Holiday Feast

Only on a road trip can you go to some of the best restaurants in Louisville, Santa Fe, Oklahoma City and Nashville within the space of a few days. That wasn't the point of our two-week trip over the holidays, but an added bonus that we could dine at Proof on Main, Cafe Pasqual's, Red Prime Steakhouse, and Etch as we made a round trip out to Santa Fe.

Proof on Main, Louisville

It is certainly tempting fate to plan a 4,000-mile road trip in what is expected to be a fairly severe winter, but fate smiled on us with dry, sunny weather as we took I-64/I-70 to spend Christmas with my brother in Wichita, then took U.S. 54/U.S. 56 (generally following the old Santa Fe Trail) down to Santa Fe for a birthday/New Year's celebration and headed back via I-40/I-81. In between, Andrea flew from Wichita to San Jose for her niece's bat mitzvah and then flew to Albuquerque to rejoin me in Santa Fe.

This was a different kind of road trip for us. Usually we load Ziggy into the back and head for scenic routes interspersed with stretches of Interstate, spending each night in a different pet-friendly motel. This time, we were traveling exclusively on Interstate to get from one place to another and mostly staying with family and friends. To make the trip more of an adventure, we upgraded to nice hotels and made a point of finding one close to a restaurant we wanted to try.

First stop was Louisville, where a friend told us the top restaurant was Proof on Main. The restaurant itself happens to be located in a fun boutique hotel, 21c Museum Hotel, which is pet friendly (at a price!). Both were great. I was able to indulge my new-found passion for octopus with a starter of charred octopus with a bagna cauda, followed by a tasty breaded pork cutlet. The waiter recommended an Elijah Craig 12-year barrel proof for a bourbon that might be hard to find elsewhere and it was a treat.

Cafe Pasqual's, Santa Fe

In Santa Fe, the birthday celebration on New Year's Eve eve was at Cafe Pasqual's, a perennial favorite for residents and visitors alike. The restaurant is colorful and quirky in a way best described as "gay" in its original, pre-sexual meaning. The culinary highlight for me was the Conchinita Pibil -- pork slow-cooked in achiote and citrus and served in a banana leaf with calabacitas, fried plantains and habanero-marinated onions.

Red Prime Steakhouse, OKC

In Oklahoma City, we stayed at the classy Skirvin Hilton, a great old-fashioned hotel with large rooms, wood-paneled bar and first-class service. It was only three blocks from the Red Prime Steakhouse, a trendy OKC restaurant billed as something different than the classic steakhouse. The dry-aged steak was truly delicious, expertly grilled and tender and moderately priced for the quality. My bone-in strip was better than Andrea's boneless ribeye, but both were a treat. The ambiance, however, was a fail, as the red neon lights used as room dividers in the cavernous and drafty Buick Building, an historic auto showroom, did nothing to make the space comfortable. Perhaps it is more appealing on a summer evening, with light coming through skylights and windows in the 18-foot-high space.

Etch in Nashville was the restaurant with the highest Zagat rating, 28, on this trip, and it was well-deserved. We shared a delightful ratatouille crudo as a starter -- a delicate carpaccio of zucchini, fennel, carrots, champignons, basil micro greens, garlic olive oil, red bell tomato essence and parmesan. For the main course, I had a lovely moroccan spice-crusted venison with sweet potato guava (ironically the two ingredients in Ziggy's prescription diet), ginger grits, pear butter and cranberry sumac relish. Andrea's porcini dusted pork tenderloin dish featured a chorizo that was out of this world. It was only a minor flaw that on a busy Saturday night, my main course reached me at a little less than ideal temperature.

