Once more…

Ashland, Oregon, March 31, 2010—

WE'RE IN A RUT, you'll say. In any case, it says something about how we feel about other lunch possibilities in this town. Yes, back to Agave today: it's just that good.
I began with a cabbage salad and guacamole; then went on to two tacos: pescado (lightly battered and deep-fried fish) and pato (that delicious duck rillette taco I told you about the other day).

House white, Sauvignon blanc

Agave, 92 North Main, Ashland, Oregon; tel. 541.488.1770

Back to Agave

Ashland, Oregon, March 30, 2010—

WHY WOULDN'T WE GO back to Agave? We're seeing Hamlet tonight; don't want a big dinner just before; won't want to eat afterward… Midday dinner then, but where? We looked over the lists of restaurants: Google, Yelp, various other sites, ruling them out one after another: not open for lunch, too expensive, too hippie, not very good, not very good… why not go back to Agave, right now? We can always have a little bread and salame and a piece of fruit in the room, just before the play…

I began again with a good Margarita and guacamole, salty this time; then went on to three little tacos: pescado Andrejo (fresh sautéed fish), carnitas, carne asada (deliciously marinated char-grilled steak). Dessert: a tamal dulce, a corn tamal flavored with pineapple and currants, with a thin crema straddling it. Delicious. On leaving, I asked if they used MSG in the kitchen. Of course not, they answered, Why do you ask? Because everything tastes so damn good, I said.

(But I think it's simply lime juice and salt and spices and really good ingredients, that and the talent at the stove.)

Rioja, Montecillo Crianja, 2000

Agave, 92 North Main, Ashland, Oregon; tel. 541.488.1770

Tabu

Ashland, Oregon, March 29, 2010—

AN EARLY DINNER tonight at Tabu, where we've eaten once almost every time we've spent a week here. The place can be fun; it offers free dance lessons now and then, and is open late for tapas after the theater. Tonight, though, when we arrived, we were the only guests. I grabbed Lindsey for a slow whirl or two across the dance floor, then we settled into a booth for dinner, starting with a four-dollar Margarita.
I had a house salad — greens, cabbage, pico de gallo, jicama, cumin-flavored dressing, spiced pumpkin seeds — and a tasty flatiron steak, rubbed with a coffee-and-spice preparation, then nicely grilled, served with chili-flavored garlic mashed potatoes and a sort of pico-de-gallo-encumbered ratatouille. Big servings, nothing-fancy presentation, nice service, tasty food.

Another Margarita

Tabu, 76 N. Pioneer, Ashland, Oregon; tel. 541-482-3900

New Sammy's

Ashland, Oregon, March 28—

ONE OF MY ELECTIONS to the Five Restaurants: New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro, a few miles north of here on old highway 99, toward Talent. What elevates it to that company? The quality of ingredients, the literacy and resourcefulness of the chef, the loyalty to place, the consistency, the heart. Everything about this place speaks to Authenticity: food from the garden, meat and fish from neighbors, water from the well, wine from the great producers of the world.
Tonight I began with a sardine wrapped in a green leaf; I'm sorry; I can't be more specific than that. I love sardines. What I'd forgotten, until having a sip of the well-water, is how sweet sardines make a subsequent sip of water: it's like the effect of artichoke on milk. Indescribable, yet utterly familiar and entirely inarguable.
We then split a good-sized ricotta-stuffed raviolo in a buttery sauce, and I went on to a couple of lamb chops, rare, perfectly grilled, on a bed of spinach with just the right trace of cream, and three perfect gnocchi as accents. The lamb was Churro; don't ask me how Navaho lamb winds up here in southern Oregon. Delicious.
Single-malt Scotch ice cream, I kid you not, on a base of poached dried figs. Enterprising, interesting, driven by intellectual curiosity and a palate wide open but sharply honed. The chef, Charlene Rollins, is a great artist and, I think, a genius, and I would happily eat here every day of my life.

Rioja, "Castillo Rioja," Bodegas Palacio, 2007 (and, to begin, a nicely balanced Kir Royal)

New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro, 2210 South Pacific Highway, Talent, OR 97540; tel. 541-535-2779

Italy. Portugal. Mexico.

