Valentine’s Day romance
A beautiful photo of the sky over Maui. I wish I had taken it, but I swiped it from Daniela A Nievergelt.
Here it is, Valentines Day, and we’re in Maui for a wedding. Seems like a fellow should do something romantic, and I don’t mean pre-printed cards garish mylar baloons and overpriced roses.
We had a very pleasant dinner with the bride and groom and 13 of their relatives. I’m not a big fan of meeting a ton of new people, (I’ll make an exception for the 13 month old grandson) but the evening went smoothly. The only problem for me was that we sat down to dinner at the absurd, inexplicable, irrational time of 4:45. Gail and I finished lunch at 2, as adults do, so to say we weren’t hungry is a masterpiece of understatement. We shared an appetizer and a salad. Who knew I could be such a cheap date?
After the meal, the evening was magnificent; sultry and balmy. I’m driving a convertible Camaro here, so we put the top down and decided to take a drive in the warm, moist air left by the afternoon storm.
Driving north from Lahaina, we quickly passed out of the humungous oceanfront developments into the quiet part of the island. The road narrowed to 2 lanes, and only 1 lane over a bridge or two. There were no buildings, no street lights, no traffic. It was lovely.
Finally, I pulled into a turnout and shut down the engine. We sat in the car for 20 minutes, as our eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness and the stars became brighter. Only one car came by in that time. Living in the San Francisco megalopolis there is so much incident light pollution that we can never really see the sky, and in the Stygian darkness looking out over thousands of miles of Pacific, the myriad of stars were enchanting.
Okay, so maybe there was a bit of necking going on–the quiet evening, the cute blonde in the passenger seat, the Valentines mood, all reminded me of the submarine races of my youth. I don’t fit in the back seat of a Camaro anymore, however.
This was a romantic moment at its finest. Gail and I just sat, held hands and shared quietly our love and our lives. The sea crashed on the rocks below, the stars glowed in the heavens, the gently winds blew steady and smooth. Life is good.
February 13, 2015
I’ve been waiting for this a long time:
Not quite heaven
Maui is often thought of as a piece of heaven on earth, a mortal Eden for the enjoyment of man. Soft sultry breezes, blue waves, green mountains. It’s hard to find a nicer place to be then this little island in the middle of the Pacific.
We are here for a long weekend of sun and fun and celebrating the wedding of Gail’s bank manager. I’m easy, I’ll take any excuse to hang out in paradise.
We’re staying at the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel, One of those behemoth facilities right on the water in Lahaina. The entire island is sold out for this three day weekend in the middle of a frigid winter, so I guess I should not complain that our room was not ready until the very last second before the official check in time
What I will complain about though, is the complete lack of Internet service in the room. That’s right, 1980 is calling and they want their hotel back.
The hotel guidebook says that there is at least wired in room Internet, but I couldn’t find it. Calling the front desk, I was cheerfully informed that the hotel is upgrading its system, so they have taken the wired Internet out. They just haven’t installed wireless Internet yet.
They claim that there is free wireless Internet in the lobby and public areas. Apparently all I need to do is take my laptop and camp out. Fortunately I can do many things on my phone, including dictating this blog post.
Torc
Main street in Napa has become a major mecca for Bay Area foodies. Gail loves Angele, we’re both crazy about Morimoto, Le Toque is trying to become another French Laundry or Manresa and now Torc has joined the passing parade as a big time player.
Located where the ultra-upscale vegetarian Ubuntu met its earthly demise, Torc celebrates all the proper buzz words of local, artisinal, organic, slow food culinary hipitude. That’s standard today–what is important is that they do it really, really well.
We had to start with a couple of appetizers. The deviled eggs were particularly appealing.
Green eggs and ham, ad Dr. Seuss never imagined.
One of the big attractions of Torc is the foie gras. Animal rights do-gooders got the heavenly goose liver banned in California, and it has just recently been returned to menus. My cardiologist won’t approve of the high fat treat, but I’ll die happy.
Sauteed foie gras and huckleberries.
