Chez Panisse at 38

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 28, 2009 —

I WONDER HOW MANY birthdays I've celebrated at 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley. I wasn't there for dinner the first night,back in 1971: I was working that night. I did stop by at the end of the night, when energy was playing out. But I didn't actually eat that meal — paté en croute, as Lindsey recalls; duck with olives; a fruit tart, I imagine.

What we had tonight: delicious crudités, raw peppers, fennel, cucumbers, dressed with the merest hint of lime juice and good salt. Then deep-fried halibut and smelt, with more vegetables, and purslane, and aïoli. Then a miracle of a course: a corn soufflée, apparently baked in an individual mold lined with a squash blossom — but baked for the shortest possible time; then turned out into a dish of corn-flavored velouté. How the hell did they do that?

Then the main course: squab from the grill, with lightly grilled figs, and broad beans, and shell beans. A course like this at its best combines textures, tastes, scents, and colors; it's like orchestration, where you think about the range of pitches from low to high, the complexities of overtones (think flute versus oboe), the pop of the attacks of sounds, their loudnesses of course. That's just a chord, of course; things get more complicated when time, the horizontal dimension, begins to take over. Same thing with the ingredients of a dish like this. They want to balance; they want to merge; they want to converse; they want to collaborate.

Then fruit: Bronx grapes, muscat-like but delicate, and delicious peaches, firm and sliced to exactly the right dimension, so that the firm surfaces, cleanly cut with a sharp knife, made maximum contact with the tongue. And then, and then,

crèpes with mulberry ice cream and mulberries and raspberries, flamed with Kirsch. I do think this was perhaps the best birthday dinner yet at Chez Panisse.

Rosé, Bandol, Domaine Tempier, 2008; Gigondas, Domaine Les Pallières, 2006; Baumes de Venise