A Basque meal at the Noriega Hotel in Bakersfield

Saturday night five of us drove up to Bakersfield for dinner at Noriega’s Hotel. It has been there, near the Union Pacific (formerly Southern Pacific) Railroad Station, since 1893. A time warp, it is pretty much like it was then and has an authentic feel like few other places. There is a large bar with the dining room behind it. Unlike the three or four other Basque places in Bakersfield, Noriega’s is very much a traditional place serving one set meal like country places in Europe. There are three very long tables with stout “jury room” chairs for about 200 people. Diner is served in one sitting at seven. Parties are seated up and down the tables more or less in the order they checked in. On this saturday night there were half a dozen birthday groups and many family celebrations and a group of jovial middle aged middle class motorcycle warriors who had rolled up from Ventura County.

The food is basque style home cooking, cooking as it was in my grandmother’s day. It is good, but not serious four star basque cooking. For that I recommend the showcase Orosko Dinning Room at the Nugget Hotel Casino in Sparks Nevada.

At Noriega’s dinner is a homey and authentic meal provided by the Elizalde family as they have since 1931. When you enter the dinning room the smell is welcoming like a country farm house kitchen fifty years ago or more, like my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with a mix of American and Portuguese dishes cooking. The Basques are generally recognized as the best cooks in Iberia and while not the same, their cooking shares many things with Portuguese and regional Spanish styles.

Waiting on the table when you are seated are a large salad bowl dressed with a blue cheese based variation on Caesar dressing and a large steaming tureen of cabbage and vegetable soup seasoned to the point and very much homemade. Placed around it are a large platter of thin slices of marinated tongue, a bowl of stewed pinto beans, a large basket of sliced french bread, butter, a bowl of herbed seasoned cottage cheese, a plate of homemade potato salad and a bowl of red tomato and pepper basque salsa picante, just this side of very hot. The salsa is added to the pinto beans to bring them to whatever level you prefer. Cuidado, it is muy picante. There is also a bottle of full bodied red house wine.

After first course were cleared away, the meal went on with a platter of spaghetti marinara eavily dusted with parmesan cheese that was as good as any I’ve ever had. After this a plate with a large slab of blue cheese was served with bowl of steamed Broccoli florets in a white hollandaise and then the oxtail stew. It was very much like my grandmother made in winter time, the meat and vegetables in unthickened cooking juices and not a heavy gravy. Finally, we were served platters of very crispy fried chicken heavily sprinkled with sautéed garlic cloves and platter of crisp hot french fries. “We don’t have to worry about vampires,” was my daughter’s comment. The pungent sweetness of the sautéed garlic on the chicken cut through any greasiness and made it a savory rustic dish. After this was cleared ice cream was served.

At dinner coffee is not put on the table, you have to ask for it. The bar has some interesting basque liqueurs if you want to try one. Les Fleurs des Pyrenees is very good as are others. The meal was large and simple in a traditional way. It took a convivial two hours and was well worth the drive to Bakersfield. What is telling is that a traditional country meal originally served to the men staying at a Basque boarding house a century ago seems to us today to be very special and festive dinner.

The meal is served for $20 per person, childern up to 12 are charge a dollar for each year of their age. A simpler meal is served at lunch for $14. A country breakfast is served daily from 7:00 to 9:00 for $10 with basque sausages, eggs and a slab of Monterey Jack cheese like my grandparents ate every morning. The Noriega Hotel is open everyday except Mondays. The dinner is served in one sitting at 7:00 pm. Reservations are suggested.

Noriega Hotel

525 Sumner Street

Bakersfield, California

(661) 322-8419

A great burger doesn't always come in a bun.

Hamburgers have become not just the great American fast food. Lately they have like cupcakes become a foodie obsession. Some are just made with care and the best available ingredients like those at Oinkster in Eagle Rock, the place that kicked off this fad locally. Now Oinster set out to prove that if you took care and skill, you could produce a perfect hamburger. They do and at a price not that much higher than ordinary fast food places.

Since then the foodies have swarmed and now we have ultra burgers for ten bucks each or more or hyper burgers for twenty or more bucks. The ultra burgers tend to be big, too big, often half a pound of beef. The hyper burgers are tarted up with special buns, exotic kinds of meat and lily gilding “gourmet” extra ingredients like fois gras, exotic bacon, rare mushrooms and so on and so forth. For me, I think what the Oinkster does is commendable and a revelation of what care and skill can do. For the ultra and hyper burgers, while sometimes interesting, even amazing, I find them decadent at best, just for show at worst.

