On the second day of our wine country trip, we headed to the Russian River Valley. I’d been there only a couple of months before, when my friend Lola treated me to a wonderful girls-weekend-out for my birthday, and I was eager to go again. I found the wineries in the Russian River Valley more relax and more friendly than those in Napa, and I was there purely for relaxation (OK, and wine tasting too).
Last time, the helpful manager of the West Sonoma Inn, where we had stayed, had recommended we go tasting at the wineries on Olivet Road. We hadn’t managed to do it, but it made sense to try them on our way from Calistoga. So there we headed.
Author: marga (Page 75 of 111)
This week Mike and I took a mini-vacation to the northern California wine country. We spent three days wine tasting, in Napa, the Russian River Valley and Mendocino. Of necessity, we visited only a few wineries, but you can read my notes from them. Alas, I’m in no way a wine connoisseur and I’m completely unable to taste any of the dozens of flavors experts can discern in wine. Berries? mango? licorish? I can’t find them. So don’t take my reviews too seriously. In reality all I can say is what I liked and what I didn’t like, which may be very different from what you like. I tend to like full-bodied wines, neither light or heavy in tanins and with a well defined oakiness (which I didn’t find at all in this trip).
Anyway here is my report from Napa. Reports from the Russian River Valley and Mendocino will follow.
Last night we got take out from New Hong Kong. I always order the same things, orange chicken, szechuan beef, sesame chicken, orange chicken, and then I’m a bit disgusted by the gooiness of it all. This time I decided to try something different and got the crispy chicken ($6 for half a chicken) and the ginger beef ($6.50). I also got the pork buns, chicken chow mein for the kids, and an order of free fried wontons.
The pork buns were good, as usual. They are steamed and they have a pretty high ratio of bread to stuffing, but they are good none the less. The friend wontons are crisp and very good with the sweet-n-sour sauce they came with. Pure fat and a guilty pleasure. Can’t comment on the chow mein ’cause I didn’t try it. But both the crispy chicken and the ginger beef were very good. The chicken was moist and had been nicely spiced (but it wasn’t spicy), and it’s skin was almost crispy enough. As it was, you could skip it and all that fat. The ginger beef had a light ginger flavor, and was nicely complimented by the green onions. The one problem is that there were just too many scallions and too little beef. Still, I’d order both dishes again.
According to Mike, there is a sign at Andy & Joe’s Restaurant saying that the restaurant is for sale or rent. I’m not surprised, as every time I walked by (and as it’s on my way downtown I walked by it a lot) it was empty or semi-empty. Alas, if they didn’t improve on their food, I’m not surprised. The restaurant business is hard and you need to offer a superior product to make it. If you do, like Le Soleil, staying alive shouldn’t be a problem.
I think there were a couple of other things that andy & joe’s did wrong (apart from offering mediocre food). One was to offer the same type of food that you can get at other established restaurants downtown. And it wasn’t a destination sort of food, like Vietnamese, Thai or Indian may be. The other was to not advertise widely at first. That’s when they need to get the word of mouth going. Putting flyers in area businesses and homes would have helped them. And finally, they priced their offerings too high.
The location may be a problem, too. This is the third restaurant in a row that fails there. The first one (since we’ve lived in San Leandro), Casa María #2 was closed down by the health department, briefly reopened afterwards, and then moved to a different (and one hopes cleaner) location. I haven’t been there again.
The second one started as Kolbeh, offered mediocre Mediterranean fair. Though I wished the owners well, their food just did not convince me. Apparently it didn’t convince others’ either, as they closed it and revamped it as a Mexican restaurant, Taqueria. They had a strange scheme, they served burritos and you paid $1 for each ingredient you wanted. That made a meat and guacamole burrito a bargain, but an “everything” burrito quite expensive. Alas, the pre-cooked meat wasn’t that great either. I was sorry to see them go, I liked the owners, but it was also inevitable.
And now Andy & Joe’s.
But alas, I don’t think the problem is the location. I think the problem is the mediocre food that all these restaurants are serving. And the lack of imagination. Do we need a burger place downtown? Ummm, no. Do we need another taqueria? Los Pericos practically has the whole San Leandro market. What we do need, if anyone is listening, is an INDIAN restaurant. There is one in Hayward, Favorite India, which delivers to San Leandro – but it’s not the same as having one here. Plus an Indian buffet would do well with the downtown business crowd.
And here is a radical idea, how about an Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant? As judged by who attends the library story time, San Leandro has a large Ethiopian and Eritrean population. That provides a built-in market for a restaurant. Add to that all the Berkeley-transplants who live here, and you have a winner. An Ethiopian restaurant could offer a killer lunch buffet as well.
A Persian restaurant could be a great addition, as well, though I’m less sure there is enough of a market for it.
But anyway, restaurant entrepeneurs take notice, here is a space you could turn into a good and much needed restaurant with some vision.
On a different note, I’ve learned there is a new Jamaican place in town, but when I went looking for it I didn’t find it (not surprising, given how I am). Friends ate there, though, and they liked it. I’m hoping to visit it soon and give you a report.
I’m not a big pork eater in the first place, but once in a great while I’ll have pork ribs or pork tenderloin. No more. This article by Rolling Stones magazine has convinced me not only that eating pork is unethical, but that it’s also bad for my health. Thanks god my children have only had it a handful of times in their lives.
Here is an excerpt:
Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.
