For Patrick and Bobbin Mulvaney, the long-married couple whose restaurant Mulvaney’s B&L is on the top of almost everyone’s fine-dining list in the Capital Region, two words seem to coexist as a single mission statement: nourish and nurture.

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For Patrick and Bobbin Mulvaney, the long-married couple whose restaurant Mulvaney’s B&L is on the top of almost everyone’s fine-dining list in the Capital Region, two words seem to coexist as a single mission statement: nourish and nurture.

“If you own a restaurant and you love what you do, you become part of the community,” Patrick says over an intimate twilight dinner for three: the Mulvaneys and a very fortunate magazine writer. It’s a Tuesday, one of the industry’s traditionally least-populated nights. But the Mulvaneys’ restaurant — a onetime City of Sacramento firehouse and later a building-and-loan institution (hence the B&L in its title) — is bustling. It usually is; thousands of people have frequented Mulvaney’s B&L since it opened in 2005.

While workflow is essential for most businesses, the restaurant field offers the most constant and visual display of it, whether the place is designated as fine dining, fast food or grab-and-go. At various times, a good manager has to be as much a choreographer and taskmaster as a gracious host.  You can be entertained just sitting back before, between and after courses to watch the intricate dance of table bussers, water pourers, sommeliers and waiters. The experience can be almost as delicious as enjoying one of the restaurant’s signature dishes. 

Those include, by the way — and these are just some of the appetizers, not the entrées — house-made duck pâté made from duck prosciutto and Klingeman Family Farms pork shoulder, served with mustard caviar, pickled white strawberry, honey and red onion jam; and house-smoked salmon (you may never buy the packaged version again). Are you getting hungry?

Over a three-hour dinner, the Mulvaneys open up about their public and private lives, how they found themselves creating and operating their eponymous restaurant — one that became, shortly after opening, a see-and-be-seen eatery — and what’s changed in their business.
“I was raised in this business. Patrick followed his passion,” Bobbin Mulvaney says, holding her husband’s hand for most of this interview. In 1937, her stepfather created what became J&I, a small fiefdom between Highway 99 and I-5 on Highway 41, once part of his family’s commercial dairy. He started with a gas station and convenience store, then a 24-hour cafe and a country-western bar. Bobbin worked in the kitchen and helped on the family’s cotton farm. The J&I Corner accommodated freeway travelers and soldiers from the nearby Naval Air Station Lemoore, which was commissioned in 1961. It’s down the road from another oasis along the arid I-5 corridor, Harris Ranch, which also started life as a cattle farm and is now a full-blown resort. 

The Mulvaneys have been together 20 years and were married in November 2008. Pat wanted to get married on the mound at Yankee Stadium “but it was booked,” he says. (He’s not joking; this is apparently a rentable venue.) So they decided instead to keep things seemingly simple by getting married on the steps of the state Capitol, but they were warned the day before that there were going to be protests on the day of their wedding. “Five thousand No on Prop. 8 and 5,000 Pro for Prop. 8 people,” Patrick recalls. (Prop. 8 was the defeated state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.) 
“So we thought we’d move our wedding into the building itself. But they wouldn’t allow us to serve cocktails.” The couple opted instead to marry in front of their own 19th Street restaurant, asking pals at City Hall to close down a street or two in the process. As a further measure of the friends-in-high-places the couple had made by that point, the horseback police monitoring the protests back at the Capitol helped direct wedding guests who hadn’t received the change-of-venue notice in time to Mulvaney’s B&L. This, friends, is old-school clout, something Pat says he might have learned from his dad. 

Patrick Mulvaney was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York, and retains, if not an accent, a certain back-east attitude of directness, teasing humor and understanding the value of knowing influential people. His dad was a “Queens Boulevard lawyer,” he says — meaning he had street cred — and his older brother Jim is a retired journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Orange County Register. Pat’s mom was an English teacher and thought he’d become one, too. “But I was a lousy student,” he says with a grin and what could be considered a degree of pride. 

