Alameda’s New Steak House Has Moxie

Moxie Steak House hasn’t even been open for a month, and already their bar is full with patrons sipping martinis as they wait for their steaks most Wednesday through Sunday evenings. Owner Christopher Seiwald set out to open a restaurant with his longtime chef partner Donna Meadows after closing their last food venture, Little House Café. When the former Angela’s location became available, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to bring something new to Alameda.

Seiwald found Meadows when he opened Little House Café. “Donna has a fairly star-studded history tour,” Seiwald told the Alameda Post . “But at that time in particular, she had a couple young kids and didn’t want to be in the 24/7 restaurant business. So we offered her more or less a regular week’s work. She ran the café for 15 years, all the way through the pandemic. But it never really took off.”

Little House had a lot of loyal customers but failed to get the momentum it needed to be hugely profitable. Seiwald believes one of the reasons for that was its location on Blanding Avenue. While it wasn’t a big financial success, the café was truly a community spot where people loved to gather and eat pastries, one of Meadows’ specialties. Before her time at Little House, Meadows consulted for famed chef Jeremiah Tower’s pastry department.

Her first job was at an authentic French restaurant in Lafayette when she was 17, where she did everything from beef Wellington to mousses to plucking feathers from the pheasants and ducks the owner brought in after a day of hunting. From there, she went on to become the pastry chef at New York City’s River Café. She spent some time cooking in Ireland. She was the chef aboard a sailboat that sailed around Europe. In the ’90s she owned the Flying Saucer restaurant in San Francisco.

When the Little House closed and Seiwald told Meadows he wanted to open a new restaurant with her as the chef, her wheels started turning.

“I hemmed and hawed about it for a long time, because Alameda’s a really hard little city,” she told the Post. “It’s very old-school in a lot of ways, and being an Alamedan, I understand it. And then one day, I was like, you know what Alameda people like? They like steak and potatoes.”

So Meadows presented her idea to Seiwald.

“Donna had my family over and cooked dinner,” Seiwald said. “We were doing steak, and she bought a couple different kinds of steaks and prepared them in different ways. She did a sample of everything, but she also did some mood samples, you know, for the decor, and then ran three different names past us. Moxie was one of them. And everybody immediately gravitated to Moxie.”

Meadows describes Moxie’s decor as contemporary-meets-speakeasy. The walls are a deep emerald green and there are hints of gold throughout. There’s a bar with alcohol stacked to the ceiling and an accompanying ladder to reach the good stuff up high. There are live plants on the wood-paneled walls and the rusty pink velvet chairs are comfortable and elegant.

So far, Meadows says customers are loving the ribeye from Santa Carota, where the cows graze on grass and carrots. But besides the meat, Meadows also has placed a big focus on her sides.

“I want to go somewhere and have dinner and be able to have really nice vegetables and nice sides,” she said. “You know, something good. I don’t always need to have the super fussy food that’s plated with tongs and is super fancy. I’ve done this for 45 years now. I like to have just something yummy to eat.”

“Part of the concept here is that everything is a la carte,” she continued. “So you order your meat, you order your vegetables, you order your starch, you can order your sauce. So you can have whatever you want.”

Meadows also noted that her sauces are complementary to the season. The Asian chimichurri and roasted carrot with yogurt and pistachio pesto sauces are two favorites. Another sometimes overlooked highlight of the Moxie menu is the authentic veal demi-glace.

“We cook the veal bones, we roast them, we put them on the stove,” Meadows said. “They cook for 24 to 30 hours. We strain it out and then we reduce it. There’s no cornstarch, no flour. It’s the real deal. When you eat it, your lips get all sticky. That makes me so happy. It’s just the small things like that that don’t seem fancy or exciting to most people, but they’re really time-consuming, and they’re really beautiful.”

Moxie Steak House , at 1640 Park Street, is open Wednesday through Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m.

Kelsey Goeres is the Managing Editor of the Alameda Post . Contact her via kelsey@alamedapost.com . Her writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Kelsey-Goeres .

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