Wild Thyme

It's a big election day in Canada and some people suggest to simply eat our ballots. Check out the recipe section: ballot flambé, ballot burrito, ballot fondue, etc. You might get inspired when it's time to get Bush out of the office...

Dear FAMOWT (Friends and Members of Wild Thyme):

Your benevolent WT dictator here. I'm thinking of rejiggering a few design elements. One idea: nixing the wine list at right and replacing it with a links list of our own restaurant reviews, alphabetically sorted. Or keeping the wine list but shortening it to name and year.

Any other ideas of what to put (or not to put) on the right-hand side?

Alex

A place so nice, they named it twice.

And now I've been there twice. Roz'n'Ron'n'Aaron and I were there last night. It was quite instructive to go back to a place so quickly, only four nights after my initial trip. Easier to see the slight fraying around the edges.

OK, that sounds too ominous. But I'll concede that it wasn't quite as good this time, starting with the service, which was extremely friendly but a tad sloppy. We sat at 7.45 for a 7.30 reservation, no great crime, but when we got to our table, it took a while for bread, butter and water to arrive. (Again, I'll cut some slack: the place was jammed.) Same thing happened with wine; our bottle didn't arrive until half-way through the apps, one of which they completely forgot to bring. Oops. And I forgot to mention it at the end of the meal, so I'm not sure if we were charged for it. OopsOops.

And the food? The apps that managed to arrive at our table were more modest than the previous visit: a green salad and mussels served six to a platter escargot-style, ie, taken from the shell and baked with lots of butter, garlic and herbs in a little cup. The salad, garnished with edible flower petals in rainbow hues, was deliciously dressed with raspberry-yogurt vinaigrette. The mussels tasted like butter and garlic. No argument from me on that.

Entrees: the lamb stew, which Mom ordered, was just as excellent the second time around (see comments in previous entry). I tried a different stew, the seafood combo, which was more subtly flavored than the meat-based stews. More of a bouilliabaise, with a thin tomato-cream broth and a jumble of different critters: clams, mussels, shrimp, calamari, crabmeat, and a big hunk of seabass. The shrimp were overcooked, the seabass slightly so. Everything else was fine, and we discussed the difficulty of sealing various types of animal flesh, all with different cooking times, in a pastry shell and getting them to come out just so.

Ron and A-Ron (Son of Ron) went for non-stews and were quite pleased, but the bites I sampled made me think, why deviate from the specialité de la maison? Aaron's flat-iron steak with a wild mushroom sauce was short on actual mushrooms and short on mushroom flavor. The mushroom-lite sauce made the steak a little flabby; I'd rather go with a peppery dry rub. Ron's grilled ahi tuna was firm and succulent, and the brown rice accompaniment was a clever, chewy, nutty counternote to the melt-in-your-mouth tuna, but not inspiring.

That leaves one more specialty stew to try: the chicken leg with olives, peppers and prosciutto, and several entrees that seem more promising than your average French bistro fare, such as the prawn and bacon ravioli.

For dessert, we split a slice of apricot-pear tart and a slice of chocolate walnut tart. Sublime. For those who expect a sugar kick, bring your own, as the tarts, even the chocolate ones, are understated. Perfect for me and my lack of sweet tooth.

As we were finishing our meal, the couple next to us took out the Chron and turned to, voila, a review of Chouchou. It's always good to get a second opinion.

At Tony's admonition, I decided to get out of the Inner Sunset for dinner. Emily and I took my dad, my sister, and my dad's girlfriend for a Father's Day eve meal at Chouchou, a fairly new French bistro on Dewey, just above the Forest Hill Muni station. Close to the Inner Sunset but not in it.

The interior is bright and cheery, with the inevitable French art-deco advertising posters and walls glowing with warm tropical colors. Rather noisy, but once you've sat down it's not so bad.

The menu is compact but a treat to explore. At least 8-10 appetizers, all of them sounding (and looking, as we craned our necks to watch various dishes arrive at our fellow diners' tables) delicious. For apps the five of us split a pizza -- actually an entree -- of prosciutto, truffle oil and parmesan. Razor-thin crust and subtle, rich flavors: as good as my favorite snooty pizza place, Pizzetta. We also split the lentil salad with crab, mango and other goodies in a mustard dressing, all piled high in a cylindrical tower. Everyone raved, although I had slight reservations about too many flavors competing. At least all of them were good flavors.

