Lunch in the café

Berkeley, January 20, 2017—

WE DECIDED TO TRY to ignore the most public events of the day, at least while they actually transpired, and met a friend for lunch instead. In sadness, to the table. What a fine festive meal!

We began with a half dozen Miyagi oysters on the half shell. They come with a mignonette, but I rarely go there: I prefer oysters as fresh and forward as these nature, just their own sweet selves.

I turned next to this imnperfectly photographed salad: sliced beets and fennel in a bagna cauda vinaigrette with perfectly hard-cooked egg and some miner's lettuce leaves, with just the right addition of chopped black truffle.

This was, by agreement with the Contessa, the principle meal of the day, so I finished with duck breast with Ojibwe wild rice, rapini, and "salsa di dragoncello." This wild rice is not your usual one: it seems shorter-grained, nuttier, less processed somehow. A good match to the duck, which always seems to me too meaty to go with rice — but then, I'm a potato-eater, it's in my genes.

In any case, the duck was nicely cooked, just enough, and the long-cooked rapini made a fine side dish.

Dessert: an apple galette with a few sour cherries to give added texture and flavor, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Can't ask for more than that!

Rossese di Albenga, U Bastiò Biovio (Italy), 2014: fresh and forthcoming

•Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510-548-5049

☛RESTAURANTS VISITED, with information and rating: 2016      2015     2017

Jérôme's final day

Eastside Road, January 17, 2016—

HE LOOKS RELAXED, standing there in his white coat, smiling at his guests as he works the dining room — but it's Jérôme Waag's final night as chef at Chez Panisse, and one can only wonder what may be going through his mind. He arrived, I think, in 1991, hardly out of his teens, the son of an old friend of Alice Waters's — a young artist in need of a job. He was taken on as a busboy. Before too long he was in the kitchen, where he learned his craft from two excellent teaching chefs: Jean-Pierre Moullé and Paul Bertolli. For many years Chez Panisse has worked with pairs of co-chefs: upstairs in the Café they've alternated half-weeks; in the downstairs restaurant, until now, alternating six-month stints. Jérôme's tenure as chef has been short by Panisse standards; he came to the position only two years ago. Alas, the experience has led him to yearn for his own restaurant, so he's leaving us. The restaurant will survive; it will even evolve. It always has. But I can't help feeling a tinge of regret: last night's dinner, like the one the night before, was very close to perfection. Here's what we had:

Endive, roe, chives

Striped bass and sea scallop

Agnolotti in brodo

Quail vigneronne

Meringata

Apéritif: Prosecco flavored with orange and Meyer lemon

Amuse-Geule: Steelhead roe on an endive leaf

Nothing could have been cleaner, simpler, more promising of a fine evening at the table. The chives were chopped very fine indeed, and sprinkled very judiciously, lending just a hint of flavor to the fresh roe…

Striped bass and sea scallop carpaccio with olio nuovo, black truffles, and fennel salad

Vermentino, "Nùo," Cardedu (Sicily), 2014

Extremely light and delicate, this fish carpaccio — Jérôme's planning to open a restaurant in Tokyo, and I think a plate like this will make a big impression on the sashimi scene. The truffles, thankfully, like the chives on the previous course, were barely present, a subtle condiment, not a powerful constituent.
   The wine does not taste at all like a typical Vermentino; it's spent time on the lees, with an almost Sherry-like result — lending further structure to the delicate salad.

Black truffle agnolotti in wild mushroom, green garlic, and herb brodo

Riesling, Ostertag Clos Mathis, 2012

Here too there was no central dominant flavor, not even truffle: you could taste mushroom, garlic, thyme, the flour of the pasta — and, of course, black truffle: but all the flavors blended with great refinement.
   The Riesling surprised me with its own delicacy; it might have been better to reverse its position with the preceding Vermentino.

