Q&A WITH CHEF JEFF GAMBARDELLA
Q: What Makes Rigolo Café So Special?
Rigolo Café is an all day, family-friendly and family-owned restaurant with a French accent. Our concept combines the food and décor traditions of a bustling French bistro with California avant-garde culinary trends and modern design. We provide a fun, laid-back café atmosphere for guests to gather and dine. We have an enthusiastic team of employees energized to provide a great experience to our guests with a smile.
Rigolo places a strong emphasis on family-friendly dining, which is hard to come by in a serious foodie city like San Francisco. In addition to a kid’s play area with toys and a blackboard, we offer an award-winning, healthy kids menu that caters to the most finicky of little appetites, along with a clean and pleasant play area for our pint-sized guests.
In the evenings, the mood changes from bustling daytime café to a relaxing bistro-style atmosphere. Our dinner menu offers bistro staples such as our tasty Roasted Free-Range Chicken and our popular Steak Frites Classique. We also offer rotating prix fixe meals such as our Stone Oven Roasted Maine Lobster, which includes an appetizer and dessert.
At Rigolo Café, we are committed to providing fun experiences and delicious meals. In fact, a large majority of our guests are regulars, many of whom we are on a first name basis with, and we love that!
Q: Why Are Rigolo’s Meals So Good?
Our menu takes inspiration from classic French cuisine combined with a California style of cooking and our own unique twists that make each of our dishes unique and flavorful.
All of our meals are made from scratch right here in our kitchen, using the highest quality fresh ingredients, sourced locally here in Northern California when available. We are proud to serve only organic breads, pastries and coffees; natural meat, poultry and dairy products, including hormone and antibiotic-free milk; and fresh seafood.
Our open kitchen consists of state-of-the-art equipment, including our Woodstone hearth pizza oven, and our Montague cast-iron stove, griddle and convection oven.
Q: What Makes Rigolo’s coffee so irresistible?
Equator Coffees & Teas, a local artisan roaster based in San Rafael, supplies our coffee beans. Equator roasts only organic, fair trade coffee beans, obtained from ecologically conscious growers. They also provide natural decaf beans using the chemical-free “swiss water” decaffeination process. Equator was selected as Roast Magazine’s “2010 Roaster of the Year”, and our guests can taste the difference in Equator’s quality and freshness, when compared to mass brands and local competitors.
In our store, we brew our coffee and make espresso drinks on state-of-the-art equipment, including a double-boiler La Marzocco espresso maker, better known as the “Rolls Royce” of espresso machines. In addition we grind our beans to order for each individual espresso drink, in a Mazer electronic grinder, thus ensuring quality and consistency. Our baristas must complete a training program on how to use this fine-crafted equipment. The training is conducted by Equator’s Master Roaster at the company’s San Rafael roasting facility.
Q: Why Are Rigolo’s Breads and Pastries so Delicious?
We are proud to serve locally sourced, organic baked goods from San Francisco’s own Bay Bread (owner of La Boulange bakeries). Bay Bread has been baking delicious and authentic French breads and pastries in San Francisco since 1999, receiving both local and national accolades for its outstanding product.
Rigolo also serves the Bay Area’s very best macaroons from L’artisan Macarons, made with 100% natural ingredients. And of course, we also bake our very own mouth-watering cookies and seasonal desserts, all made with organic flour and natural dairy products.
