MaxH

May I second that good advice? I had specific good experience (not current but in the last few years) with [Edit:] Grgich Hills and Ridge Monte Bello 1991 Cabernets. The latter especially is built to age (see related comments in Wine Bible book thread, FYI) and has been offered directly by the winery very recently, including as part of gift packs. (www.ridgewine.com or telephone the winery.) Also had good experience with red Burgundies of 1991.

Like IlCuoco and others, I find useful the Oxford Companion to Wine and Tom Stevenson's "New Sotheby" Wine Encyclopedia. (Oxford is into 2nd edition. Stevenson gets criticism that his periodic revisions are only slight; I haven't checked, but regardless, it's a unique single-volume reference, including history and geography that don't change much.) Both are solid modern reference books* useful to anyone seriously interested in wine, though they aren't tutorials or introductions. Here's more on an area (California) where I have a lot of literature. Jim's excellent reading list above, which includes classic wine books, mentioned for California the Thompson atlas (long respected), Haeger on Pinot Noir, and California Wine by Laube of the Wine Spectator, which I'll mention by way of review. I'm just reading it (2nd ed.) so this is an early impression. Its strength looks like an encyclopedic scope of current California wineries and tasting comments. (Laid out somewhat like earlier books by other authors that do the same for European regions.) Introductory and historical chapters are concise; what I've read there is available in many sources. Speaking of which, I've spotted so far only one source reference by Laube himself and no bibliography; and it's interesting what important names and wineries in California wine history don't appear at all. To be fair, introduction and history don't seem to be the book's point, current information is. A repeated declaration by Laube caught my attention, though. "It's my view that virtually all California wines, regardless of their color, varietal character or history, are best consumed in their youth." I'm in accord, when we're talking about wines made to be consumed young. The logical problem here is that many wines, not necessarily expensive, that made California's reputation in the 1950s and 60s, ranked high in international blind tastings of the 1970s, are still popular, and that Laube himself cites with respect, were made deliberately to age, after millennia of experience in France, Italy, etc. Laube may have set aside all of this traditional and current California practice but the wine world has not. When the popular Squires wine Web site ran a blind poll a year or two ago for the most respected current US winemakers, top choice of the thousands of votes was a longtime California maker whose main Cabernet is undrinkable for 10 years and nectar later, and whose meaty Zinfandels (a varietal he helped popularize) can develop for 30. This seems to me an eccentricity on Laube's part as a critic (which may well suit some readers' tastes), though he is forthright about it. On the bigger subject of California wine lit (this posting is already long, and I've recommended several books here earlier), there are many major and minor books in the post-Prohibition era and occasionally a heavyweight classic appears. I have examples of those from 1940s, 1950s, 1970s, 1980s. All are available used, often effortlessly (through tie-ins at amazon.com etc.) In the 1980s an unprecedented consortium of experts and organizations put out the landmark University of California Press Book of California Wine* (ISBN 0520050851),** 44 authors. Definitely a heavyweight (kilograms!) and maybe unique in range and depth. Obviously not a reference for today's vintages, but that's not what it was about even when published. When you know this book, you have a better idea than most people do about what really is "new" in California and what is not. Abundantly available (amazon.com currently shows numerous copies starting around USD $6). Cheers -- Max *Books I marked with asterisk share a special distinction that is a powerful recommendation: factual faux-pas in US wine journalism that I spotted in the past year (and sometimes wrote in about) would not have happened if the writers had checked these books. **FYI (Jim), though books themselves retain the traditional dashes when printing an ISBN, these are unnecessary in online searches and often omitted. You can copy and paste a dashless ISBN into any online book search or Web browser.

(Hi Bill, good to hear from you again!) I'm no expert on these wines, but thought I'd mention that this genre has some passionate and opinionated fans. Some people strongly prefer the style of, say, Vieux Télégraphe to Beaucastel, or vice versa,* even though many others enjoy both. (A member of a tasting group once declared flippantly that his notion of hell was a Beaucastel vertical. ) V. T. by the way used to be fairly cheap, say early or middle 1980s when Kermit Lynch was trying to interest people in it (in my part of the US anyway). Some years later I noticed it was no longer even slightly cheap, and was even allocated. * Early 1980s Cartoon: "How to be a PBS viewer. Have cats named after minor Shakespeare characters. Keep bowls of esoteric English candies. Prefer jazz to classical, or vice versa ..." [For non-US readers, PBS is a noncommercial TV network formerly dubbed "educational" television.]