The foie gras was excellent. Our state attorney general is going to court to try to get the ban reinstated, because we need more nanny-state rules. I may have to vote for her for the Senate just to keep her out of the AG’s office.
Gail had the tagliatelle, topped with the Perigord truffles. Chef Sean O’Toole personally comes out of the kitchen to shave the 5 gram portion over the pasta. I asked him how he knew we had received the proper amount, and he said he has a scale in the kitchen. He even came back out, saying he had only given Gail 4.5 grams, and added a few shaves to bring the total up.
Tagliatelle with shaved truffles
It was a topsy-turvy night because I’m usually the one to order the pasta, and Gail is a big fan of short ribs. So this is what I had:
Very slowly cooked short rib. That’s rutabaga and brussels sprouts in the back.
A boneless slab of short rib, cooked so perfectly no knife was needed. Flavor infused all the way through, a beautiful glaze on top. The accompanying rutabaga surprised me, tasting like sweet potato or butternut squash. Maybe I have a negative opinion of this vegetable without enough experience.
We had a side order of the purple potatoes. It’s hard to believe that just spuds can looks so picture perfect:
Potatoes, bacon, scallions and creme fraiche
We had to have dessert, of course. Gail and I had a couple of very good cheeses and a glass of vintage port, while Sigrid opted for the dark chocolate Marquise.
Dark chocolate, hazelnuts, lace crisp and salted caramel ice cream.
Chef O’Toole is from Ireland, and the name Torc is Gaelic for wild boar. So why isn’t there any boar on the menu?
The service is completely first rate. The staff is well trained, and there are enough of them to keep everything moving. All our dishes came out at once, the way it should be. I just can’t find anything to cavil about. Prices are in line with the quality of the food and service. I don’t know enough to comment on the quality of the wine list in general, but the dessert wine selection was outstanding. Torc is a fine reason to make the little trip up to Napa for a special meal.
Daisy
I posted about the issue of trying to find the perfect place to install our new sculpture, so it’s only fair that I show you hot it all turned out..
Daisy is a very large piece, with legs of bronze and an upper torso created from a single immense piece of redwood. Harry delivered, and I hired 5 guys to help carry her in and set her up. We decided on a location in front of the kitchen, near the large oak tree and the Nina Lyons fountain.
Here’s the view from the front deck:
Looking over the Topher Delany suitcases.
Still Alice
Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore shine in Still Alice
Still Alice is a good movie with a great performance. Gail read the book, by Lisa Genova, which she enjoyed but was not moved to tears. She cried at the movie. Julianne Moore is the clear front runner for this year’s Academy Award for Best Actress for her quiet, subtle performance as Alice Howland, a 50 year old super achieving professor of linguistics stricken by early onset Alzheimer’s disease.
It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t know it was coming, one supposes. But momentary lapses, difficulty in reaching the perfect word, expand into greater and greater memory and cognitive losses. The once brilliant, world renowned Columbia professor now gets lost running in her own neighborhood, eventually doesn’t recognize her own daughter.
Alice and husband John, also a professor at Columbia, have 3 children–a doctor, a lawyer and an actress. Alice continually pushes the actress to go to college, not seeing her daughter for who she is, being so strongly focused on academic achievement.
The progress of the disease is inexorable and swift. The eldest daughter, the lawyer, gets pregnant and over the course of the 9 months Alice goes from fairly high functioning to barely able to communicate at all, a progression Moore portrays beautifully and painfully.
The movie is somewhat trite–a logical plan to end her life on her own terms is foiled at the last second, the symbolism of the new birth contrasting with the decline of the protagonist is old and musty, the husband being forced to move on with his life in pain is hardly creative. The strong supporting cast and the phenomenal acting chops of Julianne Moore surmount the scriptural weaknesses, and make this a film you will remember for some time to come.
The speech Alice gives as perhaps her last public act is played brilliantly–it could easily have descended into mawkish pathos or risen to over-reaching heights, but director Richard Glatzer keeps just the right touch and breaks your heart in the process.
