Social Capital

Petaluma’s literary pub crawl offers a novel way to get off the sofa and the soma

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld

When it comes to the consumption of alcohol, I am scornfully referred to as a lightweight by my friends. This means that what most people consider a refreshing little cocktail will soon have me giddily revealing my intimate secrets before leaving me with a nasty headache.

So when I first heard through a friend about the Petaluma Pub Crawl (which is the only way one gets invited), I was reluctant. The word “crawl” seemed to suggest a debased state of gravity by night’s end.

I would have left it at that if said friend didn’t then invite me to subscribe to Pub Crawl founder John Crowley’s e-mail newsletter. What I could not figure out was how the topics posted in Crowley’s “PC News,” such as updates on local open-space purchases, links to articles about important social issues and details about the businesses of local Petalumans, had anything to do with getting out on a Saturday night for drinks.

I decided I’d better talk to this John Crowley fellow to solve the puzzle. Crowley, a software engineer, hails from a pub-owning family in Dublin, where pub crawling is integral to the social scene, and where the crawling refers not to being on one’s knees, but to moving to where one’s friends are on a given evening.

“Pubs in Ireland are extensions of your living room,” he explains. “Since you can’t invite all your friends back to your home, you meet in a public place for a good time to socialize.”

It was in his Petaluma living room some four years ago that the idea for a pub crawl came to Crowley. One weekend, when his wife and two children were traveling, he found himself watching television.

“I thought: what a horrible existence. So I sent an e-mail to all the people I knew in Petaluma to meet for drinks. They all showed up.”

That first event contained only as many participants as can be counted on fingers and toes. But the idea clicked, evolving into an event every three months (now moving to every two months due to its popularity), that easily numbers over 100.

The Pub Crawl, whose name Crowley originally balked at because he knew it brought to mind “24-year-olds getting trashed,” refers to literary pub crawls back in Ireland. This is where a group of friends gets together and visits the bars where the Irish poets, like Yeats and Kavanagh, wrote their poetry.And those links on the newsletter? In order to prevent the crawl from becoming replete with, well, 24-year-olds getting trashed, Crowley made sure to pepper it with the kind of topics that would make it evident just who these people are. And who are they? As Crowley puts it, they are “forward-thinking” mostly forty-somethings (with a smattering of thirty-somethings) who no longer have infants to raise, both married and single, who want to get out and have a good time.

Though anyone, through invitation, can be added to the newsletter and hence get the scoop on the next crawl, the only way to get to know these crawlers is to join them, which is part of Crowley’s attempt to create what he calls “social capital.” He hopes the crawls encourage folks to get involved in each other’s lives, get active in their community, get to know their neighbors, participate in local government and, yes, congregate on a Saturday night for drinks, socializing and dancing.

Each crawl comes with a set of suggestions, and often begins with art-viewing of some kind. For the latest such gathering earlier this month, we were instructed to wear red (for better visibility en masse) and, harking back to those literary pub crawls, to bring a book that had, at some point, been meaningful to us.

I labored over the choice of book, unable to give up my beloved copy of Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, briefly grasping the spine of Jorge Luis Borges’ short fiction collection, thinking how great a conversation starter The Garden of Forking Paths would make, and ultimately selecting Huxley’s Brave New World. This seemed an appropriate choice, easy to chat about, because what had been a horrifying future vision to me at the age of 14, where society is stratified into distinct classes and everyone is whipped into complacency by the drug soma, now hits all too close to home. It was also in theme with my prior discussion with Crowley about the need to engage with each other socially and how most of us live in a TV reality (TV being the new soma).

On a recent Monday night, armed with Huxley, clad in red, my significant other on one side and a friend on the other, I walked six blocks from home to the first stop on the Pub Crawl: the Sweetwater Distillery and Sonoma Valley Portworks, side by side on Second Street.

The Distillery was handing out free Lemon Drops and cosmopolitans made with their own distilled vodka, and there was plenty of port-sniffing going on next door.

