Gourmet on the Go
Micky and I are on our way to New Orleans for the spring NABC, North American bridge championships. As with everything in life, this involves a plane change in Dallas. Of course.
It’s lunch time, and we are in terminal C. Terminal A has Papadeaux, a great place to eat. Terminal C has Au Bon Pain, a place to get sustenance.
I grabbed a Thai Peanut Chicken wrap from the cold box, ordered a diet Pepsi (no Coke here), and we walked to the gate. There are nowhere near enough seats available at the sandwich store.
I know people who think travelling to distant cities to play high level bridge is dashing or romantic or adventurous, but does this meal, using an airline terminal seat as a table, inspire any of those ideas in you?
Fancy gourmet dining for the world weary traveler.
Not that I want to sound like a martyr–this is clearly the life of Riley. I love to travel, I love to play bridge, there are no real complaints. Even if it was a dreadful, cold, dry, overcooked sandwich. Which it was.
I don’t have to go back to DFW until next Thursday, on our way home. I’m hoping for Terminal A.
The sound of things to come
Dinner at Comal in Berkeley tonight. We’ve been here before a number of times, and always enjoyed it. I don’t usually write about places more than once, but I’m making an exception to cover something different. We were there with friends Ted and Mary Bayer, who kept us laughing with their tale of biking in New Zealand in very bad weather.
Gail and Mary trying to hold down the rowdiness.
Sound is a huge issue in the restaurant business. If the place is too loud, people can’t carry on a conversation. If it’s too quiet, people don’t like it–especially the all important younger crowd. Lots of issues are considered in the sound design of a new facility–tablecloths, silverware, crockery, wall coverings, floors, air conditioning and the sound system itself all are carefully balanced to give the room the desired sound level.
Comal has taken this a step further, installing a sound system designed by sound guru John Meyer that simultaneously dampens and sweetens the ambient noise in such a way that you can easily carry on a conversation, clearly hear the music, know that the place is busy and full yet not really hear the people at the next table.
A few of the 123 speakers , microphones and other components of the Meyer Sound system.
Even the art on the wall, such as this photo by Deborah O’Grady, is designed and placed to aid the sound dampening.
One of the beauties of this system is that it is unobtrusive–we have eaten there 6 or 8 times and tonight was the first occasion where I noticed the perfection of the sound; ordinarily I just like the place and don’t know why. It is also infinitely adjustable–the owner, John Paluska, can walk around with his iPad and fine tune the room table by table.
The Meyer system is the new hot thing in the business–Olivetto in Oakland installed a system recently. There are places Gail and I won’t go because the noise level is too high, but that may become a thing of the past. A system like this costs between $10,000 and $100,000, but presumably that will come down in time. Anyone building out a new high-class eatery will have to strongly consider installing this state of the art equipment to remain competitive in the industry.
Besides the great sound and the excellent company, dinner tonight was the as good as we have come to expect from Comal, except that Gail’s chili relleno wasn’t cooked all the way through–I noticed that the boss wasn’t at his usual place checking every dish as it comes out of the kitchen, and when the cat’s away…………
I ended the meal, as always, with a dish of the arroz con leche, the best rice pudding in the country, topped with pistachios and mandarin orange slices.
Don’t miss this
I don’t think I’ve ever recommended you visit a restaurant to check out its sound system, but this is so different, so pleasant, so much a harbinger of the future of fine dining I think you should check it out. And have some rice pudding while you’re there.
The Black Market lives
Mention the black market, and people will think of a guy with too much body hair and an unidentifiable middle-European accent selling weapons and bootleg pharmaceuticals. In reality, there is much more to it than that, and we are surrounded by it.
More than a year ago, I caught my front bumper on something in a parking lot, and the right side hasn’t been right since. I thought it was just a small issue, and asked the Chrysler dealer to work on it. They sent me to Cook Collision, and they wanted to replace the bumper, the fender and my entire retirement account. I don’t like the car that much, so I kept driving around with a droopy bumper.
Today, I was in the Whole Foods parking lot when a guy in a red Camaro asked if I wanted it fixed. At first I said no, then thought better of it and chased him down to talk.
He looked at the car, checked it from front to back, and offered to fix the bumper and various scratches and dings in my driveway for $700. That was less than 1/4 of what the body shop wanted, and I didn’t have to drop the car off, do without for a few days, or go fetch it when it was finished. Sounded like a plan to me, so I did my shopping and they followed me home.
That gap doesn’t belong there
There were 3 guys–the driver of the car, who is clearly an experienced body and fender man. His first assistant, and a guy who fetches and carries. The first two apparently work in a body shop, but make much more money with these “side jobs”, since they are all cash.
It’s amazing what they can do with just a handful of tools–here’s their rolling “shop”
The trunk of the Camaro, with everything they needed.
