melkor

Of course. Any suggestions for the marinade? Yoghurt, garlic, cumin, coriander, red pepper, oregano, salt, and pepper is what I've got in my mind.

A disposable foil tray could be used to catch the drippings without preventing the meat from cooking. I use the bottom portion of a disposable lasagna pan as a shield to prevent scorching when roasting coffee on the rotisserie. I think I’ll give this a try.

Perhaps this could be done on a rotisserie on a gas grill. It would be done with the meat on its side, but that doesn’t seem like it would be a significant problem as long as it was secure on the metal spike.

Adjusting the brew times in an eSantos is a pain in the ass. The way the "timer" works is by using a thermometer in that metal disc on the bottom of the coffee pot - once the temp is above boiling it shuts off and lets the water return. The best way I've found to extend brew times is to tilt the unit using a quarter or something else as a shim under the rear edge of the bottom plate. You get a different brew time using different size shims - it's a crap way to adjust brew times, but it works.

I’ve removed the posts from this thread about organizing an offline event as they violate the current eGullet events policy. If people are interested in getting together at the restaurant they are welcome to use the PM system to organize that. Another good option would be to organize an event that fits the guidelines in the events policy, in which case the event could be organized in this forum.

Rather than have this thread degrade into yet another advertisement for Manresa perhaps we could try and provide a few suggestions for where else rhiannonstone might want to investigate? The French Laundry and Manresa get endless discussion here, it’s safe to presume they are both already on the list of places she is considering. Aside from TFL and Manresa in past people have posted positive things about Michael Mina, Gary Danko, La Toque, Chez Panisse, Fifth Floor, Campton Place, Fleur de Lys, Jardiniere, and others. Granted, I dislike several of those restaurants but I think some of them are worth seeking out. La Toque in Rutherford does an excellent job pairing wine with their tasting menu. Their tasting menu has few enough courses that each dish has its own wine, and you have some chance of waking up without a hangover. I think the tasting menu is $90 and this time of year they are likely to be offering a black truffle tasting menu at a higher price as well. The food is quite good too, but their strength is the food & wine pairings.

If you pay too close attention to what the health department says you'll miss a lot of great food.

Ikeda's is a pretty good source for veggies and dried fruits/nuts. It's also a good place to stop and get some snacks for the drive to tahoe. There's one right off I-80 outside sac.

I have emailed both the Chef and the F&B manager at Campton Place. The Chef is apparently on vacation until February 8th. It is my hope that at least some of the issues we experienced on Monday are addressed before his return. Jeffj - the only part of the meal that is inexcusable is the way the staff handled our feedback. We did wonder at several points during the meal if the kitchen was staffed by one guy who was horribly in the weeds at the time. There are few other explanations that would make sense for the way the meal flowed. Ludja - Campton Place is really not that expensive, the menu is roughly the same price as Gary Danko and the wine list vastly more reasonably priced. Campton Place absolutely has the potential to be far better than Danko, they just have more than their fare share of kinks to work out first. Assuming the restaurant addresses the service issues and the kitchen can successfully get more than one plate out to a table at the proper temperature then I would urge everyone to give the place a try. Unfortunately that isn’t the case at the moment. On the bright side the foie gras, the lamb, the soups, the chocolate and caramel dessert were all top notch. If only the rest of the dishes could measure up.

