Eating my words

Well, it seems I may owe Kate McEachern an apology.

In my Best Food Moments of 2009 post, while extolling the virtues of my awesome Italian buttercream frosting, I challenged Ms. Cupkate to a Bobby Flay-style Throwdown.

Of course, I did this before actually tasting one of her cupcakes. Oops.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Bay Area street food scene, a bit of an introduction.  As implied by the clever name, Cupkates is a mobile cupcakery founded by Kate McEachern, who baked as a hobby in her student years at UC Berkeley. After an internship at Chez Panisse, which McEachern describes herself as "quite possibly the worst intern in the program’s history," she went on to a successful publishing career - serving as managing editor of Dwell magazine for several years then moving on ChefsBest, a company dedicated to sensory tasting - before starting Cupkates last year. Now she drives around Berkeley in an awesome polka-dotted truck (converted from a mail truck) selling her tasty treats to college kids, foodies and everyone else in between.

Earlier this week, Cupkates rolled out a new flavor: salted caramel. Now, salt + caramel = one of my most favorite taste combinations in the world, so I was eager to try one. I caught up with the van on a stop at 10th and Heinz Streets in Berkeley and ordered up a couple to bring home for dessert. It's only a minor miracle that I was able to keep myself from devouring them before that evening.

They were worth the wait.

I think this is quite possibly the best cupcake I've ever had in my life. I don't know why, but I was expecting the cake itself to be vanilla flavored. Maybe because I eat salted caramel often as an ice cream topping and it's always with vanilla ice cream. The cake turned out be chocolate, and it turned out be wonderful: moist, spongy, flavorful but not overwhelming. And the salt. Wow, I just can't tell you how much I loved the salt. I don't know what kind it was. The grains were larger than kosher salt - they almost resembled tiny flecks of coconut - and the flavor was more complex.  And it just complemented the sweetness of the caramel frosting just perfectly.  I can't wait to get back to Cupkate's to try some of her other flavors - s'mores, Twinkie and her signature red velvet.

In the meantime, perhaps I'll work on upping my cupcake baking skills before I go mouthing off again. I actually still think my frosting can hold its own; it's just the cake part that needs developing. But I do like a good challenge - and now I have a standard to work up to.

On another note entirely - what do you think about the new template? I checked out some free Blogger template sites but they had so many choices, I got overwhelmed and just went with a different stock one.  Remember, I'm a Libra and I have a hard time making decisions.  I'd love to hear your feedback on whether this one or the previous one looks better. Thanks!


The deets: Cupkates mobile bakery, various locations in Berkeley. Check the website at www.cupkatesbakery.com or follow on Twitter @cupkatestruck to find locations and times.

Give us our daily bread

As you probably already know, I love pizza. And one of the reasons I love pizza so much is because I love bread, and what is pizza but bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it? Mark and I are fortunate to live in an area where there are many artisan bakeries like Acme, Semifreddi, Arizmendi and La Farine turning out fine products. And while I like to have a loaf always on hand, it's difficult because they go stale within a day or two. A couple of years ago I found a great 'almost no-knead' bread recipe in Cooks Illustrated which we used a fair amount for awhile. The two problems with that particular recipe for me were a) it required a small amount of beer, which we didn't always have on hand, and b) even though you only had to knead it a little, it required at least eight hours of resting time, which meant that you had to plan ahead if you wanted a fresh loaf of bread.

For Christmas this year, I got Mark a book called "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" by Dr. Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. This book is the real deal, folks. You will not believe how easy it is to make your own bread at home, without a fancy machine, without even so much as a stand mixer. All you need is water, salt, yeast, flour, a wooden spoon to mix it with and a container big enough to store the dough. Oh, and a pizza peel and pizza stone helps, too.

The idea behind "bread in five minutes a day" is that you make a large batch of dough and keep it in the fridge. Anytime you want a fresh loaf of bread, you just cut yourself off a piece of dough, let it rest for a bit (between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on what you're making), throw it in the oven and voila! Fresh bread, and it only took you five minutes of active working time to shape the loaf. 