Just as Crowley had assured, there were no pick-up lines in action or wallflowers standing awkwardly off to the side waiting to be approached. It’s the kind of event where if you make eye contact for more than a second, you’re liable to learn the stranger’s history, résumé and hobbies very quickly. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the cocktail-party style of hanging by the hors d’oeuvres in hopes that somebody will ask you to move out of the way of the dip so you can start a conversation.

Shortly, I was coaxed into discussing my lifelong aspirations, trading restaurant reviews and hashing out the finer points of what red does to different complexions.

The next stop was the bar inside Graziano’s Italian Restaurant on Petaluma Boulevard. Despite the fact that we were packed in like tourists at the Statue of Liberty, the conversations really heated up here.

By then, what is so captivating about the crawl, as Crowley had explained, begins to make itself apparent: strangers are no longer just introducing themselves, they’re starting to reveal themselves.

At Graziano’s, I traded Brave New World away to a woman whose honeymoon to Bora Bora was so great that she was still talking about it a year and a half later. Together, she and I convinced a skeptical-looking man with a passion for history that Anita Diamant’s menses novel The Red Tent is not just for chicks.

Here I met George, from the band Boy Meets Girl (“We were popular in the ’80s,” he said), who wrote the song “I Want to Dance with Somebody” for Whitney Houston, and with whom I had a deep conversation about what drives artists to make art (it was far less pretentious than it sounds).

A woman named Leanne told me how she has lived in town for 30 years, raised her children and built a successful career as a stockbroker. Yet, emerging from the semicoma of parenthood after her kids left home, she, like many others I talked to, was devastated to discover that nightlife in Petaluma had fizzled to near nothingness.

“I got tired of going to restaurants. I wanted something to do,” she said.

Leanne had, she confided, “rested up” during the week to save energy for the second-to-last stop of the night at Dempsey’s, where DJ Val spun the tunes for dancing. Even as self-conscious as I am, I had to resist the lure of the dance floor when Prince and James Brown came on.

I must admit to fading out before the final scene at Zebulon’s lounge sometime after midnight (which Crowley later described as “mellow”). By then I’d seen enough to know that Crowley’s experiment in creating social capital is working.

To sign up for the Pub Crawl newsletter, go to www.aqus.com.

From the April 13-19, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Cooks Anonymous: Some of the North Bay’s most exciting food is served in locations we can’t disclose, prepared by chefs we won’t name.

–>Bistro Incognito

Underground restaurants serve up a slice of speakeasy–if you know where to find them

By Ella Lawrence

Ro Smith never thought he’d be cooking the best meal of his career in a gutted Airstream trailer. Gracefully sealing sushi seams with a practiced flick of his wrist, Ro, just 25, but with nearly a decade of professional kitchen experience and globetrotting under his belt, quickly and carefully arranges the gorgeous rainbow rolls on a mismatched set of Japanese sushi boats.

As dub reggae thumps from the speakers set up in a field outside, Ro turns to his partner, Mo Smythe, and queries, “Dude! How long have the lychees been marinating in that lavender honey?”

“Just a few minutes,” Mo responds. “Let’s give ’em another 20 or so before we freeze them for the ice cream. Now feel! The fury! Of my sushi roll!” He hurls a nori-wrapped unagi roll at Ro’s head.

Ro ducks, missing the flying eel by mere millimeters, and lets loose with a sweeping roundhouse kick aimed at Mo’s midsection. Mo artfully dodges the kick and lets fly a fistful of jumbo shrimp from the sleeve of his chef’s coat. Ro tightens the black belt around the waist of his own crisp chef whites, flipping an opened bottle of hot sauce from the countertop into his hand in less than a second. “You will suffer! The power! Of habañero hell!” he shouts, but the words don’t quite match up to his lips. The dub reggae gives way to the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Mo assumes a Clint Eastwood squint.

This is not the set of Iron Chef, and neither is it a restaurant kitchen. Inside this Airstream trailer, devoid of everything but a giant movie projector and a DJ booth on its hardwood floors, a kung-fu food-fight movie that these two young chefs made to accompany tonight’s service runs in the background. Dealing only in cash and soliciting customers via word of mouth and e-mail, Ro and Mo cook for a different crowd than the go-where-you’re-told-by-Zagat foodies. They run an underground restaurant.

