Berch on Food

London

Well, Berch on Food is back from this fall's set of travels, and I have a full sheaf of notes and several gigabytes of photos to show for it. This trip I was unburdened by work obligations, leaving the days and evenings free for touring and eating. Given a transatlantic flight, where should we head? I nominated London and Paris, and Maggie nominated Berlin and Stockholm, and somehow we managed to fit all four cities into three weeks. I headed to Nebraska to meet Maggie beforehand, and consequently ended up doing a lot of flying. (My final itinerary, in airport codes, was SFO-DEN-LNK-ORD-LHR(-)ORY-SXF-ARN-LHR-ORD-LNK-DEN-SFO, all by air except London-Paris which was the Eurostar train. Lots of seat belt announcements and upright seat backs, believe me. (Maggie was spared the SFO-DEN-LNK parts on either end.)

After arriving in Lincoln, Maggie met me at the airport and we headed not for the Haymarket, but for the new second location of The Oven, at 70th and Pioneers, in the same center as Venue. It's a nice room with high ceilings, modern decor, and halogen track lighting. I ordered my favorite herb-crusted lamb shank with vindaloo cream, which was delicious, and we drank a 2004 Seghesio "Old Vines" zinfandel. (The Oven East is still building its wine list, and didn't have our favorite Stag's Leap petite sirah, but the Seghesio zin was very nice with the lamb and Maggie's chicken tikka korma.) And before leaving Lincoln we managed to get to BBQ4U, which has turned into Lincoln's consistently best barbecue.

I managed to score us first class award seats from Chicago to London and back on United, which entitled us to the very nicely stocked International First Class lounge at O'Hare, with a decent bar, good beverage selection, and some tasty food, including a cold pate en croute with pistachios, a ham and cheese roll-up, various nuts and cheeses, and good coffee.

We boarded on time and were escorted to our "suites" on the Boeing 777. There are only 10 seats in F on United 777s, and each is a mini-suite that converts to a lie-flat bed, and has plenty of storage space, an IFE screen, laptop power outlet, satphone, and comfy pillows and a blanket. The seats are angled and we each had 3 windows to look out of. Service was very gracious and the seats were very comfortable.

Dinner service began with a cucumber salad and a combo of short rib wontons with thai barbecue sauce and sauteed shrimp, probably the best starter I've had on an aircraft. I ordered the filet mignon for a main course, but alas, it arrived burnt due to an oven problem in the galley; profuse apologies ensued and it was replaced with a fillet of salmon with spinach, which was fine. I was nearly full by the time the cheese course came by, but managed to enjoy some gorgonzola, parmesan, and a bit of chevre, with Sandeman's Reserve port.

After a fitful night (I still can't sleep on airplanes, even in a mini-bed) we were greeted with a breakfast of an omelette, tomato, ham, and assorted fruit. After landing at Heathrow and clearing immigration we repaired to the United's Arrivals suite for showers, coffee, and wi-fi, and then faced the trip into town.

I'd originally planned to stay in familiar territory -- the West End, South Kensington, maybe Camden or Islington, but after consulting several holiday flat rental sites and going down a couple of blind alleys, the best choice available turned out to be a new development called Maltings Place, on Tower Bridge Rd., SE1, in Bermondsey. It's a conversion of a former brewery, along with some new construction. Our apartment was in the old brewery, and the main room looked out on a small lane with mews houses, while the bedrooms overlooked a second-floor glass walkway to a set of offices. I admired the concept of the place, but the execution was somewhat odd -- in the en-suite bath off the first bedroom, it was almost impossible to stand at the sink without brushing one's shoulders against the shower and wall, and it was literally impossible to turn around in the shower.

The location, though, was exceptional -- all of Bermondsey seemed to be in the process of renovation and gentrification, and what had been run-down riverfront warehouses and abandoned buildings only a few years ago were smart offices and blocks of flats, along with a good measure of pubs and restaurants. And since the arrival of the Jubilee Line extension -- no doubt a prime mover in the district's recovery -- it was a quick trip into the heart of London.

But -- on to the food. One of Bermondsey's best points is its proximity to the fabulous Borough Market, London's largest and most famous wholesale and retail food market. While we weren't able to visit the market this trip, we were able to enjoy one of its major local effects, which is a wealth of restaurants orbiting its perimeter on Stoney St., Southwark St., and Rochester Walk. One that we had in mind was Roast, to which we had been directed by Maggie's mother, who found a review of it on the NPR web site. Alas, they were fully booked, but immediately next door was a very stylish and informal steak house, Black and Blue, in a space neatly carved into an arch-roofed former warehouse under an railroad overpass, and full to overflowing with smart young Londoners. Black and Blue is part of Britain's post-BSE beef revival and is known for its huge cuts of sustainably-farmed beef, cooked rare. After a stint in the bar waiting for a table and appetizing on paté and tortilla chips with guacamole, we shared an enormous côte de boeuf (bone-in rib steak), and didn't finish it!

After a pleasant day touring the Southwark waterfront the next day, the highlight of which was a tour of the World War II cruiser HMS Belfast, Maggie suggested we try Roast again, and this time we were successful. It's a beautiful room, one story above the street (in fact, it overlooks Black and Blue). We started with the pressed rabbit with scrumpy apple chutney, and scallops with garlic and cobb nuts, accompanied by Audoin champagne, and we both opted for the roast leg of lamb with slow-cooked shoulder, greens, jus, and garlic creme as a main course. Both the leg and shoulder were amazingly tender and flavorful and the greens gave the dish a little bit of bitter contrast to the velvety meat juices. With the lamb we had a Trinity Hill 2002 Hawkes Bay "Trinity" red blend from New Zealand.

Unlike the starters and mains, which were exceptional, something was a bit off with the cheese course. Roast features a set of artisanal British cheeses, including Montgomery's Cheddar from Somerset, Isle of Wight Blue, and Flower Marie, a sheep's milk cheese from East Sussex. The cheddar was delighful, but something had happened to the Flower Marie, giving it an unpalatable barnyard taste (really, you don't want to know) which carried over to the Blue, either due to contact in the kitchen or storage, or perhaps via the serving knife. As all three cheeses are still on Roast's menu, it must have been a one-time incident. (I dearly love strong-flavored ripe cheeses, but something had clearly gone wrong here.)

On the way to the West End the next day, we lunched at The Bridge Lounge, a delightful pub on Tooley St., just west of the south end of the Tower Bridge. In an upmarket spin on bangers and mash, I had pork and leek sausages with onion, mashed potatoes, and a wine reduction sauce. Then we headed to the V&A and the London Eye, and from there to dinner at an old favorite, Porter's English Restaurant in Covent Garden. Porter's serves the traditional classics of English cooking -- shepherd's pie, bubble and squeak, steak and kidney pudding, spotted dick -- all the things that every American kid thinks that Londoners eat every day. We started with dressed Norfolk crab (a spicy crab salad) and we both had excellent fish and chips -- beer-battered cod with malt vinegar.

Our last full day in London was spent mostly at the British Museum, then back home to our neighborhood to a lovely dinner at a Bermondsey gastro-pub, The Garrison Public House. We started with mussels in white wine and cream sauce, and for mains we both had roast organic pork belly with new potatoes, bacon, and thyme jus, a nice filling meal for a chilly autumn night. We drank a 2004 Spanish crianza from Castillo de Chiva.

And with that our London visit came to a close -- the next day there was just time for coffee and a shortbread cookie before packing up and heading to Waterloo Station and the Eurostar... next stop, Paris!

Eating in Pleasanton

Berch on Food spent most of the last half of September and the first half of October in Europe, and of course there's plenty to be said about that, but in the meantime please check out Eating in Pleasanton, which I fired up in order to cover some local food and drink topics as well as play around with the Wordpress platform, which I hope to move Berch on Food to in the future. (Blosxom is a nice package, but somewhat limited in layout ability and automated functions.)

(Credit to the hopefully-to-be-revived Eatin' in Lincoln for the name, and to the amazingly energetic Eater SF for the inspiration.)

Nebraska roundup, part 3

This last trip began in a decidedly unusual manner, in that when we headed from the airport into Lincoln's Haymarket district for dinner at The Oven, the result was what Bruce Springsteen might have called a 10th Avenue Freeze-Out -- that is to say, there was not a parking space to be had, traffic was bumper-to-bumper, the peloton of a bicycle race passed through town, and the crowd waiting for tables at The Oven was spilling out into the street. All on a Tuesday. Well, it was good grilling weather, so we headed to Leon's Food Mart, picked up some nice New York strip steaks and a bottle of Coppola Claret, and headed home to Maggie's for a less harried dinner.

By Thursday, though, we'd made it to The Oven, with our friend Amy, and for the first time that I could remember, sat outside and watched the pageant of Haymarket pedestrians. I was determined not to have my usual lamb shank vindaloo, and settled on the lamb malai kebab, which was tender chunks of lamb marinated and cooked in the tandoor, with sauteed pea pods, mushrooms, and onions, and a mild sauce on the side. Very tasty, but I think I still prefer the lamb shank. I did get a chance to try the chicken kadai, which features a complex seasoned sauce with tomatoes, onions, chilis, and coriander -- the name gives no hint, since "kadai" is simply the name of the Indian wok-like pan that it's prepared in -- but it's one of the Oven's very best curries.

The remainder of the week was spent plotting a very special Chinese dinner.

