A lovely weekend at Milliken Creek

This last weekend, my fella and I were invited to stay at Milliken Creek Inn, which is right on the Napa river. Those of you who are already familiar with my stories might know that I'm not the biggest fan of Napa, finding it overcrowded with drunk tourists and cheesy tasting room employees, so I was skeptical of this invitation, but wanted to escape the San Francisco fog.

How wonderful it is to know that there's still rustic charm in Napa! Milliken Creek Inn sits right on the river, which is a tide river, ebbing and flowing from both directions. There are several buildings on the property, which originally housed a tavern that stagecoach riders would stop at on their mail routes in the 1800s.

This was the first weekend away the Mister and I had since we were married last October, and Milliken Creek was such a sweet place--they are all about the romance. The Inn's lovely general manager ticked off the personal butlering services she's done for the Inn's guest over the past year: organized plane-writing in the sky for an anniversary, a butterfly release, bought lingerie, and procured a special bottle of wine of which there were only 10 left in the world. She joked, "The only thing I won’t let someone do is fish off my river bank!" (and you wouldn’t want to, nor would you want to swim in the river).

We dropped our bags off in the luxe room and headed into town for some oysters and beer at the Oxbow Public Market, wandered around the Ferry Building-esque food court and came back to the Inn for a spa treatment--one of the best this cynic has ever had. The line they use for facials is Eminence Organics, which I'd never heard of but is definitely on my list of skincare to recommend.

Although the Inn kindly offered to make us a reservation anywhwere in Napa, we didn't feel like dining out and so bought all of the fixings for our favorite picnic dinner (baguette, boquerones, prosciutto, soft cheese, cornichons, and a 12-pack of Pacifico) and ate on our private deck.

The morning brought a cute picnic basket packed with a hot breakfast (you order it the night before by hanging a tag on your door and they deliver it starting at 8am) and the daily papers.

I'd definitely recommend a stay at Milliken Creek for any couple who's looking for some romance, especially since the Inn is celebrating their 10-year anniversary this year, and offering special packages that include a driver, dinner reservations, chocolate and strawberries (um, did I  mention they covered our entire room with candles, roses, and rose petals while we were enjoying the 6pm Winemaker Hour in the Inn's lobby?!?), and a few frisky treats that couples can indulge in when they come back to their room in the evening.

The packages range from $900-$1200 for the 2-night package, and regular room rates depend on the season, from $275 for a “Milliken” room in the off-season to $650 for a luxury room during the high season.

No Words Minced at Quince

Okay, so I just wanted to have a snappy title for a post about dining at Quince. But words *weren't* minced at the Oregon Certified Sustainable Winemakers' dinner last Tuesday, where a select few Oregonian winemakers showcased their current releases.


When I hear "biodynamic" or "organic" wine, the word "sludge" flashes through my brain before it can help itself. It's unfortunate that the biodynamic/organic label can carry negative connotations in the haute wine world. Just as some of the city's best restaurants will use organic, local food and utilize green business practices--and not tout it--many of my favorite Californian wineries farm organically and produce their wine biodynamically, without making a big deal on the label. (Quintessa and Unti come to mind).


Adelsheim Vineyard's and WillaKenzie's Pinot Blancs were a refreshing way to start the meal, and the Montinore Estate's Borealis went wonderfully with the first course, a salad of raw, shaved asparagus with lardo and grana padano cheese. The wine was an interesting blend of 45% Müller-Thurgau, 24% Gewürztraminer, 18% Pinot Gris and 13% Riesling that worked well with asparagus--a hard vegetable to pair wine with.

I paid more attention to Pat Dudley's lively explanation of how the LIVE certification process works than to my second course of lasagnette, she was so animated when describing the different elements of the biodynamic treatments that were serving as the family-style table's centerpieces.

I helped myself to second's of Montinore Estate's Willamette Valley Pinot Noir ("It's WillAMit, dammit!," joshed the proprietor of Panther Creek as I mangled the appellation's pronounciation). The spiciness of the pinot surprised me, but I suppose the cool climate there on the coast forces the grapes to grow a thicker skin, providing the resulting wine with a little spicier tannin.


