By Nate Seltenrich

What brought you back to Petaluma after years away?

I was living in New York and LA as a full-time actor, and then I had a baby, and then there was a pandemic when he was a year old, right when I was going to get back into the industry. My parents lived in Petaluma still, and they were like, just come back to Petaluma, you know, just stay with us for a few months, and then go back to LA when everything settles down, and move to a different apartment. My husband (Juan Carlos), my son, and I all just moved into my parents’ Victorian on the west side, and we were like a big happy family for a while.

But instead of returning to LA, you stayed in Petaluma and opened a café. Tell me about that decision. 

My dad, like two months in, found out that the building that is now Grand Central became available. He leases his building next door, and he was like, Natalie, you have to take the lease. I was like, for what? I'm going back to LA. We love Petaluma, it’s just not where my career was. But he signed the lease, and me and my husband were like, oh great, now what?

Initially I was doing acting coaching and Zoom readings. It was like my Zoom room, and my husband was doing importation distribution – which never really ended; that wholesale business still exists today – and he just used it as a warehouse for cacao and chocolate and coffee that he imports and distributes. 

And then that winter, when Santa Claus arrived on his tugboat, all these families came to our back lot. We just started making them hot cocoa out of the big bags of cacao that we had in the warehouse. I was like, wait a second, this could be a location. This could be a brick and mortar. This doesn’t have to be wholesale only, and me teaching Zoom acting. And so it slowly developed. It was a pandemic birth. We were like, what goes well with the chocolate that we had been importing for years? Coffee. And the Petaluma Library had shut down their children’s storytime, so we started doing outdoor storytime. It was like the whole universe just started helping us create this vision.

Beyond Santa’s annual arrival, what’s it like being on the river?

Growing up in Petaluma, I remember back in the ‘80s, the phone book had a picture from our spot, from our vantage point. It’s the perfect vision of all of downtown without being downtown. Now that the Adobe Road Winery is popping up and covering the parking lot, it’s like the best view in town. Growing up in Petaluma, you’d have to dare me to go near the river, but now you see things like the Floathouse, which are our good friends and partners now, and you have us on the river, and there’s Taps, and we have Bands on the Basin. I think in some ways the pandemic made us re-create these outdoor spaces on the river – a lot of businesses, not just us. And it’s really wonderful to see that. 

You’re in your sixth year of running the café. How do you make it work?  

We now have a seven-year-old. The way my husband and I divide and conquer at Grand Central is pretty cool. He does day-to-day operations, so he deals with staffing, managing the staff and the crew, and all the components of the inside of the business. And I’m the big-picture events person. I’ve produced many an event at Grand Central. That’s kind of a big burst of energy, but it’s not day-to-day, so that I can be available for our child. 

I do think a lot of my producing brain in the film world comes into producing events. I look back at what I loved about being an actor, and it was actually the community part of it. What I loved about it was showing up at a set, meeting new people, and telling a story. I’m using that same gift in a different way that I never thought I would, but it is completely fulfilling. What I’m doing at Grand Central scratches that same itch, but in a better way because I have more control over it.

What’s something that people who know you from Grand Central don’t know about you?

I think the thing that maybe people don’t know is that I’m actually an introvert. I’m an extrovert-introvert, but I go by the definition of how do you recharge your battery? It’s good that Juan Carlos is the day-to-day person, and I can flit in when I have the energy to be that people person, to be on all the time. But then I need a lot of recharging. I also am an autism advocate. I go to schools and educate people on autism. Our son is autistic, and I am neurodivergent. I have a lot of weird social anxieties. You’d see me and be like, she’s so outgoing, she’s so extroverted, but the reality is that being around people is taxing to me, and I do need a lot of at-home time.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.