Over the last few years, Maggie and I have been getting our Chinese takeout from a restaurant named Jade Rivers, near 40th St. and Old Cheney Rd. (The site was formerly the steak-and-seafood house Charlie's, which closed in the early 2000's.) Jade Rivers is a pleasant, attractive restaurant that serves a lunch and dinner buffet as well as an a la carte and take-out menu of familiar Chinese classics -- kung pao beef and chicken, General Tso's chicken, Mongolian beef, salt-and-pepper shrimp, and a variety of shrimp, scallop, and chicken combinations. It's much better than anything else in town.

One night, however, Maggie made a serendipitous discovery -- while waiting to pick up an order of fried dumplings and twin curry (chicken and shrimp in a light Chinese curry), she and the hostess got into a conversation about the Chinese food in San Francisco, where Maggie lived for a number of years, and how she missed the Sichuan and Hunan food from there. Much to Maggie's delight, it turns out that Jade Rivers' owner, Chef Dong, attended the Beijing Culinary Academy, had a stellar reputation in the Chinese fine dining world, cooking at luxury hotels and for visiting dignitaries, and loved to cook Sichuan-style food.

But... would it be possible for Chef Dong to cook some of that Sichuan food for us? Why yes, quite possible indeed, with a little notice. We headed down there, armed with a couple of take-out menus -- in English and Chinese -- from some Sichuan places in the Bay Area, and I had the pleasure of meeting Chef Dong, and arranging for a couple of special dishes for a dinner that Sunday with our friend Mike.

The result was delightful. We started with real pot stickers -- which, believe it or not, are somewhat hard to find in Lincoln -- and the three of us managed to put away two orders, washed down with Tsingtao beer. This was followed by one of my personal favorites -- pan-pan chicken (sometimes written dan-dan or bon-bon), a cold plate with chicken (and sometimes cucumbers, scallions, and noodles) tossed with a spicy sauce of pureed peanuts, sesame, and chili peppers.

Next came cumin steak -- slices of beef dry-cooked with chili peppers and cumin seeds; and twice-cooked Chinese bacon in black bean sauce. The latter is another of my favorites -- the meat is sometimes called side pork, pork belly, or fatty pork, and is usually boiled or steamed, then sliced and wok-fried with scallions, other vegetables, and a spicy black bean sauce.

Chef Dong came by to greet us and we toasted him with more Tsingtao. It was a wonderful spice-fest. It would be wonderful if Chef Dong could open a real Sichuan restaurant -- I think it might catch on in Lincoln.

By early the next week we were thinking about eating out again, and this called for a trip to M's Pub in Omaha. We got caught in a classic midwestern cloudburst while walking around the Old Market, but ducked into M's in time to claim a table. After the escargot (with a glass of Bouvet Brut, a méthode champenoise sparkler from the Loire Valley, made from chenin blanc grapes), I had a feta-stuffed rack of lamb with olive tapenade, accompanied by mint-rosemary orzo and sauteed vegetables; Maggie had the veal cordon bleu with savory acini di pipi. We split the chocolate marquis for dessert, and drank a big zinafandel (M. Cosentino's "The Zin", 2003).

A few days and a couple of grilled rib-eyes, Indian take-out curries, Runzas, and serrano ham sandwiches later, it was time to hit the road. That's right -- a return to Kansas City and Arthur Bryant's Barbeque. 2006 came and went without a return engagement in KC, and I was determined not to let that happen again.

The spin this time around is that we were going to skip the Jazz District original, and try the new branch on the Kansas side of the border, at the burgeoning shopping and entertainment complex called Legends at Village West, adjacent to the Kansas Speedway. Same menu, same recipes -- but would the Q survive the transplant to the whitebread suburbs?

Well. First of all, calling Village West "burgeoning" is like calling Tokyo a "big city". The developers ate up hectares of Kansas cornfields faster than the Genesis Device from Star Trek II. (Or was it Star Trek III? Anyway, enough with the metaphors.) Legends itself is a combination of an upscale outlet mall and an entertainment complex, built in the form of a late 19th-century town with a brick-fronted Main Street and a tall smokestack. ("Legends" appears to refer to Legends of Kansas, historical figures whose images and statues are placed throughout the complex.

Then there's the Great Wolf Lodge, a resort complex built around a water park; a branch of outfitter superstore Cabela's, and just down the road, a branch of Nebraska Furniture Mart said to be the world's largest single-store retail location under one roof, and a collection of hotels and restaurants, including a Hampton Inn where we stayed. (Which was perfectly fine, and a heck of a lot better than the aging and musty Hotel Raphael near the Country Club Plaza we stayed at in '05.) After checking in we explored the mall, hit a few stores including a Le Creuset outlet (!), and headed over for some barbecue.

Arthur Bryant's is across the road from the Legends mall, with its own parking lot (which is a good thing). It looks amazingly like the original, which is impressive since they clearly wanted to match the the look while at the same time complying with Village West's architectural guidelines. The interior is pretty similar, with perhaps 50% more seating and a separate, drive-through take-out window.

So. The moment of truth. Would their barbecue measure up to the original? We ordered a slab of ribs and a pound of burnt ends, an order of fries, cole slaw, and a pitcher of beer.

The result? To be candid, I was slightly disappointed. This was good barbecue, maybe even great barbecue, but it lacked a certain something that my first visit had two years before. The ribs seemed a bit drier, and the burnt ends seemed a little less juicy and less burnt. (Maggie disagreed, and suggested that it was either the romanticization of my first visit, or that I'd picked some of the less juicy parts of the ribs and ends. Upon reflection, I'm pretty sure she's right.)

It was nevertheless a mighty, mighty, night of Q, and nobody went back to the hotel with an empty stomach. And I decided that whatever the result, the difference between the two slabs of ribs was well within the expected variation of two given barbecue experiences -- barbecue is not like fried chicken or pizza or even veal scallopini, where it comes out -- or should come out -- identically every single time. (Which, despite the occasional disappointment it produces, is part of the attraction of barbecue.) So maybe we hit the original on an exceptional night in 2005, and the new branch on an average night. So it goes.

After a good night's sleep at the hotel and a leisurely morning, we headed back to Legends for some lunch. And what's the perfect light counterpoint to barbecue? Sushi, of course. Legends hosts a location of Stix, an upscale pan-Asian restaurant with a good selection of sushi, sashimi, and Chinese and Japanese small plates. I has a sunomono, some fried calamari, and a very nice seared tuna tataki with ponzu, and shared some sushi with Maggie. (Purists might wag a finger, but I think it's a good thing that you can get excellent sushi and sashimi in suburban Kansas on an ordinary summer weekday.)

We looked around the immense Nebraska Furniture Mart for a while, started thinking about hitting the road back home, and Maggie had a brilliant idea -- why not hit Arthur Bryant's takeout window, and bring back a second sample to eat that night in Lincoln?

They packed up a slab of ribs in a narrow pizza-style box, and put some burnt ends and pulled pork in sealed containers, and we got back on the Interstate.

And when we re-heated it that night, the suburban outpost of Arthur Bryant's was completely vindicated. This slab of ribs was as juicy and flavorful as the original in 2005, and the same with the burnt ends. (It was my first taste of the pulled pork, and it was fine, too.) All is right in the world of barbecue.

The next order of business was clearly a trip to Omaha to pick up some La Casa pizza, which, as is traditional, provided two days of meals. Which left time for a couple nice meals out -- the first one at Fireworks, which moved from its Haymarket location to a new, free-standing building near 84th St. and Pioneers Blvd. earlier this year. Fireworks' menu is built around a wood-fired grill and rotisserie, with steaks and chicken predominant. We sat outside, in a pleasant shaded and screened-in area with large stone-topped tables. We shared the crab and asiago cheese dip as a starter, and I had the prime rib (which was perfectly done and wonderfully smoky), and Maggie had a filet of beef with gorgonzola sauce. We drank a crisp, flinty Chilean malbec (Montes, 2006) with the meat, and Francis Coppola's 2005 sparkling blanc-de-blancs, "Sofia", with raspberry tiramisu for dessert. (The Sofia, sadly, seems no longer to be on the wine list at Fireworks, but seek it out elsewhere if you can; it's a light and cheerful bubbly made from pinot blanc, sauvignon blanc, and muscat, and is now available -- brilliantly -- in 187ml cans, each a generous pour; about $16 for a 4-pack equivalent to a 750ml bottle.)

And my last dinner in Nebraska was a return to Venue, with Maggie and her family, for a nice steak -- filet "Oscar", with crab, asparagus, and bearnaise sauce, with Hans Fahden 2004 cabernet. Next thing I knew it was time to head back to California, and soon I was at my usual table at Pour la France! in Denver Airport, eating a cheese plate and enjoying the view while waiting for my connecting flight.

Coming soon - the all-new Berch on Food!

Watch this space for further developments. Berch on Food was off the air for most of the last two weeks due to network problems which are, hopefully, now solved. During the network outage, I was able to devote some time and brainstorming to the next generation of Berch on Food, which I hope to bring out very soon.

Thanks for the email inquiries (some of which were apparently bounced back to the sender), and for the others that all arrived together later yesterday after the network was repaired. All is well, Berch has not stopped eating, and there are exciting developments in the works...

Nebraska roundup, part 2

Looking forward to another trip to Nebraska next week reminds me to put together a roundup of my last trip in February and early March. No, I didn't cook another turducken, but we did cook up some tasty stuff -- most of it beef -- and try a few new places and return to some favorites.