After the roast duck with quince mostarda course (which was great with the Bethel Heights estate-grown pinot noir), plenty of wines had been passed around the table and the vibe was a bit looser. So loose, in fact, that Terroir co-owner Dagan Ministero suddenly leapt up and seized a new bottle from the side table.

Conversation froze as Ministero removed his shoe and placed the base of the bottle inside, repeatedly slammed the shoe against the brick wall of Quince's private dining room and began to sweat a bit as the cork inched out millimeter by millimeter. Weak applause followed the pouring of the (possibly bottle-shocked?) pinot. While I'll certainly remember that parlor trick for my next camping trip, can somebody please send Mssr. Ministero a new Laguiole??

Cellar Rat: Week One at Unti

Cellar Rat: Week One at Unti Vineyards

Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 08:53:07 AM

(first published in the SF Weekly)

When the price of a burrito in Healdsburg bypassed that of a burrito in the Mission, I knew it was time to hightail it from my hometown to the big city. That was four years ago, and I hadn’t pictured heading up north again any time soon. This summer, though, I was offered a job as a seasonal cellar worker during harvest and I wasn’t about to turn it down.

Unti is a small-production (6,000-7,000 cases annually) winery in the Dry Creek Valley, making European-style reds like Barbera and Grenache quite well. I’ve always been a fan of their wines and I leaped at the chance to be winemaker Sebastien Pochan’s assistant, especially since I am the first female to ever work in the cellar at Unti.

Healdsburg during crush-time is a flurry of activity, and it’s most apparent at this time of year where the town’s main revenue and tourism comes from. Wineries crank into overdrive, with big-production facilities like Kendall-Jackson and Clos du Bois working 24 hours around the clock to churn out millions of gallons of juice coming from
thousands of tons of grapes. Unti is not like that.

Saturday at 8 a.m. there was already fruit waiting for us--several half-ton plastic boxes of Sangiovese that had just come in from the vineyard. Unti has 60 acres of vineyards and all of their wines are made from estate-grown grapes. The winery also sells fruit to numerous other wineries and individual winemakers, including Boulevard Restaurant Wine Directors John Lancaster and Robert Perkins.

Besides me (who is working 6 days a week), there are three part-time workers: two noted restaurateurs (one from Sonoma County, one from San Francisco)--friends of the owner and the winemaker--and an Unti cousin, up from Santa Cruz on the weekends.

I climbed into a stainless steel tank and began hosing it down, learning how to sterilize the equipment we’d be using to crush and de-stem the fruit: tanks, hoses, clamps, and gaskets all had to be cleaned with a solution, rinsed, neutralized and rinsed again. Within an hour or so we were sorting through the grapes, raking the discarded stems and making sure none of the hoses or pumps backed up with fruit and juice that was rapidly getting dumped into a stainless steel tank the size of a Manhattan apartment.

After we finished the first lot, the two tasting room employees came out onto the crush pad and the equipment ground to a halt.

“It’s time! It’s time!” Sebastien called as he jumped down from the platform. “Time for tradition!”

The six of us took seats at the picnic tables and George Unti produced a bottle of vintage Champagne.

“We always have a champagne toast after we crush the first lot of the harvest season,” he explained, as the yeasty bubbles were poured into my glass.

I clinked flutes with my new co-workers and looked out over the Dry Creek Valley: land where my family lived and farmed for more than five generations. I might be able to get used to being home again.

Tawdry Tales II: In which our debaucherous waitress flees her Sonoma County misdeeds, conquers San Francisco, crashes, and burns.

This is a follow-up story to "As The Creek Dries," a piece of mine which ran in the North Bay Bohemian three years ago. Though it eventually won an AAN award for food and wine writing, it ensured I'd never work in a Sonoma County restaurant again.

**
I didn’t know when I moved to San Francisco that this would mean moments of mouth-agape wonder, making me feel so often like a Midwestern tourist that I’d go and get a giant tattoo on my arm to prove that I belong.

I had one of those moments this morning as I returned from the artists’ enclave in Chinatown where I’ve been spending nights without even wanting to sleep with any of its residents: a painter, a photographer, a hairdresser.

Through the sun and the cigarette smoke produced by a small, clean man wearing slippers on the steps of Grace Cathedral, I saw the Bay Bridge. After three months, the same thing still happens when I see the water from a hill: I stop, I stare, my jaw goes slack and I have another San Francisco moment.