Yesterday I made dulce de leche ice cream again. This time all I did was mix two cups of cream with dulce de leche. I can’t tell you how much because I did it by pouring and tasting, but it was probably 1 1/2 cups. It was a little too much, though, but not much. The results were great. The ice cream is incredibly creamy and very dense – haagen dazs dense. Indeed, it tasted quite a bit like haagen dazs. It didn’t get hard on my freezer nor did it crystalize. But it’s too dense to eat much of, which is good as this sing is pure fat and sugar. The other problem it has is that it melts quickly at room temperature. But it’s soooo good.
Finally, making it is quite expensive – much more than buying ice cream at the store. But I’m glad I tried it. I’ll probably make it again, this time with chocolate flakes (I didn’t have any of those at home).
I just heard that a new Afghan restaurant has opened near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I don’t know anything about it, so if you’d been there and have an opinion, please comment here. Still, for me any new Afghan place is good news. here are the details:
Kabul City Restaurant
380 Beach St
San Francisco, Ca 94113
415-359-1400
Yesterday was my birthday (yeaaaay!), and while I’m having the main celebration Saturday (and I’ll write more about the food for that in my next posting), Mike was nice enough to take me out for lunch and dinner yesterday. We did, however, go to San Leandro favorites (sort of) rather than all the way out of the city.
For lunch we went to Paradiso and for dinner to Horatio’s
Lunch was very disappointing, all the more so because Paradiso is supposed to be the best restaurant in town and because I’ve had a couple of good lunches there lately (if you go, order the filetes mignonettes, those are very good). I ordered a dish of penne with mushrooms and filet mignon slices in a Marsala creme sauce (doesn’t that sound good?). Alas, it wasn’t that great. The flavor of the sauce was just too mild, and the beef needed some salt to bring its own flavor forward. It wasn’t bad, but not $15-good. Mike had the scallops, and he thought they were fine, but the portion was too small to fill him up. The OK fries didn’t help much. He ended up eating some of my lunch. I don’t think either of us were inordinately hungry. Service was blah, even though there seemed to be a dozen people working that day. Our waiter never came to check on us after our food was served, and the bill was just brought after we were done with our entrees, without asking if we wanted something else. Lunch came up to somewhere over $40 before tip, definitely not worth it. Still, Paradiso does a brisk lunch business, though choices for nice lunch places in town are very limited.
Dinner was something different. Once again, we had Horaio’s delicious foccacia bread with garlic butter (I think that’s what they serve, at least), followed by the warm brie with macademia nut crust ($11). We’ve had this before and it’s delicious, in particular with the apple and the balsamic vinegar. I only wish they served more than 3 small slices of apple and a drizzle of vinegar. Still, it’s something I’ll keep ordering.
As our entrees, I had the Hawaiian baby back ribs ($19), which were quite nice though nothing special as far as baby back ribs go. The meat did fall completely off the bone, though, which Mike particularly liked. It came with sweet potato fries, I think I’d have liked regular fries better, these ones had a very mild taste.
Mike thought his crab stuffed sole was delicious, albeit a tiny bit in the salty side. He couldn’t taste the crab, however, though that didn’t seem to deter from the dish. He’d order it again.
For dessert I had the chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, which is pretty much what I always order, and I liked it a lot.
Service was very good, I got a window table just as I requested on my reservation – though we had to wait a little bit for it. Our waitress was jovial and cordial, and kept an eye on our needs. All in all we had a great time – made better by the fact that I got a $20 off coupon, as it was my birthday. It really pays to join their club.
Not actual cocoa butter if American manufacturers get their way. They want to be able to replace cocoa butter with vegetable oil (yuck!) and still call it chocolate. And you know, that the Bush-appointed industry-friendly FDA will probably be all for it. After all, making our food less food-like is their whole mission. Well, this should be a reason *not* to buy American chocolate, just in case.
But you can still submit your comments to the FDA on this issue. You can find a link to it at Guittard’s “don’t mess with our chocolate campaign”:
http://dontmesswithourchocolate.guittard.com/
Guittard protests proposal to allow vegetable oil in chocolate
I received the following complaint about the Apple Peddler in Sutherlin. I’m posting it at the request of the sender
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My kids were here on vacation-they wanted pie. We went to the Apple Peddlere in Sutherlin. We bought two cream pies, cheese cake and a piece of peach pie.
The cream pies were very good. The cheese cake was enjoyed by my daughter-the peach pie was mine.
I opened the to go container and found two slices of peach that looked like they had been sitting in a dehydrater for 7 days. The filling had jelled-I had moved past the dried peach slices and put my fork into the slice-how on earth did the server send this old, stale slice of pie out of the store? I immediately called and spoke with the server that knowingly pass this on to me. I would return the next day for a refund. She politely acknowledged my request.
My kids were here on vacation-we went with my mother early to the Wild Life Safari. When we retuned I sent my son to Apple Peddler to get the money-$3.75. He came home with the same dried out pie-really upset me. So I called again. I started with ” I want to leave a message with the manager.” I was told to quit yelling-I was using an angry voice but far from yelling, although I did volunteer to yell, then I was told “The manager does not have time to take out of his busy day and return my call.” Yes, I was then very pissed off. I explained that I had spent $26 on pie and that I wanted to have my complaint satisfied. I finally hung up the phone. I am making the third trip to the restaurant today to take care of the dried up pie situation.
I will never eat here again. The customer service leaves much to be desired.
Chris Dockstader
Sutherlin, OR
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