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Jersey on the Plate

65 Degrees, Winter 2010

Rich Pepe was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, a stone’s throw away from Frank Sinatra, who was a family friend. Like most Italian immigrant families, the Pepe home revolved around the kitchen—a pot of fresh sauce boiling on the stove at all times, sometimes crab fetched from the Hudson River.

It was there, in his grandparents’ kitchen, alight with the smell of basil and oregano, that a young, scrappy, street-savvy Pepe learned to appreciate home-cooked meals, an appreciation that he tries to instill in the customers of his various restaurants and culinary businesses.

“It seemed I was more interested in food than the other kids, but I was also more hungry,” jokes Pepe. “You got a little extra if you hung around the kitchen.” In a large family—consisting of 28 auntsand uncles, and the same number of first cousins— you had to be tenacious to get what you wanted.

It was perhaps this same tenacity that led Pepe to seek adventures far beyond the stoop-filled blocks of Hoboken and into the terra incognita of the West Coast. He was one of the few who moved away. “My family likens me to the grand- parents who left their families to pursue new lives,” says Pepe.

In Pepe’s mind, California was the place to start anew. He says he wanted to find a place that was “in juxtaposition to where [he] came from—from the hard knocks ‘whatcha gotta be’ of Hoboken to a new relaxed lifestyle.” He found it in Monterey.
Drawing on his skills as a baker that he developed in his family’s shop growing up, Pepe, then 21 years old, took a job at a Monterey bakery. And he’s been on the Peninsula ever since. Today he owns Carmel Bakery, along with two restaurants, a budding wine company, and a homemade sauce company.



It’s the new sauce company that Pepe seems most excited about. Pepe & Pants, named after himself and his childhood best friend, Joey Pantoliano, is a relatively small operation and risk compared to running two restaurants—Little Napoli and Peppoli. With this new business, everything on a Pepe restaurant table will be proprietary, just like it was at his home growing up. Pepe and Pantoliano have been in business together before, but this is the first time they’re working on something that reminds them of their childhood. “We’re really excited about this, and much of the proceeds are going to charity,” says Pepe.

But it’s not just the sauce-makers who are excited about the project. Even the Kennedy family has gotten on the Pepe & Pants bandwagon. Pan- toliano lives near Bobby Kennedy, and when Bobby and Mary Kennedy needed to cook for an 80-person Kennedy family reunion, they called on Pepe & Pants to help them out. Ethyl Kennedy especially loved the sauce and talked with Pepe for hours. “She is fascinated by cooking. Some of the top people in the world are just fascinated by a guy who can cook,” he boasts.

It’s more than just his culinary skills that bring people to Pepe. He’s got that East Coast ex- troversion that we often long for on the West Coast. Pepe is magnanimous, the way that you want your Italian chef to be, singing and yelling jovially from the kitchen, walking out to greet his regular customers with a warm handshake. And he knows this about himself. “I like making friends. Sometimes you just gotta go knock on the door and say ‘hi’ and ask what do we have in common?” The answer is usually food. °

From Calligraphy to Conception

65 Degrees Magazine, Winter 2010

As a child, Mike Poppleton practiced calligraphy. It was part of his Japanese heritage and the founda- tion for his appreciation of design that would carry him through his college years and into his profes- sional life as a designer and retailer.

“In calligraphy, you have to consider the balance, the overall impact and aesthetics,” explains Poppleton, who sits among his expansive furniture store in Monterey. The collection that surrounds him echoes his appreciation of design—there are Italian imports, hand finished and ornately etched, as well as a collection of jaw-dropping antiques.

But Poppleton’s Furnishings & Interior Design wasn’t always Poppleton’s, the eponymous shop housed on Lighthouse Avenue. Before it was Poppleton’s, the largest retailer of furniture on the Monterey Peninsula, it was Butcher Block and Barstools, a small furniture store in Capitola.

Twenty-seven years ago, Poppleton acquired Butcher Block and Barstools through an ad in the Businesses For Sale section of the Wall Street Journal. “It was only one year old and a small store so I bought it,” tells Poppleton. “From there it just kept growing.” As the store transformed, its original name no longer fit with the upscale inventory. “It came down to Poppleton’s and Dovetails. I wanted Dovetails, but the staff said Poppleton’s is better, so I said ‘okay, let’s do it.’”

Poppleton trusts his employees. He humbly says that hiring excellent people is one thing he can take credit for. Poppleton has 13 people on payroll, which he says is “not bad for a Mom and Pop shop.” But it’s really just a Pop shop, as Poppleton oversees it all himself.

Poppleton wasn’t always a retailer. Before selling highly stylized goods, he made them. With a degree in Industrial Design from San Jose State University, Poppleton pursued car styling. He had a love of cars even as a child. “I always sketched cars as a little kid; really anything that was moving, I loved,” he says. His love of cars continued into his teen years when he dreamed of being a car stylist.

