Lunching at Little Napoli in Carmel (CA) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Lunching at Little Napoli in Carmel (CA) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

When my husband was getting his third master’s degree (this one in the teaching of foreign languages), I would take my daughter Florence to Little Napoli in Carmel, California for an early dinner once a week as “Hollywood Etiquette” after picking her up from her Waldorf Charter School in Pacific Grove.

When I arrived at Little Napoli with my small child, I told them Florence was going to practice her “nice manners” for lunch.  We always got to sit at a table by a window in the round room in back that looked out over the garden.  The host would give us the standard menu and the day’s specials orally.

I know children do not initially like all foods, but our deal was that she could get one appetizer she liked all to herself, and I would order maybe one or two more appetizer plates.  I would order a pasta dish to share and desserts for each of us after that.  I would let the waiter know this is what I wanted to do before ordering.

I would get two or three appetizers like the following:

-slices of cheese focaccia bread made with Parmesan cheese

-deep-fried calamari – Florence would eat one and the rest were for me.  She did not like deep-fried calamari

-three-pepper salad in olive oil – Florence liked this salad.  I make it at home, but it is a pain to do, because you have to remove the pepper skins from roasted peppers by hand.  Claudia Roden has a very good technique for doing this in her cookbook for the BBC Series Mediterranean Cookery

-fennel-casserole made with Cabrales blue cheese from Spain. (The Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was one empire under the Bourbons at one time.  Many food products are still exchanged between Spain and Sicily on maritime routes.)

-fresh peas with pancetta (pork belly meat) sautéed in onion, butter, and olive oil with a little black pepper on top

-Capri Salad (insalata Caprese – you can take ferry boats from Naples to the islands of Capri and Ischia) made with basil leaves, tomatoes, and slices of fresh Buffalo milk mozzarella cheese and olive oil and turns of freshly ground pepper

Recipes for all of these items can be found in the following cookbooks:

-Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Naples and Campania

-How to Eataly: A Guide to Buying, Cooking, and Eating Italian Food by Oscar Farinetti

-Italia: The Recipes and Customs of the Regions by Antono Carluccio

-The Good Food of Italy by Claudia Roden

-Lidia’s Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine: Everything you Need to Know to be a Great Italian Cook by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manali

-Italy in Small Bites by Carol Field

-Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan

After our selection of appetizers, I would order one dish of pasta to share as a main dish.  These pasta dishes were usually on the menu as specials:

-pasta with peas

-pasta with squash

-pasta with cabbage

-pasta with fava beans

-spaghetti with clams

Those vegetables are “traditional” Italian vegetables as well in addition to tomatoes.  Before tomatoes were brought from the New World to Europe, all Europeans almost exclusively ate cabbage.

Clifford A. Wright begins his award-winning book A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean, from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs (with more than 500 recipes) with a recipe for cabbage soup eaten since the Middle Ages all throughout Europe.

For dessert, there was usually something on the menu like the following:

-crème brulee (not Italian, but Little Napoli knows how to make money)

-cannoli

-almond-chocolate torte

Florence asked once, “Why do I have to be on ‘nice manners’ here especially?”

I quickly responded:

1 - Clint Eastwood eats here along with other Monterey celebrities.  Stars, directors, and producers hate ill-behaved children when they are trying to get business done. 

2 - If you are filmed eating, I do not want you to look like a pig. 

3 - Everyone in Hollywood eats Italian, because it’s good for you and not always hideously expensive to prepare.  There are also many vegetarian and vegan dishes in Italian cuisine that help actors stay thin and lithe as well.

When we were done eating, we would go for a walk in downtown Carmel.  Conway of Asia was right across the street and still had Tibetan art as well as Buddhist art from Thailand and Persian carpets. 

After our trip there, we would go to the Phillips Gallery and look at sculpture by the Zimbabwean artist Gedion Nyanhongo.  (I wrote reviews of his work for the Monterey County Weekly – Circulation: 200,00 and Art and Antiques Magazine.)

Then, we would go home and sing to Gwen Stefani songs. 

That was enough for the day!

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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At the Hollywood Booth at Crown and Anchor Pub with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

At the Hollywood Booth at Crown and Anchor Pub with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of my favorite places to celebrate my birthday when my daughter Florence was little was the English Crown and Anchor Pub in downtown Monterey, California.

I do not like to eat cake for my birthday, but dearly love curry prawns (jumbo shrimp) over basmati rice with a Newcastle brown ale to drink.

There are many other selections on the menu that rotate with the season as well as pantry favorites such as:

-traditional fish and chips with coleslaw

-steak and mushroom pie

-lamb shank with ratatouille

(Thank you cookbook author Claudia Roden for popularizing this delicious dish for the British through your BBC show on Mediterranean cuisine, which resulted in your informative cookbook Mediterranean Cookery.  The photos allowed people to identify ingredients in markets.)

-prime rib with Yorkshire pudding

Bread pudding is always on the dessert platter, so I get that with ice cream and real whipped cream on top.  I do not eat like this every day, so I can enjoy meals like this about once a month without liposuction.

