Alley & Vine, the California farm-to-table restaurant on Alameda’s bustling Park Street, has been a fine dining destination since it burst onto the East Bay scene in December of 2020.
Despite the pandemic and its devastation on the industry, the restaurant with Michelin-cred leadership continued to thrive as a hot spot for farm-to-glass cocktails and executive chef Jason Ryczek’s high-end dishes featuring wagyu, foie gras and caviar.
However, in January of this year, Ryczek, the restaurant’s executive chef and one of its founders, told partners Francisco Bazo and Casey Hunt that he was leaving Alley & Vine for health and personal reasons. Chef de cuisine Zack Boyer stepped in as interim chef while Bazo and Hunt set out to find a new executive chef to fill Ryczek’s shoes. And it took until now to find that someone.
Guillermo Ortiz, a chef with 35 years of experience in some of Northern California’s top kitchens, has officially taken over the reigns at Alley & Vine. Ortiz, a native of Mexico, comes from Miller & Lux, the Tyler Florence restaurant in San Francisco, where he was chef. Before that, he worked as a corporate chef in Arizona after working as the executive chef at Bottega in Napa Valley and sous chef at Bouchon in Yountville.
“Guillermo has been working with the pioneers of California cuisine for a long time so we feel that he is a great fit for us,” Hunt says. “We could’ve just hired someone quickly and put a Band-aid on the situation but we really wanted to find the right person.”
Given the small kitchen and micro-seasonal focus, Hunt says that Alley & Vine has kept its menu relatively small, offering one vegetarian dish, one fish and one pasta, for instance. But Ortiz has plans to add more options. There are currently two fish dishes on the dinner menu: A pan-fried branzino with cherry tomatoes and Calabrian chile oil and a wild king salmon with wild rice, summer squash and cauliflower cream. He also plans to add a few casual and mid-range options to the menu.
“We love that people see us as a high-end special occasion place,” Hunt says. “But we also want it to be the kind of place you can come for a burger and glass of wine before you go home.”
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