A J.'s Profile

This Family run Basque Cider house is only open about three months out of the whole year (for 2011, Jan 21-Apr 30th). But if it is open, and you're anywhere near San Sebastian, make a reservation and GO! I don't want to give too much away about the experience, but suffice it to say that this visit was one of the most fun of our trip so far. Super friendly folks, and as far as we could tell, we were the only people there who weren't longtime friends of the family. They've had the cider house in the family for something like 40+ years. They seemed so surprised to see us that they asked how we ended up there...

In any case, it was definitely an evening that will be one of the highlights of our trip. I can't wait to go back!

Txotx!

(note that Zelaia is in Hernani just south of Astigarraga...about half an hour from San Seb)

Everything is parsed down to its purest form, every product is pristine and unique, and every taste while intellectually familiar, comes at you as a wholly new experience.  I've never had bread and butter reduce me to disbelief before, and I wonder if I'll ever experience it again. And no, it's not Poliane miche and echire butter sprinkled with caviar, foie and gold leaf.  Nor is it butter cultured sous-vide and churned with a sonicator-homogenizer dressed with roto-vaped seaweed essence.  Is is simply bread, butter, salt and a little bit of fire and smoke.  Unreal.

I'd be making a mistake if I didn't mention how breathtaking the location is.  While we were there we felt like we were in a dream...complete with living mountains, rolling hills, and an unexpected run in with a flock of sheep.  I think only Bras's Suquet has given me a similar sense of wonder.  And while the food is very forward thinking, it is inextricably linked to the natural beauty that surrounds it.

For someone longing for an experience of similar caliber, but much closer....If anything, I'd say that this is the spiritual Basque uncle of Carlo Mirarchi's tasting menu at Roberta's in Bushwick.  A completely different cuisine, place, and 180 degree difference in vibe, but there's something about Carlo's food that makes me draw several parallels to Victor's.  Regardless, if you're anywhere near Atxondo(San Seb), it's worth the gps-confounding trip.

Full Disclosure:  I staged here briefly in the spring of 2011, so I'd consider myself a friend of the restaurant.  Regardless, I ate here as a civilian in September 2010

Without mincing words, In de Wulf is among the best restaurants in the world...and like more and more of my favorite places to eat, requires that you make a special journey just to get there.  I had heard of its remote location, but I think even I was a little underprepared for how remote it was.  The three of us left Paris to make a day trip out of it, and so stopped by Bruges, Esquelbeq, France (home of Brasserie Thiriez, an amazing brewery but that's a story for another time), and then finally onto the little farming town of Dranouter.

If you want to relate in California terms, it's like making a road trip from San Francisco to Fresno, then continuing down to Porterville.  A trip complete with a turn down a poorly marked side road off the main road, a couple of turns through some corn fields and smack dab into the middle of nowhere...except out in this nowhere emerges a somewhat quainter and more rustic version of Napa's Meadowood.

I'll let you discover the food for yourself, but suffice it to say that it is imaginative, has a distinctive voice and benefits from meats, seafood and produce that no one else has access to.  Kobe Desramaults' perspective on Flemish cuisine is already well known in the global community, but he retains child-like eyes in the kitchen and an energy that tells me that he still has much more to show the world.  It's food that is artfully beautiful without being overly fussed over.  Precise, but with swing.  And yes, just in case you were wondering, it is above all else, defuckinglicious.

What's even more impressive is that for most of the year, there are only five of them in the kitchen turning out tasting menus of amazing caliber.  This is in stark contrast with some other heavy hitters...employing scores of people to produce menus that excite me far less.  This is the first restaurant that taught me that it's not about having every resource at your fingertips, it's about celebrating what you do have to the fullest. Many restaurants talk about putting forth a sense of place with their food...this is one of the few that actually live up to the idea.  This food simply could not exist anywhere else.

The dining room and grounds are also a study in great design.  It is contemporary without being cold, and integrates natural beauty with modern touches.  Kind of like going to dinner at a super cool friend's house who also happens to be a world class chef.

Don't make the same mistake we made the first time and drive several hours in, sit for an epic tasting menu, then have to face a multi-hour drive back to Paris through the dead of night.  The inn at In De Wulf is a bargain at 110-150 Euros per night...and your body will thank you for the rest and chill time.  Also, if you happen to be there in late spring or summer, take a walk next door to the strawberry farm.  There you'll find my favorite vending machine in the entire world...filled with amazing strawberries picked that morning.

Definitely a step in the right direction.  Currently their strengths are in the straight up milk teas (jasmine, black)...really nicely made, and sweetness up to your preference.  If they happen to notice the majority of their customers ordering "lightly sweet" like I do, I hope they'll take all of their drinks in that direction. When it comes to flavorings there seem to be the usual array of pre-mixed products, but it doesn't stop them from putting out tasty drinks.  They have a strong base, and as long as they keep wanting to get better, they could very well bring something new to the boba tea world.  Even if they don't...they'll still have a nice, reliable spot with solid, basic, sweet tea drinks.

