Serving Up French Bistro and North African Comfort Food in a Tiny Eastern Sierra Town

KQED News

For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse is reporting a story about food and farming from each of California’s 58 counties.

Even though only about 600 people live in the Eastern Sierra town of Independence, it’s home to a destination restaurant. The Still Life Cafe has served up French bistro and North African dishes for nearly 30 years.

Hungry hikers climbing Mt. Whitney tell each other about the steak au poivre. Skiers on their way to Mammoth follow their friends’ recommendations, and stop for a tagine. Locals in the Owens Valley come to sip wine and slurp onion soup. It’s a place where strangers interact. Hikers talk with movie script writers, who chat up the truck drivers and locals.

Hikers Mark Harris, of Lake Tahoe, and Michael Proctor, from Los Angeles, heard about the Still Life Cafe from friends. When they recently hand-delivered French olive oil and sardines, Chef Malika Adjaoud Patron exclaimed, “Oh, I love sardines. This is perfect.”

“I don’t want to let it go!” she laughed, clutching the bottle of olive oil. “This is my food, every day.”

It’s not unusual for customers to come bearing gifts for Patron. “People bring me lemons from their trees, oranges, avocados,” like neighbors and friends would, she said.

That kind of gesture makes sense at the Still Life Cafe. It’s a restaurant that feels lived in, like a home. Every available wall space is covered in art, including a portrait of Patron’s late husband, Michele. Patron lives in the back with her daughter, Kenza, who waits tables on busy weekends. Their dog, Carlos, can be found curled up in a corner near a piano.

After offering customers a drink, Patron will sometimes linger at the bar, even though she’s the only cook. Meals at the Still Life aren’t fast-paced. This is a place to take time, sink into a booth, and have another glass of wine.

Each night, Patron writes the menu on a chalkboard. Dishes like escargot, oxtail stew, steak au poivre, and onion soup. When Patron craves couscous, she’ll make it for the restaurant. She decides her menu based on whatever traditional dishes she feels like cooking. “Whatever my mother or father cooked, I’m trying to recreate those dishes,” she explained.

A plate of escargot and a bowl of onion soup at Still Life Cafe in Independence, Calif., on July 14, 2024. (Lisa Morehouse/KQED)

Her menu draws on flavors from both France and Algeria, her family’s homeland. She’s descended from Algerian Berbers, who worked in France when Algeria was a French colony. Patron was born and raised in France. But every summer, her mother would take the kids to Algeria to spend two months with extended family. Patron remembers driving dirt roads, arriving at night in her grandmother’s mountain village.

“The car could not go up the village, so we would have to walk with all the luggage and get to my grandmother’s place,” she said. “We lived exactly like the people in the mountains, barefoot, running around and sleeping all together in one room.”

For meals, each woman in the family took responsibility for one dish. If there was meat, it came from the chickens or goats running around in her grandmother’s yard.

Back in France, during the school year, the family had a different food routine. Patron accompanied her mother on trips to the farmers market and watched her make a couscous every Sunday.

They lived near a forest at the very edge of Eastern France. Patron picked wild berries and fished by hand. She was a precocious child, she said. “I read the Marquis de Sade at 12,” she laughed.

She also watched a lot of American Westerns and dreamed about going to the United States. When she was eight years old, she convinced a friend to go on an adventure into the forest.

“I told her, ‘Listen, we’re going to America today,’” recalled Patron. As night fell and the forest became dark, Malika couldn’t “see America” anymore. They walked until they found a little country road, not realizing they’d crossed a border.

A police officer from Luxembourg eventually stopped them and asked where they thought they were going. “We said, ‘To America.’ He was laughing,” Patron remembered. He took them back to France.

Patron’s dream of visiting the United States stayed with her. As a 20-year-old, she came to Southern California, first as a nanny, then as a travel agent. When she met Michele, the Frenchman who would become her husband, he took her to his cabin in the old mining town of Darwin, near Death Valley, on a night when there was no moon.

“I have never seen so many stars, except in North Africa. And when I woke up in the morning, and the sun hit my face, I fell in love with it right away,” she said.

“It just reminded me sometimes of some places in North Africa, even though the vegetation was different.”

Patron fell in love with the desert and with Michele. They moved to Darwin full-time and started a family.

Their life began to resemble those summers she spent in Algeria. They lived a happy, bourgeois hippie life, she said, with her babies running around naked. She always cooked extra food for her neighbors.

This gave her an idea: why not open a restaurant? To serve traditional food, the kind made in French countryside bistros or North African homes. So the family opened a cafe nearby, in the tiny Owens Valley community of Olancha, with a population of fewer than 200 people.

The first Still Life Cafe attracted a mix of travelers en route to Mammoth or Death Valley, film crews shooting movies in the nearby Alabama Hills, and locals, including workers from Olancha’s Crystal Geyser plant.

“Crystal Geyser is part French,” Patron said. “They would import the workers from Normandy, Brittany. At lunch…it looked like a real French bistro, with blue-collar workers speaking French loudly and drinking.”

When that building was sold, Still Life Cafe moved to Independence, 40 miles up Highway 395.

Still Life Cafe in Independence, Calif., on July 15, 2024. (Lisa Morehouse/KQED)

Hours before any customer shows up, Patron can be found in the kitchen, preparing her onion soup, a favorite dish for Parisian party-goers.

“When I was young, some places would stay open until four or five in the morning,” she recalled. “And people would be drinking onion soup to prevent a hangover.”

To prepare the soup, Patron puts the onions in a pan with butter and lets them caramelize for over an hour. She said she’d never try to cut corners on that crucial step, otherwise “it’s going to be just boiling water with boiled onions.”

When the onions are ready, she pours her homemade stock through a strainer into the pot. Patron takes this kind of care when the restaurant is busy, too. “I cook on the spot,” she explained. “When somebody orders, that’s when I cut my vegetables. So it takes a bit longer.”

Every once in a while, customers come in by mistake, people used to coffee shops or fast food, Patron said. They might ask for ranch dressing in a bottle or expect quick, anonymous service. That’s not the Still Life Cafe.

She’s made some adjustments. She doesn’t serve fondue – too dangerous. She stopped cooking rabbit – too many diners balked. But mostly, when customers step into the Still Life, she wants them to experience a French bistro.

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“When they come here, including Americans, they do exactly like French people,” Patron said. “They [take] their time. Finally, step back from the rhythm of their life, going 100 miles per hour.”