Oystered with One's Own Regard

It turns out the Acqua has a pretty good breakfast, not just barely plated box mall boxes of fauxssaints and long-over-prepped coffee, but good eggs, bacon, two kinds of sausages, fruit that's ripe, a waffle iron to play with, and a woman who can make you lattes. All included in the room rate. Nice.

This is day two of our trip up north, if you haven't had your coffee yet to catch up, and today we head out from Mill Valley to hang out at the Point Reyes National Seashore, walk a kajillion steps down to and then back up from a lighthouse, avoid looking a solar eclipse in its infernal eye, discover our motel is a birder's paradise where you learn quail are silly birds (and delicious! ok, we didn't eat any), and a luck upon the finest place to eat oysters until our own stomachs begin to develop pearls.

But before all that, before pretty much anything, we are cheesy. So that means in this neck of the woods, after we get done ahhing and oohing over magnificent Pacific cliffs and rolling dairyland, we need to stop at Cowgirl Creamery in Pt. Reyes Station. It's hard to imagine the artisan cheese movement without them, and they saved Straus Family Creamery by buying in bulk before the rest of us knew enough to go organic. It's both a bit underwhelming--I guess I pictured a place big enough to host dancing cows in tu-tus--and just right, for it's all about manageable scale, isn't it. They sell their fine cheeses and many of the best of others and have a pleasing little take out counter with salads sold by weight (the fennel and arugula with a bit of a cheese I don't recall grated atop was lovely) and soups and sandwiches, all be-cheesed, of course, if some, like the one we shared (saving room for those pearls we knew we wanted to grow) open-faced so you don't get too carbed out. As snack places go, you could do much worse.

After a quick peek about Pt. Reyes Station, which is kind of like an old west town wafted with smelling salts from the nearby bay, we headed out for bivalves. I had a rough idea of where I was headed but had only been this way once years before in the opposite direction, so when we got to an oyster place, we pulled in. Well, we waited, first, for permission to pull in as the parking looked like Dodger Stadium back before everyone hated Frank McCourt. We got a spot and wandered in to what looked like a bay-side, many-grill- and beer-cooler-fueled frat party, but with children, too, and more scary dogs. Turns out we were at Tomales Bay Oyster Company, a wilder scene than we were looking for hunting for Hog Island Oysters, which was good enough for Eric Ripert, and we want to be avec Eric. So we forsook our luckily landed parking space and motored further north along the bay, finally finding our destination, which looks like this--better than those drawings of heaven in third grade Catholic school if you ask me, which might be why I don't go to church anymore but love me some oysters.

If you want you can reserve ahead of time and drag your cooler in and buy by the bushelful and those will come with shucking knives and gloves to help you keep all your fingers. I've shucked a few in my time, but then again, too few to mention, so I have no problem letting the pros do it. Those pros are housed in a boat that's been buried, prow to the sky, as a brilliant re-use shelter, and kindly help everyone through the ordering. But basically it's simple. Tell them to keep the oysters coming. At first we had to stand, but that just gives the oysters, those perfect packets of brine and sweet, a straight shot to slide down our gullets. The BBQ oysters at Hog Island might be the best shelled thing I've ever eaten--no doubt fresh as you're looking out at their still cold beds they left perhaps just that morning, then grilled just to the point where they seem they've met heat but haven't melted or worse, toughened, and then laved with a garlic-chipotle butter so good that if Pavlov had it, the saliva from all his dogs would have drowned him. (OK, bad image when I'm trying to say how delicious something was, I know.) You get to wash this down with good micros like Racer 5, and can get bread and cheese and Spanish chorizo from ace purveyor the Fatted Calf, but if you do that, make sure someone wants to help you eat it--these are sharing portions. I guess they figure enough people fight over the oysters, why cause more problems.