Ro Smith and Mo Smythe are not their real names, of course, but for these ambitious and well-known chefs who run an illegal restaurant away from the constraints of the health department and the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, recognition is not on the menu.

Underground restaurants are popping up all over the nation. Michael Hale, a server turned sommelier turned restaurant owner, recalls his early experience with underground restaurants while living in New York. “It’s like having a whole city right in your apartment building,” he says. “There’s this guy down the hall that’s cooking Bengalese food; someone downstairs is doing chop suey. That’s how I got started in this business–we’d do all of these dinner parties, and I thought getting paid to do that would be brilliant. So I decided to open up my own place.”

Hale’s place, the successful Manzanita Restaurant in Healdsburg, operates on quite a different scale than Ro and Mo’s, whose venture runs without a dining room, a kitchen or a license. The illegal establishment has fondly been dubbed the Blind Pig by the two chefs, a reference to the speakeasies of Prohibition-era America, when alcohol was illegal.

Bruce Frieseke, head chef at Manzanita, believes the appeal of underground restaurants comes largely from diners’ shifting attitudes toward the entire restaurant scene. “I think this is part of a trend,” he says, “even in traditional restaurants, to make the dining experience more homey.”

This change toward wanting a dining experience to be more comforting and less highly formalized is a welcome one, according to many restaurateurs. Taking a restaurant out of the traditional context and putting it–quite literally–in a homier setting allows people to relax. Providing this type of low-key atmosphere is much easier when running a restaurant out of a basement or a garage, and these illegal dining spots are rapidly gaining cult status.

Young, tattooed Mo, who has worked in some of California’s best restaurants as a sous chef, vehemently denies that his underground restaurant might be part of a hip dining trend. “No, it’s not hip at all!” he insists, laughing. “There is no hipness or attitude at the Blind Pig. I see it as more of a cultural restaurant. Like there are these great Chinese restaurants where Chinese people go to eat. This is a West County restaurant where West County people go to eat. Everyday people who enjoy good food go and hang out, and we just do it as funky as possible.”

In an underground restaurant, where inventive restaurateurs don’t pay taxes, Social Security stipends or any of the costs of maintaining a full-time staff, this funky, homey atmosphere is created naturally. And chefs aren’t bound by the traditional chicken-and-fish menu rules. “When you write a menu in a traditional restaurant context, there are certain unspoken rules that you have to follow,” Frieseke sighs. “A lot of times, you only find out what the rules are through breaking them.”

But in an underground restaurant, you can check the rules at the door. When dining at the Blind Pig, you’ll have it Ro and Mo’s way, thank you very much. And lately, their way is themed. “We’ve done Thai night, French, Italian, Moroccan, Japanese, stuff like that,” Mo lists excitedly. “We recently got a crew, these two girls who come and decorate everything to match our theme. So we started doing matching ambiance to the food, and it’s been going from there.”

A recent set-up for the Blind Pig includes a large table that seats 12 in the center of a two-car garage. Layers of white muslin flow from the ceiling, obscuring the bare wooden beams, and the walls are covered with bamboo matting. The perimeter of the space is filled with two tables that each seat six, a few four-tops, a couple of small tables and a lounge area that is reminiscent of ’70s-era cocaine lords, complete with couches and tacky mirrored coffee tables. The portable bar, made of bamboo and covered in mirrors, also lives in this corner. The numerous Japanese paper lanterns that provide most of the lighting are all on dimmers, and candles abound. “We like natural decorations, and cheap ones,” Ro says. “So we do a lot of stuff like those little twisty bamboo shoots in water, plants and lots of candles.”

While the funky atmosphere and the relaxed expectations are certainly the plusses of running an underground restaurant, the downsides are potentially dangerous. Laws regarding licensing vary from state to state. In California, dining establishments must comply with local agencies’ restrictions, as well as be inspected by the fire department, the liquor authority and the health department. In addition, a state-certified “food handler” must be on the premises at all times.

