Category: Food

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Lunch with the Shepherds

If you’re driving to Los Angeles from San Francisco and want to stop somewhere along the way for lunch, there is no more tummy-pleasing a destination than the Wool Grower’s Hotel Restaurant in Los Baños. Big Chrissy and I undertook a recent lunch expedition to this comforting Basque bastion of gustatory gratification. You go in, sit down, and they start bringing all this food to you, plate after plate. And a half-bottle of their housemade wine. A simple and crisp tossed green salad, white beans, vegetable soup, lamb stew… these are all just set in front of you. You do have to decide what kind of animal you’d like as your main course: beef, chicken, pork or lamb. A ridiculously huge portion, then rice, fries… and a little dollop of ice cream to finish it off. Everybody pays the same price, everybody goes away happy and unbuttoning that bottom button and loosening the belt a notch or two. It’s not just about the quantity and variety of plates, it really feels homey, real food, just like what maman used to make.

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New York: Lunch at del Posto

So the only reservation we could get for lunch on Monday at del Posto was at 11:30. We hiked through the snow-capped peaks of the West Village and arrived on time for our freshly-demoted-to-one-Michelin-star lunch. The restaurant was virtually empty, due to the blizzard the day before and the mounds of snow still in the streets, the entire staff devoted to crafting a most memorable lunch for just the two of us. It was an amazing feast, the tasting menu inspired by the season and featuring a (to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas) panko-encrusted partridge with a poached pear and foie gras mousse; lobster with ice lettuce and cauliflower; a shaved-truffle topped cod swimming in a beef broth…

I don’t know what they could have possibly done to lose that star, or what else they’re going to have to do to get it back. The waiter did mispronounce the name of my wine—I didn’t correct him—but still, a one-star demotion? Were the Michelin tasters deprived of something as children? What more do they want? I couldn’t imagine a more pleasurable, delightful, and tasty experience. Thank you del Posto.

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New York: Christmas Weekend

So Big Chris and I schlepped over to Chinatown for Christmas dinner with our Jewish friends at Joe’s Shanghai. It was like being in a Woody Allen film—we waited in line for an hour, the PhDs in front of us discussing their research funding, the graduate student nervously interacting with his visiting mom and dad, someone reading Dostoyevsky, lots of yarmulkes. In addition to our main course, we accidentally ordered two plates of soup dumplings. Of course, we ate them all, having watched a video on YouTube earlier about how to not eat them like a caucasian, and perhaps overeager to display our advanced dumpling handling techniques:

And then the snow came. Like lots of it. So we went to the Whitney to snuggle up with the Paul Thek, Charles LeDray and Edward Hopper shows.  I just love Edward Hopper.  He’s so breathtakingly boring, all those desolate exteriors and empty storefronts, but so of his time, and such a great handler of paint and shadow.

Also engaged with the mundane, Charles LeDray’s show featured dynamite manipulations of scale: miniature hand-thrown and painted ceramic pots the size of thimbles, thousands of them; tiny outfits hanging from tiny hangers… what a nimble and inventive craftsman.

And then on to Paul Thek, who made sculptural installations before all those crappy scatter art things that we keep having to  wade through in all the galleries these days.  In the context of the museum, detached from the environments and performances that the artist staged, the works felt like, well, like the hunks of meat that he created out of wax—parts of something once very much alive.

Back up to Times Square that evening, we got tickets to see Jeffrey Wright in A Free Man of Color, John Guare’s boisterous new play about a pre-historic (1802) sexually charged, racially progressive New Orleans, just prior to the Louisiana Purchase. I was just happy to see Jeffrey Wright and to thaw out my feet.

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Birthday bellies

Emily and the boys took me to Nick’s Cove in Marshall, for a birthday lunch–the first of my birthday week activities. The food was delectable, the oysters succulent, and our server a thrilling caricature of the gay waiter. I half expected a laugh track after each of his booming bons-mots. He picked lint off of my sleeveless sweater.  We took a small hike through Point Reyes afterwards, to walk off our oyster bellies.

On to the next event…

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In the Woods

My Foreign Corresondent and I spent a romantic weekend in Guerneville last weekend. We stayed at the Woods, which was like staying on a porn set. The pool is supposed to be clothing optional, but seemed more like nudity required. We obliged. Mon petit, having come from a completely repressive society, drops his shorts at any opportunity. Our pool buddies at one point bid us a temporary adieu and made their way up to their room, where they left the door open, beckoning visitors to join in their post-pool activities. Our host wandered in at one point, but we stayed huddled by the pool.

We had an incredible meal at Eloise, a French restaurant near Sebastopol. Plate after plate of inventive flavorful sensations were set down in front of us by a staff that seemed even more excited than we. If not for the limitations of stomach space, I would have worked my way through the entire menu, every dish so masterfully constructed to tantalize and seduce our senses.