No kidding, this book has been a game changer. We make pizza at home at least once a week. No longer do we have to make a special trip to Trader Joe's or the Pasta Shop to pick up pizza dough. No waiting for four hours of rising time like traditional pizza dough recipes. No more 'slumming it' with plain old sandwich bread when we want an accompaniment to a pasta dish. And because we can control the size of the loaves we make, no more baguettes turning into bricks after three days and going to waste.

A few people have asked for the bread recipe, so I'm going to post it here. But please don't let that stop you from purchasing this wonderful book. You'll need it to get the recipes for all of the other variations you can do: baguettes, ciabatta, batards, bagels, brioche, even cinnamon rolls and beignets all can be made in the comfort of your own kitchen.

The Master Recipe: Boule (artisan free form loaf)

Makes four 1-pound loaves

3 cups lukewarm water
1 1/2 tablespoons granulated yeast (any kind)
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
6 1/2 cups unsifted, unbleached all-purpose white flour
corn meal for the pizza peel

Mixing and Storing the Dough

1. Warm the water to approximately 100 degrees F. Using warm water will rise the dough in about two hours. Cold water works also but the rising time will be longer - three to four hours.

2. Add yeast and salt in a five-quart bowl, or a resealable, lidded plastic food container. Don't worry about getting it to dissolve.

3. Mix in the flour. KNEADING IS UNNECESSARY. Mix with a wooden spoon until the mixture is uniformly moist, without dry patches.

4. Allow to rise. Cover with a lid (not airtight) that fits well to the container that you're using. (I use a plastic Tuppeware-like container, and I place the lid on it but DON'T seal the lid.) Do not use screw topped bottles or Mason jars as they could explode from the gasses being trapped. Allow the mixture to rise at room temperature until it begins to collapse (or flattens on the top), approximately two hours. You can start using it anytime after this period, but the dough is easier to work with when cold - so it's recommended to refrigerate it for at least three hours the first time you make it.

On Baking Day

5. Shape the loaf. First, sprinkle the pizza peel with cornmeal to prevent the loaf from sticking to it when you slide it into the oven. If you don't have a pizza peel, parchment paper will work too. Sprinkle the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour. Then pull up and cut off a one-pound piece (about the size of a grapefruit) with a serrated knife. Add a little more flour to the piece so it doesn't stick to your hands. Gently stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on all four sides, rotating the ball a quarter turn as you go. DO NOT KNEAD! The bottom of the dough will look like a collection of bunched ends, but it will flatten out later so don't worry about it. The correctly shaped final product will be smooth and cohesive.

6. Rest the loaf and let it rise on a pizza peel. Allow to rest for about 40 minutes (it does not need to be covered).  You will probably not see much rise during this period.

7. Twenty minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F, with a baking stone placed in the center rack. Place an empty broiler tray for holding water on any other shelf that won't interfere with the rising bread.

8. When the bread is done resting, dust the top of the loaf liberally with flour, then slash a 1/4 inch deep cross or tic tac toe pattern into the top with a serrated bread knife.

9. After a 20 minute preheat, you're ready to bake (even though your oven might not be up to the full temperature yet). With a quick forward jerking motion of the wrist, slide the loaf of the pizza peel and on to the baking stone. Quickly and carefully pour one cup of water into the broiler pan and shut the oven as quickly as possible to trap the steam. Bake for about 30 minutes or until the crust is nicely browned and firm to the touch. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

10. Store the remaining dough in the refrigerator in your lidded (but not airtight) container and use it over the next 14 days. Even one day's worth of storage improves the flavor and texture of the bread. When you've used up all the dough, DON'T wash the storage container. Mix your next batch directly into the same container. The aged dough stuck to the sides of it will give your new batch a head start on sourdough flavor. Just scrape it down and incorporate into the new dough.

