This was when Sibella Kraus called me to ask if I was interested in a farmers market in San Francisco that would bring together farmers and restaurants and sell to the public as well.  Sibella had invented the position of forager for herself at Chez Panisse, where she had been working as a line cook. She quickly gravitated to her true calling, agriculture, growing lettuces in Alice Water’s backyard and searching out artisanal farmers and producers to supply the restaurant.  She soon realized that the more restaurants she could enlist to buy from her farmers, the more sense it made for everyone. Organic and sustainable farmers who had to charge more than big conventional farmers would be assured of a market, while restaurants would get super fresh, high quality produce, not that easy to find twenty years ago. She called this endeavor the Farm-Restaurant project. With a regular urban-rural meeting place– like a farmers’ market– restaurants and farmers could get to know each other, collaborate on what to grow and prepare for the arrival of new crops, all of which would enrich the city’s menus and stir public interest.

Of course I said “yes,” eager to get something exciting going in the depressed City; and I joined a founding board which Sibella put together with Tom Sargeant, a public/private developer whose dream was to establish a market on a pier in the bay. That proved to be more complicated than anyone imagined, so we got permission from the port to open in the liberated expanse of concrete in the middle of the Embarcadero roadway.  Sibella cajoled her farmers to come down.  My restaurant, Hayes Street Grill, set up a breakfast booth to lure customers, and slowly the word got out that some beautiful seasonal produce was available–to everyone.

Sibella’s goal was to promote relationships, real connections between farmers and urbanites.  The more they understood each other and liked each other, the better it would be for both. The city dwellers would be seduced and nourished by the produce and demand more of it from a growing network of ecology-minded family farms that grew for flavor rather than volume.  The working board was made up of farmers, restaurant people, environmentalists, architects, civic minded citizens, urban planners and developers. We called ourselves CUESA–Center for Urban Education About Sustainable Agriculture–but we all knew that the educational moment happened at the market when a kid bit into his first fig, a home cook discovered fresh shelling beans, or a chef started building menus on what she hauled off that day.  Taste made the difference. The market’s vibrant fruits and vegetables were worth a higher price, a price that allowed these farmers to sustain both their families and their beliefs.

Something else happened.  A community formed around the market, a group of farmers and shoppers who came every Saturday rain or shine, who talked to each other, who became friends. The chefs formed a bond with each other, and everyone spread the gospel of the pleasure and goodness of mindfully grown produce and artisanal food. Chefs identified farmers on their menus so when their patrons fell in love with a plate of savoy spinach, they started coming down to the market to get some themselves. For once, rural and urban people developed an experiential bond.

When the post-earthquake reconstruction of the Embarcadero got underway, the market moved to a parking lot just north at Green Street, and when the Ferry Building was renovated, the developers begged us to move our market there. We did and our farmers’ market put that building on the map. In turn, the iconic location gave our farmers a wider audience. Thousands of people from all over the world get to experience the products of a sustainable food system.  But the moment of belief still happens the same way, when someone experiences a dry farmed tomato, a fragrant strawberry, or tender sweet peas, and begins to wonder why all produce doesn’t taste like that.

Customers walk up a few stairs into a high ceilinged, loft-like space with walls of charred wood and a dining hall full of handsome refectory tables with benches.  Picking up a single page menu–food on one side, drinks including easy drinking house cocktails on the other– from a stand at the front, they order at the open kitchen at the back. Groups, large and small,  stake out a place at the communal tables, or upstairs in a mezzanine filled with individual tables.  Food and drink is delivered.  (The tab can remain open with payment at the counter by credit card, allowing for additional drinks and dishes during the meal conveniently brought by the wait staff/runners.)

First things first:  the food, starring St. Louis-cut spare ribs ($13),  long, crisp edged and dry-rubbed with a mixture of Four Barrel coffee and spices. I clearly tasted the bone and the meat itself, gently seasoned by smoke.   A perky, fruity, sweet/tart Texas red sauce blessedly comes on the side, along with spears of superbly crunchy, barely cured new pickles and a soft, brioche-style pull-apart roll with honey butter. All are arranged on a piece of butcher paper on a tray. If any ribs are left, you just wrap them in the butcher paper and stick them in your bag.

