It’s one thing going to a wine tasting. It’s quite another when the wine tasting comes to you. In person. From Barcelona. While you’re having dinner. In San Francisco.
It happened like this.
I found myself in need of a business dinner that would involve four people. We ended up wandering into Contigo, a tapas establishment in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. We didn’t have a reservation. Thankfully, just as we tiptoed through the doors, some halfwits had canceled their table for four.
Oh, I can’t prove that they were halfwits, but who other than a halfwit, or someone with far too many unruly children, cancels a table for four a minute before the reservation time?
Still, we were immediately led to table with a view of the kitchen. Seated on the outside half of the table, I had an excellent view of, well, the freezers. They’re actually in the restaurant. And they make you feel like you’re eating in one vast open-plan designer home that has only been slightly remodeled to feed the fifty or so people that seemed to be there.
The wine list was rather Spanish. So we asked for advice and it was suggested that we might try a strong earthy red from the Odysseus winery.
It arrived, was opened and one’s initial reaction was that a whole load of fine dirt went into making this concoction. Before we had a chance to decide whether we liked it or not, a gray-haired man with a large tummy came over and began to shake our hands.
Personally, I am not used to gray-haired men approaching me in restaurants unless I am seated with their ex-wives who took at least half their money.
So I was temporarily flummoxed when this chap not only shook my hand, but then sat down with us. It just so happened that the winemaker of the wine that the server had just so happened to recommend to us was this gray-haired man with, I suddenly imagined, a gray-haired large tummy.
We began to chat with him aimiably and his stories, which began on the second floor, soon rose to the penthouse. He had dined at El Bulli, the world’s most famous restaurant, six times. Not five times, not seven times. Not so many times that he might not remember. Not including one time that he might have got so drunk that he couldn’t remember.
He had also cooked a paella in Jose Andres’ El Jaleo in Washington for fifty people. You know, Jose Andres, the chap with the PBS show, the burgeoning fame and the difficult combover.
I have no reason to disbelieve our guest, whose name, I believe, was Jos. Indeed, it was rather lovely how his stories opened out with a similar rhythm to his wine.
He sat, merrily chatting away, his love of food and wine (I suspect song and women might also have been preferred pursuits) emerging from his mouth like an aria from a large lady who will die in the end, while we began to enjoy the food.
(I fear Jos may have already eaten several small plates before he arrived at our table)
The food. Ah, well, yes. There was this simple green salad, which the person who had prepared it had bothered to season so that it wouldn’t taste like a simple green salad. Don’t ask me what was in it, but I saw a hazelnut or two and the dressing tasted like it had been painted by an artist rather than poured by an intern.
The anchovies were not for those who delight in beige. They slide into your mouth, bare fangs like drunken conger eels, then happily perform an end-of-party conga down your throat.
Then there were the sardines.
I am told the owner of Contigo has a quasi-sexual relationship with sardines. Something about them makes him weak in certain places and very, very strong in one other. He even has a blog called In Praise of Sardines. Though he doesn’t seem to have posted much since the beginning of the Obama Administration.
These sardines should have been given a lifetime achievement award. They exuded something so regal, so exquisite, that anyone eating more than eight would have a death wish, but one that resembled being strangled by Raquel Welch in her pre-animals-are-cuddly-and-better-than-humans-and-must-live-forever phase.
While this was occurring, we availed ourselves of some more Odysseus, by wafting into a carafe-size quaff of some white, which was more subtle than a come-on from a recently-deconvented nun and blended with the sardines with all the unexpected grace of a Turkish diplomat at a Greek toga party.
Oh, we did have some meat at one point. But this was generally loved by my dining companions. They praised the tripe, they lauded the meatballs. There was some lamb thing. But, no. My head was buried in Contigo’s water creatures, while my ears were glued to Jos the winemaker’s Tales of a Sybaritic Life.
Dessert did not contain any sardine dishes, which came as something of a return to the ground floor. Jos had bid us goodbye, nodding when I asked him to come to my house to make a paella for my friends. (He was off to Beverley Hills. He was practicing his nodding for that, I fear.)
Absent-mindedly, I had Blue Bottle coffee ice cream. What’s with this Blue Bottle thing? It tastes like, well, coffee. There was an order of rhubarb pie, which was remarkable in that it tasted wonderful, and therefore not at all redolent of rhubarb.
However, I must reserve a last word for the churros, which were more decadent than many a Latin American government. One would not want to re-elect them, but, goodness, did they feel good for a little while.
Drifting away from a very heartening evening, my mind finally drifted away from the sardines to Jos. And when I got home, I discovered one small fact.
According to his website, Jos Puig is not the winemaker at Odysseus. It is Sylvia Puig. (Jos is merely the owner.) A wife, perhaps? A second wife, perhaps? Or a daughter? I don’t want to know. Because now I know that the subtlety in the wine comes from a woman. This is all I need to know.
If the man who joined us was not Jos Puig, if this was some elaborate joke to which I have fallen victim, might I apologize to the real Jos Puig unreservedly? Perhaps, next time, Sylvia will join us for dinner and tell us she is to buy El Bulli and turn it into a sardine bar.
This is a lovely story and that was indeed Josep Puig the proprietor of Vinedos de Ithaca. I was sitting at the next table over and have to admit I represent his wines here in SF. He is a very amicable chap and if you think he’s a character you must meet his winemaker daughter Sylvia someday. She was back in Spain with her newborn child, amazingly she was working the tractor in the vineyards the day the baby came! I love the large tummy description but that could probably describe me well too!
Thanks for the wonderful writing,
Tommy
Thank you for your sympathetic words, Tommy.
It was an interesting evening, to say the least.
Table 18.