And there you have it, kids. Quick, simple and very inexpensive. We graduated from boule to baguettes, and I've even made bagels a couple of times (the second batch turned out much better than the first). We plan to experiment with the olive oil dough recipe next time out and at some point I hope to be turning out some bakery quality cinnamon rolls. You can do all this too...but you'll need to buy the book first to get the details.

Food for Thought: The Tops of 2009

Recently, my friend and Twitter sister (aka "Twister") Diane Denmark challenged me to come up with my five culinary highlights of 2009. This required a bit of thought and contemplation. I suppose that one good thing about having a blog is that in 2010 I'll be writing these things down so I don't forget them. Since I didn't start this until 2009 was almost over, I had to do some reaching back into the data banks of my brain, which can be a bit of a dicey proposition as I get older and head toward the cliff of  senility. I did remember a few more than five and whittled them down. These are in no particular order because choosing a favorite food moment for someone who loves to eat as much I do (and also happens to be a Libra) is difficult. Almost as difficult Sophie's choice (except without the Nazis, death and lifelong guilt.)

Probably the easiest way to start off is the last meal I had in 2009: eVe in Berkeley. You can (and probably already have) read my entire rave on it in my last blog post, so I won't go into too much more detail here. The food is unique, the presentation is gorgeous, the chef-owners are truly passionate about what they're doing. I wish them all the best as they gain footing here in the intensely competitive Bay Area dining scene.

As eVe is a totally 'avant garde' dining experience, Ike's Place in San Francisco is totally the opposite. It's a sandwich shop, and a very tiny one at that. But the sandwiches are AMAZING. Actually, I can only speak about one sandwich - the Super Wario - because I love it so much I can't bear to order anything else, even though there are many other things on the menu that sound delish.  So what is a Super Wario and what makes it so darn spectacular? It's a meatball sandwich with marinara sauce. Right now, you're probably thinking, "yawn, what's so special about that?" Well, for starters, it comes with fried mozzarella sticks INSIDE the sandwich.  Yes, you heard me correctly. Give that a moment to sink in. Fried Mozzarella Sticks INSIDE the sandwich. Freakin' YUM. Secondly, the meatballs are vegan. And you're probably going, "wait -vegan meatballs? How can that be good?" Trust me, it is. Because they don't taste like vegan meatballs. This is the most realistic tasting fake meat I've ever had, and believe me: I've eaten a lot of fake meat. (Thanks, vegetarian boyfriend!) So here you have all of the yumminess of the Super Mario (which is what the real meat version of this sandwich is called) without all the guilt. It's a win-win situation! Granted, the sandwiches at Ike's are not cheap and they do take awhile to make, but you get what you pay for.  They take so long to make because they don't bake the bread until after you order your sandwich. You can't get much more fresh than that. Plus they are pretty damn huge. I can only half a sandwich in one sitting, so for my $9.99 I also get lunch for the next day. Which makes it not too bad of a deal after all. Also, they give you a free lollipop with every order, and you know how I like my lagniappes.

Of course, as a pizzaphile, I have to have at least one pizza moment in my top five for the year. But which one? There were so many.  There was the first time at Flour + Water, where the fried peppers were completely addicting and the chocolate budino blew us out of the water.  There was our first pizza from Emilia's in Berkeley, which you can read about here. And there was the goat cheese and fresh strawberry pizza at Pauline's that solidified it as my favorite pizza place in the city. In the end, I decided that the honor should go to our first visit to Pizzeria Picco in Larkspur. In 2007, I had read a little blurb on Picco in the AAA Magazine, of all places.  The article quoted Mario Batali as saying that Picco had the best pizza in the country, and when Molto Mario speaks, I listen.  The thing that initially intrigued me the most about Picco, though, wasn't the pizza. It was the ice cream. Picco chef/owner Bruce Hill was the first person (at least around here, anyway) to pair vanilla soft serve with olive oil and sea salt. Nowadays, it's a pretty common dessert for the upscale pizzerias, but this AAA story was the first time I'd heard of such a thing. They even ran a photo of it -which I clipped out and posted on my refrigerator for the next two years until I actually got to go to the place. It wasn't until this past April that we finally made the pilgrimage to Picco, on our way home from wine tasting in the Russian River area. I wished that I had made the effort to get there sooner. Dinner at Pizzeria Picco pretty much embodies the ideal pizza dining experience to me and Mark: a nice salad made with organic greens, a perfectly made wood-fired oven pizza and Straus Family Creamery soft serve for dessert. The pizza here is just how we like it; thin crust with a some blistering and a bit of chewiness to it, and quality toppings that go well together. Both the red sauce and white pizzas are excellent. And dessert, simple as it may be, is a must have. Sometimes if we are truly undecided, we get it with olive oil on one half and caramel on the other. Even though it took us two years to get there for the first time, we've been back twice since and it's never disappointed.

