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Brendan O'Donovan

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Young rabbit with wild morels, fiddleheads, cherries, ramps, baby turnips and blood sorrel

carrot topper
prix-fixe-menu

Dish of the Week

young rabbit with wild morels, fiddleheads, cherries, ramps, baby turnips and blood sorrel

morels and fiddlehead2
cherries and sorel

What a palaver ~ forget about the difficulty sourcing quality rabbit these days ~ the rush is on for those delicacies that only make a brief appearance in late April, early May. All week this incredible bounty arrived in fits and starts. The indefatigable Charmoon brought in two big bags of wild morels on Wednesday, the same day ramps and fiddleheads appeared. Three kinds of tiny pink and white turnips arrived from our friends at MIX, who also dropped flats of beautiful blood sorrel, so named for the vein of vibrant red that runs down the center (and not incidentally, a curiously wonderful iron bite to the finish). I harvested the Bing cherries at our farm in Mendocino County on Saturday morning, by Saturday evening they were on plates in the dining room.

chef and raw ingredients

There's a precarious balancing act with ephemeral ingredients like these ~ the trick is to present them as simply as possible so they play with and not against each other. The rabbit loin was wrapped in ramp tops, then cooked sous vide with the kidney in fragrant aromatics. (Pan sear or grill the kidney and you risk losing that moist pop of meat juice when you cut into it.) The morels were glazed in butter and chives. The ramps and cherries were lightly pickled. The turnips were steamed, then brushed with butter. This is one of Chef's favorite times of the year: blink and you'll miss it. Manage to score a table for lunch or dinner in the next few weeks and you won't!

finished dish

The "Real" Key Ingredients

Admittedly most of the talk in our blog week after week is about sourcing food, but make no mistake: the most important ingredient here at Barndiva is of the human kind. The front of house is the kitchen's direct conduit to you; but while they provide the most powerful way to communicate the narrative around each dish, great service is a high wire act where one mis-step can reverberate throughout the meal. Some diners like a lot of talk about the food, others want only the salient facts. Knowing the difference is almost as important as knowing the food.

Sincerity is not something you can teach alongside the daily special, but it's the first thing a customer registers no matter how 'educated' their palate. What I love most about the dedicated, smart, food and wine obsessed young men and women that work here is the passion they manage to bring to the barn with every service. We are so lucky to have each and every one of them.

restaurant-staff

Matt, Kaireesa, Cathryn, Stacie, Mark, Brendan, George

The snap above was taken just before we opened for lunch last Thursday. Servers, hosts, back waiters, bartenders and Brendan, our SOM, often trade day and evening shifts, but the guiding force behind our increasingly popular lunch service is the beautiful lady third from the left, Cathryn Hulsman, our AM manager.

All text and photos Jil Hales and Dawid Jaworski

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House Cured Salmon, Crispy Capers, Heirloom Beets, Avocado, Kumquat & American Sturgeon Caviar

springtime garden
prix-fixe-menu

Dish of the Week

Sunday morning breakfast never varied in our house all the years I was growing up: lox and bagels lathered with Philadelphia cream cheese and thick rings of red onion. When, on my first trip to France, I ordered a first course of ‘gravlax’ thinking I’d come upon an old friend, what arrived at the table was exotic and unfamiliar ~ transparent slices of salmon cut so thinly they shimmered like silk, a languorous trail of crème frâiche, a light dusting of capers. On a separate plate were little pillows of pancakes called blini. My first thought, ‘ok, we’re not in Kansas anymore,’ was followed by complete surprise when I took that first bite. For all its refinements, the dish brought me home.

