Wild and crazy still lives
We saw The Underpants at Lesher Center last night. I liked it.
That may be the shortest review in history, but it’s probably sufficient. Steve Martin adapted this play from a 1911 play of the same name by one Carl Sternheim. Originally, it was a comedy of manners, part of a 4 part series(quadralogy? One more than a trilogy?) Sternheim wrote about the burgeoning middle class under Kaiser Willhelm.
We aren’t much interested in the petty problems of the German middle class of 100 years ago, so Martin has turned this play into a pure comedy. It seemed to me more a series of related sketches than anything else–two or three characters would have a few minutes onstage to work out a theme, then someone would leave while another entered and there would be another skit.
The premise is that a woman, Louise, [Lyndsy Kall]is watching the King pass by and her underpants fall off. She is wearing a long skirt, and rapidly scoops them up and under her shawl, but this is still scandalous in prim and prissy 1911 Berlin. Her husband, a civil servant, is terrified that his job, and their social standing, will be destroyed.
To supplement their income and allow them to start a family, they want to let out a room. Two prospective tenants turn out to be interested because they have witnessed the underpants incident and are infatuated with Louise. One is a poet, full of pretty words who is more interested in the word than in bedding Louise. The other a barber, apparently channeling Woody Allen while pretending not to be Jewish to the sanctimonious husband Theo [Keith Pinto].
I thought the star of the show was the libidinous neighbor, Gertrude [Jamie Jones]. Unabashedly nosy, irreverent, iconoclastic and out for a good time, she is the antithesis of the morally constipated Theo.
“There are no small roles, only small actors” would apply to Evan Boomer, one of the two non-Equity actors in the show, who portrays Klinglehoff, a third potential tenant. He wanders through the play twice before he has a line, but is so utterly outré you can’t take your eyes off of him.
My least favorite performance was provided by John Lewis, as the King. (and why do they call him the King rather than the Kaiser? Does Steve Martin think the audience is too poorly educated to know about Kaiser Bill? Is he right?) The King is dressed in a comic opera uniform, with a plastic mustache and the accent of a Kansas CPA. Even in a comedy this was an unconvincing acting turn which completely broke my mood regarding the play.
The one act, 90 minute, no intermission play speeds along, with just one slow spot about an hour in. For some unnamed reason, perhaps the lack of an intermission, you are allowed to bring your drinks inside theater to sip during the performance. Many theaters are doing this now, and I haven’t seen any problems because of it–I hope they are making more money this way. There was also ice cream on sale before the show, reminiscent of the theater in London.
The reviewers in the New Yorker always talk about the themes of the play and their moral import, the philosophy involved and how your life and thinking will be affected by the great opus under discussion. There is none of that here–you go to this play to laugh and then go home. Laughter is good enough for me, and we’re back where we started—-I liked it.
Saigon in Walnut Creek
Dinner before the theater last night at Élevé, on the corner of Civic and North Main. We’ve been there before, but as the restaurant has matured I thought it was time to write about it again.
Since our trip to Vietnam last December, Micky and Linda and Gail and I think we are experts on Vietnamese cuisine. Two weeks on a riverboat makes you an expert, right? Here’s what I know for sure: we didn’t have anything in Vietnam that tasted nearly as good as what we had for dinner Friday night.
Mike, the appetizer expert, said we had to have the shrimp spring rolls. They are much better than the vegetarian spring rolls, he said. They sure looked good:
Shrimp spring rolls
These things are so good that Mike was pouring the dipping sauce over the lettuce and finishing everything on the plate.
Stuffed Calamari
I didn’t think I wanted to try these, but I was wrong. The calamari, stuffed with chicken and wood-ear mushrooms (gaak!!! I ate mushrooms.) are wonderful, probably the best dish on the menu. Don’t miss them.
Wok fried steak
The wok fried steak is sort of a Vietnamese take on Mongolian beef–strips of meat tossed with onions and chile and quick fried. The blue lake beans are just barely cooked through, still crunchy and seriously spicy.
We ordered a side dish of the corn and cauliflower, and so should you. I have no idea how they prepare it, I just know it tastes great and mother said to eat my vegetables.
The waiter first said they were out of the curry sauce for the snapper, then some miraculously appeared. The fish is served on a bed of bean thread and mushrooms, and Gail went mildly crazy over just that part even without the fish.
