A hospitality legend in Sonoma County and beyond, Nick Peyton is retiring. The longtime maître d’ and owner with Chef Douglas Keane of Cyrus Restaurant, first in Healdsburg and now in Geyserville, is 78 and ready to “suck down coco locos on a Costa Rican beach” as he wrote in an email to guests. His last day of service will be at the end of this month.

In that email he stated, “it has been my life’s joy and pleasure to welcome all of you to Cyrus in both its iterations… it has fed my soul and kept me constantly engaged.”

Cyrus has earned a prestigious One-Michelin-Star. Just as significant, last year Peyton won The Michelin Guide California Service Award, singled out for designing “the anti-snooty fine dining experience.”

That ethos is behind how Peyton and Keane have designed an evening at Cyrus to feel like a dinner party, leading guests through multiple rooms over multiple courses, keeping things warm and friendly as the party moves from the Bubbles Lounge to the U-shaped interactive kitchen to the dining room with views of Alexander Valley and the nearby vineyards. The evening finishes off in the Chocolate Room where wishes may be made by tossing chocolate coins into an eight-foot wall of flowing chocolate.

Peyton has been working with Keane for 27 years. He said the idea for the dining journey came from moving to Wine Country after the years they each spent working in restaurants in San Francisco and New York.

“(In the cities) people always had multiple things they expected out of the evening. It was dinner and a show, dinner and the theater, dinner and drinks with friends afterwards,” he said. “But when people are up here in Wine Country, dinner is sort of the whole evening.”

He adds that he’s always believed communion happens at the table, and that it should belong to the guests – not be his stamp on the night.

“Everyone’s got a different purpose for being here,” he said. “But what I like is that people at the end of the meal have a certain catharsis, that this was an elevating experience that leaves them recharged.”

Peyton was born in England and raised near Vancouver, Canada. A child of the 1960s and self-described hippie, ski bum and world traveler, who fled to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1966, Peyton figured out at a young age that he could work anywhere in the world if he worked in hospitality, getting jobs at a bar, casino, nightclub or restaurant, even if he didn’t speak the language.

Reporter Carey Sweet described Peyton’s early days quite memorably in a 2024 SFGate profile, writing that in an earlier life, “Peyton donned colorful robes with his long hair flowing down his back as he taught sand cast candle making on a nude beach through the Bay Area’s Midpeninsula Free University program that thrived during the mid-60s and 70s.” Keeping with the times, he “was arrested multiple times in Bay Area anti-war protests.”

By his mid 20s he was married with a child and another one on the way so decided to make hospitality a formal career, attending San Francisco JC Hotel and Restaurant School. There, he zeroed in on one vision – to be the maître d’ of a fine restaurant.

His first gig was at The Fairmont San Francisco when it had a restaurant called the Squire Room. He then became maître d’/manager of Masa’s, the top-rated restaurant in the city.

From there, he was recruited by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel to be the founding manager and maître d’ of their restaurant, which is where he met Chef Gary Danko, who had cut his teeth at Sonoma County’s Chateau Souverain (Francis Ford Coppola Winery and Rustic Restaurant today) in Alexander Valley. Peyton and Danko went on to open Restaurant Gary Danko in San Francisco in 1999, bringing in a young Doug Keane as sous chef.

Peyton recalled how back when he started in the 1970s “the front of house was sort of all-powerful. People didn’t really know the chefs as much. You had to prove yourself to the restaurant, which was something that I always thought was completely upside down… there was a stiff formality to service back in those days.”

It was while working together at Gary Danko that Peyton and Keane conceived of the idea for the original Cyrus, opening it in downtown Healdsburg in 2005. Over the course of its run, it earned two Michelin stars before closing in 2012. It would take another 10 years to open Cyrus Alexander Valley, otherwise known as Cyrus 2.0.

Cyrus now sits in the middle of a vineyard, bringing the beauty of the Alexander Valley in, with the main dining room floating above the surrounding vines, the embodiment of Sonoma County’s rich agricultural history and welcoming nature.

Peyton’s welcoming nature and superb sense of hospitality will be missed. Enjoy those coco locos Nick.

Photo By: Chad Surmick/The Press Democrat