On Saturday May 20th a very small gaggle of volunteers, myself included, pulled off the 2nd annual BALT dinner. Almost 300 lucky people ate a five-course dinner amid vineyards with a spectacular view of Mount Diablo to show their support of the Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust.

Last year whilst shopping at The Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market, Kristie Knoll, an infectiously energetic farmer, asked me if I wanted to make dessert for the first BALT dinner. Donated produce from the various farmers of Brentwood? How could I say no? After learning Knoll Farms amazing verbena would be available for use I knew immediately I would be making, by hook or by crook: subtle aromatic verbena ice cream.

When I arrived at the "kitchen site" last year: a corrugated tin-roofed dirt-floored driveway with no walls, electricity or running water, I looked around at the many chefs prepping on haphazardly arranged 6 foot tables and said to Kristie, "Hey, who's expediting and where will the plates be leaving from?" She replied, "What's an expeditor?"

"Oh [Expletive deleted]!" I thought. And then I took charge. Within a few hours I had re-arranged the "kitchen" checked in with the 20+ chefs, recruited one of Kristie's Saturday workers, Chris Hatfield as my co-captain, and by 6 PM we had a physical chart of the diner's tables and a plan. My "waiters" were a gangly group of barely teenaged FFA'ers and a sprinkling of restaurant servers. We had five courses with no fewer than four chefs represented per course! It was by no means an easy task, but it was quite satisfying to realize later what I had pulled off.

Kristie, Chris and I all agreed we wanted this year's dinner to go more smoothly, be more organized. We met months ago to do a walk-through at the new site, Tamayo Family Winery, and had a meeting with the entire dinner subcommittee. I created the position "chef liaison" and filled it. Chris, a corporate organizer by profession, highlighted the site blueprints, set them to scale, creating efficient pathways for staff. She produced beautiful timeline and volunteer job spreadsheets. Hundreds upon hundreds of emails later we served a diverse exquisite five-course menu I helped to balance and arrange. Various Bay Area chefs created inspired dishes highlighting produce generously donated by Brentwood's finest hardworking farmers and ranchers.

HORS D'OEUVRES
Guy Frenette and Paul Canales Oliveto
A Sampling of House Cured Salumi
Tina Steele & Lynn Kutsal Nature's Bounty
~ Asparagus and Potato Frittata
~ Sweet & Spicy Walnuts
Ethan Mantle Camponere Fine Catering and
Tim Hammack Bohemian Elegance Catering
Chevre and Chiogga Beet Napoleons
Alison Negrin John Muir Health
Brentwood Fresh Vegetable Crudité with Green Garlic Dip

APPETIZERS
Sean Baker, Jacob Evenich and Renee Rohrig Google
~ Blue Corn Molotes with Morels, English Peas and Fava Shoots
~ Stinging Nettle Kona Kimpache Nigiri with Nettle Sushi rice,
and green Almond Seaweed Salad
~ Szechuan Pepper Crusted Wagu Beef with Cilantro Curry Potato Flatbread
and Bing Cherry Shiso Compote
Jamie Lauren Prana
Indian Spiced Mini Lamb Burgers with Green Garlic Yogurt and Onion Chutney

SALAD
Eric Tucker Millennium
Wilted Fava and Bitter Greens with Gigante beans, Braised Cardoon, and Smoked Tofu
John Townsend Orinda Country Club
Knoll Farms Petite Mixed Greens Salad with Pickled Carrots, Green Garlic,
Grilled Asparagus, Goat Cheese and Knightsen Honey Vinaigrette
Niklas Terczak RNM
Warm Crispy Fava beans Over Green Garlic and Fromage
Blanc Crostini with Fava Leaves and Arugula
Michael Dotson Evvia
Anderson Ranch Lamb Terrine with a Spring Herb Salad and Carrot-Dijon Dressing

MAIN COURSE
Kelly Degala Va de Vi
Braised Pork Belly with Vincotto Olive Oil Roasted Asparagus
Michael Baker Piatti Danville
Spring Vegetables and Caciovallo Cheese Stuffed Ennes Ranch Meatloaf
with Natural Pan Juices

DESSERT
Shuna Fish Lydon Eggbeater
Knoll Farms Verbena Cream Puffs with Aromatic Herbs and Knightsen Honey
Shuna Fish Lydon in Conjunction with Evvia
Rosemary Almond Financiere with Frog Hollow Apricot Preserves
and Black Pepper Infused Balsamic Syrup

Continuing from last week's musing being up close and personal on the set of The DaVinci Code movie, I'm sure you are wondering if or where the actual cooking took place... Well look no further...

