Cherry sherry Manhattans for a crowd

Posted on 20 May 2013 by

bottled cocktailsRecently, we threw a cocktail party for about 30 friends. Hosting events like this is one of my very favorite things in the whole wide world. Now that we’ve arrived at the age where a lot of our friends have started having babies, seeing each other regularly can sometimes be a tricky business, requiring epic coordination of sitters and nannies and bedtimes. Getting 30 of my favorite people together at one time, in my living room, feels like a much bigger accomplishment than it did six or seven years ago. So when the stars align and it all comes together, I’m psyched. I want to make sure everybody has a fantastic time. And I definitely don’t want to miss my chance to catch up with everyone because I’m stuck behind the bar, slinging drinks all night.

The secret to making it happen: batch cocktails. Continue reading →

Posted in Entertaining, Jeanne's obsession with cocktails, Recipes, What we're drinking | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Wild food: Join us May 11

Posted on 29 April 2013 by

Here in northern California, all four seasons spoil us with an embarrassment of riches. But I still love spring the most.

We’ve been experimenting with a lot of amazing wild ingredients recently. The coastal forests—and, for that matter, most of our city parks—are full of tasty little items if you just know where to look. Continue reading →

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The radish report

Posted on 9 April 2013 by

I’ve got an ongoing experiment happening outside the front door. It started with one planter and about a thousand lettuce seeds. When those actually grew and I’d proved to myself that I could, in fact, grow plants successfully, we got a second planter, and then a third.

Over the winter, we planted three kinds of radishes in our little sidewalk farm. They all grew—eventually—but the results weren’t quite what I expected. Check it out:

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Do you have a container garden? What grows well, and what doesn’t?

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Busy Saturday? Seats available for our sherry dinner

Posted on 2 April 2013 by

Saturday’s dinner is shaping up to be pretty epic—and if you’re the spontaneous type, you’re in luck! We’ve had some cancellations and we still have a few seats available. Email us now to make your reservation.

We’ll be pairing some of the world’s best sherries with each of our six tapas-inspired courses:

    • Boquerones, citrus, black olive
    • Sea bass crudo, Oro Blanco, radish, honey, paprika oil
    • Crispy sweetbreads, potato, braised pea shoots
    • Octopus, spring onion, blood orange, aioli
    • Short rib, savory caramel, slaw, black sesame
    • Cardamom duck egg ice cream sandwich

We learned an enormous amount at SherryFest West in Portland a few weeks ago, and we can’t wait take you on a guided tour of all the major sherry styles: fino, amontillado, palo cortado, oloroso, cream, and Pedro Ximenez. We’re planning to serve several wines that aren’t yet available in California, so this is a unique chance to try something rare and unusual—not to mention very, very delicious.

This dinner is $85, inclusive of wine pairings. Email us now to RSVP!

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Reporting back from Sherryfest West 2013

Posted on 17 March 2013 by

Good things come in barrels. (Obviously.) Therefore, something that comes from many, many barrels must be extra good, right? We went to Portland last week to investigate this theory at Sherryfest West 2013.


Sherry, which is a fortified wine made from palomino grapes in the Jerez region of Spain, sees an awful lot of barrel time when it’s aged in a solera system. A solera is a series of barrels where part of the wine in each barrel is regularly moved to the next stage (or criadera) and replenished with new, younger wine from the criadera before it. This constant partial movement means that by the time wine is drawn out of the last criadera for bottling, it is a mix of wine that is relatively young and wine that can be very, very old—more than 150 years in some of the oldest soleras. During this process, the wine can be aged biologically (under a layer of flavor-producing yeast called flor) and/or oxidatively, by simply leaving the barrels about one-sixth empty to expose the wine to oxygen.

A lot of Americans share an unfortunate cultural memory of sherry as a treacly, cloying after-dinner drink—and a few decades ago, most of what you could buy on the American market probably wasn’t very good. But actually, the vast majority of sherry is completely dry. These dry sherries pair smashingly well with food, providing a range of nutty, saline, and umami tones and occasionally surprising notes like butter toffee, black olive, orange peel, or baking spices. Continue reading →

Posted in Dinner announcements, On the road again, Pairings, What we're drinking | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment