You Said It: Sally Tomatoes Has the Best Kids Menu!

Moving in to our second week of Patch's inaugural "Best Of" Rohnert Park contest, local fave Sally Tomatoes takes the nom for restaurant with the best kid's menu.

Out of 16 restaurants named "kid friendly" in Rohnert Park, gained a whopping 93 percent of the vote — pulling in 15 of the 16 total votes cast. And that's no wonder. 

The popular eatery not only boasts kid-friendly choices (one reader loves the mac and cheese!), but homemade pastas, fresh salads and unique sandwiches — all made in house. Every Thursday night is all you can eat pizza and salad buffet for $7.50 and the local spot also hosts a range of community events, from fundraisers to awards ceremonies and battle of the bands competitions.

Owners Gerard Giudice and Bill Pettibone got their start together 17 years ago at McInnis Park Golf Center in San Rafael, a sprawling country club where the two ran the posh club restaurant.

But Giudice, a New York Italian boy who grew up in the Bronx, got started in the restaurant business during the days of the three-martini lunch. It was Marin, late '70s and '80s, and Giudice was working as a bus boy at a The Plaza Restaurant in Novato. He was 15, and making  $18 a shift, but he wanted more — more money, more experience.

“I wanted to move on, so I made a move at that time which was very fortuitous for the rest of my life,” Giudice said. “I went down to Fourth Street in San Rafael, and I looked at all the restaurants down the street, and I saw the one I wanted to work at, a place called La Trattoria. I looked at what the bus boys were wearing, and the next day I went down there with a white shirt and a black tie.”

“I met a guy named Franco, the maitre d', and said I will work tonight for free. If you like me, I get the job, and if not, I’ll take a hike,” Giudice said. “It was there that I met all my employers for the next 20 years.”

That was just the start.

Giudice, 49, who today serves on Rohnert Park’s Planning Commission, and has a profound interest in the types of business that come to the city, has opened 10 restaurants throughout Marin and Sonoma counties since his days as a bus boy.

It was not out of the ordinary in his heydays as a server for him to wait on real estate big wigs, politicians and leaders of the counterculture, people such as Hunter S. Thompson, whom he waited on at Ristorante Lucca in Mill Valley, which has since closed.

“I met a lot of really cool people at Ristorante Lucca and I waited on a lot of crazy people,” Giudice said. “I can remember waiting on David Crosby and Hunter S. Thompson when they rolled in, probably on one of their three-day binges, and I had to drive them home later on that evening.”

Thompson, the iconic drunk, perhaps only rivaled by poet Charles Bukowski, told Giudice something that would forever stick with him, he said.

“I have a 1972 Toyota Celica, and I have to get both of them in the back seat, and take them home. There’s no cab service in Mill Valley at this point, and Hunter S. Thompson tells me one of the greatest things anybody ever told me, he said ‘go down to the edge of reality, and take a right.’”

“But I met a lot of other people too. I can remember Marty Balin from Jefferson Airplane buying me a drink on my 21st birthday, I went to Jeff Watson of Night Ranger’s wedding and I became very good friends with Steve Perry from Journey.”

Giudice was supposed to be a lawyer — it’s what he was groomed for. But, lawyers have big egos. Giudice used more colorful language to describe them, you get the point. He wanted to be a chef.

"My father was not very happy about it," he said.

After working for a couple more Marin County Italian spots, Giudice said he didn’t want to work for anyone else. He opened up his first place of his own, named after his grandmother — called Pappalardo’s Gastronomia, what Giudice dubbed an old school Italian delicatessen.

But, it folded. Giudice and his mother, who went into business together, had lofty dreams. They’d underestimated the cost of running a business and overspent.

“I folded, and it was hard. I was arrogant, and I was cocky and I had a lot of money in my pocket,” Giudice said. “But it was there that I learned the most valuable lesson in the restaurant business: it’s the nature of the deal.”

It was 1992, and Giudice, described in his gravely, eccentric voice, what followed as a “dark night of the soul.”

He was depressed and broke. But he met his wife, Suzanne, and together they pulled it together slowly. Catering gig there, a little restaurant consulting there.

“Gerard has never missed a day of work, he’s very reliable and very aggressive,” said Edward Pizutti, who met Giudice in 1979 and gave him his first job at La Trattoria.

Pizutti today runs Café Giostra in Petaluma.

Pizutti said it was Giudice’s outgoing personality that has helped him be so successful.

“It’s just Gerards’ personality,” said Pettibone, co-owner of Sally Tomoates. “He walks into a room and he has enough personality to fill the room, that’s not my strong point, I prefer to be more in the background.”

After his business folded, Giudice went on to open a handful of other eateries, such as McInnis, he also redesigned the food and beverage program at Oakmont Golf Club and was instrumental in getting Johnny Garlic’s off the ground.

But, in the end, he still wanted to be his own boss. After starting a family with his wife and two daughters, Giudice wanted to try again at his own place. He asked Pettibone to partner with him and open up a small catering business in a 700-square foot space downtown Cotati.

It wasn’t an easy decision for Pettibone to make. But alas, it was, Sally Tomatoes, a name derived from the classic 1961 film "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

“It was a very difficult decision,” said Pettibone, who holds a master’s in finance. “It takes a lot more than knowing food and cooking great food to make a successful restaurant. You have to understand marketing and finance.”

“But what makes Gerard and I so strong, I think, is us together. I don’t know anyone who has as much food and wine knowledge as Gerard, and I got the numbers side of things,” Pettibone said.

The two quickly outgrew the tiny storefront in Cotati, and have since moved to Sonoma Mountain Village. They see it as an opportunity, not only to run a successful business, but to help bring interest and a sense of community to Rohnert Park.

“We see this place at Sonoma Mountain Village to have a huge upside potential,” Pettibone said. “We have our café and bar, outside and in-house catering and we work in three different counties,” Pettibone added. “We’re getting bigger and stronger year.”

“We’re not done yet,” Giudice said.

Editor's note: A portion of this story appeared in a previous article. Do you know another neighborhood character or cool business?