The chateau kitchen is huge, really huge, not well equipped but huge, and should I actually own a home someday with a kitchen that I could design, I would love one this huge with a huge table like this right in the middle. Baskets under the table held all the dry goods so one basket had flour, sugar, baking power, etc. Another held pastas and bread and so one. One family that stayed there would come in during the late afternoon and have appetizers and champagne at one end and while I finished cooking dinner at the other end. I also gave a few cooking lessons around the table including making gougeres with two 10-year olds and cutting up whole fish with a plastic surgeon :-) In the center of the room hung a huge chandelier - something every respectable kitchen should not be without. It was dazzling in the afternoon when the sunlight would stream in, reflect off the thousands of crystal raindrops and splash tiny rainbow dashes about the walls.

the chateau's main kitchen (there are 3!)

The produce was surprisingly not as good nor plentiful nor varied as I can get in Paris. I never knew if the market would have zucchini or melons or tomatoes or herbs on any given day so dinner was really what inspired me that afternoon at the market. If you have ever shopped for 30 people day after day after day....sorry, back to the story. As I mentioned, I tried to buy the freshest, most delicious produce I could find at the markets, the freshest fish from Madame Charlotte, the freshest bread from the local boulanger hot out of the oven that morning, and the most succulent meat from Mr et Mme Saunier. The strawberries were magnificent last summer so I bought flats of them whenever possible making everything from strawberry soup to strawberry sauce to strawberry tartes. I have yet to taste a strawberry like those in the states, except perhaps the ones I grew in my backyard when I was little.

Copper bowl of apples, avocados, limes, lemons

In the middle of the table I always tried to keep a big copper bowl filled with vibrant lemons or limes, oranges or pineapples or melons or apples along side a vase of huge stalks of fresh rosemary or basil picked fresh from the garden. It was my refuge from the ensuing, permeating insanity. I'd bury my head in the herbs and inhale deeply hoping that when I lifted my head I'd be back in my beautiful Left Bank apartment waking up from what had been a very bad dream. Alas, it was not to be so I focused on the task at hand which was trying to get the kids' dinner out first and then the parents' dinner. Someday I'll tell you the Russian diamond mafia story complete with a Matrix-looking guy named Alexi and a sting set up.... but until then, enjoy these pictures of life cooking in the most famous (thanks to The DaVinci Code) chateau in France....

the formal dining room

breakfast fruit platter I put out each morning

braised leeks with a tarragon vinaigrette sprinkled with brunoise of red peppers and chopped chives

mozzarella, tomatoes and fresh basil from the garden

roasted peppers stuffed with chevre, garlic and fresh herbs

filet mignon ready for roasting

a carralet about to get reconstructive surgery

poached sea bass with cherry tomatoes on arugula and risotto

duck breast with blueberry chutney

Berry trifle with creme chantilly

molten chocolate cake with strawberry sauce. click here for recipe.

fresh fruit tarte

my uber-tart lemon curd tarte. click here for recipe.

My life is a dog... in the mornings, and more often than not afternoons, I would pop by this tabac/cafe and toss back a double espresso to get me through the day, while trying not to trip over the dog on the way out.

Here is one of my favorite salads I made last summer. I don't have a picture of it so my apologies. It's quick, easy and the guests loved it.

Asparagus draped in Salmon with Lemon-Dill Dressing

1 cup creme fraiche (you can sub sour cream or plain yogurt)
1/8 cup fresh squeezed orange juice
- zest of 2 lemons
1/8 cup dill, freshly chopped
1 splash Grand Marnier (optional but highly recommended)
1 pinch fine sea salt

1 pound steamed asparagus
4 handfulls baby arugula
1 small red onion (or 1/2 large onion), thinly sliced
8 slices smoked salmon, thinly sliced

1. combine creme fraiche, orange juice, lemon zest, dill, grand marnier and salt in a blender and mix well. You can also whisk it in a non-reactive bowl.

