Prime Pork Chop Dinner at Pub’s Prime Rib in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget
One of the best times of year to order a pork chop meal at a locals’ favorite restaurant like Pub’s Prime Rib in Salinas, California is October when the weather turns from very hot to very cool.
This is the time when areas with strong animal husbandry traditions separate the spare, weaker hogs and cattle for slaughter from the animals that will be kept for breeding over winter. What this means for the consumer is the abundance of pork products in fall like brats, sausage, bacon, and pork chops. One classic example of how this seasonal abundance was used in Germany is the Munich Oktoberfest, which was started to celebrate a wedding with many guests.
Pork chops made from freshly killed hogs are very tender and some say more flavorful than pork that is preserved in various forms to last throughout the winter. What is true for hogs is traditionally true for cattle as well.
With that backstory told to my family, my husband Laurent, our daughter Florence Paget, and I set out for a delicious meal at Pub’s Prime Rib downtown. Pub’s was established in the 1940s, and I like to think that John Steinbeck ate there.
Our favorite family writer, Florence Paget, and her dad began their meals with French onion soup that was full of savory onions with gruyère cheese melted over the top of the bowl and down the sides just like you see in French cookbooks. It was a golden delicious stew.
I started my meal with a wedge salad made with cold and crunchy iceberg lettuce with lightly salted blue cheese dressing, chopped fried bacon, and chopped, succulent tomatoes from the blistering hot summer even in Monterey County. I like this salad, because it is a nice contrast in texture, taste, and cooking method – raw. Good appetizers are supposed to contrast in this way with a main dish.
For our main dishes, Florence had the prime rib with baked potatoes and vegetables. Laurent had lobster ravioli. Both of these dishes came with a large dinner salad beforehand. Laurent ordered seafood in a month with an “r” in it, which the French say are good months for seafood due to colder water. Florence was getting prime rib from freshly killed October cattle.
I ordered the pork chop dinner, which I considered a German hauptgeriichte, or main dish from elite cuisine:
-a one-inch thick, large pork chop that came with caramelized apples, roasted baby potatoes, and sautéed spinach in a rosemary-mustard red wine sauce.
The pork chop was easy to cut and the lovely side dishes filled me up, so I did not order dessert, but the crème brulée and New York Cheesecake both looked tempting.
Pub’s Prime Rib in Salinas, California is a cozy place for dinner with a full bar in front and a good choice of meat and seafood dinners.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
