Chloe’s mother is an avid gardener hailing from the south of France. Her backyard and kitchen are teeming with fresh sweet tomatoes, large meyer lemons, succulent fresh figs, carrots, lemon basil, lemon verbanna (for tea), tangelos, quince, kumquat, courgettes, eggplants and even her own bay leaf tree. There was little room on the kitchen counter piling over with fruits and vegetables. I’m bringing home some homemade marmelade too!
Saturday, Chloe and I headed down to Berkeley in search of pastries and good eats. We arrived at Messe Pastries 5 minutes after they closed but a bit of knocking on the door and pleading (“I came all the way from Canada!”) got us two small cakes that we saved for dessert. For dinner we headed to the Cheeseboard, a pizza co-op.
The Cheeseboard only makes one type of pizza per day and servings are accompanied by the salad of the day and the dessert of the day. A long line reaches around the block but it moves quickly as the only thing to order is size. Since it was Indian Independance Day, the pizza du jour was roasted curried potatoe slices, chives, garlic, mozzarella and olive oil. You think potatoe chips wouldn’t belong on a pizza but the Indian-fusion live jazz band made everything make sense.
Truth be told, I really wanna open up a pizza co-op near McGill and hire students on a day-to-day basis. You only really need one permanent chef who knows how to make good dough and interesting pizza toppings and the rest of the assembly is done on the fly by people whom you can train in about an hour. I think it’d be very successful.
We sat down to dig into our cakes from Messe. Chloe had mentioned this bakery long before I even came so expectations were high. And to raise the stakes even further we had talked about the pastry business with the baker/owner’s son, who told us that his father graduated from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and then spent 40 years building up the Messe name.
Why were these so crap then!?! They were both completely stale and the dough of the suposedly “rich” chocolate cake was throat-scratching. The pear-caramel mousse thingamacake was bland and bested by similar cakes in grocery superstores everywhere.
Thankfully, Chloe makes a mean pavolva and combined with fresh berries+peaches and fresh coulis, a much better dessert awaited us at home.
We drove to Napa the following day. We passed this guy. It was cool.
Napa was suposed to be all about driving around and going to free wine-tastings. However, we found only one winery that wouldn’t charge the exorbitant $10-$20 per two tastes. We therefore decided to befriend the people at Folie-à-Deux and buy their cheapest 2007 Chardonnay (Other cheap options included 2008 Red, 2008 White, and 2008 Rose, we felt that if you know what type of grape your wine is made of then that’s probably a better wine).
Our other purpose for visiting Napa was the Bouchon bakery in Yountville, a part of Thomas Keller’s empire which includes The French Laundry and newly opened Ad Hoc (we walked in for a bit, it was really nice!). Here, unlike Messe, everything was fresh, textures were perfect, flavours were strong. Altogether we had the makings of a picnic,
The lemon tarte was silky, not eggy like you usually get. The crust was also delicious. The chocolate ganache tarte was definitely the most satisfying baked good I think I’ve had all trip. The flavour was an intense chocolate, like you get in fudge or mousse and the crust was similarily delicious.
Today is now Tuesday and I get back to Montreal in a couple hours. San Francisco is amazing, beautiful, friendly, colourful, delicious, and very very hilly. It doesn’t beat Montreal though, and it doesn’t feel like home.