It was interesting watching them work, with the leader murmuring instructions to his number 2, they sounded just like the dentist working with a long time assistant. They worked together smoothly, neatly and quietly. The both smoke more than the dentist, though.
Touching up the paint with a professional tool–a Q-tip.
The work went swiftly. Somebody forgot to pack a drill, so we dug mine out of the garage. A bucket of hot water and soap was procured to prep the paint before touch-up.
A not-by-the-book repair technique.
When I worked in a gas station ages ago, we call this kind of spit, baling wire and chewing gum repair “Sam McGee” engineering. The result is pretty good. It isn’t a $3,500 job from the body shop, but it only cost 20% of that. Gail would never let this crew touch her Jag, but this is a perfect repair for my little Chrysler.
Final result.
My black market repair crew were all Hispanic, but not foreign. One of them said he was born in Honolulu, and English was clearly a first language for all of them. They were hardworking professionals, cruising grocery store parking lots to find all-cash opportunities. That’s the way the black market operates–no insurance, no licenses, no taxes, no overhead. I guess they own their own tools, but perhaps they are “borrowed” from the shop where they have formal jobs. I don’t care–all I wanted was a cheap repair job with no hassles. I don’t need an invoice, I don’t care about ‘genuine’ parts, just stick the bumper back up and let me hit the trail.
These guys were really personable. The number 2 man wanted a photo of himself with a piece of art in the front:
PJ and Senor violin
So that’s the way things work just a few steps over the line from the law. No weapons, no pharmaceuticals, no strange accents or dark alleyways. Three hardworking young men who like to mug for the camera, do good work cheap and make some cash. It works for me.
Still two sides
We are big fans of Bay Area Cabaret, an organization that puts on delightful cabaret shows a half dozen times a year in the elegant Venetian Room of the Fairmont Hotel. They find excellent singers to put on a show for 75 to 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon. Singers like Leslie Uggams, Stacy Kent and, this week, Judy Collins. People dress up, sip adult beverages and enjoy an older style of music in very upscale surroundings.
We were excited to see this particular show–it promised to be the highlight of the series. Expectations sometimes fail, though, and that was the case Sunday.
Still gorgeous, Judy Collins in the Venetian Room.
There is no opening act. Judy came out, and sang. She hit many of the notes in the songs, just not the high ones.
She had a cold, it is true. Several times she was forced to stop singing and start coughing. Perhaps that is the reason, and I’m being unfair. Perhaps sopranos need to retire earlier than altos, and she is 75.
Judy is working on a new show, featuring the music of Steven Sondheim. I think many of his songs are in a higher range than she is comfortable with, and she is pushing herself beyond her limits. When she sang “Somewhere over the rainbow”, she was spot on, and it was beautiful. Her old standards, “Both Sides Now” and “Send in the Clowns”, were a delight. The Sondheim pieces, such as “Being Alive”, are just in a higher range and were not working on Sunday.
High notes or not, she can still sell the song.
Of course, Judy Collins is a thorough professional. She still has the phrasing, the timing, the ability to sell a song. Completely comfortable onstage, she owns the room and is the cynosure of all eyes. More than merely a singer, she is an entertainer to her bones, and provides an excellent show despite all.
Sunday’s show was sub-par, but I most certainly wish her well, and hope that getting over her cold solves the problems. Bay Area Cabaret will still be high on our list of pleasant activities, and we go again in 3 weeks.
Presto!!
I like magic. I like dinner. What could be better than a place that gives you both? California Magic Theater in Martinez is just a small storefront establishment but it’s a great way to spend an evening.
The walls are covered with a King’s ransom in antique show posters.
Six of us showed up at 7:30 to take our place among the crowd of 50 that comprises a sold out house. People are seated at long tables, and there are roving magicians entertaining at all of them. It’s one thing to see a trick onstage, something quite more remarkable to see it at your dinner table, right in front of your eyes.
Gerry Griffin, the owner of the club, performing at our table before the show.
Dinner is served. There is no menu–you get salad, then an entrée of tri-tip, chicken and rice. It isn’t the fanciest meal in town, but it’s better than I expected. There is a ramekin of butter and garlic sauce you can dip your chicken in, which makes it something special. Squares of cardboard would be good dipped in butter and garlic, and the chicken is much better than cardboard. This is California, so there is a vegetarian option available when you buy your tickets.
Pretty standard banquet fare, nicely cooked and very enjoyable.
Dessert is chocolate dipped strawberries. Fruit is good for you, so I made sure to eat all of mine.
A tiny stage sits at the front of room, and the owner comes out and tells very bad jokes and does one simple magic trick, then we had the opener.
