A Writer's Best Quotes of 2009

Bill Luchsinger, artist
“All art, all higher functions of the mind, is about time - our wish to control it, to stop it, to understand its triumph over all that we do.”

Dr. Dan Gervich, infectious disease specialist at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines

“ It’s as if Staphylococcus aureus were trained to understand human behavior and vulnerability. They gravitate to the end of the nose, between the legs and under the arms — great places to colonize. It loves serum and blood. That’s what we feed it in labs. Once it finds its way to them — even through floor burns or tiny abrasions — it celebrates. Bacteria are promiscuous, I’d even say bestial. Other species share genetic material with them, extra chromosomal DNA. Within that suitcase lurks resistance to much more than what’s obvious.”

Dr. Tara Smith, the University of Iowa doctor who unleashed MRSA on the mainstream media, and who has also been working on Streptococcus suis, a pathogen of swine which causes a rapidly fatal disease in neonatal piglets as well as sporadic disease in humans with meningitis, a common manifestation.

“All are zoonotic infections — microbes that can be transmitted between animals and humans. HIV has become established in the human population, and the animal reservoir is no longer needed to maintain transmission to humans. With E. coli O157 and ST398 (the “pig” MRSA), animals still seem to be the primary reservoir for these microbes, and humans become infected upon contact with the animals themselves or with contaminated food.”

Mike Callicrate, maverick cattle rancher and bane to Big Ag

“If we can get PAMTA (Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, a bill now in Congress and supported by President Obama that would end the prophylactic use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture) passed it’s the end of the CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) - because CAFO’s can’t exist without massive antibiotics. Without CAFO’s, all the other problems - human rights, animal rights, water pollution, environemental abuses, health issues - improve by leaps and bounds.”

John Phillip Davis, painter

Speaking about himself and three contemporary painters -


“We’re packaged quite differently but we are all afflicted with the same fetish - to make that which we love making and to figure a way to live off our labor.”

Michael Brangoccio, painter whose subjects frequently defy the laws of physics, with floating elephants and grounded birds.


“Floating is nearly always about grace, that unearned quality that just happens if you are in the right state.”

Tara Donovan, sculptor

“My attraction to materials and to their quantities comes from how they absorb and reflect light. I don’t see a straw, I see a tubular construction that sucks light. I work as much as a scientist as an artist. It’s all a process of experiment and discovery for me.”

Monterey - Sicily of the Seven Seas

Sardine Dreams with Flipper Song

"Cannery Row is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” John Steinbeck

Like many baby boomers, I read John Steinbeck in junior high school, which is now known as middle school. That’s not all the only thing that changed. During my lifetime, California truly became the “Golden State,” the place where American dreams came true. With its hallowed golf courses and artsy beach communities with movie star mayors, Steinbeck’s stomping grounds in Monterey Bay became the personification of such dreams. Yet Steinbeck’s books were always there to remind me that such prosperity was built on backs of our ancestors‘ hard struggles.

That writer is best remembered today for “Grapes of Wrath” in which Dust Bowl refugees form the backbone of Central California agriculture. But I was more drawn the characters in his Monterey stories, “Cannery Row” and “Sweet Thursday,” that reified Chinese Californians. When my parent’s generation was still segregated within Chinatown enclaves, Steinbeck was creating fully assimilated Chinese characters. When most Americans still regarded Chinese Americans with suspicion, Cannery Row’s Lee Chong projected epitomic American values like industriousness and generosity.

I was also drawn to those Monterey stories by my own fascination with the coast. Because I grew up in inner city Oakland, the ocean represented my American dream. Our “family vacations” were day trips to see the beach in places like Santa Cruz and Monterey. We kids barely had time to get our bare feet sandy before we had to pile back in Dad’s car and head back to our Chinatown restaurant.

After I began traveling with bi polar bear Wroburlto, Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley: In Search of America” became a spiritual guidebook for us, even though Steinbeck’s dog never went through the wild mood swings my honeybear does. So, when Wro told me he wanted to visit Cannery Row in Monterey, I figured it was time to pay respects to our great mentor. Fortunately, Monterey makes that easy.

Ocean View Avenue, the setting of most of Steinbeck’s Monterey stories, has been renamed Cannery Row, despite the fact that the canneries there have pretty much been closed for business for half a century. If his book had not immortalized that industry, Monterey’s canneries would be as little remembered today as the horseless carriages or steamboats that also thrived during the fish canning era. Like most things Californian, Monterey has re-invented itself. Cannery Row is now a family-friendly, OSHA-approved, five star theme park where Steinbeck plays like background piano music. Tourist shops sells his books and T-shirts. The canneries’ distinctive skywalk passageways have been restored to make the avenue look like it did in the days when the book was written.

I doubt the novelist would recognize the place today though. In his books, this was a de facto skid row while Monterey’s uphill real estate was the dominion of respectability. Today, Cannery Row is some of the choicest oceanfront property in America. Like the book’s hero Doc, contemporary Monterey embraces the ocean as if it were a lovable cartoon seal. The Monterey Aquarium has become an icon of California tourism anchoring a hotel, restaurant and boutique enterprise zone.

We considered two hotels for our trip - the Monterey Plaza Hotel (MPH) and The Clement. The town also has some delightful boutique inns in quieter parts of town (Pacific Hotel is my favorite) and some marvelous hotels linger in nearby Carmel. But Wro insisted that we stay in the middle of Cannery Row - where we could hear seals barking all night long. That left two top hotels to choose between, with personalities as different as Wro’s and mine, or as Wro’s and Wro’s. After checking them out, we devised a simple test to help others choose. Just ask yourself if you would feel more comfortable in Los Angeles or Honolulu.

The Clement projects bustling chic and big city cool - it reminds me of a W Hotel in the middle of say the Los Angeles Civic Center. Guests seem to be young and hip and busy. Its main restaurant, The C, is even named in W style. The Monterey Plaza Hotel is laid back, like a grand old hotel in Hawaii. We asked general manager Doug Phillips about that.

“All great hotels have a definite sense of place. After I visited this place the first time I fell instantly in love,” he related, before adding that he came to Monterey from Hawaii via the legendary Greenbriar resort in West Virginia.

“We encourage, we cultivate the Aloha spirit here,” he admitted, explaining how every employee we talked to somehow knew our names and walked with us to point out directions.

From our room we could see the entire Monterey Bay. I exploited Wro’s interest in that vista to teach him some of the local history. We took Monterey’s Walking Path of History along the bay shore to the Monterey Maritime Museum. I don’t think the museum will be too upset if I condense what we learned there amid their sardine boats and fish nets.

Monterey’s Melting Pot

Rumsien people lived in Monterey for thousands of years before the first Spanish visitors. Both were attracted to the same good food - rich fishing waters, fertile soil and abundant wildlife. Portuguese settlers from the Azore Islands began shore-whaling in Monterey Bay soon after Mexico lost California to the USA. That industry did well until kerosene made whale oil obsolete. Then Chinese settlers developed a new junk fishing industry around China Point where they dried and shipped their catch. They made too much money though. New laws and regulations soon forced the Chinese out of fishing for anything except squid, a commodity that no other ethnic group cared about. Plus, squid were fished at night when other boats were docked.

Anti-Chinese sentiments still continued to grow. A Chinatown in China Point (where Pacific Grove now borders new Monterey) burned down mysteriously and cops prevented the residents from returning to rebuild. The Chinese negotiated for a much smaller settlement, in much less desirable real estate along Ocean View Avenue, smack dab in the middle of what became Cannery Row. Without the Chinese, the canning industry likely would never have happened here because Asian fishing families provided the expertise of fish cutting and drying.

The Japanese introduced Americans to eating abalone and they thrived on its commercialization until the abalone were overfished. By the time the Chinese had been relocated by arson, salmon fishing had become profitable. Frank Booth established a canning industry on Ocean View Avenue in 1896. Norwegian Knut Hovden pumped things up with a new can sealing technology and Sicilian Pietro Ferrante revolutionized the industry with new nets, boats and knowledge about sardine fishing. Sardines and Sicilian fishermen dominated Monterey’s fishing industry until its demise after World War II.

Compared to Atlantic sardines, California sardines were huge, over 14 inches long. Salmon cans were never even downsized to fit sardines. The industry grew in World War I when tinned sardines became a popular battle ration. After that war, American tastes moved toward other things and California sardines were converted mostly into more profitable by-products. By the time the industry peaked, canning accounted for only a small percentage of the sardines fished here. Most of the sardine catch became feed for chickens and livestock, or oil for fertilizer.

The high water mark for Cannery Row was World War II when the US government again bought canned sardines for battle rations. That encouraged over fishing. Steinbeck’s book came out in the sardine’s banner year of 1945. The following year produced a frighteningly low catch. 1947 proved that was no fluke and that the conservationists, like Steinebck’s mythical Doc, had been right all along. The industry’s belief that sardines could never be over fished was exposed as tragic fallacy. Cannery Row became a ghost town within a decade.

Massaro & Santos

All that history made us very hungry. Because Sicily was settled by so many different ethnic groups, from French and Tunisians to Arabs and Greeks, its cuisine is richer and more diverse than that of any other part of Europe. I figured that Monterey’s long history of Sicilian settlers meant that it would be a hotbed for Sicilian restaurants. Wro believed that he was destined to meet a really “hot Sicilian“ chef.

However, we were told that Sicilian restaurants had been relegated to Monterey’s past. The closest thing we could find was Massaro & Santos, on the pier halfway between Old Monterey boardwalk and Cannery Row. Frank Massaro’s dad was full a Sicilian, so there was a connection, but Frank’s from Stockton. His story is more New Monterey, than Cannery Row.

“Dad told me, son, if you want to go into the restaurant business you need to get out of Stockton. I came here to bartend for the US Open (golf tournament) in 1972 and I never left,” he explained.

This 90 seat restaurant hangs over the water and puts one in the mood for seafood. We visited on a slow day, so Frank and chef Miguel Cortez, from the culinary town of Oaxaca, could sit down and talk to us.

On their advice, we tried “scalone” - a scallop and abalone cake covered with almonds and lemon butter, garlic and white wine sauce with a little cream.

