Lunchette is Petaluma’s go-to lunch spot

Offering downtown Petaluma healthy grab-n-go or dine-in options, Lunchette’s menu includes a regular selection of veggie, vegan, gluten-free and meat-topped salads, along with an excellent array of eclectic Roman-style pizzas.|

Just as the weather starts to brighten, so too has Lunchette illuminated downtown diners to a great new menu of food choices at the corner of 4th and B Streets. Offering downtown Petaluma healthy grab-n-go or dine-in options, Lunchette’s menu includes a regular selection of veggie, vegan, gluten-free and meat-topped salads, along with an excellent array of eclectic Roman-style pizzas, sourced from local purveyors and changing with the winds of the seasons.

Visitors will likely recognize Lunchette’s husband and wife team of Joel Baecker and Naomi Crawford from Pizza Politana, which they started roughly ten years ago, and still operate out of their Payran Street headquarters in Petaluma.

Naomi was born in Santa Monica but spent a good portion of her childhood in Marshall. While studying pre-law at UC Davis, she worked as a cook in a vegetarian restaurant and fell in love with the food and service industry. Naomi would later spend time in the south of Spain helping with a friend’s restaurant before returning to the West Coast to work at such stalwart dining spots as San Francisco’s Woodward’s Garden and the Slow Club, before landing as the pastry chef at the iconic PlumpJack Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe. Eventually, Naomi ended up at the distinguished Village Pub in Woodside.

Joel grew up between Grass Valley and San Francisco, and even during high school, knew he wanted to work with his hands. He would end up attending the 2-year program at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, before returning to California to intern at Alice Water’s groundbreaking farm-to-table restaurant Chez Panisse, where he would go on to earn a permanent position. Joel would later work at Liberty Café before also finding himself at the Village Pub, which is where he and Naomi met and struck up a romance, which would eventually lead to marriage and two children.

After their wedding, Joel and Naomi spent four months traveling around Europe, with much of that time invested in Italy. While visiting Naples, Italy, they fell in love with the wood-fired pizzas and wanted to incorporate that in the locavore movement, which was gaining steam in Northern California. Once back in the U.S. they set out to make wood-fired pizza more accessible to the masses, which is how Pizza Politana was born in 2006.

While running their Baecker Catering company, Joel and Naomi worked with a builder in Colorado to design and create their first mobile wood-fired pizza oven, which would allow them to offer wood-fired pizza at a variety of locations, like Farmers Markets, wineries, and private events. Although commonplace today, at the time, only a few places had created their own mobile pizza oven, so Joel and Naomi were basically starting from scratch. The gentleman they worked with in Colorado would go on to start a business that focuses on mobile pizza ovens, all thanks to Joel and Naomi’s original idea.

Naomi’s godmother and several friends lived in Petaluma, and after visiting many times, the two decided that Petaluma was a great community in which to base their business and raise their family. After just one year, Pizza Politana was so popular that they expanded to two ovens, eventually operating four pizza ovens at 13 farmers markets around the Bay Area, as well as catering private events.

“Our Pizza Politana kitchen on Payran Street also offers everything from dough and sauce to full-on pop-up dinner events,” says Joel.

After years of commuting all over the Bay Area, Joel and Naomi wanted to do something with food that was closer to home.

“We wanted to do something simple, yet still present good ingredients,” says Naomi. “It was a combo of wanting to highlight local ingredients, but also not wanting to work at nights,” adds Joel. “We didn’t want to lose that time with our kids.”

As luck would have it, their kids attended the same school as Suzanne Alexandre’s children. Suzanne was looking to hand off her Free Range shop space. She felt strongly that the space should host a food vendor, because that was kind of missing from that area of downtown. It was a match made in heaven and Suzanne has been a huge supporter ever since handing over the keys.

It would have been natural to want to create a brick and mortar version of Pizza Politana, but Joel and Naomi were not looking to set up a full restaurant, which is what would have been required to create a wood-fired pizza joint.

“We kind of wanted to create something different,” says Joel in reference to Lunchette’s thin focaccia pizzas, which are a perfect accessory to their wide variety of salads.