Beef brisket ($15) at Hi Lo includes slices from the deckle, the fat-laced cap on the brisket that butchers usually remove and grind into hamburger.  This  buttery, smoke-tinged cut is meat nirvana. I use the red sauce on the lean slices, which are still moist and tasty, but do not deliver the ecstasy of the deckle.

Sake-braised pork belly ($12), two soft, round slices in Japanese glaze with pickled cucumber salad and watermelon radishes represents bbq light, even though we are talking about slabs of rolled fresh bacon. The fat has been rendered so gently that the belly somehow conflates unctuous and clean.

Spectacularly delicious sides must be ordered. Long baked in the wood oven, Iacopi butter beans come out miraculously creamy, flavored with smoke, big hunks of crusty pork, and the sweet and sour bbq sauce ($7).  Collard greens ($7) retain fresh flavor and color yet are tender and deep, seasoned with vinegar and house-smoked bacon $7).  Cheesy, creamy, stone-milled grits ($7) topped with black trumpet mushrooms could be a main course, they are so satisfying.  As is true of all the cooking here, the excitement comes from the brightness of flavor and the distinctiveness of texture, not bludgeoning richness.

Even though Hi Lo is a bbq place, the kitchen excels at sharable “plates” of salad. One beauty of earthy, coal roasted baby beets ($10), citrus, sharp blue cheese and a muscular preserved lemon vinaigrette that pulls it all together, sets up the palate for bbq.  Another of big hunks of house smoked trout and asparagus with a poached eggs and a mustard relish ($13) has the heft of a main course.  Who says you can’t precede bbq with bbq, especially if there are duck wings ($10) coated in a vinegary Buffalo-style red sauce, paired with apple and fennel slaw and a dry “dip” of spicy hot peanut crumbs?

A bag of warm butterscotch cookies ($5), can be nibbled on the way home, while an ethereal strawberry short cake ($7), disappears on the spot,

The chef/couple behind this fantastic food, Ryan Ostler and Katharine Zacher, ran pop up counters at Bruno’s in the Mission, where I first tasted their cooking, and The Broken Record, a dive bar in the Excelsior.  Then they opened their own cafe at Google where they prepared breakfast and lunch for 1000 from scratch, locally sourcing every ingredient. They worked 14 hours a day, learned volume and considered it the ideal preparation for the global bbq they are creating for Hi Lo. They may not be doing this kind of volume yet, but with food this exciting and a system rigged for quick service, it won’t be long. I’ll be first in line.

3416 19th Street, (between Valencia and Mission) San Francisco; 415 874-9921; hilobbqsf.com; nightly from 5:30 p.m. to around 10 p.m.

Saturday, March 30, 4 p.m.

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco

For someone who thinks she’s seen it all, especially when it comes to food, this program of ten short documentaries opened my eyes.  The film makers took me to places I’ve never been:  a cooperative farm in Uganda worked by HIV positive women; a backyard where a dad kills a chicken in front of his four year old daughter;  roof top gardens in Beijng and Hong Kong created by ecstatic amateur gardeners; a living room of an organic farmer and a genetic engineer. Don’t miss these films!  Your food and farm consciousness will be raised.  See ya there.

My real problem is Brenda Leong’s kouign amann. (She’s the b. and this $4 pastry is pronounced “queen a mon”).  It’s a buttery if ethereal roll made of puff pastry laced inside and out with caramelized sugar. Other bakers make them and sell them at high end food stores and coffee houses, but none achieves Leong’s magical fusion of butter, flour, yeast, sugar and air. The crisp, layered pastry barely holds together and each flake dissolves on your tongue whispering of butter. They are my ideal pastry, verging on savory and all about texture. (I felt the same way about La Farine’s morning buns so many years ago–many knock offs since, but none as sublime.)