Etch, Nashville

The holiday was more about celebrating with friends and family than about food, but a good meal is a great boost to conviviality. We enjoyed a perfectly roasted turkey and all the trimmings for Christmas, and a special New Year's Eve meal that ranged from an Iranian chicken dish to wonderful New Mexican hors d'oeuvres of green chiles wrapped in bacon. Santa Fe, of course, offers many wonderful eating experiences, including our current trifecta of Harry's Roadhouse (where I had a great red mole), Counter Culture (lemon ricotta pancakes) and Tune-Up (flatiron steak with grilled green chiles and pico de gallo). The real show-stealer this visit was Sage Bakehouse, where the tasty tartine of scrambled egg and avocado was exceeded only by the crumbly, sugary coffee cake we had for New Year's brunch.

Highway eating opportunities are so abysmal that we picked up sandwiches at Sage Bakehouse before heading east. I won't mention the low points of our other meals on the road, but one happy surprise was Brown's Catfish in Russellville, Arkansas, where the lunch buffet featured not only fresh, hot and fluffy fried catfish fillets, but equally tasty fried chicken and an assortment of sides -- all for 8.99!

We bookmarked the road trip with a great meal at Bistro de Provence to mark the start of vacation and a hearty brunch at our Louisiana Kitchen standby.

La Rhumerie

When I was working at the Trib (RIP), I'd go down to Bd. St. Germain with Vince DiLiberto after we put the paper to bed, ca. 11 or 12, and drink rum punches at La Rhumerie. My first encounter with this drink was a revelation because my experience with rum was of the Bacardi variety in a rum and coke. This drink was Rhum Agricole, strong and biting, softened only with a splash of sugar syrup.

La Rhumerie had other drinks, all with that potent raw alcohol bite, and kept tabs on the patrons by serving each on a plastic coaster, color-coded for price, so when it came time to pay, they just tallied up your coasters. Vince and I could while away the time with rum punches and take the Metro or a cab home in the wee hours. After I left the Trib and was working for Institutional Investor, I brought a visiting editor from the magazine to La Rhumerie one night after dinner and he was amazed that the street was still so lively at 11 at night, a time, he said, when New York would be tapering off for the evening.

Sadly, on my last trip back to Paris, a visit to La Rhumerie found it horridly made over. Gone was the funkiness, the plastic coasters. The rum punch was still there but buried in a menu with many fancier drinks.

What brought all this to mind was a tasting this week at Paul's of the Rhum Agricole from Clement in Martinique. When I described the rum punch to the vendor, he said that was a 'Ti Punch, the national drink of Martinique, and proceeded to mix me a small sample with the white rhum and the sugar syrup made by Clement as well. He muddled a piece of lime peel, swizzled the rhum and syrup together, and added ice. Le voila, my rum punch was recreated!

Needless to say, I brought home a bottle of the Premiere Canne, as the white rhum is called, and sugar syrup to make myself a rum punch at home. The Trib and La Rhumerie may just be happy memories, but their spirit lives on.

Food, culture, and food culture

San Francisco has great food and lots of culture but our recent trip there, wonderful as it was, told me something about food culture.

We went to some great restaurants. La Ciccia won top honors with its authentic Sardinian cuisine. The octopus stew in its incredibly rich and concentrated tomato sauce was one of the best dishes I've ever eaten. The mild seafood flavor rounded out the tomato and the actual octopus was tender and fresh. Andrea had a pasta dish with pork that was also exquisite. The restaurant was crowded and tight but the atmosphere was buoyant and the decor classy. The ceramic works of a Sardinian artist, cleverly framed in wood, brightened the gray-brown walls. The warm welcome from co-owner Lorella Degan made us immediately comfortable even though we had to wait for our table (the complimentary prosecco also eased the pain) and her chef husband, Massimiliano Conti (the Sardinian half of the couple, she is from Venice), visited our table so I could be the umpteenth guest to tell him how wonderful the octopus was.

The warmth and genuineness of this restaurant in out-of-the-way Noe Valley stayed with us in our subsequent meals. La Fringale, a French Basque restaurant in SoMa, had a similar feel to it, though perhaps a little less Old World. I went for the duck confit with Du Puy lentils and was not disappointed -- every bit as good as the confit I've had in France.

