GASTRO INTESTELINI VISITS EATALY

My food-reviewing alter ego is Gastro Intestelini, whom you may recall wrote up this 1995 review of South San Francisco dining spots. He would have been in heaven at New York City’s EATALY, which as I understand it is a gastronomic luxe farmer’s market/restaurant complex undertaking by someone named Mario Batali, whom I’m told is a cook or something. I went there on this week’s business trip because I’d read that a coalition of Italian craft brewers, and DOGFISH HEAD BREWING’s own Sam Calagione, were involved in this as well. Good food, good drink – what could go wrong, right?

Well, not much, outside of the astronomical, expense account-busting food prices. A dessert of sheep’s milk ricotta cheese with honey and truffle oil. What would you pay? Oh I don’t know – how about the $35 they were asking? Polenta with an egg and a couple pieces of truffle? Do I hear $40? I had a delicious “Frito Misto”, which unfortunately has nothing to do with Fritos, for a comparably pauper-like fee of $25. The restaurants themselves are broken up by Italian cuisine variant, so we were in “pesce”, fish, seated very close to the “bier” section. Ah, bier. As promised, the only beers available for purchase, both with your meals and for take-away, were from all the big and small names of Italian craft brewing – and Dogfish Head. Not a bad set of beers to choose from, and I walked out of this place with some new ones for my suitcase.

The one I tried out at Eataly was from BIRRIFICIO LE BALADIN, or as we’d call ‘em in the States, “Baladin Brewing”. This brewer also brews up sodas, and our waiter brought my bottled beer BALADIN ISAAC over to me with a big glass of ice, and got started pouring before I screamed in horror. WTF!!??! I informed him that it was a beer I’d ordered, and he sheepishly went and got me the “proper glassware”, which you can see pictured here. The beer? It is a malty, honey-flavored witbier. Predominantly, it tastes of wheat, honey, craft and attention to detail. A little bit of puckering was taking place – it’s not a Sam Adams Coastal Wheat, let’s just put it that way. But it’s good. And you should try one. Hedonist Jive gives it a 7/10.

OF CURD NERDS & CHEESE DORKS

My first true passion – obsessively collecting baseball cards and compiling decades’ worth of baseball stats in my brain – has colored my subsequent obsessions to such a degree that I wonder if my brain took its quantum formation leap during the years when I was 9, 10, 11, and 12 years old. Because I can’t seem to get away from that collector/expert mentality. It has played out with music, particularly record collecting. It even played out, and is still playing out, with craft beer – as well as a variety of minor obsessions that I’m talking about on this blog and really, to anyone who will listen: film, baseball, certain eras of history, NHL hockey, politics, artisanal chocolate, technology, and…….CHEESE. Yeah, cheese. Now when I say “minor obsession”, I mean truly minor. I marvel at the fact that anyone, myself included, would pay attention to foodstuffs in an obsessive way; yet judging from the enormous weight of food blogs and food tomes on the shelves, food-based navel gazing is having its moment right now, and that it turn is breaking off into multiple sub-obsessions. Like the fetish some people seem to have around cheese.

I wouldn’t even know about the “curd nerds” if I wasn’t already a beer dork myself. I published a beer blog for over 4 years myself, and in the course of doing so, found a cadre of like-minded folks who spent an inordinate amount of their time thinking about or blogging about certain foods like chocolate, charcuterie or cheese. Then a couple of things came to my attention over the past couple months. First was a magazine called CULTURE, completely and wholly devoted to the study and celebration of cheese. I bought a copy, mostly because I wanted to know more. For these people cheese is not just a lifestyle, it’s a life. The magazine is full of succulent pictures of weird cheeses from all over the world, along with helpful descriptions of varieties, of recent trends in the “cheese world”, and of the people who are carving out a more artisanal, experimental, and/or back-to-basics sort of cheesemaking that parallels a lot of what’s going on in beer as well. I actually enjoyed reading this thing quite a bit, while feeling sort of like it’s aimed at a demographic about 15 years older than myself. It made me head over to the local cheese shop and buy a couple of wedges of stuff I’ve never heard of – so, mission accomplished right there.

