Eating on the downscale
We were visiting friends in Sonoma yesterday, and ended up having a very interesting meal.
Along the Sonoma Highway, in the evenings after the regular business close, arrive a line of taco trucks, to set up an informal gourmet alley of authentic comida Mexicana.
The trucks arrive sometime after 7 pm, and people are already waiting for their favorite. Vicki and Don have tried a few, and swear by La Bamba, a rolling establishment with a strong following, judging by the waiting crowds.
We wandered there about 8:30, and there was still a considerable line. For the 8 of us, we ordered 30 tacos–12 chicken, 12 beef, 6 pork. That may sound like a lot, but they are very small tacos, served 6 on a plate, each consisting of 2 small soft corn tortillas, the appropriate filling and salsa. The plate also contains sliced onions, lime and radishes.
About as non-gourmet as you can get, but the food is good.
A variety of other Mexican foods are available, but “when at a taco truck, eat tacos” seems like a good motto to me.
This little place is busy–there are three people inside, cooking up a storm, and it still took about 20 or 30 minutes to get our dinner. One large table is set up in front, and we commandeered it as soon as possible. The waiting crowd is inordinately friendly, and we had a good time waiting.
Vicki and Gail in the light of the truck
At the table, waiting for the cocinero to make the food.
A plate of tacos, rapidly disappearing.
At last, the food arrived. and the 8 of us fell on the plates like a horde of locusts. More salsa was demanded, napkins were rounded up, limes were squeezed, plates were emptied. My broken, restaurant-owner Spanish came in handy.
The tab for this feast was $41, but that included sodas and bottles of water. You won’t go broke eating here.
All 30 tacos were dispatched, and we headed home. La Bamba isn’t really a restaurant, it’s more of a moveable dining hall that hangs out in a particular neighborhood in the Sonoma evening. You find some great food in the Michelin Guide, you find some on the side of the Sonoma Highway.
We used to be great
Remember the big quake? It was a long time ago, 23 years this week. I was lying on the floor of our kitchen, installing a dishwasher, when all hell broke loose. I ran out the front door, my mother ran out the back door, fortunately we had no significant damage.
The Bay Bridge wasn’t so lucky, as the above photo shows.
The Bridge was built in the 1930’s. Construction started on July 9, 1933 and the whole thing was opened to traffic on November 12, 1936. It took three years, four months and 3 days to construct the Mobile Welding work was the most difficult one, in the days when there were rooms full of men (no women engineers in the 30’s) using adding machines and slide rules to do the engineering work, no cell phones, no computers, no fax machines, no jet travel, no internet.
After the quake, it became clear that the eastern span had to be replaced lest there be another, greater tragedy when the next quake inevitably hit. In theory, the new section of the bridge will open on Labor Day weekend of next year.
That will make just under 24 years to replace one half of a bridge that was originally built in 3 years. Why? Surely things should take less time now, not more. What have we done to ourselves, what have we allowed the politicians and bureaucrats to do, that has octupled the time needed to build a bridge?
Note that this isn’t a complaint about any particular party–in twenty three years we have had both Democrats and Republicans as Governor and President. The bureaucracy just rumbles along, regardless of who is nominally in charge.
When people complain about the decline of our nation, they look too often at social trends and exogenous factors, and too little at the creeping entanglement of red tape, bureaucratic nonsense and politically correct BS.
Would it take 24 years to build this bridge in China?
Living the good life
We don’t own a vacation house; never wanted one. Besides the expense, just maintaining one house takes enough energy: trying to keep two houses in good repair would be a full time job. As well, we don’t want to feel that we are obligated to spend our time at just one particular location, there’s a lot of world to go see.
Still, it’s nice to spend a weekend in a big house by the ocean, so once a year or so we rent a place that somebody else has to worry about. This weekend we are at Stinson Beach, in a very nice, albeit strangely decorated, home right on the lagoon. Even after 50 years in this area, I didn’t know that there was a lagoon here, and it turns out to be a perfect place to relax.