Wolfe Ranch quail vigneronne grilled over rosemary vines with pancetta, celery root and black truffle gratin, and garden salad

Nebbiolo, Langhe, S. Francesco, Fontanazza (Lamorra), 2012

When this course was set in front of us there was nothing to do but lift the plate to the nostrils, take in the aromas, set it back on the table, lean back and relax: this will have been an amazing, perfectly satisfying dinner. The bird smelled, and then tasted, as if it had been aged; though quite pink at the center the texture was gamy, almost liverish; the flavors of the fire and its rosemary fuel were completely integrated with those of the meat. There were tiny slender carrots on the plate, and the celery-root gratin was complex and toothy, like the quail; and the truffle again did not dominate but simply perfected the dish, binding the other flavors.
   Nebbiolo was a fitting choice to complement this complex meat course, and this bottle was characteristic and mature.

Passion fruit ice cream and tangerine sherbet meringata

Moscato d'Asti, Biancospino "La Spinetta," 2014

The contrasting colors, flavors, and textures of the two frozen desserts was pleasant, and I admired the thought going into the dessert's recollection, in color and shape, of previous dishes. There was a crunchy element, too: toasted coconut, of all things, cooked with honey to tame a tropical flavor that is easily too intense. And the meringue — soft, firm, not at all grainy; and that on a very rainy day. What a skillful pastry kitchen.

It's so interesting to think of this meal in the context of the previous night's. Many similarities: fish, fowl, the Italian influences — but very different experiences, like feminine-masculine, or Torino-Firenze. These dinners seems to me to prove the capability cuisine has of achieving a truly artistic level, combining deep appreciation of the media, intelligent awareness of history, and imaginative vision of possibilities. Sitting at this table you can't help become more appreciative, more thoughtful, above all grateful to those who have brought it to this degree of perfection…

• Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510-548-5525
☛Restaurants visited in the last year are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Chez Panisse

Eastside Road, January 17, 2016—

LET ME BEGIN this new year of Eating Every Day (a couple of weeks late, it's true) with a disclosure reminder: my companion the Cook (as she's known here when we're home; the Contessa when we're traveling) and I are part owners of a restaurant.

The fact, and the history of the fact, have been disclosed publicly for many years, most clearly I think in the book Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee, who became a personal friend during the interviews he conducted in the course of writing the book.

So much for dispelling any thoughts of bias through personal involvement.

Let me add quickly that my principal association with the restaurant, over nearly thirty years from its opening, in 1971, was the fact of my companion's role on its staff as pastry chef. My own involvement has been less hands-on; I am by no means a culinary professional. (Though like most middle-class and lower-middle-class Americans my employment history has included a number of eateries.)

Chez Panisse is justly considered an epochal restaurant, and our fascination with the institution has gone beyond the pleasures of the table throughout its long history. The kitchen, sure; beyond that, the business, as an exception to for-profit motivation;, as a family of staff, associates, and diners; as a moment (and a movement) in cultural history. I know: all this can sound quite pretentious. Believe me: none of it was every really intended. It's all been lucky accident, born of the intersection of time (the 1960s), place (Berkeley, California), the pursuit of pleasure, and an intense commitment to ethics. Occasionally, in the course of history, idealism pays off.

Okay: Friday night we dined downstairs at Chez Panisse, as we did again last night, on a bittersweet occasion: these were the final two dinners under the supervision of chef Jérôme Waag. I set his name with diacriticals because Jérôme is French, one of a number of influences on his gifts as a chef. Among others: He's an artist, long involved with sculpture and performance art; he's intelligent; he's open-minded yet focussed and methodical; he's been in the Chez Panisse kitchen for much of his adult life. He has worked with virtually every chef in the Chez Panisse history: among them Jean-Pierre Moullé, Paul Bertolli, Catherine Brandel, David Tanis…

For two years he's alternated downstairs with Cal Peternell — downstairs chefs have been co-chefs for many years now. And now he's leaving, for the most honorable of reasons, to develop his own restaurant. Unfortunately for some of us, it will be in Japan.

His place will be taken seamlessly; the restaurant is very long on its own persona. Over the years there's no doubt most chefs have influenced one or another strand of the complex character of the cuisine, but the core, for decades, has developed a lasting strength of its own — largely no doubt because of the steady guiding hand and critical eye and palate of Alice Waters, who is of course the chef.

