Pork shank

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, March 7, 2009

Bistro 29, 620 5th Street, Santa Rosa California
tel. (707) 546-2929

OUT TO SEE A SHOW tonight, and dinner before, with a couple of special friends. We'd been to Bistro 29 before, a year or so ago. We started with a plate of panisses for the table — served as sticks here, say a half-inch square by four inches long, to be dipped into a vaguely pesto-like mayonnaise. I prefer the traditional panisse, more like a crèpe, but these had the same delicious chickpea taste, though necessarily less crisp.
On then to a dish of slow-braised greens, and then a pork shank — closest thing to a stinco di maiale I've ever encountered in a French-style bistro, rich, perhaps even too rich, particularly as accompanied irrelevantly (I thought) by a crisped crèpe filled with cheese. An enormous serving. Good, though.

Zinfandel, Louis Preston, 2007