We did finally leave, only by promising ourselves we'd consider stopping by for early lunch on the way out of town the next day, since we had to loop down around and back up the west side of the bay to get to the Motel Inverness. This isn't a fancy place, and there's barely enough room to swing a chorizo in the standard rooms, but the location is perfect--it even has a catwalk out to a bird-blind right on the bay, and if you get lucky like us, the redwood lodge/lobby will only be visited by two folks checking Facebook on the house computer.

That meant we had dinner there after purchasing it at the Palace Market in Pt. Reyes Station, a simple one, since we sort of lunched in two-parts, of locally baked bread, a couple of Fuji apples, a slice of Humboldt Fog (we weren't going to get all the way to Humboldt, so might as well meet and greet it in our bellies--plus that ash line is such a delightful design element, isn't it?), and a bottle of Broc Vine Starr Red. The wine is lighter than most predominantly zin-based (95%) wines, but we weren't really looking for heavy, just some good berry-ness and enough acid to cut the creamy richness of the goat cheese.

It's meals like these that make you go--ah, yes, this is a vacation. And then we had a giant stone hearth with a roaring fire and a pool table all to ourselves. That last part is best for everyone, as it saved you all much laughter.

Feast-Full

Food fests are frequent and everywhere of late, popping up like mushrooms that we then have to ponder over--is this one delicious or sick-making? After all, the food fest, however well intentioned, can become a glorified excuse to cloak our gluttonous consumption in a hairshirt of educative moments extolling organic, local, sustainable goodness on our way to personal godliness. Or maybe the problem is that I eat and drink too much at these things--each little taste or micro-pour is just a mouthful or two, after all, so it's hard not to stop. But I do know that at a certain, often quite early, point when attending these that if the choice is to listen to a seminar/demo or go stuff my gullet, look out stomach, here it all comes.

A couple of weekends ago we had a feast of fests in the area, what with the SOL Food Festival right here in Santa Barbara and Sunset Magazine's Savor the Central Coast up in Santa Margarita, both in their second years. SOL was a huge success (so much so evidently the food ran out a bit early), pairing up producers and kitchens, hosting the wonderful Santa Barbara Independent Foodie Awards (go us),

(Me and Branden Bidwell from Wine Cask at the Foodies)

letting a turkey roam the grounds (no, not me, a real bird). The word "hippie" has been taking a horribly beating of late, thanks to the right's lack of imagination and desire to lazily label the OWS crowd (plus, they're still fighting the '60s battles, hoping to keep youth, women, and people of color in their place--while us lefties are all about the future), but SOL captured hippie in its most optimistic sense. Maybe we all can just get along, and that can only start if we're all not hungry, and that means the land we eat from, too. The whole system has to stay healthy and fed. Thanks for stressing that, SOL.

As for Savor the Central Coast, that's a bit more upscale, but what do you expect from Sunset, which is sort of the Trader Joe's of lifestyle magazines--it's for people with some college-developed sense of taste, but who lack the money to be ostentatious about it (call them English majors). Having it at the Santa Margarita Ranch is a huge boon to begin, a lovely spot too many don't know about that seems old west in the best ways. I only had the chance to hit one day of what was billed The Main Event (no relation to the old Streisand movie), which had a bit of everything a food fest could do but on steroids (non-gmo ones, I'm sure). One slight cavil was a big part of the fest was Vons Land--nothing like corporate cash to turn a pretty standard supermarket chain into a paragon of local, organic, sustainable. No doubt these folks might have had some ideas about how sustainable Vons can be:

That said, there was more good eating than it was possible to do in a couple of hours of speed grazing, especially when the temptation was to stay at the Cracked Crab's booth and keep doing crab bisque shots. While it was supposedly a Central Coast fest, and even Ventura represented in the Pavilion of Travel Bureaus (ok, it had some other name, I'm sure, but you know what I beamingly mean, you've seen the permanently smiling sorts that shill at these things), but it was pretty Santa Barbara County light, beyond Bradley Ogden himself and Root 246 representing with a couple of delicious noshes.