Needless to say, we headed right from the airport to The Oven -- where we ran into online friends Sean and Marla and talked about the local restaurant and theatre scene. This time around I vowed to try something different as a main course, and I ended up with the Madras lamb, which as it turned out was even spicier than the lamb shank vindaloo. It's a full-bodied, flavorful curry, but I think I like the lamb shank better. Maggie switched to the lamb shank this time and loved it. We drank a bottle of Stag's Leap Syrah, which is slightly less subtle than their Petite Syrah -- the two are unrelated grapes, actually -- but bolder, spicier, and to my mind an equal or better fit for the Madras lamb. I'd eaten dim sum on the plane -- siu mai and har gow packed for carry-aboard by Fung Lum at SFO -- so we skipped the keema masala.

The next day we got takeout lunch from Runza -- my first actual Runza in over a year, though I'd eaten a bunch of their burgers in the meantime. It occurs to me that I've never actually detailed the oblong goodness that is the Runza Ovenstuff'd Sandwich®: while Lincoln is, overall, a pretty good eatin' town, the Runza is probably its most notable culinary claim to fame.

Eastern Nebraska is one of the largest concentrations of Volga Germans, usually called Germans from Russia, who brought their traditional cuisine to America in the 19th century, including the bierock (pronounced somewhere between "brock" and "brook"), an etymological cousin of the Slavic pierogi or piroshki -- a dough stuffed with chopped meat, usually with cabbage and onions, formed into a bun and baked in the oven. It's not clear how the bierock became a Runza -- whether the name is traditional or invented -- but that's the name that caught on.

Sally Everett and Alex Brening opened the first Runza Drive Inn in 1949, near Pioneers Park in Lincoln, with a second location opening in 1966. Franchising started in 1979, and as of 2006, there were over 70 Runza locations in Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, and Iowa. They also serve a reasonably typical fast-food menu (their burgers are much better than the global chains) plus chili, salads, wraps, and soups.

Runzas are terrifically filling -- they're not a light food by any means, but thankfully they're not too large, and I've learned not to have more than one at a time. There are all sorts of specialty Runzas on the menu, including cheese, Swiss cheese and mushroom, BBQ bacon, and BLT Runzas, but I think the original is probably the best, with an occasional cheese Runza for variety.

For dinner we cooked some New York strip steaks on the grill, and tried a bottle of Honig cabernet sauvignon. Most people, myself included, know Honig for its white wines, most notably sauvignon blanc, and their cabernet was solid, if not a home run hitter. The next couple of days -- Maggie made Japanese Golden Curry, and we returned to Paul's BBQ for ribs -- were a run-up to Maggie's birthday dinner. Since that comes on Valentine's Day, we ususally stay home and have something special.

This year I roasted a prime rib of beef, using the fiery hot and quick Berch on Food method. While the result was highly satisfactory, there were some moments of consternation, when about halfway through the process the smoke detectors went off and the kitchen filled with smoke. These are fancy networked some detectors, mind you, and you can't just tell them "never mind" -- they only give up if the smoke goes away, so we opened all the doors and windows, even though the temperature outside was around 10F with a stiff wind. (Thankfully, the cats did not try to make run for it.) What had happened is that the so-called "standing" rib roast had flopped over on its side, just a tiny bit over the edge of the roasting pan, and juices started dripping on the floor of the 500-degree oven. After evacuating the smoke (brrr!) we wiped up the oven, restored the roast to a secure and upright position, and let it finish. The timing was a bit off but it still turned out a delicious medium rare.

In the meantime we'd enjoyed some Taittinger brut Champagne with canapes, then Maggie whipped up some hash browned potatoes to go with the beef and we dug on in. With the main course we had a nice 2001 Medoc from Chateau Greysac, and finished with a cheese course.

The prime rib furnished a second dinner the next night, and after that it was time for a respite from beef, so I cooked us some Moroccan-style sea bass from a recipe from Cooks.com. It's pretty easy, and doesn't require any particularly exotic ingredients, and this time it came out just fine. We ate it with a Kris 2005 pinot grigio delle Venezie.

By the weekend we had a hankering for some more restaurant food, and on Sunday night decided to head over to Venue, which I've mentioned before, and is holding its own as one of Lincoln's best restaurants, and where I'd been for lunch a couple of times, but not yet for dinner. So we ventured out on a chilly night, and found... an empty parking lot. Venue is closed on Sundays. Well, I'd been lobbying for a chance to try Vincenzo's, an Italian restaurant in the Haymarket, so we decided to check it out.

Vincenzo's was sort of a mild disappointment, but I'd like to eat there again a couple of times before giving up on it. (I desperately want it to be good, since Lincoln inexplicably lacks consistently great Italian food.) It was a Sunday, few tables were occupied, and it seemed like the "B" team was in the kitchen and the front of the house. Things were oddly paced, and neither of our main courses -- Maggie had the veal Franco, and I had a pork chop stuffed with sun-dried tomato, sausage, and cheese -- were especially well-executed. The veal was dry and overcooked, with little sauce, and the pork chop was overdone as well. (Our appetizer, escargot with butter, garlic, and cheese, was a bright spot, though.) I'd like to go back on a Friday or Saturday, with a live crowd and a little "heat" in the kitchen, and maybe try the veal again, or the special of the day.

By the middle of the next week we were back in the groove, with dinner reservations for Venue (finally!) and lunch from Grateful Bread, which makes the best soup in town. Their most popular -- and our favorite -- is Moroccan tomato, which is simply delicious, and consistently so. I couldn't begin to name all the ingredients, which are surely numerous, but cumin, coriander, and peanut are definitely among them. I got one of their rotating daily soups, Tibetan Curry Noodle, as a counterpoint, and it was indeed spicy, but is no match for the Moroccan.

Maggie's sister and her family joined us at Venue, and after some negotiation we ended up at a round 6-top in the center of the dining room, with a pleasant and patient server. We started with crab cakes, which were moist and flavorful, and I also ordered the most interesting-sounding appetizer on the menu as well, which was a seafood terrine with smoked salmon, crab, asparagus, and roasted red pepper. The terrine was tasty but seemed somewhat overproduced, and would have been better if they had dropped one or two of the constituents.

My main course was exceptional -- a plump duck breast smoked, and then finished in the oven with a brown sugar crust. It was juicy, smoky, and sweet, all at once, and was perfectly complemented by its accompaniment, gnocchi with wild mushroom cream sauce, truffles, and parmesan. I won't deny that this was an uncommonly rich plate, but perfect for a chilly winter night. We drank a Hans Fahden cabernet (Sonoma County, 2000) which was full-bodied and a good partner to the duck.

On the weekend Maggie made a nice baked chicken breast with lemon, garlic, and rosemary, with roasted asparagus topped with parmesan, and we managed to find another bottle of Taittinger to drink with it. The snows came mightily again, and I decided to re-schedule my flight back to California, giving us time for a few more favorites -- takeout from Tandoor, Jade Rivers, Cafe de Mai, and finally a trip into Omaha to visit the zoo and return with enough La Casa pizza to see us through the next set of snowstorms. With the pizza we drank a rustic sangiovese, La Carraia 2004, from Umbria.

On my last night in Lincoln we finished the last of the La Casa pizza, a tiny bit of banh xeo from Cafe de Mai, and I set off for California the next day, stopping in for my customary bowl of French onion soup and a cheese plate at Pour la France! in Denver Airport.

Turmeric

Part 2 of the Nebraska Roundup is on deck, but in the meantime I wanted to rave about a couple of local places, both somewhat newish, that caught my fancy this month.

The first is Turmeric, in Sunnyvale, which after three visits I feel completely comfortable in anointing as my favorite Indian restaurant in the Bay Area, and one of the best anywhere.

Turmeric has an interesting story. Its chef, Arvind Bhargava, has a pretty serious resume, including the executive chef position at a top restaurant in New Delhi and a degree from the CIA's Advanced Culinary Arts Program, followed by the top spot at the Bombay Club in Washington D.C., a favorite of President Clinton. According to local press, in addition to Clinton, Bhargava has cooked for Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Indira Gandhi, and King Hussein of Jordan.

The restaurant's previous incarnation was spelled Turmerik, and it enjoyed a nice, but somewhat quiet local reputation. Bhargava was the chef, but he did not own the place and the owners closed it in mid-2005. Barghava and his wife purchased the place, and gave it a major makeover and relaunched it about a year ago with a new menu and a (slightly) new name.

The difference is dramatic. The old Turmerik had very tasty food -- certainly above average for the southern Peninsula which has no lack of Indian restaurants -- but the new Turmeric completely transcends the genre of passable but workaday Indian food that can be found in any town in the Bay Area.

What lifts Turmeric's food out of the average is a combination of factors. There's Bhargava's training, experience, and personal commitment, as well as the kitchen's fearless innovation while retaining the authenticity of Indian regional cuisines. (Most items on the menu are denoted with their origin -- Kohe Awadh (lamb shanks) from Lucknow; Achar Ghosht (lamb with pickling spices and yogurt) from Hyderabad; Goat Curry from Punjab.)