So I got home from dinner at Camton Place an hour ago. I sat down at my computer and wrote about each of the dishes, about the service ups and downs, and about my overall impression of the place. After reading what I wrote I realized the meal I had just had couldn’t possibly be what happens at the restaurant everyday. So I’ll write up the experience that I hope was an anomaly. I intend to email the chef both a link to this thread and some further comments about the meal. Anyway, here’s the story. I went to Campton Place tonight with Pim, it turned out to be a huge let down for both of us. First impressions were good - the room itself is quite nice, cleanly decorated with a beautiful glass sculpture in the center of the room. The restaurant was about half full when we arrived, about eight of the 18 or so tables were filled. This being a Monday night it’s no surprise that we were able to get a table on an hours notice. We started the meal with glasses of Billecart Salmon Brut Rose, served by the glass from a pre-opened bottle. Corked. Badly. This is a wine I’ve had dozens of times – assuming I had no wine experience at all it would be obvious this bottle was flawed, no wine should smell like a hot tub and taste like cardboard. I informed our waiter who handled the situation perfectly, removing our glasses and offering replacements from a different bottle. The replacement glasses were a vast improvement. We both ordered the 10 course tasting menu, when I informed the waiter that I don’t eat pork he said he’d check with the sous-chef to make sure they could accommodate the required substitution. He returned to inquire if I liked lamb and foie gras. Chef isn’t in the kitchen, that’s a bad sign – but lamb and foie as a sub for porky the pig? Lets go. Pim ordered the wine pairings with her meal; I just had my glass of pink champagne for the first few courses and water with the rest since I had to trek home after dinner. I’d write about each dish, but it really isn’t justified to do so. I’d be perfectly willing to write off the restaurant entirely if all the food was awful. The meal itself was a complete mess, but the staff we could see was working hard. They were all very professional and quite friendly. The quality of the dishes was all over the map. The pacing of the meal was awful – I’ve spent seven hours eating at Manresa and it felt like a shorter meal than the three and a half hours we spent at CP. Runners brought food out of the kitchen only to return it to the kitchen after a confused looking pause in the middle of the dining room. The staff is unaware of the origin of basic ingredients in the dishes they are serving – should you be curious about the source of the insipid grey shreds of “black truffle” you may discover as we did that after our waiter make a quick trip to the kitchen that the least inspiring truffles either of us have ever seen apparently come from Perigord in France. The whole experience would have been easy enough to just consider it a dumb idea to eat at Campton Place, but between disasters the kitchen managed to send out some spectacular dishes. Parsnip soup with crisp sweetbreads was intensely flavorful and delicious. Mille-feullete of foie gras and apples was a brilliantly balanced dish with crisp sweet slices of apples between slices of perfectly seared foie gras served with a thyme sprig used as a skewer holding the dish together. Had the lamb and foie gras dish not included a pistachio crust on the lamb it would have been a perfect dish. The pistachios were rancid which made it difficult to enjoy the beautiful medium-rare lamb chop, though the seared foie gras was excellent in this dish as well. Should you decide to follow the advice offered in a thread like this or this which suggests that you should inform the staff when you are having a less than great meal you might have the pleasure of being informed by a visibly irritated waitress that different people have different tastes. That clearly would explain why several dishes were served cold, some sauces on the plates had formed skins they had been sitting so long, and the pistachio crust on the lamb was made with rancid pistachios. Perhaps some people would find those things far more enjoyable than either of us did. By far the most absurd part of the whole interaction was the woman I was talking to decided for some reason it’d be a good idea to ask me where I worked. I said “huh?”. She asked if I worked in the industry. I informed her that I didn’t and she rolled her eyes, perhaps I she could be reminded that customers like us keep places like Campton in business. So much for useful feedback. The thing that makes it so difficult to explain what happened during our meal is that the restaurant was never more than half full. If they were short staffed and all the seats were filled, sure I could see how service could slip. That wasn’t at all the case tonight. In addition to the Chef being out of the kitchen I can only hope that the floor manager was off tonight as well. I need to return on a night the Chef is in the kitchen. There is every possibility that this restaurant can turn out an excellent meal - though hopefully with different truffles or no truffles at all. I suspect given how much energy the FOH staff showed during the meal they are quite capable of doing a top-notch job as well. It's just a shame that this meal turned out the way it did.

To say that they were corked wouldn't be entirely correct. While the bottles that were tested showed a machine-detectible amount of TCA, the amount is far lower than what most anyone would taste.

Does this mean one tree has different kinds of fruit on it all at once? A picture of that would be cool. ← Home Depot here sells these grafted multi-citrus trees. We had a lemon/orange/lime tree which after a couple of years living in a wine barrel on the patio turned into a lemon/orange/lime stick.

Lemon sorbet is always good. Lemonade as Rachel suggested is also a good plan. Lemon curd is absolutely required - few things are better. Lemon juice works pretty well to stop the burning feeling you get from working with hot peppers. You could always buy a truck full of peppers...

He even spells his name the same way I do, but so far that hasn't worked to my advantage. I need to work on that.

2002 Las Rocas de San Alejandro Calatayud Garnacha (Spain, Aragón, Calatayud) - this is one of those things we buy by the case and never get sick of. It's fresh and fruity, with nicely integrated tannins, for all of $7/bottle.