Some off beat and different burgers come to mind. Trying to recapture them might be a much more useful thing than lily gilding and hyping the whole idea of hamburger sandwich. Three of the best burgers I’ve ever eaten all came with out the common hamburger bun. Yeah,they came on bread of one kind or another and were all the better for it.

USS Camden AOE-2 in South China Sea

The first is the US Navy “Midrats” burgers and cheese burgers. By old custom at sea around midnight the ship’s galley prepares a light meal for the on coming and off going watch. The “eve” watch runs from 8:00 pm to midnight, the “mid” watch from midnight to 4:00 am. From eleven thirty to twelve fifteen, the galley has a light meal for those about to take the watch and those coming off. Every couple days my ship served burgers, on the other days they had grilled ham and cheese sandwiches or cold roast beef from the evening meal. The burgers were grilled with or with cheese and slapped between slices of ship’s bread. This was not fluffy store bought bread, but chewy home made bread that didn’t go mushy or fall apart. Basic condiments were available including lettuce and pickles, tomatoes ran out a few days after we left port. These were great direct simple burgers that tasted rich and satisfying after four hours on deck in the dark, the wind and salt spray.

In the San Francisco Bay area many places served larger burgers (a third or half a pound of beef) on flat French or Italian rolls. This gave you something to hold onto and something to soak up the meat juices. Larry Blake’s on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley had a great savory burger they served with a big helping of garlicky Caesar Salad not fries. It was ambrosia and salty enough to make sure you ordered another beer. The same was true of many places where you had a choice of a a hamburger or a linguiça, Italian, Polish or Louisiana Hot sausage sandwich. The sausages were split down the center and grilled until crusted then dropped into the big chew rolls and dresses with the usual condiments and garnishes. They were so big they came already cut in half. Great manly food.

The Joe’s restaurants around the Bay Area served and still serve their hamburgers in a long piece of sour dough baguette. Some hallow out the inside to fit the oblong burger, some don’t. Some mix raw onion into the meat before cooking, others give you grilled onions if you ask for them. None of the usual condiments outside mustard and catsup are provided, but honestly these high quality burgers really don’t need any extra flavoring.

California tastes & memories: real food.

This blog is about food and eating in California, both today and over the years. There will three contributing writers and we will write about the taste of California both today and over the past fifty years or more. We will offer memories and some recipes from our grandmother's kitchens and from our kitchens today. We will write about meals at restaurants both today and a long time ago -- in the next week we will put up posts about a dinner at Bakersfield's Noriega Hotel last month and a dinner at San Francisco at Jack's in the summer of 1965.

We have some biases. We are not foodies although we respect young cooks who have the imagination, skill and vision to try something new, even radical, if they respect their ingredients and our taste buds. We like and revere the ethnic traditions of California. We enjoy good restaurants like Campanile, but we also like red check table cloth Italoamerican family places and family run Mexican places that remember their roots in Jalisco or Sonora.

The three of us went College near San Francisco in the early 1960's and still have golden memories of the time, when San Francisco still had a strong local flavor and there were wonderful restaurants across the spectrum from great restaurants like Paoli's, Jack's, the original Trader Vic's in Emeryville to the cheap homey places in North Beach like the New Piza, La Pantera, the San Remo. All of them are only memories.

Your comments and your take and your memories are welcome.

Shopping in LA

Where I shop in Los Angeles and why.

For me, grocery shopping is a bit of hobby or at least a challenge, in addition to being a necessary errand and often a chore. In this post I will outline the places where I often shop and a few others that I visit from time to time, especially when I’m looking for ethnic or out of the ordinary food and ingredients.

Von’s (as Safeway stores are known in Southern California) is my main local supermarket. I live in an old neighborhood between downtown LA and Hollywood. I shop a Von’s once a week. At least at my local Von’s I like the meat department and appreciate the quality of their “house” brand products, and I commend their organic “O” brand to you, especially the catsup which is very good with a zippy tang and fresh tomato taste. While there is a sameness to all the Von’s/Safeways there is a real variance between individual stores, for example, my regular market gets at best a C+ for its produce and a B- for its in store bakery. There is one Von’s store that is far above the rest in service, wide selection and quality. That is the Montecito branch in that very special suburb of Santa Barbara. I’ll write about that one in a separate post.

Trader Joe’s is a place I go primarily for dairy products and light shopping, averaging not quite once a week. TJ’s has very good prices on dairy and bakery items and has a great selection of frozen fish.