It doesn’t matter that this town is full of guys who don’t call me and that my housemates are very much unlike me in many ways, because last night was spent reading aloud and then translating a letter from a heartsick Nazi to Gretel, dated 1942 as part of an upcoming exhibit where the early model tape recorder will be mounted on the wall with the letter and my voice will emerge, reading the lines to Gretel in German, then in English.

I am considering a move into the pantry where I slept last night, because I now live in a big, beautiful, expensive space that I don’t use enough, and each time I put a personal object of decoration on the windowsill it is silently removed, although my roommate’s glass full of water and rocks is allowed to find permanent residence there.

A lot has changed since I burned all my bridges, and a few creme brulees, in Healdsburg. After the price of a burrito shot up to six dollars and I barely recognized the town where my family had lived for four generations before me, it was time to get out. The plaza was filled with visiting yuppies antiquing and drinks were more expensive than in the Castro. It was time to leave the Hamptons of the Bay Area and move to San Francisco.

Finding a job was no problem--when you grow up in the wine country, have your first taste of Dry Creek Valley zinfandel at the dinner table at age seven, and start working in restaurants ten years after that, the food and wine knowledge tends to stay toward the front of your mind. I took 5 shifts a week at a well-known Bistro and plowed face-first into the trough of San Francisco nightlife, honking it up like a greedy sow.

Married bartenders? Hey, I’m not breaking any vows. Hard drugs? Gimme more! Expensive designer shoes? A girl only lives once. But table after table, it began to dawn on me. This town wasn't Healdsburg. I wasn't waiting on dear old folks who found me charming. My transformation from cute young waitress to hard-edged professional server was happening, and the girls I was waiting on were starting to be younger than me, and cuter than me, and with more expensive shoes. I realized that this was where everyone had gone--I ran into more people from my high school class than I ever had back in Sonoma County. I was waiting on my peers, young people who'd left their small towns to actually make something of themselves, and I wasn't fooling them. Sure, my consistent $300 a night matched their junior corporate salaries, but to them it looked like I was wasting my life. And I was.
.
Something had to give.

For two years, I drifted from hip new restaurant to famous classic bistro back to hip new restaurant, following the money shifts and blowing my tips the next day on Diesel jeans and dinners out with other waiters. My friend’s lip cracked because he he only drank coffee and beer for two weeks straight. Another waiter I knew went to rehab and lost all his shifts.

The last time I entered the party waitress cycle, I got fat and fired. The chance of getting fired is less now; I’m too good at what I do. The change has to come from within, but the truth is that I don’t want to change. I like being bad. I like breaking the rules, smooching my married lover in the off-camera corners of the restaurant and making out with the doorman at the bar we all frequent. I like smoking cigarettes while it’s still daylight. But I also want to have a spectacular ass.

I fear so much becoming a floozy; an old pro with a raspy voice who flirts with everyone because she doesn’t know how else to behave. When is it time to stop this lifestyle? At age 30, 35? Or was it time to stop it five years ago?

Turning these doubts over and over in a hung-over haze, I began to drown myself with tables, thinking that if I could just work enough I’d be able to stay out of trouble. It worked for a colleague of mine: he stuck himself with the insane schedule of five lunch shifts a week at Boulevard, followed by five dinner shifts a week at Jardiniere; on his day off he worked at a wine shop at the Ferry Building and on the one day a week he had to himself he was too tired to get into much of anything.

I worked ten shifts a week between two restaurants/ working a shift every day or double-shifts, for five months. As summer crept in and the 200 people who had lunch at the business restaurant I worked in during the day wore fewer clothes and looked more refreshed, I began to get bitter.

“I’m a writer, goddammit,” I’d mutter to myself as the other waiters chattered about their most recent one-night stands. “I don’t deserve this shit,” forgetting that the shit had been my choice. I set myself an arbitrary savings goal ($5K) and told myself when I reached the goal I was going to travel somewhere. I made it to $4,500.00 before pulling a no-show at my night job and giving 2 weeks notice at the fancy lunch place and bought a ticket to South America.