Vacation rentals from the holiday bungalows in sri lanka usually come with a good selection of the appropriate toys–in this case there are two kayaks on the dock behind the house. These things have improved since I went to Boy Scout camp–they are made of plastic, weigh almost nothing, and are completely unsinkable. So much so that they have holes in the bottom to let any water that gets splashed in drain out, which you are kayaking. I couldn’t resist trying one out in the perfectly calm, protected waters of the lagoon.
The Seadrift beach community, where this house is located, is a long spit of land which reaches very close to the community of Bolinas. I’m told that at extremely low tides you can actually walk across. If you want to drive, it’s about 8 miles back towards Stinson Beach, around the lagoon and then out to Bolinas.
You had best know where you are going, too, because there is no sign indication where to turn off Highway 1. The citizens of Bolinas don’t want tourists, and took the sign down off the Highway so often that Caltrans gave up and no longer bothers trying to erect one. If you don’t know where Bolinas is, you won’t get there. It’s damn near like Brigadoon.
This all comes up because that’s where we went for lunch today, but I’ve been there before. They were in the middle of their Food Festival, so there was no parking in the tiny town and we had to park next to the Fire house and take a shuttle. It let us off in the town gas station.
The 60’s never died, they are just holed up in Bolinas. I haven’t seen so many long haired freaky people since the movie Woodstock came out. The worst job in town is being the Romney campaign organizer. The little town is fascinating.
They have a very nice museum, which has 5 separate galleries–painting, sculpture, photography and one just for the history of the city. That gallery even has a “Bolinas 2 Miles” sign, “liberated” from Caltrans.
Outside the galleries, an artist who specializes in bird paintings has a hummingbird habitat with 9 separate hummingbird feeders. There were just dozens of the little beauties, who have become very tame. I was able to take this photo with just my little pocket camera.
Gail and the granddaughters are working on a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle. I’m taking photos and son-in-law Brad is barbecuing dinner. This is the life.
Zero for Three
Daniel Patterson is a famous chef. He has three restaurants in the Bay Area–Coi, the temple of molecular gastronomy in San Francisco, Plum, the “modern” cafe improvisation in downtown Oakland, and now Haven, his new flagship “modern American” in Jack London Square. Patterson is regaled as inventive, modern, ground breaking and creative.
I’ve eaten in all three of his restaurants, and so far Chef Patterson has not managed to provide me with a single happy dining experience or a memorable meal. His batting average, with me at least, is .000
This wasn’t a busy night for Haven. People were staying home to watch the vice presidential debate, or the A’s game. (Sob!) We arrived for our reservation and were promptly seated. The facility is new, with an open kitchen, lots of wood, high ceilings and decent lighting. I didn’t care for the volume of the music, but that’s probably just me–these places are designed for a younger crowd than I represent.
Our waiter came to take the drink order, and told me that they didn’t have iced tea. I’ve seen this before, and just ordered hot tea and two glasses of ice. A mere 35 minutes later, long after the drinks had arrived for everyone else at the table, they found me a glass of iced tea. I asked for sweetener. I got sugar. I asked for, more specifically, the yellow stuff (Splenda come in yellow packets.) He brought me a tiny pitcher of some kind of syrup (agave? honey? something too cool for words? who knows?) I”m not a fan of chefs who think they know so much that they won’t give the customers basics like a common artificial sweetener.
The first courses arrived
Heirloom tomato salad.
Chef Patterson is relentlessly inventive, using new ingredients and odd combinations to change your perceptions about a dish. My salad had smoked ricotta, lovage (some kind of plant), saba agrodolce (I think that some kind of vinegar), and pumpernickel (which I though would be a bread but turned out to be a more like a powder) The idea was odd, but the flavors were surprising and interesting.
Gail had the beef marrow bone, which is always wonderful even if it is death on a plate. She shared it with Joyce Hart, and they both loved it. Too bad the photo wasn’t very good; the presentation was very attractive.
