Clark Wolf's Rants, Raves, Diatribes...and a few other Thoughts

Blessed Sliver of Very Good Food

By Clark Wolf

Journalists love to declare certain restaurant locations “jinxed” when a couple of enterprises try a spot and fail – usually for very good reasons that may be entirely invisible to even the most well trained investigative eye and blog. 

The rent structure may be completely unreasonable.  The street may need to be dug up for two years.  Scaffolding may be about inhabit the land.  Partners may hate each other and – with landlords- may be embroiled in on-going conflicts that none can safely reveal but that hamper urgently needed action.   

In fact, we saw just such a spot in Sebastopol that didn’t work out for a few good reasons;  it wasn’t the spot that was jinxed, it was the fundamentals (cost of the building, debt load requiring outsized rent and ownership that really had little idea what the local community would sustain).  It’s currently up and buzzing and in the middle of things in many new good ways.

But sometimes an odd little spot can be blessed, imbued with magical charm and draw, even if it sits in the corner of a parking lot, overlooking a busy intersection, in one of the less attractive areas of an often funkified town. 

Enter Bartavelle.  Slipped right into the spot that housed the beloved Café Fanny for many years, there are many conventional reasons why this spot might not be considered ideal.  Besides the stated obvious, there is no exhaust hood, no conventional cooking line and no big name chef associated with what is essentially a rather perfect food and drink bar. 

It is, however, wedged between two beloved Bay Area institutions – Acme Bread and Kermit Lynch Wines (KL is the landlord) that help put it on the local, regional and even national radar (ok, maybe international too).  It also comes of, you should excuse me, organic evolution.  Suzanne Drexhage is the owner, operator, chief cook and bottle washer, as they used to say.  She’s worked at Chez Panisse and at Kermit Lynch.  She shares an aesthetic and perhaps even a vision of food and wine in our lives with those other food families – in fact we’re vaguely related ourselves.  At 19 she was a cashier at the San Francisco Oakville Grocery that I helped open and run in the very earliest of the 1980’s.  She’s joined by her own son Sam, and the legacy moves along.

Here’s a situation where much of the good will build by the simple joys of Café Fanny – which too many of us had not visited in a very long while before it closed last year – was warmly passed along to a freshened location that seems to meet even more of our wants and needs than it precursor.  The food is delicious and the service so thoughtful and unpretentious it feels like you know every one of the folks working there, or that they somehow know you, or want to.  This is a little slice of the very best of why many of us do what we do.  Simply delicious food and drink in a thoughtful, pleasant spot, for all the right reasons. 

Roof to Table? Our Food May Be Closer Than We Know

The future of food may well be really, really local. Or should I say close. How about calling it Wall to Table (as in hanging gardens), or maybe Cellar (a nicer thing to call a basement) to Table? Maybe even in a planter box right on our dining table. Chia Pets with a side of Russian Dressing, anyone?

I mean, how in heaven's name are we going to feed billions more people if we grow, raise and make food the way we’re doing it now? Can we really rely on underpaying emerging nations and subsidizing corporate farmers to sell bland ingredients to large companies making so-called food-like products that make us fat and sick? Can we continue to have all that money – in the middle, between the farmer and us – go to people (‘cause as we all know, corporations are people, too…) who are adding no real value, but taking a whole lot from both sides of the deal?

Many of these questions will be discussed Thursday, when food writer Mark Bittman hosts a discussion on the urban food supply at the New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference.

What we know is that our current farming system is broken. We’re virtually sucking the nutrients out of tired earth, then attempting to replenish it with edited, synthetic ones, to grow subsidized mono crops that are leading us to the kind of collapse too horrifying to imagine. We’re cutting down rain forests, ignoring so much of the nutrient value growing right there, to raise trendy crops of magical single foods with no sense of the balance, no plan for the future.

Remember, the West was the new frontier, in part, because, as farmers used up the land in the middle of the country, they simply moved further on down the road. As they hit the Pacific Ocean, they soon had to start thinking about creative alternatives we -- and Chinese farmers 2000 years ago -- call sustainable. Even the great early 20th century adventure writer Jack London understood this enough to dig in and start employing smarter, more thoughtful methods. There’s still a park with his name on it in Sonoma County, Calif., where you can see terraced farmland and a humane and smart Pig Palace, where our porcine pals lived the good life before becoming ham, bacon and darn good sausage. But going back is only part of the equation. We need to revisit the kind of multipliable diversity studied by London and old plant wizard Luther Burbank and then employ every new technology we can muster in support of practical preservation and the circulation of precious earth and water into a system that is truly self-sustaining.

I suspect we may end up with a construct very much like the imagined world of futuristic storytelling that sees us in a bubble – sphere, in fact – where everything has to work together as a universe. Think the Jetsons, with heirloom tomatoes.

Make no mistake, unless we’re smacked by a major asteroid or runaway galaxy, the earth will probably go on spinning, and life in some form seems destined to be around for a good long time. The question is, will we be along for a longer well-fed ride, or will we become lunch for some smarter or at least more-focused feeder?

OK, this is full of gross oversimplifications, but I do have a few additional thoughts. Heirloom seeds that are productive, give delicious food and produce nutritious anything will continue to become more valuable and may in fact one day be used like money: edible currency, if you will. Simple systems that recycle and replenish, capture, clean and utilize from our natural surroundings – like good rainwater systems – may well be as common as vacuum cleaners. Rents may go up depending on how much sunlight and therefore feeding fuel hits our roof or window or panel, or planter box. Already, real estate values go up (even in Flint, Mich.) with proximity to farmers markets and community gardens – instead, or along with, access to golf courses and good schools.

With a mighty push, or against our will, we will need to come around again to the age-old knowledge that we simply must have food and water, fresh air and sunshine to survive and thrive, and that the appropriate amount of energy – pun intended – must go towards getting that right. And, in the end, it could mean something really good to eat.

So here’s where creative minds deserve to run free. What’s in your future lunch box and how does it get there?

Full article here