The Culinary Timeline is a side-project that I've been working on since October. I'm hoping to have most of it complete by the end of January, with any luck. Until then, updates around here will be weekly, rather than twice weekly. Do stay tuned.
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Three-piece Chicken and Waffle @ Little Skillet, San Francisco. Seven packets of Crystal Hot Sauce is the perfect amount for this scenario: Two for the leg, two for the thigh, three for the breast.
Since I’ve recently taken up golf (again), many of my weekends have been spent out burning up the links, rather than trolling the Bay Area for choice eats. But let’s face it: Mark Twain might’ve said it best when he quipped that golf was a good walk, spoiled. Either way, I needed more of a sure thing, and an excursion into San Francisco had [... read more ...]
The Bourn and Wise Cellar. Later to become Christian Brothers Winery (1950), and eventually, CIA Greystone (1995).
Originally published as a large pamphlet in 1889, “Wines & Vines of California” offers a decent trip back in time for the California wine geek (although I do stress the word “geek”). I will admit, I found certain parts of the text interesting, but it’s definitely not the type of book that’s geared toward cover-to-cover reading: For one thing, large sections of the text are dedicated to exhaustive lists of grape growers, scores upon scores of names that have [... read more ...]
Roast Duck Banh Mi Dip @ The Kitchen Door, Oxbow Market, Napa.
Having worked at Martini House back in 2007, it would be impossible for me to offer an unbiased opinion of the newly-opened Kitchen Door at Oxbow Market — truthfully, I know too many of the staff, and in some cases, I already know the food (a handful of the Kitchen Door dishes, including the mushroom soup, are vestiges of chef Todd Humphries’ former Martini House menu). That said, it’s worth leading off this most recent photo purge with a snapshot of the Kitchen Door’s [... read more ...]
The family-style seating area at the Kitchen Door. Two-tops and four-tops are located on either side, along with some bar-style seating.
If you were ever a fan of Martini House in St. Helena, the first thing you need to know about the Kitchen Door at Oxbow is that the mushroom soup is back. Good thing, too. I developed a lasting taste for that very soup when I used to cook at the Martini House — in those days, I ate a little mushroom soup almost every night, ladling the last remainders over cubes of left-over walnut bread, which [... read more ...]
Last week, Eater SF reported that Victor Scargle has become the executive chef at Bardessono, a position that chef Sean O’Toole had vacated last November. The recent twist to the story is that, as of just a couple days ago, O’Toole has been named the executive chef of the Hopper Creek Kitchen at Hotel Yountville, a property that’s located just a block or two south of his old stomping ground (formerly the Yountville Inn). We’ll see how this all works out; Yountville is a small enough town as it is. I was a big fan of the Sunday Supper [... read more ...]
Although “Life, on the Line” is packaged as chef Grant Achatz’s culinary memoir, the crux of the book may actually be the existential question it poses: If a three-Michelin star chef loses his ability to taste, is life even worth living any longer? For most of us, this question may seem a bit melodramatic. After all, taste is just one of our five senses, and there certainly must be more to life than food and cooking. But then again, who are we to judge? The passion, the genius, and the dedication of a three-Michelin-star chef is simply beyond the [... read more ...]
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