What’s Sauce for the Goose
The marvelous SF Jazz Center
Sunday night we enjoyed seeing Chris Botti again, this time in the new SF Jazz Center. The Center is a magnificent facility, purpose built for concerts. There isn’t a bad seat in the house, and the acoustics are everything you could hope for.
Chris Botti puts on a great show, not just with his own playing but with singers and musicians to whom he gives an impressive amount of stage time. Indeed, the main show finale is a solo by his drummer! I’ve never seen a show as open and generous as this one.
After the music, we moved down 3 blocks to a restaurant named Sauce: Gough. That’s to differentiate it from their other location, Sauce: Belden Place. The Gough street location also includes a 9 room boutique hotel.
This was Restaurant Week, which means they had a special $40 prix fixe dinner. I didn’t want the entire menu (too many mushrooms), but definitely wanted the braised leek and brussels sprouts salad. Sadly, house rules precluded that simple choice. I had to cajole the waitress to cajole the chef to let one of his prized salads out of the kitchen unaccompanied with the remainder of the special. Fortunately, common sense finally won out, and this beauty hit the table:
Braised leek and brussels sprouts salad, topped with strips of white sweet potato.
Gail loves Caesar salad, but isn’t doesn’t really care for the tough ribs of the romaine lettuce. Sauce improves on the norm by making their Caesar with little gem lettuce, and is generous with the anchovies, too.
Caesar salad done right.
My salmon Saturday night was so-so. My salmon Sunday night was great. A decent size portion of properly cooked fish, served atop a spinach salad dressed with olive oil and horseradish–something I’ve never seen before.
Turns out horseradish is a pretty good salad dressing. I really liked this–how often is it that the side dish on the plate upstages the main entreé?
Gail had the stroganoff, and pronounced it excellent.
Braised Beef Short Rib Stroganoff, with Hen of the Wood Mushrooms, Papardelle and asparagus.
Sauce is tres modern, with all local, organic, tree-hugging ingredients. The food is excellent, the service was first rate, the prices were as upscale as the food. We liked it, and will be returning following more concerts at the Jazz Center–they make a good combination.
Opa!!
That’s “Bravo” in Greek.
After the art opening, we walked three doors up Grand Avenue to Ikaros, a Greek restaurant doing a very good business on Saturday night. Fortunately, we had a reservation and were quickly seated. This place is in the same block as the Grand Lake Theater, so parking can be a hassle but there is a lot to do in the neighborhood.
Ikaros is the real deal–so Greek our waiter barely spoke English. Ordering was, er, difficult. We managed, somehow.
Ikaros isn’t very upscale, it’s just a local ethnic restaurant. The food is very good, and that’s what counts.
We started with the dolmades, stuffed grape leaves. You probably know them as dolma. Gail, from the Central Valley, associated them with Armenian food, but I think they are part of both Greek and Armenian culture.
Dolma
Gail and Keith both had the lamb souvlaki, skewer of grilled lamb served over rice. Her portion was vast: we could easily have shared this dish.
Lamb Souvlaki
I had the salmon, which was pedestrian except for the Ikaros fries that accompanied a rather meager piece of overcooked fish and lukewarm steamed veggies. The fries are pan-fried in olive oil, then topped with Greek cheese and oregano. Phenomenal!
Prices are very reasonable, the service is prompt. This isn’t a fancy place; they have paper napkins. We enjoyed our dinner and I’d love to try their gyros for lunch one day. Give them a try.
Stay Flexible
Gail’s middle name is Flexible. Yep, Gail Flexible Giffen it is.
We’ve had a busy week and thought we’d stay in tonight and binge on The Staircase, a series on Amazon about a murder. We watched Making a Murderer on Netflix last week, and we’re on a homicidal roll.
Then I got a message from Keith: Did we want to go to a gallery opening and dinner? Well sure we did–that’s the flexible way to be.
So we went in to Oakland to a super fancy upscale liquor store called the Alchemy Bottle Shop. The kind of place that sells 30 year old single malt Scotch, obscure wines from Catalonia and small batch bourbons. Not a bottle of MD 20-20 in sight.
On the second floor we met Sally Petru, a friend of Jan’s from the Berkeley Tennis club. She is a tremendous botanical artist–one of those very talented people who draw plants precisely, exactly, essentially photorealistically. This is a second career, one that entailed many years of study in places around the world. Sally is a big fish in the very small pond of botanical illustration, and the art on the wall makes it clear why.
Sal Petru, botanical artist
We’ve been to plenty of gallery openings; this was the first in a liquor store.
Sal’s (because that what she calls herself, Sal) work was on the wall, just above the fancy grape juice.