---

FRIDAY NIGHT'S MENU, though, seemed to me distinctly Jérôme, for all that each course was in fact executed, as always, by a different cook on his team. And here is what it was:

Aperitif: Prosecco flavored with citrus and rosemary

Amuses: duck "prosciutto," toasts with goose rillette and chervil

chicories, beets, roe

striped bass, fennel purée

squab, parsnip purée

Tarte Tatin

Chino ranch chicories and mint with crispy beets, crème fraîche, and steelhead roe

Rully, Deux Montille Soeur-Frere, 2012

Yes, beets again. Sliced thin, though, and cooked so crisp that they'd lost all that aluminum-foil flavor and granular-mushy texture they all too often have. The chicories — we used to call this Belgian endive, no? — were tender and full of flavor, and the creme fraiche and roe made a marvelous play on the more usual vinaigrette. What a salad!
   The wine was soft but substantial, with the flavor and aroma of a Chablis but not the flinty edge: a fine complement to the salad.

Striped bass with fennel purée, coriander, and olio nuovo

Carricante, Aurora (Sicily), 2013

To me distinctly a Japanese-influenced dish: lots of umami. The firm fish, soft purée, and supple olive oil contrasted wonderfully with one another, and somehow the flavor of the purée, though quite delicate, easily held its own with the sweet, fresh bass. I think the coriander, chopped and sprinkled on top of the fish, may have facilitated the combination of tastes.
   The wine was interesting: a varietal new to me, fermented and aged with a sherry-like overtone of flor, that fine yeast you sometimes see layered on the surface of wine still in the barrel. I suspect this wine is left on the lees, not fined or filtered before it is bottled.

Grilled Paine Farm squab with sage and tangerine sauce, parsnip purée, kabocha squash fritters, and watercress

Gigondas, Domaine Les Pallieres "Les Racines," 2012

The meaty, fine-textured bird, grilled whole, was beautifully set off by a silky parsnip purée whose flavor was surprisingly mild, almost fruity; the squash fritter was crisp, like a potato chip; the sauce had a careful balance of flavors and (again) a silky texture, nicely set off by the crunchy ittle pieces of small, deep-fried pieces of winter squash.
   The Gigondas — a very fine wine, carefully made, mostly Grenache (80%) but with Syrah, Cinsault, and Clairette as well — a careful blend making the most of its ingredients, and ending with the integrity and balance you expect from a Bordeaux, even.

Tarte Tatin with Calvados ice cream

Jurançon, Lapeyre "La Magendia," 2011

Tarte Tatin used to be such a simple matter: the right apple, cut into chunks the right size, set in butter and suger in the pan, then baked under its pastry. It's a country dessert, and as if in mistrust it has grown, over the years, to be treated with disrespect, robbed of its bittersweet caramel, garnished with strawberries or citrus, smothered under cream or, worse, aerosol whipped cream. Not here: the fruit combined completely with the caramel, and the ice cream with its silky texture remained a thing apart, a companion, not a modifier.
   The Jurançon clearly thinks of Sauternes without regret. I like it; I would need to get to know it better to take it on its own terms.

---

THEN LAST NIGHT, Saturday, we returned for Jérôme's final evening. That dinner, though, will have to wait for my next post…

• Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525
☛Restaurants visited in the last year are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Marius

Prinseneiland, January 2, 2016—

I APOLOGIZE FOR THESE photos; most of all to the restaurant in which I took them. They do not do the presentation of the dishes justice.

We dined at a real favorite. Of course I'm biased: the owner-chef is my Dutch son, who can do no wrong in my book, certainly not in the kitchen. Here's what we had:

Geroosterde tonijn met spinachie, citroen wortel en venkel
Sautéed tuna with spinach, lemon, carrot, and fennel

Gebraden Barbarie eend
Sautéed Barbary duck

Gepocheerde kweepeer met vanilleijs en pistasche
Poached quince with vanilla ice cream and pistachios

Marius is a small restaurant, seating maybe thirty; the menu is small, the wine list extensive and well considered. The food is delicious. Did I mention the chef did two year-long stints at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley?