Seared Ahi, cous cous and pork belly
On to the entreés, and the major failure. I chose the seared Ahi, which should be an easy dish for a busy kitchen. I got an excellent piece of top grade ahi, on a bed of Israeli cous cous, with some bits of pork belly for contrast. This would have been wonderful if only it had been warm, but it wasn’t. Getting food to the table hot is a basic element of a professional kitchen, and Haven failed miserably. Not a single item on my plate was sufficiently warm.
Duck boudin noir
David Lee had the Duck Boudin Noir, which would also have been a great dish if it had been hot, but once again the kitchen failed.
Bavette steak
Gail and Dick Hart both had the Bavette, also often called a hanger steak. The plates looked marvelous, and the steaks were perfectly cooked, tender and flavorful.
I thought the best thing this evening was a side order of the sauteed brussels sprouts. They were also the hottest thing on the table.
Getting our dinners to the table took over an hour, which was definitely excessive in general and certainly on a not-very-busy night. I suspect that my dinner and David’s were finished and sitting on the counter for an inordinate length of time until the other dishes were prepared–very poor planning in the kitchen.
Chocolate sponge with frozen white stuff on top
Dinner didn’t much fill me up, and there was no bread and butter, either. Still, after sitting there for over 2 hours just to get a salad and a piece of fish, I was too antsy to want dessert: I just wanted out of there. Joyce, though, craved a bit of something sweet, so we had the chocolate sponge, which turns out to be like a little cake. There was some frozen white stuff on top, maybe gelato, maybe not. A coffee based something else on the bottom. I had a small bite, but wasn’t much excited.
I’d call this evening a failure, and the management of Haven should be ashamed of the service, the poor execution in the kitchen, the lack of a basic sweetener for my tea, the uninteresting dessert and the hefty check for a mediocre (at best) experience.
Someday, Daniel Patterson will open yet another restaurant and foodies will be talking, but I don’t think I’ll give it a try. Three strikes and you’re out.
Willful ignorance
I’m an easygoing sort, willing to let other believe what they choose. Then I read something like this:
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”
Okay, I think. Just another ignorant cracker Bible thumper with an 8th grade education. No big deal.
Then I notice that the speaker is a physician, graduate of the Medical College of Georgia. Worse, in my mind, he’s a congressman–Paul Broun (R-GA). Worse yet, he is a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology. Worst, he the chairman of a subcommittee on investigations. What can this close minded clown possibly investigate fairly or wisely?
Rep. Broun is an educated man, although the education apparently didn’t stick. I don’t know what kind of medicine he practiced, but I wouldn’t trust him to treat anything more than a hangnail, lest he declare it the “Will of God” and prescribe sackcloth and ashes as a cure, I will always prefer to go to Dr Amanda Brimhall.
Is this sort of no-nothing anti-intellectualism really the best the Georgia Republicans can come up with? Do we want our country led by religious fanatics? Shouldn’t we insist on some semblance of rationality in our congresspeople? I find this scary.
Edible art
Sushi restaurants often have a card on the table with a photo of the food and the sign “edible art”. Tonight, Gail and I went to Kobe, on Oak Park Blvd in Pleasant Hill where the take presentation to an entirely new level.
Kobe, in the space long occupied by Back Forty, is a large establishment with a bar area, a sushi area and a group of robata grills like a poor man’s Benihana. They offer a wide variety of Japanese and other Asian foods.
We were there for the sushi, although we started with the shrimp avocado spring rolls. Don’t order them—way too much deep fried fattiness, not enough good taste. There are better things here–the gyoza, for instance, are light and delectable.
I ordered a Volcano roll and a Lion King roll and was stunned by the presentation.
The little electric lights change color. The drawings on the plates are amusing. The whole effect is simply delightful.
Of course, presentation is nothing if the food doesn’t measure up, but at Kobe the sushi tastes as good as it looks. The busier a sushi bar is the fresher the fish will be, and Kobe is very very busy. Prices are reasonable (sushi is never cheap), service is quick and friendly. They even offer free delivery!! I’m a happy camper.
Sunset by the sea
Dinner last Friday night at The Crow’s Nest, in Santa Cruz. Gail and I drove down to enjoy the day and have dinner with her sister and her cousin Mary, along with respective husbands.