We also enjoyed a squid salad that was big enough for four people. Sand dabs were a great $12 entree, with lots of pasta and fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, plus vegetables. One daily “special’ will remind us to always ask the price of “specials.” A blue nose bass was dryer and less exciting than the sand dabs and it was served with the exact same plating. It cost $27 though. More than double the most expensive entrée on the regular menu.

Decadent Otter Acts

We walked our lunch off on Cannery Row, ending up at the Monterey Aquarium, a place that had been rated “two thumbs way up” by my chief cultural advisers - preschoolers Maggie and Stella. On their recommendations, we timed our visit to include feeding times for both the otters and the penguins. That was great advice.

I remembered that naturalist Annie Dillard had written that one of her greatest voyeuristic joys was to have seen an otter in the decadent act of floating on his back. The Aquarium’s otters never got her memo about that being a rare act. They dive to the bottom of their three story tall tank to catch their dinner, then they bring it up to the surface and eat it while floating on their backs. We couldn’t get enough of that show.

The Aquarium puts the otters’ food (crabs, clams, kelp, sea urchins and sea stars) into toy-like food tubes that stimulate their natural behavior of working to get food out of shells. Otters have the thickest fur of all animals and we saw them hide food in their coats. They eat a quarter of their body weight each day and during an average day a sea otter spends about eight hours feeding, five to six hours grooming and eleven hours at leisure. A good job if you can get it.

Penguins by contrast only eat about 14 per cent of their weight, freeing up time for other things. Otters and penguins have vastly different parenting skills. An otter mother usually has one pup at a time. If she has twins, she abandons one of them. Penguins, maybe because they aren’t always eating, make better parents. We got a kick out of watching them, both moms and dads, protect their eggs, build their nests and teach their chicks to watch out for bears. ( Polar bears’ favorite food is penguin.) Penguin parents regurgitate their fish to feed their kids. We spent several hours at the Aquarium checking out cute critters and some fish canning history too.

Watching otters and penguins eat made us hungry, so we walked back down Cannery Row to the Monterey Plaza Hotel, only stopping for a few shopping distractions. After seeing souvenir photos of the real life people that served as Steinbeck‘s models for “Cannery Row” characters, Wro surprised me with the announcement that he was “over Mack and into Doc now.” I realized his decision was superficial, that Doc was modeled after handsome Ed Ricketts (Nick Nolte in the movie) and Mack’s model was the less attractive Gabe Bicknell (E. Emmett Walsh). But I’m happy for anything that makes Wro more interested in a scientist than a slacker party boy. I so hope this means he’s maturing.

The Duck Club

We usually like to get out of our hotels to dine but not in Monterey. The Duck Club in the MPH is a California treasure. I love chef James Waller’s story about how he was fated to be a chef.

“I came from a big family and I was one of the younger kids. Mom didn’t like to cook but, after the older kids moved on, she developed a fondness for going out to eat and taking the rest of us with her. We younger kids were really spoiled food wise,” he said.

The hotel is owned by same Alden family that owns Rodney Strong vineyard, so wine and food are closely paired here. Because the hotel sponsors the Aquarium’s “Cooking for Solutions” and “Seafood Watch” programs, The Duck Club hosts the Monterey Aquarium Seafood Challenge each year. James told us how one famous chef once brought the ecologically taboo blue fin tuna to that competition. It sounded like an honest mistake so I won’t tell on Roy.

Paying due diligence to a namesake, The Duck Club’s duck takes five days to prepare . Air-dried ducks are brined in soy sauce, jalapenos, coriander, sugar, orange and lemon juices. Actually, it’s more like a dipping than a brining - they take otter-like 8 hour naps between dives in the tank - twice a day for two days. Then they are cooked on wire racks and finished in wood burning ovens.

James Waller is an odd duck himself - a contented California chef. He’s been at the same job here for a dozen years now. New and flashy may be trendy, but I prefer tradition and good execution at the dinner table.

“Over 60 % of the hotel’s guests are long distance travelers, so we‘ve got to have calamari, crab cakes and local produce for them. That’s what they expect in Monterey. But our wood aroma is our signature,” Waller explained.

Of course, the wondrous ocean views are a signature too, at least if you dine as early as we did.

We watched the sun go down over diver scallops wrapped in pancetta, on beds of diced roasted beets plus roast spears of salsify with herbed lobster buerre blanc. Then we tried some Dungeness crab cakes with tempura asparagus, baby heirloom tomatoes and a drizzle of remoulade.

La Brea artisan breads are finished in the oven and add to the spirit of the hearth.

A smooth lobster bisque included some whole mussels and crème fraiche. Caesar salad tasted like anchovies, not anchovy flavoring. We asked for striped bass with an off-menu pairing of ginger carrot puree, micro sprouts, pomegranate reduction and wild mushrooms.

James is not one of those chefs who go nuts if you ask for such things. An entrée of Kobe short ribs, in Pinot Noir reduction, came with mashed potatoes, onion rings and mushrooms.

We ate so much that we could only share one dessert - a fantastic crème brulee of Meyer lemons and smoked paprika.

That night I identified with the song of the howling seals and I promised to eat less the next day. But as soon as we awoke, we returned to The Duck Club for a scrumptious breakfast of oak smoked salmon, strawberry macadamia crepes, a little compote of prunes, figs, cherries and berries and lots of coffee - to stifle our appetites. James then gave us a tip that we didn’t have time to check out - so listen up:

Monterey Insider Info - Because of the post 9-11 nature of national security, the new personnel at the Monterey Naval Station Language School has encouraged the opening of some excellent new Afghani, Iraqi and Persian cafes.

Phil’s Fish

On our way out of The Duck Club, we received another insider tip. A fifth generation Monterey Sicilian told us that the old Sicilian restaurant heritage isn’t dead, it’s just been relocated a few miles out of town in Moss Landing. That was good information, but it created a dilemma - I had planned on eating at Don Elkins‘ Central Texas BBQ in Castroville. We always eat there when we’re in the vicinity, which is probably why I had never eaten in Moss Landing, just a few miles west of Castroville. I had been dreaming about Don’s homemade sausages and slow smoked ribs and briskets all weekend, at least when I wasn’t eating James Waller‘s food. Wro however was sulking about his “dashed dream” of meeting a hot Sicilian chef. So, in order to ward off a violent mood swing, I decided to sacrifice my smoked meat craving and headed for Phil DiGirolamo’s place in Moss Landing.

Phil is a jolly guy who tells his family’s version of the Cannery Row history.

“I was born and raised in Monterey. Grandfather immigrated from Sicily, to fish for sardines - on the pursein King Phillip. He had 12 kids including my dad. Dad owned Angelo’s (restaurant), where Isabella’s is now. So I have Sicilian restaurateur-ing and Sicilian fish mongering in my blood.

"We came to Moss Landing for the dock in the 60’s, when albacore and salmon were plentiful. By 1973, we felt that Monterey had become so touristy that it was time to abandon it completely and we moved all the operations here. Then there was a salmon glut and no one wanted them - the smokers cut off their orders, the restaurants had more than they wanted. We were desperate to all the salmon we had, so we started putting ads in newspapers as far away as Sacramento. That worked, people just started showing up here to buy salmon. That convinced us there was a need for a fish market on the docks,” Phil told us as we walked around what has become a giant seafood market and restaurant.

“We started in a tiny area, selling fish off the dock. Then we opened a 600 square foot fish market. I did demo cooking to promote the business. I used to make cioppino in a red wok that I bought at Costco. People would watch me and order some, so I started promoting cioppino with “bring your own pot” ads. People did that. We still do that at Christmas, but after the internet popularity hit home, we had to find something more standard. So now we use (plastic) buckets.

“Customers won’t let me change the menu though. And I have to respect their sense of tradition. This place has a life of its own. Families often hold reunions and memorial services here - because it was the dearly departed loved one’s favorite place. Grandmas and moms tell me that they have been coming since they were as young as the youngest kids at their table,” he explained.

Just his kitchen employs nine line cooks - at all times. Wro noticed that most of the chefs were Mexican, mostly from Michoacan and Oaxaca. Head chef and smoker Ricky Loya told Wro that he had a surprise for us later.

I have never been in a kitchen where so many line workers seemed any happier. Phil is clearly a nice guy to work for. I asked him about the Sicilian influence on Northern California cuisine, particularly seafood.
“Cioppino (San Francisco’s most famous hometown dish) is a Sicilian inspiration I am sure. The spices give it away - they’re the same as Sicilian “bicce brodo.” Cioppino is probably a slurred Sicilian pronunciation for “chippin in.” Whatever was left over went into the pot.

As a young man, I learned a lot from my grandmothers - both were great Sicilian chefs. They came to Monterey in the 1920’s and lived through the Depression when the modus operandi was to use everything and waste nothing. I came home from school and kneaded dough for bread and for pasta. I love home made pasta, but I also love the dried kind - I use Barilla in the restaurant now,” he explained.

Wro asked Phil how faithfully he follows the environmentalist creed, like the Aquarium’s list of forbidden fish. Phil answered with delightful candor.

“I do what I want. I argue with them all the time about what’s endangered and such. Fact is, I am a fish broker and I think that my information is better, and certainly more thorough and up-to-date than their’s is. They ( The Aquarium) are my land lord too. I did take shark off my menu, because they are such a slow grower. But I keep Chilean sea bass on it - I just make completely sure that mine comes from a fisherman who only uses short lines. The long lines are the problem with fishing them,” he explained.

Phil’s walls revealed that he is a proud Scottie owner. They were covered with blue ribbons and plaques that the doggies won before leading Phil into a new fishy enterprise. He now markets specialty dog food for Scotties and other breeds like them who are susceptible to liver problems. Phil’s special formula is made with sweet potatoes, green beans, carrots and cod. He makes it himself - steaming, packaging and freezing for shipment.

His most popular mail order items though are clam chowder, both red and white, and, duh, cioppino. He makes a base for both soups that can be dehydrated with milk or not - so lactose-intolerant seafood lovers can use it.

In pure blooded Sicilian style, Phil’s chief advisers are still family member.

“Dad’s been gone a long time now but I still talk to him everyday,” he said, pointing to photos on the wall. Phil’s 88 year old mother -in-law comes to work with him daily, at 7 a.m.. She and Phil take only a half day off each week.

“She’s got to earn her room & board. She lives with me,“ he joked.