On a monthly cycle I hit Costco for paper goods, pet food and pantry staples like pasta and canned goods. Then I also recommend Smart & Final for some meat items, restaurant grade coffee, especially high quality Peerless Coffee from Oakland, imported vinegar's and condiments, restaurant brand salad dressings, cleaning goods and occasionally bread. The gallon cans of chili, tomatoes, gravy, beans and pickles come in handy if you are having a barbecue or a big dinner.

When I want a lot of fresh produce I shop, two maybe three times a month at my local Jon’s Market, part of an Armenian owned chain with a very good large produce section and a wild selection of ethnic food: Armenian & Middle Eastern, Latino, and Eastern European items. They also have a particularly well selected and large Deli section with fifty kinds of ham, sausages and cold cuts, a lot of smoked fish and ethnic dairy items including Moskowskaya Smetana -- a Russian Sour cream that is to American Sour Cream like turkish coffee is to a watery vending machine cup of joe. They now carry Bobak’s traditional Polish sausages and cured meats from Chicago. The veal sausages are a revelation in how rich and subtle sausages can be when made when made with care and pride. Polish immigrant friends assure me Bobak’s products are authentic and z’dobsha -- it’s good. They also tell me that in Chicago they still make many traditional things that haven’t been seen in Poland since WW II. This is not surprising when you consider that more Poles live in Chicago than in Warsaw.

At least once a month or more I also shop at one of the two former Mayfair Markets, long been part of the Gelson’s chain, but in Hollywood they long maintained their original name. Gelsons is a high end market chain, like Raley’s in the Sacramento area. The Silver Lake store has a spectacular if expensive produce section while the Franklin Avenue Branch has a better Deli take out & Bakery section and a wider variety of up scale frozen items including frozen meat from wild game and some very special desserts. The store on Franklin Avenue is always full of faces you see at night on your TV set. Some other places I shop on an irregular basis are very ethnic stores like the Latino Vallarta Markets which have a very good panderia (Latino Bakery) and in summer super prices on a huge selection of local and tropical fresh fruit.

For Chinese and Vietnamese products of all kinds I have been going to 99 Lucky Ranch Markets. My favorite today is on Atlantic Blvd. in Monterey Park, but they have branches all over southern California. Started by a Vietnamese Chinese family that ran markets in Cholon, the Chinatown of Saigon, they came as boat people in the 1970’s and began with a small market on the edge of LA’s Chinatown. In addition to a large produce department with a huge selection of Asian fruits and vegetables, they have a large collection of tanks with many kinds of live fish and shell fish including lobsters, crabs, carp, catfish and often Striped Bass, a great tasting fish otherwise only available if you have a lucky day fishing in the San Juaquin Delta. It is known as “Rock Fish” in the Chesapeake Bay and a specialty of fine restaurants in Washington and Baltimore.

Other places I like are Filipino bakeries that make traditional products like Pan Espanol and the island nation’s specialty Pan Sal -- it is a chewy bun somewhere between a Mexican Bolio and a very big American Biscuit. They are sold hot by the dozen and locals wait for them. They also make buttery cinnamon pull apart “Monkey Bread” and custard and pineapple tarts that are a nice treat.

Three or four times a year I will drive down to the Alpine Market in Torrance which is a gold mine for German & Central European meats, sausages, cheeses, breads, Dutch, German and Norwegian packed herring and pickles. It also carries Scandinavian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Balkan and Baltic meat, cheese, bread, pickles, beers and schnapps, aquavit, vodka and many fruit and herbal liqueurs . The market has a very good if spartan lunch cafeteria with wide variety of “Old Country” dishes and sandwiches at very fair prices: Weisswurst with sauerkraut and german potato salad, big roll mop herrings, fat juicy knockwurst, spicy paprika flavored hungarian sausages and very good liverwurst on rye. You get a choice of yellow American mustard or a sharp European brown mustard with real zip.

Porto's Bakeries in Glendale and Burbank are a bit of old Havana, with great Cuban sandwiches. My favorite is Ropa Vieja -- a tangy Cuban take on Beef Pot Roast on half a loaf of Cuban bread. They serve Cubanos, Medianoches and other traditional Cuban sandwiches and a huge selection of cakes and pastries, many of them with exotic tropical fruit charlotte or pudding fillings. They have “Cubanos” -- a wide circle of puff pastry with a layer of cream cheese and intense guava preserves in the middle, the traditional Cuban Breakfast special eaten with strong coffee. They also make wonderful ham and potato croquettes and serve them with plantain chips.