One of the things I will always remember about 2009 is the emergence of street food as a cultural and culinary phenomenon in the Bay Area. Of course, street food is nothing new. I have a lasting memory of incredibly tasty kebab I got from a street cart on my first-ever trip to New York City, and one of my favorite things about Thailand was that you could get a totally satisfying plate of Pad Thai for about 25 cents on just about any street corner. But here anything other than a hot dog & pretzel cart or a taco truck was very difficult to find...until 2009, when street carts exploded. By most accounts, the catalyst for the San Francisco street cart movement was Brian Kimball (aka The Magic Curry Man), a 34-year old therapist who worked with kids in the Tenderloin. He was looking for a way to make some extra money. He had taken a cooking class in Thailand and came up with the idea of selling curry for $5 a pop on the street. On his first trip out (on March 6, 2009) he invited 10 friends. It went well, so the following week he invited his Facebook friends. Twenty people showed up, one person tweeted about it. More people showed up, more tweets ensued and a phenomenon was born. Brian was later joined in the business by his brother Curtis, who serves up creme brulee in his cart, and several others who picked up on the idea, including Adobo Hobo, Wholesome Bakery, Pizza Hacker, Bike Basket Pies and Sexy Soup Cart. The one problem with all this street food action (at least for me, anyway) was that it was taking place in San Francisco and I live in Oakland. There was a street food festival that took place over the summer in the Mission which we tried to go to, but it was kind of a disaster.  The lines were ridiculously long and most of the vendors had sold out of food by the time we got there. So I was really pretty excited to hear about the Eat Real Festival, which would be bringing street food to my side of the bay. Some of the people involved in organizing Eat Real had worked on Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco last year. While the $65 price tag had prevented us form taking part in most of Slow Food Nation, Mark and I did at least get to experience the Victory Garden they planted in front of City Hall and the farmer's market they held there (which were both free). We were a bit worried that it might turn out to be a clusterf*%& like the one in the city, but it turns out that worry was for naught. Eat Real was infinitely better organized and run. For starters, it was a three-day event instead of just one afternoon. We ended up going twice: on Friday for Beer and Ice Cream Night and Saturday for everything else. Since I don't drink alcohol the beer held no attraction for me, but I am all about ice cream. And pretty much all of the great ice cream shops/brands were there: Fenton's, Bi-Rite, Ici, Straus Family Creamery, Laloo's, Gelateria Naia and probably a few that I'm forgetting. I really wished I could have tried them all. But I am glad I had the one I did because it was amazing and unique:  the lemon shiso sorbet from Scream.  For the uninitiated, shiso (also known as perilla or beefsteak plant) is an herb (related to mint and basil) which is a staple in Japanese cooking. It's what gives umeboshi its pink color and is sometimes used in sushi restaurants as garnish. It's a flavor I've grown up with my whole life, but you don't really see it used outside of Japanese cuisine. I wish I could describe exactly what it tastes like but all I can come up with is it tastes like shiso, which is entirely unhelpful. Go get some umeboshi and you'll know for yourself. Anyway, it worked wonderfully with the tartness of the lemon. We returned early the following day and pretty much gorged ourselves. I finally had the opportunity to try the Creme Brulee Cart after following him on Twitter and being sad because I was never anywhere near to where he was going to be. (It was pretty good but not as impressive as I'd hoped.) The main find of Saturday was Jon's Street Eats, who's become my favorite street food vendor on this side of the bay. Jon is Jon Kosorek, formerly of Spoon in San Anselmo, who went mobile after financing for a brick-and-mortar restaurant fell through. That day, Jon was serving up BLATs (bacon, lettuce, avocado and tomato) made with house-cured bacon and freshly pulled mozzarella and heirloom tomato salads. Everything Jon makes is top-notch and so restaurant-quality that it's hard to believe he operates out of a truck. Then again, his set-up is a lot fancier than just a simple push cart; he's got a full-on brand new mobile kitchen. Fortunately for me, Jon sets up in Emeryville on Tuesdays and Thursdays not too far from my house - so when I'm fortunate enough to have one of those days off, I like to head down there and get lunch. Jon makes killer duck tacos with pomegranate and a fabulous patty melt. Everything he makes is seasonal and the menu changes weekly so I just keep having to go back and try the new items.