When we visited, Phil had just raised $100,000 for Legal Aid for Seniors with a fund raiser that paired Hahn’s Estate Pinot Blanc with Phil’s cioppino.

“Whatever you give comes back to you, as long as you don’t ever give to receive, just give for sake of giving,” he explained.

Sicily, by any other name

I hoped Wro was listening but I knew he was becoming impatient for Ricky Loya’s surprise. We began eating a little snack of fried oysters, sand dabs, shrimp, artichoke hearts in tempura, New England clam chowder, cioppino and Caesar salad with long white anchovies. Then we tried some of the freshest, brightest halibut I have ever seen, baby octopus, petrale and ling cod - all of which had been fished from local waters. Finally Ricky brought out the star attraction of our entire Cannery Row odyssey - grilled California sardines, “Yes, they are making a comeback,” Phil said, appropriately closing a circular story.

For centuries, fishermen have been lured into the deep and dangerous waters beyond Monterey Bay by ever changing enticements - from whales and salmon to squid, abalone, sardines, halibut, snapper, tuna, et cetera. Similarly, the composite American dreamer who came to Monterey over the centuries has morphed by ever changing blood lines - from American Indian and Spanish to Mexican, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavian, Sicilian, Vietnamese, Afghani, Persian - and Mexican again. So it goes.

The Central Coast of California has now thoroughly assimilated the Portuguese and Chinese who settled here 150 years ago and separately developed Monterey’s signature fishing industry. The islander mentality of Sicilian Monterey also washed away in the California’s melting pot but Phil DiGirolamo believes such things only change on the surface. Just as Sicily has always been a melting pot of Mediterranean cultures, Monterey has become the Sicily of the Seven Seas.

“My Mexican workers are the 21st century’s Sicilians. They work hard and they appreciate things that others take for granted. I am blessed to have them. They make my place what it is,” DiGirolamo explained.
My eighth grade teacher said that “Cannery Row” was a story about hope and appreciation. The book’s characters have very little in life but they need even less. That kind of contentment might seem outdated today but it makes me wonder about the tides that pour into Monterey Bay each night to a Hallelujah chorus of barking seals. Perhaps that unique combination of moon-pulled water, jagged geology and flipper song creates a magic mist that nourishes hope as carefully as penguin parents protect their eggs.

Otherwise, how does one explain the little miracles: Skid Row transforming itself into a luxury hotel zone; sea otters finding a place where they feel safe enough to float half their days away on their backs; and California sardines surviving near certain extinction to grace Ricky Loya‘s open-fire grill?
　
If you go

Hotel Pacific
300 Pacific St., Monterey, CA 93940, 800-554-5542, http://www.hotelpacific.com/

Monterey Plaza Hotel
400 Cannery Row
Monterey, CA 93940, 831-635-4077, http://www.montereyplazahotel.com/

Phil’s Fish Market & Eatery
7600 Sandholdt Road, Moss Landing, CA 95039
831--633-2152, http://www.philsfishmarket.com/

Massaro & Santos
32 Cannery Row, Coast Guard Pier
Monterey, CA, 93940, 831-649-6700, http://www.massaroandsantos.com/

Monterey Maritime Museum
Across from Fisherman's Wharf in Downtown Monterey
(831) 372-2608http://www.montereyhistory.org/

Reef Break: Easy Riding in San Luis Obispo County

Where wining & dining are easy too

With two universities, including the main campus of California State Polytechnic University, the town of San Luis Obispo (44,100 population) probably has the youngest average population in California. So it’s on the cutting edge of youth and scientific culture.

There is also a rather distinctive surfing scene. SLO County’s 85 mile coastline has no point breaks. As fans of Keanu Reeves (star of the surfing movie "Point Break") know, that keeps dare devil surfers away and helps the coastline remain rather bucolic. So I reasoned that a long coast of gentler reef breaks would make an easy place for a young surfer to learn the sport. SLO County is also one of the last places on the West Coast where people can still legally drive dune buggies and ATV’s on the beach.

Sycamore Inn

In 1886, oil drillers in Avila Valley found sulfur-based mineral water instead. Those white sulfur hot springs quickly became a resort and a playground for Hollywood‘s elite. The Pacific Coast Railway stopped there on its Los Angeles to San Francisco route. W.C. Fields visited frequently, as did many guests of the nearby Hearst Castle. After World War II, the emergence of freeways, super jets and air conditioning took the buzz away as Palm Springs and Hawaii became more accessible resorts for southern California’s rich and famous.

The hot springs thus remained rather unchanged until recently. Today Sycamore Mineral Springs Treatment Center offers massage therapy, herbal therapy, Chinese medicine, ayurvedic medicine, aromatherapy, yoga and hydrotherapy. Hydrotherapy tubs line the hillsides, Japanese style, but we checked into a private unit with our own tub.

Gardens of Avila

The resort’s executive chef is David McWilliam, a self-described "South Bay guy" who fled to the Central Coast for a more peaceful place to raise kids. David cut his culinary teeth at A.P. Stump’s Chop House, a traditional legend of San Jose. His biography is filled with circles of irony.
"I became a vegetarian in the Navy because the food was so bad that vegetables were the safest things to eat. When I graduated from the CIA (Culinary Institute of America), the Navy was sending its chefs there were in order to improve the quality of the food," he told us laughing.
David’s kitchen turns out wonderful Pacific Rim fare matching fresh and local seasonal products with classical European and Asian inspirations. We watched him brine his own chickens and tend his own garden. I noticed a pattern of using different salts.

"One thing I learned working for Charlie Trotter - cook with kosher salt and season with sea salt," he explained.

His Gardens of Avila restaurant featured a fireside lounge, an elegant, picture-window dining room and a century-old stone hillside patio. We enjoyed a bottle of local wine, an exquisite Bordeaux-blend called Isoceles from Justin in Paso Robles, and began with some scallops on the shell plus an awesome ahi presentation. We tried a salad of fresh greens topped with roasted red and golden beets, goat cheese and toasted walnuts. Then we moved on to a special prime rib plus a confit of duck leg with duck breast on a bed of micro greens. We chose them over two tempting dishes: seared quail with polenta, pine nuts and pomegranates; and a pepper-crusted venison loin with spaetzles and black truffles. It was all so good we ate every morsel and could only split a dessert of pistachio crème brulee before crawling into the hot tub.

Old Edna

The next morning we had breakfast at the Gardens of Avila and drove inland, through annoying mountains, to Old Edna. This was originally a stagecoach road that linked SLO and Pismo Beach. Old Edna wasn’t on my map (maps never help me), but it appeared anyhow, at the corner of Highway 227 and Price Canyon Road. Thinking like a stage coach driver, I parked under a giant cypress tree next to a little brook where my horses could drink in the shade.

A sign claimed Edna had a population of 1,600, but most of them were good at hiding. Today, an early 20th century farmhouse is home to Fiala’s Gourmet Deli which serves scratch made sandwiches and home grown salads on its porch and in cute little outdoor playhouses. Old Edna is pretty much the doing of Pattea Torrence, a native of SLO who came to here in 1998. Edna had pretty much been abandoned for two decades before she bought the town, or the site of a former town.

"One thing led to another, I didn’t ever have a vision of this as this," she admitted laughing. "I was running a consignment clothing and antique store in San Luis. I had traffic hassles because of all the loading and unloading I needed to do. So I decided to sell it. Now I had kept a horse here when I was younger, so I asked the owners to sell and I kept asking until they finally did," she recalled.

Having gotten what she wished, Pattea suddenly had more than she knew what to do with - a wood-frame, tin-sided storefront near the highway, two homes, a storage room, a shed, and a large barn.

"Everything was in serious need of repairs, too."

The homestead had been built between 1906 and 1908 and included a family home, a store, a saloon, a blacksmith shop, a dance hall and a butcher shop. Pattea restored the main building for her antique store but realized that keeping an inventory took all her time. She really missed dealing with people.

"So decided to rent it out and restore the cottage. The second floor used to be a dance hall and I am told less savory things are suspected of going on there too. It’s a good space for artists. The deli worked out perfectly on the main floor," Pattea said.

Old Edna was thus reborn one project at a time. A 1200-square-foot cottage became a bed and breakfast, accommodating up to three couples. Pattea’s skill as a antique hunter clearly paid off in decorating. So did her patronage of local artists, one of whom rents the upper floor of the main building. Pattea told us she’s encouraging artists to come in hopes that tourists will follow.
Wine tasters have been flocking to nearby vineyards, especially after the movie "Sideways." A short walk from the cottage, Corral de Piedra River passes Blue Belly Barn and MacGregor Vineyards. There’s also a one-room schoolhouse and that’s about it for Old Edna.

Claiborne & Churchill

We had lunch in a delightful little garden playhouse with Claiborne (Clay) Thompson and Fredericka Churchill. Former language professors at the University of Michigan, the couple left the "groves of academe" for the vineyards of California in 1981. Since its first crush in 1983, Claiborne & Churchill has specialized in dry Gewurztraminer and dry Riesling. They produce 10,000 cases of wine a year now, purchasing grapes from vineyards in the cool maritime valleys of the central coast. They also make Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cuvee, Pinot Gris, dry Muscat, and Edelzwicker in small lots.

We walked to their winery after lunch. (I told you Edna was a small place.) The place was constructed out of bales of hay and thus is probably the best insulated building in the area. It stays cool without air conditioning even in the hot summer months. We met their lovely daughter Elizabeth, for whom a C&C Cuvee is named.

Back down the big hill we checked into the Avila Lighthouse Suites located right on the main beach in Avila Beach. Avila and Pismo Beach get subjected to snobbery in Los Angeles, where they are labeled "the Bakersfield Hamptons" or "Malibu for Fresno." One of the local surfing guides warned southern Californians that "a lot of people live here (in SLO County) and surf here because they can’t stand Los Angeles. So, don’t remind locals that you come from Los Angeles, or you might be asked to leave."

The suites were wide open and ocean side. Neighbors said hello and gave us nice directions when we got lost. When he wasn’t taking surfing lessons, Wro sat on the life guard stand on the beach, which I could see from our room. A sign on our patio thoughtfully reminded him to not walk in the flower beds.

After hanging out on the beach, we went for a ride on the local free shuttle bus, getting off to shop at a farmers market store. Then we were off to Pismo for dinner.