Bobbin is “pure Californian,” she says in a mellow voice that wouldn’t be out of place on radio. She was born in Redding and raised in Lemoore. “I left town in 1976 in my Mustang and a cloud of dust.” Having worked with her stepfather on the farm and freeway stop, “I was determined to never work in the restaurant or ag industry again.” Now, of course, she co-owns a restaurant that specializes in using locally sourced ingredients and working directly with farmers. She doesn’t need the irony pointed out to her. “Yeah, well,” she says, smiling as her voice trails off.

Paul Muller, a partner and owner of Full Belly Farm, a 500-acre diversified organic farm in the Capay Valley, says, “We’ve been farming here for 40 years and have been delighted in knowing Patrick and Bobbin for almost 30 of those years. Early on when we had the vision of building a farm that focused on organic, local, fresh and great-tasting food, we cultivated relationships with markets that shared our passions. Sacramento was in the heart of one of the most productive farming regions in the world, and yet their local food and restaurant culture was just beginning to explore its farming connections.”

The Mulvaneys, Muller says, “were relentless in their vision of local food. Creativity and celebration were their guiding principles, adapting weekly to the flow of new crops, great varieties, and farm offerings of fruits and veggies.” Muller still marvels at how the couple created menus based on what the expanding network of farms had to offer by their network of farms. “They’ve worked to make regional food systems healthy,” he adds. 

Patrick is 62 and Bobbin is 66. “She robbed the cradle,” Pat says, and not, apparently, for the first time given Bobbin’s rolled-eyes reaction. When they first got together, Bobbin’s daughter Sarah, from an earlier marriage, was 13 years old. “Sarah was so young when I got my first cancer diagnosis,” Bobbin recalls. There would be, in the next 30 years, four more sieges. 

When she was 34, she was diagnosed with breast cancer while working in catering at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Sacramento. She contracted colon cancer at the age of 47. Her breast cancer returned when she was 55. At 65, she was told she had skin cancer (melanoma). “It’s all made me not afraid of dying,” she says matter-of-factly. “What’s the point of that?”

“When Bobbin was diagnosed,” Pat recalls, “Sarah asked me if her mom was gonna be alright. And I tried to answer as honestly as I could. I said I really didn’t know.” 

“But say what you said next,” Bobbin prompts him. 

“I said that no matter what happens, you’ll always have a home with me,” Pat says. Sarah is now 37 and a mom. The family remains close-knit. 

Before this interview began in earnest, Bobbin, whose health battles have made her anything but an alarmist, had expressed concern over a brand new bump Patrick had on his forehead — which he, as men tend to do, not only dismissed but also said he had “no idea” how it got there: “I must have run into something.” 

“I want you to get it checked,” his wife says with the kind of finality that leaves very little doubt where Patrick would be the first moment he could find to make a doctor’s appointment. 

The Mulvaneys are engaged in what some call bold-faced-name activities: Pat, for example, serves as a “culinary diplomat” for the White House, which means he’ll head overseas or over borders with diplomats and elected officials to prepare California cuisine for foreign leaders, on behalf of international relations. 

But the couple is just as concerned about mental health as healthy eating. Each serves as a mentor for young people starting out in the business as well as on a variety of high-profile and behind-the-scenes advisory boards. They provide family meals for the underserved and underfed and support for colleagues suffering burnout. 

“This is a very tough business,” Pat says. “You’re gone almost every night and working all weekend because that’s when your customers aren’t.” Bobbin adds, “It means your normal might be having breakfast at 3 in the afternoon, if you even do.” 

“But,” Pat says, “we’ve been given a very great gift. We’ve been able to create an environment for people to gather, to communicate.” 

“People come in here for their engagement or their wedding dinners,” Bobbin says. “We like being their first choice for meaningful moments in their lives.”

“I even like it when they come here for un-meaningful moments,” Pat says. Both Mulvaneys laugh. 

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