Cafe Rustica's European Flair - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Café Rustica’s European Flair – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Laurent and I came back on another warm summer night for another gastronomic treat at Café Rustica.  I ordered lamb fillets, and Laurent had the capellini pasta with shrimp.

The meaty lamb fillets came three to a serving and surrounded an impressive piece of vegetable architecture:  a perfectly round mound of au gratin potatoes on a bed of sautéed spinach with strands of roasted red pepper draped over the top of the potatoes.

Sautéed tomato squares flowed down the sides of the au gratin potatoes.  The freshly prepared vegetables all retained their individual flavors.

A cabernet-shallot sauce covered the lamb fillets with pine nuts sprinkled around for flavor.  The sauce enhanced all of the flavors in the dish without overpowering any single one.  The savory lamb, like Florence’s rib eye steak on our previous visit, was tender enough to cut with a regular knife.

I ordered the Yalumba Cabernet Sauvignon from Australia to go with my meal.  The wine smelled and tasted like blackberries and had a strong, lengthy finish.

Laurent love the capellini pasta that came with sautéed shrimp.  The savory marinara sauce paired perfectly with the briny shrimp.  Halves of sweet, cherry tomatoes made up the vegetable contingent in this light, yet filling dish.

Laurent drank a Pichot Vouvray from the Loire Valley in France with his meal.  The mildly sweet taste of this wine went well with the marinara tomato sauce.

The pleasant, hardworking staff at Café Rustica make dining there such an appealing experience.  One of the co-owners told me that they treat all of their employees from dishwashers to hostesses with respect.

“Everyone contributes to the restaurant’s success,” she said.

This philosophy comes from the fact that both owners have been employees in restaurants as well as owners.  They are both chefs in their own right: One trained at the Internant School in Germany while the other trained at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco.

The owners’ dedication to cooking and their high regard for restaurant professionals have helped them create a restaurant that merits a trip out to Carmel Valley Village from the Monterey Peninsula.

(Congratulations to Rustica for being a 2019 Michelin Restaurant!)

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Cafe Rustica's European Flair - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Café Rustica’s European Flair – Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Going to some of my favorite restaurants like Café Rustica in Carmel Valley Village when I was a restaurant reviewer for the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000 – California) was an easy assignment thanks to their perfect food and wait service.

Even after twenty years, I still love dining on their terrace admiring grapevines at the wine tasting rooms across the street.  This restaurant merited two review trips and offers daily specials in addition to their set menu:

Café Rustica Blends Creative European Cuisine with Superlative Service

Dining at Café Rustica in Carmel Valley makes you feel like you have taken a European vacation.  The restaurant offers tasty fare from Italy, France, and Germany along with luscious Californian salads in a courtyard setting reminiscent of continental European restaurants.

My family likes the warm valley weather as well as the friendly ambience at Café Rustica.  On a recent visit for lunch, we conjured up Italian vacations by ordering limonata – a sour lemon soda from Italy with our meal.

For starters, I ordered escargots bourguignons (snails), a specialty of Burgundy France.  Butter, garlic, and parsley are the most obvious ingredients in the sauce, but the co-owner told me that her spouse uses a secret recipe for this sauce that utilizes no less than fifteen ingredients.  I used the slices of toast that came with the snails to soak up this delicious, mystery confection.

Laurent and I ordered 11-inch pizzas inspired by European dishes.  Laurent’s Lorraine pizza takes its name from Quiche Lorraine and is made up of maple-smoked bacon, caramelized onions, and melted gruyère cheese.  For me, these are the best ingredients in a quiche, so I really liked Laurent’s choice. (So did he.)

Caramelized onions were one of the ingredients on my flammekeuche pizza, a dish from Alsace (France), which shares a border with Germany.  I love the onions with cubes of prosciutto that sat atop a layer of crème fraîche.  I thought these ingredients would taste especially good with a slightly sweet white wine like Vouvry, which Laurent ordered on a subsequent visit.