If they happen to be available, a cellophane bag of pain d’amann ($6), the supremely crisp trimmings from the kouign, distills its best attributes into skinny fingers of pastry. I’ve only seen them once but I would never pass on a bag of these.

Frankly, I’m not much of a French pastry eater but Leong’s airy, small size,  not too sweet iterations tempt me ($5.50).  Each expresses the distinctive style of a pastry chef who understands the ultra importance of mouthfeel and the excitement of an unexpected flavor.

The only way to optimally eat a precise rectangle of Vanilla Caramel Millefeuille–thin, crunchy layers of puff pastry with caramel creme patissiere piped in between–is tipped on its side so that the cream doesn’t squish out as you put fork to it. I know this because the server thoughtfully  instructed me.  The purposeful bitterness of burnt caramel adds the frisson. Likewise, a demure Chocolate Vanilla Choux (a cream puff) gets a crunchy wallop from chocolate rice pearls and croutons of Breton butter cookie. ( By the way, the groundbreaking crunchy eclair at Craftsmen and Wolves is very interesting if you are a cream puff fan.) Vanilla scents mascarpone, ganache, sponge cake, macaron and glaze in a small slice of Vanilla Cake set up by a thin layer of tart, boozy currant jam.  Each pastry has a focal point.

The  kouign amann (a pastry originating in Brittany with a Celtic name) is the star of the Viennoiserie (yeasted pastry) selection, but the sexy aroma of passionfruit syrup gives a round of almond brioche, called a bostock, its kick. The sad fact about b. Patisserie is that you might miss something mind expanding if you don’t try absolutely everything.

So, my strategy is to go for lunch and have an open face wild mushroom, goat cheese and braised leek tartine ($10.50) on a very thin slice of freshly baked levain made by Leong’s partner, Michael Suas, founder of the San Francisco Baking Institute.  Light, bright flavored and juicy, this sandwich leaves just enough room for a pastry–or two.  This way I figure I can work my way through the whole pastry case without resorting to between meal gorging.

2821 California (just west of Divisadero), San Francisco 415 440-1700
Tuesday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

True to noodle shop custom, the policy is first come, first served, which means that supplicants must arrive very early or very late to avoid a wait.  The austere, almost unnoticeable 49 seat restaurant on the ground floor of a newly developed commercial building, opens at 4 p.m.  By 4:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place was almost full. At 5:45,  people were waiting . ( A San Francisco pal who zips over there after childbirth class in the East Bay, says that there has been no problem after 9:30 p.m.) To entertain the crowds, the owners have installed a full bar at the front which dispenses cocktails, wine and beer, though curiously, no sake.

True to form, the food does come out fast, so seats turn over quickly. The wait staff stays attentive and the second you’re down to the last pickle of an appetizer,  they bring the soup. The servers don’t hold back while you sip a preprandial cocktail, but the house concoctions pair surprisingly well with the food. The drinks were created to be drunk with the dishes.

Everything I put in my mouth at Ramen Shop, which happened to be every dish on the menu, delighted me. In one appetizer, perky, daily-made Japanese-style pickles–daikon, black radish, kumquat, napa cabbage–teased stolid, marinated cooked sardine filets ($10).   A pastel salad of flaked wok smoked black cod entwined in shaved fennel and asparagus with slashes of cara cara orange and playful rings of kumquat ($12), tasted like spring.  A no nonsense bowl of mahogany fried rice ($10), studded with small juicy shrimp, melting hunks of pork and long strings of nettle, had flavor that didn’t stop.

Shio ramen ($15)–light, clear broth seasoned with salt–got a tremendous jolt of umami from a small handful clams.  This broth really brought out the butteriness of a slice of fatty, spit roasted pork, and a half of a soft centered, orange-yolked egg.  The chrysanthemum pepperiness of shungiko greens sent this one over the top for me– my ultimate ramen.