The meal in the middle was at Range, a trendy Mission restaurant. The food was good -- I had a delicious halibut poached in olive oil -- but this is where we came crashing up against the difference between food culture and culture. We were crammed into a bench that was essentially a hallway connecting the front bar area to the rear dining room and there was a guy at one of the tables there who persisted in talking to his table companions in a voice so loud it virtually made any other conversation in the area impossible. It was rude beyond belief and when we remarked to the waitress we had never seen anything quite so crude in a restaurant, she sighed and said she sees it all the time. She had spent some time in Paris and wondered at the the civil behavior of restaurant patrons. There was no loud talking, no high-fives, no high-pitched laughter. "I said to myself, that's the way it should be," she concluded. No sooner had the obnoxious guy left than three young women sat down at another table in our area and proceeded to squeal and giggle in a way that would be embarrassing in a home but was incredibly inconsiderate in a restaurant. And yes, they had a round of high-fives. The fact is, with restaurants designed to reflect noise to create a "buzz" and loud piped music considered necessary to convey hipness, a place like Range is destined to stimulate this kind of behavior. The guests are lacking in culture, for sure, but the fault lies ultimately with the restaurant management. To me, it was no coincidence that the behavior in the Old World restaurants was more civil because the ambiance was so much more civil.

We had great experiences with breakfasts and lunches as well at the Tartine Bakery (a great pastrami sandwich and quiche), Craftsman & Wolves (the Rebel Within, a semi-hardboiled egg baked into a sausage muffin, has to be eaten to be believed) and some others to come.

Apps, appetite and adventure

An explosion of travel and dining apps provides more tips than ever, but the best guide may still be your nose. I don't mean just the sense of smell -- grilled meat and garlic in oil can be traitors in leading you to a good meal -- but your own "nose" for what looks like a good restaurant.

Yelp and Trip Advisor are by now so packed with rave reviews from friends and family that they are often unreliable. I found on my road trip to Santa Fe in the spring that I spent too much time trying to filter the Yelp reviews and figure out which places were actually worthwhile. In the end, I made no momentous discoveries using these apps.

On our recent trip to Rome, we used two specialized apps -- Elizabeth Minchilli's EatRome and Katie Parla's Rome. These are the work of two enterprising American women who are living in Rome and doing their best to curate that city's eateries. But what chance do they have, really, to provide a definitive or authoritative guide to Rome's 6,000+ restaurants?

The economics of app-writing clearly don't allow them to wildly sample what's out there. The user has no idea, for instance, whether they are comped the meals or pay for them, how many times they go, whether they disclose they are reviewing the place and all the other caveats of restaurant reviewing. This does not mean that they don't provide some good tips and reviews, or that you won't get your $2.95 worth for buying them, but they are not 100% reliable, and that diminishes their usefulness.

You can rely on tips from friends, colleagues, your shoe store salesman from Italy, but these are bound to be hit and miss. In our case, two tips we got from the woman who showed us around the Castello di Magione -- to Mazolino in Panicale and to Roccafiore in Todi -- were both great. My friend Paula's recommendation to go to Pierluigi in Rome was just the ticket for that first evening there. But the Settimio al Pellgrino recommended by the friend of a friend (and favorably reviewed by Minchilli) was a bum steer -- where a "quirkiness" billed as charming simply masked incompetence and mediocrity.

One of the best places we went to, in the end, was one we discovered on our own after rejecting Minchilli's tip for the Osteria dell'Ingegno. What she billed as "one of the nicest pedestrian piazzas in Rome" was a windswept passage trafficked by the mobs going from the Pantheon to the Spanish Steps where four rickety tables with paper tablecloths flapped in the breeze. This was so unappealing to us we went back to another Osteria  in the Via della Guglia we had spotted on the way there, which had a modern front and a single table on a little porch outside, blessedly sheltered from sun, wind and passersby.