Alec Baldwin portrays the devoted, loving, caring husband without being a simp. His own career is reaching heights he never dreamed of as his wife is rapidly slipping away, and he is hard pressed to reconcile the two issues. He does what he must, but he doesn’t have to like it.
There is no happy ending, how could there be? The miracle cure for Alzheimer’s has yet to be found, and Alice drifts deeper and deeper into oblivion.
Still Alice has no explosions, no car chases, no sex, no violence. The good guys lose in the end. The whole damn thing is painful. It’s hard to believe that they make movies like this anymore, movies for adults. Don’t miss it.
Not ready for prime time
How long should you give a restaurant, after it opens, before you expect them to have everything running smoothly? American Kitchen has been open since August 25, the food is good but the place isn’t working the way it should. There was a tremendous amount of angst surrounding the opening and operation of this place, with lawsuits and restraining orders–I read all about it in this article. The operating partner, Victor Ivry, is the man behind Table 24 and Barbacoa in Orinda, though, so there’s some serious expertise here.
In what is rapidly becoming the Lafayette gourmet ghetto, American Kitchen is next to Chow, near The Cooperage, close to La Finestra and Roam burgers. It’s a little house that used to be a tea room, with outside tables and a very attractive fireplace where it appears they supply blankets to savor a cool winter evening.
This is not a fancy, white tablecloth kind of place. They are open for three meals a day, use paper napkins and don’t have tablecloths. The silverware is the hip kind where nothing matches–or maybe they just bought it all at Goodwill.
The meal is never off to a good start when I order my iced tea and get told it’s peach.What’s wrong with plain old Lipton? Not only did I have to suffer through some miserable frou-frou substitute for manly tea, they serve it in a mason jar. Apparently it’s hip to be a California restaurant pretending to be from lower Arkansas.
Tea is not supposed to be red.
The menu is casual local, and comfort food oriented. Three of our party ordered the caesar salad.
It looks good, but there’s something missing.
The salads looked good, but seemed to be lacking something—dressing. Perhaps there was a drop of dressing somewhere amongst the lettuce leaves, perhaps they forgot it entirely. In any event, these were salads that should never have been released from the kitchen.
I had an excellent bowl of butternut squash soup:
Butternut squash bisque
The restaurant business is hard, and you have to watch every penny. American Kitchen keeps the costs down by charging $2.00 for the bread and butter. What the hell, the soup was great. So thick the spoon would stand up in it, rich,hearty, spiced with pumpkin-chili oil and creme fraiche. The bread was pretty good, too.
Then we sat. Chatted. Talked. Socialized. Visited. Watched the world go by. About 40 minutes later the food came out. For four of us. The remaining two dishes were the extraordinarily difficult grilled cheese sandwiches, so it’s no surprise they took an additional 5 minutes.
This was not the fault of the waitstaff–I could see our waiter rushing about constantly, taking care of his customers, doing his side work, keeping the place clean. The problem, I believe, was entirely in the kitchen which lacks the ability to keep up with a moderate amount of business on a Sunday night. What they do when it’s busy is frightening to consider.
The food, when it arrived, was good. To me, meatloaf is what you eat when you run out of money before you run out of month, but some people seem to like it.
A nice presentation of serious comfort food–meatloaf, mashed spuds and carrots.
Gail’s greatest comfort food is a grilled cheese sandwich, preferably with tomato soup. American Kitchen didn’t have the soup, but she went for the sandwich anyway.
Cowgirl creamery grilled cheese with tomato and onion. Somewhat better than what mother used to make.
Nothing says American like a New York steak and fries.
New York strip with chimichurri sauce on the side
The steak was properly cooked, tender and tasty. The fries were nice and crispy, with no mealiness in the center.
I had the shrimp and grits. A half dozen large sauteed shrimp served over grits with capers and a pan sauce. Comfort food if you were born in a bayou, a bit exotic for a boy from Brooklyn. I loved it, but my photo is lousy so you’ll have to take my word for it.
The food here is good, except for the silly iced tea situation. The waitstaff are hopping, but the kitchen seems to be disorganized and poorly run. Sending out salads without dressing is unacceptable, and that sin pales in comparison to the unforgivable wait to get the first 2/3 of our dishes. There is no possible explanation or excuse for the further wait for the grilled cheese sandwiches.