I never forgot the lesson: whatever hide 'n seek we play with food, signature flavors have the power to haunt us. Sure, in chasing them down we more often than not find ourselves disappointed. But on those rare occasions when we aren’t, the experience is a remarkable convergence of known yet new, comforting yet exciting.

smoked-salmon-plate

Our first course on last Sunday’s Mother’s Day tasting menu was remarkable in precisely this way as it managed to remind me of my mother’s kitchen while seamlessly bridging the gap between homey and elevated. The taste of the sea was alive in the house cured salmon, a bright dollop of caviar like an exploding punctuation mark on the palate. The salmon was cured in equal parts salt and sugar with fresh dill, lemon and orange slices. The heirloom beets pickled in sugar, mustard seed and champagne vinegar, were punched out with a scalloped ring mold.

Everything on the plate played off or with the fish: the earthiness of the beets, the sharp bitterness of the kumquat, the creaminess of the avocado and the crème frâiche. Pink peppercorns, fresh chives, deep fried capers, opal basil and tiny mince of red onions ~ spicy herbal notes ~ wove in and around the salmon refreshing each bite. My mother would have loved it.

beautiful-beet

SOM's notes:

Sekthaus Solter Spätburgunder Brut Rosé, NV, Rheingau, Germany

A sparkling rosé wine is a great pairing to the first course on our Mother’s Day menu because underneath the German lingo this German sparkler is in fact simply a pink Champagne from Pinot Noir. Light bodied and dry, it delivers crisp red cherry and strawberry notes that stand out against a background of sorrel herb minerality. Brighter than any stateside Blanc du Noirs I've had, it's a perfect refreshing palate cleanser that elevates the richness of cured salmon and the crème fraîche, while holding it's own with the earthy and herbal elements of the dish, as well as the bright acids and tangy tartness of the kumquats. 

Brendan O'Donovan

In the Gardens last week

audi-experience

The versatility of the Barndiva Gardens had a nice workout last week when days before double barrel weddings we played host to an Audi Sportscar Experience that brought close to two million dollars worth of exquisite vehicles into the Studio Gardens. It probably was not fair that we told our staff the cars were this year's bonus for their hard work.

Our beautiful Saturday wedding made the New York Times Wedding Section because the bride was the great great grand-daughter of our 27th President. That would be William Howard Taft, if you are counting. Aside from the impressive lineage (the bride's father is the former legal adviser to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell) this was one lovely couple who blessed their vows in the gardens on what turned out to be an unusually warm late spring evening.

barndiva-wedding

All text and photos Jil Hales and Dawid Jaworski

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Wednesday at the Barn Says Adieu As It Welcomes in 2013

pretty-girls
prix-fixe-menu

Hello, Goodbye

It would be boorish indeed to post images of our guests wearing silly hats they've donned after imbibing copious amount of drink, but when it comes to our staff all bets are off.  Chef may have slipped out the back door with Bekah and the baby just after midnight, but the rest of us partied on to a playlist of Prince, MJ, Barry and an extended homage to Donna (RIP, girl).

NYE is a great night around here syncopated as it is to base notes of bleating horns and the clarion call of champagne corks popping, but for the staff it also serves a higher salutatory purpose. By the time the room emptied and the balloons had begun their inexorable drift into the new year, cliff or no cliff we were ready to say goodbye to 2012, happily done and dusted.

wine cellar
kitchen guys
chef
cocktails
rachel beardsley
lukka
isabel and geoff
brandon
bekah
bartenders
bar light

Incredibly, this is our 200th blog as Eat the View. Next week we will post one more time (wild sea bass) before taking an extended travel break. We hope to return ~ invigoration is an art around here ~  but you'll have to stay tuned to see in what form. New Year's may be over, but metaphorically (and, no doubt edibly) speaking, the night is still young.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales.

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Wednesday at the Barn Menu + New Fall Cocktail List

Fall Cocktails

I’ve heard some bad ideas in my time (many of them attached to the words “time saving”) but Push Button Cocktails? That’s the tagline the Rabbit Company is hoping will sell their new Electric Cocktail Mixer, a product that is dumb, dumb, dumb. Come on people, one of the great anticipatory sounds of the civilized world is that of ice hitting the sides of a cocktail shaker held aloft. At the end of a long day it's the sound of an evening opening up in front of you with the promise of great food and conversation...and if you play your cards right and the stars align, maybe a whole lot more. The idea of replacing it with a Double AA battery pushing a superfluous motor that grinds the life out of the inherently delicate ingredients isn’t just stupid, it’s soul destroying. They aren’t called spirits for nothing.