The tuna was cooked perfectly and was firm, fresh, and meaty. The duck was also cooked exactly au point and came with delicious cabbage. I don't know when I've had better ice cream, and the quince could have been poached by my own dining companion, so professional, flavorful, and perfectly textured it was.

It is one of the Five Restaurants.

Riesling: Dengler Seyler Heiligenberg (Pfalz), 2012: smooth, characteristic, beautiful color, fine finish;
Greco di Tufo, Calafé, 2009;
Cotes de Duras, Domaine Mouthes le Bihan "La Pie Colette," 2012: rich, solid, good finish

•Restaurant Marius, Barentszstraat 173, Amsterdam; 020 422 7880
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants>

Lunch in the café

Berkeley, October 27, 2015 —

YES, OF COURSE, it's Tuesday; we're supposed to be fasting. Particularly since we've had no exercise at all for days, and have put on just a little weight. But we can fast tomorrow: today we find ourselves in Berkeley, and the daily menu looks delicious:

Garden lettuces
Bucatini with spicy tomato sauce, Sicilian-style meatballs, saffron, and Pecorino
Bronx grape sherbet with red wine, quince, and pomegranate

I know I shouldn't post the terrible photo I took of the main dish; it's only here to give an idea of the size of the serving — this was indeed Principle Meal of the Day. The bucatini — thick-walled tubes of pasta, properly cooked of course — were in a piquant sauce suggesting Naples to me, and the meatballs whether Sicilian or not, were certainly southern Italian, rich and complex with saffron and chopped walnuts. Gonna have to try to duplicate this one day.

Dessert — well, just look at the photo. It tasted as good as it looks. The sherbet was pungent with the somewhat musky flavor of Bronx grapes, and the Zinfandel set it off perfectly; also the pomegranate seeds and carefully diced and poached quince. What a place.

Langhe white: but what?

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; (510) 548-5525
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Back to the blog.

Eastside Road, September 1, 2015—

OKAY, LET'S JUST SAY I took the month of August off. Why shouldn't I have as much vacation as any French plumber? In fact, we've been eating very well, but busy doing other things too. For one thing, getting ready for a big party.

The party fare was spectacular — a steer our son butchered for us, grass-raised and grain-finished, half of it braised, the other half grilled, served with many delicious things, with cases of rosé and red wine, and peaches in wine, and all that: but that was ten days ago, and I was too busy enjoying myself and playing the host to take photos, let alone notes.

Then came a three-day hike, which actually took five days because there's the getting there and the going back. One night we had a late-night steak and salad at a favorite Berkeley restaurant; another we dined in a new place in the same town; neither occasion requires much comment. And along the way we continued to eat leftover braised beef, which only got better.

We returned from the walk to house-guests, most welcome for among other things diverting us from a routine already diverted from the norm, and continued to eat leftover beef (gee, it was good, tender and flavorful, sweet and complex) and to drink leftover bottles of rosé and red.

Yesterday, though, we took them down to Berkeley to eat an early supper at that favorite Berkeley restaurant, where I had a faux-Caesar salad of Little Gem lettuces, anchovy sauce, and croutons, and then braised pork shoulder with figs and kale and polenta. Delicious, and the fruit basket pictured above was equally autumnal and beautiful (Bronx grapes, Flavor King pluots, figs); and the chocolate pavé… well, you know…

Txakolina, Bengoetxe (Spain, of course), 2013; then a glass of red

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510-848-5525
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Duck leg and salmon

Eastside Road, June 20, 2015—

TWO OF MY favorite dishes; two of my favorite places to eat; two consecutive days. Yesterday it was the plate you see to the left: a perfectly cooked duck leg, crisp on the outside, redolent with duck fat and salt; with it, green beans, escarole, and porcini on toast. I'd had a fine salad before, and a delicious dessert afterward (caramel-stracciatella ice cream, chocolate sauce), but it's the duck stays with me.

