pizzaiolo in oakland


I was in the Bay Area last week for a company event, and I went up to the city for a brief visit afterward. It was sunny and clear and warm and gorgeous the entire time — unlike last year when it poured rain the entire time — and I somehow got California cuisine on the brain. Vegetables, salads, new american what-have-you… that’s what seemed good to me. So we went to a place that my friend R knew about, which turned out to be the place down the block from Bakesale Betty’s that I’d drooled over last year, as i pressed my nose to the glass and read the menu: Pizzaiolo.
Apparently run by one of the horde of ex-Chez Panisse workers, this is a mid-size room done up in low-key but comfortable style, with gorgeous modern bent-wood chairs and really weird art and a wood-burning oven for the pizzas. We figured it would be good: how could it miss, really? But this was one of the best meals any of us had had for a while — everything was spot-on perfect.
We had two salads, a dungeness crab with shaved fennel, blood oranges and oro blanco grapefruits, and a grilled squid with rich spices, more fennel, meyer lemon and mint.
Then came fluffy-chewy potato gnocchi with a ragu of Berkshire pork — I expected a tomato base but it was just a pork braise, unadorned and absolutely spectacular — and ricotta ravioli topped with wild nettles and black trumpet mushrooms, delicate but vibrant in flavor, just enough to complement the remarkable tender, toothsome texture of the pasta.
There was a short rib of beef with big pillowy cannellini and kale and a sparkly green salsa. I kept mistaking that salsa in my mind for gremolata, because it was so perfectly lighting up the savory richness of the beef. This dish was so perfectly executed, it kept blowing my mind: braised short rib can be heavy, even when it’s delicious, but this had some quality to it that was light as a feather, and there were nuances of flavor to it that I couldn’t pin down.
We finished with two pizzas, since the place is known for its crispy-crust pies. These were indeed excellent, but certainly no more so than anything else we tried. We got a long-cooked-greens & sausage pie, which was a well-balanced and sophisticated rendition of the classic dish, and a wild mushroom-caramelized leek-gremolata pie, which was just insanely good.
They’ve got a small but useful beer list, and they recommended me a solid choice of red wine (I think it was a Barbera but honestly I’d forgotten what it was within about 30 seconds of ordering it). We skipped dessert because we were full and we knew they’d be wanting the table; service was leisurely, and we heard something about the pizzas being backed up, but we never felt neglected or without something delicious to be eating, so they handle that pressure well. Any other night, we’d have ordered desserts anyway, as they were absolutely compelling in their descriptions: chocolatey something with pistachio praline, persimmon ice cream, and so on.
Should you find yourself anywhere in the East Bay, I’d recommend this place without hesitation. You can be dressed up or down, hungry or just wanting a snack, and you’ll be fed with the very best the Northern California breadbasket can provide. Just make sure you get in line by 5:15pm if you’ve not got a reservation; they open at 5:30, and you do not want to be standing outside being tantalized by the smells wafting forth.

potato-turnip mash with blue cheese crumb topping

turns out that if you have leftover mashed potato-rutabaga mix, and the end of a chunk of roquefort cheese and some fresh breadcrumbs because you had a cocktail party, you can use all these things to make a really tasty lunch.
i heated up the mash a little in the microwave, then put it into a gratin dish, crumbled the roquefort over, and sprinkled a light layer of crumbs over that. stuck it into the toaster oven on broil until I couldn’t endure the smell any longer and had to tuck in immediately. the fat from the cheese crisps up the crumbs, and the whole thing is amazing creamy goodness.

new year’s cake and how to use it

We were at the Chinese bakery the other day, and along with the egg tarts and lotus seed moon cakes and the 4 GLORIOUS ENORMOUS breakfast-treat-filled bao we got a weird little golden-brown blob of New Year’s Cake. Everyone seemed to be buying some so i wanted to try it too.
I sliced a little off and it tasted kind of like paste. I didn’t get it, and complained to the tallasiandude. He suggested that I heat it up, possibly in a frying pan. That seemed reasonable enough so I put some peanut oil in the pan and fried my little slices. And holy mackerel, does that make a difference. They get all crispy and caramelized, and they go gooey and soft. Yum.
I guess I should have known, really, because I know about grilled mochi in Japanese cooking, and mochi is effectively the same thing as this weird glutinous cake. Now I know, and I can look forward to many years of yummy crispy rice-goo goodness in late January. Hurray!

celery root hummus

It’s not really hummus, but what else do you call a smooth puree of something mixed with tahini, lemon, garlic, salt and oil?
Cooked my celery root till very soft in just enough salted water to cover it. Drained it then ran it over with the stick blender and squoze in half a lemon, and put in a couple of dollops of the Sabra “tahini sauce” which is essentially hummus-makings in a tub. The lazy home cook’s version of the silky delectableness available at Sofra.
Freaking fantastic. Yums.