How about Egri Bikaver, the famous Hungarian "Bull's Blood" wine? (Remember that according to the Wine Institute's numbers, at least when I checked a year or two back, the nations with the largest average per-capita wine consumption -- much higher than the US for example -- were concentrated in three regions, only one of which gets cited much in US writing: The Mediterranean, parts of Latin America, and Eastern Europe.) Cheers -- Max

Thanks froggio for this rather encyclopedic posting. The Gros family is an extreme example to use, both in the number of related different Gros firms now, and in quality of results. As you seem to be interested in this stuff, a word to the wise is to be careful with quips re RP. He has strengths and weaknesses like most wine critics, but unlike most of them he also has ardent followers quick to accuse any critique of ulterior motives, envy, being in British pay, etc. &c. For entertainment value I'll quote a late scholar of ideologies and how they work. That's a big subject, not related to wine or critics, but it makes a larger point about followers. Ideologies, whether Positivist, or Marxist, or National Socialist, indulge in constructions that are intellectually not tenable. That raises the question of why [scholars] who otherwise are not quite stupid, and who have the secondary virtues of being honest in their daily affairs, indulge in intellectual dishonesty as soon as they touch [these subjects]. ... The various ideologies after all have been [looked at closely], and anybody who is willing to read the literature knows that they are not tenable, and why. ... The overt phenomenon of intellectual dishonesty then raises the question of why a man will indulge in it. -- E. Voegelin, after recalling his flight from the Geheimes Staatspolizei in 1938.

I resonate with the spirit of these comments. There is some real range of neighborhoods in the region though, beyond the abstract ideal of walking to famous restaurants, and even if we also omit what you might call the other extreme: neighborhoods whose violent crime rates exceed those of fair-sized countries elsewhere in the world. Excluding those extremes still leaves most of the neighborhoods in the Bay Area, a broad look at which would underline eje's "almost" above. Some rapid development in late 20th century produced even relatively affluent suburbs that are dramatically pedestrian-unfriendly and whose consumer businesses consisted mainly of corporate chains planned into strip malls.* I could give eje tours of neighborhoods putting his "almost" into stark relief. Nor do I mean Sebastopol and Petaluma, both of which have particularly charming livable unpretentious old neighborhoods -- Petaluma's downtown is worth checking out if you don't know it, and Sebastopol of all places is a gem of a North Bay town that has had excellent restaurants. (Despite being a little cold and misty sometimes, not to dwell on the handicap of being pronounced "wrong."** Still, the error is not disrespectful, unlike with "vuh-LAY-yo.) *One major city expanded, a few decades ago, almost desperately and -- my apologies to anyone who must look this up, but it's an utterly perfect metaphor, from physics -- "adiabatically" as a friend called it at the time. This town was described in the Wall Street Journal during its rapid growth as the worst-planned city in the US, a point reiterated locally in the recent election. Another town became literally a textbook negative case study in city planning (according to a co-worker whose niece studied it in college), consisting originally (if I remember) of a few uncoordinated housing and commercial developments many decades ago, whose developers sold them and departed, without provision for infrastructure such as city services, schools, etc., and which has been the butt of jokes in the region for 100 years. Both of these examples, by the way, have improved their livability considerably since those days, though adiabaticity remains visible. ** If I remember my ah-beh-veh-gheh-deh-yeh-yoh-zheh, the famous original on the Crimean peninsula is pronounced something like (in US phoneticization) syev-uh-STO-pol.

Thing is, Santana Row stands out as sort of incongruous, because it's a self-contained village assembled recently in the middle of an area that was already built up. But it has siblings elsewhere that show off more obviously the benefits of this new multi-use or "village" type of new construction. Above I mentioned a parallel (2003) development in San Mateo where open fields used to be. That complex accompanied buildings for some large employers and CalTrain. Literally some residents walk to work. That's true of most parts of the Bay Area where people want to live. (It goes along with steady numbers of people arriving from out of town to fill good jobs, complaining that the region is crowded, expensive, has too much traffic, etc. etc. Occasionally, they will reflect that these are all different facets of one and the same situation. But the irony of, for instance, a new arrival with out-of-area license plates complaining about traffic congestion is usually grasped only from a distance.)

