There's a lot of long weekend highlights I could report about today. Cocktails at Beretta and Elixir, rye whiskey at Whiskey Thieves, the bistro hangar steak and the arista I made yesterday. But I'll have to stop short and reveal that this show is going on the road later this week, as I return to the land of my birth, Kansas City.

Just for a short, family-focused jaunt. But even given the brevity of my trip, I do hope to be looking at something a lot like the picture to my right while I'm there, as often as possible!

“That’s our chef’s philosophy: waste not, want not”, said our server at Incanto Monday night. That’s the story of Incanto; and even though it’s most widely characterized by the inventive use of offal on its menu, one thing I truly love about Chef Chris Cosentino’s work there is that it doesn’t stop there.

We shared an antipasta of local, cured sardines with green peaches, capers, and carefully strewn celery leaves. The line our server used was, in fact, in reference to those green peaches (apparently pre-peach hard fruits that most farmers clear so their summer peaches are warmer and juicier). The thin, chewy slices of peach cut through the oiliness of the sardines perfectly, and also provided a color accompaniment to the capers and celery leaves. A beautiful dish.

Not wanting to have a full-blown (and wallet-blowing) dinner, we decided to share a couple of pastas. We had the pappardelle with lamb sugo, because that’s just irresistible, and the pork heart ravioli with pine nuts. This leads me to the second thing that I really love about Incanto. The ravioli were really good. Perfectly cooked pasta, the raw pine nuts a flavor foil for the meaty goodness of the pork heart. But truth be told the pappardelle was even better. The lamb sugo was made with mint and olives, and it was by far the best lamb/mint combination I’ve ever experienced. What I mean is that when I go to Incanto, of course I look at it as a way to try offal and other less typical cuts of meat cooked in an expert way, but the more traditional dishes are just as sublime. The range of the menu is actually quite wide: a (gulp) vegetarian could have a fantastic meal. I think I counted half of the antipasti as meat-free, and there were more than adequate choices of pasta and entrée.

Alli and I get kind of a kick out of the…is there a euphemism for this?..uh, relative unhipness of the space there. Incanto, décor-wise, is the diametric opposite of, say, Slanted Door. The big bright windows, the carpet, the kids, the elderly. As Alli pointed out, for the total youth and hipness of the cooking, the philosophy, and the diy salumi company, the atmosphere is decidedly different. But thinking of it now, it’s done in a way that’s a lot more in accord with the restaurants we loved in Italy. Delfina restaurant in San Francisco is about 150 years “ahead” of Ristorante Delfina in Artimino, in terms of restaurant architecture, but there is something very homey and pleasing about carpets and evening light and elderly patrons!

I think I’ve come to admire Cosentino’s work not only as your run-of-the-mill foodie and home cook, but also as a citizen. It seems to me to be wildly successful (the dining room was packed on a Monday night), and people were clearly pleased. The older couple next to us were getting an education in ingredients (“what are ramps?” “what’s agretti?”) as much as we were (“this is what pork heart tastes like”, “green peaches!”). And to gather these people into a real life economy of respect for produce and animals is a beautiful, and politically gratifying, gesture.

post script: I know that if you have a food blog, you’re supposed to take pictures when you go to restaurants, and not just steal some image of salumi from Google images. I know! But I just can’t do it. I can’t do it! To make it up to you, though, I will take some pictures of the cocktail week party at the Ferry Building tonight, that is, if I’m sober enough to point and click.

For both ec- and gastronomic reasons, Alli and I like to bring a lunch to our day jobs, and for time reasons we often like to make more dinner than we should or could eat and call what’s leftover “lunch.” Well and good, right? But sometimes I feel almost a literal embarrassment at the riches; like, let me set the scene for you:

I’m in day job office kitchen, sitting at day job office kitchen table, eating a lunch of buttery beluga lentils, sautéed Mariquita agretti, and seared duck breast with a red wine sauce. Yum. Enter co-worker, with bag from Subway.

Co-worker: “Oh, what are you having for lunch?”

Brandon: (stammer, cough, blush) Just some…er…leftover…buttery beluga lentils, sautéed agretti, and seared duck breast with a red wine sauce.”

Co-worker: “…”

That’s often how it goes. This also has caused Alli discomfort—though I do get a kick of how she described being really embarrassed at work one time eating leftover braised oxtails: “It’s boy food!”

Discuss. Or to tide you over:

The bacon they truly crave, a response to PETA from Chef Chris Cosentino

A classic, on beefsteak. (Careful, this one's a PDF)

When life hands you slightly sub-par pork tenderloin, make…just be really happy you signed up for Boccalone’s Tasty Salted Pig Parts! I can’t really figure out what happened to the gorgeous bright pink tenderloin I bought Sunday, but when it came out of the refrigerator Monday evening, it had decidedly decided to forgo being dinner, despite my intentions to roast it perfectly and serve it medium rare, sliced thinly, with a potentially excellent mustard-tarragon sauce.

