62 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {food coloring} always visit him at Sundance. So we had dinner here a lot.” Throughout high school, Galen rolled up his sleeves alongside his father, working his way from busboy to dishwasher to fry cook. “You either have passion for the career or the career will eat you alive,” he observes. When Richard first made the leap from opening restaurants on behalf of Hungry Hunter Steakhouse Group to opening his own place with a partner, he had his family’s support. “They spent every cent to get this thing open,” says Galen, adding that his father came up with creative ways of cutting costs. While buying glasses, for instance, he asked a restaurant supply store what they had the hardest time selling—and walked away with three dusty cases of snifters for a killer price. For a time, Richard served everything—cocktails, beer and wine—in those snifters. “It sounded crazy at the time, but it caught on,” Galen says. Guests seemed to appreciate the novelty. “We still have customers who come in today and ask for their cocktail in a snifter.” Back in the present, a guest at the next table is digging into a jumbo Australian lobster tail, a 10-ounce beauty steamed on the shell and graced with butter and lemon. Another diner slurps down steamy spoonfuls of chowder. “It's a collection of probably six different chowder recipes, all from the Boston area,” Galen says. “My dad would go to Boston and he would ask chefs and general managers, ‘What's your key ingredient?’” The resulting combination won the Santa Cruz Chowder Cookoff three years in a row. Galen explains that, rather than return to Sundance after college, he served a stint at the accounting firm Ernst & Young, but it didn’t "light my fire,” he says. When his father began thinking of retiring, Galen stepped up to take the helm of the family business. Under his management, Galen expanded the wine list from 70 selections to 500. “We had to build a couple wine cellars on the property to store it properly. During that process, we had wine everywhere, including the office, the kitchen and at my apartment,” he chuck-
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