tanabutler
-
Posts
2,800 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by tanabutler
-
-
I do not recommend eating at Fifth Floor until Melissa Perello gets a few more miles under her belt. I had her cooking at a farm dinner, and the salmon was neither raw enough to be sushi nor cooked enough to be edible. She'd never grilled in her life, nor heard of mesquite. How is it possible to be twenty-seven years old and never have heard of mesquite? Especially if you are a chef?!
I advise waiting until some spectacular meals are reported there, and don't be a guinea pig. She is not Laurent Gras.
You might peruse this thread; my post #8 specifically asked which of the restaurants in the (now past) Dine Around Town promotion were near Moscone Center, and which were worth eating at. Based on those recs, I'd go to Fringale (I know and love the chef there—he knows HIS way around a grill, let me tell you) and Bizou (where I've not eaten, but have heard many raves at other food boards).
Your mileage may vary.
-
I'm with you! Last 3 for me, also in SF:
Chez Nous (lunch)
C&L Steak
A16
All are all-time faves of mine.
I didn't want to be disappointed in our meal at A16. We went there as the last hurrah of Suzi's visit to California (which included not one but TWO meals at Manresa, neither of which I could attend). I took her back to San Francisco on Tuesday night, and we intended to eat at RNM, but chef Justine Miner wasn't there that night. Squeat Mungry had the idea to go to A16, since Quince was out—and I leaped at the chance. Both Divina Cucina and Ore (eG'ers with an Italian food expertise I admire) recommended it, so I figured it would be great.
I am slightly obsessed—hardly worth mentioning, really—with Italian food, to the point where Ore has promised me 14 chef's tastings for all the help I've given him setting up his blog about his stage in Italy (potentialgold.typepad.com). That kid has just GOT to set up shop in San Francisco, and not in Los Angeles!
As I said, it was a disappointment. Maybe the chef wasn't in the kitchen that night. The best of the plates was the fresh burrata. We also ordered housemade sausages with sautéed greens, and a funghi pizza (because Squeat's such a fun-guy). The sausages were pronounced "too fatty" by both Suzi and Squeat, and the pizza had burnt spots on the bottom, as well as being quite greasy. Tasty—but still, greasy and burned on the bottom.
The best part of the meal was the wine the sommelier, Andrew, recommended: a D-Cubed zinfandel that we all three really liked. Prosecco, at $9 a glass, was a stingy pour, in my opinion.
Anyway, I will give it a second chance because I really WANT to like it.
Catherine, what do you recommend at A16?
Also, I realize I have to revise my list. Remove Manresa and add in Le Petit Robert (Polk & Green in SF), where I had lunch on Wednesday. I had the cream of mushroom soup and a roasted beet salad with mâche, blood oranges, pistachios, and a wonderful vinaigrette. I'll be taking Suzi there on her return to California, because I think she'd love it as much as I do. I wish we'd gone there on Tuesday: it's so much less of a noisy scene than is at A16. (But armed with new recommendations, I shall return!)
-
Okay, this isn't strictly the last three, but ...
Urasawa, LA
Manresa, Los Gatos
Fiesta Tepa-Sahuayo, Watsonville
Almost matches mine exactly.
A-16 (San Francisco)
Fiesta Tepa-Sahuayo (Watsonville)
Manresa
I don't count the café at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where Suzi Edwards (aka Tarka) and I ate on Monday.
A-16 was a disappointment, but I will give it another chance.
-
Nice stuff, Adam. I love Siena! Where in Siena is Hostaria il Carroccio?
Hosteria Il Carrocio is in the city center. Face the town hall at the Campanile, point your arm to one o'clock, and head in that direction, going not too far up Casata di Sotto. It is directly across from the automat (lavanderia).
Here is a report I wrote up for it at IgoUgo.com, with contact information, etcetera. (No photos of food: this was before I belonged to a food forum.)
It's where I had an Italian food epiphany—though if you've been to Italy many times, you probably have already had your own.