The decision to go to South America came out of nowhere, really--I thought I’d take off for a few months and learn Spanish, returning to the restaurant world with the secret knowledge that the cooks I worked with couldn’t gossip about me any more without me returning a barrage of profanities, shocking them and forever earning myself respect and ditching the nickname “Guera (blondie).”

South America cracked me wide open. All the feelings I’d been avoiding by partying too much and working too much came out, and I was really alive. Suddenly, it was okay to be overjoyed for no reason. It was okay to burst into tears at the drop of a hat. People celebrated with you, or patted your hand and said, “No llores mas, linda,” and that was that. I spent two months traversing the continent, staying with friends of friends and tagging along with hiking groups. I felt lonely, got ragingly sick, and walked four days to get to Machu Picchu anyway. Then, just before I was set to fly back to San Francisco, I met someone.

I quit the restaurant industry on December 30th, 2006; and realized during my first week off that I hadn’t seen the sun go down in California in almost ten years--every day had been spent inside a dining room getting ready for service. The change from 5-2am-er to 9-5er was strange at first, but suddenly being in sync with the rest of the world actually felt nice.

Plus, I discovered this thing called happy hour, which is almost as good as happily ever after.

The Best of Restaurant Girl

I sent Waiter over at waiterrant an email congratulating him on making it out of the restaurant industry (for now, anyway). He walked out of his last shitty job with dignity and is now working on his book full-time. Hooray, Waiter! Waiter was so cool that he even put one of my postings up on his blog as a guest post.

Since waiterrant is super popular, Restaurant Girl Speaks has gotten over 5,000 hits since my post went up this morning, so I thought I'd offer new readers a few links to some of my favorite postings. I haven't worked in a restaurant since December, and my ramblings of late have mostly been about traveling and not about food or restaurants at all. Of course, if you want to read about what waiters do when they save up their fistfuls of tips and jump ship, there's plenty of that, too.

So here's a few links to what I consider my most entertaining entries:

This one's where I met exiled Portland restarateur Michael Hebberoy and fell under the spell of his eloquent charms.

This one's where I met Angelo Garro, who's now a huge mentor and someone who lets me eat his Sicilian pasta with more frequency than I probably deserve.

Here, I expound on the vicious cycle of waitress cash earning/shopping.

If you've ever waited tables at a high-end joint, you've had them: Waiter Nightmares!

Ever thought your waitress might have been drinking during service? She probably has been.

And here, and here, I pontificate on waiting tables as a career choice.

Many chefs are truly psychotic.

And lastly, the importance of sidework in respecting your coworkers.

Dining like a Diva

Here's something for you to do next Wednesday:

The quirky folks at the Barndiva in Healdsburg will be hosting a winemaker dinner. Winemaker dinners feature different wines from one winery, paired with an extended menu created especially for the occasion.

The winemaker dinner at the Barn Diva is sure to be a decidedly entertaining event.
First, it's hosted by the irrepressible Lukka P. Abramski Feldman, he of numerous accents and extensive wit. Also the host of Sonoma County public access TV's newest show, What Lukka Likes, Feldman will deliver as many stinging intellectual barbs as he does glasses of champagne.

Second, the meal's going to be served family-style. Gathering around the long mahogany table at the rear of the restaurant, guests will help themselves to luscious crabcakes while mingling. Yum.

Third, as opposed to being held in a posh, white-tableclothed establishment, the winemaker dinner will be Healdsburg's answer to urban chic this Wednesday. If you haven't ever been to the Barndiva, it would be worth going to check this out. I've eaten there and the food is good.

Here's the menu:

Esterlina Vineyards & Everett Ridge

~Fresh Crispy Dungeness Crab Cake, Blood Orange & Meyer Lemon Aioli
Paired with: Esterlina Vineyards, Riesling, Cole Ranch, Mendocino 2004

~ Barndiva Chicken Pot Pie
Paired with: Everett Ridge, Chardonnay, Russian River Valley 2004

~ Grilled Petit Filet Mignon Foraged Wild Mushrooms, Sautéed Chard, Pinot Noir Demi Glace Paired with: Esterlina Vineyards, Pinot Noir, Anderson Valley 2004 & Everett Ridge, Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley 2004

~ Molten Scharffen Berger Chocolate Cake
Paired with: Esterlina Vineyards, Porto, Sonoma County 2004

$85 (this is a steal for one of these events)

A not-so-cynical Thanksgiving

Until yesterday, I hadn't any plans for Thanksgiving. I was going to stay in San Francisco and not go on a bike ride and wallow in the misery of being an orphan in my home town (my family does not "do" holidays, so to speak of) and refresh www.perezhilton.com every thirty seconds, but I was invited last minute to celebrate Thanksgiving at the Burwells' up in Healdsburg, from where I now sit as the high-powered men play pool and smoke cigars and the ladies sit on comfortable ottomans and sip juicy zinfandel.