I skip coffee at the restaurant, but I like the combination of coffee, Jack Daniels, milk, and whipped cream that I make at home.

The ambience at Crown and Anchor is mostly nautical with its color drawings of ship battles, facsimiles of signed treaties, hammered brass plates with English pub scenes, Beefeater ale steins, and a tall statue of an English castle guard, complete with a towering black hat. 

I smile sweetly and laugh that one of my English ancestors was the captain of the ship Naiad, which was part of the British fleet that beat the combined fleets of the French and Spanish navies under Napoleon at Trafalgar, Spain.  I have mixed ancestry and I have researched all of them.

I looked at Florence and said, “That statue of an English guard is a good ‘photo op,’” I said.  Laurent took a photo of her by it.

“You need to have a good ‘visual’ to get yourself on TV to promote your films and TV shows when you grow up,” I said.

“You can practice photography with your iPhone,” I continued.

Laurent showed Florence the different functions on her iPhone: photo, video, microphone recording, and GPS coordinates. 

“Daddy studied photography in school when he studied engineering.  He can probably build those things.  He also taught teens how to do photography at a summer camp in France, too. 

Anyways, if you use the panoramic, you can make mom look really fat.  If you use the zoom, you can make my nose really big.  If you use that button, you can get video.  This how you turn on the microphone,” I said.

Part of the reason I showed her this at Crown and Anchor is that all the lawyers, judges, police, media peeps, and other Monterey notables have money, but don’t know how to use the technology.  They probably have to pay for classes at Apple, too.

“Take a video of me going into the London telephone booth,” I said to Florence.

“Normally no one is allowed in the telephone booth, but if you film quickly, I can sneak in and out of the booth before the owner notices,” I said.

So, Florence and I pretended to be going to the bathroom and I ran to the telephone booth.  Florence was filming as I popped in the telephone booth and waved my hands at her.

“Eh, nobody’s allowed in the phone booth.  Not even stage mothers pretending to be producers,” growled the bar stool chorus.  I smiled at them and pranced out of the phone booth.  You never know if Clint Eastwood could be at the bar in disguise.

Laurent tries to keep a straight face about all the stage mother politicking, especially when Florence or I make reservations for the “Hollywood Booth” under the large, ship model of the Titanic.

I showed Florence how to use the Internet Movie Database to calculate how profitable a movie is.  Big sales do not mean big profits, if your production costs are high.

“Those Harry Potter films might not be as profitable as people think, if you look at the production costs,” I told Florence.

Florence wanted to be an actress and wrote J.K. Rowling to be an extra in one of the Harry Potter films.  Her agent wrote back saying that only British actors were used in the films.  I thought that was discriminatory as heck.  Hollywood employs people from all over the world on its projects.  I fell out of love with the Harry Potter books at that moment even though I read most of them.

(Florence wrote to some other TV series that were on fan fiction and got a Scandinavian TV show to come to Monterey and film a show about a Scandinavian love boat cruise.  They hired her as an extra, so she got paid and SAG points.  You do make your own opportunities as Jon Bon Jovi sings about in his song It’s my Life.)

“Don’t feel too bad.  I think she does not have rights to Harry Potter merchandise,” I said.  I was wondering if she signed away electronic rights, too.

“Why is merchandise important?” Florence asked.

“You can make more money on it than ‘the art’ you produce.  Your creative work becomes a publicity vehicle.  I wonder if Fifty Cent got his stage name that way,” I said.

“Also do not build huge lists of people you do not know on social media or get a business page, if you want to grow an audience.  There are stalkers all over social media.

I am very unpopular at work for insisting that the FBI website for Internet safety be put up on the library webpage, and that librarians be trained in how to report suspected child abuse,” I said. 

Ho-chi Minh passed a lot of information this way in restaurants and bars I learned when I lived in Chicago.  I just loved having an English Bulldog restaurant for the same reason where you can even buy a Beefeater Stein as a souvenir.

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

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Dining at Phil's Fish Market with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Dining at Phil’s Fish Market with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget in Moss Landing, California by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When my daughter Florence was growing up, my family often went out to Phil’s Fish Market and Restaurant in Moss Landing (across from Elkhorn Slough and into the port area) for our favorite dish there – cioppino.

Cioppino is called a San Francisco stew, sometimes even an invention of the city.  Cioppino is not an invention; it is a Ligurian dish from Genoa, Italy.  Genoa is a port city that used to have a large, merchant fleet and is nicknamed “La Superba.”

Most of the Italians in San Francisco are descendants of immigrants from Genoa, so food from that region is the Italian fare of that city.  (For information on Genoese and Ligurian food, in general, see Flavors of the Riviera by Colman Andrews.  He also writes of what the food of Nice, France is like, which uses many of the same ingredients as Italian cuisine.)