I’m learning to appreciate art even when it doesn’t move me. These works are truly special, imbuing plants I would ordinarily consider mostly meaningless with life, dignity and presence. Yes, you could much more easily just take a photo, but you would be missing the life Sal manages to create within her watercolors. You can of course see more of her work at her website, http://www.sallypetru.com/
Tonight my horizons were widened a bit. I saw a liquor store that was actually a class joint, not just a booze outlet. And we got to meet and learn about an artist in a tiny niche specialty and see some precise, intricate drawings with a life of their own. You just gotta stay flexible.
Yachts in Walnut Creek?
There isn’t any navigable water in Walnut Creek, but we have a yacht club. This is perfect since I don’t have a yacht.
We’ve been to the Walnut Creek Yacht Club (which is really just a theme for a very nice restaurant at Bonanza and Locust) quite a few times, and it always is a pleasant meal.
The joint is too damned loud, but that’s the price you pay for hanging with the young and hip these days.
January is Lobster month. They provide a dinner of grilled or steamed lobster, fries and cole slaw for 32 clams (which is some kind of a mixed metaphor). That’s a good deal, and is part of the reason the place was so loud–it was packed to the gunwales. (see how I can continue a theme?)
Heck of a good deal for $32
The cole slaw didn’t thrill me, but that wasn’t what we were there for. The crustacean was excellent and the fries were drenched in garlic, so I was a happy camper. So happy I let Gail get a photo of me that may become my new profile pic.
Gail loves to add angles to her shots.
We happily ran into friends and joined them, which let me get this shot of some fantastic looking fish and chips:
Service was decent considering how busy they were. Prices are quite reasonable, the place is friendly not formal, there’s an interesting loggia in the back I’d enjoy in more clement weather. I think this is just the kind of yacht club for me.
Something completely different
Some great photographer once said if you want more interesting pictures, stand in front of more interesting stuff.
Tonight I went to a gallery opening in San Francisco for a show by a photographer who took that to an extreme.
Charles Gatewood is a photographer interested in the wilder side of human behavior–tattooing and body modification. He is still very much alive, but this show was a retrospective from the 70’s and 80’s.
The photographs seem to be simply done candid shots of interesting people doing interesting things. No sets or fancy lighting, Gatewood just recorded the happenings and showed the people.
Here are two that were titled “Disco Party, NYC, 1979
I never got to go to parties like that.
Ladybug Gallery is a tiny space on upper Powell Street, near Broadway. The attending crowd was hardly the well-heeled arty set, it was all young hipsters and one old codger in suspenders. The prints were priced at “$1000 (price negotiable)”. That’s like saying they just won’t accept a grand, you must offer less.
Going to shows like this expands my view, seing how brave some photographers can be in their subject matter. Now I just need to meet some wilder people to photograph. Anyone out there have something to share with the world?
I’ll die-t tomorrow
Monterey is a good place for seafood. It’s also a place to find some old fashioned American breakfast.
We’re partial to the Old Monterey Cafe, in the heart of downtown. Friday morning we were lucky enough to find a parking place right in front, and an open table without waiting.
The Old Monterey is definitely an old-fashioned kind of place, with walls covered in signs, movie posters and newspaper clippings reflecting local history.
We began, as always, by sharing some biscuits and gravy, the quintessential American roadside diner trucker food. Flaky, homemade biscuits drowned in sausage gravy. The greatest food on earth. And the food that has purchased more yachts for cardiologists than any other.
The ultimate heart attack on a plate.
Being careful about our diets, Gail and I always share this.
Then Gail ordered an omelet, with avocado and salsa and a side of grits.
The healthy alternative.
Avocado is a fruit, right? So is the orange. Grits are made from corn, so that’s a vegetable. I’m sure this is a healthy dish she chose. Do you know that doing yoga has a lot of health benefits? To read blogs about The Secrets of Yoga, go to thesecretsofyoga.com now.
I only eat pancakes about once a year—right here. This is their definition of a pancake sandwich:
It takes two plates to get this to the table. And that’s a short stack.
Two immense pancakes (which is a short stack–a full stack would be three of those platters of batter). Two eggs. Two links of sausage. Two thingies of butter colored substance. Two tiny pitchers of a maple syrup like liquid. It was great.
Of course, it was so much food that I wasn’t very hungry when we went out to dinner 6 hours later.
Service is Johnny on the spot quick. My iced ted got refilled incessantly. There is nothing fancy here–the silverware is cheap and the napkins are paper. You just get a ton of very good food for a tiny price with high speed friendly service.
I enjoy the crab and salmon and abalone we have a the fancy places on the wharf or in Pacific Grove, but I’d never want to miss my annual breakfast at the Old Monterey Cafe. That’s about all my arteries can take, but it’s marvelous.