Budding star Jack Fowler
Hey!! It’s that cute 16 year old kid who was bussing tables just a few minutes ago. The one with the great hair. He does magic, and he does it well.
Working with somebody from the crowd.
Jack did about 10 minutes, and his big finish was quite the mindbender. Modern “magic” seems to be about 80% comedy and 20% tricks, and he carried both off with the polish of a seasoned professional and the boyish earnestness of youth. I like this kid.
Next up was the main event, Timothy James. Roughly 30, James seems to be someone making a career out of magic, not a hobby. He worked the audience during dinner, and was impressive in his close-up magic work. Onstage, he was smooth and in command. He did a card trick that amazed me, somehow getting two sets of independently shuffled cards to be in the identical order.
Timothy James doing card magic.
James did some rope tricks that we have all seen before, and flummoxed all of us. Then he began a long gag that entailed a person from the crowd which was really more comedy than magic–the one trick at the heart of it was pretty simple and obvious, but we were all laughing too hard to care.
This photo doesn’t add much to the story, I just liked the shadow.
And that was the night–we got there at 7:30 and were on the street at about 10, well fed and entertained. Tickets are $79 each, for dinner and the show complete. Wine is extra. I thought it was excellent value for the price, and intend to go back.
East Coast Flash
We all want our houses to look good, to stand out in the neighborhood. Some people prize the quality of their lawns, others want big walls and gates, complex paint jobs, Disneyland lighting or colorful banners they change with the seasons. yesterday, we saw something new.
I’ve never been to the Florida Keys, so we drove about an hour south of Max and Barbara’s house to Key Largo, which certainly sounds romantic even if the town is kind of roadside tacky.
We always like to just drive around the residential streets, looking for where the rich folks live to see the nice houses. What we found in Key Largo was too interesting not to share.
On the oceanfront streets, we noticed that every house had an exotic mailbox. Some of them were commercially available plastic molds, like the walrus, while others were clearly hand made, artistic wonders. There isn’t much more to say about them, so I’ll just give you a gallery to enjoy.
Eat at Joe’s
We’re spending a day longer here than we planned. I thought we were coming home on February 23. American Air thought we were coming home March 23. Guess who won that argument.
The upside is that we took a long drive today and ended up in South Beach so we could have dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab, one of the landmark restaurants of the area.
Joe’s is open most of the year now, but for a long time was only open during stone crab season, from October to May. The stone crab is a unique story, because the only part of the crab they use is the claw. The crabbers haul their pots up from the ocean floor, and break off one claw from each crab, throwing the rest of the animal back into the water. The crabs will regenerate their claws, and when they get caught the following year the same process will be repeated with the other claw.
Joe’s does not take reservations. You put your name on the list and wait. Because we were relatively early, our wait was only 15 minutes, but when we left the wait was an hour.
The facility is enormous, and staffed by an army of well trained, efficient, tuxedo-clad waiters. They do a huge business, and need to turn the tables over as quickly as possible without rushing the customers or being in the least intrusive.
We all had the Joe’s Classic, a complete meal for $42.95. We started with an order of the fried asparagus. This is the south, where they will fry anything, so it seemed like a good idea to try one of our favorite veggies. The idea is good, but there really isn’t a good reason to take something a great as asparagus and turn it into death food.
Breaded and fried asparagus, accompanied by a dipping sauce of boursin cheese.
On to the cole slaw:
Deconstructed cole slaw, the starter course at Joe’s
You get a scoop of very thinly shredded cabbage, topped with a thick dressing, topped with relish. You mix it yourself, adjusting the ratio of relish to your taste. Not quite the classiest salad I’ve ever seen, but interesting nonetheless.
The entrées arrived. Three huge claws (although you can specify even larger claws if you like), creamed spinach and a hashed brown potato cake.
This is enough food.
Stone crab meat is very mild and a bit sweet–not as flavorful as the dungeness we are accustomed to on the West Coast. It is served with a mustard sauce.
Gail ordered the King Crab Claws, which are larger so the portion only includes two, but that is more than sufficient. The stone crab is served cold, the King crab can be served either cold or warm, and is accompanied by drawn butter.
Gail thought the creamed spinach hit the perfect balance of cream sauce. I probably prefer some more cream, but my cardiologist agrees with Gail.
The hash brown cake was food. Not great, not bad, just food.
The whole process can be messy, so they provide bibs for the customers:
Gail and Barbara, friends since high school. Note Gail’s two King crab claws.
Included in the price is a slice of key lime pie, a Florida classic.
Worth a trip to Miami.
Lots of fresh whipped cream on top of an excellent pie is the perfect ending to a meal.
Joe’s is a South Beach legend, having been in operation since 1913. They have this business down to a science, and they are damn good at what they do. I think you should stick to the stone crab–you can get a steak or slice of grouper anywhere, this is the single best place in the universe to eat stone crab.
