So what is the restaurant we should go to? Where is the flan the best? Where is the service completely top notch? If you were having guests, where would you take them, what would you want to make sure that nobody missed?
This is an audience-participation blog. Let me know where I should go to eat, if you want me to rip them a gustatory new one, include that too. I love to explore, so let me have it!
TFG
Okay, so part of the desire to do this is drawn on the desire to highlight some of the most wonderful places I have ever eaten, even though they may have been enjoyed years ago. When I wander off onto the paths of memory, I promise that I’ll have the above parenthetical addition to the review.
One of the pitfalls of being an intellectual elitist is that there are a lot of symptoms that people can pick up on and point you out to their friends, like an exhibit at the zoo. One of my favorite is reading the New Yorker. I read it at my therapist’s office and in the great stacks I inherited from my father-in-law because good writing is timeless. They have a column in the beginning called “Tables for Two” where they visit a local place to eat and say something about it. It isn’t exhaustive, but it’s instructive. That’s where I found Spicy and Tasty.
We were going to NYC anyway, so I thought I’d find some places to go and eat while we were there and I happened upon the review for this place. I love szechuan food <sounds of Angels singing alleluia!> ever since picking up Fuschia Dunlop’s book Land of Plenty and I was fascinated by the descriptions and resolved then and there to go.
And go we did. Debbie and Caitlyn and I took Debbie’s friend Lucia out for dinner in return for letting us sleep on her floor while we were in Manhattan. It says a lot about a place that specializes in spicy food that Caitlyn (5) felt right at home. The place was steamy from the steam tables keeping the make-ahead delicacies warm and watching them coming in and out of the cases was enough to keep Caitlyn busy.
The place was bustling and we waited for about 20 minutes, which, after the subway in from Manhattan, meant that we were quite hungry when we were shoe-horned into our table by the bus-boy, who, it should be noted, gave the best service of anyone in the place that night.
I’ve misplaced the menu so I cannot go into detail until I find it (yes, I try and keep a menu from everywhere that does any kind of take-away or prints its menus on paper instead of sheathing them in plastic) so I’ll just give impressions and let you decide.
The menu is difficult to decipher is you haven’t a background in Szechuan cuisine. if you don’t know your dan-dan from a hole in the ground, its best to just order three or four of them and see what you get. I don’t think that a single thing was amiss in the entire evening so have at it. The bean paste was floral and sweet while retaining a leguminous beaniness, the baked sesame dumplings were redolent with sesame aromas that burst forth when you broke them open. The spicy noodles were. The dry-sauteed beans were superb.
I think that the only thing to be worked on, especially if you are going to try and attract a clientele outside of your own cultural milieu, would be the service. To call the service at Spicy and Tasty brusque is to undersell it. They want your order, not your conversation, which is probably good since I didn’t get a lot of English ging on in the exchanges that we had, a lot of pointing when the language issues became too onerous. On the other hand, out friend the bus boy also made sure that we never got thirsty, a good thing in the land of hot and spicy.
If you are not familiar with szechaun cuisine, I must warn you: there are tastes to be had at Spicy and Tasty that are well outside of the realm of the standard, even the exellent Chinese restaurants that you may have visited. There is an earthy quality to the food, even the most ephemeral greens in light sauce, that links this food to something outside of us. There is a complexity of flavor that exceeds most of what I can ever remember eating and each new addition is like a new word in the vocabulary. Especially true, is that the first experience of szechuan pepper which is not only essential to the cuisine, but also to the experience sometimes freaks people out. There is a chemical in it that makes your mouth tingle, sort of a pseudo anaesthetic to blunt the chili oil which is most certainly coming. Be warned.
Still, this is the perfect place to learn that new vocabulary of flavor.
TFG
It is an odd thing to have come from Alaska through Minnesota, past Long Island and to have landed in Santa Rosa. In food terms, there has been one real common thread through these places. Mexican Food.
Which is not exactly true. Mexican food in New York is, while not limited completely to Taco Bell on Long Island, you have to remember that when someone in the New York metro area sees someone of latin extraction, they think Puerto Rican before they think Mexican, and in point of fact, you can get great Puerto Rican food in New York.