On the way we stopped for a bite at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. The place is beautiful and the valet parking is very nice, but I was more than a touch disappointed in the dining room. The service was both lackadaisical and uninformed. On a whim I asked if they had a caviar menu, and our server had no idea–and when she found out, she just came back and said “It’s $110 an ounce and we have white sturgeon caviar”. No discussion of what came with it, how it was served, nothing. This didn’t inspire me enough to order any.
In lieu of fish eggs, we had a cheese plate. A fairly mundane and plebian cheeseplate. I asked for a dessert wine menu, and found to my great surprise that they only offer two types of port and no other sweet wines. That a 5 star resort would have such a short wine list is astonishing to me.
Then when the bill came, they overcharged me for the port I chose–and it was clear that the computer was mis-programmed, since my port was properly labeled on the bill, just the price was 50% too high. It’s a sad day when the Ritz Carlton isn’t up to snuff.
On to the good stuff. We like the Crow’s Nest. It’s been a fixture on the harbor forever, and Gail is entranced by their salad bar. You don’t see many salad bars these days (except in Gatlinburg) and the one in the Crow’s Nest has always excelled.
We got a table outside. The dining area is surrounded by high glass walls, to keep the chill down, and they have large gas heaters available, so the temperature is quite pleasant.
Seaside dining. The walls are topped with hundreds of nails pointing up to keep the seagulls away.
It was a perfect time to eat. That’s brother in law Jim and cousin Mary facing us.
The food there is not fancy, just solid seafood. I had the scallops and risotto.
Scallops and risotto. And a bright,fresh nasturtium. I always eat my flowers, doesn’t everyone?
Oops, I was supposed to talk about the salad bar. My dinner came with an awesome Ahi Poke to start, but the others all chose the bar.
Jimmy at the start of the salad bar. I like the little eyes peeking up at me.
Okay, this has nothing to do with the restaurant, I just couldn’t resist:
I’m a sucker for cute outfits. If only those pants came in my size.
Back to the review:
The salad bar continues. Everything fresh and crispy and tasty. Gail’s right–it is a wonderful place to get a plate of salad.
Gail had been dreaming of the enchilada all day, only to find that it is on the lunch menu, not the dinner menu. Fortunately, the waitress asked in the kitchen and they rustled on up for her. It was pretty magnificent, and food enough for two.
That’s an enormous plate of enchilada. The flower makes it just perfect.
As the sun went down the view just got better and better.
This is reason enough to eat at the Crow’s Nest.
The perfect accompaniment to a meal is great company, and we certainly had that pleasure with Susan, Jimmy, Mary and John. I’d go to the Crow’s Nest anytime.
Neighborhood Magic
Walking down the street in a residential neighborhood, you think that all the houses are pretty much the same and there isn’t anything special happening. You sure can be wrong.
Our friends Kevin and Dave took us to see the incredible home of Paul and Robin Cowley, in Oakland’s Fruitvale district. A 700 square foot Sears Roebuck house, the kind you bought from a catalog and they shipped pre-fab on a train, the house was built in 1927. Robin and Paul have remodeled and expanded, of course, and now have a 2000 square foot one bedroom home with extensive studio space for both of them–Paul is the wizard behind Potomac Waterworks, which designs water features for places like the deYoung museum. Robin is both a garden designer and a textile artist.
The house is wonderful, but the garden is spectacular. As you would expect, this house has the most astounding water features I’ve ever seen. Essentially, Paul has created a bog with flowing water, grasses, reeds, a koi pond, some waterfalls, a fountain or two and enough machinery to launch the space shuttle. Robin has created a variety of garden types, utilizing plants from all over. The stands of bamboo are so dense I was looking for a herd of pandas.
I’m don’t know much about plants, so instead of speculating wildly and being wrong, I think I’ll just show you a ton of photos of this magnificent place. Enjoy them all, and when you drive down a quite residential street, remember that this is what might be lurking behind the gate.
Artistic sleight of hand is at work here–you can’t see through this stainless steel structure manufactured by the Stamping Simulation team, so they put mirrors in the squares to fool you into thinking you are.