Robyn and Bede and Pim have it right: soul-draining commutes separate otherwise great food neighborhoods from Peninsula jobs. Bay Area cities never adopted the comprehensive, regional approach to public transit done in many comparable modern population centers. (Bay Area mass transit is a patchwork of systems some of which work well. For instance, contradicting its name, the "Bay Area" Rapid Transit District embraces only part of the Bay Area, whose individual towns even picked and chose elements of BART during planning; some towns refused it completely.) Where transit works, people don't notice; but regionally there are vast "holes" where (Burt Nye's famous line, rural Maine accent) You Cahn't Get Theah From Heah. From the Oakland-Berkeley-Albany area to the mid-peninsula or South Bay you drive, with lots of company. These commutes were wretched 25 years ago, they're grotesque now. (Experience speaking.) Otherwise, North Berkeley and the Rockridge are among the best pedestrian food-enthusiast spots in the Bay Area. (North Berkeley's is the most famous: the Gourmet Ghetto and its history have many past postings on eGullet and elsewhere.) All such Bay Area food zones I know about have one thing in common: they are in districts built up in pre-automobile days, with pedestrian life in mind. Unlike post-1950 suburbs, though there's a recent reversal of this [1]. Other charming traditional pedestrian business districts are found all over the Bay Area. Besides some mentioned already, those with restaurant concentrations and small-town feel include downtown Burlingame (Broadway), downtown San Mateo (3rd Avenue), and the California Avenue neighborhood of Palo Alto with its modest but unique, very popular group of restaurants. All of these have convenient CalTrain stops. (Though none I believe approaches the restaurant count of downtown Mountain View mentioned upthread.) Downtown Redwood City is also on CalTrain. I don't know it much, but a few years ago it put a promotional billboard on Highway 101: "Downtown Redwood City: Palo Alto without the attitude." Its slogan from an earlier era was revived in modern times on a neon sign, visible from the train: Climate Best, by Government Test! [1] Remarkably the pendulum of city planning has swung back to the older wisdom of this "village" approach. You can witness this in the recent construction of complete self-contained villages merging residences, workplaces, businesses, and, mirabile dictu, even transit -- cars are optional, some residents don't need them. A radical reversal from "bedroom communities" of the Shopping Mall Era. Examples of the new style are at Santana Row in San José and, even more markedly, the San Mateo complex (name?) on former Bay Meadows racetrack land off E. Hillsdale near Hwy 101.

Hard to answer for the whole Bay Area, indeed I don't know if anyone has the comprehensive perspective to answer the question objectively. (I don't, despite 45 years in the region, most of them frequenting restaurants.) Having said that though, several older small downtowns and SF neighborhoods have strong pedestrian-friendly restaurant concentrations. One unusually dense example (though not widely known outside the immediate area) is downtown Mountain View, two towns south of Menlo Park, on the CalTrain commuter line.* This is a small business district established a little more than 100 years ago, about four blocks long, embracing currently 87 restaurants and coffee and tea houses. This density compares to (for instance) Vienna's 1st district or parts of Hong Kong. The downtown MV Caltrain station is also right at the restaurant zone. Conveniently, a local family that eats out undertook to track the restaurants independently online, Here. That directory is updated often. I mentioned some of the restaurants (and the directory) on this forum before. Edited to append: On side streets off the same district are at least three parks (the city has a practice of buying up lots occasionally and converting them to local parks), and a Farmers' Market on Sundays. Good luck -- Max * Once when I worked around a lot of European expats in the region, one of them, from Germany, spoke of the convenience of the CalTrain for himself and friends to go beer drinking, up and down the SF peninsula in all the little downtowns served by this train line. "Some of them have very good beer, and the trains even have convenient restrooms!" Since then, these downtowns have become known informally as the "train towns" and builders have accommodated the interest, among younger people especially, in living near the line and commuting on it, European-style. There's even a special freebie newspaper in newsracks (called what -- Whistle Stop?) organized around this trend.

Yes, there are some very down-to-earth winemakers around Burgundy, and they know their business. The accounts ring true to my experiences there. (I quoted the same LeFlaive here earlier this year, from when she was showing her wines, in This thread.) While I'm at it, here's another remark from Jeremy Seysses a few days ago. "It's very much a Côte-de-Nuits thing to [sample] the whites after the reds. It's also natural, because many firms there just produce one white." The business about a sommelier browbeating a customer over a genuinely corked wine is outrageous. (Assuming the customer knew corkiness and was correct in identifying it, a reasonable assumption since many people know the issue.) I will say that most of the capable somms I've run into, and this holds at least as much in France as anywhere else, are very decent people and are basically wine lovers who made a job of it, and they resonate with wine-enthusast diners and like to share the enthusiasm. Of course people are people too.

