Here’s a contender for ‘Best Road Trip Ever.”
It’s starts in Silicon Valley, goes south on Hwy. 101 to Paso Robles, then over to the coast on Hwy. 46 to Cambria, then north on Hwy. 1 through Big Sur and into Carmel. It’s that beautiful and varied, from the ranchlands and vineyards of interior California to the sea… just gorgeous. Everyone should be able to do this drive at least once in their lifetime.
Paso Robles should not be confused with Central California. Paso’s valley – indeed the 101 valley, includes the famed Salinas Valley in Monterey County that is north of Paso. The St. Lucia (coastal) mountains separate the coast from this valley on the west, and to the east is another range of low-lying mountains – I’ll have to look it up but I think it is called the Diablo Range, and east of that is the Central Valley.
Without explaining our business in Paso for now, I can tell you that the food scene is alive and well there. Our timing was off to try the best know restaurant in Paso Robles – Bistro Laurent, which was the first high-end restaurant to open in Paso Robles years ago when the region’s wine country began to be recognized for what it is – one of the best places to grow grapes and make wine in the world. So revered is Bistro Laurent’s reputation (French-inspired cuisine) that even though we didn’t try a morsel of Chef Laurent’s food, it deserves to be mentioned here. We were there on Sunday and Monday nights and the brick-building restaurant on the southwest corner of the square is open Tuesdays through Saturdays.
We arrived in Paso shortly after 1 pm on the Sunday in which the NBA Final Game 7 was to be played, starting around 5 pm. We spent the afternoon touring the local real estate market with a delightful Realtor originally from Pittsburgh PA, Wendy. It was 100 degrees and by the time we got to our hotel – the unbelievably perfect Hotel Cheval (in so many ways!), we were dying for cool showers and to get out of sweat-soaked clothes we worn looking at real estate. We watched the first half of the game wrapped in bath towels while the AC brought our temperatures down. We watched the second half of the game in the hotel bar sipping lightly chilled Rose with a few other guests. When the Warriors completed their historic collapse by losing the last three games of a final (a first!) and the Cleveland Cavaliers were crowned champions, it was dinnertime. While I nonchalantly proclaimed “it’s only a game,” inside I was deeply disappointed with the outcome of the series. And thirsty for a real cocktail.
We stopped at a bar on the way to Artisan where I knocked back a couple of double vodka sodas on ice.
So despondent was I actually from our team blowing the championship that I uncharacteristically lost my appetite. Not completely, but mostly. Over the years there been have championship series’ that I got passionate about – some of the epic Lakers-Celtics series in the 1980s, a Super Bowl here and there, the 2004 World Series when Boston ended Beantown’s 86-year drought.
At Artisan, she ordered the Hangar Steak with potatoes and bone marrow jus. We shared a green salad with local cheddar (light, somewhat creamy for a cheddar, delicious), honey mustard and oddly, a granola topping (but it worked, for texture). All I had was a simple small plate – Dungeness crab slider with pancetta and quail egg. The bread was an English muffin made at the restaurant, a very good call as the bread was sturdy enough to hold the moist ingredients together without a bunch of bread getting in the way of the featured ingredient, crab (which I was remiss in not asking where the crustacean was nabbed from the sea). The pancetta gave the pure, shredded and lightly seasoned crab meat with just enough of an accent flavor and the quail egg gave the sandwich a decadence as well as richness and subtle moisture without using mayonnaise. It was a great start to a superb week of eating.
The Hatch
Wendy the Realtor had recommended The Hatch Rotisserie & Bar and when we asked people at the hotel about it, they heartily reinforced Wendy’s recommendation. We went there on a Monday night after 5 hours of wine country touring and tasting at four wineries in 100 degree weather (not recommended!). In between the splendid afternoon and dinner, however, we took cool showers and a three hour nap at the Hotel Cheval. We arrived at The Hatch hungry.
For starters we shared the Grilled Caesar and Pork Belly, the latter of which was glazed with a blackberry “mostarda” whatever that is and it was yummy. For entre we shared another starter, the Cold Beans salad with Haricot verts, wax beans, roasted shallot vinaigrette, fennel, cucumber and parmesan. I rarely leave unfinished food at a restaurant but both salads were huge and I could not finish it. For protein, while the lady had seriously eyed the Farro & Roasted vegetables with Heirloom farro, burrata, sweet peppers, asparagus and fava beans with lemon vinaigrette, we settled on their roast chicken. The nameplate at the door does include the word rotisserie, after all.
The chicken was very good and served with house-made buttermilk dip and hot sauce, a good thing because the breast was dry. We make such good chicken at home (read the next blog, please), particularly whole-roasted bird, that we rarely order chicken out. Yet these days we’re trying to cut back on the beef and knowing that we were heading to the coast the next day for three nights and would likely eat from the sea mostly, we went for the chicken. I contend that no one can perfectly cook the breasts and the thighs in one dish. When I make roasted chicken, I remove the bird from the oven, cut away the thighs and legs and finish them in the oven while the body of the bird with all the white meat and wings rests before carving. That’s that.