Aprémont; Dolcetto blend

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525

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TONIGHT WE DINED at home, on fresh-caught salmon that I'd grilled over fruitwood coals, along with some spring onions. The salmon had nothing on it but salt and a little bergamot zest (rescued from my Martini, if you want to know), and it was first-rate. With it, broccoli and favas; green salad afterward.

Cheap Pinot grigio

☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Mushrooms. Fish. Lamb.

	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…

• Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510-548-5525
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Poisson d'avril

Berkeley, April 1, 2015—

IN FRANCE AND ITALY it is not "April Fool"; it is poisson d'avril (or pesce d'aprile ); "April fish." I do not know the reason for this, and I'm not about to look for it; we're out of bandwidth here, again.

April 1 is also the anniversary of the opening of the Café Chez Panisse — it opened April 1, 1980; it is older than many of its employees and diners. As they say: the days go slow, the years fast.

The place was full of familiars, regulars, habitués; two old friends joined us at table. And here is how we feasted:

Hors d'oeuvres et Kir Royal : prosciutto, radishes, fennel, olives, duck rilettes on toasts (photo above)

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

Dolcetto d'Alba, Cà Viola, 2012 (three bottles, considerable bottle variation, very nice)

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510-548-5525
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

One of the best

Ashland, Oregon, March 11, 2015—

THIS REMAINS AMONG my favorite five restaurants in the world, and we wouldn't dream of driving past without stopping in. Here you see only one of the reasons: the photo is taken early, before other diners have appeared, from my chair at my table, in one of three small rooms, ours containing only two tables, each for two diners.

Ambiance. But also service: Vern's pleasant hosting and professional (and knowledgable!) wine service, and then the discreet, good-humored waitress, whose name I have once again forgotten…

But you can't eat any of that, and that's where Charlene comes in. After all these years she's still at the top of her form; I think she always will be. To my taste she excels at braises and other such slow-cooked preparations; perhaps her own career is a metaphor for that. We dined on, let's see: I write this up three days later, so I reconstruct from memory…

amuse-geuele: cannellini purée in a tiny profiterole
green salad with pickled grapes, green onion, and blue cheese
plat: grilled lamb chops with braised kale, garlic, potatoes, cannellini beans with tapenade vinaigrette
dessert:hazelnut meringue with coffee ice cream and honey caramel

a glass of Champagne; Bordeaux: Château Lacoste (Garzac), 2012; Moscatel dorado, César Florido

amuse-geuele	salad	grilled lamb chops	hazelnut meringue

• New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro, 2210 South Pacific Highway, Talent, Oregon; (541) 535-2779
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Oh, that café!

Berkeley, May 14, 2014 (but written May 18)—

I MUST ADMIT to an ambivalent attitude toward rabbit. (As a comestible, I mean: my feelings about the rodents in the garden are quite decided.) Much of this is purely sentimental: we raised rabbits when I was a kid, and I always hated them — dirty, fragile, ill-tempered, and needy when living; tough and bony when dead on the plate; thoroughly unpleasant in the brief violent transition between the two states.

It didn't help when I read somewhere, during my stormy adolescence I think, that when cooked they resembled (human) babies. When roasted whole, I suppose. So over the years we've generally avoided them when cooking at home, and in the usual course of things they don't turn up all that often on restaurant menus.

(There's one exception to our home cooking of rabbit, and that's in Ada Boni's estimable book Italian Regional Cooking, one of the great cookbooks of all time (and still to be found quite cheap on the Internet): here she gives a Coniglio in porchetta, I think — I'm too lazy to look for it just now — which involves mincing the rabbit's heart, liver, and so forth, and binding the result along with chopped garlic and basil, and stuffing the carcass with this, sewing it shut, then roasting it: a delicious meal.)

Well, this day we were in Berkeley, en route to seeing another play, and stopped in at the Café — you'll have guessed by now which — and there was prosciutto-wrapped rabbit on the menu, along with roasted fennel and lovely fat fresh green asparagus, a perfect springtime menu. It took no time at all to overcome my lingering prejudices against eating rodents (though in truth I think rabbits have been reclassified out of that order and are now Lagomorphs; but they'll always be rodents to me.)