Sure! Several years ago I strolled the aisles of a warehouse-type wine shop with a fine-wine newbie who'd expressed an interest in Burgundies. This particular shop had eclectic inventory. From open boxes on each side of the aisle I pulled out leading white and red produce from vineyards under the Societé Civile du Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and casually suggested these two wines for a well-balanced collection (in order to see the reaction). The white's price tag said $1400 and the red's $4000. (Le Montrachet and Romanée-Conti vineyards respectively.) The suggestion was of course tongue-in-cheek. (I handled the bottles carefully.) Ironically the report of the Pétrus above is a report on our times at least as much as on the wine. I remember in 1980 that you could (a) find Pétrus bottles on shelves from the 1970s; I priced the 1970 (it was under $100, in 1980 dollars) and (b) more broadly, you'd find the last decade or so in shops. The inventory stayed on the market for years, and got pricier as it got older. Where would the price of Pétrus be without so much name recognition and trophy value? What does this say about where astute consumers seek fine-wine values?

Maybe what's really needed here (and for variations of this situation that recur all the time, especially but not exclusively in the US) is an Index of Affected Marketing Pronunciations (IAMP for short). You know what I mean. Synthetic company names (overwrought by expensive consultants, with contrived image "positioning" in mind) that need days of practice, or indoctrination, in order to pronounce. Use of punctuation or accents to achieve a highly artificial result. Celebrities with commonplace given names that they then insist on pronouncing abnormally after they're celebrities (and therefore putatively less commonplace). A separate point but along related lines: In late 2000 at the peak of the dot-com boom, after reading too many gobbledygook Mission Statements and buzzword advertisements by start-up vaporware firms (spending investors' money in great style, and even boasting about it), I promulgated a High-Tech Startup Horsesh*t Index or HTSHI. The HTSHI derives from a classic mathematical information measure (the Hamming distance). In fact, I was able briefly to discuss the idea with the late R. W. Hamming while he was still alive. The HTSHI calculates a score, for a given chunk of writing, based on how many (and how bad) are the hackneyed buzzwords ("paradigm," "total enterprise space," etc.). This, by the way, resonated with some high-tech people who eagerly added to the working list of buzzwords and weights. (Including one friend whose own high-tech firm has an artificial name no normal person can pronounce.) But high-tech-startup doubletalk is a small and specialized genre of baloney. The creator of a successful, crisp absurdity measure for affected pronunciations intended to "sell" things would do a service to mankind.

Thanks for the suggestions, Melkor. That sounds discouraging. (I'd still be interested to hear which places those were.) While also encountering some mediocre meals, I've done pretty well in the South Bay the last 15 years, going on reliable recommendations (when I came to the area, the first thing I did was inquire on the Internet -- only one Bay Area food forum then -- and the results were excellent). Have you tried restaurants recommended in this thread? Many people have had good experiences with them. (There was a related thread in late 2004.) With slight overlap from earlier, here are a few of the well-regarded ethnic restaurants that are the region's strength. They tend to be Asian (in the full, inclusive sense, from Japanese to Persian, not to mention the number of restaurants run by Turks). Afghani House, Sunnyvale near Santa Clara border (408 248 5088) -- Leading Afghani, of three run by cousins Chelokababi, Sunnyvale (408 737 1222) -- Persian Habana-Cuba, Race St., San José (408 988 2822) -- A "find" Kabul, Sunnyvale (408 245 4350) -- Cousin of Afghani House Regarding Chinese restaurants, Santa Clara County has one of the most diverse concentrations of them in the US, Macanese to Singaporean, owing to heavy immigration. Here are personal recommendations in local business districts, very roughly south to north. Each of these comments reflects six visits or more to the restaurant. ABC Seafood, 768 Barber Lane (Ufferts Center, frontage road off 880), Milpitas -- Quality dim sum with unusual menu items not found in most dim sum houses. There are couple other ABCs scattered around. Fatima, Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road (Hwy 9) near 85 -- One of several good Muslim Chinese places. High standards, hard-working. Thick green-onion breads with sesame seeds, deep-fried "shrimp rolls" with mushrooms (worth a trip for those alone IMO); soups w/paper-thin lamb and cilantro. China Stix, Santa Clara on El Camino (408 244 1684) -- Folksy place, fresh hand-pulled noodles cooked into daily specials with fresh produce. Huge popularity locally caused it to expand in the 1990s. Haven't been in a while. Hunan Gourmet, downtown Sunnyvale (408 739 8866) -- Classy lunch service. Cafe Yulong, downtown Mountain View (650 960 1677) -- James and Miya Pei. Unusual specialties, Shandong province, kimchee on table, may be overall best Chinese (of the 11) in downtown MV. More in This Review. Chef Liu, downtown Mountain View (236 Castro) -- Hand-pulled noodles in soups and chow mein. Try the noodle soup with pork and preserved Szechuan vegetables. On a cold day. (The broth has white pepper. Comfort food.) Hunan Chili, downtown Mountain View (102 Castro) -- Hunan specialties, good value. Exceptional classic Ma Po tofu (do fu): lemony and shocking with generous Szechuan peppercorns. There are literally hundreds more, including good ones I haven't mentioned.

