The Olive Tree

Nearly half a billion people inhabit the Middle East, a region that sprawls from Morocco all the way to Iran and comprises nearly 19 countries, that is, because the Palestinians seem intent on taking their chances on statehood at the United Nations this fall. While portions of southern California share the same arid climate as the Middle East, the various cuisines of the vast Middle East are popularly conflated into something sunny and light. Falafel and tabbouleh, both Levantine staples, have long been popular among the unusual breed of people who are acolytes of Dennis! Kucinich. For carnivores, the smattering of kebabs and of course the shawarma, or jahy-roh as it is known in most parts of America, constitute the full breadth of the Middle Eastern diet.

However, these items would not seem to provide the succor requisite by inhabitants of the Arab World--a narrow corner of which is today’s topic--and you may have heard is unstable politically, fraught with autocracy and theocracy, howbeit now under sustained challenge, riddled by poverty and war, but nothing if not gritty. Amidst such strife, the Arab peoples would seem to prize comfort in their food and concomitantly soulfulness. While there is outstanding Middle Eastern food in Los Angeles, as a general matter, it tends to be, to adapt the embarrassing Angelenan coinage, Cal-Levantine in nature.

To eat lustful, comforting Arab food, shorn of any sense of a Californian sensibility, for example, what a Hamas fighter might crave after assassinating a few collaborators and then joining his friends in a game of whack-a-mole with the IDF, the intrepid Angeleno must venture down to the Olive Tree in Anaheim’s Little Gaza section. While the Olive Tree may be initially unsettling to the kafir, the restaurant’s lusty, heartfelt food assuages those anxieties with the ease that it soothes the locals’ craving for a taste of the old country or, as it were, the occupied territory.

The Olive Tree occupies a drab dining room in an anonymous strip center, minimally decorated with Arab bric-a-brac, junk really, with the only noticeable color coming from the green and red in the small Jordanian and Palestinian flags, the so-called Flags of the Arab Revolt (designed of course by a Brit who later supported the Balfour Declaration before reclaiming what I am sure was his deeply held anti-Semitism) that hang by the front door.

At 7:30 or so, despite being moderately busy, not a single female customer was present, and the man who exited the restroom had an addled, malevolent gaze directed at no one in particular. My brother and I hoped his peculiar behavior was the product of nothing more than cocaine. Did I mention that we were the only Jews, not that anyone would care or notice since we were without our Jew-caps, and in Anaheim of all places, a “town somewhere between Buchenwald and Belsen” according to Ed? That is now two distinct sets of anxieties with which we were forced to grapple.

We ordered the two specials of the day, a lamb shank with rice and the meatballs in yogurt or, kibbe labneh and then took in the scene. The well-coiffed chef with movie star looks toiled assiduously in the open kitchen behind a deli counter of sorts. We attempted to keep abreast of our intoxicated friend, but our eyes could only follow those massive portions of lamb being distributed to the tables and which could have been served in a mead hall feast. I read the menu carefully, but saw no item described as a full-fledged Iftar. What could we have missed?

Nothing as it turned out. An order of the lamb shank was a feast for one. After they brought our shank, two middle-aged gentlemen, who by their physiognomies could have suffered at least a few scrapes at the hands of TSA, ordered by simply pointing at our shanks as if we were the experts, two Jews from Pepper Pike, Ohio. By this point, any lingering unease of ours was neutralized.

Most importantly, the shank was so tender, so delicious that our server’s failure to provide us with knives could have been a stroke of the restaurant’s bravado or maybe mere server forgetfulness. Regardless, only the four tines of our forks were needed to carve the shank up into bite-sized portions. Accompanying the shank was the Olive Tree’s version of an Arabian peninsular rice dish called kabsa, a fantastic and hearty agglomeration of innumerable spices, deftly balancing, inter alia, cinnamon, cardamom, and saffron plus currants and almonds. I asked our waitress what spices the chef used, but she declined to answer as if I might steal the recipe.

The kibbee labneh was equally as satisfying. The labneh yogurt was served like a tangy soup-sauce, with old-fashioned kibbee intermixed with bulgur wheat and spices. I remain infatuated with what was for me a dish of first impression. The thickly textured hummus also exuded hominess and careful preparation.

The Olive Tree’s traditional Arabic coffee was just as I like it: ugly and unsweetened. Before making the trek back to antipodal Beverly-La Brea, we walked over to the Forn Al Hara bakery and shared assorted baklava and other treats which in that late hour were fresh and restrained in their sweetness, a fitting finale to a surprisingly fun dinner.