On my recent trip with a group, we were able to sample a good selection of delicacies, starting with the Goan Shrimp Balchau, which were pan-seared and had a brilliant and spicy tomato and garlic sauce; the Trio of Fish Perry-Perry (salmon, tilapia, and catfish prepared three ways); and the Manchurian Cauliflower, where small nuggets of cauliflower were fried crispy and coated with a piquant red sauce of tomatoes, onion, and garlic. And those were just the appetizers.

Main dishes included a mild Punjabi goat curry with almonds and cardamom, Malabar fish curry with a sweet-spicy coconut and ginger base, murg ka mukul from Rajasthan (shredded chicken with yogurt and turmeric), and masala lamb chops, which were rib chops half-cooked in the tandoor and finished in a pan with a herb and spice masala. This was accompanied by palak paneer, aloo dum chutneywala (stuffed potatoes cooked in a sealed clay pot, served with mint chutney), and, to top things off, Chef Bhargava brought to the table a special dish, an entire head of cauliflower in a mild creamy sauce with nuts and spices, which was wonderful.

I was working a draft of this yesterday when dinner time rolled around and I was getting hungry. Well, specifically, I was hungry for Indian food, and having written all this about Turmeric, there was just not going to be any getting away with lesser substitutes. I got in the car, drove to Sunnyvale, found parking (sometimes no easy feat on Saturday night near Murphy Street), and headed to Turmeric. I knew they had a weekend dinner buffet, and while I couldn't imagine any buffet measuring up to their cooked-to-order cuisine, I thought might be an interesting contrast. Purely for research purposes, of course.

The buffet was in the upstairs dining room, which was nearly full. The buffet spread itself was not large, which was a good sign. It began with a bhel puri setup, which I skipped; a lovely salad display, which I tried, and instead of pakoras or samosas, there were ragda (stuffed potato patties), which were very nice. The meat dishes included achari chicken (more about that below), chili chicken, goat curry (more of a rogan josh style than the korma style on the regular menu), tandoori chicken (much more tender than anywhere else), and a chicken makhani, rich and creamy with nuts and fruits. On the vegetable side there was a good bhindi masala (okra with spices), paneer makhani, palak with aloo, navratan korma, and a very delicate Punjab kadi, which is usually translated as "vegetable dumplings" -- these were soft balls of greens and chickpea flour, lightly seasoned, in a mild savory yogurt sauce -- I thought it was the best of the vegetables, along with the bhindi. These were accompanied by breads, dal, desserts, and the usual condiments.

The achari chicken deserves its own dissertation: it's the best dish I've ever had at an Indian buffet. "Achar" means pickle, and these are chicken breast kebabs with a paste of yogurt, mustard oil (one of the most distinctive flavors in Indian pickles), and roasted spices (cumin, turmeric, onion seeds, fenugreek, and chili), cooked dry. The yogurt and spices form a toasted crust and the result is simply marvelous.

The buffet pretty much blew away any competition. Turmeric's buffet dishes are better than the cooked-to-order menu practically anywhere else, and the non-buffet menu simply stands on its own. I'm glad you don't have to be a head of state to eat Chef Bhargava's food. (And yes, he came upstairs to the buffet to stop by each table.)

Nebraska roundup, part 1

Since eating the Chanukah brisket with my dad last December, I think I've spent nearly as much time in Nebraska as I have here in California. While some Nebraskans flee the cold, I enjoy it since it reminds me of visits to my grandparents in Winnipeg when I was a kid.

When I arrived the week before Christmas, there had been no snow for the entire season. (Even the most dedicated snow-haters still hope for a white Christmas, for the sake of tradition, but nothing was on the horizon.) From the airport, Maggie and I headed right for The Oven, and had great dinner -- I had the Thimphu Chicken, one of the Bhutanese specialties that you can't get anywhere else I know in the U.S., except at the two other Bhutanese-Indian places in Lincoln and Omaha).

A couple of days later we brought home take-out from Paul's BBQ, from their new-ish location on Pioneers Blvd. near 48th St. The food is better since the move, and it's possible to eat there now, in a clean, modern, though somewhat spartan dining room. The pork ribs were delicious; the pulled pork had lots of flavor but was somewhat dry. On the weekend we were lucky enough to get some pizza from La Casa Pizzaria in Omaha, still my favorite of the southern Italian style, with a flaky, almost pastry-like thin crust and plenty of Romano cheese and fresh tomatoes. We usually have it with La Carraia sangiovese, a rustic-style wine from Umbria, which stands up well to pizza or any hearty red-sauce Italian food.

I'm very picky about Mexican food, and have never cared much for the usual run of enchiladas, flautas, and tostadas (or anything made up by Taco Bell) but a new place opened recently with the same ownership as El Toro. This is Las Margaritas, near 27th St., and Yankee Hill Rd. The most intriguing item on the menu was something called La Parrillada del Mar, and it turned out to be a huge plate of seafood -- shrimp, crab, mussels, clams, octopus, squid, and fish, all sauteed with broccoli and cauliflower, garnished with avocados, lettuce, limes, and oranges, and served up with tortillas and a bowl of melted butter. Wow. Not something I'd want to eat every day, but worth the trip over there.

After the family Christmas dinners, we headed out to Omaha for dinner at M's Pub. After escargot with garlic, shallots, butter, and melted cheese (and a glass of a California sparkling wine, the 2003 brut from Louis Roederer Estate in Anderson Valley), I had a grilled rack of lamb marinated in spearmint and orange, with blue cheese scalloped potatoes and grilled asparagus and zucchini. With the main courses we drank R.H. Phillips "Toasted Head" 2004 pinot noir.

It turned somewhat grey and rainy the week between Christmas and New Year's, which was a good time to stay home and cook. Maggie made Japanese Golden Curry, with beef, carrots, potatoes, and onions, which was wonderfully hearty over rice.

Later in the week we returned to The Parthenon, which I've mentioned before and where we've had many very tasty meals. The last couple of dinners, though, have been somewhat less than perfect, but I had a deep jones for some Greek food, and we headed back. We shared a roasted garlic spread as an appetizer, and I had a Greek salad and the gyros plate, with the special vegetable side dish of cauliflower cooked with onions, feta, and cinnamon. It's hard to tell what's up at the Parthenon -- if anything it seems like maybe it was a victim of its own success: big crowds and interesting food led to higher expectations, and at one point it seemed like the old one-liner, "it's so crowded nobody goes there anymore". There's certainly no problem with the food -- the chef's specials are winners, and his skill and technique with vegetables (like my cauliflower, and an earlier mushroom dish seasoned with herbs and cloves) and soups (like a wonderful lobster bisque) is exceptional. But the whole dining experience is sometimes just a little off, mostly related to service that is sometimes overbearing and sometimes just oddly paced or sloppy, and some odd experiments (like the Cinco de Mayo Mexican-themed dinner) which didn't seem to work. It's a lovely place with a great chef and I hope it finds its way back to excellence.

On the day before New Year's Eve, I finally got a chance to cook a turducken. My obsession with them had only increased since my dad and I had some for Thanksgiving dinner, and I was waiting until I had an audience -- hopefully one with hearty appetites -- to roast a whole one, which weighs in at 15 lbs. I ordered the one with creole sausage and cornbread stuffing from CajunGrocer.com, and it arrived early in the week, frozen, via, FedEx. (The dry ice it was packed in occasioned a brief but festive video.) It took several days to thaw out completely, and I followed the instructions on the label: 4.5 hours at 325F, with the last hour uncovered. One thing that I'd been warned about, and was an important point, was that even though a raw turducken looks like a turkey, it has been fully boned (except for the wings and drumsticks), and therefore has essentually no structural integrity -- you can't lift or move it like a bird that has a skeleton; it's pretty much a giant floppy sausage with a bunch of stuff in it that does not really want to stick together.

But once we got it into the pan, it roasted up nicely, and after 4.5 hours, the meat thermometer variously read 160, 162, 165, or 168, depending on where it happened to land. I figured it would come up a bit while it rested, so it was definitely done. We gave it about 15 minutes in the pan, and a little more on the carving board.

Carving was by no means trivial. Most sources recomended halving the turducken longitudinally and then cutting individual slices crosswise. Since, with 6 adults and 2 children, unlikely to finish even half, that looked like the way to go. Nevertheless, it still put up a good fight, like a game fish, mostly related to the different way each component (turkey, duck, chicken, cajun sausage, and cornbread stuffing) reacted to the knife. One thing I hadn't realized is that the Cajun sausage was not slices or chunks of cooked sausage mixed in the stuffing, but was a liberal amount of coarsely-ground raw sausage filling in the gaps between the birds. When cooked, it firmed up to the consistency of meat loaf. Interesting, and tasty (and spicy!) but it was hard to cut an even slice along with the bird meats. And the stuffing was soft and of a very fine consistency -- imagine light orange mashed potatoes, and was spicy as well.

Truthfully, the turducken got mixed reviews. It was hard to see what I was doing while carving and what I was doling out from the serving platter, and thus some people got mostly turkey and some got almost entirely the meat loaf-like sausage and stuffing. And the Cajun spicing might have overwhelmed the roast somewhat. I liked it, but when i went for seconds I carefully picked among the slices for a "good" one.

Another school of thought holds that the thing to do is to roast the turducken the day before you plan to serve it, refrigerate it overnight, slice while cold, and then heat the slices in the oven in gravy. This permits you to pick and choose among the slices, and equalize portions of the components, and otherwise keep tighter control over the whole affair. I suspect that's what CreoLa did at Thanksgiving, and it's what I'll do next time. As it was, I sliced the other half cold and reheated it for a dinner the next week, and it was much more manageable.

