Pizza Parable

I visited a new-ish pizza place recently, one that specializes in made-from-scratch, locally-sourced, organic ingredient pies.  The menu featured a fair amount of verbiage about organic and sustainable ingredients, a laboriously handmade dough, hand pulled mozarella and in-house sausage making which, depending on your point of view, could come off as deeply earnest or quite a bit precious.  For the record, I support the local, organic, sustainable ethic and I'm more than happy with menus that list the provenance of most, if not all of their ingredients.  (I think we'll have jumped the shark, no pun intended, when the actual names of individual animals start appearing on the menu: "Bessie the Cow's Vermont Cheddar," or "Piglet's Prosciutto.")

No, my issue was with the finished product itself, a pizza that could in no way be considered bad, but also wasn't as good as its pedigree had suggested.  A pizza that under normal circumstances would have been considered a decent find was, after all the build up of earnest, well-intentioned discussion of provenance and artisanship, somewhat disappointing.  A pizza that sounded better than it tasted, a pie whose intentions were nobler than its existence.

This didn't seem to be an isolated incident, either.  A week earlier, in another restaurant in another city, I'd come across some excellent house made salumi and a pizza with a crust that tasted like naan bread.  After inquiring about the texture of the crust with the waiter, I learned that the dough was made using 00 (double zero) flour and was in the Neapolitan style, two points which didn't make it taste any less like naan.  Again, not bad by any stretch, quite tasty in fact, but another case of the divergence of stated intentions and a fully realized form.

Not that this is anything new in the restaurant industry, where shameless hyperbole is hardly uncommon (Salisbury steak, anyone?).  Indeed, it's a sign of the times, of the long way that the organic/sustainable/artisanal movement has come, to be able to complain a little about how even when a restaurant lives up to those principles, it's no guarantee of great food.  Though it may have required great restaurants to convince the public that these principles were worth embracing, perhaps now we have arrived close to where we always wanted to be: these principles are a mere starting point, the preqrequisite for even attempting great food.  Not all will succeed, and many will end up as only average, but they will have succeeded in raising the bar for what it means to be average.  A delicious prospect indeed.

Tailgate Burgundy

A few weeks ago, I met a friend for a few glasses of Red Burgundy in a dimly lit parking lot.  We hadn't planned it that way, but we were both on our respective ways home after long work days (we both sell wine), and he had a few bottles of Red Burgundies he'd been showing around and I happened to have some stemware samples.  The dimly lit lot at the Park 'n Ride seemed as good a place to meet as any, so we parked and swirled and enjoyed the delicate, floral perfume and minerally backbone of these wines.  The fact that this had the aura of something illicit, or at the very least, in violation of some municipal code, may have lent the wines an added appeal, but there was no doubt that these were lovely wines from start to end.  Dom. de la Vougeraie 2007 Bourgogne Grande Ordinaire "En Bollery" Terres d'en Face, redolent of violets and floral perfume and then the firm backbone that properly grown Gamay often has.  Jean Noel Gagnard 2007 Chassagne-Montrachet "L'Estimee," Pinot Noir from a village more famous for its whites, its initial hard edges giving way to suppleness and grace.  And a 2005 Roland Thevenin Santenay, showing all the hallmarks of the vintage: power, grace, layers of fruit and earth and flower and mineral, a very good wine from a village that often falls off the radar, but in a great year like 2005 can really strut its stuff. 

We were a long way from the setting normally ascribed to the wines of Burgundy: no white tablecloths, no sommeliers...we probably would have consumed these out of plastic cups if we had to.  With the dull roar of the freeway beside us and the constant lookout for police presence, it dawned on me: sometimes the wine is just good enough and the timing is just right that everything else falls by the wayside.  It doesn't always have to be perfect; sometimes good enough is just great.