The Olive Tree

512 South Brookhurst Street, Suite 3
Anaheim

(714) 535-2878

Espresso Profeta

According to Husret Hoja of Erzurum,* “Coffeehouses are places where pleasure-seekers and wealthy gadabouts sit knee-to-knee, involving themselves in all sorts of vulgar behavior. . . Do the poor have enough money to drink coffee? Men frequent these places, become besotted with coffee and lose control of their mental faculties to the point that they actually listen to and believe what dogs and mongrels have to say.” While this may be an accurate portrayal of the scene at the Intelligentsia over on Sunset Boulevard, the Hoja would have overlooked Espresso Profeta. He simply never would have found it. I struggled to find it, concealed as it is in a jewel of a old brick building on a quiet stretch of Glendon Avenue, closer to Westwood’s office towers than to the UCLA campus.

Espresso Profeta is a beacon of quality and independence among all the Starbucks and Coffee Beans in Westwood Village where there is an alarming scarcity of charming collegiate cafés serving our local branch of the University of California, that is, unless Boba Loca draws your fancy. Drawing a crowd of actual intelligentsia -- graduate students and professors, and even a few undergrads -- Profeta is all UCLA has. Profeta offers a serene courtyard with plenty of seats for reading and quiet discourse. Whoever designed Profeta’s sunny interior understood that an appropriate amount of table space is required to read the newspaper and enjoy a coffee.

The Hoja might remonstrate that Profeta’s espresso is of such superior quality that men are sure to become besotted with coffee. Profeta’s baristas draw short, thick espresso shots using the dolce beans from Espresso Vivace, the Seattle institution dating to the Queen City’s halcyon flannel-and-grunge era. (Pace Longfellow, there is nothing queenlike about Cincinnati or Catawba wine.) The Vivace beans, as interpreted by Profeta’s baristas. have their own style: they are darker than most and taste on the chocolatey side with no residual bitterness or saccharine fruitiness.

It may be a shame that UCLA undergrads lack a proper coffeehouse with the requisite clunky brown mugs, racks of local weeklies, and late hours, but my guess is that Bruins do not care. After all, the UCLA campus is graced by a branch of a certain restaurant famed for its cheeseburgers and crossed palm trees which happens to be open very late. If their coffee sucks, who cares?

*Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, p. 12 (Translated by Erdag Goknar.)

Espresso Profeta

1129 Glendon Avenue

Westwood

(310) 208-3375

www.espressoprofetala.com

San Francisco, Day Two: The 'cation Continues

On Saturday morning, we followed the essential ritual, coffee at Blue Bottle, and then a big breakfast at Tartine. We devoured an orange bun, exquisite frangipane and ham and cheese croissants, and another order of brioche pudding. If one has to discriminate, the brioche pudding was still fantastic with apples, but lacking the blackberries from Day One, it was not as gaspingly majestic. The de rigueur quiche was cooked on this particular morning with swiss chard and chanterelles.

After the Incanto debacle, we decided not to fuck around. Accordingly, we strolled down to perennial favorite, Zuni Café, which opened in 1979 and, in a stroke of genius, lured Judy Rodgers to its kitchen in 1987. Still reveling in San Francisco sunshine, we sat in a nook along Market Street, pondering the most logical way to approach Zuni’s indispensible roasted chicken, the one served atop a bread salad that soaks up all the fat and drippings. It also happens to be a dish that takes a good hour to cook. Of course the key to avoiding table listlessness, especially at Zuni, is more eating. So we ordered three antecedent courses, beginning with a plate of magnificent cured anchovies, accompanied by thin shavings of parmesan cheese; thinner, hyperbolic shavings of fresh green celery; and tiny black niçoise olives. Celery, it should be remembered, is foul: Its peculiar bitterness and disturbing crunchiness suit the vegetable for diets. It is probably the reason that kids hate vegetables. So I submit that the knife work necessary to extract celery’s concealed sweetness, somehow a natural accompaniment to the cured anchovies, is a technical feat on par with whatever biochemical tricks those zany Catalan folks are attempting.

After Incanto’s reckless evisceration of chanterelles from the night before, we required continued corrective action, which took the form of a slender cheese and chanterelle pizza, deftly executed and cooked to an enviable point on the crispiness-chewiness continuum. Always offering one pasta dish during its lunch service, Zuni coaxes improbably rich flavors out of ingredients that would be humdrum at most other restaurants. On this day, I happen to be talking about spaghetti al farro, a wheat trendy during those halcyon days of the Roman Republic. A decade ago in San Francisco, farro returned to prominence, according to the Chronicle, as “chefs like Judy Rodgers of Zuni … seem to be taken with farro's rusticity and its association with rural Italian peasant cooking.” History aside, our spaghetti al farro was in a sense a pauper’s dish in that it contained no luxury ingredients — that is, other than the farro which I’ll guess cannot be found at Ralph’s, but is subject to a healthy mark-up at Whole Foods. In other words, the spaghetti was prepared with julienned red and green peppers and onions in olive oil and was completely satisfying on this warm afternoon with the few sips of Bandol remaining in my glass. Cooked to the tooth, the spaghetti and those delicious peppers epitomized clarity of flavor and purpose, giving the dish the aura of effortlessness just like so many other delicious items on the Zuni menu.

