Top image: The 1891 Queen Anne Victorian at 115 North Santa Cruz Avenue in Los Gatos, now home to Gardenia, photographed in October 2009 before the restaurant opened. Photo: Eugene Zelenko / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Gardenia occupies one of downtown Los Gatos’s more storied addresses: a nine-room Queen Anne Victorian at 115 North Santa Cruz Avenue, built in 1891 and later used as a funeral parlor. It has housed a run of restaurants since 1976, The Almanac reported when Gardenia opened there in September 2024. Two years in, the restaurant, coffee house and event space has a new executive chef, Morgan De Paulo, and a dinner menu that now reflects the direction he described to The Mercury News in October.
What the menu says
According to the menu posted on Gardenia’s website as of Nov. 10, dinner runs Tuesday through Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m., and brunch runs Tuesday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and weekends from 9:30 a.m.
The dinner starters open with Japanese milk bread ($12) served with black garlic-vegetable ash and hickory-smoked butters, a chicken liver mousse ($14) with red wine-strawberry gelée and brioche, and a steak tartare ($19) with leek kimchi, egg yolk jam and puffed tendon. Entrées include miso-glazed king salmon with smoked salmon caviar and mushroom XO ($38), lap cheong-crusted sea bass with chanterelles and sauce barigoule ($42), sticky five-spice lamb chops ($45) and a 6-ounce New York steak with potato pavé, smoked maitake mushrooms and truffle sauce ($52). A homemade fettuccine with walnut pistou is $26, a cha shu tofu stir-fry with udon is $28, and a smash burger is $19. Desserts are $14, among them a black sesame and white chocolate molten cake.
Specialty cocktails are listed at $18, mocktails at $12.
Several of those plates match dishes De Paulo previewed in his Oct. 13 Mercury News interview, including the milk bread, the chicken liver preparation, the miso-glazed salmon, the lap cheong sea bass, the truffle-sauced New York strip and the black sesame molten cake. Some details differ: the interview described a chardonnay-strawberry gelée, while the posted menu lists red wine.
Who’s behind it
Gardenia’s founder and owner is Carol Wang, who named the business after her mother’s love of gardenias, according to the restaurant’s About page. Wang had worked in the medical field and had no prior food and beverage experience, The Almanac reported in 2024. She built a specialty coffee program with consultants Morgan Eckroth and Weihong Zhang and sources coffee from Panama’s Lamastus Family Estates, according to that account.
De Paulo has spent 27 years in professional kitchens, with stints at the Mina Group, The LINE San Francisco and the San Francisco restaurant the Gardenia site lists as Wayfare Tavern, working under Ducasse, Vongerichten and Andrés, The Mercury News reported. He told the paper his first priority is “to rebuild the menu around Gardenia’s original concept of French-Asian fusion.” He summed up the food in three words: “Elevated yet playful.”
His plan is to bring production in-house. The milk bread, levain sourdough, pastries and desserts are already made on site, he said, along with a sauce and stock program that includes bordelaise and a vegan mushroom bordelaise. Ferments, miso, garums, preserves and eventually charcuterie are in development.
He was also candid about cost. De Paulo cited California diesel at about $8.18 a gallon in late September, roughly 64% above a year earlier, and said some ingredients cost 10% to 15% or more than last year. “Restaurants cannot necessarily pass every increase in food, fuel, labor and operating costs directly on to the guest,” he told The Mercury News.
What the critics have said
Coverage of Gardenia so far has been feature reporting rather than criticism. The Almanac’s 2024 opening story focused on the building, Wang’s background and the coffee program. The Mercury News piece is a Q&A with the chef. Neither offers a critical verdict.
The record
The house was built for Mary Barry Coggeshall, who moved to Los Gatos from San Francisco, The Almanac reported, citing the Los Gatan. The funeral parlor closed in 1971, and the most recent restaurant before Gardenia was The Palms. The Chronicle was unable to retrieve Gardenia’s Santa Clara County environmental health inspection history for this column and will add it once obtained.
On Oct. 2, Gardenia hosted a six-course wine dinner with Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars marking the 50th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris, according to an announcement on its homepage, which billed the menu as a showcase for “the new and exciting culinary direction that Gardenia is embracing.”
The long view
Gardenia is a test of whether a single-owner restaurant in a large historic building can carry a chef-driven menu in a town where rents, labor and now fuel all push prices up. De Paulo’s answer, more cooking from scratch and fermentation as a way to stretch the seasons, is the same playbook many ambitious Bay Area kitchens have adopted to protect margins without raising menu prices every quarter. Whether diners in downtown Los Gatos will pay $42 for sea bass in a Victorian that began as a family home, then served as a funeral parlor, will say a lot about the South Bay’s appetite for destination dining beyond the Peninsula, where this column’s last subject, The Village Pub in Woodside, holds a Michelin star.
The Reported Table is built from published menus, public records and other critics’ published reviews. The Chronicle does not award stars and our reporters do not claim tastings.
Sources
- Gardenia Los Gatos, menu page (checked Nov. 10, 2026)
- Gardenia Los Gatos, About page
- Gardenia Los Gatos, homepage announcements
- The Mercury News, “Gardenia Los Gatos’ new executive chef aims for ‘elevated yet playful’ menu,” Oct. 13, 2026
- The Almanac, “Gardenia opens in historic Los Gatos mansion,” Sept. 17, 2024
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