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.