But with one pig part having to go in the bin, it was a perfect opportunity to use Boccalone’s breakfast sausages. Everybody likes breakfast for dinner, right? The sausages were marvelous, with the slight sweetness you’d want from a breakfast sausage but complicated by orange juice and zest, which really made it. They would have been delicious, no doubt, with a poached egg and mimosa—but they did just fine with this goat-cheese quinoa and steamed Mariquita carrots tossed in butter and dill. I even went for a little tiny touch of that excellent mustard that would have gone into the potentially excellent mustard-tarragon sauce.

Alli was probably relieved for the breakfast sausages. Without those, I would have pushed hard for Boccalone Coppa di testa sandwiches. Mmmm. Coppa di testa sandwich.

We’re still new to each other, blog, but I feel okay confessing to you that I made the grave, youthful, (forgive me, blog!) mistake of being was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life. That’s 38%, roughly. God. But I am doing my best to make up for lost time, and Boccalone is really helping me out in this respect. Still, at the end of the day, that’s about four thousand days that I could have had duck confit instead of some unpleasant Tofurkey.

The Scene At Boccalone

Even before eating at Incanto, I admired chef Chris Cosentino’s website and blog for his its demonstration of passion for meat, which includes the respectful raising, treatment, and slaughter of animals and using as much of them as possible. Eating there is really terrific. The menu, consisting of “rustic Italian cooking”, does highlight offal and “unusual” cuts of meat, but is truly diverse and can accommodate any diet. We’ve only been once, and we had a long and tremendous meal that included a flight of Toscana wines, stuffed peppers (it was late summer), a pig trotter cake, sublime chicken liver ravioli with aged balsamic, and a roasted goat leg with, if I remember, a sort of salsa verde, and finally a bay leaf panna cotta (which was also delicious, and testament to the range of Incanto’s staff).

So with this experience in mind, I’ve wanted to join the Salumi Society at Boccalone for months, the salumi company founded by Cosentino and Mark Pastore, the owners of Incanto. I mean, “tasty salted pig parts.” Uh huh. I don’t know what took me so long! But finally I signed up, and Saturday hopped the bus up to Noe Valley to pick up my first box.

While in the neighborhood, I visited the N.V. Farmer’s Market for some greens. The Market is kind of, what do you expect in Noe Valley?, cute, I guess. More strollers than vendors. I will confess that I was a little over-served of Franziskaner and bourbon the night before, and it was freaking hot on Saturday, and I was grouchy about the strollers and the dogs. I had to remind myself, though, that I was the visitor and should smile. So I smiled.

When I finally made it to Incanto, everything got better. First of all, as pictured below, the first thing you encounter is a table full of meat! That brightens anyone-not-vegetarian’s day. Three meats were out for sample, Ciccioli, or braised scraps of lean pork meat and skin, seasoned with garlic and rosemary; a delicious salami of “three peppers”, and prosciutto cotto, a treat I have a hard time passing up in any context. Terry, the staff on hand, gave me my box and went through it with me, describing all of the products and the best ways to use them. He was really affable, and maybe it was the weather but everybody seemed really happy to be in a room surrounded by tasty salted pig parts at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

There weren’t a lot of people there so early, but I imagine it becomes a little bit of a scene on “salumi Saturdays”. I really recommend checking it out! The box, by the way, came with a fennel-brown sugar salami (amazing), coppa di testa (head cheese, my first ever, so still waiting for sandwich time), capocollo (cured meat from the pig’s neck), and Italian sausages, which I roasted last night and served with cassoulet-style cannellini beans and Happy Boy farms rainbow chard, purchased from the Noe Valley Farmer’s market while dodging three strollers and a pack of dogs.

(I want to occasionally write about local and non-local food places that I love on the blog. They're not paying me.)

I am really fortunate to have an outstanding resource for fish and poultry right in my own neighborhood (Bob’s fish market at the Mission Market on 22^nd street and Mission), but one thing that I’ve always found lacking in the Mission is a great butcher.

When I visited the Antica Macelleria in Panzano, I totally had a fleeting fantasy of being the one to open that shop, part-butcher shop, part-meat library, part social gathering place. The fantasy buzz faded, though, and gave way to images of hipsters getting wasted on the house wine, a line of homeless people forming to eat free arista rather than the plates at Glide, and, you know, abject failure stemming from a faulty business plan.

Avedano's Holly Park Meat Market isn’t the Antica Macelleria, nor is it truly in the Mission, but it is a really remarkable place, and I am glad for its existence. I first read about the shop in Meatpaper, an SF-based magazine devoted to “meat culture”, which included an interview with the three women who founded and operate Avedano's.