Glad to see you made it there, Adam. Anyone else who goes should not miss the Tuscan bread soup or the house dessert, a molten chocolate confection that is swoon-inducing.
Beautiful work on the photos, too.
-
Any recs for great chocolate shops?
I'm loving this thread.
In Santa Cruz, there is the wonderful Donnelly Chocolates. Their truffles, especially....cardamom, Tahitian vanilla, rose, mint, rosemary, Meyer lemon...
Swoony. You will be very very happy.
-
What a nice respite this thread is. Creativity, envisioning, daydreaming, and opening the doors to food and friends in the future.
--sigh.--
Thanks, Dean.
-
I reluctantly would use pasta instead, as it will have eggs in it, and gets me gummed up. Since I often turn to soups to clear out the sniffles, pasta is a bad addition. Eggs/wheat = glue in the nasal passages.My experience with soups is that, if you purée them fine enough, they will be creamy even without adding dairy. I make a carrot soup and throw in a potato or two (yellow Yukons or small white potatoes: never Russets). It adds body without adding fats.I also do the potato thing or, sometimes, I will break pasta (usually spaghettini) into the pot. The starch from the pasta will add body too.
And I've got a fairly bad cold (for me) today. I'm thinking some spicy soup with lots of broth. And lemon and garlic. Oh, hell, I might throw a box of Kleenex in there, too.
-
Thanks for the report, Amy—it really does sound wonderful.I have agree with Krys. I ate at 1550 Hyde last week for the first time and did not order the Dine About Town menu but my husband did. We were blown away by the meal. I will try to reconstruct it and blog about it soon but I wouldn't hesitate to go back.Briefly, we had the liver pate, split pea soup, the chicken roasted under a brick, the rabbit, and shared the carrot cake. The quality of everything was wonderful and I have to admit my expectations were rather high since so many people have raved about this place. The portions were very large and everything had a unique quality to it that made it feel special and unexpected, such as the split pea soup which had a nice smokiness to it or the carrot cake with pine nuts and when was the last time you had carrot cake served warm? Even the polenta was special--it had a rustic rosemary flavor and fluffy texture as opposed to the super-creamy type I am used to.
(And for anyone who's been living under a rock, Amy's food blog—very broadly focused on cooking and dining, not just the latter—is one of the best in the San Francisco area, if not the country. Congratulations on making KQED's list. Long overdue!)
-
My experience with soups is that, if you purée them fine enough, they will be creamy even without adding dairy. I make a carrot soup and throw in a potato or two (yellow Yukons or small white potatoes: never Russets). It adds body without adding fats.Since Russ has been working on losing weight, we have cut back on portions and he's not taking seconds, or once in a while, we try some lower calorie recipes if it's one of those nights he wants quantity. Another night we had this "Creamy Asparagus Soup," which truly suprised us. We're used to putting cream in creamy soups. This had nonfat milk and nonfat sour cream. It tasted good! -
-
P.S. Corn fed beef rules.
Here is a San Francisco Chronicle article from May, 2004, on Michael Pollan: why corn-fed beef (and corn-based agriculture) is a Very Bad Thing. There is a large section about Monsanto in there—Philip Angell, the director of corporate communications, actually uttered these words to Pollan: "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible."
Also:
[Alice Waters] was troubled to learn that feeding a cow corn, rather than the grass it has evolved to eat, transforms it from a solar-powered to a fossil-fueled animal. Corn requires more nitrogen fertilizer (made from natural gas) and pesticides (made from petroleum) than any other food crop.And this:
"The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald's or the supermarket," replies Pollan, "but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You're paying for it in your tax dollars because you're giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You're paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic. The antibiotics you need for your son's illness don't work anymore because we've squandered them all on farm animals. We can't take fish from the Gulf of Mexico because of the nitrogen runoff from agricultural fertilizers. [Emphasis mine: growing corn is the cause of this pollution.] The people of Des Moines, Iowa, have to drink bottled water in the summer because their water is poisoned. Those are all costs. The phrase I use is 'the high cost of cheap food.' "Corn is also at the root of the nation's obesity epidemic: the increase in corn-based sweeteners has increased something like 7000% since I was a child in the Sixties.
