"Hedonism has no rules!"

This is an account of a five day trip in Napa and San Francisco with my parents and our gracious hosts Larry and Susan. The following is not safe for diabetics.

Night 1

Began the eating an hour after landing at a tapas restaurant in Napa. Since the home cooked meals require the most attention, I will try to be brief with meals out. This dinner was insanely good for a brief post-flight and late night meal. Grilled mackerel, sardines, etc.

Day 2

The next day we went to lunch at a well-known Napa restaurant called Mustards (The chef was on Top Chef Masters but I found her irritating and the impressionable clientele rolling up in rented limos supported this sentiment). The meal was actually awesome, but details are not really necessary.

The pièce de résistance of the trip, Larry’s magnum opus, was the dinner for this evening - the hallowed pizza dinner. Larry, as some of you know, has an awesome outdoor pizza oven (he also has an awesome indoor pizza oven too). Larry’s property is flush with the best produce one can imagine (tomatoes, beets, corn, every herb, meyer lemons, leeks, limes, peppers, the list is endless). Larry is also a dynamite chef. While the fire raged in the pizza oven (he got it up to around 850 degrees before spreading out the coals), he prepared his works of art. His dough has the perfect texture, bite, and flavor (he uses a sourdough starter). Five people, six pizzas.

Pizza 1: Classic Margherita – fresh tomato sauce (perhaps the most underrated aspect of his pizza), some buffalo muzz, a lot of fresh basil, an assortment of red and yellow cherry tomatoes from the backyard.

Pizza 2: Corn from the backyard, pancetta, cilantro pesto, and his preferred mixture of cheeses (aged asiago and provelone) This pizza might have been the best. The pancetta, pesto and cheese were the perfect salty foil for the ultra sweet corn.

Pizza 3: The foie gras pizza. No sauce, a mixture of sautéed shallots and leeks, and pear-apple hybrids from one of his trees. This goes into the oven for a bit, he pulls it out, sprinkles liberally with foie gras, back in the oven, onto the plate, rage.

Pizza 4: His tomato sauce, buffalo mozz, asiago/provelone combo, sweet sausage, and peppers from his garden that were blistered in a cast iron pan in the pizza oven earlier in the evening. Bomb.

Pizza 5: No sauce, shallots and leeks mixture, figs, blue cheese. Yes.

Pizza 6: sauce, mozz, asiago/provelone, a different kind of sausage mixed with hot peppers from the garden, mushrooms. However, he bestowed the cooking honors upon my father and myself.

After...

Whatever, it was still tasty.

Our problem was that we missed a crucial step. We did not blow under the dough before sliding into the oven as seen in this picture -

On the table was also an heirloom tomato salad with a mixture of anchovies, olives, olive oil, parsley, basil, and some other ingredients I cannot recall.

Dessert was a rhubarb crisp/crumble with crème fraiche.

Larry contently sips on his wine.

Food coma.

Day 3

With the dreamscape of last night’s pizza parade still fully on my mind (pancetta and corn is an unreal combo), Larry’s compass was fully set on brunch. One of larry’s best qualities is his eternal focus on the next meal. Since our plan was to go to San Francisco to see the King Tut exhibit, Larry’s gaze fixed on a seafood joint in Sausalito called Fish. The picture explains a lot.

A seared salmon banh mi was incredible, summer ceviche, tuna and white bean salad, fish tacos etc. After this feast the people clamored about the amount of food consumed and the early dinner reservation – Larry responded - “I feel very comfortable, I will be ready in 3 hours.” Your move.

Sidenote: King Tut would probably be rolling in his sarcophagus after that exhibit. A Disney-land esque production. I doth protest too much, this was just to pass the time anyway.

Dinner was at a great restaurant in SF called Range. While everything was typically excellent one dish stood out. Marinated leeks with a poached egg shaved parmesan and a breadcrumbs. Put a perfectly poached egg on anything and it will probably be awesome.

Sidenote: Larry frequently eats with a spoon, which I suspect stems from a fear of losing a morsel of his meal through the precipitous gaps of the fork.

Also, cardamom ice cream.

Day 4

Gout would have abruptly set in without our daily exercise routine. Calories and rendered fat were dispatched vis-à-vis competitive tennis matches (morning and afternoon) and walks through town and country.

Larry is a damn nimble tennis player for his age and his “Hedonism has no rules!” t-shirt belies the rules of both biology and physics (copius amounts of food and drink do not restrict his lateral movement, at least on the tennis court).

A relaxing afternoon ultimately gave way to the final dinner at Larry's house.

Sussman once said “I love mixed grills” Not surprisingly, Larry’s first comment before dinner was precisely, “I love mixed grills.”And I, too, love mixed grills.

But first to the appetizers.

Larry’s bocadillos (he kept calling them boquerones but I’ll forgive.) baguette rubbed with garlic and tomato topped with his iberico ham (he has a whole haunch of this spanish beast in his fridge)

Head cheese on toasted bread. Head cheese is perfection. Nuff said

Abalone sashimi (picked off the rocks from his house in northern California, Gualala to be exact)

Gazpacho with roasted beets with olive oil and croutons: tastes more like a borscht, but nonetheless the best gazpacho I have ever had.

Vodka and tonic with calamondin zest (calamondins are these tiny orange fruits that taste like a combination of kumquats and limes, essentially nature’s sour patch kid) He has a calamondin tree. Attention amateurs, Step your game up.

Mixed Grill:

This dish contains the following:
Crepinettes (assorted ground meats and offal wrapped in caul fat)

Merguez sausage

Rabbit marinated in garlic, kaffir lime leaf zest, oil and some other stuff

Duck legs in the same marinade

Grilled Abalone that had been sitting in melted butter

Grilled corn wrapped in fig leaves.

Close-up of a crepinette in all of its fatty glory.

Roasted potato/turnip hybrids with rosemary and butter. Outrageous.

Marinated Lima Beans

Vietnamese watermelon grown in the backyard from smuggled seeds.

My lofty expectations had been met and then thoroughly surpassed.

Larry does not, by definition, possess an insatiable appetite; for you can sate this man with various permutations of the fat, salt, protein/produce trifecta. Amidst this food centered orbit you get accustomed to a cyclical pattern akin to a Bourdain-like gastro-erotic analogy. Foreplay (the musing and preparation) gives way to the climax (eating) which ultimately fades into afterglow (coma).

Day 5

Final Day

To cap off the trip we ate dinner in San Fran at a restaurant Larry has invested in called Water Bar. Two dozen Point Reyes oysters and one filet of sole later it was over. Red eye back to NY.

I am now writing this on a Virgin America flight in their “night club inspired aircraft.”

It was a great trip led by our fearless leader - a man determined not to let the surrounding women slow him down (although it was close). Larry is what I would call a pragmatic hedonist; pleasure comes at a calculated cost which never undermines his responsibility as both friend and host (Although it may undermine his good standing as a taxpayer). Rarely do I admit defeat, but the tennis series ended 4 sets to 2 in his favor. And people think this lifestyle is unsustainable.

Thanks Lar,

DG