Pioneering California Caviar revs Car Week with a surprising backstory.

There aren’t many women in the seafood industry – let alone the caviar business – and fewer who run the ship. That makes one Deborah Keane, owner-operator of California Caviar, a compelling story by herself, and earns her the nickname “Caviar Queen.”

But she didn’t just break a glass ceiling. She broke into an industry surrounded by barriers to entry for anyone.

It takes a decade to get a sturgeon to 100 pounds for harvest. Less than a tenth of that weight is eggs. Each tiny egg must be harvested by hand. It’s insanely perishable. It’s raw seafood, which demands close management, but that’s only part of the process. Keane estimates her work requires 11 different licenses. United Nations regulations come in, and so do laws that change state to state.

“Everybody’s not jumping in to do this,” she says.

Yet here she is, quick with a laugh and a mother-of-pearl spoon with caviar that can run as much as $600/ounce, not so much earning a place in a ruthless industry as leading it.

This week Keane, a regular for Pebble Beach Food & Wine, helps drive the most pampered events of prolifically pampered Car Week. She starts Wednesday, Aug. 17, at the blingy McCall Motorworks Gathering at the Monterey Jet Center (p. 42), where the 25th anniversary means they’re pressing pedal to metal like never before. Given the fact this is already a 0.10-percenter affair, with prototype vehicles, historic warplanes and private jets on the tarmac, partygoers can anticipate a spectacle – and striking foodstuffs.

Popular Monterey County chefs Todd Fisher, Tim Wood and Jerome Viel will use Keane’s various caviar creations a number of ways. Paddlefish caviar will sit on top of a blini lid to a Beluga vodka shooter. Barbecue-infused salmon roe will give oysters a spike of smokiness. California Caviar’s tobiko-wasabi roe will crown hamachi crudo. Truffle-infused whitefish caviar will go on deviled eggs. (There will also be other opulence… but this is a caviar story.)

“It’s a product that allows you to bring a dish to another level,” Viel says. “It’s great – and it’s fun – to be able to do that.”

The following Friday she’ll command the longest lines at Quail Motorsports Gathering, dispensing caviar insight as generously as the tiny pearls. She’ll draw newbies with familiar flavor infusions and entice lifers into ways to use it daily,

What’s harder to teach is a palate like hers. She says it’s the byproduct of Irish-Boston roots, a lifelong sensitivity to spice and smoke, an abiding affection for seafood, and years working with a French chef in Paris, as his consultant and then translator, cook and dishwasher: “It honed my palate on the simple art of eating,” she says. “I learned how to taste bread!”

But there’s more to it than that.

“Eating a lot of caviar, good and bad, helps,” she says.

It took some turning points for that to happen. The first: major producer Tsar Nicoulai Caviar recognized in her the kind of image and acumen they’d like. That makes sense. She had worked briefly as a model, extensively in luxury magazine sales and proves hilarious to talk to.

“I got a lot of attention, but no one took me seriously” she says, “I got tested and tested and tested.”

Many didn’t bother to learn her name. She was the one woman in the business, known simply as “Tsarina.”

Then the U.N.’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) banned wild sturgeon caviar, and Nicoulai, thanks to its white farms, was positioned to explode.

Keane estimates her team moved 2 tons in 2006. Just as importantly – as she moved between selling, tasting and tanks – she saw farming translated to flavor, learning when to harvest, when to purge, how to prepare it. She conquered endless FDA inspections. She sought out other farms and brokered other eggs, and started working with World Wildlife Fund to create standards for sturgeon farms.

But drama beset Tsar leadership, the WWF talks fell apart and Keane saw a chance to spend more time with her then-2-year-old daughter.

Right around that time friend Jacques Pépin, whose many books often feature her eggs, called, joining similar chef requests for newly discovered (and legal) caviars. She had a feeling all wild caviar wouldn’t be legal much longer. (It wouldn’t be.) And she knew farmers who knew what they were doing – and that they wanted to do was farm, not market.

So she got to work.

Today she has swapped the bulk operation for a boutique brand. She has worked with her favorite small farms, who each make a different egg, for upwards of a decade, sharing what she can to improve their operations. For her co-op, the first of its kind, she also sources some sturgeon eggs from her small Sacramento-area farm. She has a stylish tasting room in Sausalito, where she also lives. Meanwhile she’s advocating for new laws to allow her to source more “no-kill” caviar. That’s the promising, and patented, work of Dr. Angela Kohler at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, which allows for the gentle removal of sturgeon eggs several times, without having to off the mama.

She fills her contact list with rich clients and elite chefs like Pépin and Thomas Keller. But she also takes pains to offer $8/ounce “everyday indulgence” caviar for the rest of us. Apparently, it’s just another barrier to break.

~QUICKBITES ~

• Cult hit Taste of Vietnam (384-8855) is shutting it down in Seaside and taking offers on the space with its long bar.
• Salinas Valley Food & Wine is here. Visit p. 36 for more.
• Over in Salinas, new Pastability’s (998-7715) fast casual concept is clicking. More on the blog.
• Cultura (250-7005) officially opens in Carmel Thursday, Aug. 11. Check out the menus and more on the blog.
• The tasty wonton nachos ($10) remain at the former Kula Ranch Island Steakhouse, now named The Ranch (883-9479), as does the sushi and the steaks, but much has changed. Co-creator Joe Loeffler sold to Hersha Hospitality, which acquired The Dunes awhile back and renamed it Sanctuary Beach Resort. Service was interesting (never had a server tell me, “I’ll be in the bathroom for 5 minutes if you’re wondering where I am), prices have shifted ($19 for a grilled chicken plate) and the California love is yum (shrimp tempura, avocado, cucumber, spicy crab salad, masago, green onion, $13).
• Central Coast Juicery makes life better with things like the signature apple-kale-celery-lemon-ginger, intense ginger-root juice and raw almond milk with vanilla and honey.
• The so-called fresh market concept from Carmel Belle (624-1600) outlined for the Seventh & Dolores city center in Carmel was dealt a denial. Look for more about it on the blog soon.
• Join Caraccioli Cellars between noon-6pm Tuesday, Aug. 16, for a summer patio party behind the tasting room on Dolores Street during the Concours on the Avenue in Carmel.
• Rio Grill (625-5436) has new brunch items like the green eggs and “hamwich” ($14), smoked potato hash with Sonoma jack sausage ($15) and huevos rancheros with blue corn tortillas ($14).
• Free wine tasting at Nielsen Bros. Market 4-6pm Thursday, Aug. 11.
• Bruno’s Market and Deli (624-3821) now does dishes like pork ribs and cactus in red sauce with beans, rice, and tortillas ($10) or tacos de carne or pollo asada ($2 each) 11am-5pm weekdays.
• Michael Kors: “True luxury can be caviar or a day with no meetings.”