Lido

Pismo Beach is home to one of the largest Monarch butterfly groves in the USA and Wro and I believe that butterflies have exquisite taste. We came for Lido Restaurant in the Dolphin Bay Hotel & Residence. Chef Evan Treadwell, one of the best chefs in California, moved here when the hotel opened. The hotel is a century away from the Sycamore. A member of "Small Luxury Hotels of the World," it’s located on Shell Beach in Pismo Beach. And yes, it’s on the beach. Seventy guest rooms ranged from 900 to 2,000 square feet with 21st century appointments - double-pane windows, honed travertine floors, wool carpet, solid wood doors, granite countertops, full kitchens and laundries.

La Bonne Vie Spa’s massages, facials, herbal and hydrotherapy treatments all utilize top line treatments from Paris, Carita and Decléor, plus local and seasonal ingredients. It’s lavender to Sycamore Spring’s sulfur. We only had time for a sundown dinner though. Early birds filled Lido’s window seats to watch the ocean absorb the light over a drink and a Lido shellfish platter. Our Vegas-style presentation of crab legs, mussels, clams, oysters, prawns and accompaniments disappeared at the pace of the setting sun. After sunset, we noticed the lovely dining room and its spectacular Murano glass ornaments.

With the sun out of the way, we got serious and so did Evan. We tried some flatbreads with wild mushrooms, Fontina, caramelized onions, duck confit, chorizo, peppers, Manchego, Serrano ham and some local chevre. And a little bisque of squash with black truffle foam, and some house baked oysters with prosciutto, leeks and Bearnaise sauce.

Then we moved into the deep water portion of dinner.

Evan served an ahi crudo that was as good as any we ever tasted - and we have tasted many. He matched the fatty raw tuna with a Tunisian entourage of harissa, almonds and medijool dates. Wro ordered a tiradito of halibut, which brought a filet of fish barely "cooked" in a divine hibiscus pomegranate vinaigrette with avocado, ginger and jalapeno. We split some black mission figs with Serrano, chevre and micro greens as well as an heirloom tomato salad with pesto, homemade mozzarella, pickled onions and caper berry vinaigrette.

I passed on the highly recommended Maine lobster tail pot pie (with Cajun tasso) for something more Pacific - fast seared ahi with lentils, aioli, eggplant and roasted tomato. I also swore his pancetta-wrapped rabbit was the best ever.

I can’t eat bunnies myself, but I was tempted by the wild mushroom sauce in this dish.

I suffered a power outage from the overload of divine food accompanied by a bottle of Chardonnay from our new friends at Claiborne & Churchill. I vaguely recall that pastry chef Benji Puga finished us off with a mission fig creme brulee and a chocolate truffle torte. And a trio of home made gelatos. And a cheese plate with some local honeycomb.

When overloaded with good food, my brain attempts logical deductions. I reasoned that if Lido was in San Francisco, one would need to make reservations more than a month in advance. When I left Lido, there were still empty tables. Even if a 3 hour drive takes 8 hours, I had still saved a month of time. So, one can become younger by eating here often.

El Paso Robles
Somehow, I drove after dinner.

Paso Robles has an interesting past. The rough side of the area’s reputation comes from Jesse James’ uncle Dury James, who ranched here, and Dr. Woodson James who operated a hotel at Sulfur Hot Springs. Jesse and brother Frank were frequent visitors and even recovered from gunshot wounds there.

El Paso has been a wine town since 1797 when Father Junipero Serra planted California’s first grapes at Mission San Miguel Arcangel. Commercial winemaking began here in 1882 and really took off in the Roaring 20’s after legendary pianist Ignace Paderewski purchased 2,000 acres and planted Petite Sirah and Zinfandel on his Rancho San Ignacio vineyard. (After Prohibition ended, Paderewski’s wine was made by York Mountain Winery.) Rancho San Ignacio wines won awards and Paso Robles’ reputation grew. Zinfandel has been a star wine here since the early days but Cabernet Sauvignon is now the leading variety for the appellation.

Larger vineyards and wineries were established here in the 1980’s when reasonably priced land encouraged new growers. Smaller vineyards have been coming on line the last two decades - "vineyards for mere millionaires instead of billionaires." Between 1994 and 2006, at least 10 wineries focusing on Rhône varieties were established here. Now the area has the largest acreage of Syrah, Viognier and Roussanne grapes in California.

In 1997 Justin Vineyards & Winery’s Bordeaux-style "Isosceles," which we loved at Gardens of Avila, was named one of the top 10 wines in the world by the Wine Spectator.

Chester’s Hotel

We checked into the remarkable Hotel Cheval, an intimate inn consisting of sixteen luxury guest rooms, a gorgeous courtyard with stone fireplaces, a library and the Pony Club bar and breakfast nook with its horsehoe-shaped zinc bar. We met Chester, the hotel’s Red Belgian draft horse, who moved here from Ohio’s Amish country to provide guests with carriage rides to the restaurants around the city park. Though we could hardly eat another meal, Chester pulled us around in a vintage vis a vis carriage. Chester’s driver Tommy Harris said the horse was 18 hands tall and over 2000 pounds. He eats 60 pounds of hay and two gallons of rolled oats per day. About the equivalence of what we had consumed at Lido.

The next morning we strolled around the village shops and hung around the wonderful hotel as late as we could. Then we headed into more confusing hills in search of two of the area’s great food and wine creators.

Justin

Justin estate winery was founded in 1981 when Justin and Deborah Baldwin planted 160 acres with the major Bordeaux varietals. This property looks like a great French vineyard, from the huge cave to the tasting room, from the private club room and the inn. It also looks like it belongs in Architectural Digest as much as Wine Spectator. We had come to the patio of Deborah’s Room where we met Justin Baldwin for lunch. Restaurants like this are rare finds on wine estates in California. Justin explained.

"When we started there were less than 10 wineries in this area and 200 in California. Now there are nearly 200 here and 2400 in California. Only ten have restaurants. We made it just before the legislature made it illegal to attach a new one to a winery," he said.

Deborah’s Room serves dinner and weekend lunches inside or outside. There is no nicer setting for lunch. Justin confessed that he grew up in San Francisco and "fell in love with good food before falling in love with good wine." He also fell in love with Deborah there, where both of them were investment bankers.

"She turned me down for a loan," he joked.

We asked him to differentiate Paso Robles from Napa.

"Paso Robles is different. Napa is about 18 feet above sea level and we’re at 1400 feet for starters. Our appellation has the most Syrahs in North America," he began.

"Our winery is the furthest west and the highest in this appellation. Three miles beyond here is a dead end road and limestone quarry where all the cement in the Central Valley originates. You can set your clocks by the limestone trucks, but guests at the inn don’t seem to mind. The limestone’s ph count binds the soil nutrients and slows down both the growth of the vine and the yield. We get low yields here, but concentrated flavors." Justin said.

Justin compared wine making to cooking,
"My favorite part of winemaking is putting the blend together. My objective was originally to make one wine and one wine only. The ISOCELES was a "left bank" Bordeaux style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, which, like the triangle it’s named after, was to have three equal parts.

"That was rigid. The formula needs to be changed every year and, besides, we got bored just making one wine. It’s been 20 years of trial and error, but we use much less Merlot now. And we also make JUSTIFICATION, it’s a "right bank" Merlot and Cabernet Franc cousin. And we do varietal bottlings of Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. We also produce limited amounts of Tempranillo, Zinfandel, Malbec, Petit Verdot, Sangiovese, OBTUSE (Port wine), Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay.

Justin and Deborah were flying the Mexican flag.

"We have been flying a Mexican flag here for 20 years, in honor of our main group of workers. Those guys do the real work, we have two French experts in our harvest crew too, but we are most grateful to our Mexican workers," he explained.

After splitting a relatively light lunch of pan roasted foie gras with pickled huckleberries and arugula, followed by seared sea bass, a New York cut steak and a Meyer lemon pudding cake, we visited the the Just Inn. Four luxury suites (Tuscany, Provence, Sussex, and Bordeaux) had a definitive European look with tapestry-covered furnishings, big feather beds and frescoed ceilings. English gardens and a heated spa and pool sat in the middle of the wine making operations.

Next door to the inn we toured the ISOCELES Center, where wine barrels aged in caves and club members tasted the latest vintages. What a great place for fantasizing.

Pasolivo

We had another appointment to keep. Down more strange roads with strange names we found Pasolivo, a 140 acre ranch. Owner Karen Guth bought the place 20 years ago. It had been King Vidor’s ("War and Peace","Stella Dallas") estate back in the days when Central Coast was a Hollywood playground.

"We have over 45 acres of olive trees under cultivation, in varieties chosen specifically for their excellent oil. I wanted something different. We decided to make an olive oil more like Tuscan oils," she said, going on to explain that most oils in the American market are filtered to make them clear. Plus they are usually made from olives that have been stored awhile between harvesting and pressing and then rushed to market after pressing and bottling.

Karen does things backwards. Her oils are pressed within hours of harvesting and then aged for up to 18 months in casks. The common commercial method, which is what most American consumers expect, produces a mellow flavor. Karen says that she wanted something that didn’t "take the spine out of the oil."

" I wanted the natural flavor, bite and all," she said.

Even more exciting was her California Mission olive oil. She partnered with Mission San Miguel and UC Davis to revive the original olive tree that Father Serra planted. They have tested the DNA of Karen’s trees and they now match the original, so this is a pure heirloom oil like no other in America.

Karen said that customers are learning to accept cloudiness and bitterness in her oils. We were able to see her state of the art Pieralisi press and barrels that her oil is aged in, all just steps away from the olive orchards .After tasting her oils, we understood why everything Pasolivo produced the last five years sold out quickly. We bought some of each kind and got our names on her internet alert list for future pressings.

Wishing we had more time, I started the drive back home. Using directions from the concierge at Hotel Cheval, we made it in three hours. That made me think that everything about SLO is as easy as riding a reef break wave. You can choose to relax in sulfur springs that have been curing ailments for most of a century. Or in state of the art new spas on the beach. You can play "Sideways" without the traffic hassles or crowds that Napa wineries make you endure. And you can simply walk in and dine at places that would require you to make reservations months in advance if they were in San Francisco.

