Travel « (y)our food choices™

At least once in every food-obsessed person’s lifetime, the opportunity to go absolutely nuts must be seized. This has been an amazing year for us and we’re celebrating our good fortune by indulging in what may be our most epic culinary splurge – ever! It’s Friday, December 9, 2011 and we’re sitting in our beautiful room in Yountville, California’s Vintage Inn, just steps from Ad Hoc, Bouchon and one of the world’s greatest temples of food, The French Laundry. Yountville is a diner’s paradise, chuck full of the best food California has to offer and we’re here to eat as much of it as we can stomach in three days.

Journey begins...

Bottega
We started this weekend’s celebration with lunch at Chef Michael Chiarello’s Bottega. Tucked away in a discreet, but easy to get to spot on Washington Street (arguably the globes most prestigious culinary address), Bottega fits right in with the stylized European-inspired architecture common to this short stretch of a town with its rich, earth colored interiors and old world sensibility – entirely appropriate in the heart of California’s wine country.

Our meal started with a nice hunk of crusty bread and a bit of olive oil embellished with bits of hard cheese and herbs. The antipasti menu had us agonizing over so many choices, but we managed to settle on the Wood Grilled Octopus and the Lamb & Egg. Both were excellent. The octopus was served with a slice of olive oil braised potato, pickled red onions and a salsa verde. While the dish was delicious, one of us was less impressed than the other because of his near obsessive adoration of the many octopus dishes we devoured in Spain this summer. Now nothing seems to meet his high bar.

The Lamb & Egg was amazing! The kitchen’s “house made” lamb sausage is served with a pepperonata (caramelized peppers) and a crispy soft boiled egg, red endive and smoked olive oil poached enoki mushrooms. The creamy, soft-yolked eggs are briefly boiled then lightly battered and finally quickly deep-fried. The crisp, slightly bitter endive tempered the richness of the egg yolk and sausage. The mushrooms, while texturally perfect, were a bit flavorless and superfluous with everything else going on in the dish.

Lamb & Egg; Wood Grilled Octopus; Red Wheat Tagliarini Bolognese; Paprika Oil Marinated Grilled Skirt Steak

Bottega’s pasta menu is inspiring. We opted for the Red Wheat Tagliarini Bolognese. Thicker than spaghetti, the tagliarini was cooked as it should be – toothsome and well seasoned. It came smothered in a rich, meaty sugo of veal, pork and porcini mushroom scented with rosemary and enriched with parmigiano reggiano. We wanted to lick our plates clean once it was gone, but thought better of it. We still had the Paprika Oil Marinated Grilled Skirt Steak to eat, after all, and we didn’t want the rest of the dining room to suffer a couple of poorly mannered chow hounds. The steak arrived just as ordered, medium rare and tender, accompanied by Yukon Gold potato chips, salsa rossa and a pile of arugula.

We washed the meal down with a Trumer Pils and a flight of zinfandels served to represent the diversity of styles available in a wine that has its origins in Croatia. The Italian was light and unremarkable while the Chiarello produced California zinfandel was typical of the region with its big, chewy fruit. The Croatian wine was the star of the trio. We would have been happy with a bottle.

Service at Botegga was spot on – informed, efficient and friendly. Our meal was memorable and a fine beginning to a long weekend of grand dining.

Ad Hoc

Our second course.

Our Friday dining splurge didn’t stop with Bottega. After lunch, we did a little shopping before returning to the hotel for an evening wine tasting and a walk. We needed to keep moving to work up an appetite for our next big meal at Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc, a decidedly casual destination that serves hearty, four course, prix fix meals that change nightly.

Our first course was a salad of baby mixed greens, toasted sunflower seeds, shaved shallots, pickled baby fennel and cauliflower, olives, anchovies and crispy capers, dressed in a red wine vinaigrette. The Snake River Farms Pork Loin gave us pause until it arrived. The savory, juicy pork was surprisingly delicious as were the accompanying black eyed peas, roasted baby beets, toasted farrow and braised chard. In spite of all we’d eaten up to the point of the pork loin, we wanted to lick the pan it was served in and we still had two courses to go.

Salad of Baby Mixed Greens; Ubriaco; Sanke River Farms Pork Loin; Tiramisu

Our third course, a wine washed raw cow’s milk cheese, was as rich as you might imagine made all the more so by the accompanying paladin toast and black trumpet mushrooms. We couldn’t eat it all. When the tiramisu arrived at the table, we nearly fell out of our seats. Desert was presented in a big soup bowl that was filled to the rim with mascarpone and house made ladyfingers. We were ready to cry uncle, but we dove in anyway. While tasty, it wasn’t amazing. The cookies were tough to cut through with a spoon. It’s a small complaint, and after all we’d eaten, it would have taken nothing less than perfect to get us to finish desert. We simply couldn’t this time.

