After watching a guest speaker on the Cal campus talk about the white man ravaging Native American cultures, we found ourselves hungry. After sushi, frozen yogurt, and the purchase of two Oranginas and a brownie it still somehow seemed like a good idea to indulge in some culinary perusing.
After reading Jeffrey Steingartens "The Man Who Ate Everything" it was simultaneously and irreversibly stuck in our minds that Jeffrey Steingarten has the best job in the world. In that, while doing research for an article he wrote, he studied under the most lauded and celebrated bread maker in the world: (insert name that I forgot here) who operates the ACME bakery out of Berkeley CA.
Upon walking in the smells of freshly baked bread overwhelmed one of us (the other was suffering form a cold which resulted in cranky behavior and a highly ineffective olfactory orifice) and the beautifully browned and shaped loaves graced our eyes like fine art. Really incredibly tasty fine art. I was struck with indecision... Brown Loaf? Sweet Baguette? Sour Baguette? Ah Ha!! Sour Batard! Perfect!
On the drive home, my already distended belly screaming for me to tear off a piece of Batard and have at it right there in the comforts of mid-nineties Ford-made heaven, it was mentioned that such a fine loaf should not be muddled by anything but the finest of bread-dipping accompaniment. Upon discussion (and a walk on a pier) it was determined that a garlic and herb white wine sauce, typically found at fine seafood establishments embellishing mollusks was called for. The mollusk of choice: Mussels.
Our foray into Mussels in San Francisco began early in my residence here as a brief (and fictitious) evening spent pretending we could afford really good seafood (that was not made at home). We planned on pairing our fine loaf of bread with an appetizer of Mussels from a faux-bayou establishment called "PJ's Oyster Bed": a surprisingly upscale seafood bar and grill that serves "garlic and herb skillet roasted mussels" that, if I am not mistaken, made me conjour up images of Robuchon slaving over pots and pans before finally kissing his fingertips with pleasure as he savored a mere teaspoon of delectable sauce. Unfortunately, PJ's is closed on Mondays.
After walking the local restaurant district, and having several possibilities shot down ("I will not dip MY bread into CURRY and COCONUT sauce") we finally (Erika finally) found a place that served amazingly, white wine, garlic and herb mussels.
That'd be Pasta Pomodoro:
San Francisco - Irving
816 Irving Street
San Francisco, CA 94122
tel: (415) 566-0900
(thank you very much -- yes... I did find it :)
After warming the bread, savoring a few Mussels, and deftly dodging several semi-skilled parries about who actually found the mussels, I dipped my first piece of ACME bread into the broth and... It was well worth it.
Not to be melodramatic, and not to simply follow those who wrote the books i have read, it was just plain great bread. In fact, once the Mussels and the broth and the butter were gone, I took two pieces and ate them dry. That finished the loaf. Roughly twelve Mussels, and a LOAF of bread.
Yeah, that HAS to be good bread.