The Osteria Bottega Montecitorio was a shop window of sorts for a vineyard, but the food was excellent and inventive. I had an octopus salad that was tender and tasty and Andrea had a streamlined version of eggplant parmesan that was divine. She finally got an excellent rendition of pasta cacio e pepe and I had a very good pasta all'amatriciana. The red and white house wines from Montecitorio were both quite nice. There was a real tablecloth, an unintrusive but very professional service, and a bill no worse than any other. There was a Trip Advisor emblem on the window but how would I have ever selected this place by browsing through Trip Advisor? Can the emblem or consulting the review on the spot tip the scale? Perhaps, but both of us have a nose for restaurants and this one had a lot of positive signs.

Certainly we were also lucky. Another time we might pick a restaurant that looked good and had a mediocre or bad meal. But that happens when we use apps and guides as well. In fairness, we would not have discovered this place had we not been looking for the restaurant in the app.

Two other big hits in Rome -- the Piperno in the ghetto and Pollarola near our hotel -- were tips from the concierge. But the bruschetta we had at another place near the hotel and the porchetta sandwich we got from a stand at the Campo di Fiori were a combination of luck and nose, as well.

Part of the adventure of travel is serendipity -- following a tip from a new friend, following your nose, ducking down a street not on your map -- and too much reliance on apps, guides, and reviews can deprive you of that fun.

Al fresco

Italy offers definitive proof that ambiance is an essential ingredient in a good meal and fresh air, dining al fresco, invariably enhances the food. In our recent visit to Umbria and Rome we almost always dined al fresco -- in every conceivable way and always with a view.

Our pergola (Photo by Judy Nadler)

Pergola
The house we rented outside Todi had a lovely pergola with mature vines that shaded the back patio and was the perfect place for the meals we ate there. The renovated stone house was itself quite picturesque, but the plants, flower pots and stone walls that further shielded the patio all contributed to a comforting and aesthetically pleasing environment. The housekeeper, Triestina, cooked three dinners for us -- all great examples of Italian home cooking. The first night we had a tasty spread of salumi, warmed-up penne in tomato sauce and a delicious roast pork. The second meal was homemade fettucini in truffle sauce prepared on the spot and rabbit cooked in a mustard and herb sauce. The third meal, our final night there, was a roast chicken from her own yard, preceded by another pasta and tomato sauce, this time fixed fresh in our kitchen. Lunches often consisted simply of wild boar salami and goat cheese from the artisanal shops in Todi; they tasted particularly good in the fresh, balmy air of the Umbrian hills. The worst of the summer heat was over and gentle breezes floated through the hills outside Todi, wafting under our pergola and sharpening our appetite. I should add that the Aperol spritzes and local wines also contributed the feel-good atmosphere.

Pizza at Pizzeria di Cavour (Photo by Judy Nadler)

Terrazza
Our first restaurant meal was on the terrace of a small restaurant between our house in Torregentile and Todi, La Mulinella. Through the trees sheltering the terrace you could see the lights of Todi glittering on top of the hill. Grilled meat was the specialty of the house and my guinea fowl -- roasted in a cage-like spit over a wood fire -- was probably the single best dish I had this trip. They also brought the pasta to the table even as they were tossing it, so the truffle-sauce pasta arrived hot and delicious. The hit of the evening was a Sagrantina di Montefalco from the Cantina Tuderno that was offered at the astounding promotional price of only 18 euros a bottle -- we had two!

In Todi itself, we at at the Ristorante Umbria for the spectacular view over the Tiber valley from the semi-enclosed terrace perched on the hillside. The food was uninspired, though you simply cannot go wrong with the truffle pasta. Most of us ordered trout, which as fresh and prepared just right. Virtually next door was the Pizzeria di Cavour, which had a succession of terraces like a staircase down the hill, with the same wonderful view of the valley. The thin-crust cheesy pizzas were a bargain, ranging from 6 to 8 euros, made for a great meal the following evening.