As for that roasted chicken, there are few dishes as classic yet consistently botched in kitchens beyond 1658 Market Street. For at least 24 hours, Zuni salts its chickens, which, according to the restaurant’s accompanying cookbook, should weigh 2.75 to 3.25 pounds, as such chickens “flourish at high heat, roasting quickly and evenly, and, with lots of skin per ounce of meat…are virtually designed to stay succulent.”

But, arguably, it is the bread salad, the dish’s literal substratum, soaking up all the glorious chicken drippings, that has propelled the dish to great heights. A stuffing for all intents and purposes, Rodgers's euphemistic bread salad, is awesome proof that Zuni has earned its timelessness while yielding none of its modernity. Those hunks of bread, some chewy and some crispy, are moistened by wine vinaigrette and dripping fat. Emboldened by garlic, scallions, currants and pine nuts, the bread salad brings a necessary lustiness to the perfectly cooked chicken.

We were just getting started. Flaneuring up Valencia Street, we stopped for an espresso at Four Barrel, a café whose odious poseurdom matched its grotesquely over extracted coffee. Like Sight Glass, Four Barrel has a massive, industrial storefront, most of which is dedicated to roasting; only the front section is used for beverage preparation and seating. Four Barrel is so affected that it conspicuously employs disc jockeys to spin vinyl, as if to say, We and our record collection are hipper than thou. Let’s be clear: Four Barrel is the Dave Eggers of coffeehouses. Its espresso is heartbreakingly overdone and its disc jockey is a pointless footnote. (I do concur that vinyl is superior; there is no other medium that does Bud Powell justice. But Dave Eggers is loathsome, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius could be the most grating literary work published in English.) On their own, Four Barrel coffee beans are of unimpeachable quality and are far better utilized by the skillful hands of Tartine Bakery’s baristas.

We wound up the afternoon at Humphrey Slocombe where we encountered a gaggle of nerds manipulating their DSLRs while their ice cream melted. After a long meander up Harrison Street, I enjoyed my refreshing olive oil ice cream, which was much more lemony than Otto’s standard-bearer. But the black sesame confounded me. We all loved J-Wy’s tin roof sundae; the Tahitian vanilla was so pure and rich that the recipe could have been stolen from Guy Savoy, and hot fudge and the salty sweet genius of frosted peanuts only amplified its greatness.

Building to an appropriate crescendo, we and our already full stomachs, later made the 50-mile jaunt south to Los Gatos for a dinner at Manresa, a restaurant swiftly becoming the Chez Panisse of its day. David Kinch, Manresa’s chef, believes that he builds on Alice Waters’s emphasis on quality local produce by insisting on vegetables that are “biodynamically” grown at the Love Apple Farm, located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a mere 20 miles away from the restaurant. Biodynamics is little understood, but its proponents can be accused of lunacy — literally. After all, biodynamics, the brainchild of Rudolf Steiner in 1924, involves planting seeds based on lunar phases because of the “link between growth and the life force of the moon and sun.”

Steiner actually favored “burying a cowhorn stuffed with manure at the time of the autumnal equinox,” because—and here is where the logic sputters—through the burial “we preserve in the horn the etheric and astral force that the horn was accustomed to reflect when it was on the cow. Because the cow horn is now outwardly surrounded by the Earth, all the Earth's etherizing and astralizing rays stream into its inner cavity. The manure inside the horn attracts these forces and is inwardly enlivened by them. If the horn is buried for the entire winter—the season when the Earth is most inwardly alive—all this life will be preserved in the manure, turning the contents of the horn into an extremely concentrated, enlivening and fertilizing force.” Jesus fucking Christ.

To those of us philosophy grads overly steeped in Berkeley and Hume, biodynamics would seem to be the object of cacchination, not strict adherence. But somehow Steiner’s ravings captured Kinch’s attention. All that aside, my sensory experiences over three meals at Manresa entail a conclusion that Kinch’s vegetables are the finest I have eaten in recent memory, at least since lunch with Jim (and, oh yeah, our wives) at L’Astrance in 2005, when it was a hungry Michelin two-star. Biodynamics is also employed by Domaine Romanée Conti and Domaine Leroy, which “are widely acknowledged to be among the greatest wineries on the planet” according to J-Mc. Where that leaves Steiner’s theory is another story. But I’ll chalk up Steiner’s recent prominence to being at the goofy nexus between hippydom and hipsterdom and to the meticulous, intensive, and small-scale farming that goes on in such agriculturally advantaged locales as Santa Cruz and the Cote D’Or.