Well, it wouldn't be right to have a top five food moment list and not include something I made. There were several worthy candidates, but in the end I decided I was most proud of the Italian buttercream frosting I made. My BFF from high school, Ann, is a serious baker. She would literally bake thousands of cookies every Christmas to give out to friends and co-workers. This year, she got interested in cupcakes and brought me a few to sample. The cake part was good, but the frosting was the best I'd ever tasted. It seemed so light and airy, you could almost believe that it wasn't bad for you. Then I found out that there was a pound and a half of butter in the recipe. No wonder it tasted good, but how did it get so light and fluffy? The secret: egg whites. You make a meringue out of egg whites and add sugar and water that's been heated to 250 degrees, then add cold butter.  It sounds simple enough, but it's a process that requires a lot of precision and a strong attention to detail. If you over beat the egg whites by even just a few seconds or let any of the sugar crystallize on the side of the saucepan, you could ruin the whole thing. For my birthday this year, Ann gave me a frosting lesson (complete with my very own pastry bag and tips). She ran through the recipe one time with me watching, then I got to do it myself with her supervising.  The results were outstanding.  Since then I've become quite the frosting snob. I would honestly put my frosting up with any of the cupcake bakeries around here. Does Cupkates or Kara's want to go toe-to-toe with me? Didn't think so. :)  An added coolness factor to the Italian Buttercream story: a couple months back celebrity chef Rick Bayless (one of my favorites)  tweeted about how he was really loving Italian meringue right now. I felt pretty proud of myself that a) I knew what he was talking about and b) that I had made it before myself. I even tweeted him about a difference in our techniques and he actually direct messaged me back. So Italian meringue is entirely responsible for my one brief electronic encounter with a famous chef. That alone should be reason enough to make my top five best food moments of the year.

I'm sure 2010 will bring many more memorable food moments, and I look forward to sharing them with you here as they unfold.

Rockin' New Year's eVe

New Year's Eve is one of those nights where it seems imperative to have spectacular, fun-filled plans. For the past couple of years, Mark and I have gone to some pretty cool parties - one smallish one and one really big one. The only problem with going out on NYE is that it leaves us little (or no) energy for the big party on New Year's Day - the Space Cowboys' annual throw-down known as Breakfast of Champions. The virtues of BOC are many - it goes all day (from 6 am to 9 pm), it's cheap ($10), the music is great, and many of our friends are usually there. And let's not forget the *really* important thing: free bacon. This year there was the added bonus of a change of venue to Kelly's Mission Rock, out near AT&T Park, which features easy public trans and gorgeous water views.

The last two years, we were either too tired from staying up all night to make it very far into BOC, or we didn't make it at all. This year we decided to do something different and keep it low-key on New Year's Eve so we would have energy to go all day on the first. We decided to do what we do best: eat well.

