Archive for the 'Restaurants and Food' Category

The Sandbar & Grill hangs off the side of Pier 2 in Monterey harbor. You walk half-way out the pier, smelling the creosote from the timbers, hearing the seagulls calling overhead and watching dive boats putter toward open water while their passengers strap on scuba gear. Then you walk slowly down a flight of wooden stairs. Very slowly, that is, because an elderly patron is in front of you, gripping the stair rail for dear life while three relatives grip her to guide her down.

The restaurant sits at boat level below this commercial wharf because the space was originally a fuel pumping station for the marina. Walk in and you go back in time. It feels as if it might almost be the 1940s, certainly no more recent than the 1970s (even though I found out later that the restaurant is fairly new). The Sandbar & Grill welcomes a largely local clientele in a town teeming with tourists. You don’t find the Sandbar on the touristy Fisherman’s Wharf; it’s on the next pier down.

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What should a restaurant do when its wine list is wrong? It takes work to keep a wine list completely up to date. The more wines on the list, the more work it is. But when a restaurant runs out of a listed wine, or when a new vintage arrives to replace the listed one, the restaurant needs to handle it promptly. It’s not that difficult, really.

Even a list bound in leather can be updated in a few minutes with a quick edit in Word and a swift printout from the HP whatever in the manager’s office. Knowing how easy it is to keep a list up to date makes it all the more frustrating for a customer when a restaurant blows something this simple.

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What do you think the hottest wine type in America is? Pinot Noir? Riesling? Malbec?

Yeah, those are all fast-growing. But their growth rates pale in comparison to premium rosé. Just as the color of White Zinfandel pales in comparison to the kind of dry, sophisticated rosé I’m talking about here.

Sales of rosé priced at $8 and above per bottle grew at a rate of 53 percent in dollars at retail stores during a recent 52-week period, as measured by Nielsen, the leading authority on beverage sales at major food and drug stores and major liquor stores.

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I know restaurants have to make money. I know they make much of it from wine and liquor sales.

I also know that people expect wine to cost more at a restaurant than at retail.

But this is ridiculous: A Sausalito, Calif., cafe was charging $6 a glass last weekend for a wine that’s widely known as Two-Buck Chuck.

Can anyone top that for sheer markup ambition?

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A myth of my youth held that you should eat at the restaurants where the most truckers stopped. They traveled all the time and knew who served the best food. Problem was, it turned out that the truckers only knew where the fattiest food, weakest coffee and cheapest menu were. I didn’t share their interests.

In Napa Valley, winemakers flock to the Rutherford Grill at lunchtime on any given business day. I’ve found they are a much more reliable professional group to follow in culinary terms.

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It’s wise for a guy to have a good plan in advance of Valentine’s Day. I’ve learned this after too many Valentine’s Days when I tried to rush around San Francisco or New York at the last minute to find a gift of jewelry, chocolate or flowers. This year my gift is going to be a quiet, romantic dinner, where I spend a lot of time gazing into her hazel eyes, and not at the wine list.

Here’s what I’m thinking our evening will involve, at the table, that is. I just have to decide whether I’m buying the sushi and dessert as takeout and then cooking the quail, or if we’re dining out. What’s more romantic, anyway, cooking for your partner or dining out in style?

Sushi with Bubbly
Quail with Pinot Noir
Chocolate with Port

Ah, but why and what?

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Northern California has its own culinary specialties and traditions. It’s only been inhabited by non-natives for about 160 years, so the traditions don’t run as deep as the East Coast, and of course there’s no comparison to Europe or Asia, from where most of California’s current inhabitants or their forebears migrated.

Our family likes to put a couple of regional traditions on the table on Christmas eve. These are malfatti, an Italian dumpling that has been identified with Napa Valley for generations, and Dungeness crab salad, made from the large, native Pacific crustaceans harvested from the deep cold water outside the Golden Gate and from points north to at least Washington.
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Fabio Luca Franzosi and Luciano Gobino with their $16,000 truffle

Every restaurant I went to in the wine country of Italy’s Piemonte region this month was serving truffles, because it was high season for the famous white truffles, or tartufi, of Alba. The season begins in early October and lasts through December, but people kept telling me that the truffle hunting gets better as the weather turns colder, so early November through mid December is apparently prime time.

While black truffles grow in various places in Italy and France and white truffles also grow in eastern Europe, only here do white truffles really show the, shall we say, assertive aroma that makes them precious. Read the rest of this entry »

Pietro Ratti, overlooking Barolo vineyards, says Italians come to the country in the fall to reconnect with their pasts

I’m just back from a business trip to northern Italy. On the return flight I made a lengthy list of potential blog topics. Here’s the first one, which seems appropriate for Thanksgiving week. I was struck that both Italians and Germans I spoke to said they admire the American Thanksgiving holiday because it has a simple agenda of family, feasting and gratitude, not national imperatives or overt religion. In the Piedmont wine region they were in the midst of their own seasonal feasting.

Last week in Piedmont the weather turned sharply cold, icing over small streams and making me wish I had brought gloves. The leaves had mostly fallen from the hazelnut trees but still clinged to a portion of the grapevines carpeting the steep hills of Barolo and Barbaresco.

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I learned a few months ago that there’s a new demographic group out there: localvores. Sometimes spelled locavores, these people try to eat locally produced food. Some, like the San Francisco Bay Area’s Locavores draw a 100-mile radius around their home, and vow not to cross that line when it comes to groceries.

Whether herbivore or carnivore or ominivore, the localvore believes that it’s good for the environment to eat locally, and not incidentally you’re more likely to get food at its prime natural ripeness and freshness if you’re only sourcing locally.

It seems that a similar desire is changing the wines that some people drink, too.
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