American Kitchen may make it, it may not.Good food, poor organization. Paper napkins don’t impress me, nor does the charge for a piece of bread with my soup. Not on the recommended list.
Love the movies, hate the theater
Last week we saw American Sniper at the AMC 16 theater in Emeryville. The seating is comfortable, the theater is pleasant, but I certainly hated the 24 minutes of ads and promos before the movie started.
One of the promos, though, was for Game of Thrones. They are showing the last two episodes plus a trailer for the coming season in glorious huge screen IMAX. Tonight, Gail is having dinner with her friend Reed so I have the perfect excuse to go see something Gail would hate.
I purchased my ticket online, paying the two dollar convenience fee. It seemed like a good idea. After enjoying a couple of great mahi-mahi tacos at Rubio’s in the shopping complex, I went to pick up my tickets.
You are supposed to use some electronic kiosks in front, which adamantly refused to accept my credit card. I had to stand in line, go to the ticket window, give them my credit card and yes, that worked perfectly and I got my ticket. I suggested to the drone behind the window that it wasn’t quite right to charge a convenience fee when there was no convenience whatsoever. He said I would need to talk to customer service. I suggested that that was his job, but he demurred. Vince sells tickets only, service is somebody else’s job.
Now I’m sitting inside the largely empty theater waiting for the movie to start in the absolute perfect seats in the house. I’m glad I got here early.
There are some kind of commercials and promos being broadcast into this theater, but the screen is dark. I’m sure there should be pictures but perhaps they cannot show them on the IMAX screen. Perhaps they just don’t care. Another example of just no concern for the customer.
A movie theater is part of what is jokingly called the hospitality industry. Why are they so incapable of being hospitable? I weary of the incessant disdain these businesses show their customers and I have no surprise at the growing disintermediation as people shun the unpleasant experience of attending a theater in favor of staying home watching a DVD or streaming a movie from Netflix.
When this business, and eventually this industry, finally fails they will have no one but themselves to blame.
Paint night
It sounded like a night of fun, art and rowdiness, dinner at 1515 in Walnut Creek and then an adult painting class–which we were about to crash with a bunch of real artists. The expedition was being led by Linda Bell, a woman who knows how to have far too much fun. We were being joined by Ted and Mary Bayer, two of the hardest partying artist I’ve ever met. Kate and Brad. Harry Siter. BJ. A couple of other fun people. What could go wrong?
There were a bakers dozen of us, all crowded around a high table in the bar area of 1515. The wine flowed freely, appetizers were ordered to share, a few dinner entrées were downed and the bill came. First problem of the night.
1515 sells gift cards through Costco–$100 gift card for $75. I bought two of them because Kate and Brad were joining us. Linda had a couple she bought through Groupon. Since our bill was close to $500, we thought we were in good shape, but the manager of the restaurant didn’t want to accept the gift certificates. That isn’t particularly legal, but I don’t think he cared. Eventually Linda caved and paid cash, I threw in my certificates and we headed to the back stairs for the art class–when the manager stopped Linda and told her she couldn’t go to the class (for which we had all paid in advance online) because of the gift certificates. Arguments ensued. Insults to masculinity we proffered. Tears were shed. Linda, who hadn’t even used her certificates, finally prevailed and joined the rest of us at the class. We’re not feeling very good about 1515 at this point. The night was young.
Linda early in the evening.
The painting class was in an upstairs banquet room. Three long tables were set up, with room for perhaps 40 to 50 people. Each person had a tabletop easel and canvas, a paper plate with a full palette of colors of acrylic paint, three paintbrushes, a red plastic cup full of water and a chamois. Most of the other “students’ were earnest people in their 30’s serious about learning a bit of painting. We were not serious about anything other than partying.
The class began. The instructor had everyone put paint on a brush and draw a line across the top of the canvas. Mary Bayer started an abstract painting. Eileen, next to me, was making an impressionistic rendering of the torchiere adding light to the room. Linda had another glass of wine.
