David’s Discoveries: A great bistro in Burgundy — L’Auberge de Jack, Milly Lamartine

by David Downie on

Fred Flintstone might recognize the giant ribsteak served at L’Auberge de Jack. This poster-hung, cozy country bistro in Milly Lamartine is one of my favorite locales in Burgundy. Draw up a wooden chair and eat and drink with the locals. It’s unpretentious, affordable, and, à propos of locales, entirely local in its sourcing. It’s fun, too: a joyful dining experience.

Fred Flintstone would feel right at home: scenic, stone-built Milly Lamartine perches on a hillside a few miles from a famous prehistoric site, the Roche de Solutré, known for its bones, stones and wines.

Owners Sylvie Bouschet and her chef-husband Jack are from Mâcon, 10 miles east of Milly Lamartine. They’ve never heard of the Flintstones or locavores, either. But eaters of local food worldwide might want to make L’Auberge de Jack the template for their movement: there’s no mission statement accompanying the Charolais beef, raised by a family farmer near Charolles, 20 miles away, and served rare with thick-cut, housemade fries, some of the best you’ll ever eat. Sylvie and Jack don’t trade on common sense: for 30 years they’ve been buying wholesome, quality products from trustworthy people nearby.

But ask and you’ll discover the plump pork sausages simmered in Beaujolais come from Monsieur Girard, the butcher in Pierreclos, another handsome village, down the road a piece. The Beaujolais comes from over the bluff, near Solutré, ten minutes south by corkscrew road. That’s where the Burgundy and Beaujolais regions overlap. Excellent, underrated wines come from the eroded, limestone escarpments: Pouilly-Fuissé, Saint-Véran, Moulin à Vent and others.

Foodies know that cheese is part of the French dining experience codified by UNESCO. Sylvie and Jack haven’t heard of UNESCO’s efforts to protect French fare. No matter. Their snow-white or moldy goat’s milk chèvres are handmade from raw milk. Local dairy farmers continue doing what they’ve always done hereabouts – making cheese, modestly.

Admittedly, the chocolate in Jack’s monstrously exquisite Marquise doesn’t come from here. That’s the trouble with chocolate, unless you live on the equator. Happily, the coffee isn’t local either: it’s roasted in Italy. Maybe that’s why it’s good. Most French coffee is undrinkable.

Not so the wine: Burgundy’s whites (from Chardonnay) and reds (either Pinot Noir or Gamay or both) have rarely been better.

On the list at L’Auberge de Jack most of the wines are made in small quantities within a radius of a few miles. From the main road you see Olivier Merlin’s vineyards at La Roche Vineuse across the way. True, Merlin’s red comes from Moulin à Vent, 10 miles south. But it proves that humble Gamay can achieve greatness.

The most astonishing bottling on Sylvie and Jack’s list is from Domaine des Héritiers du Comte Lafon, a few hundred yards away, an offshoot of the celebrated Meursault winery. Their Mâcon Clos de la Crochette exudes not only citrus. It’s infused with the minerals unique to this area. And it’s blissfully free of oak.

Maybe a new term should be coined: “Locabiber.” A drinker of local wine. Burgundy’s a good place to start the movement.

L’Auberge de Jack: Milly Lamartine. Tel: 03 85 36 63 72. Open for lunch only Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, for lunch and dinner Friday and Saturday, closed Sunday dinner and Monday.

[flickr image via filtran]

Barbary Coast Food: The Hangtown Fry

by David Farley on
Take a few eggs, fry them up, and then slap on some oysters and lay a couple strips of bacon across it. You wouldn’t be wrong to think this was a late-night, bong-hit-induced home dinner. But it’s really a Barbary Coast-era rich man’s meal.

Meet the Hangtown fry. This mishmash of seemingly incongruent ingredients originated in the ominous-sounding Hangtown (today’s Placerville, CA.), smack in the Gold Rush country. It’s said that a miner in the early 1850s, who had just found a motherlode of gold, went into a restaurant and asked for the most expensive meal they could cook up. Eggs were something of a delicacy because they had to be transported (very gently) from afar; same with oysters, which came on ice from San Francisco; and bacon was brought all the way from the East Coast.

The other tale associated with the origins of the Hangtown fry relate to someone about to be, well, hanged. When asked what he wanted for his last meal, the soon-to-be-executed prisoner requested eggs, bacon, and oysters, knowing it would take days to transport them there and he’d have bought himself some time.

No one knows for sure if either of these tales are true or apocryphal. One thing is certain though: the Hangtown fry is truly a California dish–the origins of California cuisine, perhaps?– conceived at the same time the state came into the union.

Best of all, if you know where to look, you can still find it today. Mission District restaurant Foreign Cinema sometimes has it on the weekend brunch menu (though not at the moment) and Comstock Saloon turns the dish into a very snack-able and tasty toast (see photo). But the closest to the original might be at the Tadich Grill in downtown San Francisco. Opened in 1849, it’s the oldest restaurant in California and they’ve been serving up the Hangtown fry for as long as anyone can remember.