“With a background in fine dining, we wanted to use high quality, fresh, locally sourced ingredients, but keep it casual by offering something that guests could grab while on the run,” continues Joel. Helping them create healthy plant-based carryout lunches, Lunchette’s ingredients come from local, organic and sustainable farms, which include FEED Sonoma, County Line, Cowgirl Creamery, CAPAY, Windrift, Coastal Hill Eggs, Riverdog, Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese, Bellwether Farms and Star Route Farms. In fact, every time we have visited Lunchette, there is at least one person in line who recognizes and points out some of the local food purveyors on that list.

And always thinking of the bigger picture, Lunchette’s salad containers are biodegradable, as noted by the label reading “Certified Compostable, made from plant material, will turn into soil in 180 days in a commercial compost system.”

One of the key ingredients to success in Petaluma is listening to the community, which Joel and Naomi have been doing since the beginning.

“The community has been very supportive, and people are forthcoming with their suggestions,” says Joel. “From day one, guests wanted more meat salads, so that’s what we have been working on, but with so many great local veggie suppliers, we constantly update our regular salads too.”

And as meat lovers, my crew can attest to the fact that the meat topped salads are as satisfying to carnivores, as the veggie/vegan ones are to the plant-based crowd. We were also impressed that whether it is steak or chicken, the meat is chopped on bite-sized pieces, which means it distributes well throughout the salad, making it meaty enough for even this carnivore.

Naomi mentions that other local restaurant owners have been stopping in to show their support, which is one of the features of Petaluma’s downtown that does not seem to fade no matter how popular Petaluma’s culinary scene becomes. Fellow pizza maker extraordinaire, and owner of Wild Goat Bistro, Nancy Delorenzo was one of the first to offer Joel and Naomi congrats on their new venture, and welcomed them to the downtown food scene, offering to help them in any way they needed.

“When we first were looking to move out of San Francisco, we had a lot of choices,” says Naomi. “But nobody can compare to Petaluma when it comes to a community taking care of its own.”

We have been back several times for two of our favorite salads, which are the Smoked trout salad, and the Steak salad. The Smoked trout salad consists of spring vegetable slaw, sumac yogurt dressing, roasted beets, pickled raisins, and spiced cashews and the Steak salad is grilled flank steak, arugula, tarragon buttermilk dressing, green beans, sweet potatoes, candied walnuts, and one of my all-time favorite cheeses, and the perfect pairing with steak of every kind, Pt. Reyes Farmstead Cheese’s Blue.

We have also enjoyed salads, such as the Sobi Noodle Salad and salads with heartier than usual ingredients, such as farro and quinoa, which help make those salads both more interesting texturally, but also more filling than a normal salad. Diners can regularly be heard commenting on how much they love Lunchette’s dressing, so who knows, maybe there is a salad dressing business in Joel and Naomi’s future.

Often treated like outsiders, Lunchette bridges the gap between those with restricted diets and food that is healthy and easy to grab on the go. Warren Dranit is a partner at the law firm of Spaulding, McCullough & Tansil, which is located just down the street from Lunchette. Warren is a vegetarian and wife Susie is a vegan, so both find Lunchette a perfect spot for lunch.

“Lunchette makes it easy to grab food that works for our diets, without having to ask for special treatment,” says Warren. “And clearly they are using quality ingredients because the salads are clean and fresh.”

All of Lunchette’s salads are tagged appropriately, so diners can easily find which salads are vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, dairy free and those that contain dairy.

On our last visit, we had to try the Bacon, pea shoots, spring onions and goat cheese pizza because I had never had pea shoots, and I rarely forgo bacon. Made in the “al taglio” Roman style, the pizza has a light and airy dough, similar to focaccia, only a bit thinner.

The toppings will change with the seasons and the weather but during our visit, other choices included Prosciutto, with trumpet mushrooms and Parmesan, olives, with mushrooms and feta, Margherita, and an asparagus topped beauty. However, front man Bill Burck is more than happy to make small adjustments so that you can get exactly what you are looking for. In fact, Burck does a great job of welcoming customers and explaining what Lunchette is all about.

With a picnic table out front, and blankets to borrow for picnicking across the street on the Petaluma Museum’s lawn, Lunchette offers almost as many seating options as they do salads and pizzas. Located between Acre Coffee and the corner of 4th & B Streets, Lunchette is enlightening downtown diners about a whole new style of fast food, conceived with care, creativity and quality local ingredients, and available either on the go, or for dine-in.

Currently, Lunchette is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., but you will want to get there early, or call in your order, to make sure you get your favorite.

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