In a vegetable ramen ($13), the broth got richness and texture from miso with maitake mushrooms playing the role of meat.  It’s perfectly delicious if you don’t taste it after something like the steelhead miso ramen ($15) with ground pork belly.  For those who like dojo-style ramen, fat and muscular, this is the bowl for you.  Al dente noodles in this dense, milky broth full of fat and smoke, cut with the bite of spring onion and a hint of red chile, reminded me of spaghetti bolognese.

An espresso cup of super velvety coffee-caramel pudding topped off with an equal amount of softly whipped bourbon cream ($6); and a thin, black sesame ice cream sandwich with delicate brown sugar cookies ($6) were  irresistible and proportioned to follow a meal of noodles.  I’d order the ice cream sandwich, thoughtfully cut in half for sharing, just to get the two soft, tart, fruit jellies that come with it.  I strolled out past the waiting crowd with the lingering scent of clementines on my tongue.

5812 College Avenue, Oakland  510 788-6370  www.ramenshop.com  Open Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 4 to 10:30 p.m.,  Friday and Saturday 4 p.m. to midnight.

International tourists were everywhere at the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua, a high end property recently bought by the Marriott. I heard a babel of languages as I walked through the lobby looking for the haunting mural-sized landscapes of taro fields and tropical valleys that used to grace the once clubby public spaces of this hotel. They have disappeared. Accommodations are still luxurious but generic. The decent sushi bar in the lobby remains, good for thickly sliced Hawaiian-farmed kampachi sashimi and mirugai from Japan.  A new two mile coastal trail with crashing ocean along one side and condos on the other now ends at Merriman’s, a branch of a restaurant started by locals on the Big Island.  The Merriman bar makes a surprisingly tasty fresh pineapple martini, particularly nice sipped at sunset on a patio on a windy point above the sea–until it gets too cold.  The Merriman menu advertises enough island-sourced ingredients to tempt, but kitchen turns out dishes with the predictable gloss of the overly composed.

The best new thing on this side of Maui is Mala Ocean Tavern, one of two Mark Ellman restaurants in Lahaina. Honu, Ellman’s pizza and seafood place is next door. They have a hidden ocean side location  behind a mall with a gigantic Safeway, about a mile from the main part of town.  Mala looks like a beach shack from the outside and thankfully keeps that demeanor inside with a wood table filled dining room, a small bar, lots of seats pushed close together, and one side open to the old Mala harbor.

A veteran of the Lahaina dining scene, Ellman started wirh Avalon in 1987 and ran it for ten years.  He opened Mala in 2005.  He’s still cooking up homey, tasty, Asian-Hawaiian-California style fusion based on excellent local fish and vegetables. Four of us ate thin, flax seed toasts topped with mashed green soy beans, Olowalu tomatoes, slices of seared yellow fin drizzled with olive oil ($8 a piece); a big bowl of Big Island Hamaukua Alii mushrooms seared with garlic and parsley ($15); and a whole local snapper ($70), crisply wok fried with ginger, garlic, black beans, tomatoes, shiitakes and snap peas, a delicious melange with accompanying brown rice.  Mala only uses whole grains. A platter of broiled fruit and ice cream on a soup of warm caramel and fudge sauce ($20) called Caramel Miranda, somehow hit the spot. The sunset encouraged celebratory drinking of mai tais and pineapple martinis, now my favorite Hawaiian cocktail when made with fresh pineapple juice, and an exploration of the well curated if expensive California-centric wine list.  Mala food feels immediate and natural. You sense the hand of the cook, a rarity in the hotel dominated dining rooms on the Islands.

The majestic banyan tree planted in 1873 by Captain William Owen Smith still drapes itself over Pioneer Court House Square at the historic raffish end of Lahaina.  Brought from India by missionaries when it was 8 feet tall, the banyan was presented as a gift to Smith, the sheriff and enforcer of morals at the time. Now the Pioneer banyan has 16 trunks and is 50 feet tall, a rare piece of old Hawaii. Don’t miss it.