Ashland, Oregon, March 27—

IN EVERY WAY a complex day, starting with a slice of delicious Colomba at breakfast in Berkeley — a Milanese Easter cake, much like pannetone but lacking candied citrus. With it, raspberries (out of the freezer) and orange segments: I've never tasted that combination before, and I like it.
Lunch at City Gates Restaurant in Orland: tasty as always. A bowl of calda verde (kale and linguiça in broth), then these four fine bacalhao croquettes with their piquant sauce.

Vinho verde, Gazela, nv

City Gates Café, 1165 Hoff Way, Orland CA; tel. 530.865.5552

Ça commence

Berkeley, March 26—

TWO EGGS OVER EASY this morning, fried in that delicious lard, and toast with that delicious pork "rillette." A piece of toast with almond butter, a banana, and a glass of orange juice for lunch: not inspired, not even interesting, remarkably similar to yesterday's fare. But tasty, and I'm grateful for that.

Then to San Francisco for a wine reception celebrating the investiture of the Legion d'Honneur on a friend, at the home of the French Consul. A glass of Bandol Rosé, one oyster (Hog Island) on the half shell with very nice champagne jelly, and two little cheese puff thingies. Then on to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and afterward supper at a friend's house: a slice of prepared ham, I forget the trade-name; a piece of good three-year-old Gouda; a piece of somewhat sharp Cheddar.

Rioja blanco, Marques de Caceres

Grazing

Eastside Road, March 25, 2010—

YOU CAN'T REALLY CALL IT dining. "Eating" is too — basic. I guess we've been grazing today. It started with breakfast: not the usual two bowls of caffelatte and a piece of toast with honey or jam, but two eggs, fried in lard and dressed with the pork "rillettes" I made a few weeks back; a glass of orange juice; a piece of dry toast.
Lunch: almond butter on a piece of toast; a banana; a glass of milk.
Dinner, ah, now there's the thing. We began with guacamole ma façon with tortilla chips (and the routine shot of tequila and lime juice); went on to a baked potato dressed with salt and olive oil; and ended with a plate of chard from the garden, steamed with a tiny bit of the rillettes that had begun the day. So everything comes round full circle; the day's a work of art.

Cheap Pinot grigio

…marking time…

Eastside Road, March 24, 2010—

YES, WE'RE IN THAT MODE that sets in before travels. We're looking forward to a couple of weeks eating on the road, so for the moment we eat with circumspection and care, continuing to empty out Fortunatus's icebox, being reasonable. Well, not entirely; a celebration seemed in order today, so we had a Wednesday Martini. (But then, I do not think we'll have the opportunity to have a Martini on Friday. We'll see.)

So tonight it was the rest of the spaghetti in tomato sauce Lindsey made yesterday. I asked her what brand of spaghetti it was, because it did really seem like excellent pasta to me, but she hadn't taken note of it. Careless: but I can't fault her. Then the green salad; and later on the last of the Savarin — Lindsey made several for Paolo's birthday, nearly a month ago; she'd had one extra, and froze it; she thawed it out and soaked it in Kirsch for the Stein dinner Sunday, and we're still at it. Kirsch is a wonderful preservative, but it doesn't preserve itself: looks like I need to lay in another bottle…

Cheap Pinot grigio

Spaghetti

Eastside Road, March 23, 2010—

SPAGHETT', MY FATHER always used to call it, with a mock Italian accent; God knows where he'd picked it up. One of the many things it never occurred to me to ask. When we had it in my childhood it invariably came from a cardboard box bearing the exotic name Chef Boyardee. Haven't seen it in decades, but damned if it doesn't still exist, these days brought to you by ConAgra. (There's even a considerable online discussion of the Chef's original, an Italian immigrant named Ettore Boiardi, but you'll have to research that yourself.)

