California Dreamin'

I love going to new restaurants and exploring food. But who doesn't? For every ten diners it seems there is at least one food blogger or gastro-community participant these days. And yes, I'm guilty of that as well (although this obviously isn't a food blog, unless it becomes one, which is unlikely because I'm probably too peevish and impatient to snap pictures of my food during a meal).

My relationship with food is one of deep and multi-faceted appreciation (I'm not sure it's a two-way street, but I'm willing to live with that). My food background is an amalgamation of sorts - weaned on Russian food (with southern influences like Romania, Georgia, etc), raised in the San Francisco Bay Area with a large dose of Chinese food (when I get a cold I have instinctual cravings for hot and sour soup). Then there was the college blip, with monotonous, low quality dining hall food that contributed nothing to my epicurean evolution. And now in New York, I go out often enough (and cook almost never) that my palette has been spoiled enough to use words like 'epicurean.'

I read the food press and certain restaurant blogs fairly regularly, and am in tune with the trendy styles and ingredients - morels, fiddlehead ferns, 'haute barnyard,' frying everything in sight, etc. Inevitably there are a million things I have yet to try, some of them classic and essential enough to be judged a crucial oversight. Until this past weekend I had never tried steak tartare. It wasn't really because I had just forgotten or certainly not because I had lacked the opportunity, but the idea of raw ground meat didn't quite appeal to my aesthetic sense. I know this makes no reasonable sense because I eat raw ground fish all the time. The reticence had to end with a visit to Blue Ribbon since one of their signature dishes is the steak tartare. I told my friend not to count on me for much more than a taste (just in case), but I probably ended up eating more than my fair share. The dish was perfect, with herbs and capers and home-made potato chips - I have hunger alarms going off in my brain as I write this. Illogical aesthetic aversion will not deter me in the future.

Well, that should probably be a conditional statement, depending on where you are and what aesthetics might have to do with possible health threats. My friend Hui is traveling in Southeast Asia right now, and as a fellow food lover she's reveling in exploring the authentic cuisines of Cambodia and Thailand (wish I could be there too). That enthusiasm has to be tempered by practical concerns, of course. No practical concerns necessary where I'm going for the weekend. Perhaps it's a childhood attachment, but despite all the great restaurants I go to in New York, the simple things just seem to taste better in California - the salads fresher, the herbs more aromatic. Whatever the reason, it's guaranteed to satisfy.