The meat was boned, of course, and carefully wrapped in just the right amount of prosciutto, and reminded me of Ada Boni's recipe. And the entire meal, which I'd preceded with a garden lettuce salad, was succulent and memorable.



And then dessert: this absolutely gorgeous plate of fruit, and a delicous apricot tarte, with ice cream on the side… wonderful…

Chablis, Gilbert Picq, 2012: light, engaging, refreshing

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510-548-5525

Lunch back in the café

Eastside Road, April 22, 2014—

BACK TO BERKELEY yesterday, so lunch upstairs in the café, with a couple of acquaintances I'd like to get to know better — farmers, travelers, bons vivants. I began with a delicious little pizzetta with tomato sauce, brandade, green olives, and mint — an interesting and refreshing combination.

Then, because the next few weeks will be devoted to chicken research, this Riverdog Farm chicken confit, sliced breast and the drumstick, tender and nicely flavored, with good texture. On the plate, lentils and — a favorite of mine — celery root remoulade; with judicious capers and fried sage leaves. Almost makes me want to cook!

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525

For supper, all we needed was a small green salad from the garden and a couple of slices of toast with olive oil. And a glass of Barolo. We'll fast today…

Dinner in the café

Berkeley, April 17, 2014—

AND CONSTANT READER will know just what café is referred to. We dined at length and too well with an old friend who grows tangerines and avocados, and with two friends of hers who sell said produce at various Bay Area farmers' markets. We began with a bottle of rosé, is how well and extravagantly we ate and drank, and a fine pizza featuring, let's see, cavalonero?

[later edit: no: nettles, and perhaps feta. Thanks, Melissa!]


I set a photo of the last little bite of it down at the bottom of the page; the crust was perfect…

But for me the main course was the, well, main course, this succulent roast pork, with a delicious, tangy marmalade of savory grapes and currants — I'm working from memory here, and things got a little hazy toward the end of the evening… Fact is, another old friend, a winemaker, was in the next booth, and sent over some splendid bits of his work…

Rosé, Domaine Tempier, 2012; Chardonnay, Neyers "Chuy's Vineyard,"2012; Pinot noir, Neyers "Roberts Road," 2012; Zinfandel, Green and Red, 2012

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525

Away and at home

Eastside Road, April 1, 2014—

HERE YOU SEE, no April fooling, a bowl of minestrone, lovingly made by Cook of Things At Hand, and a fine way to end a rainy day — with, of course, a green salad afterward.

Cheap Barolo d'Asti

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BUT LAST NIGHT, ah, last night, now that was something different. We dined downstairs — Berkeleyans and family will know what that means — on a particularly fine Piemontese-feeling menu:

Spring vegetable salad with green garlic bagna cauda
¶
Arrosto di maiale al latte with spinach and grilled artichokes
¶
Cheese: BoDacious (chevre) (Bohemian Creamery)
¶
Page mandarin and grapefruit sorbetto with blood orange granita

Bagna cauda, chez nous, is generally a cup of hot olive oil with lots of crushed garlic and anchovy and maybe, yes these days I would say certainly, a bit of butter, kept hot at table over a flame, into which we dip bread, raw vegetables including certainly cardoon, and other things I'm forgetting at the moment — you could look it up. Hardboiled eggs come to mind.

At this table though Bagna cauda was much more discreet, as you'll see below. The salad involved green garlic stems, tiny turnips, lettuces of course, and raw early spring green peas, with the tiniest drizzle of perfect Bagna cauda threading its way through: hard to think of a more perfect combination of plates which I'd otherwise have thought mutually exclusive.

As to Maiale al latte: when I was a boy, roast pork was a frequent luxury at the dinner table. Even more frequent, though almost never served with roast pork, was what we always called milk gravy. (I did not grow up in a kosher household.) To make milk gravy, as I think I've mentioned here before, you added a little flour to the skillet after you've roasted or fried the meat (which has of course been put on a cold plate to get cold and greasy); you scrumbled it around in the drippings with a spatula (in those days called a "pancake turner"); then you poured in some milk, continuing to scrub things around to make a clotted sauce that tasted much better, fortunately, than my description might suggest.