I arrived around 3pm after taking a scenic route through the horribly constructed new downtown Windsor and past the old family farm, which Grandma sold three or so years ago to finance her retirement and her move to Oregon. Visiting Healdsburg is always bittersweet for me. It's strange to suddenly be a celebrity of sorts for being a fifth-generation Healdsburger; when grandma was growing up Healdsburg was barely a town, and when I was growing up it was not the groovy land of Diesel jeans and fine zinfandel it is now. I can't even afford to live here now but my status as built-in hick lends me a street cred that people bring up at dinner parties for an entertaining conversation tidbit.

There were twenty some-odd folks here; friends, family, and orphans like me. None of my family lives in town any more, and I don't know that my mediocre salary as a freelance writer and Restaurant Girl will ever afford me the luxury of the beautiful surroundings I'm in right now. That's okay, though, because the paths that I am following in my late twenties seem to be taking me in a direction I never thought I'd see, and I'm thankful for that. Greetings, all, and count your blessings be they large or small.

Saucy

I understand now why some restaurant owners do not let their employees hang out at the bar of the restaurant when they get off work. Friday night, after seeing Tom Petty at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, we stopped in at Sauce for a bite after pushing bikes up out of the Civic Center BART station and realizing all of the rock n' roll had made us a little peckish. I hadn't been to Sauce before but kept hearing reviews by co-workers and friends. It's one of the few late-night dining spots that serves decent food and wine until 1am and so it naturally draws an industry crowd.

We ordered two Starbucks martinis (good, although a little sweet), the tomato bisque, and fried calamari. The food was very good (we went with our bartender's recommendation for everything), especially the truffled-white-cheddar-on-foccacia sandwich sticks that came with the bisque. The calamari tubules and tentacles were lightly fried and then the bodies were stuffed with sausage and served in a tomato sauce. We accompanied the soup and squid with a glass of South African syrah (me) and a Santa Barbara pinot noir (him). Both wines were absolutely outstanding.

The problem was that we felt like we were invading a private party. Although the bartender was only about three feet away from us the whole evening, every time we wanted something we had to flag him down, and I felt rude pulling him away from his co-workers that were finishing up the shift and coming to sit down at the bar and have a drink. When we finished our meal, the bartender came over and said, "So, I guess you guys are all set then?" and dropped the check. I'm not normally a dessert person, but I wouldn't have minded looking at the menu and perhaps having a glass of dessert wine. We meekly paid and went along our way, the jovial shouts of the rapidly-loosening employees and their friends following us into the balmy late-night.

Most of the restaurants I've worked at have a no-tolerance policy for employees on the floor the same night of their shift, and I thought they were just mean. Seeing it from a customer's perspective changed my mind.

**

In other news, I've now been privy to a boar roast. I stopped by the forge Saturday to interview Jeff for a story I'm writing about him, and found out that Angelo had decided to go whole hog and skewer one of the little boar he'd hunted last week up in Healdsburg. The other is for a fundraiser on November 2nd, which I will not be privy to as I'm going to Buenos Aires for a week, for my birthday (leaving this Wednesday, which, coincidentally is the Tablehopper's birthday). The boar's feet were sawed off (it had already been cleaned) and it was stuffed with fennel from the garden plot on Potrero Hill, then wired shut and put on the spit where it rotated for two hours and made the whole forge, and our clothes, smell yummy. We served it with a salsa verde (just lots of parsley, garlic, olive oil, lemon, and capers--I was allowed to make the salsa, under Angelo's strict instruction) on braided rolls from the Acme bakery. People started showing up and we managed to eat almost the whole thing, washed down with copious amounts of red wine. I love my life.

Like Warhol's Factory, but More Wholesome

Check out my column in the SF Weekly about Angelo Garro's blacksmith forge here!