I had recently read about the opening of a new restaurant in Berkeley called eVe that sounded really interesting. The owners, husband and wife team Christopher and Veronica Laramie, are both Le Cordon Bleu Paris graduates and recently relocated here from Colorado to open eVe. Their website describes the cuisine as 'avant garde.' This totally piqued our interest because last year, Mark got me the Alinea cookbook for Christmas. Alinea is a restaurant in Chicago started by Grant Achatz, a French Laundry alum and winner of the 2008 James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Chef, who is at the forefront of molecular gastronomy. The Alinea menu features such mind-blowing items as a PB&J made out of a peeled grape with the stem still attached, encapsulated in peanut butter and wrapped in a tiny piece of baguette. Since we are probably never going to make it to Chicago, and the only other avant garde restaurant I know in the Bay Area (Daniel Patterson's Coi) is out of our price range, eVe is our best bet for trying experimental cuisine.

All courses at eVe are $11, which makes the math of eating there rather easy. There's a three course pre-fixe for $33 or a five course one for $55. Or you can just order a la carte in whichever order you want. Want to start with dessert and end with a starter? No problem. For New Year's Eve, they were offering a five course pre-fixe with a small bottle of Champagne for $65 - so pretty much normal prices on a night when most places were jacking things way up. This kind of sealed the deal for us. Plus, what could be more appropriate than celebrating New Year's Eve at a place called eVe?

The restaurant is located on a block of University Avenue (between Martin Luther King and Milvia) that's undergoing a culinary makeover - all spurred on by Christopher Blue's Chocolatier Blue, which opened there a year and a half ago. It turns out that Blue worked with Veronica Laramie at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, and he told the couple to check out the vacant space two doors down from his place. The block is also home to Octoberfeast, which makes Bavarian-inspired bread products (including an incredibly yummy-sounding pretzel croissant that I haven't tried yet, but must) and a Greek joint called Athineon. At least I know where I'm going the next time I get my oil changed at the Firestone on Milvia and University.

The first thing that strikes me about eVe is that it's tiny. Only 28 seats in the place, which makes for an intimate dining experience. The second thing that it's much more brightly lit than I expected. Somehow when I hear 'avant garde,' I also expect dimly lit and ultra modern. While the furnishings and color scheme (one bright green wall in the back juxtaposed against three whites ones) are modern, the lighting is more like what you would expect in the hole-in-the-wall Thai place down the street. I later overhear a customer say something to one of the owners about the lighting, and I am pretty sure I heard him say was that the lights aren't dimmable because they're CFLs. So if that's the case, good on them for caring more about the environment than the aesthetics. Ultimately, people will come for the food, not the decor, anyway. The thing that I like the best about the space is that the kitchen is right out in the open, in the back of the restaurant. And luckily for us, our table was right next to the kitchen. Now, some people may think that being put back near the kitchen is a bad place to be, but I love it there. I like being close to where the magic happens.



And there is all kinds of magic happening at eVe. The first course is a single Kumamoto oyster topped with yuzu, cucumber and cilantro, and accompanied by a tiny glass of mahi mahi ceviche and taro. I am not a huge oyster person, so I haven't much to say about that part other than it tasted like an oyster. The mahi mahi, however, was delicious. Just the right balance of saltiness and tang from the lime. We were off to a good start.

After the first course, our first round of bread arrived: house-made little potato rolls with butter whipped so light it almost seemed like it wasn't bad for you. The rolls were warm and just the right size as to tide you over to the next course but not so big as to interfere with your appetite. And fresh ones would make an appearance between all the savory courses.



Course #2 paired a sous-vide egg on a bed of leek, an oyster mushroom steak and a mushroom consomme topped with a parmesan tuille. Sous-vide (French for "under vacuum") is a method of cooking in which the ingredients are cooked in airtight plastic bags under water which is heated to well below boiling at a very low temperature for a very long time. The theory is that this method best allows the ingredients to maintain their integrity through the cooking process. To my knowledge, it was the first time I'd eaten a sous-vide anything. The egg, which had the appearance of a poached one, was the creamiest I've ever had. I never even thought of an egg as something that could be described as creamy, other than the chocolate ones you get at Easter with the sugary filling. The oyster mushroom had a very meaty texture, which Mark loved because it's probably about as close to steak as he's ever going to get. And the Parmesan tuille was just heaven in a little crispy, salty wafer. Sometimes when we cook with Parmesan we get little bits of burnt cheese in the pan and we fight over who gets to 'clean up' the cheese. The tuille is just like that. Basically, it *is* just that, only on purpose and not by accident, and much more pretty.