But the agricultural workers in Minnesota and California have brought with them the wonderful diversity of foods from Mexico. Like Italian food, which has split into its regional dialects in so many ways and in so many places, northern Italian and southern Italian and such like; Mexican food is doing much the same thing, at least around these parts.
The state of Jalisco seems well represented. We have a little completely unassuming taqueria down the block called Los Altos de Jalisco which is both inexpensive and has the best salsa anywhere (seriously, I could take this stuff intravenously) and then a somewhat more assuming restaurant (it has decor) called El Charro which claims the Jaliscan city of Guadlajara as it’s gustatory home which serves a Chili Verde that highlights the verde. The tomatillos are so forward in the recipe that the flavor of the pork is truly wedded to the vegetal flavor and they are still visible in the sauce, little softened chunks of an oft-overlooked possibility.
Reading through the online review sites, you’d think that there was an absolute standard for food to be truly Mexican. “the chips were greasy” or “the salsa had no kick” and “hit or miss” are common comments and I wonder is there a disconnect between the kind of Mexican many people have been raised on, and what there is available, indigenous to a particular area in Mexico. For someone who learned to like Mexican food by eating that which was made by my father, the Irish-American friend of a Mexican immigrant who taught him how to cook when times were tough (my dad can make a mean pot of refries) I find it odd that there can be such jaded opinions about something that is as nuanced and culturally particular as Mexican food.
Maybe it’s the failings of my upbringing, living in a place where the Mexican options were (until the past couple of decades) limited to about two decent restaurants in Anchorage, AK, but I tend to give a bunch of slack to the restaurants when the Carnitas over here have a subtly different flavor than I was expecting, or slightly different than the way that they make them at my “favorite” place, and just go with it, trying to judge them on their own merits. Later, I may see where the cook or the owner calls home in Mexico and then see if it is different. There may be regional variations that could be instructive to us, remember we are still visitors in their restaurants and their culture, so that we could make choices that reflect and honor both our own preferences as well as their unique differences.
For the record, greasy chips usually haven’t been hanging around for days and days and so are likely fresher. I like the thin kind which also have trouble shedding or soaking up the residual oil, so the ones at Los Altos are just dandy with me.
second, salsa is subjective. I think that the salsa at El Charro, my favorite place in town, is watery and terrible and “hit and miss” in that it occasionally tastes slightly fermented. I also don’t like the chips. If the salsa doesn’t have enough kick for you, find another place. Only in a Pace Picante Sauce world would we assume that salsa only serves one function, to add heat. If it is heat you want, ask for the habanero sauce at El Charro, a few drops will do you just fine.
No place that truly stinks could survive in this market because prices are fairly standard and people have so many choices. Each region and each restaurant will either accomplish their cuisine or fail to do so on its own terms because there are too many variables to judge them all through a myopic lens called “Mexican Food.”
certainly there will be more specifics later, but I had to unburden
TFG
So there’s a rumor of a great cupcakery (that was the word used to describe it to me) called Sift in Cotati.
No link yet, (I promise not to link to something I do not recommend with a full tasting involved of at least one meal or a range of specialty items) since the report is just preliminary, but at a recent birthday party there was a tower of cupcakes in a wide variety of flavors from Sift. Flavors included Carrot Cake, Pink Champagne, red velvet and a few others. Frankly, since it was an adult’s birthday party, we didn’t begin the cupcakes until we’d finished a few bottles of wine so the report is not as detailed as it might otherwise be.
Suffice it to say that these were among the best cupcakes that I’ve ever had. The flavors were surprising and eye-opening though the frosting was laid on not just a little thick, but WAY TOO THICK. Too distracting to be an asset. Pink Champage is really tasty, check it out!
TFG
Not the nicest thing to name a restaurant, but in Pacific Grove, CA, it’s fitting.
First of all, the lay of the land is important. Debbie and I were in Pacific Grove for two extra days before the annual Clergy/Spouse retreat program at Asilomar. Debbie got Friday off and we jumped at the chance to get some serious relaxation in somewhere between Christmas and the coming Lenten season.