We rarely eat spaghetti, for some reason; but it's a favorite pasta of mine, though to be sure it poses difficulties to a bearded man, especially when eaten in public. I like it for its lissome body and its embrace of sauce, and forgive it its tendency to spill. Before it, tonight, some raw fennel — Spring is certainly here! — and afterward the usual green salad.

dribs and drabs of wine, white and red, left from Sunday's dinner party.

Back for more

Eastside Road, March 22, 2010—

AFTER A WEEKEND of eating in restaurants and then entertaining last night, it was time to pay some dues tonight. Leftovers: Corona beans from last Thursday. But we warmed up on an interesting cabbage, new to us: arrowhead cabbage, a delicate, sweet cabbage that comes in the shape of a cone. (It looks more like a cabbagy howitzer shell than an arrowhead, at least to me.) Lindsey chopped it, not too small, and steamed it in the big stainless-steel skillet with a bit of butter and some salt. A good-sized helping of cabbage didn't keep the green salad away. A little Nostrana; a little 3-year-old farmhouse Gouda.

Alsace white, "Now & Zen", 2007

Tarte d'Alsace

Eastside Road, March 21, 2010—

ANOTHER CHEMISTRY SET tonight, but one we like: "Tarte d'Alsace," flat bread with ham, onions, and gruyère. It's from Trader Joe. In it,

wheat flour, water, sunflower oil, salt, crème fraîche, ham, onions, gruyère.

That sounds innocent enough, but parenthesized within those eight ingredients we find these:

(cultured pasteurized cream, citric acid, sodium ascorbate, salt, sugar, sodium phosphates, smoke flavoring, sodium erythrobate, sodium nitrate, canola oil, caramel color, enzymes)

But still, we've bought and cooked these things before, and they seemed the perfect inexpensive and easy thing to serve to a party of ten or twelve guests, some of whom we'd never met before, who were arriving on a Sunday evening to read through a couple of Gertrude Stein plays. (What Happened a Play, Ladies Voices.)
It was a stretch of a day, watching a mock trial for the fifth time in 48 hours, then driving home 110 miles to our party. Dinner had to be easy. Richard brought the salad — tasty — and we supplied these Alsatian tartes, six of them, bought at Trader Joe's. They worked fine.

Alsace white, "Now & Zen", 2007 (details here)

Tapas

San Jose, California, March 20—

AN OKAY CAESAR SALAD for lunch downtown someplace, and a light supper, we thought, at a tapas joint we found next to Peet's when we went out for coffee afterward. Not so light, though, as we ordered a little heavy, and these "small plates" turned out to be pretty big. I watched Lindsey eat her shrimp; then we tucked into four bacalao croquettes, a good-sized platter of patatas bravas, another of green beans cooked with garlic and pine nuts, and finally four butifarra: rounds of soft, spicy Catalan sausage laid on tomato slices set on grilled bread. The flavors here were really good, the service pert and friendly, and the setting pretty and lively, to put it positively. (Noisy as hell, to put it plain.)

Albariña, Raimat, 2008

Picasso's Tapas and Restaurant [22-22-22], 62 W. Santa Clara St., San Jose; tel. 408.298.4400

Okay hamburger, misguided fegato

San Jose, California, March 19—

WE STOPPED OFF in Berkeley for lunch with a friend at a place new to us, Café Quince. A sweet little place for lunch: I had an okay hamburger, thick, grass-fed beef, with nice balsamic-pickled onions. And they have a good espresso, a rare item in that town.

Cold water

THEN DOWN HERE to San Jose, California's second city, where the Martini, at the Fairmont Hotel, was NVG; and the soi-disantsautéed calf's liver Venice style was misconceived and badly executed: thick chunks of liver, somewhat overcooked, served in a gluey, slightly sweet tomato sauce. Alas.

unattributed Pinot Noir by the glass, fortunately rather good

I've been thinking maybe I should assign numerical ratings, Zagat-style, to the restaurants we eat in, 0-30 for food, decor, and service. I'll begin with these:

Quince Cafe and Grill [19-20-19], 2228 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley; tel. 510-717-1408

Original Joe's [16-15-17], 301 South First St., San Jose; tel. 408.292.7030