In my neighborhood is a small Mom & Pop Japanese Market called Fuji-ya that carries Japanese items and beautiful Japanese cuts of beef and pork plus some Hawaiian products including Maui Onion pickles and brewed in Hawaii Aloha Soyu and their line of their low salt and teriyaki sauces and marinades.

For Indian cooking there is India Sweets and Spices, a chain with stores in Los Feliz and across West Los Angeles and the South Bay. They carry a huge selection of Indian spices and food items and most have a cafeteria serving simple vegetarian food at modest prices. My Hindu friends tell me it like a second rate Indian Railway station buffet, but they all go there for a authentic cheap lunch. For me, their Tikka, a potato and onion pancake is a standout. I also like their lentil or bean soups (Dal), curry chickpeas & various vegetable stews especially their curried cauliflower. Indian sweets are for me hit or miss, you will like some of them and not others depending on your own taste. They also make something that is like an Indian take on a Chili Relleno, only hotter than the Mexican one.

Finally, I will tell you about a place that is worth a visit. Super King Market on San Fernando Road just south of the 2 Freeway and the Glendale city line. They also have markets in Altadena and Anaheim. This is “diversity central” and far and away the most multiethnic multicultural food store I have ever seen. It serves Gringos and Latinos, Chinese and Armenians, Vietnamese and Pakistanis, West Indians and East Africans, Koreans, Filipinos and Eastern Europeans. Everybody shops here -- from right off the boat immigrants to proper “ladies who lunch” from very affluent La Canada-Frintridge a few miles up the 2 Freeway. The produce department is huge and covers everything from topical fruits and vegetables like plantains and yuccas, all sorts of citrus including varieties I’ve never see before like sweet lemons and three kinds of limes.

The cooking oil section carried various grades of olive oil from France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Lebanon. I think they also had some from Argentina too. The pickle section had jars of cucumber and other vegetable pickles from the USA, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Iran and India. These include the red pickled turnips that come with falafel, okra, green tomatoes, peppers of all sorts including the long “pencil” peppers form Turkey and short very hot Turkish “Fefferoni.” They also carry Balkan Ajar which is puree of peppers used in cooking. It comes mild or spicy.

The deli and meat section is huge and as wide ranging as the rest of the store. Domestic and imported cheese, Bulgarian Sheep milk Feta, Polish Cheeses, Swiss and Dutch cheese, English and Irish cheeses, hams from France (the Parisian Jambon is ethereal in its subtle perfection), Poland, Romania, Hungary, Spain, Italy and domestic ones. Also cold cuts ranging from twenty or more kinds of salami, baloney's, mortadella's, head cheese and many once common but rarely seen American items like German style midwestern hard salami and old fashioned veal and pork “Olive & Pimento” loaf. This was a favorite of my father and I had not seen it in a long time. I bought a sliced pound and my daughter liked it, “It’s like an American mortadella.” She had never see or eaten it before.

They also carry Mexican and other Latino meats and sausages. One thing to remember is every Iberian region and Latin American Republic makes its own unique kind of chorizo. Basque or what the Cubans call Bilbao Chorizo is a kin to Portuguese Linguiça while Argentine chorizo is very much like semi spicy Italian sausage. Mexican Chorizo is a spicy soft sausage that makes a great breakfast of Huevos con chorizo. In Mexico little hard chorizos are common but for some reason almost never seen here anymore. In Central America they make chorizos that are more like American pork sausage than the Mexican variety. Morcella is a hardy blood sausage like French Boudim Noir or English and Irish “Black Pudding.” The Argentine blood sausage like much Argentine food is close to an Italian original with pine nuts and raisins.

In the fresh meat department Super King has all the usual cuts of meat plus “butcher’s offal” including tripe, liver, kidneys, the tongues of various animals, beef shanks, lamb shanks, fresh hams and picnic hams, and ground beef, pork, lamb and mutton. Mutton is available, either mature sheep or goat and is popular with Mexicans and with Indians and Pakistani’s for Mexican Birria (goat stew) or curries of every kind.

The freezer cases are as eclectic as the rest of the store with frozen Pirogi’s and gyoza, peleminy, ravioli alongside meat cheese and fruit blintzes. The fruit and vegetable selections that include many varieties rarely seen in American supermarkets. It is worth a visit, if you have patience and avoid the weekends when the place is thronged.

Super King is worth a trip and I can guarantee you will find things you have never seen before, a lot of stuff you will not like, like sheep and pig heads, and a lot of things you will love. A deli counter with over two dozen kinds of ham and the same number of salami’s is worth a close look.

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