Just as we had almost given up hope for any snow in December, it started coming down with great gusto in the early morning of December 31st, with about 8" total, and throwing plans for our New Year's Eve dinner into question -- the streets and driveways in the neighborhood had not been cleared by mid-afternoon, so Maggie and I shoveled the driveway by hand, and we headed back to The Oven for a festive dinner. We started with the papadum shrimp and a keema paratha, and for the main course I returned to my old favorite, the lamb shank vindaloo. We got home in plenty of time to toast the New Year with Taittinger champagne to the sound of snowplows and Bobcats digging out the rest of the neighborhood.

And two days later I was back in sunny California.

The Berch family brisket

It is said that all Jewish holidays reduce to the simple formula, "They tried to kill us -- we won -- let's eat!" (original source unknown; often attributed to comedian Alan King). We Berches stuck to the formula, and every Jewish holiday of note was accompanied by a festive meal, the centerpiece of which was almost always a pot-roasted brisket.

When I was a kid my favorite holiday was naturally Chanukah, since we celebrated it pretty much as a Christmas substitute, with seasonal decorations, music, eight nights of presents (giving us Jewish kids a sense of winter-holiday superiority), and, on the first night, the brisket dinner.

My mother cooked the traditional brisket, and after she died, my father carried on, thus he's done it for the last 20 years, with the two of us (and an occasional guest) sharing Chanukah dinner. This year I thought it might be fun to help my dad cook the brisket. I'd been there to lift the pot in and out of the oven, of course, and turn the meat, but never paid much attention to the recipe, nor had I ever seen it written down. So this time I was determined to take notes, ask questions, and make sure I could reproduce the dish and share it with the readers of Berch on Food.

What surprised me is how simple it was. Naturally, since this is home-style cooking derived from Eastern European shtetl traditions, I didn't expect something requiring a gourmet kitchen, exotic ingredients, or exacting technique. But really, it's amazingly tasty given the simplicity of the preparation.

There's only one tricky bit in all this, and that's finding a decent brisket. What you need is a full-cut brisket, that is, not the so-called "flat cut" that is usually the only brisket available in most supermarket meat departments, even those with actual butchers. The brisket is made up of two major muscles which run at an angle to each other; the bottom one is relatively flat, and very lean, and produces the flat cut. The upper muscle, often called the "cap", is somewhat dome-shaped. You want both together: the reason is that the bottom muscle does not have enough fat to produce the delicious, tender, mouth feel of the dish and the rich jus that it produces. (Some years ago, when my mother was on a severely fat-restricted diet, we tried it with the flat cut, and it was just not the same.)

The Berch recipe calls for a 10-lb. brisket, plus or minus. You can special-order it from a decent butcher, or, quite often find it around Passover and Chanukah in areas with a significant Jewish population. Sometimes the warehouse-style stores like Costco and Sam's Club carry it. My dad found this one at Smart & Final. Or, you might just get lucky; call around. (Make sure what you ask for is a full-cut brisket with the cap, not a "whole brisket", which is a much larger cut of meat not really suited for the home kitchen, and explain what you're planning. And, needless to say, a corned beef or otherwise pre-seasoned or marinated brisket can't be used for this.)

Anyway, here's the scoop:

Full-cut beef brisket, approx. 10 lbs.
2 medium onions
paprika (just the regular stuff, nothing artisanal or extra-spicy)
salt
pepper

1. Preheat oven to 450F. Chop onions.
2. Coat both sides of brisket liberally with paprika, salt, and pepper.
3. Prepare roasting pan -- we use an enamel-coated iron Descoware from France which is from the 1950s or '60s -- with nonstick spray or some olive oil.
4. Place brisket fat side up in pan and cover with chopped onions.
5. Roast in oven for 30 minutes at 450. This will brown the onions.
6. Turn oven down to 350F.
7. Move onions from top of brisket into the pan, and immediately add hot water, up to a level near the top of the meat.
8. Continue to roast at 350 for a further 2 to 2.5 hours, adding more water periodically, turning meat twice. It's done when it is tender to a fork.
9. Remove brisket from pan and let rest for 10 minutes. Retain liquids from pan and serve as a light jus gravy; do not thicken.

For holiday meals, my dad makes this a couple of hours in advance, lets the meat rest much longer, slices it, and re-warms it in the gravy. I'm not sure this adds anything, but it is convenient to have it ready in advance if you're cooking other dishes. For Chanukah this is served, of course, with latkes (potato, sweet potato, or matzoh meal), and for other holidays, with kasha, mashed potatoes, kugel, or even egg noodles. Leftovers are pretty versatile and can easily be reheated in the gravy, and eventually make great sandwiches. This can even be cooked and frozen without too much loss of flavor or texture. Family traditions aside, this is my favorite non-smoked brisket or pot roast. I'm going to see if I can get it to work with short ribs or other cuts, too.

Turducken

It all started when my dad decided that he really didn't want to cook Thanksgiving dinner this year, after all. He's 88, and while he's in good health and very active, there's some sort of crossover point where putting together a full-course holiday meal for two people is more effort than it's worth. And he didn't want me to have to cook, so we decided to go out.

But where? Neither of us had any experience with Thanksgiving at a restaurant. The idea seemed a bit odd; my parents (and my father, after my mother died in 1985) held the traditional dinner every year, and I attended every year, with the sole exception of one year where I was on a business trip in England and it would have been difficult to get back. That year, on the appointed Thursday, having seen a notice in a newspaper, I joined a large group of American expats in a rented hall and we all pretended we were home and filled up on turkey, stuffing, and the usuals. It was actually quite nice; I shared a table with a bunch of people including a retired couple from Kansas, and we talked about football and television for a couple of hours. (It was not unlike being on a cruise ship, as I learned many year later.)

Just at the time we'd decided to go to a restaurant this year, I received an email from OpenTable.com, which I'm a member of, listing a pretty wide selection of restaurants, mostly the top tier, who were having special Thanksgiving dinners. Had we been in San Francisco proper, there were a number of very attractive propositions. But my dad lives on the Peninsula, and didn't want to go into town, so we looked at a bunch of places in the general vicinity of Burlingame, San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, and Palo Alto. A couple of early favorites, listed in the OpenTable guide, were Kincaid's in Burlingame and Left Bank in San Mateo, both of which I've had some nice meals at. 231 Ellsworth in San Mateo was putting on a special dinner, but it looked a little more elaborate than my dad might like.

I solicited advice from friends, online and offline, including The Well and Chowhound, and got a mixed handful of recommendations -- and please consider this a thank-you, if I didn't thank you personally -- and I was ready to close the deal, probably with Kincaid's, or one of the hotel buffets near the airport, when I decided to look over the OpenTable list one last time. I happened to notice CreoLa in San Carlos, where I've eaten well in the past, and thought, "Hmmm, New Orleans-style Thanksgiving. That might be a hoot." And then I read the listing, which finished with the words, "Will be serving tur-duc-hen."

Well, that was it right there. The Berch households have had many a discussion of turduckens (the more common spelling) ever since it became an object of cultural wonderment, popularized by Coach John Madden on national television a few years back, during a football half-time. It's become sort of a minor culinary holy grail for me, and since it's unlikely that I'd cook a whole one (which typically range from 15 to 20 lbs., and feel 20-25 people), and I don't expect to be invited to dinner at John Madden's house (or bus) very soon, this looked like the real deal. I called CreoLa and confirmed the details. We made a 4 PM reservation, and I went to read up on turduckens.

The basic premise is this: partially de-bone a turkey, in order to expand the main cavity; stuff it with a partially-deboned duck, filling in the gaps with stuffing of your choice, and then stuff the duck with a de-boned chicken, again filling in the gaps with stuffing. Tie the whole thing up and roast it in the oven. When it's done, carve it in a manner such that every slice has a portion of each bird, as well as the interstitial stuffing.

Cursory research, which began with Wikipedia, confirmed pretty much what I had thought: nobody really knows who first made a turducken, although it it is most probably from Louisiana or east Texas, it's considered a Cajun specialty, and it's not a completely new invention; the Europeans knew of it in the 19th century, and it's likely that the concept, if not the execution, goes back to the Middle Ages. The Wikipedia article, as often happens, then makes reference (sadly without sources) to a certain flight of fancy, "attributed to a royal feast in France", of a 17-bird roast, the "bustergophechideckneaealckideverwingailusharkolanine - a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan and a passerine." (As a Wikipedia editor, I feel honor-bound to chase that one down and confirm or deny.) On more solid ground, though, is a 10-bird roast, the "turgoduckmaguikenantidgeonck", created by English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in December 2005 and documented in an article in the Daily Mail, which also alludes to the 17-bird roast.

Ahem. Well, such superlatives aside, Thanksgiving rolled around and it was time to head to CreoLa. It was a spectacular day, cool, crisp, and with nearly unlimited visibility, and I picked up my dad and we made our way to San Carlos. When we arrived just before 4, there were only two or three parties seated in the dining room, giving us a nice choice of tables. The staff was circulating with genteel but nervous smiles, perhaps anticipating a Big Night-like atmosphere later. We sat down by the window, which had a pleasant view. As soon as the waiter introduced himself, my dad couldn't help asking, "Now, you do have turducken tonight, right?" The waiter graciously assured us that they did, but added that it was good that we came early, since they expected it to be the most popular choice.