Florence meanwhile was getting an eyeful and a bellyful of a large rib eye steak.  This steak came with a generous helping of herbed butter and French fries.  The meat was tender enough to be cut with a butter knife.

For dessert, Florence ate two scoops of Ciao Bello gelato from San Francisco.  Vanilla bean flecks colored the gelato and added flavor bursts to this creamy dessert.  Laurent and I had Lavazza coffees as dessert.

End of Part 1.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Venice (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Venice (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We made reservations to take an overnight train to Venice from Naples.  We ate an early dinner at the Trattoria da Giorgio.

We ate pasta made from the hard flour called durum with marinaria tomato sauce, which is just tomato purée with sautéed garlic, olive oil, and oregano.

We cooled off in the air-conditioned dining room and enjoyed watching the noisy television.  The newscasters in Italy looked cool in their black leather jackets.  Italian women newscasters in their leather jackets wear their hair long unlike French women newscasters, who wear it short.

I was tired and slept all the way from Naples to Venice.  We left our bags at the train station and set out in a ferry down the Grand Canal in Venice.

The palaces were beautiful one after the other, but I thought the logistics of living in Venice would be difficult with plumbing letting out into the canal, delivering mail by boat, and grand pianos being delivered by boat.

Water sloshed into the first floors of these palaces along the Grand Canal.  The palaces enchanted me, but I thought of the logistics involved in carrying out everyday life on water as we passed boats carrying garbage.

We did not have a map pointing out all the castles, but you really do not need to know the names to enjoy them – Peggy Guggenheim’s Palace has big lettering on it.  However, I liked the romance of not knowing what I was seeing, so I could come back to Venice again.

Finally, we stepped off the Palazzo San Marco.  I had already seen the most portable treasures of the Cathedral at an exhibit at the Chicago Institute of the Arts, but we still visited the church.

The musicians at the Café Florian were just beginning to play as we entered the Cathedral San Marco.  I am a Greek sympathizer and have to admit that I disliked seeing all the items that had been looted from the Orthodox Greeks at Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.

I knew the Fourth Crusade still enrages Greeks, because they know most of the items in San Marco’s Treasury originally belonged to the Orthodox Church.

Next, we went to the Doge’s Palace.  My walks in Chicago made me able to skip up Sansovino’s Stairway of the Giants without a problem.

Every room seemed to be decorated with the golden colors of Veronese, Tintoretto, or Tiepolo.  Gold colors glisten in Venice due to the reflection from water.  Teacups with gold decoration look beautiful here for this reason.

We ate salty Venetian fish dishes at a restaurant.  Salt leaves your body with perspiration and can leave you feeling dizzy and weak in very hot climates.  I liked this food even though I did not eat it at home.

We walked around the Venetian Piazzas, which are like villages with markets.  We crossed bridges and walked.  I rested in a park by a graveyard while Laurent walked around.

Birds chirped in my lovely yet somewhat eerie resting spot before we took the train. 

Edgar Allen Poe would have written creepy stories about the people buried in this graveyard.  The truly rich had Palladian Villas on land and graveyards located on land as well. 

The Welsh writer James (now Jan) Morris wrote a book called Venice about living on Venice for a year when his/her children were small that I liked as well.  Scrambling for food, what I call food war games, were a daily occurrence. 

He/She stayed thin running around to each different village market buying food.  These markets were held on different days and you had to be friends with the vendors to even buy good food.

When my daughter Florence was born, the first I did was to learn to cook to insulate my family from “market food supply” shortages and price hikes after reading Venice by James/Jan Morris. 

By cooking I mean, cooking from dry goods in case of street rioting in a secured building.  We lived in Paris when I read that book, which does have a history of street rioting as did Detroit where I grew up.

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Isle of Capri (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Isle of Capri (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We started the next day out by going to Naples.  We found our way down to the port and caught the ferry to the Isle of Capri.