Hi Melkor. Can you recall any more specifics of the places you liked and did not like?Downtown SJ, to take just part of a sprawling town, is known locally for its range of restaurant offerings (see Supplement below). As a local office-building and entertainment area, the downtown has a concentration of middle to upper-middle restaurants used for business dining and before or after shows. Here are some examples of that description from my own notes, where I've had multiple good experiences: A. P. Stump’s, downtown San José (408 292 9928) -- Began, 1999, high-end, in remodeled Masson pre-Prohibition sparkling-wine building. Switched or repositioned to chop-house theme, post-dotcom. Eulipia, downtown San José (408 280 6161) -- Many ownership changes over the years, but some good large events there Il Fornaio, downtown San José only (Hyatt Sainte Claire, 408 271 3366) -- Italian brasserie; a distinctive entry in a small chain; program of visiting Italian chefs with different local cuisines, announced in a newsletter. La Pastaia, De Anza Hotel, downtown San José (408 286 8686) 71 Saint Peter, downtown San José (408 971 8523) -- One of the San Pedro Square cluster (like AP Stumps and Spiedo) Note that San Pedro Square is one downtown commercial block. Its Web Site lists 18 restaurants there. -- Supplement: The following list of 78 downtown San José restaurants within walking distance (comparable to the denser 84 currently in Mountain View's small-town downtown) is obsolete. Newspaper and travel sites have more current lists. But it at least suggests the diversity. Abigail's Pub Andale Taqueria Beck's Downtown Cafe Boudin Sourdough Bakery and Cafe Ca Mau Restaurant Cafe Fame California Sushi and Grill Casa Castillo C'est Bon Charlie's Diner Chez Croissant China Wok Chinatown Seafood Restaurant City Cafe and Deli Crepe Shoppe Dac Phuc Restaurant DiMattia's Pizza and Pasta Cafe Don Pedro's Downtown Tobacco and News El Maghreb Moroccan Restaurant El Paraiso Emile's Eulipia Fat Cat's Pizza on Wheels Flo's Char-Co Grill Fountain Restaurant, Fairmont Hotel The Freshly Baked Eatery Garden City Market Gerard's Club Jazz Gervais Goldie's Barbecue Gordon Biersch Brewery and Restaurant Grande Pizzeria Henry's Hi-Life Hoagie's Food and Beverage Company Hochburg von Germania Horn of Africa House of Pizza Hung Ky Restaurant Infiniti La Pastaia La Taqueria Las Cazuelas Lee's Sandwiches Little King Marisco's Inda No. 2 Marsugi's Bar and Grill Mini Club Restaurant O! Deli The Old Spaghetti Factory Original Joe's Pagoda Restaurant, Fairmont Hotel The Parrot Restaurant, Holiday Inn Peking House Restaurant Phoenix Espresso Cafe Pierce's Coffee Shop Pizza A Go Go Pho Hien Vietnamese Restaurant Quoc Te Restaurant Rue de Paris Sal and Luigi Pizzeria Scott's Seafood Grill and Bar Second Street Deli Silver Max Sizzler Subway Sandwiches Sweet Darling Cafe Teske's Germania Restaurant and Bar Thanh Huong Sandwich Shop Thanh Huonz Thepthai Thai Cuisine Tico's Tacos Tio Nacho Trieu Chau Restaurant Trine's Cafe #2 Victorian Garden Restaurant Wok Express Yeung's Sung Yuan Restaurant

Filling in some details from earlier: That major raw seafood source is Tomales Bay Oysters. Been in business forever. Tip: bring a cooler to keep the mollusci cold, unless you are staying near and can promptly refrigerate. The good breakfast place I know is indeed (literal name) Pine Cone Diner.

Hi kiliki, can you be more specific about this criticism? My friends and I have had pretty good luck there even in the last couple years. (I often get a seafood special over linguine; some prefer the fried foods.) Can't compare it back more than 10 years or so, but we still like to go back, and find the place a good addition to the other local offerings. Haven't tried Vlad's Czech place, but seen it (near the national seashore). One friend looked in for a snack and she said that Vlad showed up in riding breeches, carrying a riding crop or sword or something (adding to his colorful image), and said something authoritative (like "we're closed") so she hasn't tried it either.