Impromptu Bourbon

I think I have an excess amount of energy. Saturday, after driving up to Carneros to pick grapes all day with the group of bohemian food-lovers I was lucky enough to fall in with a few weeks back, we crushed and de-stemmed nine 30-gallon barrells of pinot noir and feasted on a spread that Angelo had been making all day. It was the last day of the harvest and the big group of 12 or so of us was HUNGRY.

Angelo, his nephew Gaetano, and Angelo's friend Sandro (all lovely, warm, Sicilian men) had been cooking since 2pm. The feast included wild boar (that Angelo had hunted--he still has one more and he's going to roast the whole thing sometime in January), polenta, quartered fennel bulbs, eggplant done several ways, turnips, roasted peppers, lots of bread... a lot of things that I can't really remember right now but it was one of the most delicious meals I've ever had.

I'm used to "family meal" being a tedious affair in which the kitchen of a restaurant uses the waiters as walking garbage disposals--we're hungry enough at the beginning of the shift (because we don't have anything in our home fridges except for beer and Perrier) or at the end of the shift (because we've been sprinting from table to table all night) to put away whatever the kitchen throws at us. Family meal at Angelo's forge is another thing entirely. Bottles and bottles of wine were opened (from the pinot bottling we did last Wendesday) and the platters of food that piled over the table emptied out after just a half an hour, hungry grape pickers from all walks of life completely satisfied after a day of hard manual labor that they welcome as a respite from their fancy indoor city lives.

So after all of this (and I worked HARD crushing and de-stemming. It's my favorite part, I think because it happens so fast it reminds me of restaurant service, or catering) I decided to go to the Mission with a couple of the group who weren't falling asleep in their plates. We were going to check out the Litquake finale at 12 Galaxies but it was over by the time we got there so we headed over to Treat Street, a super divey bike messenger bar where my friend Emiley works. I'd never been there (I never get as far out as 24th and Treat!) and I wanted to see her. The bar was PACKED from all of the Litquake overflow, and after about a half an hour Em asked me to hop behind the bar and help her. She was alone and I was happy to collect and wash glassware.

The fun and dangerous part about having bartender friends is that you drink way too much and way too long--drinks are free and you're allowed to hang after hours (I was helping clean up). So there were a lot of bourbon shots taken, probably not the best idea after a whole evening of drinking home wine. I had some steam to blow off, though, but Sunday morning I had one of those mornings where I swore I'd never ingest anything alcoholic again.

Fancy Art Event

Last night I went to a fancy-pants art auction, which was a fundraiser for the Larkin Street Youth Services. The Youth Service Organization, which has been a model of excellence in San Francisco and nationwide for more than 20 years, gives youth on the streets the tools they need through housing, medical care, education, and job training, to permanently reclaim their lives.
There were over 200 pieces of really cool art at the event. I especially liked the pieces by Ariel Dunitz-Johnson, Felix Macnee, and Jeff Burwell. The event, which cost $100 a head, was hosted at 21 Buena Vista East, 5-stories of excellent taste overlooking the entire city. I wanted to drink sake in the bathroom all night, because the bathroom (one of the twelve or so in the house) had the most exceptional views from the Diet Coke billboard (my personal favorite billboard in the city because it glitters) by the Bay Bridge all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I wound up hanging out at the bar (naturally) for a large part of the evening because a friend of mine was tending bar. The first thing he asked when he saw me was "How on earth did you weasel your way in here?" I assured him that I had a bona-fide invitation from the curator (I had even put on a cocktail dress and faux-shmina for the occasion) and proceeded to swap dirty jokes with him like he was behind the bar at the Restaurant where we worked together.

The food was excellent, but I didn't eat much of it because I was still recovering from the lunchtime dim sum feast I'd had with the Tablehopper at Golden River Seafood & Dim Sum Restaurant, all the way out on 22nd and Geary, a spot so far out in the Richmond I wasn't sure I was in Kansas any more. It was my first time eating Dim Sum and I think I overdid it.

I enjoyed myself at the Fancy Art Event (I always like to get dressed up and look at pretty things and drink free alcohol) but was assured by all involved that tonight is really the night to come. It's $45 and all of the artists will be there. Just my luck, I've got to work on the night of the tawdry fun.