Recipes

Pasolivo’s Oven-dried Tomatoes

24 Roma tomatoes, halved lengthwise Sea salt (Debbi prefers gray salt) and freshly ground black pepper
6 tablespoons Pasolivo, plus more for storing 2 tablespoons dried herbs, like Herbes de Provence 1 clove garlic, minced

Preheat oven to 250. Arrange the tomato halves cut side up and close together on a baking sheet. Season with salt and pepper. In a small bowl, combine the 6 tablespoons olive oil, herbs, and garlic. Spoon a little of the mixture over each tomato half, stirring as you go. Bake until the tomatoes are soft and shriveled but still retaining some moisture, about 5 to 8 hours. Timing will depend on how large, meaty and juicy the tomatoes are. Let them cool completely, then arrange in a plastic container, making no more than 2 layers. Add olive oil to cover completely, then cover and refrigerate. Use these stuffed with goat cheese and sprinkled with basil for an appetizer.

Pasolivo’s Oranges

This is an easy, elegant way to highlight the taste of extra virgin olive oil. It was prepared for us by a friend in a tiny restaurant in Rome and we've never seen it anywhere else. With so few ingredients, it's perfect to bring to a party, and it looks lovely on the table. We serve it all the time at the ranch - enjoy!

Ingredients:
4 - 5 of oranges pinch of sugar
freshly ground black pepper
Pasolivo Extra Virgin Olive Oil
loaf of fresh bread

Instructions:
1. Cut the oranges into slices about 1/2 inch thick. Arrange on a large plate or platter. 2. With a fork, press the orange slices to release some of the juice. 3.Sprinkle just a pinch of sugar over the oranges. 4.Generously drizzle with Pasolivo so that the oranges are covered in olive oil. 5.Pepper the oranges. 6.Cut the bread, and dip it onto the orange slices. You'll taste the oil, with a hint of fresh citrus. You can also try this with lemons or grapefruit. Tucking basil leaves under the oranges adds even more color.

If You Go…

San Luis Obispo County Visitors & Conference Bureau at 800-634-1414 , http://www.sanluisobispocounty.com/

Justin/Deborah’s Room
11680 Chimney Rock RoadPaso Robles, CA 93446805-238-6932, http://www.justinwine.com/
Dolphin Bay

Lido
2727 Shell Beach Road, Pismo Beach, CA 93449
805 -773-8900, http://www.thedolphinbay.com/

Hotel Cheval
1021 Pine Street • Paso Robles, CA 93446
866-522-6999

Avila Lighthouse Suites
550 Front Street, Avila Beach, CA 93424866-853-3997 , 805-322-7010

Sycamore Mineral Springs Resort/ Gardens of Avila1215 Avila Beach Drive, San Luis Obispo, California, 93405800- 234-5831, 805 -595-7302

Mister We Could Use a Man Like Mike Dukakis Again

Since Iowa's caususes began to matter, political campaigning has heated half the state's summers. Because of its pole position in the presidential nominating process, hopeful candidates canvas the state not only during the summer before an election but also the summer before that, prior to its first-in-the-nation caucuses. Next term, it looks like the Republicans will be in Iowa a year or two earlier. Let's hope they've learned something.

While the overwhelming majority of Iowa’s population now lives in cities and suburbs, most candidates still play to the old rural clichés about Iowans. So, they import bales of hay and bandanas to stage media events outside hip Des Moines corporations like Meredith.

While pandering to our inner rube is harmless to Iowans, it’s risky of the candidates. They walk a thin line between identifying with Iowa voters and coming off as either phony or priggish. But that’s changing. My father used to tell how his father lost an election in Iowa because he didn’t know how to milk a cow. Today, the only people who still hand milk cows live in Old Order Amish communities, so candidates are no longer judged on their barnyard skills. But elections are still won and lost because of what they eat.

Democrats failed to carry Iowa twice in the last six Presidential elections, coincidentally the only two times they lost the popular vote. And both Mike Dukakis and John Kerry choked on food matters. In 1988 Dukakis suggested that Iowa farmers diversify into crops like Belgian endive, flowers, blueberries, apples and grapes. He even suggested changing the structure of federal farm subsidies to encourage farmers to plant crops other than corn and beans. For a lot of small individual farmers, Dukakis was dispensing wisdom and foresight. A walk through just about any authentic farmers market today shows that there’s good money in growing diverse crops that humans can eat. You don’t need a minimum of 40,000 acres to make the numbers work either.

But Dukakis threatened a status quo which continues to guarantee lavish price supports for the Big Two crops, farmed increasingly by fewer and richer investors, mostly financed with out of state money. As a result, Iowa agriculture now resembles Third World mining more than early 20th century farming. Since 1988, the number of heavily capitalized outsiders exploiting our natural resources has grown exponentially, while the number of proud farmers who grow good foods to eat, and who can live off their land, has dwindled to a precious few. Big Ag helped take Mike Dukakis out, somehow making him look like he didn’t understand farming. In retrospect, he understood too well.

In 2004, John Kerry’s wife didn’t help his elitist Francophile image at all by advocating more rabbit on the American dinner table. That too actually pointed out a stupid problem with government intervention in our food system. Since rabbits multiply like rabbits, why do they cost so darn much at the store? Because Congress has refused to mandate the federal inspection of rabbits, unlike chicken or red meat. This forces processors to pay extra for inspections. Since no grocery store with lawyers on retainer would dare carry a meat product that is not USDA inspected, rabbit remains either very expensive or very hard to find. Both Kerry and Dukakis were talking about something we didn‘t want to hear and something that Big Ag and Big Chicken didn‘t want them to fix.

Food politics has changed less than you might think. In a prelude to today’s mad rush to convert corn into car fuel, Thomas Jefferson worked obsessively to develop sesame seed oil. His motive was remarkably similar to the justifications of ethanol subsidies that one hears today, from politicians as different at George Bush and Chet Culver. Jefferson talked about freeing America from dependence on foreign oil. In his time, salad dressings were being made exclusively with imported olive oil.
One hundred years before freedom fries and the French frying of Kerry’s image, Grover Cleveland rebelled against French food. Cleveland so disdained his own French White House chef that he often preferred eating with his servants, where’ corned beef and cabbage was the standard fare. The President joked sarcastically to the press that he dined on “boeuf corné au cabbeau.”

In food as in politics, there are no new ideas, only recycled ones. During the presidential campaign of 1928, a famous circular published by the Republican Party claimed that if Herbert Hoover won there would be "a chicken in every pot." Hoover’s image makers stole the phrase from 16th century France where King Henry IV used it. Then three other Presidents stole it from Hoover.

In hindsight, Dukakis was merely suggesting that farmers return to a practice that the average person still doesn’t realize has been abandoned - raising foods that humans can eat. Since Dukakis was pilloried, grapes have returned to Iowa in a big way. Iowa farmers in the 1990’s discovered they were a hedge against the tyranny of corn and bean prices: Grapes actually return more money per acre than most any other Iowa crop. They also have environmental advantages: Grapes prevent erosion and encourage small family farms that sustains rural communities. For the most part though, Iowans are still content to let places like California and southwest Wisconsin grow good things to eat, while industrialists convert the most fertile farm land into ethanol mines and livestock feeding troughs.

Mister, we could use a man like Mike Dukakis again.

Fortunes Collide in the Des Moines Lobe

My grandfather liked to say that Iowa’s good fortune had been thrust upon it but bad luck was its own doing. Grandpa farmed in the Des Moines Lobe, a tongue shaped area of north and central Iowa with Des Moines on the tip of its tongue. Receding glaciers of the last Ice Age dumped enough silt and loam there to create the world’s richest soils. When word of its miraculous fertility reached Europe, immigrants flocked to Iowa creating one of the greatest population explosions in history.

Iowa and those immigrants grew rich in the 19th century by raising foods that would, by the early 20th century, make Americans the best fed population in world history. Corn fields and livestock pastures, rotated with myriad other crops, orchards and vineyards all thrived. Iowa became a rich state with an economy based on a sustainable agriculture that directly supported most of its population and indirectly supported nearly everyone else. Iowans ate better than others, especially during the Great Depression, because they consumed the good foods that they raised from seeds they saved, whether at home or in local restaurants that bought directly from local farmers. Within that environment, both Populism and high quality food became synonymous with Iowa. That was what Grandpa meant by good fortune.

During the last half century, government policies and industrial agriculture diverted the miraculous abundance of the Des Moines Lobe. Rather than raising varieties of quality foods, the land was reemployed producing record setting quantities of things that yielded “industrial convertibility” and profits for a new elite investor class that often moved those profits out of Iowa. Machines replaced workers and the majority of Iowa’s population shifted to cities and suburbs. Stewardship of the lobe land reverted to corporations that cared more about immediate returns than about the land and its ability to regenerate.

Iowa became the prize fiefdom of industrial agriculture, as recent statistics dramatize: Iowa planted more acres of hay this year than 16 other states planted, period. Iowa also planted seven times more soy beans than hay and almost ten times more corn; Over eighty five per cent of Iowa’s corn and a full ninety one per cent of its beans were planted with biotech “seeds” which can not be saved for replanting and which require huge applications of herbicide and fertilizer; Des Moines Water Works now owns the world’s largest water filtration system to compensate for the run off of those fertilizers and herbicides, which are also blamed for the Gulf of Mexico’s Dead Zone.

Some things don’t change. The lobe remained rich enough to raise some of the best foods on earth and a few old fashioned farmers still do that. This decade, new independent Des Moines restaurants found national prominence supporting unique local foods. Diners responded creating a culinary niche that resisted industrial food and celebrated Iowa food artisans. That helped revive the old Populist Iowa and made Des Moines the center of a confrontation zone for conflicting food philosophies.

Such clashes drew national attention with debates about immigration stings in Marshalltown and Postville, ethanol-generated food inflation and the Iowa legislature’s usurpation of local control, taking from counties the authority to restrict the pollution of confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s). When Iowa scientist Tara Smith discovered an alarming relationship between the MRSA (killer bacteria that resist antibiotics) epidemic and CAFO‘s, Iowa became THE battleground state in the food wars.

