Hello hello,
It is wildly, the beginning of March, and my high hopes for telling you things like my favorite wines and meals of 2023 has faded into a superfluous backlog, that will have to be rephrased, as the “new year” element is less and less topical while the next year parades forward.
I went home to California for January, and to Oregon, where I have lots of family too. So I shall tell you about that. The thing about California, the thing about almost everything, is, it is good, but not nearly so good as my imagination. As such, the climax of life for me often resides in the anticipation of a given event, the getting ready. I also appreciate artifacts after the fact. Enjoying the ephemera of my outings almost more than the outings themselves. The Meyer lemon, for example, taken out of context, flown back to England where it does not grow, takes on a suddenly mythic presence. Its novelty, its wistful conjuring of another place and life, its fleeting specialness. That is where my true delight lies.
It is for this reason that living in the countryside suits me. I enjoy not having everything readily available all the time. I like to seek it out, acquire it, bring it home and squirrel it away in a little eden that is conceptual as much as it is physical. It seems likely that, homesickness too, is amenable to my temperament. I enjoy the distance I have from my history, it allows for a telescopic fascination. A narrative scope so much more generous than the day to day could ever allow. Longing is the natural habitat of my pleasure.
The first thing I thought when I got off the plane in San Diego was: baseball caps. The kind that are slightly puffy-looking, as though the tiniest bit of air has been inflated into their bills. It’s a symbol of modernity apparently, this mild puff. You see it in cars, furniture, children’s toys, and other items of clothing too.
Anyway, the air settled around my face in a balmy haze the way it always does at the San Diego airport, and all the men were wearing these particular baseball hats and the whole thing was so familiar.
The landscape, so unlike Wales, or even the East Coast, stretches in parched brown with bursts of rough green on the hills. A different shade of green, desert green, then I ever get to see anymore. This backdrop—“earth-tones” seems such a lackluster description, more like pastels deprived of water for 10,000 years, sun-bleached into bone-like arid beauty—is transposed atop the electric true blue of the sky. Bluer then the sky in England, for absolutely sure. Throw in a certain kind of signage, emerging maybe in the 1920’s or 30’s? in hues like mustard, fire engine red, and something slightly greener than teal. They declare speed limits, coffee houses, hardware shops, rest stops, and all the other anchors of humanity. Its electric, this array of colors, this strange antiquated-modernity, this cartoon like man-made-ness propped up against all that cracked earth.
I like that part, find it refreshing for my eyes. How human tastes are different here.
I’ll tell you what did live up to my imagination, Musso and Frank in LA. A steakhouse, once the hub of early twentieth century Hollywood (Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford etc.) and conveyed to me via Eve Babitz (my favorite writer and thing about Los Angeles). The waiters get a star for every decade of their employment. Ours had two, we spied one man with three.
There were the red leather banquettes, the cavernous ceiling, the dark wood paneling, and opulent brush-stroke-scenic wallpaper. Not to mention, the service, honed by generations of pride and etiquette, and, I’m told, good treatment. All that surely, would have dazzled, but to my great and ecstatic surprise, the food was actually good.
I say this because, so often, when places become consecrated institutions it becomes very easy for the quality of the actual food to slip. It is slop for the masses, turning up in droves, made for photographs that mimic photographs that have already been seen. This results in experiences like very bad Caesar salad at the Carlyle Hotel. Not prepared table-side, as the menu decrees, but rather arriving in a limp anemic looking heap of iceberg scattered with seemingly long-ago precut uniform slices of pale dry chicken strips, some shredded carrot, and one or two sickly looking cherry tomatoes. Should you find yourself at the Carlyle I recommend skipping the restaurant entirely and heading straight for Bemelmans, where you can have your stomach and morale sustained on very good cocktails and little silver bar nut and Chex Mix trollies.