2. toss the arugula with 1/2 the dressing sparingly, adding a little bit of dressing at a time. Place on 4 plates.

3. arrange the asparagus on top of the arugula and sprinkle with the sliced onions.

4. arrange smoked salmon over asparagus and drizzle the sauce over salmon and asparagus.

5. garnish with a sprig of fresh dill.

Bon appetit!

I'm completely obsessed with TV. No, really. No. Really. I watch it, I write about it, I talk endlessly about it, and when people tell me they don't own a television set, I have a Joey Tribbiani urge to ask, "You don't? Then what is all your furniture aimed at?" I usually manage to squelch that urge because I don't want to come off as a complete bitch. I let people get to know me before I invite them to that side of my personality.

One of my most prized possessions is a version of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile. It was recorded off of the ABC Monday Night Movie back around nineteen-eighty-something. Now, I do love that movie for what it is, but the reason I keep it in a fireproof box is not because of Angela Lansbury's sloshily wonderful performance as a drunk novelist, it's because of the commercials that are forever preserved on that magnetic strip. There's the "We! Build! Excite! Ment! Pon-ti-ac!" and the Snicker's "Packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies" where -- in a precious bit of CGI -- the Snickers magically appears from a fist of peanuts and the "Time flies, and you are there! Time cries, and makes you care! We understand the world we sha-a-a-are! Time brings you closer to living!"

There's now a site where I can spend hours -- HOURS! -- watching old commercials that remind me of my callow youth. The San Mateo-based YouTube was founded in early 2005 and as "a place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos. YouTube originally started as a personal video sharing service, and has grown into an entertainment destination with people watching more than 40 million videos on the site daily."

I first became aware of YouTube when someone sent me a disturbingly hypnotic link to a SIMian Jean-Luc Picard rave dancing. At first, I thought YouTube was just for homemade, original videos -- the Mentos-Pepsi experiments are in there, as are fantastically edited episodes of Star Trek that pit Kirk against Picard -- but then I discovered a dangerous place where I spent no less than five hours in complete retro-ecstasy. Food commericals.

Pre-Seinfeldian Jason Alexander singing and -- what's even worse -- dancing about McDonald's McDLT ("The hot stays hot, the cool stays cool!") in Miami Vice-like attire.

Matt LeBlanc wearing a pink tee-shirt to shill "Isn't it cool in pink?" Cherry 7-Up.

Several Pepsi: The Taste of New Generation bits featuring Michael J. Fox all his Marty McFly sexiness. ...What?

Hearing that old lady crab, "Where's the beef" will never get old. Ever.

Nor will catching the Coke Wave with Max Headroom.

The outtakes of a drunk Orson Wells promoting Paul Mason sparkling wine is sort of pathetic.

Overly estrogened General Foods International Coffee spot.

Oh, oh, oh! Who's that kid with an Oreo Cookie?

(It's not food, but do you guys remember those Summer's Eve commercials? With the jaunty songs and weird references to "keeping good times on my mind"? Bizarre.)

What happens when two Bay Area food bloggers meet up in Chicago to go to a four-star restaurant? A great number of posts describing an amazing dinner.

Fatemeh at Gastronomie posted about several of the courses:

Hot Potato, Cold Potato
Lamb
Mango
Dungeness Crab
Salsify
Hearts of Palm
Asparagus with Egg Yolk Drops
PB & J
Snap Peas

And you can read Joy's version of the same dinner on her blog, Confessions of a Restaurant Whore.

This post is a few weeks old, but if you haven't had a chance to read Cheap Food in Cheap Places by Shuna, I would highly recommend it. The post was a follow-up to her review of Cafe Gratitude here on Bay Area Bites. When a commenter criticized Cafe Gratitude for being too expensive, Shuna wrote an excellent response which garnered a lot of discussion via comments.

Having the desire to earn a living so that one can pay others a living wage is not, by my standards, yuppification or gentrification.

Our privilege helps us to have unreasonable expectations. I have been working in restaurants for almost 15 years and I can count on one hand the amount of owners who run a decent business.