In addition to a few baskets of really beautiful produce and jars of interesting condiments and jams, as well as a couple small refrigerators with cheese, cured meats (some from Boccalone), and pates, the long case always has something exciting. Very fresh fish, whole and filleted; sustainably sourced beef, lamb, pork, poultry, and usually something like fresh duck breasts or fresh quail. But what’s even better is the flexibility and service. I called a couple weeks ago needing a bone-in pork loin chop, and even though they had one in the store they could cut for me, the counter person told me I could always call with a couple days notice and they could set me up. I noticed when I went in to pick up the pork a grass-fed veal liver in the case. If I hadn’t already done a lot of prep for the pork, it would have been really fun to work with that!

I’m really already close to living the dream. Maybe I’ll move to Bernal Heights or Avedano's will open Avedano's 2 on South Van Ness, and I can start having my paychecks direct deposited there. Meanwhile, hurrah for women-owned butcher shops within (kind of long) walking distance, and hurrah for Avedano's!

Since becoming seriously interested in cooking and food over the last couple of years, I have been lucky and/or financially reckless enough to eat at some pretty amazing restaurants. So it’s with some hesitation but not really reservation that I say that the best restaurant experience I have ever had was at a restaurant called Solociccia, in Panzano in Chianti last month.

I found it almost by accident. I knew that I wanted to visit Panzano, and the butcher shop owned by Dario Cecchini, made famous by Bill Buford’s book Heat. Buford presents a portrait, or possibly a caricature, of Cecchini as a madman who was possibly the most knowledgeable butcher in the world. The “mad” part, by the way, had a lot to do with Cecchini’s obsession with Dante, and his ability to recite from the Commedia at length. But the description of the shop, and the butcher, and the town, was intriguing. When I was doing research about how to find the shop and Panzano in Chianti, I found that Dario had opened a restaurant, called Solociccia, or “only meat.” The website had one link, called “RULES” in English. The rules:

“This is not a restaurant. It is the home of a butcher. All that you will eat is the fruit of my work and that of my family. You will not choose from a menu, though you will be treated well, and with great respect, if you return the favor. You will eat at a communal table, together in “convivio.” There will be six meat courses, chosen at my discretion, with seasonal vegetables, white beans with olive oil, foccacia bread, wine cake, coffee, and after dinner liquors. All of the above is to be had for 30 euro, with nearly two hours at our table, at the end of which you will turn over your seat to the next guests. We do not serve steak. We are open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings with seatings at 7:00 and 9:00 pm, on Sunday we sit down for lunch at 1:00 pm. In closing, please be aware that everything: the food, the wine the space and we ourselves are for better or worse…thoroughly Tuscan. P.S. Please feel free to bring your own wine without corkage fee. Welcome. (If you dare!).”

Uh huh.

So I made reservations.

We planned on visiting Panzano and the shop a little before our dinner but as we were driving towards where we were staying I saw a sign for Panzano, 6 kilometers away! And I persuaded Alli to go. The shop was amazing. It was small. Walking in, to the left was the butcher’s case which had several cuts of meat, olives, and a huge bowl full of lardo (Alli’s favorite). On the other side, a long table, with huge serving platters, holding meatballs and spicy jam, tons of lardo and baguette, finocchiona, and huge decanters of wine and glasses. Next to that was a stool with the massive arista pictured here. Dario himself was having his picture taken by some Brits, and when they left he grumbled a little and then went over to slice the arista. I asked him if they were porchetta, and he explained in fair English that porchetta is the whole pig, but this was arista (I would learn how utterly delicious arista is later, at other places). The other person working was a young woman, and I think she noticed that Alli and I were a little hesitant, so she came over and poured us glasses of wine, and said, Eat! So we did. And it was superlative, all of it.

So I had a feeling that Solociccia was not going to be disappointing.

We went the next night, driving on a dirt road (that in the States would have no name, but was called Santa Maria Macerata), and got to Panzano early. We hung out at a bar across the street and had a couple aperitifs, and then went over. One thing the RULES didn’t state is that there are only two tables, in two separate rooms. And also that the meal doesn’t begin until everyone is there. We walked in behind a group of four young Americans, and for one second I wondered if we hadn’t ended up at a fake restaurant, you know, a tourist trap for blithering foodies who thought they had found Disneyland Toscana. It wasn’t to be. We were seated at a table with eight Italians, two couples, a pair of women (aunt, niece or something), and a pair of older men.