The first time we ate here, they were all modern and green and didn’t have any decent sweetener for my tea. They are smarter now: I could get Splenda. That’s a good thing, he said channeling Martha Stewart.
I wasn’t very good in French class when it came to paying attention to the diacritical marks. It turns out that eleve is a student, and élevé is the verb to lift up or elevate. The goal of Élevé is lift up your dining experience, and I think that they have achieved their purpose.
Good food in Berkeley
Okay, that’s a pretty simple headline, but Lalime’s is a pretty simple restaurant, on Gilman St. in the very far north of Berkeley. Quiet ambiance, attentive yet not obtrusive service, excellent food, reasonable prices. You just can’t ask for more.
The building Lalime’s occupies was originally a home, but was converted more than 30 years ago; Lalime’s has been there about 25. The entrance is up a long walkway on the side of the building, then when you get in you end up going back down stairs to the street level. Lighting is muted, the carpets and tablecloths keep the noise to a minimum, the decor is simple and warm. This is a great place to have a quiet meal and just enjoy your food and your companions.
The cuisine is your basic California modern–fresh, in-season, organic, preferably local, ingredients well prepared.
Heirloom tomato gazpacho
I can’t pass up a cold soup, and this one was first rate–spicy, tangy and rich.
Butter lettuce salad with buttermilk parmesan dressing.
Gail raved about this salad and insisted that both Kate and Brad try it. The dressing is excellent, and we realized that buttermilk is non-fat so it isn’t even very bad for your caloric consumption.
Lamb shank
Here’s my dinner–lamb shank, rice porridge, carrots. Every part of the dish worked. The lamb was just right, the carrots were neither too soft nor too woody, the rice was an interesting take on risotto.
Buttermilk fried chicken with roasted chili slaw.
There is nothing at the Colonel like this–buttermilk fried chicken with a maple-porcini glaze. Gail isn’t much of a chicken eater, but this was surely worth the exception.
The slaw was made with no mayo, and had a very spicy, Asian taste. I thought it was a cross between cole slaw and a green papaya salad, and Gail, Kate and Brad polished it off in short order–it was a trifle too spicy for me, but I’m a sissy about these things.
There was a fantastic looking butterscotch blondie on the dessert menu, but Kate is avoiding sugar and I couldn’t sit there and eat it in front of her. Not to worry, it’ll be there the next time, and there most certainly will be a next time–Lalime’s is just a wonderful place to have dinner.
That’s why they call it adventure
If you want to take a trip where everything is fine and safe and predictable, where there is no chance of being disappointed, go to Disneyland, it’s the happiest place on earth. Nothing bad ever happens there, Walt wouldn’t allow it.
If you want more adventure, you have to be prepared for a few failures along the way. Reaching for the stars sometimes entails tripping over logs and falling into chasms. That’s what happened to us last Thursday, in our visit to The Catbird Seat, the super hot, super cool restaurant in Nashville that inspired our trip.
The Catbird Seat is on the second floor of an old house. You enter a street level door, which is barely marked–they don’t need to be showy about their location–into a tiny, ultra-chic assembly room and take an elevator up to the restaurant, entering through a long strange corridor. By the time you see the dining room, you’re already prepped for the hippest experience of your life.
This place is just smokin’ hot these days–you have to make your reservation weeks in advance. Every time we told someone where we were going to dinner, the response was “Congratulations!” or just “wow!!” If only it lived up to the hype. In fact, if only it lived up to its own claims. Here is what their website says:
Thirty-two seats surround a U-shaped kitchen, where chefs Josh Habiger and Erik Anderson will prepare your meal as you watch.
Yep, that’s what it says. It just isn’t true. There are 24 seats around the kitchen, and 2 tables for 4 stuck in the corner, where you can’t see much of anything. Guess where we got to sit? We fly all the way from here to Nashville just to watch them work, and they shove us off into a corner where we can’t see a damned thing. We were not happy, right off the bat.
It’s an interesting looking place, it just doesn’t have 32 seats around the kitchen
From the other side. It’s very nice looking, if you have a seat where you can look. If you are in the corner, not so much.
We fought. We argued. We begged. Nothing helped–the seats around the kitchen were all accounted for and we would be sitting in the seats of shame in the far corner. We didn’t like it, and weren’t shy about saying so, but there was nothing to be done. Eventually, we accepted our fate, although Gail spent some time sucking her thumbs.
Some people take setbacks better than others.