The Italians in Monterey County are mostly of Sicilian descent, so they go out to Phil’s Fish Market and Restaurant to eat Geneose Cioppino fish stew, too.  (A great cookbook about Sicilian food is Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor Simeti.)

The cioppino at Phil’s Fish Market and Restaurant is especially good, because they use Dungeness crab from Alaska and the Pacific West Coast to make it in their version instead of mussels that you find in many recipes.  (Parisians call mussels “poor man’s oysters.”)

Sicilians do know how to cook Dungeness crab, so they buy 6 to 12 at a time to make a nice meal for their family.  (As a tip for visitors, Sicilians in Monterey go to the Fish House or Vito’s in Pacific Grove to eat well when not cooking for their families.)

Basically, the ingredients of cioppino that you boil together until the fish fillets are cooked follow (you can tell what something tastes like by looking at ingredients):

-olive oil

-fennel (optional – use a splash of Ricard or Pernod, if you do not have fennel)

-onion

-shallots

-garlic cloves

-red pepper flakes

-tomato paste

-diced tomatoes

-white wine

-fish stock

-clams

-Dungeness crab

-shrimp

-salmon fillets in chunks

There is a very good online history project about cioppino called History of Cioppino – The Kitchen Project.  This site documents where the editors obtained their information and recipes.  Its website address varies, but you can find it with this information.  It appears that Jean Andersen, who wrote The Food of Portugal is the main editor.

Cioppino is great with toasted baguettes, panisse with tahini sauce (chickpea bars with sesame seed sauce.  Chickpeas are full of iron.  I like sparkling water like San Pellegrino, Badoit, or Perrier (for the Roland Garros crowd) with cioppino.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Eating English Breakfast at River Inn for Brunch with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget in Big Sur, California by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating English Breakfast at River Inn for Brunch with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget in Big Sur, California by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When my daughter Florence began high school at the Big Sur Charter High School, I would drive down to Big Sur to set up her curriculum at the school office at the beginning of each semester, which is right by the River Inn Restaurant.

After our school meeting, I would take Florence to the River Inn for brunch.  The River Inn is snuggled under sequoia trees.  We sat on chairs and ate at tables made of sequoia wood with many rings.  We identified years with little or a lot of rain by looking at the width of rings in the wood.

The location of the restaurant makes it a little chilly, but that is why we wear layers in Monterey County.  I would order two English breakfasts for us and told Florence to take her time eating.  There were not many people in the restaurant when we were there in the morning, so we had time to eat our English breakfast that was made up of the following items:

-2 over-easy eggs

-3 or 4 sausage links

-4 strips of bacon

-a large helping of sheet-pan baked potatoes made with purple onions and garlic and coated in olive oil to bake – a little salt and pepper makes them taste better

-2 or 3 broiled tomatoes with a topping of breadcrumbs mixed with chopped garlic and parsley

-a pot of English breakfast tea with real cream to add, if we wanted it (we did)

-white and whole wheat toast

-a choice of various jams and jellies, including marmalade

-Kerrygold butter

-wildflower honey

We would spend about two hours eating our English breakfast.  If the restaurant were really not crowded, we would spend about three hours eating, talking, and getting hot water refills on the teapot.

The Big Sur River Inn has a large, enclosed dining room with large, glass windows all around it, so you can see the sequoia trees.  Pfeiffer State Park is down the road on Highway 1 from Big Sur River Inn.  Many tourists make Big Sur River Inn their home base for touring Big Sur.  There is a large, terraced deck outside that leads down to the river.  There are tables, chairs, and heating units out there for cocktails and meals, too.

Many times, I would take out some paper, pens, and journals and give Florence some, too, and ask her, “What do you think kids could do here in addition to this just eating?” I asked.

We would both write up ideas, which include responses like these:

-Memoirs Writing Workshops using Bill Roorbach’s book entitled Writing Life Stories

-Foreign-language discussion clubs like the Goethe Institute, the Alliance Francaise, the Cervantes Institute, and the Italian Cultural Institute

-Film Clubs – for contemporary films as well as historical ones by national cinema (There is an Oxford Guide to World Cinema that has historical films listed by national cinema.)

-Theatre workshops for kids

-Puppet shows with nice stages (A beautiful Sicilian one is needed for this.  The town of Acireale in Sicily makes these.)

-Sommelier training for Levels 1 and 2

-Nature Writing with lectures on the wildlife and wildflowers in Big Sur, California

-Wildflower drawing workshops

-Tai Chi Club

I thought these were pretty good ideas and hope the current owner of Big Sur River Inn might consider putting them in place.  (Note: I reviewed the River Inn for the Monterey Country Weekly when I was a restaurant reviewer for 2 ½ years for them.  I had fun being Mimi Sheraton for a short time.  Her book Eating my Words is great fun for foodies.  I also like Diane Jacob’s Will Write for Food.)

In any case, driving down to Big Sur River Inn is a field trip.  We usually stopped to get soda for the trip back to the Monterey Peninsula and listened to “World Village Music Hour” from UC – Santa Cruz.

By Savvy Mom Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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