With the flavored drinks, they tend toward the saccharine, but you can still find some fun there too.   I just had the mango juice with pomelo and seaweed balls (agar jelly balls), and while the mago juice is definitely more like dried mango (i.e. packaged) vs the fresh mango juices you can get seasonally at many local shops, it's a pretty interesting mix of textures along with bitter, sour and sweet.  I've also tried the peach "juice" with pop bomb (alginate spherifications)....definitely candy in liquid form.  Better still is the Hokkaido Green milk tea...again a little sweet for me, but it's a fun flavor.  Sure, I'd find it hard to believe that this drink has anything to do with actual Hokkaido milk any more than Carlo Rossi's hearty burgundy has anything to do with Clos de Vougeot, but still, it's a fun diversion.

Okay, so maybe I have dreams of a "third wave" style boba tea shop minus the snoot...I can see it now, fun varietals of tea, really nice local milk, care put into hand brewing and shaking(bye bye shaking and sealing machine!), a few choices in natural sweeteners, decent glassware instead of plastic or ikea....but yeah, since the "serious" tea shops seem to stop short of that idea and the boba centric shops tend to be mainly candy peddlers, I can be happy that Tea Lover is doing what it's doing at the moment.

Compares favorably to Wonderful Foods Co, and I definitely prefer it to the chain boba places....

pure flavors, pure talent, pure love.

I'll be perfectly honest...I came here pretty much because the full weight of Yelp behooved me to.  Top Portland Restaurant on the front page of Yelp, Top 10 most bookmarked, numerous recs in talk threads and a slew of positive reviews....plus I wanted to get to know the PDX food cart scene a little bit better.

What sealed the deal for me though was that at 2AM when I was asking about Portland street food, B2G "Bubba" was on the talk threads responding to my inquiry.   Anyone crazy enough to run a food service business during then day then go on to play "customer service" at 2AM online is going to get my attention.  Of course this was something of a double-edged sword...could anything possibly live up to all that hype?

In the end though, the hype didn't mean shit.

What I found in B2G instead was a reflection of what Portland does best: Inexpensive, soul-satisfying, tasty food made by someone who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.  And if they also happen to be a little Punk Rock...

B2G "Bubba" certainly has good reason to be working hard, you can see that on the picture taped to the window. But even in our brief encounter I could see that he genuinely cared for both his customers and his cooking.  Everyone who came up to the cart could've been mistaken for a personal friend of his.  If anything, he most reminds me of Doug from "Hot Doug's" in Chicago.  The lines may be long, but he still makes you feel like he's been waiting all day for you to come in.

Sure, you foodie mcfoodertons out there might not think his food's the "best".  Certainly it won't compare to that time you spent nine days in Italy gaining your "expert" badge in regional Italian cooking.  Nor will it compare to your meals at Michael Tusk's/White's (take your pick) carefully refined Italian temples to gastronomy.  But it sure as hell will remind you of your mom's cooking, and if not your mom's, at least someone else's Italian-American mom's cooking.  And sure, Primo'd balk at garlic bread being served with pasta "She likes starch...I don't know, what?  Bitch!"...but you can't deny that it represents a very real part of how many of us grew up.

Beyond food memories though, as far as I can tell, Portland is the only place where local government and individual passions seem to be on the same page when it comes to food.  NYC is far too driven by the profitability of bureaucracy and competition, LA too trend-focused to be substantial, and SF too self-conscious of its own image to pay attention to the results.  But in Portland, it seems anyone with the will and a minimum of capital can hang their own shingle and see if the people like what they're doing.

And that's where you find Bubba...standing in front of two little burners, line full of people, making sure each carton of pasta, each sandwich is as good as he knows it should be.  Is it the "best"?  Eh, I leave that for other people to fight over and debate.  However, there's no question in my mind that B2G best of what Portland is.

For once, having the best linguine and clams on the parking lot block is far more important than having the best Tagliolini alle Vongole Veraci this side of Venice.

Désolé pour mes amis .fr, Mais je ne pense pas que j'ai la salle, ni
la fluidité de traduire mon avis. Anglais, il devra être
cette fois.

*****
Oddly enough, the only Michelin 3 star restaurant I've been to that fully lives up my perception of the red guide's highest honor.

Sure, there is always debate, and the variance at both the 1 and 3 star level certainly fuels that fire.  (My current belief is that the most interesting cuisine happens at the high 1 to 2 star level).  However, if we take a romanticized view of the bibendum, and think of the rating as an assessment of how far out of the way a person should be willing to go to visit a restaurant, then L'Astrance certainly fits the the "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey" assessment.

