Zen and the Art of Restaurant Dining
UPDATED: 4/16/09
Even more than cherry blossoms, restaurant dining makes me understand the Zen appreciation for transient beauty. The cherry blossoms will be back next year and, God willing, I’ll be here to see them. When a restaurant that makes a favorite dish closes, changes hands, alters their menu or just plain starts to suck, that dish – at least in the form we fondly remember – may be gone forever. I’m stuck between feeling fortunate for the experience while it lasted and being grumpy because it will be no more.
Biographical note…before I moved to the City in 2002, I lived for most of 17 years in Palo Alto. For the first three of those years, I shared a condo with two friends from grad school, Jaycee and H2. Accordingly, this post is PA-biased and the guys figure into some of the stories.
Jaycee introduced H2 and I to Fresco in Palo Alto. We all loved the cream of roasted red pepper soup while the lemon fettuccine with Black Forest ham was my favorite main course. H2 asked for the three-color seashell pasta with Oregon pepper bacon for a least a year after it exited the menu in the vain hope that he could resurrect it. Fresco shuttered years ago. The perfect pepper soup and our beloved pastas have gone the way of Darling Clementine.
From the Palo Alto Weekly, H2 and I learned of Firenze Pasta, Etc. tucked away in a nearly invisible location in Menlo Park (hmm…invisible…maybe that was the problem). Their fettuccine carbonara is the best I’ve had but the dish I still Jones for is the fettuccine with hot Italian sausage and peppers in a white sauce. Odd combination, sausage with cream sauce, but it was soooo good. So bad for you but oh…so…good. Alas, Firenze is gone and with it the fettuccine with sausage and peppers.
When the Blue Chalk Café first opened, they actually served some darn good Southern food. Really. My favorite was their original red beans and rice. It included a generous amount of meat from ham hocks and a couple of slices of andouille on top. (Me loves the pork.) Totally yummy. Messing with near perfection is usually a bad idea but they changed the recipe (okay but not as good as the original), changed it again (dreadful), changed back to the second recipe but never reverted to the first and best formulation. Now, the Blue Chalk is Left at Albuquerque with a different name and red beans and rice are nowhere to be found.
Between Theo’s closing and Tamarine’s opening, 546 University Avenue was a black hole. Mystic Café, Perry’s and maybe one or two others I’ve forgotten were sucked into its vortex. Those I don’t lament but I do miss one victim of 546 curse – the Crescent Park Grill. They served a type of pasta whose name I can’t recall – it was a wide flat noodle that was curled – with a spicy red sauce and pancetta. Fantastic! Sadly, this dish has been “lost in time like tears in rain.”
Mackie has this inexplicable love for iceberg lettuce. Personally, I hate the taste, hate the texture and know it to be nutritionally valueless. There’s hardly even any fiber in it! But Mackie adores it. During the height of the dot com boom, the Old Pro guys opened Mackie’s Supper Club on Ramona (their Mackie is totally unrelated to my Mackie). They served the best steaks in Palo Alto (a surprisingly low bar, given the town’s upscale character) and, as typical for the times, served some outrageously expensive wines. But Mackie’s favorite thing on the menu was the iceberg wedge with blue cheese, granny smith apples and pecans. When the dot com bubble burst, so did Mackie’s. It’s now The New Old Pro and the wedge comes with bacon instead of the grannies and pecans she loved.
In a Sunnyvale strip mall that was run down when I frequented it 20 years ago and has only gotten worse with time, there once was a man from Nan…oops, sorry, a Filipino bakery whose name I’ve long forgotten. They had the best rice cakes – sweet, fluffy disks about four inches in diameter baked on top of banana leaves. The bakery is long gone and I’ve yet to find another one that produces a similar cake. At least the neighboring Armenian Gourmet is still in business and churning out some mighty succulent fare after all these years.
Moving to the City, the Hyde Street Bistro, when owned by Fabrice Marcon, introduced me to Lyonnais-style frisée salad with lardons and poached egg as well as wonderful dessert version of café liégeois. Mackie was partial to the steak frites with gorgonzola butter and the flourless chocolate cake. After Fabrice sold the Bisto, the quality of all dishes slipped badly. I’ve not found a frisée salad as good as Fabrice’s, although the one at Fringale comes close. Mackie says that HSB’s bleu cheese butter is the only she’s had that didn’t taste like gasoline. No café liégeois or flourless chocolate cake we’ve tried can touch what Fabrice’s kitchen used to turn out.
I love spaghetti and meatballs but I’m very fussy about my meatballs. They have to be small. If they’re too big, it requires entirely too much filler to hold them together and there’s just not enough browned exterior for the amount of meat. That’s why I loved the spaghetti and meatballs at Vino E Cucina. The spaghetti and sauce were good and the meatballs were close to perfect – small, tasty, nice texture. They held together so you could cut them with a fork, put the tines through some pasta, anchor the noodles by stabbing a half meatball and twirl away. The cucina had a knack for delivering the perfect number of meatballs so that you had a nice chunk for each bite of spaghetti. Their pizza was really good too, although pizza of similar quality can be found elsewhere in the city. My understanding is that couple that originally owned Vino E Cucina sold the place to some staff members and opened Misto in Berkeley. Unfortunately, both are now closed although the big red tomato still hangs at 489 3rd Street to remind us of what was. [Update: the big tomato had been taken down and is for sale!]
There’s a lesson here – savor every bite when eating especially beloved food. You never know when this time will be the last time.
Do you have any favorite dishes that have been lost in time? Tell us about them in the comments section.
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