Chouchou has a menu section devoted to mainstay entrees -- a flat iron steak, a pork tenderloin, grilled ahi, moules-frites, etc -- but a second section features the house specialty: French country stews baked in a clay pot with a pastry shell. If you go, try these first.

The four of us -- my sister had a dance lesson and didn't stay for the main course -- ordered three different stews, all of which were incredibly rich, complex and completely different from one another. The lamb was dark, earthy, steeped in bacon, mushrooms, wine and oregano (and no doubt butter, as no doubt were the others). It was more intense than my dad's beef bourgignon, which he cooks for three days. Seldom do dishes demand complete attention; it was not mine, so I limited myself to two small bites to keep myself from abandoning my own meal completely.

We also ordered the veal and the sole clay pots. The sole dish bowled me over with its balance of richness and delicacy. The fine flesh of the fish wasn't overwhelmed by the stewy, buttery intensity. The veal was equally good, the richness cut by the tang of bell pepper.

(For my main dish I ordered a halibut filet with a creamy tomato coulis--just as good as the stews.)

After all this richness and excellence for very reasonable prices -- no entree more than $18 --all I can say is save room for dessert. You won't be sorry.

Last night I attended a gay potluck at the urbane but gemûtlich apartment my saturnine friend, David Mattingly. Saturnine not because he is "sluggish," "gloomy," "morose" "grave," or "taciturn"--on the contrary, David is Saturnalian, a big, merry light-emitting presence--but because he orbits in the outer-middle circle of friendship, though closer, upon reflection, to Jove than its ringed neighbor.

It wasn't a potluck in the classical sense, what I think of, correctly, as "the Methodist" sense, and perhaps incorrectly as "the lesbian" sense. There were no covered dishes. There were no demoralizing experiments in meatlessness or anything requiring crushed cornflakes. There were no crayon-colored gelatinous substrates for canned fruit cocktail. There was no duplication. Though the meal depended on everyone's participation, offerings were subject to central planning and strict control. There was an appetizer course, a main course with side dish, an expertly dressed salad (served after the main course), dessert, and plenty of bottles of good red wine, augmented by a selection of apéritifs and digestifs.

This was a gay man's potluck.

My job was to make a main course for 10 to 12 people. The solution? "Pasta puttanesca!" I thought to myself, triumphantly. This is cheap, easy, filling, and most important, delicious. And the sauce is very forgiving. It's hard to get it wrong. Or so I thought.

Here's what I learned...

First, when quadrupling a recipe, even for a big, openhearted and very forgiving dish like pasta puttanesca, don't assume that you should quadruple every ingredient. Anchovies, for example. I put four times the amount of anchovies called for, chopping 32 canned fillets. Like Salicornia, the common pickleweed of our coastal marshes, I'm very salt-tolerant. But the salt from nearly three dozen anchovies threw the sauce, whose success does not ordinarily depend on much calibration, noticeably out of balance. Of course, quadrupling the briny olives and capers contributed to this result.

So did the pepper flakes, which I confess, I dumped into the big pot without measuring. But I did estimate, based on previous experience. Having grown up in that geo-furnace called the San Joaquin Valley under the culinary tutelage of a Texan who liked to pop raw hand-picked pea-sized peppers whose name I can't remember--I do remember that they were hotter than flame, over a thousand on the Scoville Scale, I'm quite sure--into his mouth as demonstrations of machismo, I'm pretty damn heat-tolerant. But, dammit! The sauce was too hot. Since all the guests were well-brought-up, none cursed or spat, but volumes were revealed by the choked compliment of the man sitting next to me: "Very diabolo."

Finally, in addition to the anchovies, I like to add fish to pasta puttanesca. Sometimes, I just throw in some canned tuna. Why not? It's good and it makes the sauce meatier. But for last night's dinner, since the cost was spread over three of us, I bought a pound and a half of good fresh Ahi. I love ordering Ahi at restaurants both raw and rare. I have virtually no experience cooking it, however. I cubed the steaks and stirred them into the bubbling but not boiling sauce. Big mistake. Ahi doesn't really want cooking because when it comes to ahi, to cook is to overcook. What should have been a succulent mouth-watering treat turned out to be tough, chewy, and demeriting.

