Zachary's Restaurant

Zachary’s Restaurant began its incarnation as a breakfast and lunch spot in 1985. We (Tom Watson and Cathy Kriege, at the time recent UCSC graduates eager to find a way to stay in Santa Cruz) bought the BBQ dinner house business in February, 1985 and established the breakfast menu that we had developed while subleasing the morning hours of the tiny Suzanne’s By the Sea in Capitola, with expanded brunch and lunch offerings. (We had been known then as Suzanne’s in the Morning.) At the time we bought Zachary’s it was half the physical size that it is now; we expanded into the neighboring unit in 1987, and finished with the expansion in time to hold our wedding reception in the new space. Our son was born the day before the 1989 earthquake that devastated downtown Santa Cruz; we were very lucky that our building survived, but not until after a nail-biting six week period of being “yellow-tagged” and in limbo.