Portola Valley Tutors

About Portola Valley

The Alpine Inn Beer Garden in Portola Valley, California, is considered the oldest surviving roadhouse in California. Its fame reaches all the way back to the Gold Rush era, a fact taken advantage of by many Portola Valley tutors who like a hands-on approach to teaching history. At the same time, the roadhouse has a unique claim to fame that forever changed the future.

On August 27, 1976, a van containing a mobile radio laboratory pulled up alongside the roadhouse. SRI researchers unloaded a computer terminal, set it on a picnic table out back, and proceeded to send a long electronic report to Boston. This “internet transmission” (the word “e-mail” had not been coined yet) was the first of its kind because it linked two dissimilar networks. A year later, three networks were linked, and the internet took off.

Looking Back
The site was first established by Felix Buelna as a casa de tableta, or gambling house, in the early 1850s. Disgruntled gold seekers who had moved to the fertile Santa Clara Valley to farm gathered there to play cards and drink. Business was good, but Buelna was in gambling trouble and sold the roadhouse to William Stanton in a poker game for $1,200 in gold to pay off debt.

The Stantons remained owners until 1940, although proprietorship changed frequently, reflecting the ethnicity of the region: Mexican, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Croatian. The names changed as frequently as the management: Fernando’s, Philpot’s, Stanton’s Saloon, Chapete’s Place, the Wunder, and Schenkel’s Picnic Park.

In the late 1880s, Chapete’s was a welcome respite for construction workers building Stanford University, and when the school opened in 1891, students flocked there—Palo Alto was alcohol-free. The roadhouse was probably a great location for them to receive tutoring in Portola Valley.

In 1908, Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, publicly complained that the Wunder had the reputation of being “unusually vile, even for a roadhouse,” and that it was a “great injury to the university, and a disgrace to San Mateo County.” The controversy made the place even more popular.

In 1909, fourteen nearby saloons were closed after the state of California passed a law prohibiting liquor sales within 1.5 miles of schools. But by its fortuitous location, the Wunder escaped the restriction, and business boomed. In World War I, the soldiers discovered the place and joined Stanford students in partaking liquid refreshments.

Although the Prohibition temporarily removed alcohol from the premises, the saloon was revived when the lease passed to Enrico Rossotti in 1933. The Rossottis added a food menu, and the place became a popular hangout on Stanford home football games.

The restaurant was sold and renamed the Alpine Inn Beer Garden in 1956, but locals still refer to it as Rossotti’s, or even by its nickname, “Zott’s.” Still extremely popular with students and locals, patrons are as likely to arrive in luxury cars as they are to arrive on a bicycle or even a horse.