Berkeley, April 21, 2015—
NO TIME FOR a proper dinnertime dinner today, so we made do with a substantial lunch instead. We began by splitting what has to be my favorite pizzetta: tomato sauce and brandade, flavored as I recall with green olives and herbs.
I went on to this quite piquant pork shoulder, braised, then served in a sort of stew with broad beans, garbanzos, carrots, and cilantro, with steamed rice, itself flavored with mint, I believe, and cilantro. The dish was piquant with pepper and cumin; on the whole the Café seemed to be Californio today.
Dessert: Meyer lemon ice cream merengata: on a bed of crisp meringue, softened with its judicious whipped cream, heightened with candied kumquat. A delicious meal!
Dolcetto
• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510-548-5525
Santa Rosa, April 20, 2010—
OUT TO THE HOME of friends for dinner tonight —a couple who routinely split their cooking assignments. Mac, who spent years on Pacific islands, took care of the protein: the mantle, not the tentacles, of squid, flattened, tenderized with a mallet I'd guess, dredged in panka and fried golden brown, as you see. The very good result reminded me of abalone.
Margery had presided over the accompaniment: fettuccine with sautéed kale and sweet peppers, tender and succulent, a perfect foil to the crisp calamari.
Dessert: Three Twins ice cream— I chose vanilla, my favorite.
Roussane-Viognier blend, Quivira, 2013: very nice, expressive, balanced.
San Francisco, April 16, 2015—PHOTOGRAPHS SO RARELY do justice to these dishes. This is a small pot of halibut rillettes, beautifully textured, flavored with a red pepper that recalls paprika without the sweetness, smoothly shaggy if that's not an oxymoron, a generous serving even shared with my companion, and a pefect opening to a pleasant early supper on what had felt like an ideal summer day, even though it's only mid-April.
We were at a Basque restaurant we've neglected too long — and we'ree not the only ones tto neglect it: good as the kitchen is, smoothly professtional yet friendly though the sesrvice be, interesting as the menu and the wine selections are, and wwhen you come down to it reasonable as the prices are, it's strange the place doesn't turn up more often on lists of favorites.
(Oh: And I haven't mentioned the settings. You can park nearby; it's in the shadow of Telegraph Hill; the bar and dining room are very comfortable and spacious; you can hear one another talk.)
I went on to the signature dish, a piperade: slowly cooked sliced onion, red sweet peppers, tomato, nicely flavored with garlic, garnished with ventrèche (which is basically French for pancetta, lightly smoked I would say), with a perfectly poached egg on top.
On the side, spinach sauteed with raisins and pine nuts. And for dessert, a very nice gâteau basque, almond cake filled with a thick pastry cream and topped with marvelous glacéed kumquats. (Companion said her beignets were the best she's had anywhere.)
Albarino, Candea, Rias Baixas | 2013
•Piperade, 1015 Battery St, San Francisco, ; (415) 391-2555
 | Berkeley, April 14, 2015— YES: THAT'S LAMB you see at the left — rack, loin, and leg, cooked to exactly the right rosy color.But first we had crostini generously spread with morel duxelles, with artichoke, arugula, Pecorino, and mint — a dish from somewhere between Calabria and North Africa, I'd say. Sicily! That's what it made me think of! White blend, Pinot bianco, Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, Manincor "Réserve della Contessa", 2013: clean, expressive of both Chardonnay and Sauvignon, smooth and well rounded |
 | Then the fish course: Northern halibut cooked on a fig leaf with lime, calendula, and coriander flowers. Well, you can see how generously this thick, moist, delicate filet had been garnished with the flower petals, which contributed a surprisingly delicate piquancy to the dish, offsetting the slightly tannic fig leaf. A remarkable concept, this dish, and perfectly set off by its wine: Sylvaner, Albert Boxler, 2012: very smooth, soft and fruity, dry |
 | Finally, the lamb. It had been grilled over wood, was garnished with green garlic and marjoram — far too delicate a Spring lamb for rosemary! — and came with fennel purée, sweet peas, and watercress. A dish defining springtime. Cornas: serious, quite dry and a little tannic, but very pleasant with the lamb Oh: and last of all, dessert, simply described as strawberry île flottante , but so light a meringue, so silky a custard, such flavorful strawberries and candied citrus, and such a pretty presentation… |
Pasadena, April 11, 2015—
WE DASHED OUT OF THE THEATER (after a particularly good production of Julius Caesar) and hit the freeway for downtown Pasadena, where a favorite restaurant waited for us. Will there be a table? Hard to say: Open Table said no.