Mala Ocean Tavern, 1307 Front Street, Lahaina, Maui  808 667-9394  www.malaoceantavern.com Open for lunch or brunch and dinner every day

The scent of jasmine wafted in the air as we walked into the lobby of the 1 Kearny building, just off Market Street, on the edge of the Financial District.  As we emerged from the elevator on the second floor, we were embraced by a jasmine cloud.  Hakkasan engages all the senses from the moment you step inside its territory.  We were led past a long, blue, under-lit bar into a clubby den of a dining room demarcated by carved wooden lattice work, furnished with embroidered leather banquettes, and populated with an army of managers and staff, a number of whom we recognized from other restaurants around town.  Though San Francisco’s Hakkasan may be a branch of an upscale international chain, the management is local and has drawn on some of the best fine dining talent in the city.  Even Cecilia was impressed by the table side attention, the striking blue porcelain plates and bowls, and the post-meal hot towel.  A luxurious Chinese restaurant had finally returned to San Francisco.

Elegant dim sum are a strength of the Hakkasan menu, particularly at lunch when you can get a steamed or fried assortment, followed by a choice of main course and a dessert for $29, a fine introduction to the restaurant.

The fried dim sum are breathtaking, the multi-layered and shatteringly crisp pastries have delectable fillings of scallops or duck or daikon.  Some are crescents; another, the shape of a fat little carrot. One filled with duck looks like a miniature pumpkin.  The steamed dumplings have the tenderest wrappers. One that happens to be bright green is filled with expertly proportioned minced pork and Chinese chives.  A scallop har gow is delicately seasoned with sesame. The wrappers on xiao long bao ($9), Shanghai soup dumplings, are the slightest bit thick, though the pure pork filling is buttery and juicy.  (Yank Sing still reigns on these technically challenging dumplings.) However Shanghai pan fried dumplings ($10), golden on one side with succulent pork and cabbage filling, served with dark rice wine vinegar and ginger threads, are luscious.

The large Hakkasan bar goes into high gear with the after work crowd, making tasty and balanced, if expensive, cocktails, such as the signature Smoky Negroni ($15) that uses aged gin and Carpano Antica.  The impeccable mixed drinks are worth the price, especially since they were created to go with the best Hakkasan dishes which tend to be rich with dark, reduced sauce, and excitingly salty.  Stir fried mushroom lettuce wrap ($9) brings a taro leaf cup of chopped mushrooms, pine nuts and pistachios, in an intense brown sauce.  You spoon it onto crunchy little center leaves of romaine.  Crispy duck salad ($18) turns out to have a similar flavor profile, with finely chopped bits of duck and duck cracklings tossed with pine nuts and pomegranate seeds, threads of kaffir lime leaf, grapefruit segments, and tiny sprouts.  It’s a taste sensation.

Pipa duck ($36) is the distillation of Peking duck:  two rows of crispy tiles of burnished skin over velvety flesh, on a plate smeared with plum sauce. A little pile of pickled ginger refreshes the palate.  It is easy to eat and easy to share, as most dishes are here.  Even vegetable dishes like French green beans stir fried with dried shrimp and minced pork ($11) have that dark, addictive saltiness.

After this kind of eating–and drinking–Hakkasan’s huge psychedelic fruit plate ($18), enough for four, tastes like heaven.  It is fantastically, luridly colorful and so much fun to dismantle with chopsticks.  House made sorbets and ice creams ($8) in tropical flavors also beckon, as does a lovely coconut milk pearl tapioca pudding at the bottom of a stemless wine glass with hunks of caramelized pineapple and cubes of caramelized brioche ($10).

Hakkasan is not a serious temple of Chinese cuisine but a high flying, soignee fantasy that promotes dress up, cocktails and stylish, indulgent, Asian-style eating. Cecilia Chiang might pooh pooh the authenticity of the dishes, but she can’t deny that she had a great time. I’m looking for an excuse to go back.

