After a year of incredible meals at restaurants, it’s always hard to narrow down a list of my Top 10 dishes.
But I managed to — picking the ones that were so memorable that I still lust after them and would hike a mile in a blizzard just to have them again.
Here, in no particular order, are my top eats of 2011:
Hankering for fresh, local Dungeness crab, but don’t want to cook it, yourself?
Take a pretty drive along the coast to the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company, where Chef Gaston Alfaro is dishing up “Baked Pesto Infused Dungeness Crab.”
The crab is poached in a secret blend of spices and a splash of Mavericks Ale, then cracked and slathered in pesto sauce before being slipped into a hot oven for a few minutes. How good does that sound? Even better when you hear it comes with garlic bread.
Of course, if you’re a purist, you also can have your crab in the classic style, served warm or cold, simply with drawn butter and garlic bread.
Both dishes are $23 each. They’ll be on the menu as long as local Dungeness is available.
A new contemporary Indian restaurant has opened in Sunnyvale, serving up the likes of vegetarian tandoori kebabs and “Doodhiya Gosht” (lamb curry with ricotta cheese, essence of screw pine and edible silver).
Arka Restaurant, Bar & Lounge will officially open in January, but it’s already opened its doors this month for a test launch.
By the time you read this, there’s a good chance that not only have the dishes changed on the menu at AQ in San Francisco, but the decor, as well.
That’s because this new restaurant, opened less than two months ago, takes seasonality as literally as it gets — down to switching out the bar top, light fixtures, artwork and waitstaff uniforms according to whether it’s autumn, winter, spring or summer.
If you’re familiar with Park Avenue (Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn) in New York City, you’ve seen this concept before. It can be gimmicky, but only if the food falls short and plays second fiddle to the switcheroo interior. In the case of AQ, it does not. Indeed, the food created by Executive Chef-Proprietor Mark Liberman, former chef de cuisine at La Folie in San Francisco, is the star of the show. It’s executed so well, and with so many thoughtful little touches, that you long to come back again and again just to experience more, no matter how the dining room morphs.
When I was invited in two weeks ago as a guest of the restaurant, it was still officially “autumn” at AQ — down to the bronze plaque embedded in the floor right after you walk through the front door. The bar top was a gleaming, gorgeous copper, which will give way to white marble in winter. The industrial-chic space with exposed brick walls and massive timber beams is decorated with soaring trees, whose leaves will be stripped for the winter. So will the hip ceiling fixtures fashioned out of vintage heaters and chicken wire. The servers were dressed in warm, plaid shirts, but will be wearing something all together different in the next season.
When the champagne glasses start clinking on New Year’s Eve, you’ll want something tasty to go along with all of that bubbly.
But why settle for the same old spinach dip in a hollowed-out bread loaf when you can have this instead?
“Yogurt and Spinach Dip ‘Borani Esfanaaj’ in the Persian Manner” sure looks pretty, doesn’t it?
It’s also a bit more healthful than the old standby because it’s made with thick, creamy Greek yogurt instead of cream cheese or sour cream. You can make it with low-fat Greek yogurt, but it’s far more satisfying with the whole-milk version. If you insist on being virtuous (even on New Year’s Eve), use both — a tub of each. Just make sure you get some of the full-fat version in there.
The dip is by Shayma Owaise Saadat, a Toronto economist, whose recipe is featured in the new “The Food52 Cookbook” (William Morrow) of which I recently received a review copy. The book is by illustrious food writers, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, whom as you may now developed the Web site, Food52.com, which each week for 52 weeks ran recipe contests to find the best recipes from home cooks all over the country.
Believe you me, I wish I could be so lucky as to give away a table for two at El Bulli.
But now that the illustrious and pioneering restaurant has closed, I can at least give you a better understanding of the culinary genius, Ferran Adria, revered by chefs all around the world, who created what was arguably the best restaurant in the world.
“Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man who Reinvented Food’ (Gotham Books) tells of Adria’s humble beginnings as a college drop-out who took a job as a dishwasher only to make enough money to party. Then, he was drafted into the military, where he landed the demanding post as a cook for an admiral. During a summer leave, a friend urged him to take a job in the kitchen of a Michelin two-star restaurant in the middle of nowhere in Spain. Adria so impressed his bosses at El Bulli there that he was promised a full-time job after he finished his military service.
At age 25, he became El Bulli’s sole head chef. That same year, a chance encounter with some Spanish chefs would forever change his life and his way of thinking about cooking. Learn what set him on the path to creating foams, gels, spheres and other breathtaking, modern cooking techniques we now refer to as “molecular gastronomy.”
The book, by Saveur magazine co-founder Coleman Andrews, has just been released in paperback with a new afterward that details what Adria plans next.
Contest: One lucky Food Gal reader will win a copy of the book, “Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli.” Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight PST Dec. 31. Winner will be announced Jan. 2.
How to win?