Another optical illusion–more mirrors to make you think you can see through the wall.
A garden isn’t complete without art–here you see a “dango” by noted Japanese sculptor Jun Kaneko.
Looking across the expanse of the water installation.
Paul enjoying one of the many places to sit and enjoy. There were at least 5 sets of wind chimes, too.
Gail and I loved this ceramic piece.
The muscle behind the magic.
No, the view doesn’t go on forever–they’ve fooled you again with a mirror behind that sculpture.
A stand of black bamboo. I don’t know how they get it to grow in Oakland.
The ‘folly’–a small structure that is purely decorative. In a strong wind, the two sides of the roof will rise up and “clap”
After touring the garden, we went into the house to visit their extensive collection of art, mostly ceramic.
Inside Robin’s studio. These boxes are love letter from Robin’s father to her mother during WWII. She folded them into boxes and lacquered them.
Trompe l’oeil sculpture. The entire piece is ceramic.
Robin Cowley, Dave Larson and Gail in the kitchen.
A hall full of art.
The other side of the hall–there is an astonishing amount of art in a fairly small house.
One more large vessel.
Incredible gardens outside, formidable ceramic collection inside; the Cowley’s have an astonishing home. Gail realized that she had seen it before–two years ago on a day trip with the Oakland Museum Art Guild. She enjoyed this time more, because there were just the 6 of us instead of a busload trying to make their way through the space.
After our visit, we returned to Kevin and Dave’s house behind the Apple store in Berkeley. Dave, a former Apple executive, spent some of his vacations at the Cordon Bleu in Paris taking cooking lessons. He delighted us with lunch:
Red snapper poached in heirloom tomatoes, wine, butter and garlic. C’est magnifique.
Broccolini with parmesean
Sated with great art and stuffed with Dave’s formidable cooking, we wandered home and collapsed. Life is good.
So close, so far away
Apple is a great company. It’s no secret that I’m completely addicted to my iPhone, which is now the sleek new iPhone 5. Yes, it was politely waiting for me on the front doorstep Tuesday afternoon, along with a white one for Gail–she’s very happy that her phone is better looking than mine.
Apple makes one hell of a good product, with Rolls Royce level fit and finish, incredible attention to detail in every part of the unit and the packaging. This new one is so much faster than the old it’s stunning. It is thinner and much, much lighter. I’m a happy man.
But there is a downside to everything. The new design includes a new port on the bottom to charge or sync the phone, which means new cables and new car chargers. Apple will probably only make $100 million or so from all the accessories, enough to pay their leader for 10, maybe 11 months of his services. Good CEO’s don’t come cheap.
So today, I toddled off to the Apple store to pick up the necessary accessories. The store had a sign in front announcing that they had no supply of the new phones, so there was no crowd.
With a little help from the staff, I found the cord I needed:
Just what I need–a little piece of wire with a plug on one end and a different plug on the other.
Notice the perfectly formed box, the exact color of the wire and its fittings. The perfect clear tab which both seals the box and holds it to the display rod. Everything they do is perfect.
A cute little diagram to show you how to use your cable, in case you can’t figure it out.
Notice also the perfect little price NINETEEN DOLLARS. The box costs more to make than the wire inside, and they have the damned nerve to charge NINETEEN DOLLARS for it.
Okay, so they’ve got me. In a couple of months I’ll be able to buy this for three bucks on eBay or Amazon, shipping included, from dozens of knock-off manufactures. But I need it today, and the only place to buy it today is Apple, and that’s the price. Bastards.
The misery wasn’t quite over, though. If you go to the Apple store, you don’t just go up to the cashier, you check yourself out with the “Apple Store” app on your iPhone. I guess there must be somebody who can do it for you, but that would be seriously de trop. All the cool guys use their phones.
The sales drone stayed right there to walk me through–this process doesn’t seem to actually reduce the staffing requirement. Open the app, use the camera to scan the bar code, you’re in good shape. Except that I had to buy 2 of the cords. Can you just tell it 2? No. Can you loop back, scan the thing again and then check out once? No. Apple, in its infinite, majestic solipsism, has decided that you can only buy one item at a time with their app, and if you buy two then you can just jolly well use the app twice. They don’t care. They’re Apple, they don’t have to care.