Eileen’s mise en scene
The instructor continued, offering the most basic possible instruction, leading the class stroke by stroke in a very simplistic seascape. Our group got rowdier by minute.
Harry was well behaved, but he doesn’t color inside the lines.
Linda and Jill acting out.
A break was called, so the paint on the canvasses could partially dry. Some people used this as an opportunity to refill their drinks.
Linda somewhat later in the evening
At this point, things went downhill rather swiftly. Our group was, you might say, “chatty”. The serious students were not amused. The instructor was frustrated, and not very well trained at handling ill behaved groups, which we sadly were. There is a bar right in the classroom; it can be no surprise that people drink and some drink too much.
Finally, things came to a head. The rowdiness reached a crescendo. The instructor completely lost it, and began a tirade which included the immortal line “shut the fuck up”. I think there was cheering from the studious side of the room. It was ugly.
Kate and Brad left. Gail and I left. Jill, and Mary and Ted, had already gone. The fun had died.
Paint night was an amazing event. Fun food before, marred by an insane policy and poor management. Tremendous fun painting, then an incompetent instructor who couldn’t handle some overly rowdy people–I would certainly have understood if he had quietly thrown a couple of us out, but his foul mouthed screaming tirade was utterly unacceptable.
I don’t think we’ll be going there again. Not that they would let us in.
American Sniper
Bradley Cooper stars as CPO Chris Kyle n American Sniper
American Sniper started out as just a movie, but it has become more than that. It has become a symbol, a meme, a viral storm. The story of Navy Seal CPO Chris Kyle, the most successful sniper in military history, is a lightning rod: how you respond to it is now a measure of your patriotism and your politics.
The Clint Eastwood directed epic tells the story of a redneck Texan, not making much of a living as a rodeo cowboy, who enlists in the Navy, survives the brutal training to become a Seal, and is deployed to Iraq as a sniper, providing support for the Marines by killing people who threaten their mission. He has a wife and kids at home, from whom he grows estranged through his 4 tours of duty in “the sandbox”.
Eventually, Kyle has had enough and leaves the service. Returning home, he is plagued by PTSD, but eventually gets help and recovers his happy home life. It doesn’t hurt that he wrote a best selling book and made millions, but the movie doesn’t mention that part.
The Iraq war was a ghastly mistake, the product of ignorance, incompetence and/or venality, a war based on a lie that cost 6000 American lives, 100,000 Iraqi lives and about a trillion dollars. This movie ignores all of that, focusing on the micro story, not the macro issues.
As a movie, it’s great. Eastwood is a marvelous director, keeping the movie taut, the action fast and the emotions high. Bradley Cooper is marvelous as Chris Kyle–he bulked up so much for the role he barely looks like the guy from Silver Linings Playbook. Sienna Miller plays his wife with sensitivity, the woman who stuck with her man through thick and thin, who supported him through firefights live via satellite phone and frantic, violent overreactions once he returned home.
Those who remember Mr. Eastwood’s speech to an empty chair will understand that he sees the world in pretty black and white terms–there are no moral ambiguities. CPO Kyle, too, has no issues. He likes what he does, he thinks the Iraqis are “savages”, he never questions authority. To some, that makes him a hero. To others, that is the mark of a psychopath. Maybe both are right, maybe neither, but nobody in this movie will raise that sort of question. Kyle continues to snipe until the day he can’t do it anymore, then feels huge guilt that he is letting his friends, his family and his country down. He honestly believes that he was in Iraq protecting his family, without ever questioning what we were doing there in the first place. His loyalties are to God, country and family, in that order, but maybe in some rare case family could outrank country.
American Sniper grossed more in its first weekend than any movie ever, although it only scored a 72 on the tomatometer. See it if you like good war movies. See it if you like good acting, or good action. See it if it will make you fell more American and patriotic, it’s very good at that. If you are looking for the definitive Iraq war movie, that explores all sides of the issues and seeks to find the overall truth, that movie hasn’t been made yet.
Totally Unauthorized 