Again, I'm digging up an ancient thread because it seems like the only one specific to the restaurant. We had dinner at Don Giovanni last night. The outdoor patio has now been partially converted into year-round seating. The front portion of the patio - the part that overlooks the garden and the vineyards - is still completely open, but the side with the parking lot view has been partially walled in and is a surprisingly enjoyable place to have a meal in the middle of winter. Our table being near the fireplace didn't hurt matters any. Our meal was ordered family style, which the restaurant is generally quite good at accommodating. This time, however, rather than split up the three pasta dishes we ordered and serving one with the meat dish, they chose to serve three pastas and a meat dish all at once to the three of us. I would have preferred three courses rather than two. We started our meal with beef carpaccio and fritto misto - the carpaccio is something I always order when I eat there, it's just simple and flavorful. The fritto misto was quite good, the veg was nicely cooked - still a little crunchy, which I enjoyed. Next came the onslaught of dishes - silk handkerchiefs (delicate sheets of pasta) with wild nettle and walnut sauce, wild mushroom risotto with artichoke hearts, rigatoni with duck and green olive bolognaise, and milk braised rabbit with polenta. The rabbit and risotto were the two standouts. The others at the table thought the risotto was a bit too salty; apparently I prefer more salt than they do, as I found it to be perfectly seasoned. The rabbit was far better than any of us expected from the less-than-compelling description the menu offered. It was very flavorful, nicely tender, and just generally an excellent dish. A single order of apple and cranberry fruit rustico with vanilla gelato was shared for dessert. It was perfectly fine, though we were all too full by then to really enjoy it. Don Giovanni is a place I used to visit fairly regularly; it somehow fell off my radar about six months ago. It was nice to return and see that the food is still good and that the place was packed on a Sunday night in January. The restaurant is reasonably priced for a tourist town; dinner can be had for around $50/per person including wine. The wine list is what you'd expect for a restaurant along highway 29 in Napa - they have plenty of options for the trophy wine drinker, but the bulk of the list is reasonably priced, and there are a few really nice Italian wines on the list if you are in search of a wine to go with your meal.

La Farine's rustic baguette is my favorite as well. Somehow I almost always have the good fortune of turning up there while they are still warm. The Acme baguettes run a very close second and since they are available nearby, they are what we most often end up with.

Crap. Now I have yet another reason to plan a trip to Israel. Anyone know what the weather is like in the spring?

Me too.

A few of the dishes in Jeff's post look and sound good, most I don't think I'd enjoy - the pictures themselves are excellent as usual. Really, who is still serving foams? Two dishes in a row served in gelee? It all looks as if they are trying too hard to be different and not spending enough energy putting together a cogent menu.

Wine service varies in quality so much that it's quite comical when you end up on the bottom end. When we were having dinner at Tetsuya’s in Sydney six months ago, we ordered an older Australian Riesling to go with the first few courses. As we got to the bottom of the bottle, the sommelier started pouring the wine more slowly, as if to prevent the large chunks of sediment from landing in my glass - everything was looking good until for some reason she turned the bottle upright, moved it to MsMelkor's glass and dumped half the sediment and a half ounce of wine into her glass. Building on her great success in adding chunks to one glass on the table, she returned the bottle to mine and shook the remaining bits into my glass. Job done, she turned on her heel and walked off. We drank our wine slowly, turning the glasses often to avoid the sediment – we successfully drank most of our wine. As we finished the last course we were having that wine with, the sommelier returned, collected our glasses, and while looking down at the glasses, commented on the surprising amount of residual sugar left in the wine. At Tra Vigne in St Helena, after we ordered a bottle of wine, the waiter disappeared for fifteen minutes then returned with a small table, a candle, a decanter, the whole deal – all this for a current vintage Rafanelli Zinfandel. He removed the foil, twisted the corkscrew into the cork, pivoted the corkscrew and knocked over the decanting table, smashing the decanter on the floor and spilling the wax from the burning candle onto the carpet. Clearly it’s not his fault he’s a klutz, but since he was acting like a condescending jerk when he gave me the guided tour of the wine list, making sure to point out the ‘value section’ twice, I found the whole thing quite amusing.

