Forthcoming coffee shop Captain + Stoker aims to give Monterey a different sort of space.

This story was originally about a sought-after restaurant on an awkward corner in a highly foot-trafficked spot in downtown Monterey. More than a dozen businesses – including hipster favorites Cachagua General Store, PigWizard and Katie’s Coldpress – wanted in, but didn’t get the lease.

But something interesting happened in the course of tracking down the chosen tenant for 398 Franklin St., a Carmel Valley native with a memorable name, Peterson Conway VIII (yes, the eighth): The story quickly became as much about what’s going in the space – in this case, a new coffee roastery – as what he hopes people get out of it.

That, ultimately, makes the story about more than a shortage of local restaurant space (see p. 32). It makes it a story about a historic egg ranch, the lonely soul of Silicon Valley and a giraffe poking its head through a window.

And, as much as anything else, it makes it a story about bicycles.

CAPTAIN + STOKER WAS FIRST SLATED TO BE NAMED TANDEM, and a vintage 1973 Ritchey Skyliner two-person bike will soon be mounted on the wall. (The name Tandem was already trademarked.) Dramatic bike decor aside, the space already looks a world apart from Nuernberger’s German Sausage, the former occupant of the corner spot across from the Monterey Sports Center.

The kitchen walls have been knocked down, faux low-fi light fixtures hang from heavy ropes and windowed roll-up doors along Adams Street – facing grassy Jacks Park rather than car-choked Franklin – welcome in air and natural light. An outsized map will detail legendary Monterey Peninsula road-bike routes.

Alongside world-class coffee gear like the 2.5-ton roaster that sailed here from Hawaii and two slick Rocket espresso machines from Italy, the big tandem bike will look cool and serve as a symbol of a philosophy laid out in the plans: “making beautiful, simple things together.”

“Tandem was started with the intention that connecting with one another can both make our lives more meaningful as well as more empowered,” the plans read. “Being in tandem is seeing we still need one another, perhaps more than ever.”

The togetherness language gets a little touchy-feely, but the obsession with bikes in general and tandems in particular is real for the friends and partners launching the place. The new name is for the passengers on a tandem, the captain (or driver) and the stoker (in back).

The project pointman – 20-year-tech-industry veteran and Carmel Valley native Conway VIII, 44 – estimates he spends two hours a day on a bike. He owns six tandems. He has pedaled in Iron Man races, the 300-kilometer Vätternrundan in Sweden and the aptly named Death Ride Tour of California. He took his first solo bike ride from Carmel to Big Sur at age 10. He and his wife Wendy rode into their wedding on an old Schwinn.

“I was raised on a bike,” he says. “It’s a symbol of simplicity and freedom. We all remember our first bicycle. Cycling is the easiest sport. Anybody can identify.”

His close friend Tom Ritchey is one of the partners at Captain + Stoker. Ritchey started his now multimillion-dollar company at 16, built his first tandem at 18, and went on to become a giant in bike design – many consider him one of the fathers of mountain bikes – and got married on a tandem himself. He built the bike on the wall, customizing it for a couple who lived in Alaska so the woman could use it despite losing her hands to a bear attack.

“You can’t be on a tandem without committing to teamwork,” Ritchey says. “You don’t have the choice of mutiny. You’re deciding to do something together that is very close, very challenging, very trusting and very therapeutic.”

It was Ritchey who introduced Conway to another Captain + Stoker partner, Switzerland native and two-time Mountain Bike World Championship winner Thomas Frischknecht.

“In the history of cyclists, somehow there was always a connection to coffee,” Frischknecht says. “The old road pros stopped for a coffee every two hours.”

Frischknecht, in turn, introduced Conway to an original 1961 Faema E61 espresso machine, and a new gear fell into place. After years obsessing over tea, Conway is now consumed by coffee. Last year, Frischknecht tutored Conway on bean selection, roasting and grinding over three months in Tuscany as part of a fateful Conway family trip (more on that in a minute).

“Biking, coffee, beer, repeat,” Conway says.

“Without coffee the world would still be turning, but it’s one of the positive moments in the day,” Frischknecht says. “What would you do without sex in your life? You’re not gonna die, but you’re not gonna be the same, that’s for sure.”

OFF CARMEL VALLEY ROAD, NEXT TO FOLKTALE WINERY, down a dirt road behind a gate with a red star at its center, a leafy oasis lingers. A white arrow points the way down a pebbled driveway to “Casa de Conway,” a 1,200-square-foot 1920s farmhouse set amid an 8.5-acre farm.

Here lush fields once hosted Carmel TomatoFest, and for decades the property provided eggs for the area’s restaurants as Carmel Valley Egg Ranch. When the Conways acquired it in 2013, 68,000 chickens came with it. Today they keep less than a hundred, but still eat a lot of eggs.