I was prepared, and feeling good natured about this very likely prospect. In it for the atmosphere, rather than the meal. I was prepared, but it soon became apparent that actually, everything was going to be perfect. We ordered all the classics: oysters, wedge salad, shrimp cocktail, beef consommé (served out of a silver teapot, fragrant with celery, and easily my favorite part), gin martinis, potato dauphinoise, steaks, and Eve’s favorite creamed spinach. We topped the whole thing off with an ice cream sundae littered with banana and peanut brittle, shared a cognac, and decided we couldn’t possibly eat or drink anything else for the rest of the evening. We could take a walk to the Roosevelt, badly in need of both movement and fresh air. The Hockney pool was sadly closed off, though it was just as well as we were ready to collapse into our beds.
The whole experience magnified a vision of LA I enjoy mentally luxuriating in. For three hours, we existed in a cinematic canopy that did not disappoint. It tasted right, it smelled right, it looked right. It blazed COCKTAILS in yellow neon with an accompanied arrow. Not mawkish about its aesthetic and social history, but matter of fact. Never costumy but also never wavering. We got exactly what we came for.
This idea got me thinking some days later when we visited Chez Panisse and had an entirely different experience. Not bad, per se, but deeply uninspiring. The death knell, potentially being, that in this case, I had come especially for the food. Or, for the woman, whose food ideas, had permeated the landscape forever. Everything besides the food was perfect, and the food wasn’t bad, it was perfectly correct.
So why did I leave feeling…nothing?
When I reached the entrance, on a busy Berkley street, just past sunset, I gazed up at the iconic arched wooden sign, its specific font, red with white outline, and felt idly excited. Upon entering there is a staircase to the left which leads to the more casual cafe upstairs, to the right you enter a room of glowing yellow-lit warmth where the initial concept, the prix fixe more fine dining experience takes place. Atop the hostess stand sat an enormous bowl of squeaky-clean Meyer lemons, adding their glow to the already honey-hued room.
The interior, sheathed in a slightly monastic or even spa-like facade made from red wood, emanates a warm glow. Everything is pleasantly squared off, in elegant grid patterns bisected with wooden beams. Hanging in the center of each ceiling-square, is a wooden lantern inset with a waxy-looking amber pane, and the sections of ceiling visible within each panel are spread with silver leaf. Not only reflecting the amber glow of each hanging light throughout the room, but also, somehow absorbing it. Making it look hyper-natural, its golden-undertone reminiscent of true silver mink or fresh fish or the dusk.
The service is impeccable, observant but relaxed. A regimented comfort exists here that feels almost old fashioned in the face of the warehouse-leaning self-consciously un-fussy environs of your average natural wine/small plates restaurant. No, at Chez Panisse they take your coat, the wine glasses are etched, the leather bill folder embossed in golden lettering, the open kitchen is opulent in a functional way, like photographs from the 1980’s of French-cottage leaning decor. The wine list is very good too. They give everyone a complimentary wine spritzer to start, homemade elderberry ginger syrup and sparking wine, a ruddy magenta in the glass. It’s a little suburban in feeling, like a lady’s magazine recipe, but I actually like that. Enjoy the Sunset Magazine feelings of my childhood playing out in this famous dining room.
All this and then… it shrugs into unmemorable, if, unoffensive, blandness. We had some kind of amuse-bouche, a tiny blini thing. I cannot recall exactly what was atop it, only that it tasted like very little. I cannot remember much of what followed either, which struck me almost immediately because I usually remember everything. There was some kind of fried squid with Meyer lemon aioli that didn’t taste like Meyer lemons at all. The second course, the plainest but also the best, was a creamy parsnip soup. To conclude there was a duck breast, rosy yes, expertly cooked, but I could not tell you what it was served with or what it tasted like. I was utterly unmoved.
It was restaurant food. That is the only way to describe it. Proficient certainly, in terms of skill, but lacking any personality with which to teach or to ignite memory, idea, or atmosphere. I felt mildly depressed, but also thought it was a little funny to feel this way, so I floated out of the restaurant exuding the bemused tranquillity of luxury-disappointment.
In the days to come I felt slightly guilty for feeling this way, wanting very much to feel differently, or at least understand why I felt the way I did. Was it easier for an institution like Musso’s, for which people came because the menu didn’t change to capture a more soulful history then it was for Chez Panisse with its essential premise of ever-changing menu & season? Probably, yes. But it wasn’t just that, there was something else, a rote-ness which should be avoided at all costs. I wanted it to feel like the ripest fruit, the best attention to detail in the breeziest mortal way, the cult of California encapsulated. Instead it felt like rich-people pilgrimage and fodder for impressive resumes.