This summer, over forty international food activists convened in Des Moines to plot changes to America’s meat system. That conference drew non profit giants like Pew Charitable Trusts and Sierra Club, ranchers, farmers, church leaders and labor organizers. Remarkably, the group came from the far left, the far right and the middle of partisan politics. They met almost continuously for 30 hours brainstorming ways to alleviate the way American meat production pollutes our air and water, violates human rights and abuses monopoly powers, workers, consumers and animals. The big issue, which tied the others together, was the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), a bill now in Congress and supported by President Obama that would end the prophylactic use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture. As maverick rancher Mike Callicrate (one of the heroes of “Fast Food Nation”) explained:

“If we can get PAMTA passed it’s the end of the CAFO - because CAFO’s can’t exist without massive antibiotics. Without CAFO’s, all the other problems improve by leaps and bounds.”

The conference highlighted trends and ironies of the food system. Bet you didn’t know that:

~Dairy Farmers of America own 8 import licenses; “Angus” labeling requires only 10 per cent Angus bloodlines; Most “grass fed” meat in America comes from Canada and Wyoming where grass is available for only a few months a year;

~AMRP’s (advanced meat recovery pellets) are now included in most frozen industrial hamburger products and AMRP’s can test positive for spinal and brain matter;

~The leather and wool of grass fed animals is judged to have superior texture and strength. Prius now offers “grass fed“ leather seat covers.

I asked delegates to explain a news release from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) which baffled me. How could the US in 2009, following decades of suburban sprawl that had devoured farmland, plant its largest acreage ever of soy beans and also the second largest acreage of corn? Callicrate responded with most others nodding cynically.

“You don’t actually believe the USDA numbers? Nothing is impossible but overestimating the acreage planted will cause commodity prices to fall and that’s in the best interests the USDA and all the Big Ag corporations that influence the USDA.”

In the following three weeks, corn prices plunged. That’s what Grandpa meant about Iowa’s bad luck.

Chattanooga

Lifting Tia-Numa’s Curse

Romantic travelers want to be transported to another time and place, even if it’s just for dinner. And many don’t need to go any further than the warm spots in their memories where spirits of their youth play in familiar surroundings. That why folks still trek to the Empire State Building, decades after it stopped being the tallest in New York. That’s why sports buy every seat to Wrigley Field, Cameron Indoor Arena and Keeneland even though the comforts and amenities in those places are sorry by today’s standards. It’s also why travelers adore historic old hotels like the Ahwahnee at Yosemite, the Greenbriar in Appalachia and the Grand on Mackinac Island where Hollywood goes to make movies about time travel.

Entire towns are sometimes holy depositories of zeitgeist - a German term that means “spirit of a former time.” Historic twists of fate can freeze cities and ghost towns in time like Bruges and Maccu Piccu on a grand scale of centuries. On old Route 66, Albuquerque has become adored by travelers for maintaining a cornucopia of Eisenhower era quirks and amusements, punctuated with outdoor adventure, gorgeous landscapes and time warp architecture. Just as that New Mexican city marked the two thirds mark on Route 66 between Chicago to the California coast, Chattanooga marked a similar progression on old Highway 41’s route from Chicago to Florida. That’s just the beginning of the similarities.

Both towns were best known to most of America through popular songs about travel - “Route 66” for Albuquerque and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy“ and “Ramblin‘ Man” for Chattanooga. Both are drop dead beautiful mountain towns where nature provides everything an adventure traveler could desire - river treks, skydiving, gliding, hot air ballooning and rock climbing.

Because songs are so much a part of the way we imagine Chattanooga, Wroburlto and I planned our trip for Riverbend Festival - nine days of eclectic music ( Last year we saw Willie Nelson, Three Dog Night and Train, plus numerous other acts on smaller stages) on the Tennessee River downtown, with one day off for the Bessie Smith Strut, a neighborhood blues fest that celebrates Chattanooga’s most famous singer and attracts some long distance barbecue kings besides. We checked into the newly remodeled Chattanooga Doubleday, just four blocks from the music festival and even closer to the famous Tennessee Aquarium and downtown.

Chattanooga is pedestrian friendly. The Doubletree was just a block from a city wide free shuttle bus service that connects just about every part of town we wanted to visit and making it possible to only rent a car for one of the four days of our trip.

Tia-Numa & His Curse

Determined to get some educational stuff in before dinner, we walked up, 80 feet straight up, to check out a most peculiar art museum whose history includes as many colorful anecdotes as a half dozen William Faulkner novels combined.

The Hunter Museum of American Art was built on holy ground - former home of the Cherokee’s giant hawk god “Tia-Numa.” After chasing Tia-Numa and his people away, white folk first built an iron foundry on this sacred bluff - an offering to the gods of industrialization. Union forces destroyed the foundry in the Civil War and then insurance broker Ross Faxon built an Edwardian mansion here, with lots of Classical Greek touches thrown in. About the same time, local businessman Ben “Quick” Thomas bought the national rights to bottle Coca Cola during a gentleman’s outing. The founder of that soft drink company couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever want to drink Coke out of a bottle, so he figured he was stealing $1 from the imprudent Thomas.

Ben’s nephew George Thomas Hunter was a gay blade who suffled around Chattanooga in Rolls Royce, took over his uncle’s company and broke the hearts of all the unmarried women in town. He bought the Faxon mansion and later willed it to the city, to be turned into an American Art Museum. Two modern glass and steel additions later, it’s remained true to its American-only mission. It dazzled us with do-it-yourself art mirrors

and some food art - Severin Roesen’s “Nature’s Bounty” and Rich Goodwin’s “Huntsman’s Door.” Our visit coincided with “Jellies: Living Art,” a collaboration with the Tennessee Aquarium that paired the artistic splendor of fine glass sculpture with the living beauty of jelly fish.

Dinner in Bluff View

Glass fish make us hungry so we walked a couple blocks to the Bluff View Art District where a single family revitalized a turn of the last century neighborhood over 50 years of due diligence. Dr. Charles and Mary Porteras began purchasing property and remodeling arty conversions back in 1960, when Chattanooga had been stung. The New York Times named it America‘s most polluted city. That was the curse of Tia-Numa.

Anchored by the River View Art Gallery, with a super regional collection of high and folk art, the area includes an outdoor sculpture garden that overlooks the Tennessee River, B&B’s, additional galleries and three distinct restaurants all of which are provided by Bluff View’s own coffee roaster, bakery and chocolatier.

We learned that the bakery turns out over 50 pastries a day, all laminated, hand mixed, artisan products. We tried croissants, puff pastries and the area’s signature - The Nun, a “Napoleon with a hood.

The chocolaterie was run by Jerome Savin, a French educated chocolate genius who prefers Callebault and high cocoa butter (22 - 54%) confections. His mastery of tempering allows these high fat treats to have reasonable shelf life and a signature sheen.

Just to be sure, we only ate freshly made truffles. In a former glass factory, coffee roaster Matt showed Wro the dramatic differences in fresh beans.

We had to choose between two fine dining restaurants - Tony’s, which makes all its pasta from scratch daily, and Back Inn Café, a more traditional place with historic trappings. Wro chose the latter for its library dining room. I began dinner with huge seared scallops served with a sweet pepper pomace and lemon emulsion and charred pico do gallo. Wro opted for fried green tomatoes, the first of many versions we would have in Chattanooga and one that would set the template for “Chattanooga fried tomatoes” - a serving that included cooked prosciutto, lots of melted goat cheese and some fresh greens.

We split an excellent lump crab timbale served simply with sliced green apples and crostini with olive oil. Knowing we would be visiting the fresh water aquarium, I reasoned that this might be my last conscience-free chance to eat frog legs for awhile and huge legs from Indonesia proved irresistible fried in panko and served with slaw.

Lobster bisque was made with lobster shell stock and salad was fresh as spring time.

Wro ordered turbot ( whose relative would cast indicting eyes at us when we visited the Aquarium) served on wild mushroom risotto with crispy noodles and haricot verts. I ordered a NY strip “Rembrandt style,” rubbed in coffee and served with asparagus, mushroom cream sauce and truffled mashed potatoes.

Crème brulee and chocolate mousse cake finished our evening. We retreated to the music fest and thanked God that our hotel was only a few blocks away lest we fall asleep on the music grounds

Blue Plate

The next morning in our hotel lobby, we saw a guy wearing a T shirt for a tow truck museum. Loving such quirky places, we followed him into the gift shop and asked about it. He offered to drive us there. Turned out he was Bill Mish , the owner of the hotel. That’s the kind of place Chattanooga is.

We began the next day at Blue Plate, a metropolitan diner with a locovorean spin on comfort food. The place is designed for efficiency and that encourages the use of fresh food. There is only one tiny freezer and only two flat top stoves. Yet they manage to serve breakfast lunch or dinner at all hours they are open.

“This is a metropolitan diner, not a Mom & Pop. We hired an architect from Berkeley. It was really something new in 2005. Now it’s a style all around town,” said owner Rob Gentry of black and white schemes with wood and exposed ceilings.

“No one was doing breakfast downtown then. I see now why Waffle House does so well. Even though our average check is only $12 - $13,” Gentry continued.

Chef Joseph Black showed Wroburlto around. Joseph invented a Moon Pie cheesecake that both the restaurant and the Moon Pie company brag about. He showed Wro his stashes of local goodies - Aretha Frankenstein pancake mix, pastries from Bluff View and Niedlov’s bakeries, Stone Cup coffee, Spencer Farms chickens, River Ridge Farms pork and eggs, House of Rayford turkey, Clumpie’s Ice Cream and Mayfield Farm cream.

We tried a light breakfast of pancakes, with free ranged eggs and bacon. plus meat loaf and mashed potatoes with collard greens and creamy mac & cheese. I know that doesn’t sound like breakfast but soul food is hard to find in San Francisco, so we get it while we can.

Song of the Southside

The Southside is Exhibit A in Chattanooga’s most recent renaissance. Anchored by its old railroad terminal, it is a Bruges Syndrome story. Like that medieval Belgian city, economic circumstances froze the industrial southside’s real estate and architecture in time for decades. As suburban sprawl dominated new construction between World War II and the 21st century, the southside’s old brick buildings languished - too sturdy to tear down cheaply until restoration and gentrification became stylish. Now the southside and downtown are trendy again and not just on the covers of bricklayer magazines.