A little wirehaired pointer/dachshund rescue mutt named Lucy joins a tour of the property, stopping to exchange sniffs with the pigs (BLT and Porkchop) and to gaze at the dairy cows. A half-dozen white ducks bustle about a small wading pool. Elsewhere goats mingle and sheep practice their consonants. Behind the house, rows of soothingly green olive trees bask in the sun, readying fruit for the estate olive oil. Nearby, more fruit trees proliferate – Pink Lady apples, Flavor King pluots and Bergamot pears among them.

Conway’s wife Wendy runs the farm, distributing its treasures from a cellar pantry under the house that once held the egg store and is now stuffed with their own sausage, fresh eggs, apples and pears. Today’s lunch includes peppers and watermelon from the property and crusty bread Peterson baked overnight.It’s damn good. He’s been practicing.

There are other clues to come, but the farm is the most vivid indicator Captain + Stoker will have a downhome ethic and be about something more than good coffee. The new place, scheduled to open next month, will feature whatever’s coming off the farm, eggs most reliably, but also things like Carmel Valley sweet corn, avocados and row crops.

Head-baker-to-be Helena Bee will join the team in April – after four years at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center as a monk and a cook – to do rustic bread with wheat grown by Conway’s grandfather (on his mom’s side), who happens to be the largest dry wheat farmer in the country (via Lehi Roller Mills of Utah). His baking wheat comes highly coveted, and is used at celebrated spots like Tartine Bakery in San Francisco.

Another ringer is helping hone the coffee program. Australia native Jeremy Creighton co-founded cult phenomenon Common Room Roasters of Newport Beach and is coaching Captain + Stoker on where to source interesting beans and how to design its “roasting curve” for blends that up fruitiness and flavor. He knows what he’s doing, at least according to judges at November’s highly competitive America’s Best Espresso showdown in Portland, Oregon, where Common Room took second place.

“Every little town in Australia had that type of amazing coffee shop on the corner,” Creighton says. “That’s the experience I grew up with. It did a lot of things. It was coffee and community and like-minded ideas and creativity and start-ups. That’s not going to happen at a Starbucks.”

That energy will also play nicely at the Esalen Institute, where Captain + Stoker is planning its second location with a new coffeehouse off the redone dining hall. Like the Monterey location, it will feature retractable garage doors. (March is the current aim for opening at Esalen.)

Other than that, a grand total of two things are about all visitors can expect at either: freshly roasted coffee and freshly baked bread. “We’re not trying to provide something for everyone,” Conway says.

PETER THIEL CO-FOUNDED PAYPAL, which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He was an early investor in Facebook. He launched Central Intelligence Agency-backed big data startup Palantir, which has grown as huge as it is secretive. Forbes ranks the billionaire on its Forbes 400, and as one of the world’s top tech investors. He’s a rare conservative in Silicon Valley who funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign (he’s since dissolved ties) and is looking into launching a cable news competitor to Fox. Conway’s been on Thiel’s staff for almost all his adult life, though they rarely interact directly.

“I do anything he asks me to help his companies, which translates to me holding on for dear life,” Conway says.

Originally that meant building a distribution network of banks and money-transfer outposts for PayPal acquisition Xoom.com, in places ranging from India to Argentina. These days that includes a weekly commute to Palo Alto – which takes as little as 19 minutes in Conway’s open-cockpit Alaskan bush plane. His primary duty is a doozie: assembling teams for Thiel and other tech founders as they start new ventures, headhunting everyone from physicists to senators to mentor would-be disruptors of industry. Conway claims he has recruited a whopping 67 of the current Fortune 100 chairmen. He also put together the initial group at Palantir, now valued at $20 billion.

Palantir – named for the “seeing stones” used to view faraway lands in the Lord of the Rings – is a trip. It builds upon PayPal’s fraud protection technology, using a combination of human and artificial intelligence to flag everything from human trafficking to disease outbreaks the world over. That means Conway and his assistant Ava Eitzen can claim to hunt spies, though it’s more accurate to say they hunt the people who hunt the spies.

“Here in little Carmel, Ava and I built teams in France, Australia and Singapore,” Conway says. “It’s a funny life.” The work comes with controversy, as the technology empowers the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the CIA in ways not everyone is enthusiastic about. As Conway concedes, “We make the gun, but don’t decide how the gun gets used.”

The rest of his current to-do list can be difficult to comprehend, let alone explain. The tasks include helping develop new credit card technology with the potential to process half of the world’s transactions (Brex.com) and evolving autonomous firefighting (“The future in California is a lot of fires,” he says). On his personal website (goodwynpowell.com) he describes his work, and vents existential angst that comes with it.

“On a personal level, retiring to a farm and commuting once a week to Palo Alto would seem like living the dream,” he writes. “And it is. But on another level, there is a realization there must be more; sort of like looking into the star-filled sky and knowing there has to be other life. Life on all levels is a search for meaning.”

