Eastside Road, April 15, 2010—
LOOK UP "POP-UP restaurant" online using your favorite search engine, well, mine, anyway, and you'll start exploring some interesting territory. I think it's a very healthy development, a response to mindless bureaucratic administration of ultimately necessary regulation. It's a very complicated issue, and further evidence, as if it were needed, that ad hocity is the correct posture in an over-complicated, over-populated, over-urban society.
Anyhow: tonight we ate not too many miles from home in a barn at a table with a number of people we didn't quite know but might have. One, for example, was delighted to meet Lindsey: he'd treasured her
book for years. Another is off next week to Amsterdam to eat at
Marius. A third is somehow connected to a
winery we visited a year or two ago near Ashland.
The kitchen was set up in a side alley of the barn, spotless stainless-steel and seriousness. These people absolutely know their business — but they're also proud and pleased with it.
All that was very nice: but best of all was the food. I began with
Sopa de Raiz de Apio, celery-root soup with fava bean pesto. I nibbled at a friend's
Ensalada de esparragos, warm asparagus salad with cara cara oranges and raw-milk feta; and then hr
Pescado locale, pan-seared cod with piquillo peppes and safferon-flavored carrots.
Best of all, I feasted on
Chicharron de pato, duck breast cooked almost as if it were in
confit, with a
masa polenta-like toast with crinkly
chicharrones from the duck; it was a veritable Yucatanese cassoulet lacking the beans. An extraordinary dish, deep, rich, complex, but in perfect balance, and thoroughly healthful. Oh: pea and fava-tendril salad to garnish it.
Then, out into the night, chilly, darker than this twilight photo suggests, with a big Evening Star hanging just off a tiny paring of a crescent new moon. Magical.
Blanc d'Alsace, "Now & Zen," 2007; Pinot noir, Kenwood (Russian River Valley), 2007;
Syrah, Cowhorn (Applegate Valley, Oregon), 2006; Malbec, AR Guentota (Argentina), 2006
It was the billboard fascinated me, of course. It continued to throughout my youth, though I didn't see it that often (perhaps that was part of the fascination). Looking at it now, I'm surprised at its similarity to another advertising gimmick that's often fascinated me, 
