansive cookbook collection of nearly four thousand items was destroyed in the massive Northern California 2020 Glass Fire. Among these rare cookbooks was Pawlcyn's grandmother's notebook, filled with handwritten family recipes and notes as well as Pawlcyn's recipe ideas from when she developed dishes for Mustards Grill. The historic fire burned 67,000 acres in Napa and Sonoma Counties, including Pawlcyn's home and the Restaurant at Meadowood, where Pawlcyn was the opening chef in the early 1980s. In a 2020 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle she acknowledged how devastating and permanent her losses were. She went on to say, "But there are a million cookbooks out there. There are many more that need to be read. So, I better get on it."
Sources
Burns, Jim, and Betty Ann Brown. Women Chefs: A Collection of Portraits and Recipes from California's Culinary Pioneers. Berkeley, Calif: Aris Books, 1987.
California Walnuts. "Cindy Pawlcyn." 2025. https://walnuts.org/food-professionals-old/meet-our-chefs/cindy-pawlcyn/.
Jung, Carolyn. "Legendary Napa chef Cindy Pawlcyn loses 3,800 cookbooks after home burns in Glass Fire." San Francisco Chronicle, updated October 15, 2020. https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Legendary-Napa-chef-Cindy-Pawlcyn-loses-3-800-15644243.php.
Mustards Grill. "Our Team." Accessed May 25, 2024. https://mustardsgrill.com/our-team.
Mustards Grill article from Western's World magazine (Box 2, Folder 19), Cindy Pawlcyn Papers, D-696, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.
Note in Meadowood folder (Box 2, Folder 7), Cindy Pawlcyn Papers, D-696, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.
Peirleoni, Allen. "The Queen of Napa Cuisine." Sacramento Bee, September 15, 2010.
Spector, Amy. "Chef Pawlcyn Exits Real Group, Keeps Flagship Mustards Grill." Nation's Restaurant News 34 no.35 (August 28, 2000): 8, 83.
- Acquisition information:
- Gift of Cindy Pawlcyn, 2022.
- Processing information:
-
Michelle Trujillo and Elizabeth Wood created this finding aid.
- Arrangement:
-
The records are arranged in five series, one of which has been further arranged in subseries.
Arrangement of the materials is as follows:
Series 1: Menus and Restaurant-related Materials
Subseries 1.1: Pawlcyn's Restaurants and Special Events – Arranged alphabetically by menu and event title.
Subseries 1.2: Other Menus – Arranged alphabetically by menu title.
Series 2: Scrapbooks and Articles – Arranged alphabetically by title.
Series 3: Awards, Recognition, Professional Development – Arranged alphabetically by title.
Series 4: Cookbooks and Wine Guides – Arranged alphabetically by title.
Series 5: Photographs and Slides – Arranged alphabetically by title.
- Physical location:
- This collection is stored off-site at the Northern Regional Library Facility. Researchers should contact Archives and Special Collections to request collections in advance.
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Indexed terms
About this collection guide
- Date Encoded:
- This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2025-08-22 09:47:44 -0700 .
Access and use
- Restrictions:
-
Collection is open for research use.
- Terms of access:
-
All applicable copyrights for the collection are protected under chapter 17 of the U.S. Copyright Code. Requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Head of Special Collections. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the Regents of the University of California as the owner of the physical items. It is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the researcher.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Cindy Pawlcyn Papers, D-696, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.
- Location of this collection:
-
University of California, Davis, Special Collections, UC Davis Library100 NW QuadDavis, CA 95616-5292, US
- Contact:
- (530) 752-1621