It is a fascinating article, and it's what convinced me to give up corn-fed beef much the same way that I gave up "rainforest burgers" at Burger King back when that was an issue of social conscience. There are some ranchers who feed organic corn to their beef, and I don't have an issue with that meat. But the other risks of eating beef (especially since they feed cows to cows) is not worth it.
One chef I know says that it's going to come down to beef having pedigrees. If you don't know where your meat is coming from, the health risks are just too great.
We used to live in Boulder, Colorado, and one of the scary things nearby was a cattle ranch next to Rocky Flats nuclear power plant. A few months after we left Colorado, the plant was closed due to "environmental and safety concerns." It took $17 million to clean it up. Meanwhile, where did all that beef get sent? Safeway? Vons? Glow-in-the-dark burgers, anyone?
See what I mean?
I'm not saying corn-fed beef doesn't taste good, but I can't stomach it for all the reasons cited.
-
Fat Guy is probably right. I can think of no clearly convincing rational reason for eating seasonally and locally--particularly if you think your only choice is between crappy trucked-in Safeway produce and crappy shipped-in Chilean. The standard arguments are full of holes. Eating seasonally and locally is not better for you, at least not in any medically measurable way. It’s not always necessarily cheaper, though I think in the long run buying things at the peak of the harvest usually is. And it doesn’t always taste better—there are plenty of mediocre farmers at even the best farmers market. In addition to eating seasonally and locally, you have to spend the time to find the good ones.
Furthermore, I have found that even trying to argue the point only gets up people’s noses. (This seems to be particularly true for New Yorkers, who believe themselves to be a unique race singularly blessed by a just and discerning god to receive the very best of everything. When something happens that hints otherwise, they begin hurling imprecations and shrieking heresies. It all gets so tiring.)
That said, and admitting in advance the futility of my effort, there are a couple of reasons that I find compelling for doing buying locally and seasonally. The first is structural, the other aesthetic.
The reason there is so much crappy produce in the stores today—honestly, wherever you live, not just in Manhattan—is complicated, stemming from historic, artistic and economic factors. But the single overriding factor it is there is that people continue to buy it. It’s like watching Fox or, god forbid, The WB. You watch because there’s nothing else on, the ratings go up, and good lord, here comes “Who’s Your Daddy.” Every time you choose an out-of-season cherry from Chile, you are encouraging someone to ship more of them in. At the same time, you are discouraging someone else from growing something better (it is always easier and more cost-effective to do shoddy work than good and agriculture is a zero-sum game).
The aesthetic argument is harder to pin down because it deals with notions of connoisseurship (which sounds so much nicer than the equally descriptive “geekiness”). Connoisseurship is not about consumption, but discernment. It’s not about satisfying your appetite, but educating it. And doing that means eating widely as well as deeply. A connoisseur is not someone who drinks only great Bordeaux; he also loves good Beaujolais. It’s not about loving truffles, but also appreciating a perfectly cooked Brussels sprout. Eating without regard for the season, your food choices naturally fall in a fairly narrow range of things you already know you like. You never discover anything outside those boundaries. You never stretch to understand. You may love something, but it’s only because you don’t know any better.
I have no ill feelings toward someone who chooses to eat Chilean cherries in January, but frankly it would never occur to me to do that. Why would I want cherries when I can have Meyer lemons, Oro Blanco grapefruits and those great little mandarins that are just coming in, or the last of the gala apples or Comice pears.
Which brings me to a third reason for eating seasonally, one that I really hesitate to bring up, since it verges on the theological. Maybe it’s just me turning 50, with the years seeming to whiz by, but I really find it comforting the way eating each of my favorite foods in their own time slows down the clock. Cherries will be here in due time (about the middle of February, in fact). I can wait. And then will come good strawberries. Before you know it, we’ll start getting Blenheim apricots. Why in the world would you want to rush things?