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Liquid Lemon Joy

Life gave me a lot of lemons this year… so I’m making Limoncello! Meyer Limoncello, that is. Here’s my recipe, using the lemons I grew on my back deck. (You can substitute tangerines in this recipe, and then call it Mandarincello, but use about one-and-a-half times as many peels):

—Wash and peel 25 or so Meyer lemons. Put the peels into a 2-liter glass container. (Squeeze the lemons and set aside the juice for lemon sorbet. Mmmm….).

—Pour the contents of 2 750-ml bottles of Vodka over the peels. Put the jar in a cool dark place for 40 days to 2 months. Every few days, or whenever you remember, gently turn and rotate the jar upside down to distribute the flavors, although I don’t really know that this is necessary, but it makes me feel like I’m helping things along.

—After 40 days to 2 months, create a simple syrup of 4 cups sugar and 4 cups water. Mix the sugar and water together in a saucepan and heat on the stove until dissolved and starting to thicken, about 5 minutes. Let cool.

—At this point, you’ll realize that you should have started out with a 3-liter bottle to begin with, so if you didn’t read ahead, then you and I are both going to have to now transfer the contents to a 3-liter bottle. Add the syrup to the vodka and lemon mixture, and let sit an additional 10 days.

—After 10 days, strain the mixture and pour into bottles that have been cleaned and boiled. Let rest for another 10 days before serving. Or go ahead and drink it now, what the hell.

I keep a small bottle of Limoncello in the freezer, where it turns nice and syrupy and ice cold, a perfect after-dinner summer refresher.

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Brücke, Bonnard, Becco, and Broadway with Balding BC

BC and I started the day at the Neue Galerie, to see an exhibition of works by the Brücke, an early 20th Century group of artists who ushered in German Expressionism with their utopian scribbly primary-colored green-peopled bridge between past and future post-impressionism.  Downstairs I spent most of my time oogling the Josef Hoffmann objects from the Wiener Werkstätte, and the beautiful Klimt and eerily beautiful Schiele paintings.  Across the street at the Met, we viewed an exhibition of late interiors by Pierre Bonnard, made over a 20 year period in which neither his palette, subject matter, nor style changed in the slightest.  They are dazzling works of color and form, and the compositions made me more aware of framing than any art in recent memory.  For instance, lines of painted surfaces are almost always parallel to the lines of the picture frame.  He even alters rules of perspective to bend this table or that window into proper alignment.  The compositions are also crammed into the picture space, creating a claustrophobic visual and sensual experience of light, fruit and french charcuterie.

For dinner we went to Lidia Bastianich’s Becco on W. 46th.  We shared a perfect Caesar salad and mixed appetizers including a squid salad, poached swordfish, marinated beans and miscellaneous vegetables.  For our primi piatti, we each had the presso fisso meal, which included 3 pastas each: an asparagus risotto; rigatoni with tomato and basil; and fettuccine with a bolognese meat sauce.  Desert for two was like desert for 10 in San Francisco and consisted of a ricotta cheesecake, bread pudding, passionfruit sorbet, vanilla panna cotta… and I’m sure some other fabulously tasty thing that I’m forgetting about.  There is so much pleasure in her cooking and so much flavor.  You can’t go there and not overeat.

The women sitting next to us at Becco were straight out of The Sopranos.  One sounded exactly like Rosalie Aprile.  The waiter even called her “Ro!”  I couldn’t tell if her name was given by her parents or non-ironic viewers of the show.  The two from New Jersey loudly discussed how lucky they were to be surviving in this economy with only two houses each.  “We are so lucky, Ro.”

Continuing with the Sopranos theme, we then went to see James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage.  What a knockout play!  Two couples get together to discuss a fight that their kids had.  They try very sincerely to be nice to each other, but end up drunk, mercilessly tearing into each other, and nearly destroying the apartment.  And 50 tulips.

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Post Birthday Post

Sheesh, I just looked at this blog and realized I have written hardly anything this year. What’s the deal? Well, the turns that life has taken this year resemble a bit too closely the turns taken last year, and the year before. And probably the year before; trips to the south, the midwest, dates with all the wrong but-incredibly-sexy guys, Big Chrissy, Dean, the theater, opera, movies, expensive restaurants, visiting europeans, art… I’m clinging to the tail end of my mid-life crisis, the point where resignation and contentment are supposed to align and the new era begins. I see myself teetering, ready to roll into new experience, but held back by the comfort of the familiar and the dogged determination to not let go, not just yet. I might be consoled by the cyclical nature of my unfulfilled desires and experiences, but writing about them again and again is just going to be boring for you, gentle readers.