Cupcake Bakeshop by Chockylit features a recipe for Vietnamese Coffee Cupcakes that are inspiring even to this non-baker.

When it comes to coffee flavored cakes, what one typically finds are mocha type concoctions (coffee and chocolate) or tiramisu type desserts (sponge or lady fingers doused in coffee). I haven't found many examples of coffee-flavored cake batter outside of these two options. In lieu of an existing recipe, my approach would be simple - substitute strong brewed coffee for the liquid in a basic cake batter.

Wondering what to do with your springtime artichokes? Sam tells us how to trim and prepare them, Brett tells us to braise them, Derrick tells us to fry the hearts, and Michael tells us to grill them.

The Bay Area is blessed with a fantastic variety of wonderful Asian food. With each wave of immigrants unfamiliar cuisines have made their way into our delicious community and become old friends. Some of the best restaurants and chefs in the Bay Area are cooking Asian food and some of them are coming together for the East West Eats dinner.

I talked with Charles Phan of Slanted Door to get his thoughts about local Asian food and out what it's like to participate in this dinner along with chefs Robert Lam of Butterfly, Hung Le of Three Seasons, Peter Pahk of Silverado, Kirk Webber of Cafe Kati, Anjan and Emily Mitra of Dosa, Mutsumi Takhara of Slanted Door and Chris Yeo of Straits. The East West Eats dinner takes place June 1st, register to attend by May 25th, here.

What trends are you seeing in Asian food in the Bay Area?
Fusion has come and gone. I never really agreed with that anyway but I see more and more specialization. In the Chinese community people are doing more regional cuisines and are interested in Shanghai or Szechuan food etc. The whole school of regional cuisine is going to continue to grow--it's no different than like what A16 is doing making Neapolitan style food.

At my restaurant I'm taking old ideas and building them with local ingredients and sensibility--like cooking beef medium rare, same methodology same recipe but not medium well or using local vegetables but stir frying them the same way you would in Vietnam. Also using oysters and raw fish a Vietnamese style here we use fish sauce shallot and lime instead the Japanese style with wasabi.

What's been the response to the cooking kits sold at Out the Door?
It's been great. The response has been phenomenal. We sold out super fast on Valentine's day. I was surprised! A lot of people had the idea to create a romantic dinner at home. People are using them in different ways than we expected such as for parties, romantic meals etc.

We've held back but when we move to a central kitchen commissary there will be more choices. Maybe even "vlogs" video clips to learn how to cook with fresh ingredients all packed fresh daily.

Are Western palettes adapting to Vietnamese cuisine or is Vietnamese cuisine adapting to Western palettes?
Combination of both. I'm surprised everyday at what people buy at the restaurant. At the same time a classic dish from Vietnam is never sold here, like Hainan chicken never sells, and I've tried a dozen times. Eating boiled chicken just won't catch on. But I'm doing a new dumpling that texturally is very unique and it is selling. People's tastes are changing rapidly, I sell lots of whole fish and people used to send it back everyday to have the head removed. I used to have fish returned every day now I haven't had one returned in over a year.

What will the food be like at the East West Eats dinner?
The food is always better at these events than a sit down meal because it's prepared right there. Everybody is doing different things, everybody will showcase their speciality. It's a way for people to get to know the chefs. It's a good way to sample. You get to see several restaurants at one time.

What's it like working with the other chefs at an event like this?
I do this all the time, you learn something new since most of us don't do catering, it's a challenge. I get to see my colleagues and give back to community. It's fun, mostly I wouldn't see these chefs except at these events.

Want to know more about the East West Eats event? Head over to Cooking with Amy.

Place de la Concorde metro station in Paris

For those of you who have spent the past three years living with an indigenous tribe in sub-Saharan Africa, you might not have heard of The DaVinci Code. For the other four billion plus of us, we have been inundated with Code media the likes of which have no doubt already seared their iconic status in future business school marketing classes.

Place de la Concorde metro station, before

The French who loathe anything splashy or frivolous (or garrulously American) actually redesigned the Concorde metro station a la DaVinci Code going so far as to repaint, yes repaint!, the station red! Considering they wouldn't so much as clean the metro stations when the Olympic bid committee came to town, this is quite a statement. So what does the DaVinci Code have to do with cooking, you ask? More than you might think, at least for this little cook.

