Lunching at Rocky Point
Restaurant with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget in Big Sur, California and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
My family discovered the Rocky Point Restaurant when went to
an Alliance Française lunch there. After
that we went back to Rocky Point for lunches as a treat on drives down to Big
Sur from our home in Marina, California.
We always reserved ahead to get a table by the
floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the Pacific with a view of Bixby
Bridge in the distance.
Bixby Bridge is the bridge used in car commercials on
television. It is very photogenic, but I
do not dawdle when I am on it, because Highway 1 is a freeway not a place to
stop and take pictures despite Big Sur’s beauty. There is a place to stop and take photos before
you get on Bixby Bridge.
The reason the Alliance Française was holding their lunch
there was that they had some French items on the menu even if they were not
named as such.
So, we could get eat French onion soup and a “Pacific
Omelet” made with a pepper and onion sauce with sheet-pan baked potatoes,
purple onion, and garlic. The Pacific
omelet with pepper sauce is really a Basque omelet in piperade sauce.
In the Spanish and French Basque countries, cooks use a
pepper called “esplette” to make this Vitamin-C rich sauce. (For more information on Basque food, the San
Francisco-based cookbook writer and restaurant owner Gerald Hirigoyen has
written two informative books entitled Pintxos and The Basque Kitchen.)
We always drink iced tea in Big Sur. Bixby Bridge and Highway 1 hang on a narrow
cliff on the side of the Santa Lucia Mountains that separate the Pacific Ocean
from the Salinas Valley on the other side of the mountains.
Before driving down the coast from Rocky Point, my family
would go out beyond the parking lot and get great photos of us with Bixby
Bridge in the distance. There are hiking
trails down to the beach below, if you really want to take them, too.
Half the fun of going to lunch at Rocky Point is driving
down the one-way road that leads to the restaurant. They have pull-out space for when two cars
meet, but we liked to drive down the steep road chanting, “Make way for the
Pagets!”
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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