The Bay Area

Another perfect culinary trip to the promised land of food, The Bay Area! On a brief three day trip at the end of March, ostensibly to have mud baths at Indian Springs in Calistoga, pastrybag and I managed to take in several superb restaurants, in the meanwhile eating enough for a week.

We arrived Sunday morning and went by BART directly from SFO to the Ferry Building . The Ferry Building lines San Francisco Bay along the Embarcadero at the foot of Market street and is a wonderland of eating and drinking possibilities. Boulettes Larder only makes beignets on Sundays, and they are by far the best beignets I have eaten. Always piping hot, crisp on the exterior and soft and custardy on the interior. After beignets a perfect single origin espresso from Blue Bottle Coffee seemed in order. The espresso, pulled from the hand pull machine was rich, creamy and aromatic.

Having satisfied our hunger from the plane ride, we decided to go to Ton Kiang for dim sum before walking it all off at Muir Woods in Marin county! The dumplings, featuring thin delicate pastry, were super fresh and delicious. The seafood is particularly good here and of the 5 or 6 plates we tried almost all featured either shrimp and or scallops. The dumplings we had were scallop and shrimp, shrimp and mushroom, snow pea and shrimp, shrimp and pork and a plate of roast duck. Specializing in Hakka cuisine and more broadly, Chinese cuisine, Ton Kiang serves the best dim sum that I have had outside Hong Kong. Much much better than anything in New York and better than what I have tried in Vancouver and Toronto.

After an inspiring walk among the very large coast redwood trees we checked into the hotel in anticipation of dinner with Corkdork at the newcomer Frances. Chef Melissa Perello's cooking is well known in San Francisco earning many accolades over the last few years, and Frances was certainly the most highly anticipated opening of the year. Melissa and her family built the restaurant, and you can see that this is a labour of love. For a restaurant that had recently opened, the food and service were particularly, and impressively polished. The room is small and cozy and it is always packed. Luckily the acoustics are such that the decibel level is tame.

The food from start to finish was expertly prepared and uniformly tasty. We started with a quartet of bouchees (mouthful); applewood smoked bacon beignets with creme fraiche and chives, the panisse frites (chickpea fries) with meyer lemon aioli, the crisp pork trotters served with sauce gribiche (a mayonnaise like sauce) and pickled baby vegetables, and the grilled calamari with butternut squash, preserved lemon and pickled currants. Three of the four bouchee involved frying and this was done expertly. Absolutely clean, crisp and no signs of grease or frying oil. The flavors rang true and all four paired very well with our first wine, the Muller Catoir Riesling Spatlese Haardter Herrenletten 2006, especially the calamari with preserved lemon. We continued with two appetizers, the dungeness crab salad with little gem lettuce, kumquat and avocado vinaigrette, and the ricotta gnocchi with green garlic, fava beans and morel mushrooms. Both were superb, the crab was very fresh and the dressing slightly tart without overwhelming the crab which was delicate and snowy white as a Sibelius melody. The rieslings fruit acidity combination paired beautifully with crab salad. For the gnocchi we transitioned seamlessly into the red wine, the 2007 Passopisciaro made from the Nerrelo Mascallese grape on Mount Etna in Sicily. I like the wine well enough, but there was a bit too much new oak than I prefer. The pasta was tender and light, and the sauce struck the perfect balance of salt, tart, nutty and earthy. It was amusing to be eating all this beautiful fresh spring produce on March 24 when in NY it was still very much winter. For mains we ordered the Sonoma duck breast with butter bean ragout, sauteed escarole and cotechino (a poached pork sausage from Modena, usually eaten at New Years and often served with lentils) and the Lucky Dog Ranch bavette steak with cipollini onions, and green garlic"chimichurri". Both the steak and duck were perfectly cooked rare (bavette cooked past med rare would taste like a leather shoe) and the vegetables accompanied each dish like Carlos Klieber would accompany Mirella Freni. Speaking of vegetables, we also shared a side of wildflower honey glazed bolero carrots. These were some of the best carrots I have tasted. the dish was not at all sweet, just pure carrot flavor. Delicious!

Frances is a superb neighborhood restaurant (although people are certainly traveling from elsewhere to eat here) in the vein of some of the best neighborhood neo bistros in Paris. An expertly cooked small menu of local ingredients, a chef with high pedigree, excellent service and a welcome atmosphere. To accompany your meal there is a small but nicely annotated wine list with selections that will pair well with the food.

Next day we were off to Calistoga via Berkeley, and breakfast at the best strip mall in America. A little pastry and coffee at Cafe Fanny, which is owned by Alice Waters, and a snack to go from Acme Bakery. The third store in the strip mall is Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant. Next stop in Berkeley was 4th street for some superb tacos at Dona Tomas's Tacubaya. Later that evening, on the way to dinner at Ubuntu we stopped at Bottega, Michael Chiarello's new restaurant in Yountiville. We decided that we need to do some research and got just one appetizer at the bar, fritto of arborio rice floured monterey calamari with aioli nero. The squid was well fried and the aioli was good. I could have used a bit more flavor over all and the squid needed a little shower of fleur de sel. The restaurant, which seemed large, was packed. I would be curious to try some more of the dishes here and the corkage is an incredibly fair $2 per bottle!

This was our second meal at Ubuntu in downtown Napa, and the first since Jeremy Fox had vacated the head chef position. Something did seem a bit different and when I inquired if Jeremy was still there, they said he had left. The food was still very good and four of us ordered the entire menu. Highlights were Catalan chickpea stew with Romesco, Onion doughnut with burdock, Poached egg, ash cooked baby potatoes and mustard greens and Carta de Musica with micro green and truffled pecorino. All the dishes were expertly prepared, beautiful to taste and to look at. The cheesecake in a jar was a highlight of the four desserts and the rice pudding was interesting in that the rice was grown at the restaurant garden. The menu changes frequently as most of the cooking is done from their garden. The restaurant is not vegetarian but it only serves vegetables. They do make an extremely strong case for eating ony vegetables. With this kind of care and expertise one does not miss meat.

Last dinner of the trip, after another taco lunch at Tucubaya, was another superb meal from Paul Canalis at Oliveto in Oakland. Since taking over from Paul Bertoli, chef Canales has really taken this restaurant to exciting new heights. The food from beginning to end was superb. Several crudo featured super fresh fish with interesting spices, salts and spicy peppers, and every pasta was al dente, light and delicious. We had the tajarin with ragu, ravioli, squab, stuffed rabbit loin and braised beef with potato puree. The wine list is excellent, leaning heavily towards Italy and especially Piedmont.

On the way back to SFO we managed a small breakfast of toast and jam, and a donut at Pizzaiolo, another superb single origin espresso at Blue Bottle Ferry Building and some superb vietnamese fresh spring rolls from Out the Door.

Another fantastic trip to the city by the bay!