Looking out to the gates from the chateau entrance

You might remember me mentioning now and again a certain swanky chateau that I cooked at last summer? Well it was none other than the chateau featured in The DaVinci Code! Located about an hour northwest of Paris, the chateau is rented out to families for vacation, to ad agencies for photo shoots and commercials and yes, to movie studios for movies.

Movie production trailers lined one side of the property

As it turns out, Dan Brown's wife stumbled upon the chateau and decided to use it in their unassuming little murder mystery... Who knew...?! The main character in the novel, Sophie Neveu played by Audrey Tautou, was named after a woman that lived in the chateau in the late 1700s, Sophie de Grouchy, who married the Marquis de Condorcet in the chateau's chapel. The best man at their wedding was none other than General Lafayette! Once again, who knew...?!

Plaque in the chateau chapel

At the chateau, I cooked for families that rented it for vacation and to call my schedule greuling would be an understatement, making cooking school seem like a walk in the proverbial park. I was up and in town by 7am getting fresh croissants and bread piping hot out of the oven from the local boulanger, then back to set the tables, prepare the fruit, and get the coffee going. Once breakfast was over, I started preparing lunch. After lunch wrapped up around 2 or 3pm, I'd head backing to town to purchase food for dinner.

The chateau lit up and ready to go for the night filming

Once I returned to the chateau, I was frantically chopping, searing, roasting, boiling and more often than not burning until dinner. By the time dinner was prepared, served and cleaned up it was 10 or 11pm and then it was upstairs to plan the next days' meals and food shopping list. On a good day, I'd collapse in bed around 1am and do it all over again 6 hours later.

The helicopter about to take aerial shots of the chateau

I was also there during the filming of the DaVinci Code movie and it was nothing short of breathtaking to see a blockbuster production kick into action. 300 people, 30-plus trailers, 1 helicopter and a week of filming all for just a few minutes of actual movie footage. How they created the lighting, the misty night air, the duplicate set of gates, the fog was stunning.

Fake gates built over the real ones! They look identical down to the peeling paint.

The scene where Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) drove up to Teabing's chateau and spoke into the intercom garnered about 20 seconds of airtime but took no less than three hours to film as they had to film it at five different camera angles and each camera required up to five takes. The cool part of seeing the movie was having sat right behind the director while it was being filmed.

Sitting behind the director just before they yell out "Roulant!" (Rolling!)

There were three armoured cars, two Silas the Monk stunt doubles (a rather eerie site), and gallons upon gallons of coffee so everyone could stay awake. Since the action at the chateau took place at night they naturally had to film at night so set up began around 7pm and filming start at 11pm and ran til sun up. I'm not sure exactly what time everyone cleared out as I was usually asleep by 3am. There is just so many times you can watch someone repeat the same five lines into a fake intercom, even if it is the charming, gracious and very funny Tom Hanks....

Tom Hanks on the set of The DaVinci Code

My computer curse strikes again! A few weeks ago, I come back from a perfectly lovely dinner in Half Moon Bay, all full of good food and bonhomie and oh-so-ready to write a Bay Area Bites column about some rockin' Rancho Gordo Borlotti beans...when my iBook decides to throw a tantrum.

And now that the vein in my head has stopped jumping around in a thoroughly alarming manner, I can sit down and write about it.

I had a slight fantasy about putting a well-inked pen to clean white paper and composing long epistles about the glory of returning to the lost art of longhand-composed columns and pieces, but the unfamiliar sight of my own scrabbly handwriting scared me into a corner for a few hours where I also attempted to uncramp my confused fingers.

The good thing about having a computer crisis in the Bay Area is that I could think of at least four people we could call for technical advice, and not one of them was CrAppleCare. NOT ONE! After brokenly calling my Bay Area Bites editor and leaving several tortured messages about my predicament, I called Amy to let her know I would be physically and mentally unable to make our appointment. Amy made sympathetic noises in my direction and suggested I give her incomparable husband, Lee, a call and pick his brain. I did, and The Incomparable Lee said calmly, "Okay, first thing is: Don't panic." Having just dragged myself through a sleepless night where I was up every two hours, checking on how my disk utility was coming and creeling, "The O.C.!" and "Grey's Anatomy!" to myself, I didn't have the heart or sense of humor to ask The Incomparable Lee if a towel would be of any good use in this situation. The Incomparable Lee talked me through the problem, provided much sound advice and information, and really helped to assuage my stomach-twisting fears that I had lost nine months of unbacked-up data.