That searching instinct embeds in Captain + Stoker’s DNA. Given Conway’s occupation – IDing the minds that can shape the tech companies that know what people want – he spends a lot of energy thinking about where the world is going. And for someone who spends his time amid high-profile influencers, he is surprisingly hopeful about what his little-coffee-shop-that-could can accomplish – namely, relief from all sorts of postmodern pressures.

That includes self-absorption, ironically amplified by “social” media. “In an overconnected world, we have ended up very lonely,” Conway says. “People are posting their coffees and photos of themselves, but it’s polished and staged and inauthentic. Interacting with someone is real, and requires grace and humility.”

From there comes the desire to create a gathering place: “In the gig/independent contractor economy, we’re going to need somewhere to go,” he says. “And as we’re heading to a world of automation, the reason we need coffee shops is that we’re all going to be put out of work.”

That also includes the rise of hyper-customization, the I’m-a-snowflake effect. “We don’t want to overwhelm with choice,” he says. “We’ll do a few things really well. If you want a place with 50 choices, there’s Caffe Trieste.”

Perhaps most intensely, that includes the Western obsession with individuality. “Everyone wants to run around talking about changing the world – it’s a lot of ‘I’ statements,” he says. “We need each other. We’re doing this together. I think it’s timely. That’s the symbol of the tandem.”

At one point he pauses.

“I hope I don’t sound too serious,” he says. “I don’t talk like this a lot. I think [this project’s] coming out of a loneliness. My life on paper looks like it has some trading value, but the reality is I’m not saving lives, and I don’t know if I’m making life better.”

His proposed solution: something simple, something tangible, something tasty. Roasting coffee and baking bread.

Ritchey sees the coffee shop in that context. “Peterson’s very much in tech, and that’s a dog-eat-dog world,” Ritchey says. “It can be a soulless place. You get chewed up and spit out. There are a lot of things I can tell that he’s trying to put more meaning into, in his way. The idea of something like this to him is very personal. I don’t think he looks at it as a business. This is Pete’s personal attempt to personify more meaning in his life.”

SURPRISES ACCOMPANY CONVERSATIONS WITH CONWAY, who likes to start his days with a glass of “green sludge,” meditation and a swim in the Pacific, sans wetsuit. At one point he describes how he likes to make his own luggage; at another how he loves to fix old Land Rovers. (“We used to demand we could interface with things,” he says. “I miss that sense of feeling capable of doing things.”) At another junction he admits the paradoxes of espousing togetherness and being a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian. (“I’m comfortable with contradictions that wouldn’t stand up to rigorous academic debate.”) At yet another, he acknowledges how conceptual his philosophy sounds. (“I’m going to come across as a douche,” he says. “I can see people saying, ‘You open a coffee shop and suddenly you think you’re Socrates.’”)

But it becomes clear he’s less concerned about how he looks than what his daughters see. That’s the case with the farm and that’s the case with the shop. “I want them to see [Wendy and I] working,” he says. “What I do is esoteric and removed. Plus I want them to muck out the stalls. To wipe some tables.”

The philosophy echoes something he heard early and often from his father. Locally famous (and famously flamboyant) Conway the Seventh made a point of taking his sons around the world on trips seeking artifacts for his Carmel shop, Conway of Asia; Conway senior remembers toting along junior to Afghanistan when he was still breastfeeding. “The Afghans said, ‘He is one of ours because he came here so young,’” senior says.

A mantra VII recited seems to have stuck: “No matter what you learn at school, you’re not going to learn as much traveling and meeting people.” (He was at least partially right: VIII graduated from Dartmouth after dropping out of Carmel High as a junior.)

Last year, Conway VIII, Wendy and their daughters unraveled an odyssey that involved seven months, four continents, the Galapagos Islands, one baby elephant rescue (via tranquilizer dart and African bush plane) and – most remarkably – zero emails. Somewhere around month three, in a place called Giraffe Manor near Nairobi, Kenya, a giraffe stuck its head through the window, interrupting one of the girls’ many home-school sessions.

By month seven, Conway VIII had completed his impromptu coffee education and the girls had lived a real-life lesson to make grandpa jealous. Now a worldview built upon extensive personal – but not personalized – interaction finds a new home on a corner in Monterey, where the refrigeration and roaster are arriving as this publishes.

The world champion cyclist compares the forthcoming Captain + Stoker to a cup of coffee: “It stops you for a moment, to breathe, to think about something else. It forces you to take a break. Good ideas come after a good coffee.” The Common Room coffee pro calls it a place that provides “the ability to go somewhere outside your house and be inspired.” Conway sees it more as a venue to enjoy coffee and bread and conversation, and he’s hoping others will want to join him.

After all, it takes two to tandem.