I dropped my companion off at the door, found a parking lot, and hiked back to the restaurant — to find her comfortable seated at a table for two in a crowded dining room. The tables are close-set here; this is the kind of place where you wind up conversing with strangers at the next table.
We split an arugula salad to start, and some bread and one of the house specialties, giardinera — which always puts me in mind of Companion's Aunt Victoria. The giardinera here is not Piemontese, though; it is Calabrian, I'd say, with a fair amount of heat.
I went on to another house specialty, porchetta. It's so succulent, flavored with fennel seeds and garlic and the right touch of red pepper, strewn with chopped parsley, in its own succulent juices, with a bed of oven-fried potatoes underneath… bbuon, siamo a Roma…
Gavi di Gavi; Dolcetto
• Union Restaurant, 37 East Union Street, Pasadena; 949-645-5440
Los Angeles, April 10, 2015—ONE OF OUR PLEASURES is following friends and acquaintances as they move through their careers. Among them, the fellow you might be able to make out at the far right on the other side of the counter, working at his new-fangled steam kettles in his brand new restaurant.
It's Mark Peel, who we first knew many years ago when he worked at Chez Panisse, and whose cuisine we enjoyed as often as we could after he'd opened a restaurant called Campanile in Charlie Chaplin's house on La Brea in Los Angeles.
That was a while back, too. Then, a couple of years ago, he sold the place. Next time I enjoyed his food it was at an installation in the Los Angeles airport. Then today we had the pleasure of lunch at Bombo, opened only two weeks ago in the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, at the foot of Angel's Flight.
If you zoom in on the photo you might be able to read the menu. From it I chose the fried chicken, which came as three generous portions of breast meat, well breaded and deep-fried very crisp, served with a nice chopped salad and a cone of thick-cut oven-fried potatoes. Mark's cooking has always been full of flavor, and that hasn't changed. This place is fun.
Afterward we drove out to another LA market, the one at Fairfax in Hollywood, for coffee and cake at Short Cake, which I wrote about a month or two ago. The cake had a perfect texture, moist and light, and was flavored with pistachios and tangelos, with a sort of Bavarian cream between layers and butter cream frosting; and with it a superb cappuccino made with coffee from Santa Cruz's Verve roastery.
Dinner: light, of course; we were going to a play tonight. (A superb performance of Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro, funny as hell and pretty true to the original as far as I can tell.) We found a decent local Italian with a nice bar, where we shared a plate of fusilli aglio-olio and a salad, and basta così.
Martini; Pinot grigio
•Bombo, 317 S. Broadway, Los Angeles; Short Cake, 6333 W. 3rd Street, Los Angeles, 323-761-7976; Nikki C's, 470 S. Rosemead Blvd., Pasadena, 626-792-7437
LUNCH WAS DELICIOUS: a couple of thick slices of rabbit paté bought yesterday in Petaluma's Thistle Meats, on a couple of thick slices of Como bread from Healdsburg's Downtown Bakery and Creamery, eaten behind the steering wheel on Highway 5, somewhere near Coalinga.
Dinner, well, dinner was for little more than convenience tonight. We had a 7:30 curtain at the opera — Le nozze di Figaro, Los Angeles Opera — and we were parking in the theater's lot, so we decided on a supper at the Music Center's resident restaurant, a bistro wannabe.
Here you see my choice, billed as steak tartare with Caesar salad. It was okay. Companion had risotto, saying she couldn't eat factory meat. Well, I know what she means, but I figure once in a while won't kill me, or ruin Earth…
House red
• Kendall's Brasserie , 135 N. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles; 213-972-7322
Westley, California, April 8, 2015—
ON THE ROAD again, and we knew there'd be no place to eat half-way to Los Angeles — so we stopped in Berkeley for a pizza. The Café Chez Panisse makes a delicious nettle pizza, bitter and chthonic, baked dark as we like it.
Then a packaged "Country Italian" salad from Trader Joe: lettuce, cabbage, grated carrot, chopped green and red pepper. A vinaigrette that could have been worse. No trace of onion or garlic.
Dessert: a tangerine, some candied citrus peel, a cookie or two.
Cinsault, L'Argentier, 2011: deep, earthy, just right with the nettles…
| Raviolini aux fèves et fromage frais : raviol filled with fresh cheese in broth with peas and pea shoots, with mint and marjoram |  |
| Agneau de printemps avec les asperges, céleri-rave et mesclun de jardin : spring lamb chops with asparagus, celery-root purée, and garden lettuce photo: LRS |  |
| Gâteau glacé à la PANISSE : ice cream bombe with strawberries and tangerines |  |
| And, to end, friandises — chocolate-covered almonds, candied citrus peel —served on the (paper) poisson d'avril : no fools here! photo: LRS |  |