“It costs $200,000 just for a permit to be allowed to buy water from the city!” exclaims Hale. “You have to get tons of permits from various people. You’ve got to get a building permit, a permit if you want to remodel, you have to get licenses for beer and wine, and you have to get certified by the Health Board.”

Ken Sato, principal environmental health inspector for the San Francisco Health Department, says an underground restaurant would only be investigated in case of a complaint.

“We’d issue a notice to cease and desist operation,” he says. “We want to prevent food-borne illness, so anyone doing something like that should know how to properly handle the food and have a permit from us. There could be other issues as well,” he continues. “Temperature violations, structural violations, equipment violations, rodent violations, ventilation violations.”

Ro and Mo have garnered a huge following in the two years the Blind Pig has been in operation. “It started as a completely word-of-mouth thing,” says Mo. “At first, only people who knew one of us could come. The next time we did it, we expanded the guest list enough so that everyone who’d been before was allowed to bring one other person, as long as they were someone cool, and it’s just branched out from there.”

The two started their own restaurant because they were tired of the constraints of the restaurant industry and “sick of working for other people” in stuffy places where customers got their food “how they wanted it, when they wanted it.” The laid-back chefs explain their endeavor simply as “all of our favorite things in one night! The food we would want to eat, the music we’d want to hear, the drinks we like to drink and the people we’d want to hang out with. It doesn’t get much better than this!”

One of the best things about having an underground restaurant, they say, is the variety of people who come to dine. Because the advertising is word-of-mouth, all who show up share a common thread; either they know Ro and Mo one way or another, or they’re in the restaurant industry. But while the clientele may share common interests, they are all very different.

“We get so many kinds of people!” Mo beams. “All ages, men, women, different sexual preferences, whatever! It’s so great to see all of these people come together through food.”

Another positive aspect of running an underground restaurant is that freelance chefs do not have to invest a lot of money or time. When they started the culinary speakeasy two years ago, Ro and Mo had planned to supplement their rent by throwing dinner parties where friends paid to be wined and dined like any gourmands, only without the restaurant structure. But the guys couldn’t find a house with a garage, so they did it in a field. Word spread like wildfire, until “this one night we had Indian food, and 95 people showed up,” laughs Mo. “It was way too crazy. We decided if this many people want to show up, we might as well do it.”

So they rented a two-car garage, slowly equipping it with restaurant booths from an abandoned Chinese diner, thrown-out silver and mismatched china from the Bohemian Grove (the ultra-exclusive men’s resort in the California redwoods where presidents go to play and no women are allowed), where one of the chefs works during the summer. They’ve rented a portable bathroom and built a kitchen outside with a pop-up car tent, a mini refrigerator and homemade propane wok burners. The dishes are washed in bins in the backyard, and now the restaurant runs on reservations only.

“After that one crazy night in the field, we had to make it a little more regulatory,” Ro says. “The rule for attendance is that you can come as long as you know one of us, and you can bring one friend. From there, we’ve built an e-mail list, which is how we advertise for the next event.”

The restaurant operates anywhere from two to four times a month, depending on how much energy the guys have and also how much money is in the Blind Pig piggy bank. Ro and Mo started the restaurant because they were “sick of going out and eating, and paying way too much money for mediocre food.” Their desire to serve high-quality food in a unique setting is now a reality because they don’t pay any taxes or licensing fees. “It keeps the costs down, and it’s a lot of fun,” says Mo. Indeed, the prix fixe menu only costs between $15 and $30, depending on how many courses there are.

It takes us three days to do the restaurant,” Ro tells me by phone from the grocery store. “We used to have some other people who helped us, but one guy went back to school and another guy is starting a new job so he doesn’t want to be involved with the risk any more. The day before the restaurant, we spend all day shopping for what we’ll need for the menu. We do a lot of prep work that night, as well as all day the next day, of course. Then we serve that day, and spend the entire next day cleaning up. You can’t just show up and do your thing, like in a typical restaurant–it’s not like you’ve got someone delivering your stuff!”

