The hip restaurant ...and my parents

My parents are in town visiting before we all jet off to Kauai tomorrow. Last night we met our cousins Michel and Tony at Cesar, a tapas bar in Berkeley. The occasion was particularly interesting for me because Michel’s husband, Stephen Singer, is apparently a mover and shaker in the food world. He is one of the owners of Cesar, as well as another place in Berkeley called Downtown, imports wine and olive oil, and used to be married to Alice Waters. It was great to meet Michel and hear her thoughts on the restaurant business, California life and her own background.

Currently Stephen and Michel are starting up a winery on their property in Sebastopol. The prospect of owning a winery began to sound decidedly less sexy after Michel regaled us with tales of their constant Bill-Murray-esque struggles to control the gopher population in the vineyard. She explained the mechanics of a device called The Rodenator using the sort of dreamy tone other women might reserve for a pair of diamond earrings or a romantic trip to Tahiti. The Rodenator gasses gophers by flooding their tunnels with oxygen and propane, and is unfortunately off-limits to Michel because they are growing their grapes organically. A girl can dream.

Cesar was great. I love eating meals with big groups; it allows you to sample just about anything on the menu, pass plates around and generally overwhelm your taste buds. And probably expose yourself to a variety of germs and microbes, but isn’t culinary variety worth the slight risk?* I’ll list everything that we had at the end of this post, but now I’m all self-conscious about it because my parents went on at length about my capacity to remember everything I eat. I feel ridiculous for allowing my brain to get clogged up with such useless information, and at the same time I feel slightly pressured to produce a perfect verbatim report of all that was served last night. Michel reassured me that Stephen has this same capacity for wines, and is able to recall just about every single glass he has ever had in his entire life. So I’m not a freak! Or at least I’m not alone in my freakishness.

It was odd going to what I would consider to be a “hip” restaurant with my parents. I knew they would later complain about the noise level (which they did, and always do …I think their ideal restaurant would be situated in a crypt) but overall I thought they behaved themselves admirably and everybody had a good time. Cesar wasn’t hip in a judgmental, cold way; it just seemed to be filled with lots of happy young Berkeleyites out for some wine and conversation.

Because I had wiled away an hour at Ramekins reading the introduction to the Cesar cookbook, I had an inkling of the incredible toil that had gone into opening it, and was more appreciative of some of the aesthetic and culinary choices that the owners had made (namely, they choose to use small, flimsy napkins just like the ones in Spain. I don’t understand those, by the way. Why must Mediterranean countries all use the most universally awful paper goods? Greece has the most laughably atrocious - and yet ubiquitous – napkins, tablecloths and toilet paper ever. EVER.)

It made me think about restaurant design in general, and how so much effort goes into planning a menu and a space and a kitchen, and yet I would bet that that the vast majority of patrons hardly notice anything beyond their plate. Restaurants that remain open for years must have an indescribable something about them that ensures their continued popularity (I refuse to use the phrase “Je ne sais quoi” here, unless you agree to imagine it being spoken in a fabulously pretentious French accent inflected with heavy irony). I would like to think that all it takes to cement a restaurant’s success is good food, but that’s clearly not the case. Otherwise how can one explain the way people keep returning like lemmings to crappy places such as Wild Ginger in Seattle?

Did you notice how elegantly I slipped that dig in there? My friend Jason emailed from Beijing this morning to describe his latest Chinese food escapades. He made the mistake of mentioning Wild Ginger, which served to remind me of its existence, thus fanning the flames of my hatred. This is the perfect example of a restaurant that continues to draw in crowds despite the fact that it serves overpriced, decidedly mediocre pan-Asian food in a pretentious setting. I’ll say no more. Let the Cesar menu begin!

Wine: 2001 Mauro

Tapas:
Marinated olives
Yellowfin tuna with mojo verde
Papas fritas with cumin, garlic and aioli (Divine.)
Shrimp and crab cakes
Cod and potato cazuela (This was basically a brandade, and was excellent. Velvety texture, crispy crust, and very comforting.)
Mixed greens salad with pumpkin, pomegranate and queso fresco
Beef filet with mashed potatoes (This was delish, but my description sucks. The beef was meltingly tender.)
Duck salad with braised endive, olives and oranges
Lamb bocadillo
Manchego and mixed greens bocadillo

Desserts:
Bread pudding with orange-caramel sauce
Medjool date and almond ice cream
Crema de chocolate

I tried to order something called Leche Frita, which was described to me as deep-fried flan, but they were out. I want deep-fried flan. I want deep-fried flan right now.

Also, I just realized that they list the menu on their website each day. I want to assure you that I posted this all on my own before I noticed. My freakishness remains intact.


* In my co-op in college, we all used to eat off one another’s plates and share toothpaste and razors in the bathroom. I didn’t realize how disgusting this was until we all came down with mono at the same time. It could have been worse. Many of the people in a neighboring co-op got scabies after one of its members decided to sleep with an itinerant tattooist that had been crashing on their sofa. Nasty.