If eGullet were like Readerville.com, and had a Posting Hall of Fame, I would put this entire post in there so fast your browser would spin. (Not that I don't understand how godawful it must be to live in Manhattan in January and be bored with food and fruit.
)Russ, you always make such good sense. I am not judging this like a debate or, god forbid, a legal case, granting points to either side. It's not a competition for me. I just find myself resonating. "The heart has its reasons..." (though Russ's post is not without sound reason).
Side note (really more to the person who mentioned Brix upthread): I do believe that the nutrients in fruits and vegetables (not to mention the complexity of flavor—including Brix, which I did not name in conjunction with apple farmer Bill Denevan's report to me) deterioriate as soon as the produce is picked. I defer to you in the realm of science, but if you do disagree, I will have to take your refutation to my friends at CAFF, so they can take a look.
But really, Russ: a beautiful and poetic post.
-
Kudos and welcome to RJWong for stepping up to the plate and taking on the weekly digest of the LA Times Food section. He even went back and provided the missing week's digests which I think is above and beyond the call.
Well done!
Cheers to RJWong: above and beyond the call is right. That is mighty indeed.
Welcome, and thanks for saving the collective ass.
-
Blood, Sweat & Cheers
-
There are some kitchens that come to mind that are reputed to be calm, almost orchestrated. Blue Hill in NY, for one, and Thomas Keller's kitchens, as well.It's funny that you should mention that....after my wife returned to the table after making a trip to the bathroom she came back and told us that she had heard a lot of yelling going on in the kitchen. She could only assume that it originated from Chef Lefebvre. So, I definitely don't doubt the validity of your story.Isn't this normal? Though Les Halles was a different kind of restaurant, Bourdain documents this in his book, no? There's a lot of crazy stuff that happens in the back. I know someone who has worked some kitchens in L.A. and this person also said swearing, screaming, bitching, hissy fits, etc. start when you walk in the door. But there's so much riding on the kitchen to be perfect every time. I can see how it can be hard to maintain decorum in such a pressure cooker situation.
Justine Miner, of RNM in San Francisco, earned that praise from Patricia Unterman, as well. "I could sit in her calm kitchen and eat my way through the menu."
Not everyone needs to be drama kings.
-
FWIW, Chef David Kinch (no slouch, he) is building a menu entirely around Navarro wines for an upcoming dinner on January 20. That would impress me sufficiently to make a visit there.
-
I'm thinking of a certain scene in The Witches of Eastwick...with cherries...lots of cherries...lots and lots and lots of cherries....Oh man are these cherries good.It's a very visceral scene.
Be careful, Fat Guy. I know you've got a redhead in your entourage, so take inventory. If you spy a blonde and a brunette, put the cherries down. Just put the cherries down, man!
EDIT: to make something plural and to get you all to look.
Isn't it silly when someone tells you why they edited a post?
-
Interestingly enough, the first reason of "buy local" ("Local produce tastes better and it’s better for you") is something that I can address directly, specifically in relation to apples.In contrast, apples, most notably, can remain saleable, if stored under the right conditions, for months after harvest.A friend of mine, the über geek of appledom, is Bill Denevan. He's been farming apples organically for decades, and from him I learned these galling facts.
1) Because the apples in Santa Cruz come ripe in September, and the harvest moves northward on the Pacific Coast slowly, the apple farmers in Washington got pissed that they were missing the harvest by a couple of weeks or more.
Their solution was to hold their apples back TEN MONTHS, and then release them on the market ahead of Santa Cruz. That's right, folks, your Safeway apples are sometimes a year old.