The terrace at Roccafiore, a spa and vineyard on a hilltop outside of Todi, commanded a splendid view of Todi, lit at night. The food corresponded to the elegant ambiance as the chef ventured away from just the standard Umbrian fare. We had the house salumi, made, they said, from their own livestock. The slow-roasted pork belly I had for a main course was delicious, though very rich with the fat.

Balcony
In Panicale, a walled town high on a hill overlooking Lake Trasimeno, we sat on a narrow balcony with a view of the lake. I had a delicious fresh pasta with lake perch in a tomato sauce, and a crisp local white wine. The restaurant interior was charming, but the balcony -- with its flower pots, its view of the medieval walls and the blue lake in the distance -- was unbeatable. In Assisi, the balcony was wider and the Umbrian countryside less dramatic, but the setting was perfect for the prosciutto and melon antipasto and the various pastas we tried there.

Fresh fish at Pierluigi (Photo by Judy Nadler)

Piazza
Our first night in Rome we made the pilgrimage to Pierluigi in the Piazza de Ricci, sitting at a table surrounded by splendid Renaissance palazzi. We had a charming multilingual waiter from Ecuador who counseled me to take the sole poached rather than grilled. The well-known culinary standby was busy and vivacious on a Saturday night and the meal was enchanting. In a little piazza in the Monte de Cenci in the ghetto, we had marvelous meal at Piperno. We had the delicious fried artichoke specialty as antipasti and I followed with a pasta with octopus chunks. The restaurant claims to date back to 1860 and it is truly a classic. Our last night we went to La Pollarola on the narrow piazza of the same name. A special of the day was huge porcini just arrived from the provinces. These were sliced and sauteed in oil to an amazing tenderness, making an elegant antipasto with just a hint of the woods. My grilled sea bass was fresh and tender and a great counterpoint to the mushroom.

It is certainly no coincidence that the least satisfying meals were the ones eaten inside, at the Ristorante Jacopone in Todi and at the Settimio al Pellegrino in Rome. The food was not bad, but uninspired and missing that extra ingredient.

London - world city

London has been transformed from the capital of the British empire to the preeminent world city. Or rather, this melting pot city has been overlaid on the imperial center to create a fascinating but very crowded playground.

The pace has picked up and the congestion, especially in high tourist season, has intensified. And everyone is eating and drinking all the time. Every other storefront is a cafe, or bakery, or juice place, or restaurant, or pub, or sandwich place, or Starbucks, or Costa. The choices are innumerable.

I was juggling a couple of "secret London" guidebooks with Zagat's and my street map to identify targets for lunch and dinner. Those resources sent me to Abeno's on Museum Street in between my visits to the Sir John Soane house at Lincoln's Inn Field and the British Museum. The restaurant, rated a 25 for food, offers a savory Japanese pancake, the okonomo-yaki, as a specialty.

I ordered the Tokyo mix -- which adds pork, shrimp and squid to the base of egg, dough, ginger, spring onions and tempura batter. The lunch menu also included a miso soup and the side of the day -- marinated cucumber, but the main attraction was the pancake. The server mixed the ingredients in a bowl at the table, stirring and tossing, and then ladling it onto the hot griddle in the middle of the table, shaping it as a 2-inch thick pancake, then returning to turn and cover with a dome so that it can cook through. The pork belly is browned separately on the griddle then added to the top of the first cooked side. The pancake cooks through under a metal dome and then is served with a couple of sauces. I'm not sure I'll ever be fanatical about Japanese food, but it was nice to be able to try something different.

Borough Market Hall has become such a mecca for tourists that stalls offering ready meals have proliferated. There are still the beautiful butcher counters, fish stalls, produce, specialties, including a branch of famous Neal's Yard cheese store -- how wonderful it would be to have this as a resource for a special meal or even a weekly pilgrimage. But as a tourist, I have no complaint about the food ready to eat. I searched for Kappacasein, a cheese stall mentioned in a 2012 article by George Aquino that I found through Google. He said they had the best toasted cheese sandwich he ever tasted. And it was in fact terrific. Grated cheese -- predominantly cheddar with comte and "hard cheese" added -- was piled with some chopped onion between two slices of sourdough bread (Poilane?) and pressed into a robust electric grill to toast and melt. Two heaping half-sandwiches comprised the order for 7 pounds, making it a bargain at that price. They also served raclette, but that will have to wait for another time.

