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YOUNTVILLE, CALIF. - Ending her 17-year partnership with Real Restaurants' co-founders, Bill Higgins and Bill Upson, noted chef Cindy Pawlcyn assumed ownership of Real's acclaimed flagship, Mustards Grill, located here, and disclosed plans to overhaul another Napa Valley restaurant landmark, Miramonte.
In return for Mustards, Pawlcyn sold back her interest in the Real group's Fog City Diner in San Francisco and Buckeye Roadhouse in Mill Valley, Calif., Higgins said.
Real Restaurants grew from wine-country roots at the epicurean-rustic Mustards Grill in 1983 to become an 11-unit, multiconcept enterprise that trades in Northern California and Aspen, Colo. Among its holdings are Bix and Gordon's House of Fine Eats in San Francisco and the Tuscan-villa-- style Tra Vigne in the Napa Valley town of St. Helena.
Higgins, the majority shareholder with Upson in the privately held, San Francisco-based company, declined to state its annual sales figures.
Real Restaurants is known for kicking off the careers of such celebrated chefs as Michael Chiarello, who parlayed his position as Tra Vigne's chef into a shareholder's role in the separately owned Real American Restaurants. Also launched by Higgins and Upson, that company has developed the Postino and Bistecca concepts and has expanded the Tomatina brand that Chiarello had created for Real Restaurants. Real American, whose chief executive is former Everen Securities analyst and executive Dean Haskell, also operates a Fog City Diner location in Phoenix.
With Pawlcyn no longer at the culinary helm of Real Restaurants, Higgins and Upson are expected...