Having recently received an email from El Bulli and seen the name pop up several times recently, I am not inclined to wait until after I go there to write something about it. After all, a Google search for the name will point you to over 600,000 results; if only 1/4 of those are reviews, who needs another one?
Back in Lyon, because my clothes seemed to be shrinking, I was trying - in vain - to stay away from the sausages; in my efforts to find distractions from food, I went to extremes: a visit to the zoo seemed like a way to have some wholesome fun, but, after four hours of picturing the roasted loins and sauteed breasts of the fresh game on display, I decided to go to the movies.
Watching "Kramer vs. Kramer", "10" and two other American films dubbed into French, plus about four European movies, kept me away from restaurants enough so that, on the morning I was back in a bus headed for Paul Bocuse's, I was starving - which came in handy when I decided to taste about ten different kinds of goat cheese after my six main courses but before the pastries. No problem, since Nouvelle Cuisine is "lighter", right?
Madame Bocuse had greeted me again and introduced me to her husband, who, after giving me the grand tour of the whole restaurant, put me in the hands of his Chef de Cuisine, Roger Jaloux, who went out of his way, in the middle of his busy service, to answer my questions and show me as much as possible.
It was a beautiful Spring morning, and I was so excited about my scheduled 8 AM breakfast that I woke up earlier than usual without the need for an alarm. Opening the shutters to let the sun in revealed a calm, deep blue Lake Annecy, just beyond the multi-green colored vegetable garden at my feet.
The bathroom in my three room suite was all tiled, with one of those big old porcelain bathtubs that are bigger than most hot tubs. But even that tub and the bottle of Badedas (known as Vitabath (R) in the U.S.) on the shelf next to it were not a big enough temptation for me to risk being even one minute late, and, after a quick shower, I was on my way to the main building of a long time internationally renowned country inn that included The Aga Khan and Dalida among its frequent guests. I was ten minutes early and already about six people had arrived; by eight o'clock sharp, fifteen of us were sitting down for a breakfast of scrambled eggs, freshly baked croissants with the best sweet butter and jams I have ever tasted and jumbo sized bowls of coffee.
The breakfast was taking place in an immaculate kitchen and my companions were the cooks "brigade" of L'Auberge du Pere Bise in the village of Talloires, the ritzy area of the lake, about twenty five miles from Geneva. I was there for an indefinite time, under a special arrangement to observe and take part in the cooking of the food served in one of France's best restaurants.
A ten quart stock pot given to me as a Christmas present in the mid 70's triggered what I wish had happened long, long before. At the time my life was, to use the then-modern terminology, the pits; I had allowed myself to almost hit the bottom of the gutter.
I had been working in sales for most of the fifteen years that I had lived in the San Francisco Bay area and gone through putting on the whole show of a successful businessman: the finest clothes, lavish entertaining, the Mercedes sedan, the airplane, the handmade Austrian grand piano, you know. And I was living exactly where you have to be very good at putting on the show, because there is a lot of competition: Marin County (of "we want it all now" fame).
I have been wanting to write about current restaurant experiences, but where I am at the present time, I just haven't been in one I want to take the time to write about. Perhaps, when I start getting out to San Diego, I will find something worth telling you about.
Restaurants are not all there is when it comes to food and cuisine – one could write volumes about the subject without ever using the R word. So, what I am going to do in the coming days is try to write about the subject in general.
I am going to start by posting two little essays that I wrote for my former restaurant's web site about some of my experiences. I hope some of you find these entertaining and worth a few minutes' time. See you soon.
I have lived in San Francisco since 1964, but have been in my native Colombia most of the past three years. I have been back in the U.S. since late 2006, but due to various circumstances, I am staying with one of my sons and his two daughters in So-Cal for an indefinite period, with plans to return to San Francisco sometime this summer.
We are in a not-so-little-anymore town called Lakeside, about 30 miles East of San Diego; on the way, you drive through an area that must have been settled by furniture salesmen or carpenters: the two fairly big communities you pass are creatively named El Cajón (The Drawer) and La Mesa (The Table). And North to your left, the biggest and most prominent thing is romantically called Escondido (Hidden).
A couple of months ago, my son invited me to drive out and stay overnight at the most popular week-end destination around here, to which the locals go in droves on Friday evenings, in traffic that makes the commute from Oakland to SF look like a cart ride from holes 3 to 4 at Pebble Beach. We would be cruising by an area where there are wineries and casinos in an Indian reservation. I had visions of driving through Napa-Sonoma and ending up near the South Tahoe shores. The Indian thing turned out to be a mall with lots of outlets; and I did see some terrain with what looked to me like weeds and brush, but I was wrong, those were vines!<more/>After 30 miles eastward, we arrived at what the locals here describe as their paradise: the desert – i.e. the Mojave. Now I have a vague idea of the working conditions our boys in Iraq have to endure, thanks to the Global Village Idiot (that was You-Know-Who's nickname in a newspaper I read in France about three years ago). But I digress ...
If you have any ideas about becoming a web site designer, this is a good lesson about what NOT to do.
In the mid-late 90s, when I decided Timo's should have a site, I started to build it myself. I am good on the back end (input forms, database manipulation and such), but a dreadful designer. The site I built initially would have made you want to throw up, but I ended up with a very nice one, thanks to my friend Miklen, who created it as her "thesis" to get her web design certificate from UCSF or USF or one of those places with a U in it.
If you have read my previous post, you already know that I have been a chef for around 30 years, and I owned and operated my restaurant, Timo's, in San Francisco for about 12 years.
For a long time, I have wanted to write about food - in fact, I finished the better part of a cookbook years ago. But that's another story that I'll tell another time.
I still think of myself as a chef, as food is my #1 interest. But I am now retired, not in the classic sense, but more as in refried beans (frijoles refritos). Refritos does not really mean fried twice or fried again or fried over, as you might think: it really means "well fried". Diana Kennedy, the Julia Child of Mexican cuisine, explains this in The Cuisines of Mexico, her first book, which is considered by many a classic – actually, her recipe is titled "Well-Fried Beans", not "Refried Beans". (See? already talking about food!). In Mexico, if those beans are really, really, really well-fried, they would say "requetefritos".