So meat and milk is a serious and comforting thread in my makeup, unlike meat and cheese, about which I whined the other day. I'm not sure how this Maiale was cooked, but I know (because I asked) that it spent a couple of hours roasting. I don't think we've ever actually eaten Maiale al latte in Piemonte, and I'm not sure we've had it elsewhere in Italy. Roast pork always brings two things to mind: first, my childhood home, when it was usually leg of pork, frequently from one of our own pigs, and had been roasted in the oven of our wood-fired cookstove, and had been flavored with salt, pepper, and garlic salt.

Second, Rome. Porchetta is a Roman glory, one of many of course, but certainly one. No garlic salt would ever have come near it; there should be as little industrialization as possible. This dish was superb. The artichokes set it off exactly right, recalling the Bagna cauda through mental association with cardoons; the spinach added iron and verdure; the meat itself was beautifully flavored and tender as Fitzgerald's Night.

And then the sorbetti, made no doubt from those delicious Ojai citruses from Churchill Orchard — lots of pointed flavor, cold and crisp, the tattered granita setting off the scoops of sorbetto as the Bagna cauda had the salad. Menu with memory, that's what I like, and this one will stay in mine for quite a while!

Seco Ca' del Merlo, Giuseppe Quintarelli (Veneto), 2011 (a splendid apéritif, not quite assertive enough against the Bagna cauda); Basadone (da Pelaverga Piccolo), Castello di Verduno (Piemonte), 2012 (rich, deep, not heavy, fruity and delicious)

• Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525

salad with Bagna cauda	Maiale al latte	Sorbetti

Lunch in the café

Berkeley, October 22, 2013—

THE USUAL APOLOGY for the terrible photo, which can't convey the delicious salad: grilled albacore with green beans and cherry tomatoes, dressed with a light vinaigrette incorporating olive tapenade.

Next, succulent pork loin, very fine-grained and flavorful, with zucchini and Nardello peppers, salsa verde on the side — a course that rhymed, you might say, with the earlier one: tapenade and salsa verde, pork and albacore, peppers and green beans. Such things can't be accidental.

I had a dessert, too: ginger cake with poached Bosc pears and crème Chantilly. Delicious!

Jurançon Sec, “Vitatge Viehl”, Clos Lapeyre (Pyrenées), 2009: smooth, a little assertive, at its peak at this age

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525

Catching up

Eastside Road, September 27, 2013—

LET'S SEE, NOW, how long has it been? Since Monday? Sorry: we've been rushing about. Tuesday it was fusilli al pesto at home, with a bottle of cheap red Italian wine.

Wednesday we were in San Francisco, and stopped off at a favorite restaurant for a Martini and a hamburger. Well: before the hamburger, this delicious little plate of arugula, Parmesan, celery, anchovies, and olives, a refreshing way to begin anything, and particularly nice with the Martini. Elective affinities.

The hamburgers here are first-rate, on foccaccia bread, with pickled onion and gherkins and very nice catsup and aïoli. If only for the hamburger, this remains one of the Hundred Restaurants:

• Zuni Café, 1658 Market Street, San Francisco; 415-552-2522Yesterday we were in Berkeley, and stopped in at another old favorite. (In our justification: we're hosts to a houseguest from out of the country, and we're showing him around.) Here I lunched on another refreshing first-course salad: rocket, again, with cucumbers and radishes in a soft, fragrant vinaigrette.

Following which, this absolutely memorable plate of bucatini alle sarde, with sardine, currants, pine nuts, saffron, and toasted bread crumbs — a dish that managed to take me to both Sicily and Venice, simultaneously, with none of that Italian mainland in between. (Appropriate, perhaps, since in the evening we visited Sicily and the coast of Bohemia, via Shakespeare.)

Godello, A Coroa (Valdeorras, Spain), 2012: complex and flavorful; Zinfandel, Green & Red Vineyards (Napa Valley), 2011

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525