The two split the duties of the pre-Pig grocery run. Mo does the food shopping and Ro is in charge of keeping the bar stocked, which is the biggest expenditure for the Blind Pig. During service, the bartender at the curved, slatted-bamboo bar pours wine and mixes cocktails (the well consists of top-shelf alcohol like Stolichinaya vodka and Bacardi rum) for a $3 donation; specialty cocktails like martinis and “pain-in-the-ass” drinks like mojitos are $4; and bottles of beer are $2. The bartender is Ro’s brother. “He’s our favorite,” says Ro. “He’s trustworthy, and the bar is the leakiest place as far as finances go.”

Ro and Mo have “never really figured out the profit margin on the bar,” they say. “We’re worried about selling alcohol, but we’ve heard from caterers that if you call it a ‘donation’ instead of a ‘charge,’ you can’t get popped.” Furthermore, the chefs insist on carding those who appear to be under 21. “It’s definitely an illegal business, but we’re being safe about it,” Mo chuckles. Unlike the bar at a normal restaurant, the bar at the Blind Pig isn’t the biggest moneymaker; the food is. Food costs alone are between $330 and $500 for one evening of serving approximately 50 guests. Add decorations, propane for the stoves and the heaters, and nonalcoholic beverages for another $200, and the costs for one night’s worth of underground revelry are covered.

“We just have this wooden shoe box, but it’s only the size of one shoe,” Ro explains. “We keep the money in there, and when it starts to overflow out of the box, Mo and I take some out and split it. We pay the servers from there, if they don’t make enough tips, and the bartender. We pay the dishwasher from there, too.”

The guys are more excited about “having a great time, eating lots of good food, and collecting a whole slew of random equipment” than making money, Ro says.

A potential downside of running a popular underground restaurant is just that: its popularity. “The amount of people attending just keeps rising,” Mo says. “We’re turning away like five more people every week. I feel like we’re doing something good for the community and our friends, but at the same time we don’t want to get in trouble for it.”

The plates are dirty, the candles are burned down to stubs and literally every last grain of rice has been consumed at the Blind Pig tonight. Ro and Mo flop down on a couch in the corner of the garage and clink their bottles of Rolling Rock together in a toast. They survey their domain and sigh contentedly.

The guys plan to take their hot restaurant really underground from here on out. This month, the Blind Pig will begin moving between three separate locations in three separate counties. Ro and Mo plan to do a little more “fine-tuning” so that the restaurant can maintain its busy clientele while still flying under the radar. “It’s been such a special experience, I don’t want to quit doing it just yet,” says Mo.

From the April 6-12, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Unabashed Pleasure

Annie, Get Your Dip

By Steve Billings

No, she didn’t pay me to write this. Honest. I don’t even know if there is a real woman behind my current snack fetish, so Annie–if you’re out there grinding nuts for your cashew, sesame and pimento dip–I hope you’re listening, because this one’s about you and your dip that rocks the spot.

When I go to the grocery store, I take risks, I try new things. As expected, sometimes I get satisfying returns; from others, a puckered palate. My Comstock Lode moment came one day while mining the cooler case at a health-food store, and it panned out initially as a rather innocuous 12-ounce container topped with a red-and-white label, containing an odd peachy-colored substance that provided more questions than answers.

Back at the ranch, I busted open a bag of salted organic yellow corn chips (a solid delivery system) and peeled back the 12-ounce container’s plastic lid to reveal a strangely uniform, slick surface littered with pin-sized holes. Doubt and cumulonimbus confusion filled in quickly, building a cold front that threatened the hoped-for feeding forecast.

I pawed the sheeny top like a quizzical kitty, gingerly testing surface tensions, in an attempt to wrap my senses around this–how do you say in English?–food product.

I looked back at the homey, text-heavy lid and perused the ingredients for calming effects: water, cashews, canola oil, pimentos, sesame seeds, brewer’s yeast, lemon juice, sea salt, agar and spices (which, by the way, for you folks in labeling, is not actually an ingredient, but a category of ingredients within which particular distinctions should be made).