The hostess, Jane, was completely professional through all of this, and now it was time to move on and have dinner. She explained our options: a $40 wine pairing, a $75 wine pairing, and a $20 non-alcoholic pairing. I had the latter, everyone else had the former.
Now we get to the next, and larger, lie about The Catbird Seat. Again from their website:
The experience can be as interactive as you wish; that part is up to you.
The details of what you’ll be savoring at your meal won’t be determined until you’re there; that part is up to us.
Kind of makes you think you’ll be talking to the chef about what you are going to eat, adding your input and making some decisions at mealtime, doesn’t it? Fuggeddaboudit. The menu is made every Tuesday for the entire week, if you’re at the seats of shame the chefs come over, plop the plates down and skedaddle as fast as possible. There is no interaction, the website is a lie.
The first amuse hit the table: tiny improvisations on the Oreo cookie. Three of them were black and white, featuring a porcini mushroom cracker and a cheese filling. We had told them in advance that I don’t eat mushrooms and Daniel would be having a vegetarian meal, so they made this for me:
Olive oil soaked green apple and cheese
The “cookie” is roughly the size of a quarter, this isn’t a place to put on weight. It was an interesting bite, but I don’t really get the idea of soaking an apple in olive oil.
The next dish was much more interesting:
A snack plate, Catbird Seat style
Three interesting snacks: a smoked mussel in an edible shell, created by pressing pasta dough between two mussel shells. A house made “Cracker Jack”, much better than the original (with shiitake mushrooms on everyone else’s plate), and hot chicken, very crispy chicken with a ton of spice. They were all excellent, creative and innovative.
Glamor, glitter and Nudie suits
Much of what we think of in relation to country music is the result of the genius of a Ukrainian immigrant named Nuta Kotlyarenko, the man behind the Nudie Suit, the Cowboy Hardware outfits, that garish, embroidered, sequined, rhinestoned outfit that comes to mind when you think of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzel or Dottie West.
We went to the Country Music Hall of Fame on Thursday. Right there in downtown Nashville, it’s a monument to the music that made Nashville the mecca it is today–you go to Beale Street in Memphis for blues, Broadway in Nashville for Country. There’s a reason American has daily non-stops from LA to BNA (Nashville airport)–the music business is commuting between the two.
Back to the Nudie suits. The Hall of Fame has lots of them–they have chosen to represent the great artists of Country by the clothes they wore and the instruments they played, and it works very well. Gail thought that there was too much talk and not enough music in the displays and the museum was not as pleasing as the Rock and Soul Museum in Memphis, which is largely true, but I enjoyed it still.
I thought I’d give you a gallery of the clothing, and a car Nudie created for Webb Pierce. You can get an awfully good idea of what the museum is about from these:
They call it music city for a reason
After dinner last night, we wandered over to Music Row, the area of Nashville filled with honky-tonks, bars, saloons, dives and assorted other drinking establishments where music is blared. For several blocks, these stand cheek by jowl and you can wander into as many as you like–there are no cover charges.
The business model here is that the hundreds of bands trying to make it in Music City get to play an hour set and pass the hat–they don’t get paid by the house, and after an hour they have to make way for the next group. The house gets its entertainment for free and the bands get exposure and tips. It seems to work.
Isn’t this what a honky-tonk is supposed to look like?
Didn’t this guy used to play bass for ZZ Top?
We spent the best part of the evening at a table at Roberts Western World, a bar which is supposed to look like a western wear shop, with rows of boots in racks on the wall. I don’t get the conceit, but who cares? The music is good and the beer is cold.
One of these bars looks much like another. This is next door to the first one.
My annual beer. When in Nashville………………………….
Here is the star of the evening, Sarah Gayle Meech. She comes from Washington, has been singing since she was 5, and her mother was sitting right behind us and is now Gail’s new best friend.
Sarah Gayle Meech and friends playing for tips and hope at Roberts Western World.
We had fun. We had beer. We’ll be back tonight after dinner. This time I’ll bring ear plugs–the music may be good, but it’s also damn loud.
It’s Adventure Time Again
Our friends Daniel and Tracy are restaurateurs, the founders of both Nibblers and Origen. Recently, they were telling us about an innovative new place in Nashville called Catbird Seat. We decided we had to take them and go see for ourselves.
What is it about Tennessee? You’d think there isn’t much here for a California boy, but I come here every April for the Gatlinburg Regional, we were here in March for the NABC and now we’re back to go out to dinner. One of the strange coincidences of life, I guess.