And, of course, they are right. Apple will soon be have a market value of more than one trillion dollars, people will still line up for days to buy their products and I’ll still pay the damned $19 each for two of their stupid cables. Being nice to the customer won’t bring them another dollar in sales, and they know it.
If only the phone didn’t make my life so easy………………
Vanessa’s Bistro
The best Chinese food I ever ate was in San Francisco, not Beijing or Shanghai. And the best Vietnamese food I ever ate was here, not Saigon.
Tonight, we had dinner with Mike and Gretchen at Vanessa’s Bistro 2 in Walnut Creek. The have a place in Berkeley as well, which is #1. It wasn’t the very best Vietnamese I’ve eaten, but it’s pretty darned good.
A few years ago, Vietnamese meant pho, the chicken broth soup that is the heart of the cuisine. Today, the best Vietnamese places are going gourmet, with nary a bowl of pho in sight.
Situated on North Main Street just north of Mount Diablo Blvd., Vanessa’s Bistro 2 is a long narrow storefront type of restaurant with a couple of tables on the sidewalk. I think there was another room in the back, but never got there to check it out.
Vanessa’s offers “tapas”, small plates designed to be shared, as well as traditional entreés. We decided to concentrate on the smaller plates so we could try more things.
Green papaya salad. The Mickey Mouse ears are just some kind of chips.
I’m a huge fan of green papaya salad, which I always think is odd because I don’t like papaya. Which turns out to mean that I don’t like the regular, ripe papaya because it is too soft and texture-less for me, but the green papaya is very firm and crunchy and just delightful. This particular salad was extra crunchy, from a very very green papaya, and I liked it considerably.
Roasted Beet salad.
The roasted beet salad sure is gorgeous. Too bad I don’t like beets. But Gretchen and Gail do, so the salad disappeared quickly even without my help.
Vermicelli Noodle Salad w/ Honey Lemongrass Grilled Filet Mignon w/ Bean Sprouts, Lettuce, Cucumber, Pickles & Roasted Peanuts
Okay, this is a great looking dish but there’s really too much going on here. Grilled “filet” (in somebody’s dreams), noodles and salad is just more than one bowl needs. I’d like the “filet” with the noodles OR the salad, but both is just too much for me.
Salmon and tuna poke
Poke (pronounced “pokey”) is really a Hawaiian dish of raw fish, onion, avocado and whatever good spices the local chef dreams up. In the islands you can buy it in Safeway. In Walnut Creek, you need to go to someplace cool like Vanessa’s.
Fresh spring rolls
I think these spring rolls, which are neither hot nor crispy, are an acquired taste for those of us who grew up on shopping center Chinese restaurants with deep fried rolls. Fortunately, I’ve acquired the taste, and these were particularly good. Prawns and vermicelli are combined and then dipped in, strangely enough, chipotle sauce. The Vietnamese use a lot of various chili peppers, so going for the chipotles isn’t really much of a stretch.
Don’t be deceived by the serving dish–these rolls are deep-fried, not steamed.
Besides the things I have photos of, we had the Duck confit lettuce wraps: duck cooked in duck fat with sliced onions and spices and then you wrap it in lettuce leaves at the table, add some spicy sauce and enjoy. Then there was the Five Spice Quail, which we thought was overcooked. The tiny quail have so little meat that it if you go for crispy skin the meat is incinerated, too.
Service was prompt if a bit impersonal. The restaurant loses the standard full star for not having a decent sweetener for my iced tea–Equal or Splenda are acceptable, Sweet-n-low is cheap for a reason–it sucks.
Overall, Vanessa’s is not bad. The food is perhaps a notch below Eleve, but decidedly better than any pho house you might try. I notice that they not only have an early happy hour from 3-6, but a late one, from 9-11. This could be a fun place to come for a late snack or after movie treat. If only they would get a better class of sweetener.
Totally Unauthorized 