Yesterday was my 43rd birthday. The weekend was pretty fabulous, with many dinners, a carrot cake (like last year), a chocolate raspberry mousse cake, loved ones, barbequed oysters, the Sonoma Coast, movies, the Legion of Honor… Big Chrissy surprised me by purchasing most of the books on cooking that I don’t yet have that were mentioned in the recent article in The Art of Eating titled “Throw the Rest Out.” Tonight Bob’s taking me to the Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant to continue the birthday season. Imagine Mandarin Chinese food, but with lamb and middle eastern spices.

I want there to be more films by Fatih Akin. They’re about how life is, not how we want it to be.

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Hell, Champagne, Family Visits, Art Shows

Lately, when I’ve thought that maybe putting some stones in my pocket and walking into the Pacific would be easier than trying to get a New York show, my vision of hell pops up and steers me away from the water. I’ve never gone for those visions of hell that include fire and screaming naked people. In mine, all of my close friends, family, teachers, favorite writers and directors–all of us would be forced to watch my life projected in its unedited entirety on hell’s big movie screen. And the seats would be just like the SF Opera House balcony–all cramped and everybody’s elbows jabbed into the sides of their neighbors. There I’d be picking my nose, singing off key in the car, doing things in the bathroom I never imagined being seen—in Cinemascope. I could see Preston Sturges in the audience laughing at my first date, Einstein getting excited by my posing in the mirror, my mother weeping silently. Not that I believe in hell, or heaven, really. Well, maybe, it’s just all that Catholic indoctrination. Somewhere in the back of my head it’s still there, preventing me from answering the call of the waves. It’s ambition, albeit a very lazy ambition, as well as my fear of Hell’s Cineplex, this belief that this something that I have to say hasn’t found the right place yet, or a prospective buyer. They’re out there, though, and I’m still looking.

Speaking of… I saw Connie Champagne a few weeks ago, with my friend Doug. She performed as Judy Garland at the Columbarium, surrounded by adoring gay men and the ashes of their buddies. Convinced and confused by her illusion, guys kept periodically yelling “We love you, Judy!” Sincerely. She went through most of the standard Judy tunes, but knocked our socks off with a version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that captured all of Judy’s mannerisms and quirks in a performance that was also pure bubbly Connie Champagne.

Big Chrissy and I played in the snow a few weeks ago, too, flying out to visit his family in the Quad Cities, Midwest. I don’t see how people can complain about snow, it’s the most beautiful thing to see.

My sisters visited for the New Year holiday, all of them, and Carol’s husband, Bruce, and mother-in-law, Margaret. Margaret took me and the Underbears out one night to Range, just her and the boys. I had this roasted chicken that was like something that made me believe we were in heaven right then and there. The skin was like paper, really good-tasting chicken-flavored paper, and the meat like butter. Margaret was the best house guest ever. She preferred the heat turned down really low most of the time, unlike every other person her age, and she kept buying me things and taking me out for expensive meals. We’d go out to a really expensive nursery to look at pots, I’d say, “Wow, isn’t that really expensive terra cotta sculptured pot amazing?” and the next thing I knew she was at the cash register getting it rung up.

Hiroshi Sugimoto curated two of my favorite shows of last year, both at the Asian Art Museum, and still up to see. One is called “A History of History,” and includes highly refined objects, mostly Japanese antiques, from 500,000,000 years ago to the recent present, fossils that he relates to photography in that they were the first things to capture and preserve the essence of something once alive, a Nara period scroll in platinum and silver ink on indigo-dyed paper, with the entire bottom burned off that he unraveled and mounted on beautiful paper, his own photographs, one seascape arranged to be seen inverted through a Kamakura-era miniature pagoda that he’s retrofitted with a glass sphere–things that make thinking visible, he says. The other show is a display of avant-garde Japanese couture dresses, some of which he’s photographed, a few of the photos shown alongside the actual dresses. The dresses are all sculptural wrappings for the female form that seem drawn from history and science fiction–a dress that could also be a chair, a contemporary knit outfit with a tube-like bustle, another stuffed with padding to deform and disguise the body.

Speaking of galleries, I finally shlepped over to Margaret Tedesco’s 2nd Floor Projects gallery, in her apartment on 25th Street. Everyone should go, it’s a great space, intimate. One could say homey. Jill Miller was showing a body of work created as a result of the surveillance of several local collectors. She studied with a real private eye to prepare for the project, and the installation looked like something a real private investigator would have set up in his 25th Street Mission apartment. Jill was there, just absolutely gorgeous. I thought that she looked more like the person cast as the artist in the movie about her than the artist herself. The project seemed like a way of entrapping collectors into engaging with her work, very little of them actually revealed. We all do our best to get them to come see our shows–Jill printed a tabloid with pictures of them under surveillance and sent it to them, inviting them to see the show. Good for her.

More updates later…