And while I'd like to focus on the cuisine, as it is the reason for coming here, I can't quite ignore the level of refinement in the front of the house.  For us Americans who consider TFL and Per se as the reference points for efficient, formal, yet sincere and unobtrusive service, you might change that reference point after dining at L'Astrance.  M. Rohat and his team seem to disappear into the background while always anticipating your needs even before you realize it.  At one point, they cleared one plate while setting a charger for the next course and I didn't even notice.  Almost like a bit of slight of hand, my place was set without the formal ceremony that I typically experience.  Add to that the fun game of "guess the wine" and there's a nice balance of playfulness and formality.

The cuisine however, is where all of this refinement begins...refine, refine, refine, is what I kept thinking while eating the food.  It's obvious that Chef Barbot has a distinctive voice and he uses his minuscule kitchen to be heard without having to be loud.  His signature dish of  Foie gras mariné au verjus, galette de champignon de Paris, pâte de citron confit was a dish that changes your perception of the main ingredients.  Most know foie as a rich, luxurious centerpiece of an ingredient...like truffles or caviar, it's a symbol of luxury about as subtle as a scuderia badge.  However, here Chef turns it into a team player, so that the humble button mushroom can have equal footing.  Along with them, texture, richness and acid are all balanced out by the individual components.  It's a dish that tells a story...one that you can talk about and break down for days, yet it's best to simply eat it up and enjoy it in the moment.  Many wonderful dishes preceded and followed, but this is just one example.

The ingredients were all exceptional, but I suppose that should be a given.  However, I couldn't help but be taken aback by the cheese course.  Fleur de Courgette safranee, fruits rouge, gorgonzola cremeux.  The rich cheese (perfectly afinee), served as a base, its richness and flavor balanced by the acid in the raspberry and the whole covered with the most ephemeral squash blossom.  The blossom appeared to been "cooked" until it was transparent and infused with saffron, however it still retained its natural structure...similar to the compressed melons you see from time to time, but a much more delicate execution.  But that raspberry...I don't know if it was simply the most delicious raspberry that I've ever had, or if the components of the dish made me think it was the best raspberry I'd ever had...either way, the final effect was other-worldly.  Mind you, I'd sampled flat after flat of raspberries in California in the weeks prior, so I'd refreshed my familiarity with the year's raspberries...but this one instantly made me think that the ones I had been getting simply weren't as good.  This was confirmed at Astrance with the final course of fruit....the raspberries on that plate were more typical.  Still tasty, but hardly the platonic idea put forth in the cheese plate.  So...did they really save the best raspberry in the bunch just for the cheese course, or was it the composition highlighting the fruit?  A little of both?  I'll never know.

L'Astrance is cuisine that approaches on the literary, and while that might appear to be effusive, there is no question that Chef Barbot has a clear, confident and subtle voice in his cooking.  And really, there are still far too few places and chefs with that kind of strength.

Plus, Chef Barbot rocks New Balances instead of clogs in the kitchen.  Total Badass.

The building tells as much of a story as the sorbet itself, so be sure to ask about it while you decide between pistachio and mandarin...while the space is still very much a work in progress, Nate was there to sell prepacks of thier unique sorbets.  As time goes on, I expect we'll see a pretty cool progression of fun ideas and flavors.

Congrats on opening the shop and I wish you all the best!

.

Oui, Paris ont alimentaire ivrogne/stoner

Le Kebab Pizza se compose de:

croûte à pizza hyper-wack
-La sauce que semble laquelle de Chef Chuck E Cheese
-Oignons épices sulfurique
-La laitue
-Frites (indispensable!)
-Tomates
-Viande kebab d'agneau
-Harrisa et sauce blanche (coincé dans les flaques d'eau dans le coin de la boîte, natch!)

Une étoile supplémentaire pour harissa qui est en fait épicée, une autre étoile supplémentaire car bien qu'elle soit complètement rassasié de 5 cours de Inaki Aizpitarte, S l'a mangé

PS étoiles moins 100 pour les sueurs viandes et l'imapact GI ... mais étant donné que ces effets ne se présentent pas au moins 4 heures après la consommation, je vais laisser glisser.

Mes excuses si mon français blesse, malheureusement, la version anglaise n'est pas beaucoup mieux!
****
Yes, Paris does have ace stoner/drunkass food.  

The Pizza Kebab consists of:

-wack pizza crust
-sauce reminiscent of Chef Charles Fromage's finest
-cheese-like food product
-onions for sulfuric spice
-lettuce
-fries (essential!)
-tomatoes
-lamb kebab meat
-harrisa and white sauce (squeezed into puddles in the corner of the box, natch!)

An extra star for harissa which is actually spicy, another extra star because despite being completely satiated by 5 courses from Inaki Aizpitarte, S still dug in....

PS minus 100 stars for the meat sweats and GI imapact...but since those effects don't show up for at least 4 hours after consumption, I'll let it slide.