Rain Has Come

And thus begins my year of never-ending winter. It was so lovely to have a month of sunshine upon my return to San Francisco from South America, but today the rain has arrived, reminding me that I missed summer entirely this year and am now in for two more months of winter. Sigh. Last night I went to Angelo Garro's forge in SoMa and helped Angelo and Jeff bottle wine. Helping to make wine is fun! Although I worked at wineries for years (Roshambo, Iron Horse Vineyards, and Michel-Schlumberger), it was always as a tastron, an events coordinator, or a tour guide--never in the cellars.

We bottled 50 cases of the 2005 Pinot Noir, drinking plenty of it as we went along, and finished the evening with a lovely dinner of homemade Penne (Angelo's nephew, Giatano, was cranking it out of an ancient machine as I arrived) with a sauce Angelo made with tomatoes from Jeff's parents' house in Healdsburg and sausage made by a friend of theirs whose name I've forgotten but is supposedly a famous sausage-maker. We also had a tomato salad (just fresh heirlooms with olive oil and vinegar and dried oregano that was hanging from the ceiling in bunches, from Angelo and Jeff's plot in one of the city's community gardens), and lots of songs (Hope from the Lincart gallery pulled out a guitar and proved she's got a set of pipes as soulful as Gillian Welch) and laughter. It amazes me how Angelo can have such a slow-food, Sicilian lifestyle right in the middle of San Francisco. Having been introduced to a group of people to whom simplicity and friendship is so important to is inspiring.

After bottling the pinot (two barrels), we punched down the grapes we'd picked last Wednesday. My hands are completely stained purple (although I managed to escape with my clothing free of wine-stains), and I have to wait tables tonight. I'll just wear them like a badge of honor, shrugging casually and saying, "Oh, you know how it goes during crush! I haven't had a day off in weeks and everything's covered in various stages of wine. But, you gotta do what you gotta do!" like a seasoned pro.

A Day in the Life

Instead of slobbing around in front of the laptop in my pajamas drinking coffee all day, stopping only for an hour of yoga somewhere in the middle, yesterday I decided to go up north for some manual labor in Healdsburg. I was called late the night before that by the owner of a.Muse gallery on 18th and Alabama, who I'd met at the soft opening of my friend Brandon's new spot, Luau. She was going up there to help harvest and crush two rows of Syrah as the guest of chef/blacksmith/Sicilian about town Angelo Garro and his young apprentice Jeff Burwell, who is one of her artists. I'm from Healdsburg, and I hadn't been up there in way too long (ever since I let DPT keep my car after one tow-job too many) so I agreed to keep Lori company on the drive and in the fields.

We arrived at 11am to join a jovial crew of artists and Europeans (including Angelo's cousin from Sicily, Jeff's cousin from Belgium, and an independent filmmaker from Slovakia who was mostly sick because she had put on a nicotine patch in order to kick her 15-year habit) sweating away, sickles in hand. We jumped right in and picked the two rows pretty quick (well, we only picked about 3/4 of a row, having been late). After putting everything through the crusher/de-stemmer it was time for a swim in the young apprentices parents pool while Angelo cooked lunch: wild boar ribs (which is almost common food in the Dry Creek Valley), a delicious pasta, crostini with cheeses, tomatoes, figs, and Angelo's own prosciutto, and lots of wine (jug wine from Preston, which is next door to the house and Angelo's syrah from last year).

More swimming and sunning followed lunch, and then Jeff and Lori and I headed down to the Barn Diva (where I worked and was fired from three times in 2004-2005) to see the general manager, who is a dear friend of mine (hence the re-hiring) and a friend of Jeff's as well (Healdsburg is a very, very small town). We quickly polished off 2 bottles of Roederer Rose (it's good to have friends who manage restaurants) and called it a day. It was 6pm and time to head back to the city; after promising the GM that I would return to Healdsburg next summer and stay in his empty bedroom (which has been empty for a year ever since his hippie chef left to get married in Santa Cruz) and clean for him and see how many more times in one summer I can get fired from the Barn.