I reminded myself that these things are my friends and tried to move forward, but the last and only time I had used agar, it wasn’t for eating–it was the jellied medium we used to prepare petri dishes to grow cultures in 10th-grade biology. Notable is the memory of my teacher as a large, sweaty, mustached man who frittered continuously with a failing combover while dishing reprimands in an exasperated, high-pitched voice. These are not idyllic associations conducive to new sensory exploration. But I braved it, broke the surface and delivered myself a transformational bite.

Annie asks you to take a leap of faith, to look past looks and trust your taste and the amazing interpretive powers of your mouth. The person who remembers there are no lights on inside their mouth is ready to indulge. I can’t explain what happened, but I was instantly hooked. All right, I’ll try.

The crisp, salty corn chip married perfectly with the cool, velvety spread, providing opposing textural counterpoints, crunch and anticrunch. Still, the exact flavors are difficult to describe. The dip is both nutty and cheesy (though there is no dairy), soft like slowly cooked scrambled eggs, or ricotta’s pigmented second cousin finely blended. I could see it working well as a filling for cannelloni, providing a peculiar magic in vegetarian lasagna or even complementing chunks of grilled chicken and diced scallions tossed together in a cool summery salad.

Regardless of how it is used, Annie’s cashew, sesame and pimento spread experience is truly protean. It is everything and nothing, part food and part science experiment. It is also the kind of snack that can disappear without asking questions even before you’ve had three sips of your Tecate and lime. This is Annie’s pimento paradox: It’s good without you really knowing why you enjoy it. Don’t ask questions. Just close your mouth.

From the April 6-12, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

News of the Food

Curd Crazy!

By Heather Irwin

Uff dah! Hot, greasy and full of artery-clogging cholesterol, fried cheese curds made their debut at A&W restaurants nationwide on April 1. A horrible joke? Alas, no. Rather, it is Wisconsin’s gift to the world–these oddly shaped nuggets of young cheddar that are breaded, fried and stuffed popcorn-style into your waiting craw, don’tcha know.

Curds, you see, are the very best part of the cheese. Naturally created as part of the cheese-making process, curds are ugly little buggers that eventually get pressed into a nice, neat block of cheese then aged for a year or so to become nice, respectable cheddars and such.

Picked in their prime, however, curds are the essence of cheesiness: creamy and salty, with a Silly Putty-like consistency that makes a satisfying squeak between the teeth when bitten. Fried in batter, they become molten little blobs of supercheese that ooze and string tantalizingly between lips and fingers. Sexy, no?

The only dangerous bit about eating curds is the inconsistency of size. Because of their youthful nature, curds steadfastly refuse to conform to any uniform shape or size, and sometimes, well, they get a little obese. The fat ones (we really aren’t being size-ist here) just don’t fry up as well, so you get a nasty little cold bit in the middle where the cheese isn’t melted. Yuck. I was the unfortunate recipient of one such preemie on my initial tasting, and regretted it immediately. These large ones are best pawned off on younger brothers and the like.

To be true to form, one typically dips curds in ranch sauce. Being a California transplant, I am unsatisfied with conformity. I tested my curds with ranch dressing (acceptable, but a bit salty), honey mustard sauce (the tang and slight sweetness beautifully offsets the salt and greasiness) and barbecue sauce (nice, but a bit heavy-handed with the delicate cheese). I later thought that perhaps the curds, which come in a nifty red box, would be nicely paired with a marinara sauce or even a lusty cranberry compote! Then again, we’re talking about fried cheese, so honestly, if you make it out of the drive with more than half the box left, you’re ahead of the game. Pairs well with root beer, naturally.

A convert? The restaurants are offering one lucky winner a year’s worth of curds. Ya der hey! To find out more about the curds, and to play an oddly disturbing curd-squirting game, go to www.curdcrazy.com. A&W Restaurants are located in Windsor, Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park and St. Helena.

From the April 6-12, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.