It's amazing what effect one’s expectations can have on a meal - Rubicon has such a solid reputation that anything but excellence is considered a failure. I had dinner at Rubicon last night for Dine About Town. We ordered all of the DAT options - one vegetarian menu, and one of each of the two carnivore options. Somehow Rubicon in my mind never seems like it’s worth the asking price the rest of the year, but during DAT we manage to spend just as much money by spending more on wines. Had the food we were served come from a kitchen with a lesser reputation it would have been a perfectly pleasant meal. Had the champagne we were sipping while waiting for the 3rd person to arrive not been excellent we might have had lower expectations for the food. Had the amuse that they sent out not been an amazing match for the champagne... you get the picture. Once the actual food we ordered showed up, it bombed. The apps were mussels with melon (in January?!), the functional equivalent of bread salad with tuna fish in it, and a green salad. The green salad was the best of the bunch. The tuna salad was a dozen competing flavors and textures that made for a completely incoherent and ultimately unremarkable dish. The mussels I didn't try, though the melon served with them was bizarre, a mealy texture with a strange mango flavor. Some of the mussels were apparently reasonably good, a few were spoiled, according to one of my dinner companions. The green salad was perfectly fine, and was accompanied by slices of a perfectly ripe pear in it and a very nice simple vinaigrette. Next we were served nut crusted sole, butternut squash ravioli, and braised lamb. The ravioli was a bit too sweet and the sauce on the thin side. I'd be satisfied with the dish if I had cooked it, but I expected more from the kitchen there. The sole was a high quality piece of fish, properly cooked and then coated in an unusual crust of pistachios, caraway seeds (!?), coarse salt, and what seemed like whatever else they had on hand at the time. The fish came with some very good sauteed bitter greens, which were great until some of the nut-crust contaminated them. There was a bit of sweet potato puree that suffered the same fate as the greens. The braised lamb was perfectly acceptable - I really wanted to love it, but it came up short, overcooked a bit and dried out; the flavors worked but the texture wasn't there. For dessert we had a frozen milk chocolate ice cream “cake” (a layer of chopped hazelnuts between 2 layers of ice cream) and earl grey creme brulee. The chocolate dish was quite good once it defrosted enough to be enjoyed. The creme brulee was quite a bit less successful - the sugar on top was flaccid, and what was sitting under the surface tasted more like a muddy custard than one that had been infused with tea. Having had just a portion of each dish, two of us were still hungry so we hiked a few blocks to Bocadillos for a second dinner. The food at Bocadillos was perhaps slightly better, but our expectations were far lower and the meal much more enjoyable. I really want to like Rubicon - I loved it on my previous visit, though this is the first time I've been there since the chef change. I'll certainly give it another shot, but this meal was really not what I had hoped for.

Strangely this post seems to be the only one in the CA forum dedicated to Bistro Jeanty. Since we just returned from dinner there I suppose this is as reasonable a place to post about it as any. We started our meal with fried smelt which were incredible - just a tiny fresh fish rolled in semolina and deep fried, better than the best french fry. The other app was duck and goat cheese rillettes, which were good but paled in comparison to the smelt. For entrees we went with daube du boeuf and braised lamb shank - I preferred the beef, MsMelkor preferred the lamb. Both were quite good and on a cold winter night it's hard to go wrong with a good braised dish. Dessert was surprisingly good, rice pudding that was quite creamy while keeping the individual rice grains intact and a bread pudding made from toasted cubed of bread, giving it a nice texture contrast. This was one of the best meals we've had at any of the Jeanty restaurants - I'm far more excited about going back than I was previously.

I dropped by the Della Fattoria shop in Petaluma this morning, snacked on a bunch of the bread samples and bought a pile of stuff to take home. A few of the breads were still hot from the oven, so naturally I had to bring them home with me. Their walnut-currant bread was a perfect base for the sandwiches we had for lunch - caramelized onions, meyer lemon mayo, leftover roast chicken, and spinach. Their pain-au-chocolate is good, but a bit dry - I prefer the Bouchon Bakery version. The pear tart is better, it is really a pear croissant but how could that be held against them. I've yet to try the meyer lemon/rosemary/sea salt bread - it smells good, but I'm too full to try it. The thing not to be missed at the store is their peanut butter cookie sandwich, which is two light and delicious peanut butter cookies with some peanut butter cream filling in the middle. The thing I found most striking about the place is that it looks EXACTLY like the photo on their website, the display case to the right which is half empty in the photo was half empty when I stopped by. The staff is really friendly, they sell a good product, if you’re in the area it's worth a visit. Thanks much to Krys for pointing the place out.

So what's the story with this event? Is it still scheduled for the 15th?