The holiday was four courses, prix fixe depending on the choice of a main course -- I hardly looked, but I think there was filet mignon, cajun-style shimp, catfish, and a vegetarian choice -- and the first courses looked delightful. My dad started with the crabcake, which he enjoyed, and I had the fried bacon-wrapped oysters, which were delicious and came with a Cajun remoulade. (I could have eaten a dozen or more of those, really, but that would have put the kibosh on the turducken.) Next came an array of soups and salads, and my dad had the shrimp-lobster-crab bisque, which he described as rich and delicious, while I had the seafood gumbo, which was deep, complex, and spicy, with the fundamental roux, filé, and okra flavors in evidence.

After a pause, and a refill of wine (we Berches almost always have pinot noir with Thanksgiving turkey -- this time a Schug 2005 Carneros, which was a little young but spirited), it was time for the main event.

The turducken appeared on a plate with cornbread stuffing, a nicely-spiced cherry-cranberry relish, green beans, and mashed potatoes. The turducken itself was a single thick slice, covered with a tasty gravy of reduced pan drippings, and so far as I could tell, appeared to be from a turducken roll rather than a whole bird, though I wouldn't swear to that. (Both appear to be available from the larger turducken suppliers.)

Most importantly, it was moist and delicious, although the gravy made it a little hard to tell, visually, exactly what bird was what. My dad took a couple of bites and asked, "Does yours have bacon in it?" I poked around a little, found what I though was a slice, but upon closer examination it turned out to be crispy, smoky duck skin. Hooray! (Some of the best duck I've eaten has had bacon-like skin.) I took a bite of the duck, which was very moist and tender, and then found the chicken. And there, too, right in the middle of things, was the cornbread and sausage stuffing. All in all, a success. My only disappointment was that between the gravy and the now somewhat dim restaurant, it was hard to see exactly what I was eating, and it seems to me that visual appeal is part of the turducken tour de force. (I hadn't thought to ask the waiter for "gravy on the side".)

It was a filling portion, but both my dad and I managed to finish, and leave at least symbolic room for dessert. He opted for the Cajun pecan pie, which appeareds to be a traditional pecan pie with a layer of cheesecake above the filling; I went for what the menu called a pumpkin chipotle flan, which turned out to be a relatively normal slice of pumpkin pie seasoned with a small amount of hot peppers, with some cayenne power on the side as a garnish.

My dad loved it, and we were grateful not to have a whole kitchen of pots and pans and plates to clean. Next year...who knows? In the meantime, I want to get my hands on a real turducken and cook it up, with copious photography and a dining room-ful of diners. Maybe I'll order one up and have it shipped to Nebraska, and convince Maggie's family to let me experiment on them sometime in the vicinity of Christmas/New Year's. There are several purveyors of air-shipped turduckens, with reviewers tending to favor Hebert's Specialty Meats and Tony Chachere's Turkducken King, along with CajunGrocer. They all ship their turduckens frozen, in dry ice, via FedEx or UPS. Needless to say, I'm jazzed and can't wait to give it a try.

Berch on Cruises, part 3: helicopters and glaciers

Wednesday, August 9, dawned cool and grey like much of the week preceding. I was up early, out on the balcony, trying to divine whether the cloud deck and visibility were going to be sufficient for helicopter flying: we'd booked the 1:45 PM Pilot's Choice Ice Age Odyssey, which is the tour company's name for a 2-hour tour involving two landings, a chance to troop around a glacier in ice boots, and some nearby sightseeing from the air. Maggie and I had been looking forward to it for weeks.

The weather did not look that promising, and I was glad we hadn't booked our flight for the previous day in Juneau, since most of those tours were canceled. I paced nervously, tried to get a weather report on the room TV. Around 10 AM, I looked out and saw helicopters heading out in pairs from the nearby airport. "They're flying!", I cried, and we headed to brunch, then joined the rest of the party on a walk downtown.

Skagway was a little more interesting than Ketchikan or Juneau, I thought, mostly due to history: it was the port of entry for gold-rush miners heading to the Klondike gold fields in the Yukon, over the perilous White Pass. Later, a railroad was built, the White Pass & Yukon Route, and it remains as a narrow gauge tourist attraction, with its yard and tracks taking up much of the Skagway waterfront.

The town itself is a somewhat more fully realized tourist village, laid out in about 5 by 10 blocks of the usual shops and restaurants, with an 1890s motif. It was fun to see a village of wooden Victorian houses, with our ultramodern ship looming in the background, as if it were a UFO mother ship hovering over a contemporary city. We wandered a bit, and headed back to the ship in order to pace nervously some more, waiting for the tour.

We were shuttled over to Temsco Helicopters' base adjacent to the airport, watched a safety briefing, and put on bright orange safety vests and ice overboots. The flights were running on time, which meant a quick walk over to our craft, which was a Euroocopter AS350 Ecureuil ("Squirrel") piloted by a lanky Californian named Jesse. My first helicopter ride!

Weight dynamics put me in the left rear window seat (Maggie & I switched for the ride home). The AS350 carries a pilot and 6 passengers – 2 in the front and 4 in the back. A quick takeoff and low fly-by of the Diamond Princess, and we were on our way south down the Taiya Inlet, then turned left on one of the smaller arms. The view was amazing -- water, then mud flats, then, in the distance, the face of the terminus of the Meade Glacier. We flew lower, and slower, and could see the deep blue, crenellated face of the glacier, and its dirty top. Lower, and slower still -- it reminded me of the TV pictures from the landing of Apollo 11 -- and finally we came to rest on a flat spot on the surface of the glacier.

We were cautioned about crevasses, but were otherwise free to roam around. Our sister ship -- the helicopters always travel in pairs for safety -- landed nearby, and we all just got out and explored. The similarity to the moon landing seemed very apt. Maggie and I shot a zillion photos, and I made some short videos. The minutes flew by like seconds. If the whole trip had been nothing but this tour, it would have been worth it. We saw moulins (meltwater streams), deep crevasses (which our pilot demonstrated by dropping a rock in one -- it took more than 10 seconds before there was a splash), tiny lifeforms, and the deep blue crystalline color of the ice.

And then it was time to go. Since this was the "premium" helicopter tour, we were treated to a second landing, this one on a nearby mountaintop, a few thousand feet above the glacier. The glacier looked like a huge frozen slot-racing track, with multiple medial moraine lines making parallel S-curves as the glacier made its way down the mountain valley. And the mountaintop itself was an intricate ecosystem in miniature: tiny blueberry plants crept among the mossy ground between flat rocks that hosted hundred-year-old lichens. I ate a blueberry no bigger than a BB, and it gave a tiny burst of sweetness. Maggie climbed up the mountain and admired the glacier from above. I just marveled at being on a mountaintop in the wilderness, with no human settlement or activity visible -- not even a tiny plume of smoke -- in any direction, yet we had ascended seemingly effortlessly, as if plucked from the ground by a giant and set down on a peak. (That was meant metaphorically; I was quite appreciative of the skill and calm professionalism of our pilot, and the quality of our helicopter and its instruments, believe me.)

Too soon, we needed to head back, down from the mountain, retracing our flight path, back up the Taiya Inlet, and back to Skagway which, from a distance, appears to be a collection of cruise ships with a few tiny buildings nearby. Back at the heliport, we exchanged stories while we put away our vests and boots and got back on the bus to the dock.

Dinner that night was back at the Vivaldi, and it was Alaskan seafood night, which was just the right note. I had crab cakes, salmon lox with toast points and capers, and Alaskan rockfish chowder, followed by local, fresh king crab legs, the best I've ever had -- and for the only time on the cruise, I called for seconds on the main course. We had a crisp Kenwood sauvignon blanc, and I skipped dessert, but had the cheese course.

My stress level went down considerably after the helicopter tour. I confess I'd been worrying about it since we reserved space well before the cruise -- not about the flight itself, of course, but just hoping everything would come off OK, especially the weather. I don't presume to know what other people like to do, or what sort of things pique their curiosity and enthusiasm, but I'm pretty confident in saying that if you make it to that part of the world, which for most people means a cruise ship, do the helicopter glacier landing. You'll like it. It's more expensive than the land tours, but it's worth it. Really. It was the highlight of the whole trip.

Since Skagway was the last port of call, it was time to relax and enjoy the scenery for the remaining 2.5 days of the cruise. The next morning we entered Glacier Bay National Park, and we'd signed up for a champagne breakfast on our balcony. Not just champagne -- it's a lovely breakfast with lox, bagels, cream cheese, crab quiche, berries in a stuffed canteloupe, and assorted breads and pastries. We couldn't finish it. Luckily Maggie's nieces came by later to look at the view, and helped out with the fruit and pastries.

Then it was time to see the sights. We had Glacier Bay almost to ourselves; the National Park Service limits access to two cruise ships and a few smaller vessels per day. We were able to come up close to the face of the Margerie Glacier, and watched for hours -- the captain rotated the ship in place so that both sides got a good view -- as bits of the glacier cracked and fell into the water. There were no large "calving" events but there were some good deep cracking sounds. Naturally, we managed to get some lunch in as well -- a nice buffet of mostly local produce, with cold baked salmon, caribou sausage, venison stew, halibut terrine, and roast crackling pork. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to catch up on my exercise, and did laps of the ship (which you can do via decks 7 and 8) along with a little group of fellow walkers.