Course #3 was so artfully presented that it almost seemed a shame to eat it. Almost - but since it was the lobster course and lobster's one of my favorite foods, it really was not that difficult. The plating featured a small piece of lobster tail in the center, surrounded by one lobster-filled ravioli, a slice of citrus, braised leeks, Pernod foam and an encapsulated olive. Encapsulated, meaning it wasn't an actual olive. But it looked like an olive and was filled with liquid that tasted like an olive
and certainly made you believe it was an olive - albeit the creamiest olive you ever had in your entire life. And 'olive,' much like 'egg,' is a word that doesn't usually go with 'creamy.' See? I told you molecular gastronomy was like magic.



And then just when I thought it couldn't get any better, course #4 arrived: duck with farro, parsnips and prunes. I think that whomever invented the word 'succulent' did so after having a bite of this duck. Holy moly, it was fabulous: a bit on the rare side with a beautiful ridge of carmelized fat. The tartness of the prune was a good accompaniment to the richness of the duck. I'm sure the other stuff on the plate was tasty too, but I was too enthralled with the perfection of the duck to pay too much attention to anything else.



I ask you, is there a more perfect way to end a decadent meal than with dark chocolate? I didn't think so, and Veronica Laramie agrees. And like all of the other dishes at eVe, dessert is a riot of contrasting and complimentary flavors. A rich, dark chocolate ganache is topped with tart passion fruit seeds and accompanied by sweet bananas and ridiculously decadent black truffle ice cream. It's one of those dishes that is so good, you want a taste of everything in every bite - and you don't want it to end.




But like all good things, this most excellent New Year's Eve dinner had to come to an end. At least this one came with parting gifts. We were each presented with a little pound cake (wrapped in cellophane with a thank you note attached) to take home. Quite a sweet touch. Unfortunately, the cake itself was a bit underwhelming. It was a tad on the dry side, but nothing a quick dip into a cup of coffee didn't cure. And it's not like I'm going to complain about the completely free bonus item I wasn't even expecting. That's like finding a dollar on the ground and grumbling that it wasn't a five spot.

As you can tell from the pictures, the portion sizes are small. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We were completely satisfied with our five courses. Not stuffed, but happy. We have a tendency to order more food than we need just because it sounds good - and then we eat it because it's there, even though we're already full. So the forced portion control was good for us. Though I would warn you that if you're looking for a place where you can stuff yourself into a food coma, this isn't it.

A quick word about the service. As eVe is a tiny restaurant, so is the staff. There are four of them: the two chefs, one waiter and one dishwasher. On the night we were there, the dishwasher didn't show up, so the other three had to pick up the slack. There was a bit of a lag time between courses, but it wasn't so noticeable as to be annoying. It just gave you more time to savor what you just ate and to build up anticipation for the next course. I'm not sure if it was just for the evening or if this is a regular occurrence, but the chef came by our table with each course to tell us what everything was. It was a really nice, personal touch - and it shows how much he cares about what he's doing.

Our dinner took a little over two hours, and we savored every minute of it. We left eVe knowing that we had made the right decision of how to spend the evening. We may have opened the new decade with Breakfast of Champions, but the last night of 2009 was all about eVe.

The deets: eVe, 1960 University Avenue, Berkeley. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 5:30 to 10:00 p.m. Phone: 510.868.0735. On the web at www.eve-restaurant.com. Vegetarians or those with dietary restrictions are encouraged to call ahead and let them know, so they can accommodate you. Menu changes almost daily.