Interior Life: Colonial Vietnam meets Key Largo meets ambitious late-90s conference center at Latitude.

Every Port on the Plate

Latitude is all over the map

By Heather Irwin

It’s hard not to feel a little conspicuous eating in a restaurant that bills itself as “sexy.” I’m reminded of this when cramming an unarousing handful of calamari in my mouth. As I drip aioli and oily crumbs everywhere, my date takes the opportunity to do his own rendition of Latitude’s latest radio spot: “It’s sexy! Latituuude!” he growls.

Chipmunk-cheeked, with greasy fingers, I’m not feeling the heat. Neither are the 60-year-old guys in golf shirts lunching next to us. Engrossed in their Manhattans, they seem to have missed the memo that this Rohnert Park hot spot is supposed to be seductive. I remind them as gently as possible of the advertisement. “Latitude. It’s fun! Latitude. It’s sexy!” They pretend to ignore me, but next time I think they’ll give a little more thought to their wardrobe before coming to such a titillating place.

Opened in December, Latitude’s early publicity made the restaurant seem rife with possibilities. With a pricey facelift on the former Wine Visitors Center, Latitude’s lakeside dining and ultra-loungey bar in the midst of Rohnert Park’s ubiquitous strip-mall chain restaurants sounded intriguing and new. Get past the mind-numbingly stupid radio ads, and you’re promised a cool, unique experience. But after two visits, we were still seeking out the elusive libidinousness we’ve been promised.

By the third visit, the signature pink drinks seemed pretty sexy. During Friday night’s “Ultra Lounge” late-night happy hour, plenty of boys and girls were drinking Latitude Lemon Drops ($7.50), a treacly, cotton-candy-pink mixture of vodka, lemon juice, sugar, Triple Sec and Chambord. But sticky fingers, a nasty sugar high and the sticker shock of $15 for two drinks killed the sexy party mood fast. My date needed several shots of Wild Turkey to fully restore his testosterone level.

Each time we visited, the bar staff was polite but not overly helpful, tending to chat with friends and acquaintances. In fact, the folks at the bar seemed so chummy with their pals that we sometimes felt like the only outsiders in the place.

An indoor waterfall cascades behind the bar (very sexy), giving Latitude some major snaps in the design department. The ceiling soars in the center of the bar, culminating in a stained-glass skylight. The tables and chairs have a rattan, plantation-thing going on, while origami-like light fixtures lend an Asian flair.

Crackled-glass dividers lit from below echo the blue water of the nearby lake. But mosaic tiles on tables and floors confuse the whole thing by bringing in a Caribbean feel. At the end of the visual inspection, you’re left scratching your head (not sexy!) as to what the theme of the place is. My closest guess: colonial Vietnam meets Key Largo meets an ambitious late-90s conference center.

At its heart, Latitude is a convenient hotel restaurant that does a heavy traffic with corporate expense accounts, the over-45 crowd and after-golf lunchers who want a decent steak and a stiff gin and tonic. But does this core contingency really want a sexy experience, or food that comes with a healthy dollop of “L’atitude” (sic)?

It’s doubtful. And the crowd reflects that. The ratio of older to younger patrons, even at night, was marked. On repeated visits to the bar, the room ranged from being nearly empty to hosting only a table of giggling women celebrating a bachelorette party, to thirty- and forty-something couples huddled over drinks. And then there are all those twenty-something girls with the forty-something guys. After seeing several May-December couples and obvious nooners, we’re wondering if Latitude has become, well, a special meeting spot for such lovers. Perhaps the place is sexier than we thought.

Foiled in our own search for sexiness, we got down to the next best thing: eating. There’s nothing to complain about, but there’s nothing to really get excited about, either. The menu vacillates between Pan-Asian fusion and meat and potatoes. Both styles are good, but a bit overplayed.

The restaurant’s own website describes itself as serving “diverse lunch, dinner and cafe menus to satisfy everyone’s palate.” And herein lies the problem. The food is OK in a vanilla sort of way. There aren’t any big risks. There aren’t any huge standouts. The wine list is Napa- and Sonoma-centric, with a good selection of moderately expensive ($35-$54) bottles. Again, no big surprises.

For lunch, the Asian-marinated hangar steak ($15), cooked medium-rare, was rich and buttery, served with a pile of crunchy julienne vegetables and plenty of cilantro. We tried the duck spring rolls with plum dipping sauce ($9) and calamari with chipotle aioli ($9). The rolls were crisp without being overly greasy and were stuffed with exotic mushrooms and sweet duck. The calamari was generously served, tender and chewy without being rubbery or tough.