A Domaine Dupeuble Pere et Fils Beaujolais Nouveau washed the meal down, aided by an end-of-meal espresso. Our hats off to the staff at Ad Hoc. Our server couldn’t have been more charming.

A few of our favorite pictures of Valencia

Our first stop in Spain took us to Valencia, Spain’s third largest city. Few of the people we surveyed in preparation for our trip had much to say about Valencia. Friends who have traveled to Spain focus their adoration on either of Spain’s two urban hubs – Madrid and Barcelona. Too bad! We loved our time in Valencia and would recommend it to anyone planning to spend time along Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

The biggest food market in Spain. So much food, so little time.

The cab ride from the train station to the hotel was quick. We checked in, unloaded our things and headed out to grab a bite to eat in the Placa de la Reina. First stop, the pintxos bar La Taberna de la Reina on the square where we found all kinds of delicious bites of meat, fish and cheese atop slices of baguette. These ubiquitous morsels can be found all over Spain, and while the main event was yet to come in San Sebastian, we thought it worth a visit to get a sense of how it works before we find ourselves in the serious pintxos bars later in our journey (more on pintxos to come).

An array of tapas.

Feeling sated, we wandered the ancient narrow streets in Valencia’s old city center around the cathedral where we found innumerable cafes, tourist trinkets, and massive colorful graffiti-covered stone walls. All that walking worked up an appetite so we scouted about to find our next bite and happened upon Boatella Tapas, a tapas bar and cerveceria across the street from the Mercado Central, Valencia’s fresh food hub and one of the largest food markets in Europe. The tiny corner bar has a small counter and seating area indoors and a few tables set out on the sidewalk. Atop the bar inside is an array of platters with piles of various fish, some fried, some roasted, all incredibly fresh and delicious. Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs and Steve’s Spanish language skills were just good enough to get the servers attention but not quite good enough to explain that we simply wanted a mixed plate of various items from the bar. The “medium” plate of food he thought he was ordering ended up being several medium sized plates of each of the things he pointed at on the bar. We had a big plate of fried whole small fish, a plate of grilled squid salad, a plate of fried shrimp in their shells, a full plate of padron peppers and a nice big plate of chicharones. There was no way we were going to eat it all!

Valencia has the best paella in Spain.

Paella is a Valencian specialty. The rice most commonly used for paella, Bomba rice, grows in rice paddies near Valencia and the sea provides all the delicious squid, muscles and langoustines needed for a traditional pan of saffron scented rice. We had the best paella of our visit at Restaurant El Rall, a great little place tucked away in one of Valencia’s many medieval squares. While we waited for our paella for two, we noshed on a favorite Spanish blood sausage that had been topped with a dollop of pureed ham and cheese then toasted under the broiler. They were delicious. The paella was exquisite and we were careful to delicately scrape our servings from the top, avoiding disturbing the bottom of the pan so that the rice could continue to cook and ultimately crisp up. That crunchy, brown rice at the end is the best part of the paella. Ours was perfect!

The best tapas in Valencia. It was worth the bike ride to find this place.

Perhaps our most memorable meal in Valencia, lunch at Bodega Montana, was satisfying in every way. The bodega has a great atmosphere with its marble bar and several barrels lining the walls from which wine and sherry is dispensed. We stuffed ourselves with an assortment of perfectly executed tapas. Standouts included the marinated tuna, the anchovy stuffed green olives, the bacalao (salted cod) potato puree and the fried stuffed red peppers. But that wasn’t enough. We also snacked on slices of Manchego cheese and thin slices of Iberico ham – perhaps the best we’ve ever tasted. As with many of our meals in Spain, we washed it all down with glasses of rosé and beer.

Hot chocolate and churros. A must try when in Spain.

We took a break from traditional Spanish food on our last night in Valencia, settling instead for Italian at La Papardella, just a couple of blocks off the placa near the cathedral. But this was not our last meal in Valencia. Before cabbing to the train station on departure day, we got up at 6 a.m. and headed over to the L’Orxateria next to the main entrance of the Mercat for churros and chocolate. The outdoor temperature at that hour was just cool enough to make this decadent breakfast of fried pastry and thick hot chocolate the perfect sendoff.

Next stop: Barcelona!