**

I drove back to the city and dropped myself off on Cesar Chaves, which was the location of yet another Ghetto Gourmet (which I weaseled a seat at and a ticket to, through my hard work as a waitress on Sunday night. Thanks, Jeremy!!). The food was interesting, and you'll have to wait until next Wednesday to read more, somewhere in the actual printed-word world.

Following the "underground dinner," Michael Hebberoy, his lovely girlfriend Holly (who'd flown down from Seattle for a long weekend), the photographer who's documenting the dinners for his book, two friends of theirs who live in the Mission, and I headed over to Nopa for more wine and dessert. I like the food at Nopa very much, and the three other city-dwellers (we were joined by a friend of Holly's, who was jokingly peeved we were at Nopa at all as she'd wanted to surprise Holly with dinner there tomorrow night) agreed that the food was good but were in disagreement over the mural. I love it (it's an artists rendition of the Western Addition, complete with a hipster walking little dogs in Alamo Square, and I think I can see my old house), they hate it.

Dessert was two baskets of fries (I think Nopa has the best French fries in the city, served with a spicy harissa aioli), chocolate ice-cream, and spiced doughnut holes with a rum-caramel sauce. The fries were gone in a blink and we all picked at the desserts (they were very good but I think we wanted something saltier to accompany the two bottles of Nosis (where's the "G"? Anybody?) verdejo that Michael picked, yum. The two Blue Bottle espresso martinis went down easy, too, which was maybe not such a good thing as several shots of espresso right before bed atcually *do* make for a sleepless night.

Bad Restaurant Girl!

Having neglected her loyal readership for more than 2 weeks, Restaurant Girl (aka Resting Girl) returns to you from a computer in the port town of Valparaiso, Chile. Having spent the last two weeks in Argentina, I was too busy eating and drinking to blog, sorry! Happily, my South American intestinal maladies have pretty much resolved themselves after a month of gut-misery, and I was able to sample the legendary cuisine of Argentina after just one last bout of unpleasantness in Mendoza.

Steak, steak, steak. Good thing I'm not vegetarian (actually, I was vegetarian for my whole life until I got my first restaurant job, working the cold side of the line at age 18 at Lisa Hemenway's in Santa Rosa)--chefs HATE vegetarians and there's just something so unconvincing about a waiter who tries to sell you your dinner by saying haughtily, "Well, I'm vegetarian (sniff), but I hear the steak is really good here."

I met up with two Irish friends of mine, Trevor and Pat, from the Macchu Pichu trek (during which I was only able to digest white rolls and some white rice), and we stayed at the lovely Hostel Alamo in Mendoza, just over the Andes from Santiago. I took the bus there, which only goes during the day in the winter when then passes are open at the whims of the skies.

Steak and Malbec are Argentinian specialties, and I enjoyed both of them in various combinations during stay. I also took private Spanish lessons, and am happy to report that my Spanish is progressing rapidly, which I will keep a secret upon my return to SF so I can see what the kitchen crew is really saying about me.

In Mendoza, we toured a couple of wineries one day; my favorite was the Fammilia di Tommaso. Not only did they have better wine than the legendary and large winery whose name I've already forgotten, di Tommaso has been using some of the same storage equipment for over 100 years, so everything was all cute and covered with adobe. The other place was just like Kendall-Jackson, except the hospitality crew was speaking Spanish, and not just the guys working in the cellars.

The week I spent in Buenos Aires was less culinary- and more wine-influenced, with the highlight restaurant dinner going as a tie between the live tango show at the famous Cafe Tortoni and a smoky, wine-drenched meal with 5 fellow tourists (two Spanish boys, a Chilean boy--Valentino's cousin who had flown out to meet me--and two Spanish-speaking German girls) at the Parridilla Desnivel in the cobbled San Telmo district of the city, where tango was born. At a parridilla, when you order a steak, you get just that: a giant steak on a plate. A grizzled old man brings up a huge board of meat and forks juicy pieces off onto everyone's plate. Such frivolous things like vegetables and use of cutlery are not included in the price of a steak, so you have to be sure and order them from the waiter.

Terribly, I have not been writing down the wines I've drunk since yesterday (when we drank a Concha y Toro Trio, a blend of sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, and pinot gris from Chile's largest producer. It was bitchin', especially since it was a warm day and we were eating out on the terrace), so all I can say is that it's all yummy and it's mostly cheap, which you probably knew already.