Dinner was the second of the two formal nights. If you ask me, a cruise doesn't really need more than one, but we made the effort in any case. Maggie's dad had booked a table at Sabatini's, one of the ship's two specialty restaurants. Perhaps by that point we were a little sated by cruise ship food, or they were having an off night, but Sabatini's was really not that great. They serve sort of an Italian seafood tasting menu, although it's not really presented like that, and the waiters more or less told us what to order and whisked the menus away. The food was tasty, particularly the first courses, but it was served in a somewhat overbearing and speedy manner, without much attention to diners' preferences, to the degree that it seemed more like a buffet than what was nominally the ship's most elegant dining room. The first courses were prosciutto with melon, beef bresaola, assorted grilled vegetables, a tiny portion of sevruga caviar with a potato pancake, salmon roe with a crab cake, marinated shrimp with artichoke, marinated green-lip mussels, and white anchovies. This was followed by a cioppino, gnocchi alfredo, spaghetti with oil, garlic, and assorted seafood, canneloni with beef, and finally lobster tails. (The lobster was one of the only things that wasn't good at all; the tails were tiny ones, the type often seen at Asian buffets, and were badly overcooked.)

Now, all that sounds like a lot of food, and it was, but there was no way to easily have more of the things you liked and less of the things you didn't like. Some things were very well executed (like the seafood spaghetti and the marinated shrimp with artichoke), while others were simply pedestrian (like the canneloni and the prosciutto with melon) or downright poor (like the aforementioned lobster). So, I wouldn't necessarily write it off, but at $20 extra per head, it really didn't meet my expectations. And also, oddly, they made a big fuss about the need for reservations and how hard it is to get a table, especially on formal night, but Sabatini's was half-empty all the time we were there. Go figure. Maybe it works better for a party of two.

Our last day aboard was a Friday, and it was spent touring College Fjord, which is an arm of Prince William Sound, and the routine and the scenery was much like Glacier Bay. The featured vista was of Harvard Glacier, and we were able to get as close as we were to the Margerie Glacier. The view was slightly different, as Harvard Glacier takes a steeper and more twisted path down its mountain.

No one really felt like braving the main dining rooms, so we settled for the buffet for lunch, which provided some nice filling food for the chilly weather, including veal scallopini, corned beef brisket (the only corned beef I really enjoy), and some beef short ribs in a tangy sauce. Outside the buffet, on the Lido deck's seating area, there was a display of some very cleverly carved melons and some rich baked desserts. I didn't try either, but it was a good photo op.

My final meal aboard was dinner. I realized that buffet lunch and dinner would break my self-imposed one buffet per day maximum that I adopted a few years ago in Las Vegas (not even counting breakfast!), but everyone else bailed on dinner and I found myself a bit peckish late in the dinner hour. So I made my way down to the buffet for the last time, and had a (relatively) light dinner of salad, spinach and cheese frittata, chicken curry, and scallops with eggplant and zucchini.

The logistics of our tour transfer meant that luggage had to be put out again in the evening, and we had a very early morning ahead of us -- 7:35 AM disembarcation -- and we went to bed just as we were pulling into Whittier with four sharp blasts of the ship's horn (one of the only times I'd heard it since we left Vancouver) on a foggy, foggy night on Prince William Sound. The next morning we assembled according to our disembarcation color (brown) and group (3), and were led off the ship by an efficient parade of crew members. The disembarcation instructions ran to three pages, with a couple of dozen different groups sorted by their further plans, whether a transfer to Anchorage airport, a bus ride to a hotel, or, as in our case, a trip to Denali on the Midnight Sun Express.

We were quickly escorted onto the Princess chartered train (with its own sleek branded cars) on the Alaska Railroad. We found our seats upstairs (two tables of four people) and took a last look back at the Diamond Princess before we left the station at Whittier.

And then it was time for breakfast.

Berch on Cruises, part 2: formal night, ports of call, and the thermal sanctuary

Our first full day on the ship was uneventful, though it began with somewhat of a mistake: we decided to try the dining-room breakfast, on the grounds that since the dining-room food was so much better than the buffet, that must surely extend to breakfast. Now, neither of us really likes facing the world before coffee, but we decided to brave the crowds -- mostly at my insistence since room service did not offer my daily mainstay of hot oatmeal -- and headed to the International Dining Room, which is where sit-down menu breakfast and lunch are served. First of all, we were matched with two other couples (eek) and plopped down at a 6-top. Next was the 8:00 AM cheery perkiness of one of our tablemates, whom we dubbed "Chatty Cathy". The food (I had oatmeal and a croissant) was fine, but we swore off dining-room breakfast for the duration. I've wondered where the evil management types who schedule (and thrive on) so-called "breakfast meetings" go on vacation; now I know.

The rest of the day was pretty much spent exploring the ship. Even now, after a week's cruise and a bunch of notes and photos, I'm pretty sure there was plenty I never got to. There's a fully-equipped gym, a jogging track, more swimming pools than I can remember, a walkable promenade all the way around Deck 7 (and a little bit of Deck 8), similar walks on the top two decks, plus a bar on every corner. (Each has a thematic decor, and a different ambience; the Skywalker Lounge is all mirrored-disco lights and flash; the Wheelhouse resembles an old-fashioned men's club with leather wing-back chairs; the Explorer's Lounge is cozy and has a good view.) And since we were out of port, the casino had started up. It was actually an attractive (though smoky) room: I managed not to risk a single cent (there were penny slots!) but wandered through a few times. It had a pleasant African motif.

That night was Formal Night, a hoary old tradition dating back to the age of ocean liners and widely grumbled about among passengers, who nevertheless manage to turn out in snappy dress twice per voyage. I had whimsically brought my tuxedo along, damned if I was going to be outdone, and things turned out reasonably well. We sat at the Savoy Lounge waiting for our dinner reservation, which afforded a good view of the Captain's Reception in the adjacent Grand Atrium.

Dinner was at the Pacific Moon Dining Room, and their nightly special -- which I ordered -- was stir-fried shrimp and scallops with vegetables and Hong Kong noodles. What's more, it gave the impression that whomever cooked it had actually cooked Chinese food before and understood the seasonings and timing of the dish. Replicating that for a large and unpredictable quantity of diners while keeping the quality high was very impressive. With the stir-fry I had first courses of smoked duck breast with greens, crab quiche, and a nice bowl of lobster bisque. I don't usually have dessert, but opted for the chocolate hazelnut souffl�, which was delicious.

The next day was our first port of call, Ketchikan. The weather had closed in quite a bit, turning overnight from a fog into a drizzle, with poor visibility. Nonetheless, the floatplanes were flying, and we were awakened very early, our ship in port, by swarms of amazingly noisy aircraft taking off and landing right next to the ship. We had a good view of the action from the balcony. (One misconception I had was that cruise ships always docked on the, well, port side -- not the case here.)

It was only a short stop in Ketchikan -- we were scheduled to sail at 2 PM -- but I really wanted to go into town, although "town" didn't really look like much. We'd decided not to book any tours since it was such a short stop. But, down the gangplank we went, and I landed with both feet at the end on the wharf, having set foot in my 50th state. Hurrah! (Plus the District of Columbia, of course, but haven't made it to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, or any minor possessions of the United States.)

Ketchikan itself, like the other two towns we called at, seemed to have several faces. First is the tourist village on the waterfront, which exists entirely to service cruise ships, and contains an amazing range of similarly-themed gift and curio shops selling a combination of Native crafts and mass-produced merchandise from China. (It was not always apparent which was which.) Plus art, jewelry, accessories, various tours and excursions, and the usual number of bars and eateries. We pretty much skipped all of them, but headed instead to the Tongass Trading Post, an amazing three-story retail emporium that almost literally seemed to stock everything, from casual clothing to fancy; everything needed for an expedition into back country, from pre-packed food containers to rifles and ammunition; tents, boats, outerwear; maps, GPS receivers, radios, and a good selection of books. I bought a raincoat.

The second face is behind the tourist village, and was the remnant of a town struggling with a decaying housing stock, some poverty (much of it Native), and pieces of the non-tourist economy. We saw a number of boarded-up houses, a free clinic, a halfway house, a rescue mission, and I wondered about the stories of the lives of some of the people I saw. A third face, much more successful, was Ketchikan as a modern freight and transportation hub: the container port, the airport (with an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 freighter taking off), and a large number of water craft, from water taxis to bulk carriers.

Back on the ship, we found the perfect antidote to the southeastern Alaska climate, in the form of the Thermal Sanctuary in the ship's Lotus Spa. The Spa, which had a modern Japanese motif, was one of the nicest areas on the entire ship. It offered the customary set of massage and skin therapies, mud baths, aromatherapy, and the like, at suitably uptown prices, but also offered an unlimited Thermal Sanctuary pass, for only $109 per couple, for the whole voyage. This entitled you to use of the saunas, steam room, theraputic vapor room, and something I hadn't come across before, a set of reclining lounge beds surfaced with matte-finished ceramic tile and heated. Lying on them for 20 minutes, wrapped in your terrycloth spa robe, was heavenly. I liked the vapor room best, which was a light steam room with a eucalyptus aroma essence. The main steam room was traditional style and a good solid sweat. There were also traditional wood saunas in the mens' and womens' changing rooms, and a "gentle sauna" in the main area that we didn't spend a lot of time in since it was not very hot. The spa was one of the highlights of the cruise.