In any event, we left the house in the dark of the morning yesterday, cooled our heels in LAX for 3 hours and got here in the late afternoon. We had reservation at the Hampton Inn, but there was huge construction going on all around the hotel which they conveniently forgot to mention when booking. We refused to stay, are still having to fight Expedia even though everyone promises a money back guarantee, and ended up downtown at the DoubleTree in a better hotel for less money, free internet and a complimentary shuttle all over the downtown area that save a fortune on taxis.
We let Tracy, the wizard of both the kitchen and the internet, search for a great place for dinner, and we ended up at Flyte World Dining and Wine. She done good; dinner was fantastic.
Flyte is in a very large building, and they had almost no customers. I hope that’s because it was Wednesday and the World Series was on, because this place deserves to thrive.
A tasting menu was offered, with 3, 6 or 9 courses, but we chose to order a la carte. Dining with serious foodies means that everyone tastes all the dishes, nothing is sacred.
The first thing I saw on the menu was Elk Tartare, so you know that was coming my way.
Elk tartare
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The Elk was very good–flavorful, chopped just enough and no more, a more complex flavor than beef. What was more interesting was the cheese, a cave-aged Tennessee Tombe–fantastic, deep, rich and involving. A great choice.
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Other first courses included a beet salad with a wonderful walnut puree, a watermelon gazpacho with blue crab which seemed more like excellent crab in watermelon juice, and the hit of the course, a Chanatrelle soup with chestnut bread pudding so rich and smooth and creamy we were fighting over the chance to scrape the bowl. I’m the last guy in the world to rave about a mushroom soup, but this was extraordinary.
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Game Hen sous vide
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Tracy’s Game hen was pretty spectacular, too. It was cooked sous vide, a technique wherein the food is sealed in a bag and immersed in not-quite boiling water, which cooks very gently yet thoroughly. The equipment is far too expensive for home cooks and the process can take quite a while, but the results are wonderful–the inside is cooked the same as the outside, everything done to perfection.
I had a breast of duck, served over risotto with chestnuts and Japanese sweet potato, and could find no complaint. Gail enjoyed the short ribs, served over corn pappardelle, something I’ve never seen–wide flat sheets of pasta made from corn. Daniel had a vegetable dish with farro and oyster mushrooms which the chef had foraged himself–if it satisfies him, it has to be great, and he was indeed satisfied.
Chef Matt Lackey
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It was a slow night, and we’re pretty interesting customers, so the chef came out of the kitchen to meet us. He looks like he’s about 14, but he’s the boss. Chef Matt Lackey went to the CIA–Culinary Institute of America which is in New York and every weekend he would go to NYC and stage (work for free) at Thomas Keller’s Per Se, on of the world’s great restaurants. He has also worked in California and Spain–this guy knows his business, and may well not stay in Nashville all that long as he moves up the ladder of big time chefs.
Then came dessert. We only ordered 2 of them.
Goat Cheese Cheesecake
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An interesting take on classic cheesecake, we thought the pastry chef (not Matt) spent too much energy on presentation and too little on flavor. Just serving the cheesecake without all the foofrah on the plate would have been better.
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Pumpkin custard
Similarly, the pumpkin custard was over-produced–too much energy into making it a complex presentation, too little strong flavors. Don’t let this sound like we hated dessert; we didn’t. There were no leftovers. We were doing the foodie exercise of being fanatically critical, the better to rave over the perfection of Chantarelle soup.
Dinner, with considerable decent wine (I even had a glass of a botrytis Semillon dessert wine from Australia) was about $80/person, not at all unreasonable for this level of cuisine. The service was excellent; considering how little the staff had to do last night I think they were trying to be busy and we got the benefit.
To say we like Flyte is an understatement. The food is spectacular and I suspect that Chef Lackey is a rising star. The pastry chef will get better with practice and some guidance from his boss, too. I hope management can improve the marketing to get more people in the door to try this place out.
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The old is new again
Once there was a classic French restaurant in Walnut Creek, called Le Virage, but it closed some years ago. One year ago, the chef from there, Rick Delamain, opened Cypress, a modern take on the classic French cuisine flavored by modern California style. We had dinner there tonight.
The facility, on the corner of Locust and Cypress, was formerly Vesu, a disaster of an eatery that came and went in a flash. There was no need to remodel, the building is very modern and attractive.
