by Christina Waters | Sep 9, 2009 | Food, Home, Wine |
No longer just a gorgeous place in Spain, Mundaka is also the name of a hot new tapas restaurant in the center of Carmel. Gabe Georis and his partners have worked interior design miracles with burnished, distressed and time-worn recycled materials, all of which give a distinctive patina to the two spacious dining rooms of this chic new spot.
Last week, armed with graceful tumblers of Spanish varietals — a white Txakoli and a mighty Rioja from M. de Legarda crianza, both loaded with minerals, fruit and a perfume of sea salt — we worked our way through several rounds of $2 pintxos. These tiny tastes, maybe three bites each, included a brandade on sliced potato, stacks of salmon, pink beets and caper berries, an outrageously garlicky baguette topped with fresh tomatoes and (I know, I just said it) garlic, plus duxelles topped with air-dried beef. Major flavor intensity in every bite.
The central room, with its upright piano, steep stairway to a mysterious (more…)
by Christina Waters | Sep 8, 2009 | Food, Home |
by Christina Waters | Sep 4, 2009 | Art, Home |
Paintings by the late Eduardo Carrillo are currently on display through November 22, in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Carrillo was a true shaman of light and color — prepare to be dazzled.
A bravura practitioner of magic realism in hallucinogenic large-scale oil paintings as well as subtle watercolor miniatures, Carrillo cast a long shadow in his ancestral Baja, his early Los Angeles stomping grounds, and ultimately in the Bay Area. Two dozen of his major works – including his neon-hued masterpiece of mythic time travel, Los Tropicanos — fill the main Solari Gallery of MAH. Even the final unfinished painting — a searing self-portrait — is on display, next to his studio table, chairs, easel and palette, in this retrospective of one of California’s path-breaking, multi-cultural iconoclasts.
Public reception will be held this coming First Friday, September 4, from 5-9pm.
by Christina Waters | Sep 2, 2009 | Food, Home |
If you’re like us, you live for August and September — dry-farm tomato season! The best, the most intensely-flavored, the juiciest – tomatoes the way the Great Mother intended them to be.
And there are lots of terrific tomatoes out there at our farmers markets. But now I know the source of the very best.
Meder Street Market is a boutique stand open at the bustling (ha!) crossroads of Meder & Western Drive on the Westside.
Sundays from 10am until 3pm, you can find neighbors hanging out over bins of brilliantly-hued flowers, basils, onions, tomatoes, squashes, beans. It’s a charming, laid-back scene where the best tomatoes in the area go for a mere $3/lb.
Organic, home-grown, yeah baby!
by Christina Waters | Aug 24, 2009 | Home, Wine |
The best white wine you’ve never heard of. The initial opening of jasmine and mineral salts, continues into a center of golden delicious apples, green and crisp. The piquant finish offers hints of tangerine and lime. At 13% alcohol you could drink this all day long.
Made from central coast grapes by oeno-gurus John Locke and Alex Krause, this mysteriously perfumed yet utterly dry wine is so far available only in Canada (there’s a long story here), and at Soif. But soon, it will be all over your neighborhood. And in your glass.
by Christina Waters | Aug 23, 2009 | Home, Movies |
Nora Ephron’s new film is just a trifle. A mere bon bon. An amuse bouche for baby boom nostalgics. But for providing the cinematic feast that is Meryl Streep playing Julia Child, Ephron deserves our unrestrained gratitude.
Streep is as joyous in her over-sized portrayal as the real Julia Child was in everything she did. Large, generous, and graced with a huge appetite for life’s sensory possibilities, the real Child was the savvy gastro-entrepreneuse who made “cuisine” a household word in post-war America. Streep, by all accounts our greatest living actress, not only retrieves the most Childesque mannerisms – the perpetually tossed head, the rolling eyes, the warbling chortle – she goes further. Not into an over-the-top impersonation. Dan Ackroyd already did that.
Mais non! Streep does something even better. She offers us Julia Child transfigured. Julia Child as we remember her, as the collective “we” created her — a robust, hulking, darling of a woman who brought joy, memorable recipes and most of all empowerment to several generations of hopeful gourmet cooks. Streep is blindingly accurate in portraying our cultural memory of this icon. Not Julia as she exactly was, but Julia exactly as we recall her. (more…)