Not sure what's obvious and what's not; but there's a fair amount of eating slightly up and down the coast from Pt Reyes Station proper. Tony's, few miles up the coast (15-minute drive) is widely known and popular locally. Fresh seafood specials, right on the water. Old-fashioned friendly family-style place. Tomales Bay Foods in Reyes itself, mentioned already, has done semi-catered dinners, i.e, you pick up multiple courses, ready to serve, very reasonably priced. But call them in advance for current availability. Slightly south, in Olema, are a couple of places -- hotel restaurant, local café, etc., no direct experience to report though. You can also get fresh oysters in bulk, a very longtime local specialty: fans of them have been known to behave strangely, as if drawn by a spell, from other parts of the Bay Area. You have been warned. Edited to add: 1. Forgot to mention, there've been some good Breakfasts at a local diner-like hangout in Reyes itself, I forget the name, and the Reyes-Olema file's elsewhere. Driving through town from the south, you go through the main business street (supermarket on right, bookstores and later tie-die places on left). I remember the breakfast restaurant as further in the same direction a couple blocks, on a side street to the left. Somebody can probably add more. 2. Usual approach to the region from points east and south is via Sir Francis Drake Blvd (which comes directly off both Hwy 101 and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge road) through multiple Marin-County towns, liesurely but picturesque, finally through a forest preserve to the coastal road at Olema. Don't, unless you have a good reason or are traveling at an unusual hour, try to get there along the coast from the south (via Stinson Beach). The problem there is not the drive up from Stinson (which is pleasant) but getting to Stinson from further south. The small road winds up and down tortuously, one lane each way and often blind, and you will often find a huge tourist car with out-of-state plates -- a large dark-red Ford maybe, driver wearing a golf hat -- going ten miles an hour with infinite ease and serenity, and 30 impatient cars backed up behind hitting their brakes jerkily. It can cause delay, among other effects.

Here are notes accumulated, last couple years, on two high-end restaurants of the six or eight well established in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties (all have now been mentioned on this forum); three French brasseries, one of them (Left Bank) in the form of a chain; and a new restaurant, Quattro. (By the way, I started posting Internet notes on Bay Area restaurants 20-some years ago. After eventually moving to the particular region of this thread, it took time to fully realize how many good, unique restaurants it does have. They're far-flung in both style and geography.) Marché (chef Howard Bulka, www.restaurantmarche.com) is in downtown Menlo Park. I've had several small and large dinners there last several years and characterize Bulka's style as elegant comfort food. For instance, one time for a group "gastronomic" dinner around certain serious wines he made oversized (4-inch square?) duck-breast raviolis drizzled with meat juices, counterposed to bitter greens and a mound of God damned garlic puree. (Animally satisfying, with a rich red wine.) That's what I mean by elegant comfort food. Bulka told me that to make this dish he must sacrifice at least one raviolum to check the cooking, and therefore needs multiple people to order it, and it's not on his menu, but he'd do it for, say, four people or more, given advance arrangement. Also I and a friend had an interesting experience there when one of the region's great wine collectors dropped in, but that's another story of little service to the question. 231 Ellsworth, downtown San Mateo (off third) and a good value, established itself well last decade then went through a reconstitution early this decade. You may occasionally run into, say, Clive Coates there (the British writer on wines of Burgundy). Hip and businesslike and new to Palo Alto this year is Quattro in the new Four Seasons hotel, part of an exotic circular complex at the old Whisky Gulch. I was at a banquet function there earlier this year with special "theme" food, and they did it very well. Chef was from the Milan area. Many Europeans work there. The bathroom was so stylish as to be humorously awkward (sink a huge very shallow porcelain square, hard to reach the fixtures.) Being a new enterprise of an upstart chain (the WSJ reported recently something about Four Seasons taking market share from the Ritz-Carlton, in high-end chain hotel business) the personnel were understandably eager and professional. Local Frenchoid brasserie chain Left Bank, which opened additional locations the last couple years in Santana Row and San Mateo, sticks to formula recipes, some of which tend to be unusually sweet (e.g., onion soup) or bland. I've been now to maybe 20 dinners and lunches including most of the locations more than once. Best experiences at Santana Row and San Mateo. Had, for instance at Santana Row, very finely done shellfish (prawns, mussels) with citrus zests and Pernod, and a devastating tarte Tatin of caramelized apples and leaf pastry, for those fortunate not to fill up on savory courses. (The kitchen's sweet touch works well there.) Moderate price points are part of the format, which includes well-known French food-wine posters (Santé, gaieté, espérance!) and Real Grammatical French on menus though some staff struggle over its pronunciation which is a little incongruous. On the other hand a couple of dinners at Santana Row had gross mechanistic problems. Wine glasses were brought to the table greasy, dusty, and fingerprinted at one business dinner; then a big food-wine organization's banquet became a comedy of service problems and sustained confusion. I've had other, detailed reports of bizarre service problems there. For independent, lovingly done casual French food I'd instantly choose Le Petit Bistro, upthread, or Brigitte's in Santa Clara (www.brigittescuisine.com .) Each is small, independent, consistent, unpretentious, has French cooks and servers, and is no more expensive.