Bill said that, of the 31-something elements that go into creating the flavor of a good apple, 25 or so are destroyed as the apples sit in storage. The brix is compromised seriously. You are getting the ghost of an apple, not only flavorwise, but in the decreased nutrition. I suppose the nutrition aspect wouldn't bother a lot of people, as some consider "food" as little more than caloric entertainment. But the flavor will be seriously eroded by long-term storage.
2) Bill also said that so-called "Delicious" apples (which you and I know are the farthest thing from "delicious," unless your idea of "delicious" is mealy and sacchrine) are only sold in supermarkets because they're what the average consumer thinks an apple is supposed to look like. "Oh, look, a red apple." Reminds me of those people who won't let the guy sell his Ugly-Ripe tomatoes.
Neither of these things is that surprising, is it, at least not if you're as cynical about the economics of food and marketing (and supermarketing) as I am.
However, like many people at eG, I have had the joy of standing in an orchard in late autumn, in upstate New York, picking and eating apples straight from the tree. Likewise, I've had a tomato still warm from the sun, and corn, and peas straight from the pod. Those of you who know what I mean, know what I mean. Those of you who haven't, I encourage placing yourselves in the path of opportunity for this to happen. Go to a U-Pick. Visit a farm. Go to a farmers market, if you can't do either of the above.
Striving for quality is a good thing. Undercutting local farmers is not (anyone who thinks local farmers can compete with megalithic supermarkets is missing some information). Not that buying cherries in January is affecting any farmers in New York. Not this week. But it still has repercussions on the environment.
-
Heh.
I think of Carmel as Mrs. Thurston Howell III meets The Stepford Wives.
-
I'm sorry, but this is so not what "buy fresh, buy local" is about. There are myriad reasons not to eat out-of-season produce that traveled thousands of miles to get to your table. Chief among them are environmental reasons (the cost of shipping in terms of wasted resources), which, believe it or not, is a huge factor that deserves consideration. Environmentally, the chances that those berries you're eating from Central and South America are also coated with a lovely dusting of some toxic chemicals that you won't necessarily taste—and are you aware that berries especially retain residues of pesticides, and are therefore recommended to eat when only grown organically? (I'm not such a purist, believe me, but I will no longer eat any berries grown with pesticides, period.)We're not in a Steinbeck novel, folks...transportation, packaging and delivery has greastly improved since 1920...its ok to eat a pear in May or asparagus in January.There are the costs you pay out of pocket, but there are the hidden costs you are paying by depleting natural resources and, hey, your local and national economy when you give your money to a megalith supermarket, even though very little of your money will benefit the farmer who grew that food.
From the Community Alliance for Family Farmers web site (QUOTED IN ITS ENTIRETY WITH PERMISSION FROM CAFF TO ME): Five reasons to buy local:
Five reasons to Buy Local1. Local produce tastes better and it’s better for you.
A recent study showed that fresh produce loses nutrients quickly. In a weeklong (or more) delay from harvest to dinner table, sugars turn to starches, plant cells shrink, and produce loses its vitality. Even in California, produce may have traveled surprisingly far to get to your grocery store. Food grown in your own community was probably picked within the past day or two. It is crisp, sweet and loaded with flavor.
2. Local food supports local farm families.
Fewer than one million Americans now claim farming as their primary occupation (less than 1%). Farming is a vanishing lifestyle. And no wonder: the farmer today gets less than 10 cents of the retail food dollar. Local farmers who sell directly to consumers cut out the many middlemen and get full retail price for their food - which means farm families can afford to stay on the farm, doing the work they love.
3. Local food protects genetic diversity.
In the modern industrial agriculture system, produce varieties are chosen for their ability to ripen simultaneously and withstand harvesting equipment. Shippers demand produce with a tough skin that can survive packing, transport, and a long shelf life in the store. Only a handful of hybrid varieties of each fruit and vegetable meet those rigorous demands, so there is little genetic diversity in the plants grown. In contrast, local farmers that sell direct to you or direct to your local restaurants and grocery stores grow a huge number of varieties selected because they have the best flavors, provide a long harvest season, and come in an array of eyecatching colors. Many varieties are heirlooms, passed down from generation to generation because they taste good. These old varieties contain genetic material from hundreds or even thousands of years of human selection. They may someday provide the genes needed to adapt to a changing climate.
