What kind of restaurant is it that cuts a tomato, puts it on a plate with maybe a wedge of cheese and a sprinkle of sea salt and charges $20 for the privilege? Yes, the tomato may have been grown in the restaurant’s own garden and the cheese came from the farm down the road and perhaps they even harvested the salt flakes by hand from the shore but still, could we really call this cuisine?
California cuisine. That’s what they called it. A generation of chefs - Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman and their like who introduced the world to the idea of putting vegetables on a plate from a farm down the road and called it cuisine. Surely this could not represent a distinct style of cooking, not when there were French mother sauces and Italian pasta, Cantonese dim sum and Vietnamese noodle soups. These were dishes born of cuisines, evolved over centuries that required time and labor and balance of flavor, not simply the good fortune to live in a place where the land is fertile and the sun always shines.
Then there is the wine. How many over-priced California cabs and chardonnays treated with wood chips to the point of tasting like cup of melted butter must people drink before they realize there is literally a world of wine out there, most of it far more affordable and of higher quality than what is being pushed in most fancy Napa tasting rooms?
At least, that is what I thought twenty years ago, desperate to move away from the California of my childhood. Not the Hollywood sparkle, beach tanned California of most people’s imaginations, but the strip mall scarred, brown crusted hills of the interior. Hemet, my hometown, was a mecca of citrus production in the early 1900’s, part of a “second gold rush” in the Inland Empire. By the time I came around, this once promised land was reduced to a few remaining farms and a bedroom community of lower middle-class workers.
Sometimes you need to leave to appreciate what you had. In the last two decades I’ve lived in New York (twice), Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. Along the way, first with friends or alone, then with my husband, I have lived out of a suitcase for months on end, from camping in the Namibian desert to hiking in the Tibetan mountains of Yunnan, China. Along the way I’ve eaten Bánh Xèo cooked on an open fire by teachers at an elementary school in the Mekong Delta and I’ve sat down to four-hour 3 Michelin star French dinners in crystal dripping dining rooms in Hong Kong.
Now 2023, I’m back in California, happy to call it home.
Here’s the thing, it is really hard to talk about food in California without falling back on cliches - the Land of Plenty, Garden of Eden – especially when you have experienced the alternative. For the eight years I lived in Hong Kong I would pay $6 for the privilege of a slightly wilted bunch of kale flown in from Australia. In California, I can buy four crisp bunches of organic lacinato, red, or classic green kale for the same price. It is grown down the road. Even Walmart sells it.
And yet, California is not just produce on a plate. Where I live now, in San Diego, in addition to the proximity to Mexico and the large Latin American population, the county is home to the second largest population of Iraqis and the largest Filipino community in the United States. With this diversity of people comes a multitude of cooking traditions, each with access to amazing fruits and vegetables, high quality meats, and incredible seafood.
The wine scene has changed a lot too. I’m happy to find wines I’ve tasted on my travels and living abroad back here in California at wine shops that care to showcase a wide variety of quality producers from around the world. At the same time, though the big names in Napa and Sonoma will remain at a price point not available to most, young winemakers, often trained at the big houses, are finding ways to redefine California wine on their own terms, for a new generation of wine drinkers.
That’s a small taste of what I hope to explore in this weekly newsletter. If you live in California, I hope this will inspire you to take advantage of all this great state has to offer and make it your own. If you live elsewhere, I hope you can live vicariously through the food and wine in these pages, much of which you can recreate where you are. And when you get a chance, come visit. The tomatoes really are that good.
And because sometimes there is nothing better than a tomato on a plate, a no-recipe recipe using the best of summer’s tomatoes.
Pan con Tomate
Take two, medium to large ripe tomatoes, the best you can find. Grate them on a large box grater into a bowl. Add a good glug of extra virgin olive oil, then stir in some flaky sea salt and pepper to taste.
Heat a grill (you can do this in the oven too) over medium-high. Take sourdough bread and cut into thick slices. Brush bread on both sides with olive oil. Grill on both sides until lightly charred. Arrange on platter in a single layer. Rub each slice with a cut piece of raw garlic. Liberally spoon tomato mixture over each slice of bread. Top if desired with additional drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of sea salt. Feeling a little extra? Top with thinly shaved Manchego cheese or sliced serrano jamon (highly recommend you get the jamon freshly sliced from your deli counter, a world of difference versus the pre-sliced charcuterie which tends to be too thick and dried out).
To Drink…
Fresh tomatoes have a lot of acidity. Best to pair like with like and find a crisp, stony, saline white wine. Options abound in this category. I’m going to keep it Spanish with an Albariño from the spiritual home of the grape in Rias Baixas. If topped with jamon or cheese, the Pan con Tomate can handle a little bit more body like with this Granbazan Etiqueta Ambar 2021. The nose brims with tropical fruit and yuzu, with a steely, mineral finish. The juice spends 5 months on the lees (also called sur lie - dead yeast cells and grape fragments that settle to the bottom of the barrel during wine making) giving this Albariño a bit more complexity that your typical bottle.
Granbazan Etiqueta Ambar 2021 is widely available in the United States. $24.99 from Wine Connection in San Diego.
Love this! My new favourite read … California is one of my ‘must live there’ places. So between now and then, this will do very nicely to give me a taste 😁
I love fresh tomatos. I had two plants last year. One was cherry tomatoes. Not a single cherry tomato made it into the house. I ate every one of them right off the plant washed with water from our garden hose. And I’m still alive to write this. 😊