A summer internship program at GM made that dream a reality, and shortly after college GM hired him to work on their design team. Among his favorite tasks was converting a Cadillac Seville for the Geneva Auto Show. “We put in Rolls Royce leather and modified the interior, the exterior, and shipped it to Geneva,” exclaims Poppleton, whose voice fills with excitement as he talks about the project.



While he liked the job at GM, he hated the weather and looked for a reason to move back to California. He found it in a Wall Street Journal ad, and thus Mike Poppleton the designer was replaced with Mike Poppleton the retailer. But before there was Mike Poppleton the designer, there was Mike Poppleton the child in Wash- ington State, and before that, Hawaii, and even before that he was a little boy named Manibou Arai (Manibou translated means to study and learn) living in Japan. Mike Poppleton acquired his current name through his stepfather, Sydney Robert Poppleton, who was in the Navy and met Mike’s mother during the war. The family took Poppleton as their surname and began a new life in the United States.

Despite being given the name by his stepfather, Mike Poppleton has made a name for himself. From his teen years as the National Judo Champion of his division (his success got him a scholarship to SJSU) to his adult years as proprietor of his namesake shop, Poppleton is fully Poppleton.

And his store seems to reflect all the parts of himself. There’s the gorgeous leather couches, reminiscent of his early GM days, Asian-inspired art hangs on the walls, and most notably, hand-drawn tags adorn each piece of his furniture. Poppleton sketches each piece of furniture on a small card and hand-writes a history of the product. He says he draws the tags to make it easier for him to keep track of sales, but like the calligraphy he learned as a child, the strokes perform double duty as both art and story. °

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Article in San Francisco Magazine

Check out my piece on San Francisco's lesbian nightlife in the December issue of San Francisco Magazine. On stands now.

Toxic Toys
By Kristin A. Smith
Published in Curve Magazine


You know what you like. You’ve spent years perfecting it. You know how to cinch it, stuff it and strap it on. You know what speed you want and what length you need. You know how to ask about it in the store and ask for it in bed. You are a sex toy connoisseur and you may know what feels good, but do you know if it IS good?

Cheaply made sex toys are full of harmful chemicals. The most ubiquitous of these chemicals are phthalates (pronounced THA-lates), which are added to otherwise hard PVC toys to make them flexible enough for your enjoyment. Manufacturers add a chemical cocktail of phthalates to destabilize the molecules and give the toy that soft, realistic feel.

It’s not just adult toys that contain phthalates; some children’s toys also contain the chemicals. But children’s toys are becoming government regulated. There is no currently regulation for adult toys.

“In some ways that’s good,” says Jessica Giordani, founder of The Coalition Against Toxic Toys (CATT) and owner of Smitten Kitten, a sex shop in Minneapolis. “We don’t want the government in our sex lives…but it means we have to be smarter consumers.”

Being a smarter consumer means making connections. No study has been conducted on the danger of phthalates in sex toys, but studies have been done on phthalates in children’s toys; the results show a link between phthalates and liver and hormonal damage. The European Union and the state of California have now banned the chemicals in children’s toys. Giordani says we need to ask ourselves, “If it’s dangerous for my kid in a pacifier, might it also be dangerous for me in a butt plug?”

Phthalates aren’t just used in butt plugs; they’re used in a lot of toys— a lot of your favorite toys, like the “Rabbit Habit,” with its little pearls of joy. Babeland founder Claire Cavanah says that while Rabbit Habit was one of their best selling toys, they have taken it off the market and replaced it with a new phthalate-free version of the toy.

Giordani and Smitten Kitten partner Jennifer Pritchett went further than just pulling phthalate-infected toys from their shelves. With what they describe as “an information blackout” about the dangers of chemicals in sex toys, Giordani and Pritchett took matters into their own hands.

The CATT founders brought some of the most scrupulous toys to a chemist for testing. Among the chosen toys—the newly popular Cyberskin products. The women were surprised to learn that the product contained no phthalates, but did contain “industrial grade mineral oil,” a compound that Giordani says is “essentially kerosene.”

Giordani says that unless you are a chemist yourself or go to have your toys tested, there’s no way to know the chemical makeup of your toys. But there are ways to tell if your toys contain phthalates. “Trust your nose,” says Giordani. “The new car smell, those are phthalates.” She adds that if the toy melts when boiled, it probably contains phthalates as well.

Many companies, even boutiques, still sell phthalate-infected toys. Some stores urge you to use a condom with anything that may contain dangerous chemicals, but Giordani says there is no proof that a condom will keep you safe from toxins. “If there was,” she says, “we’d all be walking around covered in giant condoms.” She adds that good sex shops should have floor models that you can feel and smell before you buy.

So why are these toxic toys still on the market? Denise Corona, owner of Vixen Creations, a toxic free toy manufacturer in San Francisco says, “it’s all about the profit margin—with a lack of oversight and cheap overseas labor, sex toys are affordable, but not always safe.”

Even with all the dangerous toys on the market, there are still some that are guaranteed harmless—Glass, surgical steel and medical grade silicone are sure to tickle your fancy while keeping you safe.

All images from smittenkittenonline.com