Kinch differs from the Panisse mafia in that he takes enormous conceptual and technical risks, exemplifying his apprenticeships in Burgundy and San Sebastian, Spain, as well as in the Axis countries. Meals at Manresa always begin most propitiously with a rendition of the L’Arpege egg, paying homage to his ideological comrade Alain Passard, the iconoclastic and vegetable-focused chef of L’Arpege who first concocted this amuse bouche. This “hot-cold egg” contrasts a warm poached egg yolk served in its brown shell with cold cream and sherry vinegar as well as maple syrup with sea salt, plus some chives for good measure. It would seem that only an alchemist could transform a poached egg and cream into such a sophisticated little jewel that still tastes downright homey, owing to the presence of maple syrup. But we have Kinch (and Passard) to thank for this treat.

Manresa’s gargouillou, its “Into the Vegetable Garden” salad, is another modern French showstopper that in the right hands and with pristine produce, is a composition “of vegetables, leaves and flowers, each prepared in a different way and set upon a black ‘dirt’ of roasted chicory root and dried potatoes” that “showcase[s] the farm’s daily offerings, from roots to leaves.” Each vegetable is individually braised, and all of their collective juices are “combined to make the foamy emulsion that represents dew.” Michel Bras, a chef from Laguiole, France, specializing in modern haute cuisine, originated the dish over thirty years ago, and it tends to be served only in the most rarefied restaurants. Mugaritz near San Sebastian, Spain, serves it, as does Coi in San Francisco. Corton in TriBeCa achieves admirable results despite being in an unfavorable location, agriculturally speaking. Manresa’s gargouillou manages to be even snobbier. Kinch credits NOMA’s René Redzepi, a Dane who is perhaps the most cutting edge chef in the world, for inspiring the edible black dirt that is supposed to approximate the dirt at the Love Apple Farm. The dish is a perfect vehicle for testing Kinch’s thesis about a restaurant’s sense of place, and his work with vegetables that were grown 20 miles of the kitchen is electrifying. Perforce I examined each vegetable, considering and savoring every delicious bite.

My favorite dish of the night, Kinch’s own creation, was the ingenious rice-less risotto of big fin squid and Vietnamese lemon balm, mushroom, and parmesan. But I must first cavil before I kvell. I doubt that Manresa was serving big fin squid, which would seem impossible to capture. (This squid, which can be up to 23 feet in length, lives at depths thousands of meters under sea level, safe from commercial fishing operations. No adult specimen has ever been captured according to Wikipedia.) Regardless, Kinch and his staff, demonstrating tremendous physical stamina above all else, transform their squid into simulacra of grains of rice, possessing the same texture and color of an al dente risotto. With mushrooms and lemon imparted into the mix, parmesan would seem not to jibe. Yet at Manresa, the parmesan worked wonders as if the risotto really were rice, and not a delectable creature from the deep.

Totally sated after a weekend of hedonism, a full dessert course was not in the cards. But we managed to sample a few cheeses from the traditional cheese cart. Collectively we were most taken by a Portuguese cow’s milk cheese and an Oregon blue, and it is a shame that we—in our food-induced haze—never got their names.

Zuni Café

1658 Market Street
San Francisco
(415) 552-2522

www.zunicafe.com

Four Barrel Coffee

375 Valencia Street

San Francisco

(415) 252-0800

www.fourbarrelcoffee.com

Humphrey Slocombe

2790 Harrison Street
San Francisco
(415) 550-6971

www.humphryslocombe.com

Manresa Restaurant

320 Village Lane

Los Gatos

(408) 354-4330

www.manresarestaurant.com

San Francisco, Day One

Are there two better American neighborhoods than the Tenderloin and the Mission? Are there three more choice words to utter to a cabbie than "Eighteenth and Guerrero?" I think not. Wikipedia may allege, with its customary, solecistic élan, that "The Tenderloin is a high crime neighborhood, particularly violent street crime such as robbery and aggravated assault," but this charge is utter nonsense. The 'loin is the home of Blue Bottle Café, whose Italophilic espresso, unlike all the charred, overpriced Third Wave swill that is the true Starbucks legacy, is exquisite and can accommodate a macchiato so elegant and compelling that it is in itself a riposte to the sanctimonious black,-like-my-women purism that I am wont to espouse.

With bags in hand, Jim, Justin and I raced from SFO to Tartine Bakery, with collective eagerness to begin 48 hours of gluttony that we hoped might have a dash of refinement. We were greeted with a short line and plenty of Northern California sunshine, defying the laws of physics as much as that weird carom that rebuffed Ian Kinsler in Game 2 of the Fall Classic. Even as our luck seemed to turn, upon learning that the bakery was out of its stalwart croque monsieur, order was fast restored by the Jambon Royale & Gruyère, a pressed sandwich consisting of cured and smoked ham, the aforementioned (but now accent-less) gruyere, and Dijon mustard between Tartine's warm country bread. If nothing else, we presumed that the sandwich would make for a nice accompaniment to the ham and chard quiche and ham and cheese croissant. (Not to mention our appetizers: a gougère, the brilliant orange-zested morning bun, and brioche pudding.) Clearly we meant business.

