Mangia!

There are two camps when it comes to food, the folks who eat to live and those other unfortunate swine who live to eat. Sadly, I fall into the latter subset, headed for a life's remainder full of those particular aches and pains reserved for the porcine and the gluttonous.

I have friends that will not eat at any restaurant beyond the culinary ceiling of Pick up Stix or Appleby's. One friend has the narrowest spectrum, nothing weird, nothing ethnic, no mexican, no spicy, nothing much beyond the narrow bandwidth of the grilled cheese sandwich on white. You know who you are... We all create our own relationship with food. For some it's fuel, for others an exercise in gustatory perception and an exalted sense of taste. To each his or her own.


I have noticed that there are regional differences in taste in regards to spicy foods in this country. I had dinner with a New Mexican woman last night, who eats a steady diet of green chile, who had a hard time handling habañero chile, a southern california staple.

When I traveled on the road, several decades ago, I was always amazed at the buttery blandness of the food in states like Maine and Pennsylvania. The lobster, the soup, the corn pie, everything was modulated and without much taste to this native San Diegan. Of course, we who live near the southern border may have merely burned our taste buds light out after a life of living at scoville's edge.

When I hang around my foodie friends, I get an appreciation that they may have a greater and more immediate relationship with life and pleasure than your ordinary muggle. It is almost like the ability to recognize a great painting. Some people reject their senses, others try to experience their universe with guns blazing and all sensory circuits wide open. We make choices in life. I am willing to suffer the occasional clogged artery for the perfect veal chop, call me the madman.

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Yesterday I had business in the big city and the wife and I decided to enjoy lunch together at Cucina Urbana.  Cucina Urbana is a relatively new restaurant that sits on the same footprint as my favorite San Diego restaurant of the last few years, Laurel. It is located at 505 Laurel, on the corner of Fifth. Both places are the brainchild of one Tracy Borkum. Both have a surfeit of great food, beautiful people and an interesting decor. But Borkum did an amazing thing in this new italian restaurant, no entree is over twenty dollars!

This was our first time at Cucina Urbana and I can't wait to go back, maybe with a bunch of my regular food friends. We sat with our back to the front window, so that we could take the whole restaurant in. Our server, Tristan, brought over our menus and explained some of the more esoteric fare.

We started the meal with a vasi, or bread topping. We had a burrata, mozzarella and cream in a roasted garlic confit. It came in its own little swivel topped mason jar. Absolutely delicious, served with sourdough and a rustic wheat bread, the burrata stretching apart like congealed library paste.

Everything on the menu looked so interesting that it was really hard to make a decision. Leslie settled on a short rib pappardelle with mushrooms and large shavings of parmigiano. I ordered the daily grind, a pork and pistachio sausage served under a generous caponata topping, alongside fresh ricotta, on a crusty roll.

My dish was accompanied by a too generous serving of truffle fries, the amazing holdover from Laurel. They are the best I have ever had and I am so happy that they are still on the menu. Some of the other special ingredients on the lunch menu were guanciale, speck, porchetta and lemon ricotta. I asked a lot of questions and the server was helpful, patient and informative. I also looked at the dinner menu, which was a bit more involved and looked equally promising. Such exciting offerings as burnt brussel sprouts.

We didn't have drinks but they had a nice cocktail menu and  a cool and quirky wine selection. Very fun bar.

The food was marvelous. Leslie's papardelle would have been a perfect cold weather food, rich, hot and filling. My sandwich was exquisite. Strong flavors, definitely not for the timid, but perfectly balanced for my palette. We finished our entrees and decided to get one more item, another vasi of smoked trout and golden beet. I wasn't as wild about this item but Leslie loved it. It was not the fault of the dish but I should have had it first or perhaps at another time, it didn't flow with the rest of my meal.

Which reminds me of a time in Vancouver, at the greatest indian restaurant I have ever been, Vij's. The owner, Vikram came to talk to me about the menu and I asked for suggestions and he started asking me about what I had eaten for breakfast and lunch. He built a dinner around my previous meals and it not only was delicious but made sense. I think that that was one of the failings of the French Laundry, I do not think that the human body likes to ingest so many disparate types of meat, fowl and fish at the same sitting. It is a dining habit of french offshoot, I am sure, and popular in 19th century America. See Lincoln's inaugural feast.

We were presented dessert menus that looked tantalizing: blood orange and ricotta fregolata with pistachio bourbon gelato, a roasted pear and rum soaked currant crisp. We just couldn't eat another bite.

Cucina Urbana is not the type of restaurant to be enjoyed by the meek. Flavors are vivid and confident. If you decide to dine there and are seeking company it would be a shame to waste an invitation on someone who didn't really love food. You could always call me. It still may be my favorite restaurant in San Diego. I need to check it out again and soon.

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Two more things on the food front. Try the cara cara orange available now at your supermarket. A hybrid between the  Washington navel and the Brazilian Bahia navel, it has a beautiful raspberry red flesh and a tangy taste. Best new citrus I have tasted in decades.

Also bought huge chilean cherries at the market last month that were incredibly sweet. At one time the south american fruit we received up here in the winter was dreadful and expensive. We bought the cherries at Henry's for $1.99 on special and they were as good as anything stateside.

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We tooled our way up the coast after lunch, finally caught the King's Speech and met up with Bob and Terry, our cronies from New Mexico and Omaha. We stopped at 333 for drinks and calamari and then went to Bull Taco for dinner. I had never been to the Oceanside location and had a much larger menu than cardiff. Funky but amazing. I had duck, and a lobster, chorizo, bacon taco. Talk about food combining. Also one of the buck fifty carnitas tacos. They had quail tacos, fois gras tacos, abalone tacos, ox tail tacos, the place is just insane.

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And finally, how to cook every part of the duck from bill to tail feathers. And end up with stock, confit, sausage, the whole megillah. Video quality not good but bearable.