After a fairly leisurely drive down from Santa Rosa, stopping off at Pezzini’s for some deep fried Artichoke hearts (part of the ritual, don’t you know) we took a little snooze and then thought about where we should go for dinner.
I’d always been curious about Fishwife, after all, it sits at the entrance to Asilomar and I’ve driven past it dozens of times. I heard the woman at the registration desk saying that it was one of the two seafood restaurants that she recommended, so what the heck?
Unfortunately the ATT Pro-Am was at Pebble beach around the corner (okay, only if you consider the point at Spanish Bay to be the “corner”) and so there was a 45 minute wait in the lobby with a dozen or so of my closest friends and neighbors, each of them wearing enough golfing gear to make Jack Nicklaus blush. But the bar was open and the staff was friendly and attentive.
We sat and got started with the Calamari wedges “golden fried” according to the menu. Let me take a moment to wax eloquent about my love of calamari and my oft-felt disappointment at the way that it is served in many places. It should be tender to the point of being undercooked when at all possible; if fried, then certainly in the hottest oil and for less that two minutes, 90 seconds seems about right.
These were spectacular. I mean that is the truest sense of the word, they were magnificent and wonderful and thoroughly tender and succulent and the breading was light and interfered not at all, serving the purpose of keeping the oil off of the delicate flesh itself. The “Caribbean-style tartar sauce” left a little to be desired, but in truth I could have eaten the wedges of squid with no sauce at all. With the Klinker Brick Zinfandel we had at the opening, it was a very welcome beginning after our sojourn in the lobby.
I decided on one of the signature dishes, the “bowls” of differing varieties. These are fresh-caught whatever, prepared appropriately according to what’s in them, served in a large bowl over black beans, rice and cabbage which itself has a wonderful vinaigrette over it. Garnished with fresh vegetables and “tortilla spears” they sounded good from the menu. I picked the Baja Fisherman’s Bowl which was shrimp, scallops and crab sauteed in lobster sauce.
There was a sweet delicacy to the lobster sauce, itself silky and rich, which truly complimented the other ingredients, by which I mean it said nice things about them. The seafood was perfectly cooked, with discernible though small shrimp and scallops as well as goodly-sized pieces of crab.
The thing about it was that when you managed to get a fork-full of the full thali, with cabbage, vinaigrette, black beans (with some mystery white sauce) the seafood melange with lobster sauce something truly magnificent happens in your mouth and all of the air hisses out of your nose but you don’t care, all that matters is chewing. Sweet meets salty meets earthy meets creamy and as it blends there is something new emerging that is really quite good.
Frankly, I could live without the tortilla spears.
The bowl is a meal-of-a-piece and as such it satisfies.
Dessert was the Creme Brulee served with Navan alongside. This was my first taste of Navan, a vanilla infused cognac from the makers of Grand Marnier, and the two of them together were very yummy. The Creme Brulee was delicate and the sugar crust was crust and not armor. Dissolved with a sip of Navan, it vanished into your mouth.
Debbie had the Shrimp Veneto, which she enjoyed rather a lot, though I didn’t have any.
The bar is good, the service is terrific (thanks Whitney!) and the food is top notch. We’ll certainly be stopping by the Fishwife the next time we’re in Monterey. For the record, there is no rating system here, if you can’t tell if I liked it from the text, you’ll just have to go elsewhere for your advice.
dinner for two with five drinks (2 wine, 3 cocktails), dessert and coffee was $111 plus tip.
TFG
I thought of blogging on the food I love some time ago, but with the job and everything, I thought I’d better get other things going first. But after a delightful meal in Pacific Grove this past weekend, I decided that the time was ripe to get off of my expansive backside and get some words down about food, about living, about whatever.
I’ll be catching up with some of the wonderful places that I have been and the wonderful foods that I have eaten, revisiting some of them if memory has begun to fade, just unloading some others as I remember to do so. If you want a recommendation and I’ve been to where you are, ask and I’ll be happy to advise, if you have a recommendation for the Fat Guy, I’d be delighted to try it out.
for now, be blessed, for we are blessed with taste buds so that the wonders of creation can be ours.
TFG
