The band was late. The opening act was almost done and they still hadn’t arrived.
I got up from my chair on the lawn and went back to the kitchen to talk to Chef Jeff Mosher, the chef at the Robert Mondavi Winery about this evening’s meal. The VIP dinner served at every concert between the rows of vines just beyond the lawn, is some of the best food served in the Napa Valley. Moreover, it is the best example of what we could call a Napa Valley Cuisine.
Nick, the Vineyard Room Manager, has changed things up a bit. Originally, guests arrive in the cellar, and get the chance to drink chilled chardonnay amount the cavernous French oak fermentation tanks, then they make it to the table, where things start with salads. The normal flow is salad, entree, cheese, dessert.
Now Nick has decided that cheese goes at the beginning of the meal so guests have something to nosh on while waiting for the concert to start. Chef Mosher always chooses three local american cheeses paired with apricots this time. One of the fun things about the meal is guessing which cheese is which, based on what is listed in the menu, and what the cheeses look and taste like. Sheep, goat and cow, all become as recognizable as cabernet, merlot and pinot noir, which is lots of fun. And Chef usually includes one of each.
There were two salads, like usual. Burrata and heirloom tomatoes with basil - nothing better than a Caprese in July. And a salad nicoise.
Salad nicoise is a favorite of mine. Its a traditional French bistro salad, consisting of lettuce - usually romaine; French green beans, otherwise known as haricot vert, which are thinner than their American cousins; some kind of small white potato - I usually get Russian fingerlings when I do this at home, but Chef Mosher chose XXXXX potatoes that he chopped into bite size pieces; soft boiled eggs - I’m sure Chef Mosher’s were locally sourced; and tuna. It may have been the case that Chef Mosher actually sauteed pavés of tuna, but I wasn’t able to confirm. At home, I use an Tonnino brand canned tuna that I can get at Nob Hill Foods - where I shop now that Vallergas has closed. Its packed in oil, not water, and is prepared in one solid chunk, not a mishmash of tuna chips like Chicken of the Sea tends to be.
The Nicoise was tossed in in big ceramic bowls with an anchovy mustard vinaigrette, which is brilliant. Anchovies are what give Caesar Salad it's unmistakable flavor and mouthfeel. Anchovies have umami, which is the ghost that has been living in the attic of your mouth, and mine too, when the only taste receptors you thought you had on your tongue were sweet, salty, bitter and sour. Umami confers a ‘savory’ taste - I can’t find anything more specific than that - which is so vague, it makes a food writer like me who demands specificity want to scream.
My Nicoise salad dressing relies on lemon juice for acidity, dijon mustard for texture and parsley for a vegetal kick. Next time, I’ll remove the parsley and chop up a few anchovies to mix with the lemon juice and mustard.
The star of the show, though, were the pork spare ribs. Chef had gotten them from a farm in the midwest, especially for the concert. The menu said that he made a plum barbeque sauce, which is quintessential Jeff Mosher: brilliant ideas you never thought of before but are obvious when you see them on the menu, and put them in your mouth.
Plums would add a fruity sweetness to barbeque sauce that is often prepared to be sweet anyway. Using fruit sugar instead of cane sugar is great. Cane sugar is a baseball bat of a sweetener. Brute, upfront sweetness that you can instantly tell. The only thing worse is high fructose corn syrup.
But the addition of plum even gets the color is right. Purple barbeque sauce is just going to be more interesting than bright red barbeque sauce.
But the sauce itself turned out to be more maroon, kind’ve a deep roasted tomato color, with a bit of tan mixed in. Jeff brought out a rack of three ribs for me to taste. He got a bowl of sauce and, with a paint brush, gently coated the ribs with the sauce. I, of course, was salivating so much my shoes were getting wet and was annoyed that Jeff was only putting only one coat on those ribs instead of plastering them. But this is why Chef Jeff is the chef and I am not - Chef Jeff is measured, relaxed and fine tuned. Never in a hurry, and completely humble, which only accentuates how much I jump out of my skin when I eat his food.
He sliced a rib off the rack for me and handed it over. The grain of the meat was at a consistent slant, and it was just barely pink - now being a bit overcooked because it was the end of the meal.
I took the rib by the bones and sunk my teeth into the meat. I nearly melted. The meat came off the bone as if I were pulling a down comforter off the bed in a five star hotel. The plum flavor and infiltrated the meat, and the fresh sauce underscored that. The result was a perfect rib, ideal for a warm summer night before a concert.
The ribs were served with Carolina white rice with cranberry beans, which are obscure - I had never heard of them. Carolina is a producer of rice, whose rice, as prepared by Chef Mosher, was delicious, but whose website is is woefully inadequate when it comes around to telling their story and what makes it so good. I called the number on the website, telling them I was a food writer, but the guy couldn’t have cared less. So much for the plug.
Cranberry beans are pinto beans, but with little red flecks on the outside. They’re not spots, mind you. They are irregular, crimson chicken pox kind’ve things. I wasn’t able to tell the exact difference in taste however. But I can say that I’ll take an unusual cranberry bean over a regular old pinto bean any day of the week.
The beans and rice were tossed together, in one bowl - rice and beans being culinary friends since the beginning of time - and such a dish being the ideal starch to compliment a protein as perfect as those pork ribs in plum barbeque sauce.
At this point, my cup having runneth over so much that it’s watering the grape vines that we are seated next to, comes dessert, which doesn’t help the situation.
Today Chef Mosher made seven layer bars. Like an idiot I didn’t ask him what the actual seven layers are. So far as I can tell from my research, there aren’t actually seven ingredients. Coconut, chocolate chips, graham crackers, some kind of nut and sweetened condensed milk are the main ones. But Chef Mosher had included pretzels in his, which is perfect because pretzels have a crunchiness to them whose texture is welcome in bar that can be soft, AND, pretzels have salt, which the sweet/salty thing gets me, and many other people, every time.
Adding pretzels to dessert, not unlike plum to barbeque sauce, is yet another brilliant and unexpected touch by a chef whose become known for such things. Though, I think I’m the only person who notices. Maybe now, others will notice too.
I have to say, this is definitely a plum assignment. Especially when there’s one more concert left!