On the table already were a couple of courses: pinzimonio di verdure dell’orto, or I guess seasonal vegetables. This was thinly sliced fennel, carrots, ack, I’m forgetting, other things. Also the pane di Panzano, or typically saltless Tuscan bread. We were the only ones who had taken Dario up on the wine-with-no-corkage, so the waiter handed me a corkscrew and two glasses. I opened up a very delicious bottle of Classico. Quickly, once everyone at our table was seated, a bell rang and the waiter walked over to a stainless steel dumbwaiter on the wall. This bell would come to mean only good things: rumblings from the meat basement. He brought us the first course, crostini di sugo all’uso di Natale. I can’t find an adequate translation, but essentially they were fluffy pieces of bread completely covered in a meat sauce. The crostini were served on two large platters, and the waiter handed them to people at the table to take as much as they wanted, and then pass. Everyone did. The crostini were far from subtle, and they were terrific. And maybe that’s the first time I really realized that something we were in for something different at Solociccia. Not only the take-some-and-pass-it-down thing, though I can hardly see that working out too well at the Cracker Barrel or any other all-you-can-and-by-can-we-mean-can-eat hovel. It was the presentation. Or the lack of presentation. It’s bread and meat sauce. That’s it. Eat it.

Our waiter when he brought the courses announced the name of the course and then came over to Alli and I and tried to provide a translation, which was very appreciated if sometimes misleading. The people at the table, who had started by pretty much chatting with their dinner partner, started to all talk to each other. They laughed a lot. One of the couples had a dog with them. Now and then Alli caught them feeding the dog from the table. Luckiest dog, uh, ever.

Ring ring went the dumbwaiter and the next course was brought out, fritto del macellaio, which I think I can translate as “Fried stuff a butcher makes.” Amazing, totally not greasy but altogether fried onion, whole sage leaves (a revelation), chicken fried pork cutlets, and small breaded meatballs that burst with lemon when you bit into them. When the waiter came with the third course and announced the name, ramerino in culo, everyone laughed. We laughed too but didn’t know why. The waiter told us, “it means, uh, um, rosemary…rosemary in the behind.” So the third dish, Rosemary In The Ass, was a small ball of ground beef, with a rosemary sprig stuck in one end, and the other end seared, for what was obviously a very brief amount of time; enough to make one side slightly gray. The ass end, with the rosemary sprig, was raw. And awesome.

Another thing to point out, we weren’t too full already, like we would be in an American restaurant. The genius of take-what-you-want-pass-it-down is that you really can just take what you want. I only needed a few bites of fried things a butcher makes, and I really only needed one raw beef ball. Don’t get me wrong—they were perfect, but it was also perfect to have a little bite (I’m reminded by way of a negative example of a really nice lunch place I went to one time in Healdsburg at which I ordered chicken livers, because, you know, I’m all about them. The owner himself brought them to me and said, “And here’s the best thing on the menu” and I’m all about them except it was a gigantic plate full of chicken livers in a thick balsamic sauce which, again, were awesome, but I could eat about ¼ of it.)

It did already feel, though, like a bit of a marathon by the time muscolini alla salvia came out, a braised pork butt (Alli pointed out that it reminded her of carnitas) with tons of sage. And then possibly my favorite course, tenerumi in insalata, which the waiter said was “Boiled beef with salsa,” but deserves a better explanation. Tenerumi are tendons, and the beef parts were cartilaginous but not squishy, and seasoned lightly, so the flavor of the tendons came out and provided a foil to the salsa verde-ish insalata of fennel, celery, carrots, and onions. Finally, we were served braciole rifatte, which unlike the American braciole (braJOL), consisted of thin slices of breaded beef in a spicy tomato sauce full of capers.

Okay.

So we ate all the courses and they were all terrific, and all the plates were still on the table in case anybody wanted to revisit anything, which people did as they pleased. When everything was done, a basket of olive oil cake was brought over and everyone had a slice. The hostess asked us if wanted caffe. Half of us did. Then she brought three liters of liquor and put them on the table and gave everybody a clean glass.

All right. Imagine this happening, uh, anywhere in the United States. Having trouble? Right. The bottles were three different kinds of liqueur, one was grappa, another slightly sweet but unidentifiable, another totally unidentifiable but our favorite. Everybody tried all three, and while I definitely sensed at the end of this round of drinks that everybody was a little bit tipsy, nobody, like, had a chugging contest or asked their friend to turn them upside down for a keg stand. It was moderately consumed. It was consumed in the way it was meant to be consumed: take what you want, pass it down. You didn’t pay for it, necessarily, so there wasn’t an anxiety to finish. It was the perfect ending.

I think the best way to illustrate how profoundly unique this was, though, is to say that when I walked out of the little room with our table in it, I was completely shocked to find that we had to pay for our meal. I don’t mean that I didn’t know beforehand that the meal cost 30 euro, after all, that was in the rules. But at some point in the almost two hours we spent at the butcher’s table, Alli and I both forgot that we were even at a restaurant.

At some point, Dario charged into our room to ask everyone tutti bene? Bene bene bene, that was the chorus. He smiled tipsily, acknowledged that all was indeed good, and left. And it was good, all of it.