For dinner on Thursday, I wanted to find a Zagat-rated restaurant in Mayfair, near Claridge's, that offered British cuisine. Patterson's (26 rating on food) seemed to fill the bill but when I got there it had turned into a Japanese restaurant. But they kindly sent me around the corner to Wild Honey, a "New Brit" with seasonal dishes that earned a respectable 23 for food. The reddish wood paneling and red leather banquettes with bright modern paintings made a warm and welcoming impression. A bar seat was available and a personable Lithuanian waiter provided flawless service. Dinner guests were lively but the noise level was comfortable and a contrast to the American obsession with making places noisy to create buzz.

I opted for a la carte because the prix fixe menu seemed a bit boring. The smoked Lincolnshire eel for a starter was tender and delicate in flavor, different from smokier, eelier versions I knew from the Baltic beaches, but more appropriate for a swanky Mayfair restaurant. The rack of lamb main course was also tender and served with a spring roll with lamb shoulder as a complement that wasn't even mentioned in the description. A carafe of red wine was just the right amount to accompany. The English custard tart for dessert was so light it did not so much melt in your mouth as evaporate, leaving behind a creamy, sugary aftertaste. The grated nutmeg topping was just the right accent.

Staying with my friends for the weekend, I had a chance to visit their favorite neighborhood restaurant, a Vietnamese storefront that had astonishingly fresh salads and exceptionally flavorful treatments of what is often a lackluster cuisine. The caramelized pork entree actually tasted of both, and went well with the sauteed beans and bok choy the owner sent out to her regular customers.

An even greater revelation was the neighborhood bakery we visited on the morning of my departure. the E2 Bakery was a poster child, my friend explained, for School of Artisan Food, a relatively new institution housed in a classic estate in Sherwood Forest. The baker had learned his trade there, as well as how to run a small business, and had created a runaway success with his bakery nestled under the arches of (an abandoned?) train line. I couldn't resist the standard pain au chocolate, a crispy, puffy, extra-large version of my favorite pastry. I tasted their granola, which was toasted and garnished with a creamy yogurt and fresh berries and absolutely the best granola I'd ever tasted. Next time! The breads were beautiful and I brought back as a souvenir the signature Eccles cakes that the baker had revived as an English favorite -- a puff pastry with a piquant black currant filling.

Atlantic tuna

Photo by Tamorlan via Wikimedia Commons

Something you don't see every day is two workmen sitting down to split a $2 salad for lunch. But that's what I witnessed at a dockside restaurant in Santander when a heaping platter of tomato, onion and tuna was set in front of two burly workers in blue coveralls.

This was a long time ago, during my Fulbright year in Europe, and I would imagine the salad has gotten smaller and the price has gotten higher in the meantime. But that image has stayed with me and came to mind as I was preparing my Mediterranean light lunch today. I had canned Cento sardines on the side instead of tuna, but farmer's market tomatoes are great right now and lent themselves to a simple salad with red onion and Spanish olive oil.

The tuna in Santander was scooped out of a huge bucket of canned tuna kept in a refrigerator under the counter. The city has a picturesque fishing port on Spain's Atlantic coast (Bay of Biscay) and I had driven up there with friends from St. Louis University during my semester break stay in Madrid. The restaurant -- more of a pub, really -- was a simple bar with wood tables and benches, serving cheap bulk wine and these wonderful fresh salads. There was plenty of doughy Spanish bread to sop up the olive oil left on the plate. Needless to say, I managed to convey to the bartender that I wanted some of what these workmen were having.

I don't remember much else from our brief stop in Santander, except an impression of salty sea air, blue choppy ocean and a down-to-earth city with no resorts or tourists, but fishing boats and workmen in coveralls.