Michael O’Brien, owner of the former Cricklewood restaurant, decorated combat pilot, dies at 76

Spiritually inclined, perpetually curious and occasionally ornery, Michael O’Brien was a former combat pilot who’d welcomed guests into his cozy, old-school Cricklewood steakhouse in Larkfield for more than 40 years before the Tubbs fire devoured it and also the art-graced apartment upstairs that was his and his wife’s home.

O’Brien, a student of Buddhism and a steadfast champion of the Sonoma County food-and-wine scene long renowned for his French onion soup, bountiful prime rib and caring nature, died Jan. 16 after a yearslong siege of cancer. He was 76.

“There’s not a restaurant owner in the region, there’s not a person in the industry, who didn’t know Michael O’Brien,” said longtime friend Guy Fieri, the food celebrity and former Santa Rosa restaurateur.

“He loved the business. Boy, he loved the business,” Fieri said. He recalled that O’Brien long ago showed a sincere interest in him and his Tex Wasabi’s restaurant in downtown Santa Rosa, and that O’Brien was the first to come check on him when fire struck his Johnny Garlic’s on Farmers Lane in 2002.

“Michael would tell you what was on his mind,” Fieri said. “The older he got, the louder he got. But he cared about people, and he really cared about our industry.

“I learned a ton from him.”

Another friend for decades, Gary Looney of Santa Rosa, holds O’Brien as a supremely intelligent man and a proud Irish-American who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and multiple other military honors for valor he exhibited on more than 150 combat missions launched from the decks of aircraft carriers off the coast of Vietnam.

Looney, who served as a Marine in Vietnam and then entered the debt recovery business in his native Sonoma County, once asked O’Brien how it was he went from a highly decorated, airborne Naval officer to greater Santa Rosa’s king of prime rib.

Looney said O’Brien recounted his deep disillusionment with the futility and harrowing human and environmental toll of the Vietnam war. Looney said his friend and fellow vet then told him that after he resigned his commission and quit the military, "You know, Gary, I just dropped out.”

Having earlier aspired to become a physician, O’Brien found himself drawn following his departure from the Navy in the mid-1970s to another lifelong interest: food.

Said his wife, Lynette McGee, “His father always had a subscription to Bon Appétit.” And a brother was a chef.

O’Brien was still in the Navy and living in Alameda when, in 1969, he discovered and came to like the Victoria Station steakhouse located at the time on The Embarcadero in San Francisco. He thought he’d like one day to go to work for the restaurant chain.

Several years later, after he’d left the military, he discovered that the then-thriving Victoria Station chain had an opening for a manager trainee at a huge restaurant in Miami. He applied and was hired.

He told The Press Democrat in 2012, “I'm a good talker and I love food. In the Navy I had 254 enlisted men who worked for me, so I know how to do things and how to manage people.

"Victoria Station hired me immediately. Six weeks into the three-month training program, they made me a manager."

While at the Miami restaurant, O’Brien spotted something that would stay with him.

"They decorated with British boxcar memorabilia," he said in the PD interview. "In the middle of the lobby there was a sign for Cricklewood, which is a suburb northeast of London. I always liked the sound of that name ...“

McGee said one reason her future husband was attracted to Victoria Station was that another of his sources of fascination was architecture, and he could imagine helping to design and create more of the chain’s railroad-themed restaurants.

From Florida, O’Brien transferred to California for an management opportunity at the Victoria Station in Sunnyvale. McGee said that there he asked to be switched to the chain’s design and construction division and he was told it was fully staffed, so he left Victoria Station.

Seeking to go into business for himself, O’Brien found that a restaurant business was for sale in Larkfield, immediately north of Santa Rosa. He visited the place, which had been home to a smorgasbord or two after the owners of the property, members of the Venturi family, closed their restaurant, Marico's.

In the spring of 1976, O’Brien opened there the Cricklewood steakhouse. Highly particular about what served, he built the menu around aged, hand-trimmed Black Angus meats.

Patrons savored the generous, reasonably priced cuts of prime rib, the booths, the inviting bar with its fireplace and easy chairs, and the amiable proprietor. Often enough, entertainers would appear for drinks or a meal following performances at the nearby Wells Fargo Center for the Arts.

“I remember running into Waylon Jennings there one time,” said friend Looney, who dined often at Cricklewood.

The place changed little over the course of 40 years.

Jeff Cox, a former Press Democrat restaurant reviewer, wrote in 2011 that the difference between Cricklewood and more contemporary, nearby restaurants such as John Ash & Co. and Willi’s Wine Bar illustrates how Sonoma’s food scene has evolved since the 1970s.

Cox quickly added, “This is not to say Cricklewood doesn't have its charms. First, it has a loyal clientele that like it the old-fashioned way.”

Proprietor O’Brien met his partner in the restaurant and in life, McGee, nearly 30 years ago. They married and eventually rented the living space above the restaurant, which they also rented from the Venturi family.

“The only thing we did there was sleep,” McGee said. “We lived downstairs. It was our home.” For years, O’Brien managed Cricklewood seven days a week.

Then came the hot, windy Sunday night of Oct. 8, 2017. McGee will never forget being awakened at about 2 a.m. by the sound of blown leaves scraping along the flat roof.

She arose to see the glow of a firestorm. She said O’Brien ran down and began watering down the building and landscaping with a garden hose.

“We were trying to fight the fire in front of the restaurant,” McGee said, when a state firefighter pulled up and shouted, “Get out of here! Now!”

“We got out with two cars, two cats and our lives,” McGee said.

With the destruction of the Cricklewood building, she and O’Brien lost their business, their home, virtually everything. They stayed with friends and relatives, then lived in a small motorhome.

Late in 2018 they celebrated being chosen to rent one of five attractive, well-built tiny houses that the volunteer-driven Homes for Sonoma located on a parcel off Old Redwood Highway with the enthusiastic permission of the town of Windsor.

O’Brien said at a “Welcome Home” celebration at the micro-village in December 2018, “When you come from a motorhome of less than 300 square feet, 480 is spacious.”

His wife said that in the intervening two-plus years, her husband studied Buddhism and they traveled to the seasonal art workshop in France that’s run by Sebastopol artist Carole Watanabe. They also took what was for O’Brien a healing journey to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

And O’Brien dealt with his cancer. He was at home with his wife when he died in his sleep Saturday at 10:14 a.m.

In addition to McGee in Windsor, he is survived by his sister, Kate O’Brien of Knoxville, Tennessee; his brothers, John O’Brien of Coronado and Robert O’Brien of Sacramento; his stepchildren, Sara Stone of Redding, Abby Clester, also of Redding, Kris Vonderscheer of Cotati and Erik Vonderscheer of Redding, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

There will be a celebration of his life once it is again safe for people to gather.