We also tried the pan-fried half chicken served with potato-spinach puree and raisin, lemon and jalapeño chutney ($14). Good, but lacking a bit in cohesion and flavor. Lunch service was acceptable, while a bit brusque. When we asked for help deciding between two entrées, our server answered with a shrug, “Everything is good.” There is no worse answer.

For dinner, the standout winner among our table of four was the blue-cheese-crusted beef fillet with shrimp. However, when the plates arrived, we were told it was “surf and turf” which, for a moment, felt as if we’d been transported to Sizzler. For $28, I want to be charmed a bit more. The generous and tender slab of meat sat atop a lusty pile of caramelized onions and was served with a red-wine reduction sauce. The shrimp, perched on a sweet-potato purée, lacked finesse and were tough and rubbery. The ahi tuna steak ($19), served rare, was tender and fresh.

Our appetizers, however, fell far short of our expectations. Oysters served on the half-shell with lemongrass mignonette ($1.50 each) were unremarkable in size or flavor. The chicken satay ($8) was unimaginative and a bit paltry. Dinner service was attentive and helpful, from assistance selecting entrées to a perfect wine pairing. Our waiter claimed to have sampled all the restaurant’s wines, an impressive feat.

We were told the restaurant expected 600 for brunch the following morning, Easter. That tells me that people–brunch-eating people, who I’m guessing are not looking for a romantic rave spot after church–like this place. And sitting out on the lake sipping my $7.50 mojito, I like this place, too, for what it is.

Latitude is a somewhat bland, mom-and-grandma-pleasing restaurant that has something for every palate. This is the fourth restaurant for the Left Coast restaurant group, which includes Brannans, the Flat Iron Grill and Checkers. It’s Outback Deluxe, and at some level, that’s OK. It’s just not sexy.

Where’s the Loo?

The devil is in the details. After the impressive design of the interior space, the bathrooms at Latitude are a visual black hole. A truly great interior design carries the themes of the exterior space into every public space. The restrooms (and I can only speak of the ladies’ room) are bland and institutional, with ugly tiling and colors that ruin the visual continuity of the exterior. A unique window and architectural ceiling in the women’s restroom cried out to be utilized in a more pleasing way. The cavernous sink area made for disturbing acoustics. A row of chairs outside the restroom area also made for a strange experience–were they merely extra chairs or some sort of bathroom staging area? Frankly, after a few cocktails, we found them to be a tripping hazard.

–H.I.

From the April 21-27, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photograph by twistedlens.com

Tangled Up in Goo: As with so many good things, the invention of cellophane was pure accident.

Wrap Star

Let us now sing the praises of cellophane

Jenny Compton has recently become a dedicated fan of cellophane. A waitress at the popular Aram’s Cafe in downtown Petaluma, she’s been intimately familiar with the stuff for years, as plastic wrap clearly ranks among the most commonplace item in any restaurant kitchen. Throughout the day, little parades of perishable food ingredients are endlessly wrapped and unwrapped and rewrapped again, each new wrapping underscored by the sharp, sibilant snap-and-hiss of folding, crinkling, overlapping cellophane, snapping cellophane, tearing cellophane, occasional big wads of cellophane lazily unbunching itself on the counter or in the trashcan with the sweetly sizzling sound of a far-off campfire. It’s cellophane city in there, and after so many years engaged up to her elbows in various food-service activities, one can assume that Compton has spent dozens, maybe hundreds, of hours playing with the stuff.

“It’s probably true,” she grins. “I’ve got my hands on cellophane all day long.”

Still, Compton admits that she’s never really thought about cellophane all that much–until two weeks ago, when she and her fellow employees were enrolled in a daylong food-safety class. The class, she says, was all about “washing your hands and not touching stuff”–sensible lessons, to be sure–but during that eight-hour training there was also plenty to learn about the amazing, unsung, transparent, pleasantly-filmy-yet-largely-taken-for-granted plastic product that’s been unobtrusively playing a part in humanity’s existence for almost 100 years.

“If it weren’t for cellophane,” Compton says, “there would be much more cross-contamination. That’s my new big word: ‘cross-contamination.’ Germs just jump from everybody, all the time. There are a lot of germs out there. Cellophane stops the germs. Cellophane,” she pronounces firmly, “is good.”

While certainly good, cellophane’s creation, like vulcanized rubber and the potato chip, was ultimately an accident.

According to historians, a Swiss chemist and textile engineer named Jacques Edwin Brandenberger, working in France in the year 1900, was seated in a restaurant, enjoying his meal, when a particularly clumsy patron spilled a bottle of good red wine all over the pristine white tablecloth. “Wouldn’t it be useful,” he surely thought to himself, “to find a way to make such fabrics waterproof? Stain-resistant? Impervious to the ravages of good red wine?” (Actually, no one know the specific words M. Brandenberger was thinking, but what’s clear is that witnessing the destruction of that tablecloth in that little restaurant was like lightning on his brain.)