Service is excellent. Our waitress was completely on top of the entire meal, brought me drawn butter when i wasn’t fond of the mustard sauce and showed us how to get the meat from the shells most efficiently. For some reason I cannot fathom, the house wants the customers to sign the back of their dinner check–not the credit card slip (though that must be signed as well), but the actual dinner check the waiter has filled out. I’ve never seen that before and don’t understand it.
If you have to spend an extra night in Miami, Joe’s Stone Crab is a pretty darned good way to do it.
Worse than the sixth grade
Miles Teller and J K Simmons in Whiplash
The worst teacher I ever had was Sister John Lucy, my sixth grade tormentor until we moved to Orinda. She was domineering, abusive, nasty and all around miserable–and she particularly hated the smartest kid in the class who asked questions she couldn’t answer. That was not a fun semester of school, and my parents of course sided with “Sister”, who could do no wrong. 20 years later they would admit she was seriously disturbed, but that was a bit too late.
What makes me thing of that particular black veiled monster? The movie Whiplash. The story of a freshman at a prestigious music college and his evil bandmaster is a movie with some very good sequences, some dreadfully bad scriptwriting and an evil antagonist who is so well performed that the actor J. K. Simmons is a favorite for the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award.
The movie is the story of Andrew Neyman, a young man who burns to be the best drummer possible, attending music school in New York. He is plucked from freshman obscurity to try out for the premier jazz band by Terence Fletcher (J K Simmons), the terrifying, imposing, brilliant bandmaster who rules with an iron hand. Just to be a jerk, Fletcher tells the kid to get the bandroom at 6 am, although class starts at 9.
Life goes downward from there, as Fletcher terrorizes the band members in relentless pursuit of perfection. Wining an annual band competition is his only real purpose in life, although he contends his behavior is for the purpose of improving the players.
J K Simmons is magnificent in this role. I just can’t get behind a movie that ultimately honors this insane, psychopathic misanthrope. He should never be allowed in a classroom, and it is inconceivable to me that he would be allowed to continue his career of terrorizing, abusing, insulting, demoralizing and physically attacking his students.
Further, the script contains some of the laziest, cheesiest plot devices ever seen. Here’s one sequence:
The band is to perform somewhere out of town, and everyone is to be in their place by 5:30. Our hero, Andrew, takes the bus–apparently the only one in the band to do so, everybody else has other methods of transportation.
Oh no! The bus gets a flat tire.
He finds a car rental place.
Oh no! They are closed.
He gets them to open, gets a car (and how does a 18 year old college freshman rent a car?) and arrives at the auditorium.
Oh No! He forgot his sticks at the car rental agency. He has exactly 10 minutes before the performance begins.
He races back to the agency and grabs his sticks. (Why are they still open? They were closing an hour earlier when he got there?)
OH NO! Racing back, he is distracted, runs a stop sign and is T-BONED BY A SEMI!.
He crawls out of the car, which is upside down.
He crawls back into the car to get his sticks.
Bleeding and wounded, he runs 4 blocks and miraculously makes it in time to perform.
I can’t take it.
The plot goes downhill.
Fletcher the tyrant is fired. Andrew finds him playing in a cafe, and makes nice with him, for some unfathomable reason. Fletcher offers him a chance to perform in another band, then trips him up by providing no sheet music. The kid tries to fake it, and is embarrassed publicly. He flees the stage. He returns to the stage. He gets fired up and gives the performance of a lifetime, with Fletcher helping lovingly. The end.
I’m not a fan of Whiplash. The performances are excellent, Gail loved learning about drumming, the cinematography is beautiful, but the the character of the teacher (who should be considered the lead, not a supporting actor) is too unpleasant and unrealistic for me, and the holes in the plot could supply a swiss cheese factory for a month.
Dallas, where else?
Gail’s sister Susan and her husband Jimmy went to visit his brother in the Virgin Islands last week, and stopped in Miami to spend a few days with
Max and Barbara. Gail hates to miss a party so we’re off to Florida for two nights to join the fun.
This means we have to change planes in DFW, as always. There’s a lot of construction going on here, which seems to be more a matter of upgrading than expansion. Possibly its related to the merger between American and US Air, but I’ll take any and all improvements to this place I seem to visit so often.
Now we’re on the plane to Miami, just starting to taxi. Every single seat is full. How can airlines not be making money by the ton when they sell all of their product? I’ll never understand.
Two hours from now we land, get a rental car and head straight to a restaurant to join our friends for dinner.
More to come.
That’s my ducks
Elizabeth and Frank taking a dip
Now back, for their sixth consecutive year, my migratory ducks Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth I. Every year they stop here for a visit.
Totally Unauthorized 