So too in the US. The word is ambiguous. (There's even argument about the words grill vs. barbecue for the equipment.) BBQ gets used to describe the tool, the food, or a dinner party based on either (usually outdoors). And styles and flavorings of "barbecued" meat vary greatly within the US. Texas is known for certain styles, Kansas City for others. (Connoisseurs will talk your ear off.) Pervading North Carolina is a chipped, vinegary style of "barbecued" pork, delicious when done well, but unrecognizable to people who assume that "babecue" must have tomato sauce or obvious smoking. It looks more like the Austrian specialty beuschel (made from beef lungs) than anything else I can think of. Uncle Frank's comes from a couple of far-south states and is none of the above.

Thanks alanamoana. Within the US it's hard to imagine a metropolitan restaurant scene to compare with NYC's. The range, the standards, the vibrancy. On the Pacific coast, historically the largest population center until 70 years after the Gold Rush was San Francisco (constrained to a tiny fraction of the land of Manhattan). The region in this thread is younger still, and highly suburban. But also vibrant, and motivated people accomplish remarkable gastronomy. You have to drive, though.

1. Thanks for the report! Plenty history in that place. Original purpose-built "power lunch" venue in silicon valley starting about two booms ago, with little competition indeed. Even had a stock-ticker display near the bar. Opened by Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame; appears in 1986 edition of the SF Chronicle's restaurant-reviews book. Busy in the early-middle 1990s: you'd see Bushnell, other local industry celebrities, negotiations over lunch. Got serious competition from Birk's down the highway, when that opened. 2. Thanks alanamoana for reprising relevant threads promptly here. This Bay Area subregion, population some 3 million, actually is rich in diverse, unique modest to upper-middle level restaurants, often ethnic, but they are scattered all over. With some concentrations like Downtown Mountain View (84 restaurants currently, within four-block radius) and the Willow Glen district of San José (does it have an online index too? Please post, anyone). This far-flung region commands periodic threads, I wish we could collect the articles in one place for the queries that arise, because many people travel through, or come for business, school, etc. (The old Bay Area Restaurant Guide site, 1994-1997, collected them like that.) Even the necessary search terms are far-flung. 3. Consistently excellent insightful honest French brasserie eating just recently at Le Petit Bistro, Mountain View near Palo Alto, 1405 West El Camino Real (650 964 3321, dinners 5:30-9:30 PM). I think it's been mentioned here before but wow. This is a family-owned modest French restaurant that sticks to its knitting. French-born second generation has run it for years, local regulars support it. Unpretentious cuisine bourgeoise done with taste and integrity. Everything sang: A-la-carte specials of mussels with a Pernod "tomato" sauce. (I suggested change in specials board wording: "tomato sauce" implies thick puree to many; this was a spicy Mediterranean sauce almost as for a bouillabaisse, with some tomato in it and finely diced aromatic vegetables.) The sauce was a main part of the dish. With some bread, a meal in itself. Then special of crab tartlettes, delicate, little cheese sauce, small. Special of beef filet "bourguignon" (I asked and yes, stewed filet! -- marinated in advance with wine and aromatics, French-style). Sounded good, was better. With pauses to digest (server even brought up the trou Normand ritual for such situations but Calvados unavailable) onion soup followed by simple French-style leaf salad with tart mustard vinaigrette, garnished by three piles of shredded root vegetables of different colors, some lightly dressed, some not. Very European (cold vegetable salads are more common there than in US, unlike 100 years ago I gather). Anyway no room for any desserts alas. Books scattered on the tables: on crêpes, Bocuse, etc. I've dined at this place a few times and noticed this time the sequence of "on" dishes at moderate price. Food like a Sunday dinner in a warm French family home. Check it out. (Edited to garnish the salad.)