Dinner was at the Savoy Dining Room, with just Maggie and me at a table for 2, which was a nice change, although we loved the family dinners. That night was, if I remember correctly, French night, and we started with escargot bourguignon, in the traditional presentation, onion soup gratinée, and I had the duck á l'orange with potatoes and red cabbage. The escargot and soup were excellent; the duck was a little on the bony side, with an overly sweet orange sauce, not awful but not the best dinner main course of the voyage.

The next day, however, it was back to rain and fog. We arrived early in the morning in Juneau, Alaska's capital, which seemed quite a bit like Ketchikan, but, alas, even wetter. The two touring highlights of Juneau are the nearby Mendenhall Glacier, accessible by road (about a 20-minute drive), and a tramway to the top of Mt. Roberts, which is adjacent to the cruise ship docks. We decided early on to skip the Mendenhall Glacier on the grounds that we were going to see a whole lot of glaciers in the next few days, hopefully even walking on one, and in light of the weather and diminished visibility, the tour to the Visitor Center might not be worth the hassle. (This turned out to be the rigtht choice.)

Mt. Roberts Tramway, on the other hand, was right next door, and when the rain let up a little we headed over there. It's a dramatic ascent up the mountain -- punctuated, in our case, by a frightening instant when the operator accidently leaned on the stop button, jerking our car to a halt and momentarily leaving us suspended in mid-air, slowly swinging in the wind -- but that passed quickly and the view from the top was magnificent, even in the rain. I managed some quick photos of Juneau and of our ship docked below, and then we hiked a bit on a wet but pleasant trail, visited the wildlife center, and headed back down.

Back on the ship, dinner that night was a triumph: at the Santa Fe Dining Room, the last of the four main dining rooms, Maggie and I shared a table with her parents, and I had a simple but very satisfying meal, beginning with a crab quiche and chilled beef consomm� with marsala, and a main course of a roast veal chop with a reduction sauce, with sauteed asparagus. The veal rib chop was tender, flavorful, and possibly the best I've had of the genre. It went well with a 2004 Sonoma pinot noir from La Crema.

It was time for a good night's sleep, since we had big plans for the next day in Skagway.

Berch on Cruises, part 1: the departure

I just returned from a week-long cruise to Alaska (plus an added land tour) with my sweetie Maggie and her family, on Princess Cruises. It was my first time on a cruise ship (hers too), and it was a grand time, notwithstanding the vagaries and exigencies of packaged group travel. The glaciers and fjords of Alaska rate pretty high on my lifetime list of great sights. What's more, the food was good.

The following is a detailed recounting and review of our trip, not limited to the food and drink, but it should come as no surprise that they're pretty central to the cruise ship experience.

The journey began with a flight to Vancouver on Alaska Airlines. Unlike Maggie and family, who had to leave their house at 4 AM to catch a Northwest flight from Omaha at 7:30, I had a very reasonable nonstop from San Francisco. I got the exit row, an empty seat next to me, and the plane was Alaska's well-known "Salmon-Thirty-Salmon" logojet, advertising wild Alaskan seafood.

We all met up at the Four Seasons Vancouver, which was a good choice for cruise passengers (which it was full of), since it's close to the cruise terminal at Canada Place, and, well... it's a Four Seasons. Since we were too tired to explore, and had a big day coming up, Maggie and I ate dinner at Chartwell's, the hotel's main dining room. It had aspirations, but I would not call it a destination restaurant. My ambitious first course of bacon-wrapped figs stuffed with foie gras was not entirely successful: the delicate interplay of the fig and the foie gras was overpowered by the smokiness of the bacon. The steak and side dish of chanterelles and asparagus were fine, though, as was a 2002 British Columbia cabernet from Sumac Ridge.

We reported to a meeting room the next morning to check in for the cruise. It's a good idea to come a day ahead for a cruise, since you don't have to worry about a delayed flight, you're not rushed (as much), and if you check in at the hotel, your luggage is whisked away and you can board, theoretically, at your leisure. The logistics of getting the people and bags onto a bus to the pier were somewhat confused and disorganized; this is not Princess's strongest suit. But they got us there in plenty of time, and as promised, we walked right on board.

So there was our ship: the Diamond Princess, the largest cruise ship in the Pacific, capable of carrying about 3,000 passengers and a crew of 1,000. We were in a maze of corridors in the cruise terminal, so didn't really get any impression of the ship, except that it was huge. The public spaces were grand and well-appointed, in natural woods, granite, brass, and etched glass. Nothing looked cheap or makeshift. Even the corridors to the staterooms were wider than I expected, although they are vertiginously long.

We got to our stateroom, a balcony double on the Baja Deck (deck 11), forward. I'd never been on a cruise ship before, even to visit, and the diagrams and photos and statistics on the ship's web site don't really communicate what you're getting into. It's a small space, but very well laid out. It was not at all claustrophobic, at least for me; the sliding door and balcony make all the difference. Except for the tiny bathroom with a tinier shower, it would be an entirely reasonable single hotel room in most big cities; for two people who like their space, though, it was a bit cramped. But such are the economics of cruise ships: all that grand public space has to come at the expense of personal space for the passengers. Maggie's parents, who were celebrating their anniversary, had a suite in the forward starboard corner of the same deck, with much more space (and the largest private balcony I've seen), but there are only a few suites like that on each ship. (They generously invited us, as well as Maggie's sister, brother-in-law, and their kids to join us in their suite and balcony whenever we liked.)

Since it was about 1:30 in the afternoon by the time we got settled, it was time for lunch. On the first day of the cruise, before leaving port, only the buffet is open for lunch. It was, of course, packed, and we stood elbow to elbow at the buffet lines. Happily, this was the only time I stood in a significant line for food -- or anything else -- for the entire voyage. While the buffet food was not nearly as good as the dining room food (which was as expected), it got better and better during the week. That first buffet lunch -- a caesar salad, some roast pork loin, beef stew, fried scallops, and fresh fruit -- was unexceptional, but still well above the quality of typical shore-side buffets.

We returned to the room, and I began wondering where the luggage was. It was 3:00, and the ship was due to sail at 4:30. Our cabin steward introduced himself, pointed out the card on the desk with his pager number, and explained a few housekeeping items. A passing luggage handler said to me, "your bags are coming soon!" Then 3:00 became 3:30 and 4:00, only one bag (Maggie's) arrived, and I wondered if perhaps mine had been left behind or misdirected. I asked the steward to look into it, which he promised to do, and figured there was nothing else that could be done. The ship's departure was delayed until 5:15, which I guessed was due to luggage issues, and the missing luggage finally showed up at 5:30. This was not a big deal, but a note in one of the various welcome/instruction messages in the room to the effect of, "hey, you might not get your luggage for 5+ hours; don't worry" would have been reassuring.

We walked around the open upper decks and enjoyed the sunshine, inspecting all the mysterious and arcane navigation and communications equipment, and took a bunch of photos. Finally, we cast off, and I was surprised at how quickly such a huge ship could accelerate. Wow! Thrusters are a pretty impressive nautical innovation: megaships can move sideways and turn in place.

Next came the required safety briefing and life jacket drill, conducted in the main theater, which is pretty impressive in its own right. After that, and some simple enjoyment of the Vancouver and Georgia Strait scenery, it was, well... time for dinner.

We were able to get a reservation for the Vivaldi Dining Room for our table of 8. Unlike some other cruise lines, Princess offers a choice between Traditional Dining, where you eat in the same dining room at the same table (and with the same table-mates, if applicable) every night, and Anytime Dining, where you eat dinner where and when you like, and can get smaller tables for 2 or 4. This was one of the best features of the cruise. Neither Maggie nor I wanted to be tied down to a particular dinner time (neither the 5:30 early seating nor the 8:00 late seating are particularly convenient), nor did we want to be stuck with 2 or 3 other couples for artificial companionship (although as a party of 8, we probably could have gotten our own table for the whole cruise).

The four Anytime dining rooms on the Diamond Princess have different decor themes (Vivaldi: Italian; Santa Fe: Southwestern; Savoy: French; Pacific Moon: Asian) but they all serve an identical menu save for a single main course "specialty" which remains the same in each room for the whole voyage. Dinner at the Vivaldi was lovely: I began with a lobster and rockfish terrine, a salad, and the main course was prime rib -- perfectly medium rare -- with bacon-wrapped string beans, followed by a chocolate mousse and a cheese plate. We had only planned to order only single glasses on wine, but the waiter explained that if you order a bottle and don't finish it, it's kept for you in a wine cellar and you can finish it the next night or any other dinner. So we got a bottle of barolo (Stefano Farina, 2001) which was not the best barolo I've had, but was adequate though a little rough, like a rustic sangiovese or nebbiolo. It was not terribly expensive, though; wine is marked up but not as much in equivalent restaurants. (On most cruise ships, food in any quantity is included, even multiple portions, special desserts, and other gluttony, but every drop of alcohol is an extra charge.)

The dinner was very satisfying, and I figured if they kept it up all week, I would be one very happy cruise passenger. By meal's end we were about ready to spend a little time on the balcony and then try to erase the previous day's sleep deficit. In the meantime, it became foggy and cooler, and our ship motored up the Georgia Strait and into the narrow passages that separate Vancouver Island from the mainland. I stayed out late on the balcony and watched as another cruise ship passed us going south, a brightly-lit but spectral apparition in the fog. We slept well.