Old Fishermen Know Best
Gail loves abalone, and being in Monterey is always an excuse to have some. It used to be that only a very few places served the elusive dish, because they had to buy it from divers and the supply was completely erratic. With the advent of modern aquaculture, abalone are now farmed and much more consistently available.
Gail’s preferred abalone house is the Sardine Factory, but they are closed for a couple of weeks. I asked the hotel concierge, who told me she would call the abalone distributor, see who got a delivery today and make a reservation.
And that’s how we ended up dining on the wharf at the Old Fisherman’s Grotto, for a fantastic meal we hope to repeat Saturday.
Old Fisheman’s is about in the middle of the wharf, still decorated in the old style of dark and heavy wood with thick carpet and napery to keep the sound down. There is a sign in front declaring no high chairs, strollers, baby seats or crying children. This is a place for adults to have a solid meal in peace.
There are perks to having the hotel make your reservation. The waiter brought us an enormous appetizer with shrimp, calamari and artichokes on the house to start–they want to keep getting referalls fom the Hyatt.
Gail began with the crab cocktail–which is a huge boat of crab, imported fresh from Oregon because of the bacteria problem with local crab this El Niño year.
A staggering amount of crustacean
I chose the crab tower– more crab meat, mixed with lemon aioli, avocado and mango. Wonderful beyond words, in a delightful presentation.
Crab meat tower
The abalone on the menu is two abalone and two giant prawns. Gail told the waiter she wanted three abalone, no prawns, charge what you have to. I think many people take what is written on the menu as carved in stone, but restaurants will almost always accommodate any even moderately reasonable request.
Her dish was stunning:
Abalone, risotto and vegetables
Farm raised abalone may actually be better than wild. They are consistently sized, properly fed and well maintained. Gail says the flavor is excellent.
This dish was made better by the inclusion of some perfect vegetables. The abalone were on a bed of spinach in the shell, drenched in butter and the juices from the abalone. There was also broccoli rabe, brussels sprouts and carrots, along with a spinach risotto, all fresh, local and properly cooked.
I had the seared ahi tuna.
Local Ahi topped with a huge hat of pickled ginger.
My dish was also excellent, sesame crusted local Ahi tuna briefly seared, served on a bed of udon noodles and more of those great veggies.
No dessert was needed after this–we had way too much food in the first place.
Service was slightly more casual than I would have expected in a place so dark and formal, but no real complaints. The iced tea was perfect.
Abalone is always expensive, and Gail had 3 of them, so the bill was stiff, but not at all unreasonable. Wine was offered at 25% off, perhaps because it was Thursday, and we had a full bottle (bringing back to the hotel the excess). There was a further $10 “VIP” discount on the bill, I assume because we booked through the Hyatt.
We loved the meal and the setting. I’m serious that we will be back on Saturday night. Anybody else want to join us?
Our favorite tournament
Back to Monterey for the first tournament of the year, and our favorite. The Hyatt Regency, nee Del Monte Hyatt, is a lovely hotel, now with all refurbished rooms.
Play, for us, will start tomorrow. We drove down in the afternoon and went out to dinner with Carol Scott, returning for our annual pilgrimage to the Monterey Fish House.
Everyone goes here. Although I had a reservation, we had to wait about 10 minutes for a table to materialize. That was after I had to physically force my way into the joint because some woman, who also had a reservation, refused to move to let others in. She said there was no room. She was wrong. Gail was not about to stand outside in the rain.
Gail started with the shrimp cocktail, in a classic presentation complete with the “oyster” crackers that contain no oyster.
Imported shrimp in the seafood capital of the state
Next up was a spinach salad, topped with too many sliced black olives straight out of the can and a too-sweet dressing.
Good looking, at least
Gail had the sand dabs. The waiter graciously volunteered to bone them:
Professional deconstruction of fish
Sand dabs always strike me as a high risk meal–they are very good or very bad. These were good, although the veggies and pasta didn’t look all that appetizing.
I had the salmon pasta. Chunks of salmon floured and sauteéd, served with liguini and a vodka sauce. They were supposed to hold the mushrooms, but failed in that simple task.
Salmon and pasta. Meh.
This dish was both heavy and tasteless. When I don’t finish a plate of pasta you know there is something missing.
The best part of the meal was yet to arrive–spumoni!
Chocolate, cherry and pistachio ice cream
Three kinds of ice cream blended with frozen cherries and nuts. Wonderful! You can make some very fancy desserts, but it is hard to beat a simple dish of Italian delight.
The Monterey Fish House is always jammed. The staff does an excellent job of hustling the customers in and out without rushing them. Prices are very reasonable.