Among this array of textbook quality bakery items, the sandwich was the knee-buckler. Owners Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson understand how to create a perfectly proportioned sandwich -- just the right amount of mustard in every single bite, the bread sliced somehow to the right width to accommodate the most classic sandwich fillings of all, ham and cheese. Moreover, Tartine does not scrimp on the quality of these key ingredients. They use the good stuff, including ham from the venerable Niman Ranch and proper cheese. (Note to the world: There is no mayonnaise on this sandwich.) So, yes, once assembled, the sandwich is a model of precision, but we are not talking about something sterile and soulless. The masters at Le Cordon Bleu in the 15th Arr. and the goons drinking beer in the late morning at Nick's Roast Beef at 20th and Passyunk would esteem this sandwich equally. That is, if the goons at Nick's would stop gambling and remove their attention from Philly Classic Sports broadcasts of keg tossing. The ham and chard quiche was just as flabbergasting, also in equal parts refined and guttural. And as simply delicious as the brioche pudding happened to be, it was a vehicle for the tart blackberries and plums that went into the oven inside it on that very morning. After solid espressos made with neighbor Four Barrel's beans, we ambled down to the local BART stop, dropped our bags off at the hotel, and headed to the Ferry Building, tacitly understanding that we would be returning to Tartine on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

At the Ferry Building, we first stopped at Boccalone, Chris Cosentino's shop for cured pork and sausage, or what Cosentino's marketing specialists have tagged "tasty salted pig parts," which is a far cry from the Hot Doug's much wittier "There are no two finer words in the English language than 'encased meats', my friend." We went in for a "salumi cone." We should have been warded off by Boccalone's lame locution, which did not augur well for our Incanto dinner later. Still, the mortadella, prosciutto cotto and whatever other parts were thrown into the paper cup were tasty enough.

We moved on to Il Cane Rosso, a meat-focused establishment owned by Daniel Patterson, David Chang's recent sparring partner in the recent Made-for-the-Internet "NYC vs. SF" debate. (If Patterson believes that New York follows San Francisco, then all of the Red Dog's pork and beef proves that San Francisco follows New York right back.) We split a braised pork sandwich with cracklings and a relish of sweet peppers and jalapeños along with a plate of meatballs, both of which were respectable, but underwhelming in the aftermath of our Tartine extravaganza. This criticism may be unfair, but that's tough luck. The most memorable item from the Dog was a side of ciabatta, i.e., carpet slipper bread, with a garlic flavor so acute that Patterson must have pillaged half the garlic in Gilroy.

With our circulatory systems nearing rupture, we secured a table on the Bay over at Hog Island Oysters, which is known for its quality oyster production in Tomales Bay, an estuary 50 miles north of the City in Marin County. We shared a dozen oysters -- regrettably we only ordered a half dozen of the tiny and deliciously sweet Hog Island kumamotos, which take two to three years to grow to maturity, and two to three seconds to ingest. Even mollusk-phobic J-Wy could not resist. We washed the oysters down with a glass of muscadet and I am here to pronounce that, pace Mr. Franzen, "comfortably dissipating . . . in coastal affluence" is sorely underrated.

Before leaving Ferry Market, we queued up for caffeine at Blue Bottle Café's north bar, which I later learned pulls single-origin espresso shots while the main bar pulls uses the mainstay Hayes Valley blend. Regardless of the blend, Blue Bottle makes a caramelly, Italian-style espresso, eschewing all the cloying efflorescence that I usually find in what is considered "American premium espresso." Indeed the macchiato was so delicious, its proportions so finely hewn that I found myself admiring the beauty in the otherwise preposterous form of expression known as "latte art." Don't people know that Arabica's perfectly segregated, layered cappuccino circa 1996—steamed milk on the bottom, espresso in the middle, and foam on top—will always be the ne plus ultra of coffee art even if those caps were a few notches short of potability? I trust that The Coffee House at University Circle has maintained the tradition, even if it has abandoned the upstairs smoking section.

