Shepherd & Sims: Look Inside Los Gatos’ New Fine Dining Restaurant - Eater SF
"Jim and Angelique Stump are no strangers to creating the kind of neighborhood restaurants diners can return to time and again — for weeknight dinners, weekend celebrations, and just about everything in between. And that’s exactly what they’re hoping to do once again with their newest project Shepherd & Sims, an upscale but approachable fine dining restaurant serving a menu that veers from pickled fried green tomatoes with buttermilk dressing to 45-day dry-aged New York steak. The restaurant is distinctly personal for the couple, its name being a mashup of both their former last names, and the menu stemming from the kinds of meals they love to share together. “The menu of this restaurant is really an example of Angelique and me, how we like to eat and what we want,” Jim says. “We want to enjoy life and we want people to enjoy life with us,” The Stump’s other restaurants include the Table in San Jose, Forthright in Campbell, and the Vesper, a cocktail lounge also in Campbell. At Shepherd & Sims, Jim has partnered with chef de cuisine Robert De La Mora to create a menu that’s rooted in Californian ingredients and infused with flavors from Mexico — the restaurant’s pork chop, for example, gets an al pastor-inspired marinade and pineapple puree crown — to Japan — with Yukon potatoes arriving alongside a kombu butter accoutrement. There’s also caviar and pate and ratatouille if diners want to take a trip to France, but one thing both Jim and Angelique stress is that they don’t want the restaurant to feel inaccessible. “I don’t want it to be a special occasion restaurant, I want to have caviar on a Tuesday afternoon,” Jim says. They intentionally chose to open in an “underserved” neighborhood, Angelique says, eschewing downtown Los Gatos and its abundance of independently owned restaurants in favor of a more out-of-the-way part of town, where the couple says most dining options are chains." - Lauren Saria