One Kearny Street, San Francisco  415 829-8148; www.hakkasan.com/sanfrancisco/
Lunch Monday through Friday; dinner nightly; brunch Saturday and Sunday

Alice Waters filled their spots with two very experienced Chez Panisse chefs, Jerome Waag, who started last summer, and Cal Peternell, who just now came on for the winter and spring term.

I will admit that I was scared before my first dinner cooked by Jerome Waag, not because I thought he would be incompetent, but because I thought his food might be different.  I love the food at Chez, upstairs and down. Their kind of seemingly simple, local ingredient-based cooking is exactly what I want to eat.  Alice Waters and I exactly agree on what tastes good, better and best. She is someone who frets if one of those beautiful ingredients the restaurant gathers is not cooked to its fullest and highest potential. Alice doesn’t like obfuscation, fussiness, or screwing around with the natural flavors of superb raw materials, and Chez Panisse makes the seemingly mundane–green beans or nettles or a tangerine–a taste sensation, a revelation.  Her sensibility is personal, emotional and as far as I’m concerned, infallible, and everything prepared at her restaurant reflects that.

However, the rumor was that Alice was stepping back from the restaurant to do other things, and who knew if Waag, wanting to make his own statement, would change something that many of us thought had been perfect for 40 years?  In fact the meal I had on an August Tuesday ($85) could have been cooked by JP himself: airy eggplant fritters with wild arugula; a toothsome mussel risotto with crispy pancetta; grilled duck breast, sliced, on a plate full of summer vegetables; a summer berry ile flottant–a soft pouffy meringue floating on custard cream with berries– all just as vivid and balanced and delicious as food can be.

It was Cal Peternell’s January Friday night dinner ($100) that surprised me with its creativity. Ginger scented a salad of escarole, beets and steelhead roe.  A shrimp risotto was fragrant with toasted sesame seeds.  The crisp skin of a grilled duck breast was rubbed with coriander and fennel, and came with young parsnips, brussels sprouts the size of a child’s fingernail, and a gently pickled persimmon relish.  Meyer lemon ice cream profiteroles had a layer of creamy pistachio-anise nougatine inside.  Peternell’s food possessed that transcendent Chez succulence and brightness but tasted new and rather poetic with its overlay of exotic if totally integrated scent. Charming!

These two dinners reinforced my love of Chez Panisse.  It is the most representative restaurant in the Bay Area, and the continues to be the best.

1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley 510 548-5525  downstairs dinner served Monday through Saturday

Because the group knows so many local kids, and their parents, the place was packed from day one, huge pressure on a new place. Though I was predisposed  to like it, in all honesty, I thought the place needed some time to pull all the details together.

But recently, two of us walked over for an early weeknight dinner at the now six month old restaurant, and the whole thing clicked.  The place was as full as ever–every bar seat taken, the dining room full, the heated outside tables huddled against the side of the building filling up–but the small open kitchen was executing with assurance and consistency.

We had a perfect neighborhood meal, starting with  a couple of negronis ($9), expertly made with equal parts Campari, sweet vermouth and gin.  A shaved winter salad ($8) with thin slices of raw root vegetables and chicories in a balanced balsamic vinaigrette was ingeniously pulled together by a swatch of celery root puree at the bottom of the plate.  It had the texture of cream and it gave the salad lusciousness. A couple of Corner Store burgers ($13), on house-made brioche buns were dressed with aged cheddar, pickled red onions, bread and butter pickles, aioli and a dollop of bacon jam which kind of acted like catsup.  The patty was loosely formed and juicy.  The whole added up to a savory, sweet and sour, umami blast, totally satisfying and super fun to eat–not too big, not too small, just right.  A towering pile of crisp shoe string fries banished any lingering hunger.
What more could anyone want on a cold winter night?

