Bar Pintxo - Otra Vez, June 12, 2010

Every other restaurant on the Santa Monica Promenade has faded from view for me since Shiho and I had tapas at Bar Pintxo. We took Jack there, without realizing that Spanish tapas - and really, a menu that is meant to be consumed with copious amounts of alcohol - is a land mine for anyone with gastro-esophageal netflux disease (GERD).

Knowing Jack as I do, I had suspected that GERD was just another way to for him to get attention from girls. Sadly, it is a real condition, with symptoms ranging from heartburn to difficulty swallowing to a regurgitation of bile. He cannot have things that we all take for granted and regard as healthy, like tomatoes, citrus, or olive oil. He can have poultry, fish, most vegetables, and whatever junk food I happen to have in my office when he rambles in at precisely the moment I am working on my next Pulitzer-quality opus.

With this in mind, we perused the menu. Shiho and Jack had gotten there before me and already ordered a couple of things: peach gazpacho and ensaladilla rusa, or Russian potato salad with tuna.



A view from the bridge.

I sat at the counter with my two friends, who had just met that day at an event we attended at a place near and dear to my heart, the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum. Beauty and the Beastly seemed to hit it off, but I was hardly a third wheel, having been lucky enough to find two handsome dining companions of my own. Sitting inches across from me on my end of the counter were two gorgeous serrano hams, installed on special wooden racks, one of which had a swath of glistening fat that the chefs kept to "seal" its cut end.



Swoon over my hammy.

The gazpacho arrived, topped with thin slices of serrano ham and lashings of lovely green extra virgin olive oil. Lovely that is until we were told what the effects would be on Jack's digestive system. So Shiho and I carefully skimmed it off the top of the pale yellow soup, which by the way, was fantastico. It was a lot like a vichyssoise with a summery, sweet finish kissed with cinnamon.




Everything's better with bacon - even peaches!

We needed to find more things that Jack could enjoy safely and selected the tortilla espagnola, which to my surprise was actually a type of Galician omelette. Composed simply of eggs, onions, and potatoes, it was the perfect thing.



Jack tentatively poking at the tortilla espagnola.

There is no sauce like laughter. We especially enjoyed the slideshow of someone's vacation in Spain that was playing over and over on the restaurant's widescreen monitor. There were images of hilarity amid much food, much wine, and much willingness of the revelers to moon the camera.

Humor is also the best medicine. We managed to eat well despite Jack's dietary limitations, which to his credit, he handles very well. I always feel badly for people who cannot eat everything because I live to eat, not eat to live. But considering some of the rare places I like, where one might say that food takes a backseat to ambiance, I also know that the power to taste and consume is not everything. Spending time with good friends is.

Which is not to say it was all a Kodak moment. Jack made fun of Shiho and me for being women of a certain age; I made fun of him for being bald. Your real friends are the ones who hammer at your faults and who let you hammer at theirs, yet everyone comes up laughing.



He gives it a thumbs up! Jack Sprat can eat no fat, so more aioli for Shiho and me!

Between bursts of hilarity, I obsessed over a stray flake of ham that had fallen on the base of one of the wooden racks. I wanted it, like it was a shiny, porky jewel. But I was being polite and refrained from snatching it up. It was kind of like when you are at someone else's house for Thanksgiving and can't just start ripping the skin off the turkey that has just emerged from the oven.

It was the best of all worlds for me, hanging out with friends while watching the Bar Pintxo team of chefs and cooks at close range, kind of like our own personal Food Network show. And somehow, we managed to finish with the traditional churros con chocolate. I guess GERD doesn't rule out dessert. Or hopefully, Jack felt too good to mind.




She's a lady. Except when it comes to stray bits of ham.

Bar Pintxo, June 6, 2010

Summer weather turns a Girl's fancy to cold soups, especially one of my all time favorites, gazpacho. Like a V8 with bits of salad floating in it, nothing beats the heat - and gives you one of your eight-a-day - like a nice bowl of gazpacho.

The choice of gazpacho had a two-fold purpose: I had asked my friend Shiho, a talented illustrator and watercolorist, for special artwork for GMS. So we needed a colorful and textural dish for her to depict in her inimitable style.



Shiho and I started with some very flavorful olives. She drew them, I inhaled them.


I remembered that i had seen a tapas place on the Santa Monica Promenade, but could not remember the name of it. I called Shiho, who started looking up places on Yelp where we could have the chilly concoction, but none of them had the all-important "stroll factor," the better to have that post-dinner constitutional by. So I talked her into this unknown place, remembering that it was on Santa Monica Boulevard near 4th Street.

I met here there and the recognized the storefront, with the sign for Bar Pintxo. When we were seated, we immediately asked what the soup of the day was, ever hopeful for the long-awaited gazpacho. But it was lentil with chorizo, which was fine with me. The afternoon swelter had given way to a cool marine layer and suddenly warm soup sounded good. It was. The smokiness of the sausage was a great counterpoint to the homey-ness of the lentil soup, which despite the pork product, was not at all salty. But that was only the beginning.

A hearty soup like this one can be a meal in itself, but not when you can have all kinds of unusual little dishes alongside it. Upon exploring the menu, we found a number of enticements and succumbed to temptation. So distracted were we by these delights that I forgot to take a photo of the soup. But since the point of the exercise was Shiho's sketch, we were covered there.