The food is mediocre. It has always been mediocre. You get what you pay for, and they charge what this stuff is worth. In a city with so many truly fine seafood restaurants, for some reason we keep coming back to this one. I don’t know why. I think I’m giving up on it–even the places on the wharf catering to tourists from Kansas serve better food. I just feel like this is a long silly tradition that people feel a need to follow although they have forgotten why.
I wish they didn’t like me so much
I had to call Citibank this week because an employee had destroyed his credit card and we needed new one.
So I dialed, and put in some numbers, and told them the name of my 7th grade English teacher, which is my password.
Finally speaking to a person and not the computer, I told her my sad tale of woe and requested a new card. She said she wasn’t able to do that, and transferred me to somebody else.
Who promptly needed know all the things I had just told the first person.
Naturally, I inquired why this was necessary. Why couldn’t the original person fulfill this relatively simple operation?
Turns out that Citi thinks I am an “elite” customer and the people in Manilla or Bangalore who answer the phone aren’t able to access my account. Only a proper stateside customer service rep can safely cope with simple requests from special people like me.
So being “elite” means that I get to do everything twice and waste twice the time on pedestrian tasks.
I asked him if I could be taken off elite status, and just get my jobs done efficiently, but that is a concept too advanced for Citi. Noblesse oblige and all that.
If only they didn’t like me so darned much.
Two Days, Two Movies
Gail made a New Years resolution to see more movies, and we started the year off with two very good ones.
The first, Spotlight, is the very true story of how the Boston Globe did brilliant investigative journalism and broke the story of the Catholic church consistently covering up for child abusing priests.
Michael Keaton has long been one of my favorite actors. In Spotlight he plays Robby Robinson, the editor of the Spotlight section of the Globe, it’s investigative arm. A home grown Boston boy, raised in the Church with working class roots, he doesn’t want to believe that the corruption goes all the way up to Cardinal Bernard Law, but cannot deny the evidence before his eyes. He leads his team, including Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams, driving them to find solid proof of a widespread program of shielding and protecting pedophile priests with no thought to the damage they were doing to the children.
The new editor of the paper is an out of town Jew, who has no allegiance to the local history and power structure, willing to take on the Church. He is portrayed by Liev Schreiber, looking so much softer and non-threatening than he does in Ray Donovan that I didn’t recognize him.
When the story is about finding a story, the plot gets too meta for me to properly analyze. I’m getting dizzy trying to figure out which story is the real heart of the movie, but it doesn’t matter. Spotlight is compelling theater. It runs over 2 hours, and I wasn’t checking my watch ever.
In the end, the truth comes out, changes are made and reparations are paid, but Cardinal Law is kicked upstairs to Rome. Did the paper, and the city, win or lose?
Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan in Creed
The original Rocky was one of the greatest movies of all time, then followed a series of increasingly sucky sequels, and now there is Creed, which is magnificent.
Turns out that Apollo Creed had a son with some now nameless woman with whom he was having an affair, a son who was born after the fighters untimely death. The mother died, the kid bounced around foster homes and juvenile halls until Apollo’s widow finds him and takes him in.
Although raised from then on with money and class, fighting is in his blood, so much so that he is taking unsanctioned club fights in Tijuana by night and working in financial services by day, until he can no longer bottle up his drive, quits his job and moves from the LA mansion of his father to Philly to look up Rocky Balboa and train to be a champion.
Rocky by this time is old, tired, not interested in fighting and just wants to run his restaurant, named for his deceased wife, Adrian.
From here you could probably write the script yourself. There’s the staccato sound of boxing training. There’s work. A fight is presented, which nobody thinks he can possibly win. He works harder.
There’s a girl, beautifully played by Tessa Thompson. Lots of inspirational speeches. Some bad things happen, then there is a great fight. Your heart swells. You cheer. The audience applauds and the house lights come up.
Of course you know what is going to happen, and you don’t care. This is not a suspense movie, it is an exciting, uplifting movie, and it works very very well.
Stallone wrote and directed most or all of the other movies, but this was written and directed by Ryan Coogler. Stallone just acts, and he does it very well, showing an old man who accepts his life, good and bad, with maturity and grace.
The fight scenes are incredible, filmed in very long takes with a hand held camera in the ring with the fighters. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti did a brilliant job of bring the closeness and immediacy of the ring to the screen.
Real fighter Andre Ward plays movie fighter Danny Wheeler. Real announcers Jim Lampley and Max Kellerman, Ring announcer MIchael Buffer play themselves. Liev Schreiber pops up again as an off-screen narrator.
I thought this was a wonderful movie, but I’m a fight fan. Stallone became famous with the first Rocky and has created the perfect cap to his career with the final one. I hope it’s the final one–hate to see him try to milk one more our of the series. Time to go out a winner.
Totally Unauthorized 