4. Local food preserves open space, and supports a clean environment.
As the value of direct-marketed fruits and vegetables increases, selling farmland for development becomes less likely. A well-managed family farm is a place where the resources of fertile soil and clean water are valued. Good stewards of the land grow cover crops that prevent erosion and replace nutrients used by their crops. Cover crops also capture emissions and help combat global warming. In addition, the patchwork of fields, hedgerows, ponds and buildings is the perfect environment for many beloved species of wildlife. That landscape will survive only as long as farms are financially viable. When you buy locally grown food, you are doing something proactive about preserving the agricultural landscape.
5. Local food is about the future.
By supporting local farmers today, you can help ensure that there will be farms in your community tomorrow, and that future generations will have access to nourishing, flavorful and abundant food.
Primarily, in terms of flavor, there is another component for local/seasonal. Russ Parsons dialogued with Mimi Sheraton in this Q&A, after she complained about the terrible Driscoll strawberries she ate in New York this year:
Hello? What?! You ate a strawberry that was designed to travel 3000 miles: why didn't you just salt a pingpong ball instead?And could there be so churlish a visitor as to not love strawberry shortcake, when the berries are local and succulent and not the hollow, white Driscoll travesties from California, the state that in more ways than one, I consider a wasted miracle.Russ Parsons countered:
it's important to recognize what travels and what doesn't (and what the costs of that travel are) [emphasis mine]. wasabi, a dried root, ground into a paste, will ship easily. even fish, as long as it is handled right, will ship fairly easily. a great strawberry, which is the very definition of fragility, will not. if you insist on buying strawberries when they are going to have to be shipped, there will be a farmer willing to grow them. and they will be something like the current favorite Camarosa--a strawberry-like fruit that will bend forks.if you want, you could probably have them air-freighted, but even that probably wouldn't be enough to protect a great strawberry (i once had a farmer next-day me some fraises des boises ... they came in an elaborately protected series of boxes ... and they still had been smashed to jam).
But Mimi missed the whole point, clinging to the idea that Driscolls are the best California can do to bring a decent strawberry to the world. Which makes me think she needs to visit here some spring or summer, and go to a U-Pick or a farmers market and find out what she's missing.
Meanwhile, like Melkor (though I haven't recently enjoyed an expensive tropical vacation), I'm enjoying root crops, too, but we still have basil and other local stuff to make me happy. Citrus, oh yeah. Even canned tomatoes—if they're good enough for the Italians, they're good enough for me.
Finally, Food Routes: more on why buying local is so important.
EDITED to fix formatting.
-
Yes, indeedy. These beans are from Madagascar. Not to be confused with NASCAR.Hmm, maybe Trader Joe's has gotten better than when I tried them. I did buy beans from TJ's a couple of times but theirs were too skinny and not moist enough. Thanks for the tip.--do you remember when TJ's used to sell $.99 Tahitian vanilla beans? That was awesome.
-
Not to detract from Berkeley Bowl, but I can get a pair of fat and sassy vanilla beans from Trader Joe's for $3.29.
-
We had dinner at Manresa last night. (Just 20 pictures.)
That is some of the citrus they picked yesterday at Gene Lester's farm, for the upcoming six-course citrus dinner on Thursday.
-
I'm not from either! I'm a rube of the worst kind!
CA Road Trip Ideas?
in California: Dining
Posted
Merle, while the idea of Highway 49 and Gold Country is a great one, I caution you against taking it up in the summer. Unless you like perishing heat, you will roast.
September or October would be better bets, unless of course the heat doesn't both you. Or say, at the end of May. We did that, and cherries were in season. There are few things on earth as beautiful to me as an orchard full of ripe cherries. It was ridiculously pretty.
Amador and El Dorado counties are beautiful.