Southside revival began with the brick and mortar version of a song. “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was written by Mack Gordon & Harry Warren while traveling on the Southern Railway's "Birmingham Special" train. Glen Miller’s version of the song was # 1 hit in America for nine weeks during World War II. The inspiration for the song was a small, wood-burning steam locomotive which belonged to the Cincinnati Southern Railroad and now is a main attraction in what used to the Chattanooga Terminal.

Opened in 1909 that railroad station hosted thousands of travelers during the Golden Age of railroads. Now known as Chattanooga Choo Choo, it was saved from the wrecking ball in 1971 and transformed into The Garden’s, a restaurant modeled on Tivoli in Copenhagen. Today, it’s a 23 acre complex offering a variety of overnight accommodations, including Victorian Era train compartments and suites, plus authentic New Orleans trolley rides, a model railroad display, formal gardens and a bar that evokes that glorious era.

Holmes Wreckers & Other Heroes

We could have lingered all morning at the Choo Choo but Wroburlto is a modern bear more interested in tow trucks than antique trains. So we took Bill Mish up on his offer and headed to the International Towing & Recovery Museum and Hall of Fame. I am not making that up.

There we learned that the Holmes Wrecker (1913) is not a slut TV show and that the Bubble Nose is not a fish. Well at least it’s not just a fish.

Those are both famous antique tow trucks that now educate and comfort fans who come from all over America to see them. This quirky museum also enshrines workers who gave their lives as first responders - a frightfully under appreciated number of brave souls each year. We also saw the world’s fastest ever tow truck, appropriately owned by a garage in Talladega, Alabama. Wro loved this place and even Mamabear was fascinated.

Tow trucks make us hungry so we moved down the southside to the University of Tennessee where Chattanooga Market’s open air, covered pavilion showcased regional farmers and artists, live music and chef demonstrations.

This is a real farmers market, meaning vendors must personally produce the goods they sell. I bought a Smokey Mountain bow knife for $30. I have never found a better tool for slicing bread or frozen meat. We also found the best strawberries and okra (from Mike Mayfield of Mayfield Farms) and peaches (from Ahzlewood Orchards in Cleveland, Alabama) in years - and I live in California! Signal Mountain Organic Farms sold Wro some radishes that were so fresh he needed to wash the bite down his throat with a strawberry smoothie from Bunky’s Salad Station.

Moon (Pie) Over My Amity

Chattanooga Bakery is an indisputable American icon. It’s just that most people know it by another name. This bakery makes a product that defines a Southern lifestyle as in “You’re a red neck if your wedding cake is a stack of Moon Pies.”

Chattanooga Bakery Vice President Tory Johnson told us the story of the birth of Moon Pie, no relation to Tia-Numa.

“Campbell’s Flour Mill started here in 1902 and by World War I they had excess production. So they started bringing out new items. Moon Pie developed after visits to the coal mine region of Kentucky where miners said they wanted something bigger and more substantial in their lunch pails. Moon Pie was developed in response to that - a snack as big as the moon. It was about the 200th new item brought out by the bakery,” Johnson said.

By 1930, Moon Pie was so popular it was the only item the bakery made. Still a family owned, family run company, they make six flavors now. The original flavor is the original s‘more - chocolate enclosed marshmallow. In southern lore, Moon Pie is linked with RC Cola, so we asked about that.

“RC Cola was the first soft drink to bottle in 20 ounce sizes, when others were still preferring 6 and 8 ounce bottles. So, the blue collar lunch became a Moon Pie and an RC. It stuck ever since,” explained Johnson.
Other Moon Pie lore.

~ Moon Pies were one of three things, along with Coca Cola and Bazooka gum, that Oprah said made America American.

~ 2008 was the year of the first non-marshmallow Moon Pie, with peanut butter filling introduced.

~ Sam Walton told Wal0Mart managers that each needed to promote a personal favorite item. He held up Moon Pie’s as his personal favorite. Kiss-ass managers followed his lead and Moon Pie sales soared.

~ Chattanooga Bakery purchased Betsy’s Cheese Sticks of Alabama recently, looking for a product for the high end market. Betsy’s Cheese and Sweet sticks are made without high fructose corn syrup.

Knead Love?

Junk food history always makes us hungry, so we decided on a moveable feast dinner, with bread at one Southside place, appetizers and cocktails at another, entrees at third and desserts at a fourth.

Niedlov’s Breadworks on Main Street was a charter member of the area’s revitalization program. This artisan bakery sells to walk-in customers and also provides bread for Greenlife Grocery and Chattanooga’s fine dining establishments. Niedlov’s signature loaf, Wholely Whole Wheat, is the city’s only organic, naturally leavened whole-grain bread.

Wearing a T shirt that said “We knead to love,” owner John Sweet said he learned in Germany that “Good bread is a commonality to good life.”

Niedlov’s practices extensive fermentation. Sweet wanted a unique leavening agent and created his own mother starter (we call that sourdough in San Francisco) on Lookout Mountain. As the Chattanooga food renaissance developed, he moved to the southside to be in the middle of it.

Moveable Feast

At Niko’s Southside Grille, owner Nick Kyriakidis added linen tablecloths, dark woods, modern lighting and impressionist art to the brick wall ambiance of an old warehouse. Chef Edward Lewis turns out “Greek & Southern fusion” cuisine - grouper is given a Thai treatment, grits are served with shrimp and tasso ham, quail are wrapped in bacon and flat iron steaks are marinated in Jack Daniels.

But old Greek American favorites dominated the appetizer menu we tried: traditional hummus; tzatzikis; and tapenades with pita and sweet potato chips; beef-stuffed grape leaves; fried calamari rings; fried kasseri cheese with pecans and bread toast; and some fried green tomatoes with arugula, goat cheese and prosciutto.

St. John’s Restaurant and its owner/chef Daniel Lindley are Chattanooga’s consensus top dogs. Wro gets excited about meeting hot chefs so he was disappointed that Dan couldn’t be there the night we came. We discovered much later that he was having surgery after a bad accident.

Set in a 1920’s bank with live jazz, balcony dining and deco trappings, St. John can certainly transport diners to another time and place. It epitomizes the black & white, mortar & brick, marble & wood, Modernist “Chattanooga style.”

Our plan had been to have entrees only but we couldn’t resist a couple appetizers: divine tenderloin tartare with a capers, shallots and quail eggs;

a baby beet salad with pea shoots and marinated mozzarella; and an heirloom tomato salad smartly paired with a Parmesan soufflé, fresh basil leaves and sherry vinaigrette

To honor our original plan, we also ordered entrees. I tried a Kobe steak heftily paired with mashed potatoes. Wroburlto has been a pork belly sampling tour for several months so he ordered a “pork tasting” that also included loin, a rib and pepper risotto with smoked onions. It was served minus the belly with an explanation that they had run out. That provoked such ostentatious despair that our server returned to the kitchen and found some after all.

Full as we were, the highlight of our moveable feast still awaited us at Table 2. That place is one of the few hot new places in town that deviates from the “Chattanooga style.” It’s more like late Gaudi - bold and metrosexual with reds and golds, velvets and crystal, open glass and open kitchens. The patio was conspicuously part of the restaurant and even had outdoor fireplaces. Semi-private booths were draped in theatrical curtains.

The kitchen professes faith to sustainable, organic and natural foods. Pastry Chef Rebecca Barron presented a wondrous array of nightcaps paired with fine dessert wines. Georgia Peach bread pudding was beautifully layered in a cocktail glass with candied pecans and home made vanilla ice cream.

A strawberry rhubarb shortcake was served cream puff style with a strawberry compote and freshly whipped cream.

A spicy chocolate pot de crème might have been the best we ever had - with multiple flavors of dark chocolates, cayenne pepper and strawberry coulis. We tried three excellent wines with these desserts - a Marcarini Moscato d’Asti, an 06 Chateau Roumieru Lacoste Sauternes and an 05 Four Vines Zinfandel Port, from Paso Robles.

We could barely stay awake long enough to catch a couple Three Dog Night songs at Riverbend.

A Teaching Farm

Crabtree Farms is Chattanooga’s urban teaching farm offers public tours and teaches visitors about sustainable flower and vegetable production, ecology and seed propagation. I figured it was time Wro learned that food didn’t just come out of restaurant kitchens.

Melanie Mayo showed him around. They visited mushrooms deep in woods, mosquito-filled woods. We learned that shiitakes take 7 - 18 months to grow and that morels grow near dogwoods here too. Crabtree also cultivates night velvet, bolshoi breeze, WW70, CW25 WW40 and WR72. Not as romantic sounding but just as good.

“One guy inoculated his compost heap with mushrooms and got a bunch the next year,” Mayo reported.

Wro also saw paw paws, strawberries and all kinds of green foods.

Moses & the Promised Land

We went appropriately to lunch then at 212 Market, proclaimed Chattanooga’s greenest restaurant. This “Mom and Daughters” café is a labor of love by Maggie Moses and her daughters Susan and Sally. It’s also the only restaurant in downtown Chattanooga that predates the Aquarium - or as the Moses like to say “We were downtown, before downtown was cool.”

They have reputations for being the major teaching restaurant in the area, a hands-on learning center for culinary students and recent grads. All three ladies are almost always working in the kitchen or bakery. They are also a great supporter of local farms as well as green foods. This is one of the few places in America where turkey is always Bourbon Red, a legendary breed that many feel is the ultimate in turkey tasting. The menu was punctuated with other local farm brands - Sequatchie Farms, Meadow Creek Dairy, Fall’s Mill grits.

The dessert tray was enticing, but we managed to stick with just two: one of the best tres leches anywhere;

a chocolate mousse; a crème brulee and a bread pudding. Did I say just two? I meant just two each.

Fish We Didn’t Eat

If the Hunter is old Chattanooga, the Tennessee Aquarium represents New Chattanooga. Designed by Boston architect Peter Chermayeff, its opening in 1992 signaled the city’s intention to rid itself of a negative image from Tia-Numa‘s curse. The place first opened as the world’s largest freshwater aquarium. Today the original building showcases “River Journey,” with exhibits that follows a single drop of water flowing from the Appalachian Mountains down the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico.

One popular rumor, which will never be likely die or be confirmed, is that Home Depot management bore such a grudge against Chattanooga that they donated money to Atlanta for the purpose of building a bigger aquarium. Chattanooga responded by hiring Chermayeff’s firm to build a $30 million, 60,000 square-foot adjoining building, which opened in 2005 and jumpstarted a downtown revival that also created a beautiful new ball park, the Riverfront festival grounds and the restaurant renaissance we had come to sample.