The other touchpoint in the new cheese awakening is this book “CHEESEMONGER – A LIFE ON THE WEDGE” by Gordon Edgar. Now, I don’t personally know Edgar, but I remember him from his days as a punk rock show denizen like myself, and as someone who used to work at Epicenter Zone, the San Francisco punk record store from the early 90s run by the Maximum RocknRoll commune. He’s taken cash from my hands, let’s say that. I don’t shop at the Rainbow Grocery food collective he now works at (and runs point on all things cheese for), but I love the idea that he’s written what looks to be a very funny book about his own personal cheese awakening. I’ve read a bit of it in a bookstore, and it’s definitely on my list to buy & devote some real time to. He obviously takes a semi-cynical eye to food fetishization while reveling in his newfound love & appreciation for the sort of edible art that can be spun from a farmer and a few simple ingredients. The book appears to be the story of his “journey”, with some good advice for those of us who barely know a thing about cheese and who want to know more. I’m gonna read this book someday, I promise. In the meantime, check out Edgar’s blog.

With my own affection for cheese growing by the day, here’s my first tentative stab at a cheese review. I bought a wedge of NICASIO VALLEY BLACK MOUNTAIN at a Berkeley, CA foodie store. It's picture above. These folks make their European-influenced cheeses just north of me in Marin County, CA. Black Mountain is a milky, buttery, medium-creamy soft cheese with a slight sour tinge. The acids don’t stay in the mouth long, though I’d still recommend a big breath mint when you’re done with this one. Wow – did I say butter? Really buttery cheese, one that’s fairly simple and can be approached by just about anyone. Buttery!

So there you have it – my baptism into cheese dorkitude. Grab one of the aforementioned reads and get your cheese obsession revved up as well.

OMG THAT BURRITO WAS AMAZING

My wife’s now got a subscription of SUNSET magazine coming to our house – yeah, the same Sunset magazine I was sooo embarrassed to have in my parents’ house when I was a kid. Backyard gardening, beach vacations, wicker furniture – and WAITTAMINUTE – “The Hunt For The Best Burrito”?? “Food writer Jan Newberry travels up and down California to find out who makes the best burrito”!!?!. Now that’s my kind of must-read journalism. The magazine hadn’t left the postman’s fingertips for five minutes before I’d devoured Newberry’s article, and had a new list of taquerias – that’s what we correctly call them here in Northern California - to conquer. And while Newberry did give voice to the oft-hashed out Northern vs. Southern California burrito debate/firestorm, in my eyes it’s not even a contest. Refried beans my ass. Northern California - more specifically, the San Francisco Bay Area – even more specifically, the taquerias of the Inner Mission District in San Francisco, from roughly 16th through 30th Street – makes some of the world’s greatest sub-$6 meals, and they’re so far above and beyond those wussy, stomach-churning cheesy frijole cylinders they call “burritos” in LA and San Diego that it’s like comparing filet mignon to rump roast.

So anyway, Newberry raved in particular about a place called LA CALLE ASADERO in downtown Oakland. I looked it up, and I’ve probably driven by it a hundred times without noticing it. “Prettiest burrito place I’ve ever been to”, she said, and check it out – the table pictured here is the exact same one I parked my burrito-lovin’ carcass at. Their Burrito Gringo (hey, if the shoe fits..) with pollo asado was everything I’d hoped for and more. WOW. What was the secret sauce? Well, the easiest way to unpack the vagaries of a given burrito are to highlight its subtle differences from the mean. In La Calle Asadero’s case, they slap the flour tortilla on the grill first, instead of steaming it. Yeah, I know a lot of folks do that, but theirs somehow seemed to have a lot more heft and crunch to it, which still being “supple” and “flexible”. Sexy, right?

They also throw in a total curveball among the big juicy pintos and the perfectly melted cheese: red onion. That’s right, I said red onion. Fresh and packed with flavor, like it was grown in the garden plot out the back exit and sliced right as I was coming in the door. Oh – and there’s this: fresh tomato. Not watery chunks, but meaty squares obviously chopped with the sharpest of knives. Put it all together, and I’ve got a new favorite burrito to nearly supplant the firm hold PAPALOTE in San Francisco has had on my burrito-buying wallet the past decade.