Shiho's masterpiece - talk about multitasking... I don't think I can eat and paint at the same time!


We happily obeyed the axiom, "Eat dessert first" with a "pintxo" or "small bite" of dates wrapped in bacon and filled with valdeon cheese. I can't even begin to describe how good this was. Salt is the new sugar, and this celebrated the pairing of both with great flair.

Next up was the ensaladilla rusa or Russian salad. This consisted of a potato salad with house-conserved tuna in a light, non-greasy mayonnaise. A taste revealed the fact that a) the peas and diced carrot were fresh, not frozen as I had surmised and b) tuna is pretty darned good in potato salad.




Not your mom's potato salad - unless your mom happens to be from Barcelona!

For dessert we hemmed and hawed about the churros. In America, churros are foot-long tubes of tasteless dough coated with a fur of sugar that you buy at the movies or a fair. Bar Pintxo's version was what I've always imagined authentic churros to be: yeasty but dainty blips of dough served with a cup of bittersweet, cinnamon-laced chocolate for dipping.




This beats Krispy Kreme.

For more of Shiho's work or to subscribe to her newsletter, click here. She's a Scorpio, her favorite color is everything, and she digs long walks on the beach, candlelight dinners, and guys who are willing to go to museums, change a flat tire, and check her dim sum selections for hidden shrimp: she's allergic to shellfish.

Short Orders: The Lusty Month of May

Although spring has sprung, this Girl still loves her some soup... and bagels... and Vietnamese street food... and...?

Although May was a busy month, I still took time to stop and smell the:

May 22, Vietnamese Rice Cake with Caramelized Onion in Chinatown: Jolene and I always delude ourselves that we can just run into Chinatown, pick up whatever trinkets and treats we decide we can't live without that day, and depart in a timely fashion. We are always so wrong.

On a mission to fetch supplies for the necklaces I make and sell at local museums (the Japanese American National Museum and the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum), my sister and I hurried to Chinatown on a mission, promising my brother-in-law that she would be back "soon" for the onslaught of Saturday activities with the kids. While puttering in a shop that sells knock-off handbags on Broadway near Ord, I caught a whiff of something that took me back to childhood. It was as if someone had opened the world's biggest bag of Funyuns. I looked around and noticed a boy eating something white and gelatinous out of a styrofoam box.



I always share snacks with my sister. Unless she takes too long putting more money in the meter!

As we headed down the street, we stopped in front of a little Vietnamese deli where I found the object of my olfactory delight. As we entered the store, a woman was unwrapping a pan the size of a tire that was filled with something covered with caramelized onion. She was selling slabs of this to passersby, dousing each serving liberally with a light brown sauce full of little red chilies. Although I had already surpassed my allotted carb intake for the morning - miniature pan dulces from Venice Bakery - I had to try it.



Move over, Gaga. This is my neuvo-disco diva name: Lady FishPaste.



Although we had only meant to stay an hour, Jolene and I took turns running back to the car parked a few blocks away to add more change about three or four times. While she was gone, I put some of what the vendor and the people in the deli simply called "rice cake" and dug into my portion greedily. The consistency was custard-like and white as snow. The onion topping also had dried shrimp in it, Southeast Asia's answer to bacon bits. I tried to stop eating after my first helping, but decided that Jolene, who is as fanatic as I usually am about counting calories, wouldn't mind a smaller piece of the stuff.

May 23, Smoked Whitefish Salad on a Black Russian Bagel at the Bagel Factory: Fish is said to be brain food and I need all the help I can get. A weekend treat is a toasted Black Russian bagel - dark pumpernickel with raisins and onions - slathered with smoked whitefish salad from the Bagel Factory.



One bagel is said to be the caloric equivalent of five pieces of bread. My rules of thumb are a) if they use dark flour, it's practically whole-grain, which doesn't seem as evil and b) toasting a bread product makes it like a cracker, which is usually lower in carbs. No wonder I flunked freshman algebra.

May 29, The Big Steak at Grand Casino: When I'm not wearing one of my many weekend hats as roving reporter, social butterfly, or doting aunt, I grab my beading board and go to one of my favorite spots in downtown Culver City, Grand Casino. I love the quasi-European twist to the menu and bakery, which is largely influenced by Argentine cuisine. I have spent many a sunny late afternoon alone there, reading or making a necklace, basking in the melodious conversations of the other patrons, who speak only Spanish.

It was getting close to dinnertime and once again I was faced with having to make a low-cal decision. And I was hungry. I spotted the steak on the menu but did not want potatoes or anything starchy on the side. I asked the waiter if I could just have twice the salad. He was very accommodating and told me he would have the cooks put something together.



Grand Casino always feels like I've gone back in time to a slower, more gracious era, where a "Lost Generation" isn't necessarily lost, just looking for comfort. If Lady Brett and Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises" would have stopped all their agonizing, they could have gone to a little sidewalk cafe to eat something like a juicy, medium-rare steak with a crisp, fresh salad - with yes, a little Pernod on the side - they would have felt as I did on that Sunday afternoon, alone in a babel of Spanish whose words I did not understand, but whose emotion was clear. Damned fine.