Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Foodies' Getaway


Katherine was taken by thoughts of gardens and gardening on our recent trip to Justin and Aubra's wedding in Berkeley. I was more taken by the end results of that gardening: the restaurants.


You have to understand that any trip we take is mainly an excuse to go out to great restaurants. Going to New York City is about seeing Nate and Ashley, but it is also about eating at Babbo, or following Nate for a food tour of the lower east side. It was wonderful spending time with Ken and Franny in Kauai, but the tasting menu at the St. Regis and tapas at Bar Acuda added a lot to the experience. So yes, we were in northern California to celebrate a wedding and rejoice in the beautiful ceremony, but before we left we made sure to score dinner reservations at some memorable places.

Before we leave for a trip we like to go out to some nifty place in Denver in order to make the evening before the plane ride an easy one. This time we had an early dinner at Z Cuisine in the Highlands area. Z Cuisine is a small french bistro occupying a tiny space on 30th, so you have to get there early since they don't take reservations. Katherine specifically wanted to go there because we had lunch reservations at Bouchon, Thomas Keller's version of a bistro in Napa, and she wanted to compare their respective onion soups. Yes, that is the kind of thing we think about when traveling.

(I have to insert here that I despise reading food critics for the most part because they labor to come up with new verb choices in their effort to relate every nuance of every dish. Things are always getting slathered, drizzled, adorned, ornamented, topped-off, etc. I don't care about stuff like that. I just want to know what the place feels like.)

I am happy to report that Z Cuisine feels great. The evening's offerings are always written in someone's gloriously ornate handwriting on a large chalkboard. The tables are small, but well spaced. There is an inviting bar with five or six stools and there is a wine bar next door while you wait for your table. Like at all good restaurants (Z Cuisine is good, not great) the waitstaff exhibits great pride in the food and drink they bring and delight in filling you in on the particulars of the evening's fare. There are suitably frenchlike posters and knick knacks on the wall and the uni-sex restroom, even though it opens out brazenly into the middle of the room, is tastefully appointed, rising above the obsolete plumbing that defines places like this. By the way, Katherine's onion soup was quite good with the bowl crusted over with the melted cheese that ran over the top, just right for nibbling. My lamb was huge and just okay and the wine by the glass menu was well-priced and adequate. This was a nice way to start our trip.

After arriving in San Francisco and somehow getting over the Golden Gate Bridge, we stopped off in Sausalito on our way to visit Ken's family in Santa Rosa. We stopped off at a sea food restaurant right on the harbor aptly named Fish.

(Don't you love the new trend of naming restaurants exactly what they are. There is Toast in downtown Littleton serving breakfast. The Kitchen in Boulder serving, you guessed it, food out of a kitchen. Tyler Florence has a place in Manhattan called The Cafeteria. There is probably a cafe some place called Meat and Vegetables, another one tersely called Food, although there might be a copyright on that one. If I ever opened a restaurant I would like to specialize in organ meats just so I could call it Offal. I think it would be a sensation.)

Anyway, Fish was the perfect place to recuperate from the drive through the maze of San Francisco. You order your food at a counter that doubles as a fish market. The "catch of the day" is clearly indicated and the choices are huge and tempting. I had three huge fish tacos and Katherine had a hearty clam chowder. Our only regret was that we didn't order the french fries as we saw one heaping serving after another go by to the crowd of diners on the deck overlooking the impressive array of yachts and fishing vessels.

We had a great visit in Santa Rosa which Katherine has already elaborated on in the previous post. The tour at Kenwood will become a permanent memory. I'm still trying to get my head around the volume of wine produced by less than an acre of pinot noir: 56,000 bottles! Multiply that by the tens of thousands of acres in cultivation and one wonders how people could consume that much wine. We certainly try to do our part.

The highlight of our foodie tour of northern California was Saturday night at Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse is a kind of culinary shrine for people who care about such things. Started by Alice Waters after she toured France as a young woman, it is the first restaurant that emphasized locally grown, sustainable product, and thus it started what has become known as California Cuisine. When I was a kid, I remember my uncle Carl taking us out to dinner at Gartner Haus in Estes Park, the fanciest restaurant in town. There we would have prime rib, baked potatoes, and the adults would splurge and order a bottle of Lancers. Oh yes, and we all had the shrimp cocktail to begin the meal, except Carl: he had the marinated herring. That was fine dining in the early sixties.