The new aquarium building showcases “Ocean Journey,” a story of the unique coral reef systems in the Gulf of Mexico. We watched 10-foot sharks, fierce barracuda and graceful stingrays glide through amazing coral formations. Other galleries showcase cuttlefish, scaly tarpons, squid, crabs and jellyfish, some of which we found on local menus.

We saw the rest of “Jellies: Living Art,” the collaboration with the Hunter that paired the artistic splendor of fine glass sculpture with the living beauty of jelly fish. In a butterfly gallery we particularly enjoyed the Tawny Owl, who did not seem to mind us at all as he sat in his black olive tree.

The aquarium boasts more turtle species than anywhere in the world. We met Oscar, a rescue turtle, who had been run over twice by motor boats. When he first came to the Aquarium, his lungs popped out when he inhaled.

Downtown Dine Around

After the overindulgence of the previous night, we decided to only hit two restaurants on our next dine around. We started with Easy Bistro, another paragon of the Modernist/Deco black & white, masonry and tile Chattanooga Style. Chef - owner Erik Niel is a Cajun country transplant who keeps a faith with both his bayou and gulf roots by blending Deep South and Continental cuisines. This was the only place in town where fried green tomatoes were not covered or stuffed with melted cheese.

Erik’s were heavenly with just bacon, black eyed peas and a crawfish vinaigrette.

He also served some marinated olives, a baked oyster confit, shrimp cocktail, salad with spring mix and endive, strawberries and candied pecans.

Oh, and a couple dozen raw oysters and an order of heavenly potato ravioli with local peaches and crabmeat, in brown butter with shallots and capers.

This was an occasion in which we could barely force ourselves to leave and move on with our plan. Especially since Erik’s menu offered two fish we had never tried before - triggerfish and scamp grouper. We calmed our nerves with a couple house gin specialties - a cucumber-infused gin and ginger cocktail and another featuring elderflower liquor and orange bitters.

I also tried my first Sazerac, America’s oldest cocktail making revival now that absinthe is legal again.

We plunged on to Hennen’s, the sister restaurant and neighbor of Blue Plate. It’s just as a casual despite being an upgrade from diner to steakhouse. Casual steakhouses are a popular tradeoff, customers give up expectations for prime, dry aged beef in exchange for prices that range between $16 - $30. Southern style sides (wilted greens, mashed sweet potatoes, grits, etc.) were also priced low $3 - $4.

Despite all the great appetizers at Easy, we ordered carpaccio with horseradish cream and a gumbo with good roux. For entrees we tried prime rib with peppercorn sauce and some Carolina red trout. Wro’s prime rib didn’t’ come out anywhere near the promised degree of doneness, but in this economy he reasoned he was lucky to be eating beef at all and didn’t pout too much. Powdered beignets and chocolate cheesecake with fresh berries calmed his disappointment. Since Hennen’s is actually inside the Riverbend Festival grounds, it was easier to crawl over for the music before crawling back to the Doubletree

Quirky Roadside Attractions

We started our last day on North Shore, Chattanooga’s riverfront neighborhood and home to Coolidge Park, specialty shops, cafés, outfitters and galleries. We had Clumpies Ice Cream for breakfast. In the shop of a third-generation candy maker, Clumpies makes each gourmet flavor in small batches. We tried fresh peach and blueberry before visiting the 82-year-old steamboat Delta Queen, who began her life floating to San Francisco from Stockton. She is now a floating hotel and lounge.

Then we stopped in Hanover Gallery to see the latest works of Toby Penney, a Tennessee artist who sculpts amazing fruits, vegetables and tubers from perspectives both above and below the ground.

The time had come to rent a car and drive to Boathouse, a restaurant accessible by car, bike, parachute or kayak none of which is my preferred mode. Owner Lawton Haygood patented the Tuff Grill, the standard restaurant operation for wood burning grills. He has my kind of food group philosophy, he says that his rib eyes are “flavored with fat.” Lawton put his name on a Lawtonrita, which we ordered while contemplating lunch. It was simply a classic margarita, with the best tequila and freshly squeezed lime juice. Boathouse featured “Gulf Cuisine” - meaning barbecue, wood grilled meats and fresh seafood, three of the best things in life. We sat on a shaded porch and devoured fresh oysters.

Boathouse sells more fresh oysters than anyone in Tennessee - they take twice-a-week delivery of Appalachoia and luck would have it ( actually it was planned) we showed up at delivery time.

Specialties include wood grilled chicken and El Scorcho, a cioppino like soup. So we ordered them both, plus an appetizer of wood-grilled squid and rotisserie brisket while we contemplated our main order - more raw oysters. Fortified with so much gulf food, I was ready to visit Chattanooga’s most revered and quirky roadside attractions.

Located deep within the underground caverns of historic Lookout Mountain, Ruby Falls’ is among the highest waterfalls in America and has been a huge tourist tradition since 1929.

“No one knows where the water comes from, or where it goes, said tour guide Brent Wade, “in the “30th year of temp job.” He assured me that there were stairs if the elevator breaks down.

People have been willing to crawl on their bellies for 17 hours to see the waterfall. Fortunately for us, pathways are pretty wide and tall now. I didn’t even conk my head. It took us just 20 minutes to walk to the amazing waterfall.

Rock City Gardens opened in 1932 and advertised on barns roofs throughout the South. On top of Lookout Mountain, it features pathways through massive ancient rock formations, gardens with over 400 native plant species, the gnome-inhabited Fairyland Caverns, panoramic views of “seven States” and more.

Roadside attractions, not to mention driving, make us hungry so we returned downtown to Bluewater Grille. This place is a sister to two Florida seafood restaurants, with fresh fish handpicked by a team of chefs in St. Augustine Florida. We tried a lobster bisque and a crab and roasted corn chowder. We followed that with grilled grouper and mahi mahi and some Kobe beef sliders. All were matched with house made beers that had most appropriate names - Big River Lager, Sweet Magnolia Brown Ale, Southern Flyer Light Lager.

Having eaten with some restraint, we were primed to strut rather than crawl. The legendary Bessie Smith Strut is a free downtown event that features live Rhythm & Blues music on three stages. It’s known as the largest block party in the South.

We walked around talking to the smokers, mostly local guys with awesome equipment.

Ron Jones had the biggest smoker, long-trailer sized. He’s a Chattanooga-born guy who recently moved back from Houston. So he combines southern and Texas style Q, specializing in briskets but using an East Carolina sauce.

In the African-American Museum that hosts the Strut, we learned two amazing life stories. Bessie Smith began singing on Chattanooga streets at age 8. By age 9 she was making $8 a week singing in clubs - big money then. She beat Ma Rainey in a talent show and then stowed away on that famous blues star’s train. Ma took her in and mothered her the rest of her life. Bessie died young in a car crash in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Her grave was unmarked till Janis Joplin erected a memorial pillar.

Jimmy Winksdale was the best jockey of the turn of the last century, winning two Kentucky Derbies before the Ku Klux Klan chased black men out of racing. He moved to Russia and became the best jockey in Europe, until the Bolsheviks chased him out of the USSR. He moved to Paris and was the leading trainer there, until the Nazis chased him out of France. He moved to Charles Town in West Virginia, where black men could train and own race horses. In 1960, Jimmy was walking the streets of segregated Louisville during Derby Week when some older horse owners recognized him and demanded that the Brown Hotel lift their racial ban and permit him to drink with them in Louisville’s ultimate bar. What a life.

When is Spike Lee going to make that movie?

Last thoughts -

Chattanooga is rightly proud of its food renaissance. While St. John gets most of the accolades, our singular experiences found a bigger movement, with Table 2 and Easy Bistro every bit as deserving of honors and with Clumpie's, The Chattanooga Market, Boathouse, Bluff View, Blue Plate and a dozen amateur smokers all contributing to a roots-to-table scene as quirky as the city's best known roadside attractions.

If You Go

Chattanooga Doubletree407 Chestnut Streetchattanooga, TN 37402(423) 756-5150http://www.chattanooga.doubletree.com/

This hotel topped the entire Hilton system for customer service in a customer poll. That showed on our stay with sensationally friendly, accommodating people - and that’s saying something as Wro can be really demanding. It’s also a green hotel, recycling everything from garbage to lighting.

Chattanooga African-American Museum
200 E. MLK Blvd. , Chattanooga, TN 37403
423-266-8658
http://www.caamhistory.com/

Bluff View Art District

411 East Second Street, Chattanooga, TN 37403
800.725.8338 http://www.bluffviewartdistrict.com/

Ruby Falls
1720 South Scenic Hwy. Chattanooga, TN 37409 423-821-2544
http://www.rubyfalls.com/

Hunter Museum of American Art

10 Bluff View. Chattanooga, TN 37403
423-267-0968
http://www.huntermuseum.org/

Tennessee AquariumOne Broad Street, Chattanooga, TN 37401-2048 800-262-0695
http://www.tnaqua.org/

International Towing & Recovery Museum and Hall of Fame
3315 Broad St., Chattanooga, TN 37408-3052(423) 267-3132
http://www.internationaltowingmuseum.org/

Back Inn
411 East Second Street
Chattanooga, TN 37403
800-725-8338 ext. 1

Blue Plate
191 Chestnut St. # B, Chattanooga, TN 37402-1035(423) 648-6767http://www.theblueplate.info/

Niko’s 1400 Cowart St., Chattanooga, TN 37408-1113(423) 266-6511http://www.nikossouthside.com/

St. John’s1278 Market St., Chattanooga, TN 37402-2713(423) 266-4571
http://www.stjohnsrestaurant.com/

Table 2 232 E 11th St., Chattanooga, TN 37402-4208(423) 756-8253
http://www.table2restaurant.com/

Easy Bistro
203 Broad St., Chattanooga, TN 37402-1010(423) 266-1121
http://www.easybistro.com/

Hennen’s 193 Chestnut St., Chattanooga, TN 37402-1012(423) 634-5160
http://www.hennens.net/

Blue Water Grille
224 Broad St., Chattanooga, TN 37402-1009(423) 266-4200
http://www.bluewaterchattanooga.com/