I have little patience for dumbing down the art of the drink. I’m no snob ~ great dives can produce great martinis ~ but skill and individual style come with the territory (+ a touch of OCD doesn’t hurt). Since we opened Barndiva, cocktails have been at the heart of the dining experience we’ve wanted to create; seven years on we have developed one of the best cocktail programs in Northern California. Our passion has been fueled by consistently bringing on bright new talent and giving them stellar ingredients and an environment in which they have every opportunity to thrive.

But it hasn’t always been easy to put all three elements in play at the same time. Rachel Beardsley is the first woman to manage the Barndiva bar ~ about time, right? Turns out, Audrey Saunders notwithstanding, the mixology world is a glorified version of boy's town, as I suspect it always has been. In addition to the usual stereotypes, beauty like Rachel's can be an obstacle for being taken seriously behind the bar. She rocks it with professionalism and a cool but commanding presence. Brendan O'Donovan, who manages our wine list with an impressive understanding of nuance and nose has been a great foil for her. But with respect to the Fall list, it’s also hard to ignore the energy a new apprentice is having on the program. Justin Wycoff worked under Ryan in the kitchen for the past two years, but found his heart wasn’t in it for the long run. Affectionately known around here as Junior, he is the younger brother of our talented sous chef Drew sharing the Wycoff gene for crushing long hours with unbridled enthusiasm. Both brothers have an impressive focus for detail, but it turns out Junior also has a bit of the mad scientist in him. We’re going to encourage him to take what he learned under Ryan ~ especially from the garde manger station ~ and run with it.

Cocktails are an innately human endeavor, one of the few which fully combines art and science, but you don't need to be James Bond to understand the difference between shaken and stirred ~ it’s all in the wrist. And heads up: anyone who tells you differently is just trying to push your buttons.

Here's a preview of our new cocktails. It comes together at a great time of year for spirit drinks which pull inspiration from the gardens and the forest. Consider yourself invited.

 Lady Penrose is a gin cocktail where the complexities of the spirit soften and open, house-infused with garden sage. Gently shaken with huckleberry jus and fresh lime, the drink is topped with sparkling Roederer from just down the hill from our farm in Philo. Named after the great modern photographer and Man Ray muse Lee Miller, Rachel incorporates a perfume of angostura for a spiced nose and a bit of heat ~ in her incredible life, Lee had plenty of both to go around.

Golden Boy uses our ever popular house-infused browned butter whiskey with a hint of black pepper syrup and fresh lemon juice. The drink stars Barndiva’s apple juice from our farm, pressed at Apple a Day over in Sebastapol (a blend of Spitzenburg, Golden Delicious and Jonathon’s ~ if you dined with us in the past month you've no doubt enjoyed a shooter on the house and would agree, it's killer). A charge of soda frames the conversation of this drink, the epitome of smooth ~ more Oscar De La Hoya than Clifford Odets.

Ruling Class Lite is made with house-infused burnt orange tequila hit with a splash of fresh lemon juice. The drink's citrus is tempered by a light but distinctly herbal tarragon syrup. Rachel’s first interactive cocktail, RCL comes with a sidecar of beet and tarragon foam, earthy and wonderful. Check out the drift.

Bitches of Seiziéme is a thoroughly modern take on a champagne cocktail made with sparkling Roederer, house-infused orange peel brandy, coriander syrup and a hint of creole bitters on the nose, reminiscent of absinthe. Ask the bar about the name.

Ninth Ward is Brendan’s contribution to the collection with fennel infused vodka, a bit of citrus, and a mist of Herbsaint over a beautiful sea of egg white foam. Garnished with bronze fennel from the gardens.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales and Dawid Jaworski (unless otherwise noted.)

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