Taste

Scott and I woke up this morning unimpressed with the world and with no plans. We escaped the city and headed across the water to warmer parts--the East Bay. After a very brief trip to Ikea, which included an equally brief dash to the car and zoom out of the parking lot, we ventured over to North Berkeley, where we hoped beer and pizza at the Cheese Board would help soothe the world’s, or at least our, woes. But, to our dismay, it was closed, at lunch time on a Saturday afternoon.

But I was hungry (the wafting aroma of Sweedish meatballs at Ikea somehow did me in) and wanted food. We parked the car and walked over to Gregoire on Cedar. I had seen the one on Piedmont in Oakland and wanted to try it, but this one was crowded with no place to sit, and Scott, quite understandably, didn’t want to eat standing out of a box. We moved on.

We rounded the corner onto Shattuck. We passed Cha-am (home of many undergraduate Thai meals), and Chez Panisse (where Eleanor was volunteering for the day), and Cesar (where I once had the most decadently fabulous cheese and pear dessert), and settled on Taste, in what I later found out was called Epicurious Garden.

On our way to our seat on the little sidewalk patio, we passed a funky looking wine machine. It was a large circular contraption that held at least a dozen wine bottles attached to metal spouts with red digital numbers above each bottle. For a wine display, it was an impressive and intimidating one. But, we later learned from Greg, the house wine master, that Taste is a wine tasting bar, where with the purchase of a card that acts like a debit one, we could try as many different wines as we wished. The machine measures out each pour, debits our card, and keeps the wine fresh with, if I remember correctly, nitrogen. Greg also told us that Taste had opened only four months ago.

We didn’t opt for the wine tasting but Scott ordered a glass, which he didn’t like so much and which Greg replaced with a California Syrah that Scott liked better. To eat, we chose the flank steak sandwich with frisee salad and the day’s pizza, which was topped with bacon, roasted garlic, and grilled chicken.

The flank steak sandwich was delicious. The slices of steak were tender and full of beefy flavor. The meat seemed to have been cured beforehand since it was pink without the bloody taste of being rare. A generous but not disgusting portion of horseradish mayonnaise was spread on the thick, crusty toasted slices of baguette. And, the peppery and lemony frisee salad was a refreshing touch.

The pizza was good as well. The flavors of the garlic and bacon were overpowering compared to the chicken, but that didn’t matter since they worked well together in creating something tasty for my mouth. The crust was chewy, in a good way, although it seemed a little too heavy along the outer edges.

We ended our meal with the flourless chocolate cake (it seems like every restaurant has a flourless chocolate cake on their menu nowadays) with the mascarpone cheese topping and fresh blackberries. The cake was rather light, not too sweet and not too rich, as some flourless cakes can be. And the mascarpone cheese, with its slightly heavier consistency than whipped cream and velvety smooth texture, held up well against the cake.

We sat there, leisurely eating our meal in the sun and watching the people walk by. Sure, it wasn’t how we had originally had planned to spend our Saturday (we hadn’t really planned anything at all) but it wasn’t a bad way to while the hours away.