By the year 1908–the same year Henry Ford unveiled the first Model T–the Swiss tinkerer had experimented with several different materials in his quest to create repellant tablecloths. Various people had been playing with a derivative of cellulose and alcoholized camphor called “celluloid” at that time. An inventor named John Wesley Hyatt first came up with the stuff in 1868, hoping to find a substitute for ivory in billiard balls, and scientists had been testing out other applications ever since. Ultimately, Brandenberger tried applying liquid viscose (a cellulose material derived from wood or cotton fibers) to the fabric, but the viscose only acted as a stiffening agent, making the tablecloths difficult to fold but certainly no safer from cataclysmic spillage.

Worse yet, the stuff wouldn’t stay affixed to the cloth; the plastic coating kept sloughing off in great big sheets of thin transparent film. Like any good inventor, Brandenberger eventually gave up on saving the tablecloths of France, having realized that the weird byproduct of his failed experiments was a lot more interesting.

His next task was to develop a machine that could produce regenerated cellulose in attractive, see-through sheets. It took him nearly 10 years, but by 1908 the world’s first cellophane machine was born. The process employs an alkaline solution of viscose, extruded through a very narrow slit into a bath of acid. The acid regenerates the celluloid, resulting in a thin film. After the additional processed of washing and bleaching the material, it becomes cellophane.

Having perfected the machine, Brandenberger only needed to find a practical use for the product it made. By 1912 he had formed a company, La Cellophane–combining the words “cello” from “cellulose” with “phane” from the French word diaphane, meaning “transparent”–and had begun producing and selling thin cellulose film to be used in the manufacture of gas masks. By the time it became available to the general public, cellophane was being produced by several companies in France, each finding neat new uses for it, and the excitement surrounding the material was so high that an organization, La Cellophane Société Anonyme, was formed to promote and explore its potential.

Cellophane’s usefulness as a packaging material had become clear, and on Dec. 26, 1923, Brandenberger entered into an agreement with Du Pont to make and distribute cellophane throughout North and South America. Five years later, Du Pont scientist William Hale Church finally figured out how to make cellophane waterproof, instantly creating countless new opportunities in food packaging.

This had a remarkable effect on the food industry. With cellophane wrapping suddenly available to keep bugs out of products like candies and chocolates, such treats could be shipped across the country. The omnipresence of the Whitman’s Sampler owes a lot to Brandenberger and his invention. Today, according to the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, Mass., cellophane is produced in more than 2,000 forms. In addition to having revolutionized the medical world with the various sanitary applications of sealable bags and other products, cellophane changed the way people cook and eat. Leftovers suddenly became feasible and safe to eat a few days after that first meal. It is difficult to imagine a modern-day kitchen without a roll or two of plastic wrap banging around in the pantry.

Nearly 100 happy years after its arrival on the scene, cellophane continues to evolve as scientists and inventors find ways to improve upon Brandenberger’s flexible invention.

Jennifer Barnhart, a media representative for the Glad Products Company, a subsidiary of Clorox Inc. in Oakland, Calif., is paid to be excited about plastic wrap, and she does her job well. When reached by phone, she seems genuinely thrilled to be talking about a favorite subject. She knows, for example, that a sheet of Glad Cling Wrap is exactly .5 millimeters thick.

“Are you familiar with our newest innovation?” Barnhart cheerfully asks. “As much as your may love plastic wrap, you have to admit you also have a few frustrations with it, don’t you? Some people are frustrated because plastic wrap, while it’s very good at clinging to itself, hasn’t always been good at clinging to other surfaces. When a Tupperware container is missing a lid, for example, plastic wrap isn’t always good at covering the container, because it won’t cling to the plastic surface.”

Glad’s newest product, she enthusiastically explains, is a sealable wrap, chemically engineered to seal to practically any surface, merely by pressing against the wrap. “Regular wraps cling,” she says. “[This] actually seals.”

Asked to muse upon the vast social significance of plastic wrap and other cellophane products, Barnhart’s professional observation is sweetly succinct.

“Cellophane,” she says, “has clearly made a lot people’s lives easier, in and out of the kitchen.” And finally, asked to speculate as to what Jacques Brandenberger would think about Glad’s latest twist on his invention, she says, “I don’t know, but I bet he’d like it.”

Of course he’d like it. But he’d probably have one burning question: “How does this stuff work on tablecloths?”

From the April 14-20, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.