Sauntering through the Tenderloin, our bodies demanding caffeine even though we just left Blue Bottle, we managed to admire all the aging, unkempt architectural gems on Howard and Mission Streets, plus the occasional steely dan manufacturer. We stepped over and around scores of homeless on our mission to overpay for the fancy coffee that we knew existed in the neighborhood, even if was less conspicuous than the local drug trade. We landed on quiet Seventh Street, home to the rehabilitated warehouse that is Sight Glass Coffee. Sight Glass is the latest San Francisco roaster to hang a shingle and roast and brew coffee with any array of methodologies and technologies. Despite a large and attractive space, it was off limits to civilians; Sight Glass's retail operations are confined to a coffee cart and two seats at the front door. But in the middle of the afternoon on a dreary and seemingly out-of-the way block, Sight Glass drew a steady crowd, which was no surprise because the coffee was really good. The slow-brew technique, which all the cool kids are doing these days, proved itself worthy and, if the espresso was not quite on par with Blue Bottle's, well it was nothing to scoff at either. Does any city anywhere have coffee this good?

Disaster then struck at Incanto, a farce of a restaurant possessing remarkable incompetence. (J-Wy questioned my decision to review the place because he figured it would be defunct by the time I got around to typing something.) During the afternoon, I attempted to move our 8:30 pm reservation up to 7 o'clock in deference to the two jet-lagged New Yorkers. But the restaurant claimed that it could not accommodate us. We nonetheless arrived at 7:30 and discovered a dining room as devoid of charm as it was people. Disconcerted by the deceit and solitude on what should have been a busy Friday night, we sat down at our choice of tables.

The waiter recited the specials. The chef, Chris Cosentino, has struck fame as a votary of cooking extreme offal and on this night, he offered cow testicles. Our waiter chose the biological term over the euphemism "Rocky Mountain oysters." Why not just say "testes," which seems grossest of all? Now I consider myself an adventurous eater and was mesmerized by the tartare of tête de veau at Pierre Gagnaire in 2004. But there is no way I would put a bull's balls in my mouth at Incanto or anywhere else.

Incanto's path of destruction began with a dish of ill-sliced sardines with sunchokes and sunflowers utterly sodden from some unfortunate marinade. We were forced to push the dish to the far corner of the table to minimize the pain to our eyes. An inexplicable mistake on our part, we ordered poached oysters, which were removed from their shells, served on a bed of what turned out to be a Twinkie-like polenta cake and accompanied with a side of heated mussels. These oysters were so gargantuan and slimy that it took us several minutes to identify them. In no mood for diplomacy, there was no need to conceal them in our napkins or under bread. Our diffident waiter began to suspect that we did not like the food.

By this point, it was clear that the meal would be an abject failure. In one dish, some beautiful chanterelles were denuded of all chanterelle flavor. Three half orders of pasta--handkerchief noodles with pork ragù, paccheri with calamari in squid ink, and a macaroni cacio e pepe, were so hopelessly awful that we bellowed in laughter to the point of tears. I was afraid that I would choke. The ragù could have been Ragù, and the cacao e pepe was sin pepe. The ink was as bland as John Thune despite a potent appearance, and the calamari was downright quaggy. We quickly skedaddled. This meal was as indelible as it was inedible.

(More on the Gaycation to come.... Stay tuned, intrepid readers.)

Tartine Bakery & Café

600 Guerrero Street

San Francisco

(415) 487-2600

www.tartinebakery.com

Boccalone

Ferry Building Marketplace, Shop 21

San Francisco

(415) 433-6500

http://www.boccalone.com/location-22.html

Il Cane Rosso

Ferry Building Marketplace, Shop 41

San Francisco

(415) 391-7599

http://canerossosf.com/

Hog Island Oyster Bar

Ferry Building Marketplace, Shop 11A
San Francisco
(415) 391-7117

http://www.hogislandoysters.com/bars/san-francisco

Blue Bottle Coffee

Ferry Building Marketplace, Shop 7

San Francisco

(510) 653-3394 ‎

http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/locations/ferry-building/

Sight Glass Coffee

270 Seventh Street
San Francisco, CA
(415) 861–1313

http://sightglasscoffee.com

Incanto

1550 Church Street
San Francisco
(415) 641-4500

www.incanto.biz

Momed

As Boris Yelnikoff conceded, "Sometimes a cliché is finally the best way to make one's point." So here goes: in Los Angeles, the Mediterranean cuisines with their similar climes have been adapted to California's cherished agricultural and piscatory products to salutary effect. While this practice has produced such cringeworthy locutions as "Cal-Ital" and the antipodean "Cal-French," I will trade their regular utterance for the work product of Suzanne Goin, chef-owner of Lucques and the city's foremost practitioner of Cal-French and for that matter Cal-Maghrebi. (She prepares an expert lamb tagine.)

But until the advent of Momed, the great cuisines of the Eastern Mediterranean--from Turkey, Greece, and Lebanon--have never received their due Californication. Granted there is no shortage of falafel shops around, owing to Los Angeles's large population of persons of Middle Eastern lineage. I plead to an especial weakness for the lamb's tongue sandwich at Falafel Arax despite its dreary location. But Arax and its ilk are yoked to a specific Old World sense of tradition that nevertheless yields an everydayness well suited for Los Angeles, owing to their various foods' lightness of flavor and casual sensibilities.