I would still go to The Hatch again when in Paso Robles and highly recommend it. I didn’t get the chef’s name but looking at the menu now online and having been there and seen it (marvelous interior – brick wall, clean, simple, good lighting, and great wine list), you can tell that they get it and make good food. Some of the items I would have liked to have tried include Shrimp & Grits (with a smoked sausage side option), Harissa-Rubbed Tri Tip, Ramen with house-made Miso Broth, and the Crawfish Boil. We left Paso Robles after shopping at the local Walmart for me to buy some tank tops. I had not brought any from home and had not anticipated the blistering heat. It was 102 when we left Paso around 1 pm and the temperature would rise another couple degrees before it started tapering for the day. An hour later we were walking the tourist strip of Morro Bay in marine-shielded sun and a lovely 68 degrees. We popped into a forgettable restaurant for large, cold Sapporo beers and a side order of fried calamari. Before heading north for Cambria we drove over to the base of the Rock. If you’ve never been, it’s impressive, as if a giant rock fell out of the sky one day and happened to land on an otherwise flat beach. I am sure geologists have a logical explanation for this:
At the beach there was a warning sign about the rough surf and tides that is a classic: “Drowning is an once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
In Cambria we settled into our OK lodging for the next few days, El Colibri. It is on Moonstone Beach which further north has many smaller places of lodging and a few restaurants with ocean views. This section of town has a boardwalk that parallels the road (which in turn parallels the 101) and the boardwalk meanders along the cliff that is a few hundred feet above a rough and hardly trammeled beach. I took off on the mile or two walk to the end of Moonstone Beach to have some cocktails while the lady rested.
One of the beachside restaurants is locally famous and so popular that they demand and get away with their payment policy: cash only. The Seafood Chest reminds me of the Chart House in the 1980s – all the fish is lightly broiled and slathered with butter and lemon. How original! But the tourists love it and keep coming back for more. On our second night in town we decided to give it a try, lest we be snobs. We let the early birds and people that dine at “regular hours” do their early thing and got there in time to watch the sunset around 8:30, then walked in to get a table. We were told it would be about 90 minutes.
Fortunately, earlier that day after touring the Hearst Castle (amazing) we stopped at the Hearst Ranch winery in the little hamlet of San Simeon, which is right at the base of the road that leads to the Castle, to do a little tasting. My traveling companion is always good about asking locals for local information, including the question (that starts with a statement): “you live here, where do you go out to eat, and where do the locals go?” The guy pouring wine gave us a couple of names of in-town restaurants (vs. the strip of coast where we stayed). This information came in handy as we took a pass on what I labeled “Corporate Seafood” when told we had a 90 minute wait for a table.
Finding The Black Cat Café was easy enough and out of the 20 or so tables with white linen covers, only a handful were occupied. It’s too bad I couldn’t text all the people waiting for a table at Corporate Seafood, because they missed out on some great food. The Black Cat has a menu that appeals to locals and tourists alike and you could go there several times of month and not tire of it. In fact, I wished I could go several times because there were so many appealing choices – from the entrees alone: Maple Leaf duck breast, Bella-Sage Farm braised rabbit, chicken or shrimp piccata, chipotle shrimp linguine and wild caught salmon, to name a few.
My dining companion had stuffed pork chop with fontina cheese (pictured below).
Two items on the menu had my attention from the start – sea scallops and rare seared albacore tuna, the latter of which appealed to me more so for its accompaniment that just the fish itself. I am a sucker for anything that starts with “Vietnamese,” as in “Vietnamese cucumber slaw, shitake, ginger, wasabi cream, shallots, peanuts, cilantro served with jasmine rice.
For as accomplished of a home chef that I am and student of food, I can’t cook scallops to save my proverbial life. It is one of those dishes that I just can’t pull off. I’ve tried brining them in milk, roasting them, sautéing them, you name it. It all turned into cat food, and we don’t even have a cat. So when I see them on the menu at a good restaurant, I want them. Our food server and the chef were gracious to make the Vietnamese dish and replace the tuna with the scallops. By far, this was the best meal of the trip.
My former wife, as was often her habit, wanted to meet the chef.
On a different trip — in Madrid (Spain), the day we arrived after flying the red eye from New York, we unpacked at our hotel, showered and went for a walk to get on local time. We ended walking near Retiro Park and looking for food, walked down a street to find Casona Retiro, which was open but with hardly any patrons. The food was so good we still talk about that meal. At the end of lunch (the last plate was chicken wings with a hunk of the breast still attached in a butter tarragon sauce) my wife asked to meet the chef. A big black guy with a gap between his two main upper teeth came out to meet us. After that I never set any expectations when meeting chefs in restaurants where we eat.
Back in “downtown” Cambria, Chef Mauricio came out to say hello upon the request for us to thank him in person for a wonderful meal. It turns out he is not only the chef, but also the owner. Mauricio is a Mexican-American, presumably legal, who worked in California restaurants starting when in his teens. He went to the Culinary Academy of America in Napa, so his skills were honed by hours of hours of work and formal training. I’m always curious how people manage the business side of restaurants so I asked Chef Mauricio if he had used a small business loan to buy the restaurant. “No,” he said, “just savings.” America is truly a great country.