So, after all that, I ended up stress food shopping at Albertsons when my sole intention had been to pick up a prescription and some cotton balls.

Here's some news for a few of you out there: Cheetos aren't local. And when it comes right down to it, neither are caramel-filled Hershey Kisses. But both are damn tasty in almost every situation and they come off especially tasty when contemplating missed deadlines, unrecoverable photographs, and nine months of deleted work.

So, I'm sorry Eat Local. I'm still trying.

Title: Founder Chinablue and author of Modern Asian Flavors, a Taste of Shanghai
Hometown: Shanghai, now lives in Sausalito

1. What are "modern Asian flavors" and "a taste of Shanghai" all about?
For years I've cooked my family's recipes for my friends and people really like the Shanghainese flavors. Shanghai was a true melting pot, with Europeans, Americans, Indians, so the flavor is much more European style. The flavors are in the sauces that come from a specific dish. In modern Asian cuisine, if you don't want to cook Chinese you don't have to, use the flavors and sauces anyway you like to.

2. Why did you decide to share your Chinablue recipes?
I wanted to take Shanghainese flavor profiles and bring them into American households. People don't cook anymore, they prepare, mostly the recipe are for dishes anyone can make. The sauces in the book aren't exactly the same as the ones from Chinablue.

3. How does Shanghai cuisine compare to other styles of Chinese food?
A few things, there's a sweetness to everything, it's a cleaner type of cuisine not using heavy sauces like hoisin, a complexity to the flavor that is never overbearing. Enhancing a dish but never overpowering it. More of a "dish" from a visual perception. When you're eating shrimp, you're eating shrimp, there isn't too much else in the dish. It's not the country style "one-pot" type of stir-fry. It's much more refined, sophisticated for the wealthier city people.

4. Other than your house, where can people find great Shanghainese food in San Francisco?
Shanghai 1930 is good, if a little diluted, I ate at Old Shanghai on Geary with my mom and it was good.

5. You left Shanghai when you were still a child, what is it like today?
It's like San Francisco, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago all in one city and growing ten times faster. It's becoming the gateway to culture like Paris or New York.

A movement is afoot in Washington that has many bloggers concerned. Referred to as "net neutrality," the discussion involves the most fair way to offer content to consumers: do we allow equal access to network bandwidth, or do we allow the network to be sold to the highest bidder resulting in "fast sites" that pay more money and "slow sites" that do not?

Under the latter scenario, blogs hosted by large companies would be much faster than our little old food blogs. Where's the fairness there?

Bay Area Bites is one of many food blogs participating in today's "Day without a Food Blog". For a complete list of participants, go to Participating Food Blogs on Chez Pim.

What can you do?

ACT.
CALL.
READ the links below for more information.

slate.com

Since about the 17th century, there's been a strong sense that basic transport networks should serve the public interest without discrimination.This might be because so much depends on them: They catalyze entire industries, meaning that gratuitous discrimination can have ripple effects across the nation. By this logic, so long as you think the Internet is more like a highway than a fried-chicken outlet, it should be neutral in what it carries.

Washington Post

We all want our broadband and the benefits it can bring. Let's hope our policy-makers in Washington can resist the siren song of "net neutrality" and keep government out of Internet regulation so that the future that beckons becomes a reality.

New York Times

One of the Internet's great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft's home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like.

I had never been to Cha-Ya, the much-vaunted vegan Japanese restaurant in North Berkeley. But this week, in a valiant effort to put as much pickled burdock in my mouth as possible, I tried not only the Berkeley Cha-Ya, but the new San Francisco outpost, too. The things I do for you.

Regulars to the Berkeley restaurant should chime in, because I fear that my friend Shree and I took a misstep in ordering. I'd like to know what we did wrong, because the reality just did not live up to the hype. (And, that's right, no photos. Bad blogger! Blame the broken camera -- and check out Rae's lovely photos.)