Momed was conceived when businessman Alex Sarkissian, an émigré from Iran by way of London and of Armenian lineage, somehow linked up with chef Matthew Carpenter over their shared interest in the cuisines of the Eastern Mediterranean and, to a lesser extent, the Maghreb. In thinking about menus and recipes, Sarkissian and Carpenter explored Athens, Beirut, and Istanbul, a city that is the dream that the otherwise trenchant Paul Keating says it is. Along with GM Vasilis Tseros, they did not want to be serving basic shawarma and hummus a la Arax. Carpenter, it should be noted, is no prima donna and is prone to setting up Momed's patio tables and chairs in the morning hours.

With Beverly Hills's many pedestrians and Semites, management settled on the suburb for its location, the very same Beverly Hills that is home to the original Cheesecake Factory; the opulent hook bar known as Cut; Crustacean, known for its soi-disant Secret Kitchen; and best of all Mr. Chow's whose popularity has endured despite being derided 28 years ago by the Stern Critic of the Contemporary Scene as the spot where narcotics salesman Jive Miguel celebrated at midnight with "Szechuan dumplings / After the deal has been done." Accordingly, Momed's cultivated sense of style and charm, which is an extension of Mr. Sarkissian's personality, and the elegance of its informal service make the restaurant one of few in Beverly Hills where an unironic meal can be had.

Dips are a staple of the Levantine kitchen, and Momed has engineered several twists on the familiar that are as clever as they are agreeable to the palate. The avocado hummus tastes as creamy and green as its looks with a flavor that splits the difference between the chickpea and the avocado. A single bite overcomes any initial fear that the dip is as contrived and off-putting as a grocery store California roll, or for that matter, a Kogi taco. The balanced, spicy eggplant dip, which--it has been intoned--is not baba ghanoush, gradually reveals its flavor and gentle spice over a period of seconds. Momed does offer a standard hummus for the timorous and hidebound, but its overly thick texture yields one of Momed's few missteps.

The salads, in constant variation, exemplify seasonality and an adaptation of the Mediterranean. The tabbouleh swaps parsley for fresh watercress, not that there is a shortage of parsley on the Left Coast. One constant salad is a showcase for samphire, a seaweed resembling baby asparagus that is tossed with green beans and actual asparagus. (I have only seen samphire used elsewhere in Casa Mono's fideos, where I used it to sweep away that dish's mayonnaise, a surefire emetic.) When in season, Momed serves roasted artichokes with fava beans and peas, a dish that appears much less oleaginous than the comparable version served at Tawlet Restaurant el Tayeb, a restaurant profiled in the recent "Back to Beirut" episode of No Reservations. My favorite salad is a simple helping of roast potatoes—sorry, Weiser potatoes—served room temperature with a tapenade of the First Triumvirate, namely anchovies, capers, and olives. I can assure you that Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey would have concurred.

Of course Momed offers an array of meats and seafood cooked on skewers. I am most taken by the pepper-laced lamb and beef koefte, which is always a model of succulence and spice. Accompanied by lightly grilled watercress, mint, and cherry tomatoes, the heat can be elevated with a helping of muhammara, the delicious red dip of roasted red pepper, walnut and pomegranate. Underneath the koefte lies one of Momed's toothsome and delightfully chewy pide, the pocketless Turkish flatbread that is a Momed specialty. Despite the considerable restraint required, one must allow the pide to soak up all the escaping juices and not devour all the muhammara at once. When the pide is all mucked up with koefte remnants and the piquant muhammara, the taste is irresistible. Patience is a virtue.

For my tastes and proclivities, which have always favored seafood to meat, the Byblos seafood salad is the standout. Named after the ancient Phoenician seaport near Beirut, the plate overflows with tender marinated shrimp, octopodes of various stages of adolescent development, and calamari. Bolstered by fennel, herbs, and the occasional schmear of avocado hummus, the salad is dressed just lightly enough with an admixture of lemon and raki, the anise-flavored spirit popular in Turkey. At the suggestion (and compliments) of Mr. Tseros, I had a glass of the Domaine Spiropoulos, a Peloponnesian white wine made from the autochthonous moschofilero varietal which has a striking pink tint. The combination of wine and all that octopus and fennel instantly transported me back to Mr. Tserors's native and bustling Salonika, where I once spent two days drinking wine and eating olives along the Aegean. Reality only re-intruded when I finished a section of the Gray Lady, looked up, and found myself in Beverly Hills, California.