Well, maybe the wedge, Corner Store style, made with little gem lettuce, buttermilk dressing, pickled shallots, blue cheese and candied bacon bits ($8). It’s a lighter version yet comforting at the same time.  On other visits I’ve had an excellent corn meal crusted trout filet ($17) on a pile of broccoli and cauliflower florettes nicely seasoned with anchovy, brown butter and capers, a lovely dish. I promise that the Mary’s chicken dish of the moment ($17)–it changes as does the trout dish– will be succulent.  A plate of warm, house baked, brioche dinner rolls ($4) are light and airy, but irresistible, especially slathered with honey butter and fleur de sel.

I’ve been meaning to try one of The Corner Store’s adult fountain treats ($9) for dessert, such as the Manhattan shake–bourbon, sweet vermouth, cherry syrup and vanilla ice cream–but I’ve never had room.  From experience at my beloved Ice Cream Bar on Cole Street, I’ve found that these can be meals in themselves.

The Corner Store vibe is inclusive, friendly and just stylin‘ enough for an uptown neighborhood that encompasses Pacific Heights, Laurel Heights, the Haight and the Inner Richmond.  It serves as a club house for a private school crowd now in their twenties and thirties, their parents and the grandkids, depending on the hour. With cocktails, sports on TV, brunch, lunch, dinner and adult fountain, this Store carries  just about everything.

5 Masonic (at Geary) San Francisco 415 359-1800
Tuesday through Friday lunch and dinner; Saturday and Sunday brunch and dinner. Closed Monday

Less than ten years ago California Olive Ranch started planting high density olive trees that look and act like grapevines. These cloned olive trees can be espaliered on wires, and mechanically pruned and harvested. Forget the romantic vision of groves of majestic hundred year old olive trees towering twenty feet high that must be harvested by hand. In the new world of olive oil production,  olive trees look like bushes, are planted close together in narrow rows and are less than six feet high.

These bushy trees were developed in Catalonia, Spain, fifteen years ago, where an agricultural conglomerate was able to clone arbequina, arbosana and koroneiki varieties that would grow in high density formation and bountifully produce. Financed with big time investment from a group that includes Spanish engineers, California Olive Ranch has thus far planted 13,000 acres of these olives north of Sacramento around Artois, and it now produces high quality, easily available, extra virgin olive oil of traceable origin.

I visited two of their olive ranches and their production facility in November, during the 2012 harvest.  Towering tractors with long arms straddled a row of low bushy trees, shaking them so that their bright green fruit fell onto a conveyor belt that dumped them into a hopper pulled slowly one row away.  The olives remained amazingly unbruised.  (A fellow journalist told me that she witnessed raspberries harvested the same way, and that  even these most delicate of fruits survived unscathed.)

The olives were immediately trucked to a modern, high tech facility in Corning where they were washed, hammer pressed and centrifuged to separate the oil from the pits and skins.  Each truckload of fruit was labeled as it arrived at the mill and tracked throughout pressing and storage. Because the whole process takes less than a day–picking, transport, pressing– there is  no time for spoilage or oxidation. The oil, stored in air tight tanks and kept cool, is only bottled once it is ordered.

Anyone who has been hit with the almost tactile scent of newly pressed oil remembers it.  And we were immersed in this luscious olive perfume on the day we visited the California Olive Ranch pressing facility.  I’d say that balance and moderate fruitiness characterize their oil.  This is oil you can use everyday–in cooking, in vinaigrettes, as a drizzle, though some of the more expressive, lively, bitter/fruity and expensive, traditionally grown and harvested oils, would be more exciting as a condiment.  Still, these California Olive Ranch high density trees, cultivated right here, produce a lovable, practical and  affordable oil for the everyday kitchen.  As we have all learned, extra virgin olive oil is one of the healthiest fats you can eat.  It actually lowers cholesterol, and as part of a vegetable rich Mediterranean-style diet, easily followed here San Francisco, olive oil promotes long life–. especially with a regular exercise.

The price of these nice oils also contributes to a sense of well being. My favorite, California Olive Ranch Arbequina, the freshest and fruitiest of the lot, is about $14 a half liter and is available at Lucky, Safeway, Whole Foods and many other stores.  It is available at Trader Joe’s, under TJ’s own label, at a slightly lower price.