As we expected, we waited a loooong time for a table. The Berkeley Cha-Ya is notorious for the long wait. It was a nice evening, and it gave us plenty of time to look over the menu, which we did not do, because we were busy catching up. The space is very small, and, as I said, very popular. We probably waited about 40 minutes (and, at the end of our meal, were shooed out to make way for others patiently waiting).

The menu is a little confusing. It's amazing how many permutations of vegetables, rice, and noodles there can be. We started with haru maki ($6) -- vegetarian (natch) spring rolls, lightly fried. They had asparagus, shiitake, carrots, beans, tofu, and silver noodles, all wrapped up nice and tight in a lightly fried package. Slightly greasy, served with a sweet dipping sauce. The vegetables seemed too soft -- I like my vegetables to bite back a little, you know, and these just gave in rather easily. Put up a fight, dammit.

Shree then had the taku-sui ($7.75), a big bowl of pot stickers and vegetables in broth. This was the big disappointment. It fell prey to the vegetarian stereotype (to which I generally do not subscribe): bland, cabbagey, boring. The potstickers tasted like they came from Trader Joe's, which I highly doubt, but still.

I had the hana gomoku ($8.50), which seemed like a vegetarian version of chirashi sushi: sushi rice in a bowl topped with artfully displayed vegetables. Plenty of good hijiki mixed in with the rice, and a nice helping of pickled ginger to fire up the tastebuds. Again, I could have used a little more toothsomeness in the vegetables, but it was clean-tasting and fresh.

Shree, needing a little palate pick-me-up after her bland bowl of taku-sui, suggested we order a roll, specifically the umekyu ($3.95). It was the perfect ending (though perhaps should have been the beginning) -- the bitter-bright flavor of pickled plum and the cool cucumber put us in better spirits. And I was ready to face the next Cha-Ya.

It was two days later, actually. The San Francisco Cha-Ya (762 Valencia, next to New College) can't be missed. In a rather odd contrast to its mellow Berkeley sister, SF Cha-Ya glows like a fluorescent beacon. The lighting is horrible, as Tablehopper has reported. But perhaps fluorescence greases the wheels: we walked in at 7:30 and got seated immediately. The SF outpost is bigger than its Berkeley sibling, and maybe word has not yet spread enough to make for long waits.

The SF menu is exactly the same. They even left the sake and beer on the menu -- despite the fact that they do not yet have a liquor license. You can plan your booze for future visits. Kara and I shared a few dishes, and while the overall impression of the food was better, the ambience needs a little work. It's like a doctor's office in there.

We had the goma ae ($5.75) -- blanched spinach and broccolini with a flavorful sesame dressing. The spinach was shaped into a pleasing spinach log, which did not mask the fact that it was plain blanched spinach. Thank god for the dressing -- pleasantly oily and thick. We then branched into tempura sushi, sharing the vegetable tempura roll (squash, carrots, yam, and green beans, tempura'd as a whole and then wrapped in rice and nori, $6.75) and the Shattuck roll (tempura'd asparagus and yam, $6.75). The tempura batter was not too thick, not too greasy, and offered a nice crunch. The rolls were definitely the high point. We also had the kinoko soba ($8.50) -- a medley of mushrooms and soba noodles in a light broth.

It was plenty of food -- I don't think we finished it all. Overall, I was surprised at how lackluster both restaurants were. Good for vegetarians, yes -- as Shree said, she was happy that she could walk in knowing that she could order absolutely everything on the menu. But everyone knows by know that sacrificing meat (figuratively) doesn't mean sacrificing flavor, and Cha-Ya's glowing reputation wasn't clearly defended. I know others feel differently, and I would certainly be willing to give it more chances -- there's certainly plenty more to try on the menu.

Cha-Ya
1686 Shattuck Ave.
Berkeley, CA
510.981.1213

No reservations, major credit cards accepted.
Dinner Sun-Thurs, 5-9:30pm

Cha-Ya
762 Valencia St. (near 18th St.)
San Francisco, CA
415.252.7825

No reservations, no credit cards (for now).
Dinner Tues-Sun