Momed is so comprehensive with its coffee that it offers both mild and dark roasts of Turkish coffee which Momed has re-christened as "Mediterranean coffee" in the spirit of ecumenism. (In this vein, the wine list spans Greece and Turkey, Israel and Lebanon. If only it were that easy.) The mild roast, which is from Edna's Coffee in Glendale, is the best coffee in Los Angeles, that is, when the single barista trained to make it happens to be on duty. Momed's genius is to imbue every sip with physicality; the coffee has the thickness and color of the waters off the Louisiana coast, perfect for Turkish coffee if not life itself. The Four Seasons at Sultanahmet in Istanbul could not approximate such quality. For this luxury, I deem Momed's sin of using Intelligentsia beans for espresso expiated. When Edna's mild is coupled with a sweet, walnutty ma'amoul soirée cookie, any afternoon would be complete.

Momed

233 South Beverly Drive

Beverly Hills

(310) 270-4444

http://atmomed.com/

Heinous Returns For One Last Taco On U.S. Soil

My favorite pop-up, guerilla gay bar is naturally in my adopted city's most fashionable neighborhood, home to what Our Hero has called "the most evolved shopping area in Los Angeles." This bar boasts enormous street cred since it was borne as an unlicensed taco cart, stationed on a sidewalk across from a bus stop at Santa Monica Boulevard's eastern terminus. Eventually the cart's popularity and the need to avoid pervasive MTA effluvia prompted a move into the sizable garden of bric-a-brac that is part of the nearby Mi Alma Collective. This gay bar, which goes by the name Ricky's Fish Tacos happens to make the best Baja-style fish taco in Los Angeles, even if the competition is less than vigorous.

The highly distinguished food blogger, Heinous—formerly of Brooklyn, currently of Sydney—was taken back when a promised taqueria greeted him not with urban grit, never mind a narcocorrido anthem, but with speakers blaring Madonna's "Like a Virgin." Through prior visits, Heinous became accustomed to the colorful shenanigans of East L.A.'s Tacos Baja Ensenada, which in a fit of immodesty, hung a sign proclaiming itself as the best restaurant in Los Angeles. He understood the mercurial ways of El Parian, with its prison cell-like, trompe l'oeil front door and a menu that expressly states that it "reserves the right to serve alcohol to anyone." (El Parian's decision to alter its carne asada recipe a few years ago remains a source of continuing frustration.)

Instead the bonhomous Ricky, with his signature straw hat, gave us a warm welcome while he lorded over the deep fryer, ever eagled-eyed in his weekend pursuit of preparing only the most flavorful fish and shrimp tacos. A perfectionist, Ricky makes his own batter and salsas. He heats the tortillas on a small griddle which, if my dated investigative efforts remain accurate, he buys in the mornings from a North Hollywood mercado. I have no doubt that he would make his own tortillas if circumstances allowed him to do so. An assistant dresses the tacos with shredded cabbage and pico de gallo. Patrons are invited to complete the tacos at the salsa bar with its assortment of delicious offerings. However, the spicy chipotle salsa, if applied injudiciously, overwhelms the taco taste.

Since the operation is unlicensed, Ricky and his friends quite justifiably see no reason not to offer visitors a glass of Tecate from the keg. If an invitee felt so obliged, he could donate a mere $3.00 to the kitty. Who is to say that these enterprising young capitalists are doing anything wrong? After all, a concern specializing in the distribution of a Schedule I substance flagrantly disregards the CSA from a Sunset Boulevard storefront within sight of Mi Alma. In fact, Ricky is probably smart to sell tacos within a stone's throw of all these potheads.

Once ensconced into a nook away from the techno-dance cacophony pulsating out of the speakers, we were able to eat the tacos. I love both the shrimp and the fish, both of whose freshness is indisputable. Ricky is a lot more adept with a deep fryer that I was during my tenure as a Burger King fry guy. (To be sure, I made a mean Whopper.) My preference is for the pescado over the camarón. The light catfish filets are a better complement to the thick batter than the dense shrimp, though the Wife disagrees.

We were in Silverlake, so a dose of irony is in order. When Ricky's cart was at the bus stop, it suffered from spatial constraints and those mephitic fumes. Yet the hipsters would queue up for a taco like tourists outside of Sprinkles or Pink's. But now that Ricky's Fish Tacos has moved into a lovely and festive oasis complete with a keg of beer, the crowds seem sparse.

On our way out, Ricky informed us that a disc jockey appears on Sundays. I don't know if the jovial O-Bar in West Hollywood is still around. Touch Supper Club, my old spot in Ohio City where I enjoyed several raucous nights, used to have some interesting Latin food. But there is no way they made fish tacos this good. Neither does anyone else in this town.

Ricky's Fish Tacos at Mi Alma Garden

4016 Santa Monica Blvd.

Silverlake

http://twitter.com/RickysFishTacos