I believe the sequence was more like the revolutionary government grabbed the lands and sold them off for cash (along with everything else), then a dictator seized power and used the peasants as cannon fodder in a bid to conquer the world. (Did you know, apropos, that of all books ever in print, some 0.1% of them are biographies of that dictator? I Am Not Making This Up.)Marie Antoinette seems to be misperceived lately. Her qu'ils mangent des brioches, I hear, was actually an effort to be helpful (by a Habsburg girl, who like siblings may not have been too swift, and who was raised in big houses where if you ran out of bread, you could find brioche). I know what you mean. Not I, but a fellow student bought the Tâche, 1971, for $30 (on sale from $40) at a good merchant in Boston, late 1970s. (With inflation, say $80 now.) Gave a bottle to his professor on leaving. The professor, whose self-described wine experience was "I like a good Manischewitz," spoke to me in awe after tasting the wine. Moved almost to tears.

Certainly not, busboy. ("Cliché" as in familiar -- it's no comment on quality.) That's the second straw-man you've assembled here from my remarks and then answered. Here's the first: ... if you can look me in the eye and tell me that a $20 lesser appellation Burgundy captures the majesty of a Le Montrachet ... I will cease and desist.We address different things. For many years I've heard people hold forth that (say) all drinkable Burgundies cost over $50 (or whatever sum), which is baloney of course, as you know if you know Burgundies. Unless, that is, you limit yourself to names everyone mentions. The point, in its price range, doesn't concern top Burgundies (Le Montrachet) but shows the problem with buying just well-known wines.Deeper perspective difference might emerge from examining a sentiment (with a famous precedent) in the first post: In 1980 or 81 Robert Finigan, who was then a, or the, leading general US wine-newsletter writer, complained of high Burgundy prices. This brought a reply from Aubert de Villaine (of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti which of course makes several wines named here). De Villaine observed -- this is from memory, but close -- that Finigan was grousing because current prices made "the glass of Chambertin a luxury; but is that not what it is, a luxury in our time, just as it was in 1750, when a bottle of La Tâche cost as much as a postman's weekly salary?" In other words, people have noticed luxury wine prices for centuries. (They seem always to regard this as new.) Posts here of that kind, if I read them right, begin by assuming that serious interest is limited to brand-name wines, then try to force replies outside that perspective into it. The thread title even lumps all Bordeaux together as if humble regional wine tracked Petrus. Oversimplifying at the outset. (Finally you can always join others and split the cost of tasting an expensive wine. Thousands do.) Next question?

A venerable subject online, though complicated by counter-intuitive cases where an unlikely technique does some demonstrable good. (Years ago I gave an invited talk about that subject to practical experts, and chose only "safe" examples of bizarre audio gadgets -- examples that contradicted their own claims. But as I just mentioned, the sword of counterintuitivity is two-edged.) Which comes to the core issue: many claims circulate, hard to glibly test. (For those people even inclined to test them.) The subject is bigger than wine, or audio gadgets. And even when a reality test is easy, people resist it. Case in point (of data, not gadgets): 20+ years ago, unscrupulous Austrian wine producers illegally employed an adulterant that backfired into a public-relations disaster. (Their motivation is often wrongly surmised, I gather, but that's a small issue.) The additive is a glycol traditionally listed (in the Merck Index for instance) to have twice as large a lethal dose (LD) as alcohol in animal tests, i.e., alcohol kills rodents at lower doses than the adulterant does. But it became perceived as "car anti-freeze" (which it isn't), thus the PR disaster. I've just summarized the regular wine-industry account of the whole case, easily found in standard books. Still, the "car anti-freeze" notion persists, and survives correction.

I took a quick look: it seemed to be an interesting article. (Aside: Here again we see, spotlighted now, the widely-understood mention of "cult" California wines; anyone who insists on resisting that usage argues with major mainstream publications, not just enthusiasts of the wines themselves.) Anyway: I'm a little unclear about why people spend energy on protesting high prices for cliché brand-name wines, rather than on finding good wines that are less expensive. The last has been the aim of many wine enthusiasts and writers for decades. Bordeaux itself makes a vast range of wines, some of them very moderately-priced. Enthusiasts and merchants have recommended them for decades. Including on the Internet: they figured in the first posting on the original Internet public wine forum (February 1982). Prior to that, one respected importer/merchant I was buying from, for instance (Kermit Lynch), advertised "futures" on 1978 Bordeaux (a hugely hyped vintage, generally, at the time) that specifically sold for $4-6 and from less brand-named appellations or makers. I still have the advertisement, with my notes on the ones I bought. They developed finely. Many merchants have done variations of that. I and others continue to buy (for instance) a trustworthy Haut-Médoc that's been a value for decades and long mentioned online. Seek, and ye find such values. They won't impress wine-ignorant yuppie snobs, but is that the point, or to enjoy the experience of the product in the glass? Fish, or cut bait.