Concord’s vibrant Todos Santos Plaza

BAY AREA DAY TRIP

From the spring beer festival to great food and history tours, the city’s main square has plenty to offer in 2023

A view of the “N scale” model railroad at the newly opened Concord Museum. BAY AREA NEWS GROUP

Try the Lima Piqueo sampler at Concord’s Lima, a restaurant that specializes in ceviches, grilled beef heart, Pisco sours and other Peruvian delights.

PHOTOS: DAI SUGANO — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Public art brings new life to downtown Concord, thanks to murals painted last summer by California artists. Among them you’ll find the “Dragon of Michinoku” mural, left, and another mural depicting a Fourth of July street scene on Salvio Street painted by Bay Area muralist Dan Fontes, below.

The Side Gate Brewery and Beer Garden in Concord is conveniently around the corner from Todos Santos Plaza. JANE TYSKA — STAFF ARCHIVES

Image

By John Metcalfe

jmetcalfe@bayareanewsgroup.com

We’re in a bedroom of the Galindo Home and Gardens, an 1850s ranch house in Concord, standing before what to all extents looks like a jar of hair.

“This is a ‘hair keeper,’ ” explains our tour guide, a member of the Concord Historical Society. “Back in Victorian times, you’d save hair and stitch it into memorial artwork of a heart or maybe into a brooch. Some people would even use it to poof up their own hair.”

Students from UC Davis once came here and observed the hair, the guide continues, “They said, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat to do a DNA analysis? It could be dog hair.’ But the jar’s full, whatever it is.”

We are admiring this mysterious hair — and more to the point, the Galindo home — on a recent ramble through the Bay Area’s 10th largest city. What is there to say about Concord, in general? Well, in 2022 it was ranked the happiest city in America, according to Instagram-selfie smiles. It’s the birthplace of Tom Hanks and childhood home of Carlos Alazraqui, voice of the Taco Bell Chihuahua.

Concord is also the home of Todos Santos Plaza, a bustling downtown square and destination spot for locals and out-of-town-visitors alike. The American Planning Association has dubbed the plaza a “Great Place in California” for its urban design, vibrant retail scene and community events including farmers markets, summer concerts and a popular Spring Brews Festival, which falls on March 25 this year. That specifically is what we’re investigating here in Tom Hanks territory — the depths of culture, cuisine and history around Todos Santos Plaza.

“I like the headboard,” says a man on our historic home tour, pointing to a massive wooden edifice overshadowing the bed. “That got loose in an earthquake? It’d be the end of you.”

The Galindo manor is a fine way to start a day trip. It was built in 1856 by Francisco Galindo, a Spanish American capitalist and son-in-law of Salvio Pacheco, founder of early Concord. The house is full of lovely Eastlake furniture, like Victorian but not as fussy. There’s a naturalistic painting made with dried moss and ferns and marble fireplaces that burned coal, because there weren’t a lot of big trees around to chop.

“The kitchen was initially out in the yard,” notes our guide. “Back then, if your kitchen caught fire and burned down, there goes your house.”

The Concord Historical Society played a major hand in renovating the house to its current beautiful state. Wallpaper was reconstructed from a minuscule patch hidden near a light fixture, and there was a matter of removing bees. The society also is behind the next-door Concord Museum, which is celebrating its grand opening with a historical exhibit and sprawling model railroad.

“Hello! You like trains?” a man asks a visitor, staring intently. “Yes. I love trains,” the visitor replies, locking eyes with equal intensity.

The track traces the route of the old San Ramon Valley Branch Line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, nowadays part of the Iron Horse Regional Trail. Early 1900s buildings and cattle farms are recreated in surgical “N scale” precision. The model train even chugs across an iron bridge and creek with ant-sized swimmers in the water, though at this size, it’s hard to tell if there’s any skinny-dipping going on.

One floor below is the historical society’s new events center with a stage named in honor of Dave Brubeck. The famous jazz musician was born in Concord and studied veterinary science at college in Stockton with the intent of becoming a rancher. It was there a professor told him: “Brubeck, your mind’s not here. It’s across the lawn in the conservatory. Please go there. Stop wasting my time and yours.” You can see Brubeck’s former home a few blocks away, though it’s now offices for a surgery group.

Downtown’s looking even more colorful these days, thanks to nine murals from California artists that went up last summer, the first mass display of public art in the city — controversial Spirit Poles notwithstanding.

You’ll find most of them clustered around Todos Santos Plaza: an intricate painting of Egyptian lore, a tribute to the flora and fauna of Mount Diablo and fierce Aztec creatures from Jesse Hernandez, whose work has been featured by Marvel and PlayStation.

On a smaller scale is the gallery in the loft of Side Gate Brewery and Beer Garden. Right now, there’s a charming exhibit of classic-car artworks mounted on wooden beer barrels. You can enrich your mind with culture, then relax it with a Gates of Wrath double IPA or Suburban Forager, a saison made with locally gathered herbs.

Up the road is the Hop Grenade taproom and bottle shop, pouring suds from NorCal greats like Ghost Town and Russian River. The taproom happens to be the world headquarters of the Brewing Network, a podcasting and webcast leviathan devoted to professional and homebrewing shows.

The network has featured celebrities from Zane Lamprey and Adam Carolla to the guys from “Mystery Science Theater 3000” — you can grab a pint and watch the magic happen in a glass-fronted recording studio.

Concord has a sizable Asian population, and it’s represented around the plaza at a juice shop with purple-taro tea and a Beard Papa’s store with ube-filled cream puffs.

Aung Burma is a newish offshoot of the local family-owned Aung MayLiKa restaurant chain. It has nicely priced whole fish, but saving our appetites, we go for the tea-leaf salad with nearly a dozen veggies and grains and fermented-tea dressing. The “classic rice noodles soup” turns out to be mohinga, a bold and satisfying stew of pureed fish, tomato broth and fried yellow-bean fritters.

Then it’s down the road for a bigger meal at Lima, an upscale Peruvian joint. The specialty ceviches here are worth exploring — our waiter suggests a lobster version — and they pair well with the bar’s pisco sours.

Also fun: the “Lima Piqueo” sampler, an experiment in how many ways you can combine potato, beef, hard-boiled egg and aji amarillo sauce into delicious bites.

Ranching was once big in this area, and to celebrate that heritage, we finish with anticuchos. The beef hearts are charred on the grill until springy and succulent, then drizzled with a black-mint huacatay sauce. In Victorian days, we might have celebrated these delicious hearts by reaching over to our hair catcher and knitting a memorial heart in their honor.