Alice Waters and her funky little restaurant changed all that. Today most good and great restaurants proudly tell you where each item of food originated. They give you the names of the farms and tell you on what the cows grazed. There are fast food joints that tell you where the day's french fries originated. All of that, like it or not, started with Chez Panisse.

As opposed to The French Laundry, another culinary shrine in St. Helena, Chez Panisse serves five straight forward courses in a fixed price menu that changes every day, depending on what product looks best on any given day. The French Laundry is all about presentation; Chez Panisse lets the food talk for itself. We started with a glass of champagne from Rheims, the only thing on our menu that was not locally sourced, moved to crostinis with halibut, incredible heirloom tomatoes, and chicken liver. Next came a raviolini (I call them tortellini) in brodo (little raviolis in brown chicken stock). Then came a spit roasted pork loin on locally farmed beans that might be the greatest thing I have ever tasted. Finally a dessert that was good but still just a dessert. I'm not much into dessert. We had two bottles of the same champagne and Alice Waters personally comped our first bottle. It pays to hang out with a White House staffer who has made friends with the first lady's personal chef.

If you ever find yourself in the bay area, try to score a reservation at Chez Panisse.

The next morning, before the wedding ceremony, we drove over to Fisherman's Wharf with Franny and Ken and browsed around the markets at the Ferry Building. See the photo above. Mushrooms I've never seen, nor heard of. Great oysters. A cheese shop that we are going to start shopping at on line. Ditto a store that serves any kind of pork preparation you can think of and some you can't. If the Ferry Building were in Denver I would want to sell my house and move to some place within walking distance.

After the wedding Franny and Ken went back to the east coast and Katherine and I headed up to St. Helena in Napa. On the way we stopped at Bouchon where we had one o'clock reservations for lunch. This is one of the great restaurants of the world, at least in my experience. It is another french bistro kind of place with the freshest oysters I've ever had--even better than the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. I ordered steak frites which might be the best meal I had, excluding Chez Panisse, on the trip. Katherine had the onion soup. It was on a completely different plane than the onion soup a few nights earlier at Z Cuisine.

Then it was on to Meadowood where we intended to park the car and spend the next two days and three nights playing tennis, dabbling at croquet, and eating every meal on site. Meadowood has the highest Michelin rating of any restaurant in Napa Valley and for good reason. The room is incredibly sophisticated, the wine list is alarmingly huge, and the service is impeccable. Not only do they bring you a new napkin every time you leave the table, but on the way back the hostess greets you with a "Welcome back" and ushers you back to your table. Of course, the food is beautifully presented and ingenious. On our last night there the general manager of the place gave us a beautifully wrapped bottle of Roederer champagne (crisp, clean, and characterized by the tiny bubbles that shout "THIS IS A GREAT BOTTLE OF WINE").

The next day we somehow crossed the bay bridge during rush hour and made it to the airport with time to spare. The ride home was mercifully short. That night, after unpacking, we went to Tres Potrillos and had margaritas, Negra Modelo, and wonderfully greasy enchiladas. That menu always gets our digestive systems back on track.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Garden Thoughts, California, Justin's Wedding, and Hamlet


Katherine today.

I've had gardens on my mind for a while. I like them.

We were in California for a week to see Justin Garland get married. It was wonderful and gardens certainly were pivotal in the event. We were touring gardens with Franny and Ken's family around Santa Rosa before we made it to the wedding with all of its garden connections. After the wedding we headed up to a resort in St. Helena in the heart of more gardens. I can't imagine someone having lived our week in California without coming home and yearning to become a bigger and better gardener.

We started our week in garden-land in Santa Rosa at a BBQ hosted by Ken's eccentric cousin Steve. He has a big room off his kitchen that is totally papered in photographs of his favorite memories and postcards that connect to artwork he is passionate about--artists like Frida. I noticed her stuff a lot because I'm currently intrigued by her work. I was sad there was never the right moment in the crowd of folks to ask Steve about the Frida postcards placed throughout the photographs.

This same room is bordered in all directions by multi-colored Christmas lights and 1950's furniture and Mexican pottery and dishes. This is an eclectic place. It moves all over the place. So does Steve.