instead of icky maraschino cherries

For the manhattans we made this weekend, I needed a replacement for the disgusting maraschino cherries that most bartenders put into this otherwise delightful drink. I bought some frozen sweet cherries that I’ll have to try some other time, because plan A worked so well.
I took plain unsulfured dried sweet cherries from Trader Joe’s (and i bet this would work with dried sour cherries too, like the delectable ones I got at the Persian market), and I soaked some of them in bourbon and some in Cointreau. I wanted to see if the fruitiness of the Cointreau would be a pleasant addition or an unwelcome distraction, and the bourbon cherries were the lower-key option.
As it turned out, both were delicious dropped into a manhattan — or fished out of the dish and snarfed on their own, and I have visions of putting these into desserts or over ice cream. But though both were made of nom, the consensus was that the Cointreau cherries were the best, and so we’ve made another batch with the rest of the dried cherries.
We found that the soaking liquid was syrupy and sweet, very tasty also, but we wanted to dilute it down just a little bit so it could be used as a sauce or a drink ingredient, so we covered our latest batch of cherries with Cointreau and let them soak for a day, then we put in half again as much vodka, to see if that would thin things down a bit. When we use them, we’ll post again and let you know.

salt-o-holiday 2009

Our friends are awesome. Last night, in addition to getting out their finest tuxes, feather boas, chiffon dresses, tiaras and stuffed parrots, they braved a “snow emergency” parking ban (start time 2pm) and actual snow (start time around midnight) and proceeded to make me proud by getting through pitcher upon pitcher of manhattans and martinis, and the occasional hand-rolled cosmo and gin-and-tonic, and *demolishing* the following:
60 deviled eggs
2 pounds of cocktail shrimp
2 pans of sweet-and-sour cocktail wieners
most of a cheese plate
a bunch of grapes
2 trays of celery stuffed with blue cheese
a baked camembert with garlic-pimenton toasts
1 recipe of stuffed mushrooms
3 hefty stacks of tea sandwiches (ham-n-pickle, olive cream cheese, and cucumber dill butter)
2 trays of pigs in blankets
1 tray of salmon canapes on pumpernickel with horseradish sour cream
1 batch spicy pimento cheese and a platterful of crackers
64 scallops wrapped in bacon (in literally SECONDS)
most of a double batch of Chex party mix
a huge relish tray of sweet pickles, cornichons and stuffed olives
A tip of the hat to the lovely and talented Mr. Lauderdale, who invented the ChocoHoliday concept 20 years ago, when he strung Christmas lights along the ceiling, mixed pitchers of Tom Collinses, and fed undergraduates in formalwear ridiculous amounts of Belgian chocolates from silver trays. I just swapped out the chocolates for suburban American savories, and turned it into a bon voyage party for the lovely and talented JBar. (Bye! Have fun in Chicago!)
Notes to self:
Fingerburningly hot trays of scallops in bacon cannot safely be left unattended for 2 minutes — people will brave any danger to get at the trafest and most enticing of treats. When you come back and find the empty tray, you will laugh and laugh and laugh.
Stuffed mushrooms are the ideal companion dish for tea sandwiches, because you can use the ends of the Very Thin Bread loaves for the breadcrumb filling.
Pigs in blankets are the easiest party treat ever. LOVE!
Mild hangovers can apparently be cured by drinking a glass of water, taking 2 ibuprofen, and eating blue cheese mixed with cream cheese on crackers.
The best dance music of all time was probably made in the 1980s.

balvenie at The Franklin Cafe

taken by TallMatt, but it was my idea to prop the menu up behind my drink while he was playing with the camera — collaborative photo excellence!
food at The Franklin was very good across the board, but not so awesome that I would necessarily brave the atrocious parking situation very frequently. if you live in Bay Village or are otherwise in walking distance, by all means, and be sure to try the grilled calamari and the meatloaf.
and bring a flashlight — those hipsters like to eat in the dark.

dullsville 100

I am disgruntled. Saveur magazine has finally jumped the shark in a way that I can’t ignore or explain away, and it feels a lot like it did when they bulldozed my favorite 24-hour Korean restaurant in Las Vegas: something that used to be lots of fun is just gone, replaced by some corporate snooze.
The Saveur 100 issue just arrived, and usually I jump on it with glee and scan through the list to see which exciting treasures I already knew about, and what new things I might learn. This one I read through and shrugged. This one is the “Home Cook Edition,” which is apparently code for “pandering to boring wanna-be foodies who can’t find their ass with both hands but love to shop at Sur La Table.” BLARGH.
5 must-have sugars, 6 cooking oils, how to make your own mustard, fancy condiments and salts. Yawn. The Saveur 100 should not be about what you should buy to feel like a “real home cook” — it should be about bizarre treasures found, hidden gems celebrated, and forgotten simplicities rediscovered. I am about a third of the way through the magazine, I’m already annoyed, and I may not even bother reading the rest of it. And this is on top of the appallingly pedestrian graphic redesign (oh how I miss those white covers framing one jewel of a photo), and the alarming tendency toward mass-market, lowest-common-denominator content both in the covers and the articles (a turkey on the cover for November? 14 amazing pastas? give me a break — if I want that stuff, I’ll buy Food & Wine or Good Housekeeping, and sometimes I do). I never thought the day would come, but I’m actually entertaining the idea of letting the subscription lapse.
Saveur of old, I miss you.