Wednesday, March 14, 2012.
Festival Of Delay. Eat Clubbing At Carmelo.
I guess an analysis using rigorous statistics and probability theory would show this as purely coincidental, but I caught every single red light in the fifteen miles from the Cool Water Ranch to Ristorante Carmelo today. In most cases, I pulled up to the light just as it turned red, creating the maximum amount of delay. I was barely in time to get on the air for our remote broadcast.
Once there, I met a technical glitch. For some reason, all of the phone lines at Carmelo are voice-over-internet lines. To connect to the radio station, we have to send the digitally coded signal over a cell network, add two more code-decode steps to the process. Each of these adds a bit of delay to the transmissions back and forth, such that anything I say will not be heard by the on-air listener-caller until a second or two after I say it. That sounds like no big deal until you try to have a back-and-forth conversation that way.
On the other hand, I don't have any real problems.
The show ended a half-hour early, a preemption for the all-important March Madness basketball games. This gave me a loose hour before the dinner began. The subject of Negroni cocktails had come up during the show, and our engineer Dominic was interested in trying one. Since he was, I may as well. Carmelo Chirico had one, and then the first two Eat Clubbers to arrive joined the party. I'll bet this restaurant has never before sold so many Negronis in one hour.
The dinner began with a pass-around pig picking. Carmelo had roasted a whole cochon de lait, and was pulling it apart for the pre-dinner reception. With it was Secco, a variation of Prosecco made with grapes other than the one prescribed be Italian law. It was none the worse for it as far as I could tell.
The pasta course also veered off the main highway. It was hand-made gnocchi--Carmelo said he'd made six hundred of them--served in what was almost a soup of cream, Gorgonzola, and herbs, with truffles floating around. This was excellent, and if he doesn't add it to his menu he's missing a good bet. Quadri Pinot Grigio held down the liquid part of the assignment.
After a straightforward salad of nicely bitter greens and goat cheese, I moved on to a very ample entree of veal Sorrentina--one of the two or three best dishes Carmelo makes. It's veal scaloppine with prosciutto, fresh-milk mozzarella, eggplant, and a very light red sauce. It was as good as usual, and matched by two wines: a Pinot Noir from a Rogue Valley (Oregon) winery called Foris (new to me), and a big Barbera d'Asti by Paolo Scavino. The latter was easily the wine of the night. We don't run into enough Barberas, but Carmelo always has a few on his list.
There was a fish option on the menu, billed as branzino, the Mediterranean sea bass. I wanted to slap Carmelo's hand for that, because what was actually served is Chilean sea bass--a fish I have a political problem with. I don't like it, either, because most chefs (this one included) don't cook it as much as it needs to be. Which is more than a typical fish.
A little Moscato-flavored semifreddo brought up the rear of the dinner, with a Moscato wine alongside. But the party was nowhere near breaking up. One of the guests was an adept musician, and played first his guitar and then Carmelo's piano. His table had a sing-along going on, which I would have gladly joined had he played anything I enjoy singing. He and the people at that table proved once again that the all-time hardest pop song to sing is Hey Jude.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
