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Two superb meals
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:22 am on 7/25/2005
We do pretty well with food here in the Bay Area. Last weekend, I went to Maya and Bouchon for the first time.
I’d been wanting to try Maya forever - imagine a truly high-end Mexican restaurant. Well, I don’t have to imagine anymore. Appetizers were a little on the gimmicky side, but both quite good: we got soups. Dad’s was a cream of roasted corn number, and mine was ceviche with mahi-mahi. The corn was deeply flavorful without being cloying, and the ceviche’s textured, moist fish made up for a hint of cannedness-or-something in the tomato base. My entree was carnitas, sort of - really a pair of tiny loin medallions over a mound of what amounts to pulled pork, all surprisingly mellow and sweet. I don’t even remember Dad’s entree, but I know it had a baby huarache in it.
The biggest surprise and revelation at Maya was dessert. We were expecting to see all sorts of chocolate, even though that’s really more Aztec than Mayan; instead, we got caramel, cinnamon and pastry. This made perfect sense once our selections were on the table and in our mouths. They are, after all, the mainstay flavors of every panaderia on Earth. No pink cookies, though. Dad got two thin crepes literally underneath a plate-filling puddle of caramelized goat’s milk (really a fantastically delicious sauce), and I got banana-walnut empanadas with coconut ice cream. We took our time over these plates, dipping everything we could find into that crepe sauce, short of our fingers. And Dad may have used his fingers.
Bouchon is better known than Maya, and more of a destination; at least it was for us. Two hours’ drive each way, and we didn’t end up doing much of anything else in the area, not even a sip of wine. We just drove up and down the main drag in tiny, middle-of-nowhere, yet incomprehensibly yuppified Yountville. Saw the actual French Laundry for the first time; I’d spent the whole drive up regaling Dad with tales about it from the Michael Ruhlman books. I guess these places always seem small in real life after all the buildup.
Bouchon’s trick is just to be a bistro, well suited for a 3:30 lunch and a stroll in the door with no reservation. Keep it simple, but do things to the same standard of technique that made the French Laundry one of the greatest restaurants in the world. I can say with no doubt that the onion soup with which we both started our meal is the best onion soup I’ve ever had. We both then went on to get poulet frites, and the roast chicken was quite possibly the best I’ve had as well. Frites were very good, although a touch undersalted and cool. The little pot of mustard on the table (the only condiment provided, besides butter for the bread) helped with that.
Dessert brought things back up to the level of flavor and execution that the soup had. Dad’s lemon tart was light, creamy and very intense without hitting Super Lemon Bomb levels or anything - you could still taste the cream. For my part, the pot au creme of the day was coffee, so I was on that like Eric Meyer on CSS. Perfect, perfect texture, perfect sweetness and coolness, not just temperature-wise but in the flavor; nothing jumped out and got in between me and the simple, sweet coffee. The custard just supported that flavor elegantly.
I spent most of the meal kind of intimidated - when a kitchen is doing things that right, I start to worry about whether I’m doing things right - but the staff finally warmed up toward the end of our meal, when I started asking questions about the odd stamping machine on the table by the maitre’d podium. Various parties had been pressing its button and jumping straight up in the air at the loud snapping noise it made. It turns out it’s just there to stamp the restaurant’s name and phone number on the little yellow-ochre cards next to it. And, as the busboy grinned, to make people jump. I enthused to the host about the card machine as we were on our way out. (Dad apparently enthused to her about how beautiful all the women on staff were. Cheeky bastard.)
Maybe I should start a “food” category in the blog engine. That would certainly indicate positive things about my life.