You leave this room and enter a garden designed and tended by the lady Steve shares his life with--LaVonne. It is a glorious garden. Herbs and lilies mingle together and there was a rosemary bush I envied tremendously because the scent was so powerful and good. There were vegetables and medicinal plants and all varieties living in some sort of perfectly ordered harmony that might make sense only to its creator.

The room was so Steve and the garden so LaVonne. I was glad we were included in the family reunion orchestrated because Franny and Ken were in town.

The next day we went to a redwood forest named for a General. My past experience tells me there are lots of individual redwood trees named for generals. This time the whole grove was named for General Armstrong. It's a California state park. It's lovely.

We walked amongst the trees and ultimately all of us--Ken's mom and brother, Franny and Ken, Jim and I--were in a quiet amphitheater surrounded by the redwoods and it was ever so slowly raining golden leaves down. Nobody said anything. A really nice garden moment.

We had a quick lunch at a great deli at Korbel and did a tasting of several champagnes. There were gardens, but LaVonne had called and we needed to meet her at Kenwood to see a full "crush" of some grapes just being delivered.

LaVonne works for the Korbel group of vineyards and got us in at Kenwood to see the grapes arrive in giant steel trucks and then watch them dump them into a crusher vat where a nasty looking coil churned the grapes around and turned them into mush and juice. We tasted the grapes--so sweet and the juice from the first pressing was sweet too. The best grape juice I've ever tasted. We wandered amongst tanks and watched a guy happily stirring a tub of yeasty water with his bare hands. We learned how the bees that arrive with the grapes get filtered out of the wines (a great relief at the time). We learned that folks who had been working with the harvest were really happy people. I really do think gardens help people be happy.

The next evening we ate dinner with Franny and Ken at Chez Panisse in Berkeley where the whole locally grown movement began. Alice Waters began a whole movement with this one beautifully simple restaurant in a simple house. We had a wonderful mean based on what was fresh in Ms. Water's garden. We got to tour the kitchen. Ahhhhhh.

Sunday was Justin's wedding. It was the first Jewish ceremony we ever witnessed and it was beautiful. The blessings made my heart sing. The ceremony took place in a redwood grove that is part of Berkeley's botanic gardens--very holy and quiet and just enough breeze to have leaves fall on the knitted covering for the wedding space that Cindy had created. The design of the covering was based on garden images as well. There are correct and sacred words for the covering C. made and for the space the ceremony took place and I've forgotten those words already. It was a perfect place in spirit and in aesthetics. I never saw C. that I didn't cry for the happiness of it all.

The reception was at a very "green" place with very hard floors, but the food came straight from gardens and the folks who attended certainly all believed in fruits and vegetables and food. It was a good time.

On Monday we headed up to the Napa Valley to "camp" alone at Meadowood. We found it years ago when we first looked into that book about all the places you are supposed to go before you die. We were doing pretty well (we knocked off four anyway) when we discovered we liked some places so much we needed to go back. Meadowood is one of those places. Anyway, Meadowood is a definite splurge and we stayed two days.

We played tennis surrounded by vines that grow on the fences while we listened to woodland creatures moving around in crisp, fallen leaves. We played croquet in the officially required white and/or khaki clothing while we bemoaned the fact that our croquet game was off because some leaves and pine needles had fallen on our otherwise perfectly groomed croquet playing field. We ate at The Restaurant and The Grill where all the fruits and vegetables are grown on farms on the property. We sat on our porch and watched ferns under old oak trees and wondered how the management got the pretty little stag with his pretty little antlers to walk by us on our first evening there. Gardens everywhere.

I'm home now. My garden is dead and yesterday I made dinner out of its last production--harvested just before we left. I'll miss my garden.

Hamlet compares Denmark to an unweeded garden and notes that rank and gross things possess it. That's the charm. You have to look at your garden all the time and you have to tend it and get rid of weeds and rank and gross things like slugs and aphids, and you have to love your garden and notice if it's feeling perky or blue and you have to worry about bugs and critters that want to eat what you've grown and you have to look with joy at the flowers and blooms and fruits and vegetables you've managed to get to your table for viewing or eating. Hamlet doesn't tend his garden and his Denmark garden just plain sucks. If I pay attention to my garden, it thrives. I have no clue what I'm doing, but I know if I just pay attention I manage to grow stuff and it is a happy thing. Hamlet just needed to be a better gardener.