When I pictured Chez Panisse I pictured the descriptions I’ve heard about Alice Water’s rings, which she never takes off apparently. Fine rings on elegant hands but a little banged up and worn, dented and scratched from decades of cooking and dishes. I like this idea, this comfort with the wear and tear of fine things being lived in. I pictured bowls of fresh dates, sticky and yellow and alive. I pictured MFK Fisher drinking Zinfandel, the good kind, not that boxed pink stuff. But the noble dark bottles my grandmother keeps in her wool closet, describing her admiration of the grape variety because she “loves to chew on it”.
It is possible that I had too much riding on Chez Panisse for it to ever satisfy, mostly because I wanted it to be like California. Or, like the California I imagine, a place which is not at all like a restaurant but rather a hearty wide expanse of un-mannered grace. The way we ate outdoors almost all the time growing up, and rubbed our hands with citrus stolen from neighbors trees to hide the smell of our smoking, and ate big warm waffles flecked with oats and sour from their overnight buttermilk-soak.
I pictured women gardening, dressed like Susan Sarandon in Stepmom. The lemon-oil clean puritanical backbone met with bounty and cheerfulness that is the closest I come to patriotism. More scrubbed than Europe yes, but also less delicate, slightly more big-boned, windswept, and warm.
If not Chez Panisse, what were the gastronomic highlights? The cucumber salad we ate with Dulci at a little Dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, exploding inexplicably with flavor, slick with sesame oil and the merest suggestion of chili (three tiny slivered rounds). The Al Pastor and Suadero tacos from the stand outside the 99 cent store with Lauren & Natalie, eaten with heaps of spicy carrots and onions and salsa. The consommé, as I said before, from Musso’s. I long to throw parties that begin with a silver teapot full of clarified beef broth. My aunts white pozole, which I had never had, having grown up with a preference for green over red, this was a revelation. It is different than either. More delicate, with the hominy really taking center stage. Without the infusion of tomatillos or chilies (both of which I love, but stay with me here), the corn flavor steeps into the chicken stock, making it irresistibly warm smelling. Not sweet, but whatever comes right before sweetness. We eat it for three days while snowed in, and I look forward to it every time. Maria-Rosa’s salsa macha is drizzled over the top, along with slivered cabbage, raw white onion, and chunks of the best avocado I’ve had in years. My grandmother’s signature salad, a flavor imprinted on my entire life, the greens slick with good olive oil, a hearty sprinkle of Vege-Sal, & grated parmesan. Healthfood store bagged hard pretzels, non-existent in the UK, and one of my favorite foods in the whole world.
Barring a few high blood pressure moments (inevitable when surrounded by one’s own relations), I feel mostly a removed calm. For three and a half weeks my main goal is only to spend time with people I love dearly and go to nice grocery stores.
I decide I will go on a beef jerky tour of the west coast because I’ve yet to really find any great ones amongst the UK’s biltong offerings. I try thick dried chunks that have been steeped in pineapple juice before drying from Hawaii, pretty thin slices flecked with sesame seeds from a favorite Thai restaurant, carne secca fiery with habanero and preserved in citric acid from Capella’s, and wide strips dusted with jalapeño made by the local butcher.
I make chicken soup for my grandmother who is ill, and my little cousins off on Winter break. They respond like ducklings following me around and asking me if they can try pieces of raw cavolo nero even though up until this point all I have seen them do is beg for diet pepsi and ice cream sandwiches. I spend days with my grandmothers because that is what I came to do, and something about it, makes me feel older than I ever have before. Instead of feeling the tumbling backward towards childhood I used to feel upon returning home, I feel a certain erect adult lady-ness. As though the boundary between myself and my adults has finally foreclosed its gap and we are now simply all in the same room. I am given my great grandmother’s rings and we go through photo albums and Dani sits and chats with my grandfathers. I feel confident that everyone will get along. It feels as if time and distance has culminated into this moment and we all anticipated it, knowing intrinsically, how to arrive back to one another.