Stern opens The Midway in Midtown with focus on local farms

It was rainy and gray on opening day for The Midway, but customers lined up on the rain-slicked sidewalk to grab a seat at chef Katherine Stern’s new restaurant on Soquel Avenue in Santa Cruz. Despite the chilly morning, the floor-to-ceiling windows filtered warm light into the sunny dining room filled with simple, natural wood tables decorated with fresh flowers. 

A brick-and-mortar location for The Midway was more than three years in the making. Stern launched The Midway as a farmers market pop-up in 2020 after another potential location fell through right before the pandemic. For the past three years, she was a fixture at the Westside Santa Cruz market on Saturdays and the Live Oak market on Sundays, serving a rotation of breakfast and brunch dishes inspired by the bounty from nearby farms. 

Stern calls her commitment to using local ingredients an “obsession,” and estimates that more than 90% of the meat and produce on her menu is produced locally. It has been a source of inspiration for Stern since her days as the chef at La Posta, a California-Italian restaurant on Seabright Avenue, a position she held from 2009 to 2018. 

Stern announced a permanent home for The Midway at the end of 2022, and spent a year remodeling the restaurant location at the intersection of Seabright Avenue and Soquel Avenue, just two doors from the Rio Theatre. Her husband did most of the carpentry work himself, and helped bring light into the previously dark blue-walled space. 

It seems like the perfect location for Stern. She’s lived in the neighborhood for 24 years, and its hotly debated nickname, Midtown, inspired the name of her restaurant. She even visited her future restaurant space at 1209 Soquel Ave. when it was occupied by Bea’s Koffee Kup, which closed in 2002 after more than 30 years. “The Midway mostly came from wanting a restaurant in Midtown,” says Stern. “I’ve always lived in Midtown, so that’s just where I wanted to be.” 

A soft opening, with shorter hours and fewer days of service, will continue through the end of the month. Currently, the menu featured some familiar dishes from the farmers market days, with seasonal updates: savory rice porridge made with Fogline Farm chicken, ginger and lemongrass ($19); fluffy sour cream pancakes topped with poached pears and spiced raisins ($16); and toast topped with smoky black cod, pickled beets, radishes and sprouts ($18). 

The tall, golden pancakes were faintly tangy, a perfect match for the sweet pear and raisins infused with warm spices. The ginger and lemongrass wove through the silky chicken and rice porridge, which we topped with Stern’s homemade chili sauce ($2). The house-smoked cod – obtained via Ocean2Table, a Santa Cruz-based fish and foraging distributor – was worked into a schmear, and peeked out along the edges of the toast from under a pile of microgreens, flower petals and ruby-colored beets. 

Stern also offers a case of baked goods, like a carrot, marmalade and sesame muffin ($3.50) and a fist-sized chard and feta scone ($4), along with homemade pantry items like chili sauce. The menu includes beer, wine, fresh-squeezed orange juice, mimosas and coffee. Guests order at the counter but receive table service after ordering. 

Those familiar with Stern’s culinary creations will not be surprised to hear that the menu will change frequently depending on the availability of local ingredients and her own inspiration. “I just get bored and I want to do something different, so it’s my own issues that people have to live with,” says Stern. “But things will return, be it a similar dish with a different ingredient.” For example, a few days later, the sour cream pancakes were topped with oranges and almonds, and the chicken and rice porridge was replaced with crispy Fogline Farm pork belly and pickled vegetables over brown rice.

During the soft opening, The Midway is open for brunch and lunch Thursday through Sunday. Later this month, Stern aims to launch dinner service, although she is still working out the details. The menu will be hyper-seasonal, European-style cuisine, similar to what she served during her yearlong culinary residency at Bad Animal in 2022. 

Now that the restaurant is open, The Midway stall won’t return to the farmers markets. At least, not for a while. “Currently, we’re really focused on the brick-and-mortar since our space is so small,” says Stern. “At least in the near future, probably not, but I don’t want to close the door forever.”

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