The thing to do, I realized, is either add the cubed ahi to the heated-up, but not still-cooking, sauce just before serving, or sear it separately, arranging slices artfully atop the sauce on each plate with a few saucy drizzles added.

The larger take-away, a reminder--oh, how we loop round and round to the same ancient lessons--is this: When multiplying a recipe or going off-recipe, even for something as forgiving and uncalibrated as puttanesca sauce, err on the side of too little as you add ingredients. Taste. Adjust as needed. This is as basic as putting your pants on before your shoes.

And while I'm skeptical of the proposition that one can learn from the experience of others, I humbly submit this sad report in the hope, if not expectation, that such miracles happen. To test the thesis that one may at least learn from one's own experience, I propose reprising this "gay man potluck." This time, though, being a gay man is not a requirement for attendance. Game?

My lunch today confirms it. I just had a modest bowl of won ton soup, with shrimp, pork, small tofu cubes and a bok choy leaf or two, at Chow on Church. $8.95. I thought it was going to be a big steaming bowl for that price. It was only a demure, rather shallow bowl.

My lunch companion, the SF Station Literary Arts intern, and I split a dessert of "fresh spring" fruit cobbler, which was in fact a hockey-puck shaped shortbread topped with whipped cream (oh, excuse me, "chantilly"), and sitting atop a gloppy bed of what I suspected were once-frozen strawberries and rhubarb. How much, you ask? $4.75, I tell.

The more I think of it, the more I realize that Chow is officially on my shit list. ("Finally," sighs Shyamala.)

At least in my neighborhood, there is no reason anymore to go to Park Chow. What they have, I can get elsewhere for comparable prices, although admittedly ambience and comfort factors vary greatly.

For meat cravings, there is Slider's (ask Barry about the burger) or Yumma's middle eastern (one of the best shwarma plates in the city). For Asian, the Little Bangkok, Hotei and Yummy Yummy (Vietnamese) are a top-notch trio. For salads, Pluto's and Crepevine will do. Or I'll make my own, damn it. For spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, pasta, etc., there's Pasta Pomodoro.

Chow, get out of my face.

Next time you're at the Kabuki for a movie, getting some bling-bling for your ride at Autofreak, or ogling the Japanese manga at Kinokumiya bookstore, and you're looking for a quick bite, get out of Japantown proper, cross Fillmore to the west side of the street and step into Perry's Joint. I love this place.

You really should have a hot dog at Perry's. They're long, they're steamed, they're tasty. They'll give you any fixins you want. As the ultimate test of human gastrointenstinal limitations, I recommend mustard, kraut and jalapeno slices.

If you absolutely can't deal with a dog, I also recommend Perry's veggie combo sandwich. Nothing so out of the ordinary -- avocado, tomato, red onion, lettuce, cheese, etc -- but the three times I've had it, everything's been super fresh and crisp. Thick avocado slices. Crunchy cool iceberg leaves. Red, juicy tomatoes. I also like the "wheat bread" they offer, which is more like a super light rye but with a toothsome crust. $5.75 is a bit steep, but it was enough to sate me all afternoon.

They also serve up soda-fountain specialties. The place is a popular lunch hangout for the locals and a hit with kids when school gets out, which reminds me fondly of that place on Dewey St. we used to invade on our way home from Hoover to eat fries and play Asteroids. (Thankfully, there are no video games at Perry's.)

Just an Inner Sunset food note: Fanch and I had a great meal last night at Hotei on 9th Ave. The nabeyaki soba featured crispy cabbage and carrots, a few tempura green beans, and fat chicken chunks in a rich broth that much to my delight wasn't very salty. My main complaint about Japanese noodle soups is overly salty broth (even at Hotei, and especially at Mifune in Japantown).

We also ordered a double hamachi roll, and as you might expect from a place that shares its sushi inventory with Ebisu, the fish was firm, fresh and very tasty.