Susan and I had one of those Seasonal Affective Disorder-ridden winters this year where all we could really do was think about sun and warmth and large doses of natural Viatmin D. By the time the spring came to Connecticut, it started to rain; as far as I know it hasn’t actually stopped raining for over a month. So when our long-planned work/play trip to Northern California came around last week, we weren’t just joyful; we practically wept with delight.
I’ll write more from home, since we’re currently sitting in a tiny cottage about a block from the famed Cafe Beaujolais in Mendocino and the sea air has seriously gotten to me and made me exceptionally woo-woo. Or maybe it’s just Mendocino. Stranger things have happened.
So far, we’ve eaten a lot of really remarkable food out here; we found ourselves situated a few blocks from Union Square in San Francisco, close enough to the area in this city that is referred to as Little Saigon. It took us exactly five minutes to drop our bags and hike over to Lee’s Sandwich Shop, where we had really remarkable Banh Mi for the insane price of $2.50 per over-stuffed sandwich, served on a house-made baguette. We made a pilgramage to Greens with a very old friend of mine from college who I haven’t seen in 23 years, and who some time back unceremoniously left her job in the arts field to become a veterinarian in the Bay Area, specializing in rehabilitating pit bulls in Oakland. (We love this woman and her boyfriend, who plays the tuba.) On this first night in San Francisco, the four of us sat at a window-side table in the airy, sprawling restaurant on the Bay, and ate things like local grilled peaches and house-made creme fraiche, while the small black heads of harbor sea lions bobbed around in the water. This was good for the soul. Very, very good.
We tooled over to Bette’s Ocean View Diner on Fourth Street in Berkeley the next day, and Susan immediately developed a tapeworm; my last visit to this small, remarkable diner, I ate housemade chorizo and I can’t remember what else. I had it again, with some eggs and tea, while Susan–who has listened to me wax rhapsodic about the place for almost ten years–ordered pancakes, an egg, and a side order of their homemade scrapple. She finally understands why I won’t shut up about my beloved Bette’s.
Susan has family in Fremont, a suburb way away from San Francisco (but apparently close enough to take the train in if you have to) so we went out to visit them, only to turn around and come back into the city to Farina–a restaurant recommended to me by Tori Ritchie. There was a lot of good to say about it, but we’re still recovering from their stuffed focaccia: this is not focaccia like Americans know it. It’s thin, flakey, and stuffed with a creamy Italian cheese so soft and gooey that you could go into cardiac arrest mid-meal.
Right now, we’re in Mendocino; we drove up from Fremont yesterday–straight up Highway 1–and stopped in Petaluma when we felt just a wee bit peckish. It was not quite breakfast and not quite lunch, but just the right time to hit an In-and-Out Burger (neither of us had ever been) for “double doubles,” animal style: I expected something the size and girth of White Castle. I got something more along the lines of the state of Rhode Island slathered with cheese and sauteed onions, and stuffed between two toasted buns. If this is fast food California style, and it’s actually cheaper than McDonald’s, why does the latter still exist?
Mendocino, on the other hand, is California’s own Brigadoon; it’s the Land that Time Forgot, replete with VW Microbuses, more tie-dye per square foot than all of Laurel Canyon in 1968, and some of the most unbelievably friendly people I’ve ever met, as a group. (This includes a long-bearded man in a tie-dyed tee shirt, purple skirt, and red socks who sat across dining room from us at dinner tonight.) We spent our first night dining at a local favorite, where a Bill Murray-like waiter served us perfect tofu-and-cabbage stuffed pot stickers dribbled with sweet chile sauce, pan-fried Pacific halibut with mango salsa, and a deep bowl of Thai red curry with rock shrimp, which we washed down with a Navarro Gewurtztraminer. The bill? $75.00, which, given that this is a heavily touristed town, isn’t bad. What was bad? The $159, totally unacceptable meal I just ate at Cafe Beaujolais, which involved duck confit so flaccid that, if you ran it up a flagpole, it would have flapped around like the Stars and Stripes, unflurling in the wind. Seriously. Give me bland anything; give me overpriced vegetable stew covered with a stiff sheet of filo dough (like what Susan had). But please, for god’s sake, cook the damned confit before plating it.
Anyway. We bought some wine at Navarro and Husch vineyards. We’re heading back to San Francisco tomorrow night, for dinner at The Slanted Door, and then, on Monday, dinner on my birthday at Chez Panisse.
More to come.