Not that a whole bunch of SLO and Paso hurt--most of the best wineries were there, like L'Aventure and Tablas Creek--and then the food was as good or better. OK, make that perhaps nothing better than a lamb taco that Central City Market (in what I'm told is the godforsaken Santa Maria Mall) was serving up with lamb from Superior Farms Lamb. There should be more lamb in Mexican food, it seems.

We also took in one seminar, The Art of the Oyster with Sunset Food Editor Margo True. There was tons of information, but almost as much tantalization (and if that's not a word, it should be). Alongside the very informative and surprisingly self-deprecating (especially when it came to shucking) True was Neal Maloney from Morro Bay Oyster Company, who offered much fascinating info about teh bivalve that does so well slightly to our north. One of the best bits is Morro Bay's oysters are shaken not stirred (and, sure, Muscadet, Champagne, yeah yeah yeah, a gin martini makes for an elegant oyster pairing)--that is, as they farm the oysters, they shake the bags, which chips off the soft parts of the shells (better for cleaner eating later) and that shocks the little fellows a bit, too, so they deepen, making for a meatier oyster with more room for that lovely briny-sweet liquor. Then True whipped up some recipes, but we didn't get to taste any, which is sort of the lap dance of food. If anyone would like to have me over for barbecued oysters with chipotle glaze, I will be there before you finish reading this paragraph.

(These seminars were in the Santa Margarita lovely old barn/chapel, but then the videoed all of them, and often had the camera guys in the way, so you had to watch the video, even while the real action happened 12 feet away. It's an a-v world, isn't it.)

So was Savor worth savoring? Completely--an embarrassment of riches, so the less good things you could brush off with the next magnificent taste. But they might need to have some early seminars next year on the Art of Pacing Oneself.

The Green Monster of Jealousy over a Boston Brunch

Be prepared for me to bat all out of order for the next few entries as Georgeeats is on the road, and part of that road winds through Boston, where I hadn't been in over a decade but my has the food and drink been good there. I might do an east coast beer wrap up separately to do proper justice to everything from Smuttynose to Pretty Things to Clown Shoes Tramp Stamp in-between, but just the names should be enough for now.

But if you're near Fenway and you need good eats and drinks, don't hesitate to visit Citizen Public House and Oyster Bar. Indeed, you can sit right at the bar, but in a booth, too, if you're lucky, as the one end gives you the best seats in the house, it seems. We were there for a wonderful Sunday brunch, Adrian Gonzalez good, not Carl Crawford good. You can get bloody Marys two ways, veggie or carnivorous, so as I become more and more a beefy sort, I said, sure, lay your bouillon on me, and fortunately they were out of Slim Jims, which are the usual stirrers, but not out of the candied bacon that got sprinkled on top, a delight of brown sugar and pig. (This is a place that takes pig very seriously, as it will cook up an entire pig roast for 10 if you order ahead--way better than Peking duck, if you ask me.)
Now, since we're in Boston we have to sample things from the sea (the other sea, that is, given we partake heartily of the Pacific at home), and for me that means mainly Maine lobster. It might just be my east coast growing up bias, but they still seem to be the best, and Citizen served them up well in a Maine lobster benedict that got to be richness of all sorts, what with the fresh crustacean in glorious chunks (they didn't gyp me), the eggs poached to runny loveliness (where once chefs put that last pat of butter on a dish to enrichen it, now everything gets this yolk trick, doesn't it?)(of course a benedict does, I know that, but you know what I mean), and a Hollandaise that perhaps had a bit extra lemon zip, as everything else needed a balancing acid badly.

Those potatoes were wonderful, too, and made for a great sauce sopping material. Meanwhile my lovely companion went for the Atlantic fried oyster po-boy, and in addition to frying mighty well, Citizen also knows the super secret to one of these sandwiches--that bread only the best po-boys and lobster rolls ride astride, something seemingly so soaked in butter you wonder how it's still a solid.

This was one rewarding, filling, fulfilling meal. Makes you proud to be a citizen.