Saturday, January 25, 2014

Uncle

A Noodle Joint

Katherine noted just a little while ago that eating in Puerto Vallarta was a much cheaper proposition than eating at home.  That of course is not technically true.  It we actually ate at home it would be different.  Not much, but different nonetheless.

Food in PV is simple.  Katherine fries up egg and bacon sandwiches for breakfast after our morning workout and walk along the beach.  The rest of the day we are either on a tour where the food and drink is part of the package, or we are hanging out by the pool and taking random bites of sliced turkey, ham, and cheese.  At night we eat out, but rarely at pricey places.  We eat at Pipi's, or The Sea Monkey, or take a great and relatively inexpensive food tour courtesy of Vallarta Eats.  The most expensive place we ate with Bud and Janet was Tino's on the Malecon and I ended up getting sick.  Kathie and I did manage to have one mid afternoon foray to Las Palapas, a great restaurant on the beach.  Even that wasn't too pricey.

Things got different when we got home.  First of all, instead of cold cuts, our mid-day snacking has become trays of great cheeses, salamis, and breads along with glasses of wine.  Since we've been home we've eaten at Bonnano Brothers (we were in the neighborhood anyway to pick up a parcel after hours at UPS), Lou's Foodbar (met Franny, Ken, and the kids there our second night back, a traditional meeting place), Ted's Montana Grill (took Kathie's mom there for a burger before the AFC championship game), Bones (stopped there on the way home from a handyman job to grab a quick beer and some Shishito peppers and to grab a take-out order of edamame), Snooze twice (we go there every Saturday morning for breakfast), and just the night before last, Uncle.

I've been wanting to go to Uncle ever since the last "5280" restaurant rating issue had listed Uncle as the top noodle bar in Denver.  I was skeptical.  I agree with my friend Kevin Williams that when all things are considered, Bones (a noodle bar, I should point out) has the best food in Denver.  I was anxious to see how Uncle stacked up.

Pretty well I must say.  There were all kinds of things I liked about the place.   A little like Brothers Bar, the restaurant has a barely visible "Uncle" etched into the window above the black exterior.  If Kathie and I didn't know it's address, 2215 32nd, we never would have noticed it being anything other than a barely visible storefront.  Inside, it is a clean, well-lighted place, with shiny horizontal and vertical wooden slats lining the walls and well-spaced, bare wooden tables and chairs.  The bar overlooking the kitchen is the center piece of the place and by the time six-thirty rolled around every seat in the small room was full.  The music is well-chosen and hipster loud (This is a place for a youngish crowd.).  The vibe--some might say din--limited conversation to guttural responses about the food.  Lots of "oh my god's," and "yums," and "wow's."  The most complicated thought that anyone could communicate went along the lines of "did you try the Bibimbap?"

The menu was quite similar to Bones.  Maybe five appetizers (the brussel sprouts were terrific), but none as interesting as the variety you get at Bones.  There are maybe five different versions of Ramen, and the same number of noodle bowls.  They even have three different types of steamed buns to try, but the pork belly ones we tried, though excellent, were not nearly as perfect as the ones you'll get at Bones.  There is an interesting beer, wine and sake menu plus four specialty cocktails.

The best thing about Uncle is that it is in Franny and Ken's neighborhood, so we are apt to add the place to our restaurant rotation.  I would gladly drive across town to get a noodle bowl at Uncle, but if it were sitting across the street from Frank Bonnano's place, I would end up going to Bones.

Friday, January 3, 2014

30 X 30




An Art Post

I remember a time in Comp for the College Bound when I was leading my kids through the old hammer in a frame gimmick in order for them to come up with some sort of appreciation of aesthetic distance.  I pointed out two drawings on the wall given to me by past students.  One, a rather rough hewn painting of what Bourani must have looked like to Nicholas in THE MAGUS, the other, a finely wrought drawing of an oriental princess surrounded by a flowering garden.  Insofar as the Bourani painting was playing with textures and shades of color and perspective, I thought it was what we might call "Art," while the exquisite drawing, even though it was given to me by a sweetheart of a girl from Laos who did everything I asked of her, wasn't art so much as decoration.  Between you and me, I think drawing such a distinction is pointless at best and downright mean spirited at worst, but it is always guaranteed to get a rise out of high school seniors.  Besides, defining art is one of my favorite pastimes.  I mean I could reread--I have reread--the aesthetics discussion in PORTRAIT dozens of times and always find something new to think about.

I'm talking about this because my son Christian gave me a magnificent oil painting of a barn by Richard Harrington.  When we go to Jenny Lake every year we always stop by the Rare Gallery in Jackson.  The last few years we have found ourselves admiring the collection of barns Harrington was showing at the gallery.  By the way, if you're ever in Jackson, go to this gallery.  It has one of the most varied and interesting collections I've ever seen.

Well, Christian, bless his heart, wanted to do something special for my sixty-fifth and he commissioned Harrington to paint me a barn, so to speak.  When he gave it to me on Christmas night, he didn't look convinced about the wonder of Harrington's work.  He finally asked me why I thought it was good.  What made it art?

If I let myself relax and, like William Hurt in THE BIG CHILL, "just let art flow over" me, the answer to such a question is simple.  It's wonderful because I love it.  It jumps off the wall at me.  It's cool.  But then I have to start thinking about the whole thing.  That night I gave Chris what I thought, him being a musician and all, was an insightful explanation.  "It's like listening to jazz," I said.  "The barn is like an improvisation on a theme.  It's like listening to Coleman Hawkins play 'I'm Beginning To See The Light.'  You can still hear snatches of the melody as he dives and soars all around it.  It gives you something to think about."

But I want to be more thorough here.

Harrington's painting--it has no title so I've decided to name it "30 X 30" after its dimensions--is quite simply a stylized barn in blues and whites and shades of green sitting in the middle of a field with a forest in the background leading up to a broad blue sky flecked with those same whites, blues, and greens.

It is, of course, more than that.  A straight black line defines the main floor of the barn and sits at an angle to the grassy field sloping down from right to left.  The floor of the barn also sets off the bottom third of the work which is comprised completely of the predominately grass green field textured with flecks of all the other colors in the painting.  As the painting rises, the shades of green go from light to dark and back again with the floor of the barn accented by the teal-green foundation.  Then the green of the foreground becomes almost black as the forest looms behind.  But the darkness of the deep forest gives way to the lighter green of the treetops and finally the splotchy blue of the sky.

The barn sits in the middle, resting on the downslope with zig zagging swatches of color running up and down the facade.  The first dominant color is the purplish blue sitting in triangular shapes between the green of the field and the blue of the sky.  But then there is an equally angular collection of mottled white that matches and adds to the triangularity of the blue.  The frame of the barn is clearly there in the background with its Mormon Barn roof jutting up into the sky, but that jutting shape is taken up by the whites and blues until it becomes unclear which is in the foreground, which is the outside and which the inside, the white or the blue?  The roof brings it all together by incorporating all the colors of the work into one almost pointillistic whole.  All of this is awash in the pinks and ambers that light the meadows and forests of the Tetons at sunset.  It is more than field and sky and barn.  It's how Jenny Lake and its environs feel at dusk.

But mostly, "30 X 30" is really cool.