Is There Such a Thing as A Free Lunch In San Francisco?

by David Farley on

It turns out, yes, there is such as thing as a free lunch in San Francisco. Well, sort of. Welcome to the Comstock Saloon, opened in May 2010, a throwback to the old Barbary Coast saloons, when drunken men would fall through trap doors and wake up shanghaied on a ship in the Pacific Ocean.

This cocktail-centric restaurant, an homage to 19th-century San Francisco debauchery, is about as spot on as you can get without turning the place into a gimmicky Disney-fied version of a theme restaurant.

The owners, both mixologists who came over from Absinthe, are Jonny Raglin and Jeff Hollinger. During my walk along the Barbary Coast Trail, I stopped by Comstock to chat with Raglin about the place and the Barbary Coast, and hoped I wouldn’t fall through its trap door and wake up in Shanghai.

“We wanted to open a pre-Prohibition cocktail saloon,” said Raglin, who figured the 1920s speakeasy-style cocktail bar has been done too much to add yet another to the scene. “And I’m fascinated with the Barbary Coast history.”

And it’s not just him. “There’s definitely a buzz about the Barbary Coast these days,” said Raglin. “Think about it: in the 19th century, it was the only place on the West Coast to really party.” He added that when they first opened they had been putting out the phrase ‘Barbary Coast’ in their publicity and then a few months later the Wayfare Tavern opened up and they, too, were boasting a Barbary Coast theme. “Ah ha! I thought,” said Raglin. “This is catching on.”

True, but it seems Comstock is doing the best job of keeping the Barbary Coast spirit alive, from the teak high-ceilinged interior and 19th-century-esque sartorial choices of the staff to the Victorian-era cocktails. Oh yeah, there’s that free lunch too. Buy any two “adult beverages,” as they’re called on the menu, and you get a free lunch.

“It’s an old San Francisco tradition,” said Raglin, who couldn’t think of any other place in town that still maintained the practice. The Comstock Saloon offers the lunch deal Monday to Friday and it’s always one pre-decided menu item per day.

And just as I ordered a second cocktail–a cherry bounce (watch Raglin make it in the video above)–Raglin said, “Get that man a free lunch.” Ten minutes later a delicious BLT was sitting in front of me.

Ramazan pide: a Turkish tradition

by Meg Nesterov on

We’re halfway through the month of Ramadan (called Ramazan in Turkish), an important time for religious Muslims but also a time of many celebrations. Turkey is a largely secular country, thanks to founder Ataturk, who brought the country out of the Ottoman Empire into the modern world 90 years ago, and many Turks do not observe the fasting but do enjoy many of the traditions associated with Ramazan. Each day’s sunrise-to-sunset fast is broken with the iftar meal, a feast anyone can enjoy and typically started with consuming a few dates.

In Turkey, a large flat loaf of Ramazan pide bread is a specialty only made during this month and a must for any iftar. Last year, during my first Ramazan in Istanbul, I tried a few supermarket Ramazan pides and was mostly underwhelmed, it tastes similar to a pizza crust. This year I got wise and joined the many locals standing in line for a fresh hot pide and now I’m hooked. Bakeries all over the city make pides in the afternoon and evening to be fresh for sunset call-to-prayer and it’s one time you want to show up at a bakery at the end of the day. Look for a bakery with the longest line, get your lira ready (they generally cost around 1.50 TL or $1 USD), and grab a piping hot loaf wrapped in a paper sleeve. Pides are usually covered in sesame seeds and make a great sandwich base with cheese or spread with tahini and Nutella, that is if you can wait that long. Many Turks tear into their pide on the way home from the bakery, while it’s still hot and crusty from the oven. Enjoy them while you can, Ramazan will be over August 29, when the national bayram holidays begin and pides disappear until next year.

Tyler Florence’s Wayfare Tavern: An Ode to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast?

by David Farley on
A decade and a half on the Food Network and several cookbooks with his name onthe cover, chef Tyler Florence’s first restaurant, the Wayfare Tavern, has been a hit since it opened in 2010. Reviewers (and even the press material) boast that the handsome teak interior and the menu are an homage to the Barbary Coast. I deviated a couple blocks from the Barbary Coast trail that I’ve been following all month to go find out.

Chef Florence didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, so I couldn’t ask him what makes his restaurant in the former Rubicon space a particular nod to the legendary lost neighborhood and why he did it. The Wayfare Tavern is part of a growing Barbary Coast trend I’ve noticed in the last couple years (more in this in later posts). The dark wood and taxidermy do give it a particularly 19th-century Victorian feel. The food is hearty and rustic and hugely portioned and, from my knowledge, is impossible to know exactly what hungry minors and the newly rich were scarfing down in the mid and late 19th century. The burger, though, was one of the best I’ve had in San Francisco and my dining companion’s pork ribs were fall-off-the-bone tender.

This would have been the place where the newly rich would have come to throw around a few gold nuggets. Today, though, the crowd is mostly bankers dressed in blue polo shirts and khakis. Which, if you think about it, is about as close as you can come to being a Barbary Coast-era nouveau riche.

It’s not likely, though, they’ll let you pay for your dinner in gold nuggets.