The menu is your standard paper item, but the wine list is presented on a custom iPad. It seems to be something you can use to order electronically from the bar, but that’s just an illusion–you can press the buttons, but nothing happens until you talk to the waiter.
Chef Delamain has tried mightily to recreate the experience of French fine dining, with all the trappings of classic service.
Steak au poive prepared tableside. It’s more showmanship than cooking, but the customers love it.
Seeing the old-time tableside preparation was like revisiting my youth, when my father would take us out on Sunday afternoons to the better restaurants in Chicago. The menu, though, reflects the modern use of ingredients.
Gail started with the escargot, which is served in mushroom caps rather than shells. I don’t eat either the snails or the ‘shrooms, but Gail thought they were mediocre.
Duck crepes
The duck crepes were overstuffed, napped with a heavy, creamy sauce (the white stripes above) and the duck was cooked to the point that it was indistinguishable from pork. Not a winner.
Onion soup
You can’t have a French restaurant without offering soupe l’oignon, so there it is on the menu. I thought this one was too sweet and apple-cidery, Gail said it was “nummy” (which is good).
Things picked up with the entrees:
Sea Bass, wrapped in potato, sitting in mashed potato, with greens and red pepper sauce provencale
My sea bass was excellent, The presentation was over-done, needlessly complex and just plain artsy-fartsy. The fish was wrapped in thin potato slices before roasting, then placed on a bed of mashed spuds, with side of greens and some very tasty red peppers that must be the sauce provençale. The concepts of simplicity of ingredients and clarity of flavors have been sacrificed on the altar of Escoffier.
Hangar steak
Gail had the hangar steak, which was simply beautifully prepared, oddly paired with a head of grilled romaine. Why grill lettuce? Who knows, it’s French.
Fried chicken with truffled mac and cheese.
If all else fails, you can make it French by adding truffles. The fried chicken, which was excellent, was sprayed with what is laughingly called “truffle oil”, a concoction of oil and chemicals that may or may not ever have seen the presence of a genuine truffle. The mac and cheese, which wasn’t particularly cheesy, fairly reeked of this truffle like substance. Which is not to say we didn’t enjoy it, because it tasted great. I just wonder what it was.
Service was pretty much what you would expect. Lots of waiters, runners, bussers and assorted factotums. They still managed to forget to bring the rice I ordered, but that turned out to be a blessing, because there was so much food I didn’t need it.
Overall, Cypress gets a B. I’d rather have better food and less theater. The appetizers weren’t all that great, the entrees were good but over-engineered. Prices are not cheap, not ghastly. Dinner ran about $100 a couple plus tip, but there was wine involved too. I’d go back again, mostly for the fried chicken, but overall I think there are better restaurants in the area.
Weekend at Stinson
The wonders of the internet continue to amaze. There is a site, Animoto.com, where you can make your photos into beautiful slideshows, complete with professional fades and music. Easy enough for me to do it in a very few minutes.
Here’s the one I made about last weekend at the beach, and the 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle.
Taking the raccoons for a ride
Rocky and Rockette ready to meet their new home.
Our house sits between two creeks, and we often have little visitors. I’ve seen racoons, skunks, opossums and coyotes along with the lesser pests like turkeys, hawks, squirrels, deer, gophers and feral cats. It’s like living in a zoo sometimes.
Most of these don’t bother us, but sometimes the racoons decide to dig up the lawn looking for white grubs. Then we have to take action, and I get the humane trap out of the garage, bait it with cat food and wait.
Sometimes, I catch a skunk. Then I have to sneak up on the cage and throw a big towel over it so the critter can’t spray me. I open the far door of the trap, the skunk goes one way and I go the other. So far, I haven’t had to take a tomato juice bath.
When we get raccoons, they go for a ride. I think I could legally kill them, but I don’t want to do that. The county would come get them, but then they would do the killing, and I don’t want that either.
So I pick up the trap, put it in the car and head over the bridge to the oil refinery in Benicia, where I let them go. They don’t have the $3 for the bridge toll, so they can’t come back. So far 14 or 15 of the little perishers have been relocated, counting the two we got Friday night.
This is the first time I’ve managed to get two in the trap at once. They were small; I think they were littermates just ready to strike out on their own. Marvelously cute in the cage, destructive as a tornado on the lawn.
Now they are living in the wilds of Benicia, meeting up with the rest of their family I’ve taken over there. There isn’t much damage they can do to a refinery, and I hope they live a long and happy life, just not here.
Totally Unauthorized 