I turned my head around and thought the Bay of Naples look pretty in the distance with Mount Vesuvius behind us.

I never understood why people ranted and raved (literally) in Tiberius’s case so much about Capri until we arrived at the harbor of the Isle of Capri.  The crystal blue water around us glistened.  We could see down to rocks in the bottom of the water.

There were yachts all around us with white-haired men and blonds in bikinis.  The area all around the harbor was full of designer clothing stores and accessories firms. 

Once you started walking along mountain paths through all the hotels and villas, the Isle of Capri became very quiet.

Every place on the Isle of Capri was immaculately clean.  No cars or Vespas were allowed on the streets or mountain paths; it was very quiet. 

Bright pink and red flowers streamed down the side of whitewashed walls.  I wished we were staying in a hotel with a swimming pool.  The sunbathers at these hotels with swimming pools seemed to ignore their swimming pools, though.

We paid money to go to a private beach.  Groups of Neapolitan young people gathered at this beach. We swam through grottos and dove down to touch rocks that you can see at the bottom of the shallow water in the sun. 

We took the last ferry back to the Bay of Naples and admired the sun setting behind Mount Vesuvius in the background.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Salerno (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Salerno (Italy) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We went to Salerno (South of Naples) to look for a more bucolic place to stay than Naples on our vacation.

When the train came in to the station, we found out that as in France, August the 1^st is the beginning of a month-long vacation exodus to the South of a country.  The train resembled a sardine can, because there were so many people in it.

We hopped in and held on around the curves going to Salerno.  I lost balance a few times along with some other people standing on the train.  I just laughed knowing the tickets were oversold.

Absolutely no one in Salerno spoke English.  I was able to get directions in Italian.  At the tourism bureau, Laurent spoke in German to find out the names of some hotels. 

Everything was full except for a place about 2 miles outside of town.  I was willing to go there after lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant.  We found a fast-food place called Golden Burger and ate there.

I knew all my walking would burn off the fat in those fries in no time and ate every last one of them.

After eating, we walked to the hotel, which was about two miles away from the train station.  We made our reservations and looked around our neighborhood.  There were many apartments and markets in this area.  Salerno’s streets were also very clean.  (When I was growing up in Highland Park (an enclave inside Detroit) Michigan, the streets were cleaned every two weeks for public health measures. 

There was a famous Medieval medical school in Salerno that focused on nutrition and commissioned tucinae paintings showing the Mediterranean Diet of their day.  Clean streets for walking to the market must have come down from this period.

The next day, we changed hotels from Naples to Salerno, which required taking a full train again and bus out to our hotel.  We stood with our suitcases and swayed around the curvy mountains down to Salerno.

We unloaded our bags, took cold showers to deal with the heat, and went out to buy some yogurt.  We ate and slept until 4:30 p.m.  Laurent went out and bought roll-up, reed mats for the beach.

After swimming, we rested on our mats and watched the sun go down.

As we were going out for dinner, the hotel managers invited us in for a glass of sweet, white wine and slices of watermelon.  They were happy that a couple on their honeymoon had come to stay in their hotel – The Hotel Suisse.  Laurent and our hotel managers chatted away in German.

We went to the restaurant next door where Laurent ordered spaghetti all carbonara with proscuiutto or pig’s cheek as the ingredient depending on the supply in the local region. 

This Italian version of this dish is good, but I like my American better.  I fry up a ton of bacon until crispy, drain it, and chop it up. (Pancetta is bacon without salt added or pork bellies.)

I add grated parmesan or gruyere and cream to the bacon and serve this over spaghetti or whatever cooked pasta I have on hand.  (I know the value of the commissary.)

I ate large cannelloni filled with ricotta cheese while Laurent regaled himself with deluxe pork.

Then, we ate a light summer entrée of seafood salad with octopus, shrimp, scallops, and mussels in a lemon-and-oil dressing.

I went to sleep on a full stomach all happy with a real Italian seafood meal. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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