I'm a sucker for a great Caesar salad. Call me old school, but there are few things that can beat it in my book. Garlicky, lemony, cheesy, and anchovy-y, if there is such a word. If there isn't, there should be.

Sadly, a great restaurant Caesar salad has eluded me in San Francisco.

With the possible exceptions of Zuni Café and Tadich Grill (both old school and old guard), I have been bitterly disappointed every time I order a Caesar salad in a restaurant. And the above venues merely create good salads, not, in my opinion, great ones. Yet I keep on ordering them everywhere I go. It's like forgetting the pain of childbirth or the tragedy of falling in love with a crazy sadist-- I fall blindly and hopefully back into bed with the salad section of the menu and think, "This time, it's going to be good. This time I am going to find the one I've been waiting for all my life." Invariably, I am served a Romaine salad with either a flaccid, mayonnaise-like dressing, or an underdressed, uninspired one with croutons like ship biscuits that leaves me asking my server for a little extra lemon and another napkin with which I might dry my tears.

Perhaps I just live to be disappointed.

And then, when discussing the demise of this salad with a friend over a lunch that included a particularly sorry looking one, I understood what all of these salads were missing, good and bad:

Drama.

The Caesar salad is a dish that cries out for table-side service. It is, in my opinion if not in fact, the ham actor of the salad world-- a fact none too surprising when one considers that it was first created in a pique of impromptu by Cesare Cardini, an Italian man living in the once-glamorous town Tijuana, Mexico. Fortunately for us, Cardini had the good sense (or delicious folly, depending on your point of view) to seek out his fame and fortune in Hollywood, dressing recipe in hand, where the salad soon became a favorite among the local movie stars and luncheon élite. Cesare's salad soon evolved into Caesar's salad and, somewhere along the way, the apostrophe "s" was lost, and Caesar salads were being dramatically created in front of and for delighted diners in leather banquetted dining rooms and Danish Modern living rooms across the country.

Sadly, Cesare's salad is going the way of Banana's Foster, Cherries Jubilee, and the dodo, thanks to the demise of table side service. There is little room in most restaurants today to manoeuver the necessary salad carts, and diners (with the possible exception of brief fads like the Benihana's craze of the 70's, and eating at chef's tables in the 90's) seem less interested in having a server who entertains. Lastly, and perhaps most sadly of all, those venues who do still provide table side cooking are often so old-fashioned and unchanging that they have become a sort of dwindling, petrified forest. And those diners who habituate them are either equally as fossilized or, at best, there solely for kitsch.

So what can one do?

I, for one, have started making my own damned Caesar salads. Or Cesare salads, as I prefer now to call them. I can make them as obscenely garlicky as I like and can toss them as high and dramatically as my ceiling and physical abilities allow. I'm a professional waiter, after all, and one with a strong dramatic bent. Just ask anyone. Just don't ask me to make one for you at my restaurant-- there is no way in hell I could ever get that rolling cart past the drunken cougars hovering at the bar.

Lyle's Muy Fuerte Cesare's Salad:

Serves 2 to 4

At my birthday party last summer, I had decided that my own contribution to the buffet would be my favorite old-school salad, since I was now, officially (according to some people) old. It was then that I realized that I had never actually made one before. The one's I had known and loved were always made for me by people who understand gusto like my friend Shan or my ex-boyfriend Paul, who was about as theatrically dramatic as they come.

When I confessed this salad-tossing inexperience to my friend Lyle, he told me he would walk me through the entire process. Being my birthday, I let him take over, while I poured myself another glass of wine and watched him do all the work.

This is a recipe muy fuerte-- extra garlic, extra anchovy, extra everything. Brash and unsubtle. In other words, just the way I like it.

I would suggest preparing this dish with at least one other person in the room when you first try it. Talk the entire time you are mashing, whisking, and tossing. Remember: you are the entertainment. If you don't have anyone on hand to chat with, I suggest, chatting up your pet. If you have no pet, bring a houseplant into your kitchen and talk to that. If you are lacking a house plant, you are more than likely not the type of person who would ever make a Caesar salad and are therefore not reading this.

Ingredients:

Two heads of Romaine lettuce, well washed, outer leaves removed, and torn into bite-sized pieces.

About 1/3 cup Parmesan cheese. Please use the good stuff. Nothing that comes out of a shaker will do no matter how good a deal you got with that double coupon.

Whole anchovies for garnish are entirely optional.

For the Dressing:

1 coddled egg. Yolk only.

3 anchovy filets (spanish, preferably)

2 cloves garlic, crushed

A pinch of coarse salt (kosher is excellent)

The juice of one half lemon

4 to 5 drops Worcestershire sauce

4 to 5 drops Tabasco sauce

1/4 teaspoon Dijon mustard

6 tablespoons (approximate) of extra virgin olive oil

Coarsely ground black pepper to taste.

For Croutons:

For two cups of croutons (it is always a good idea to make extra):

2 cups of day-old bread (french, sour, white-- take your pick), dried out a touch and cut into 3/4" cubes.

2 tablespoons butter, melted

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

a heavy pinch of salt

Preparation:

To Coddle an Egg:

Coddling the egg yolk lends a richer texture to the dressing by thickening it slightly, in case you were wondering. If you want a better scientific understanding of this process, ask a scientist. I prefer to live in ignorance and call it a miracle.

1. Bring your egg (which should be very fresh) to room temperature by placing it in a heat-proof glass of warm water for a few minutes. When this temperature has been achieved, drain water and cover egg with boiling water. Let stand for exactly one minute. Drain. Run cold water over egg. Egg has now been thoroughly traumatized and is now ready for use in your dressing.

Making the Croutons:

1. Preheat oven to 375F. Drizzle butter/oil mixture over bread cubes while tossing cubes with your free hand (if you have no extra hand available, use someone else's.) Coat evenly but do try to avoid an absolute drenching.

Place a single layer of bread cubes on a baking sheet and pop into the oven on the upper rack. Peek into oven at around 7 to 8 minutes into the process, shake and turn cubes. Remove from oven when cubes have become golden brown and therefore have officially attained crouton status*.

*To my mind, croutons should be very much like Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show-- hard, crusty exterior, but soft and warm on the inside. They should, however, not smell strongly of bourbon in the middle of the afternoon.

To Make the Dressing:

1. Place kosher salt, anchovy, and garlic in the bottom of a wooden bowl. Mash these ingredients together with the aid of two forks until a rough paste is formed.

2. Next, add mustard, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and lemon juice. Trade in the two forks for a wire whisk. Whisk until well-blended.

3. Add coddled egg yolk to the mix and whisk with gusto for about one minute to allow the citric acid from the lemon to "cook" the yolk a little.

4. Slowly drizzle in olive oil from as great a height as you dare, for theatrical purposes. Pause occasionally to taste with a clean finger. Make dramatic noises as you do so.

5. Let the lettuce leaves rain down into your dressing-drenched wooden bowl. Do not add any sound effects at this point. With the two forks you had earlier cast aside or with larger, more festive, salad utensils, begin to toss the salad. Sprinkle in a little cheese here, a little there. Hum as you sprinkle. Something lilting and hopeful.

6. Add your croutons, tossing and humming all the more.

7. Now add cracked black pepper to finish both the tossing of your salad and the incessant humming.

8. If serving directly from the salad bowl, sprinkle with a bit more cheese to garnish, if serving individually, divide equally among chilled plates, then add more cheese. Whatever you do, serve and eat immediately.

Enjoy.

For years I searched for the ideal fish and chips. Journeying 45 minutes away to a restaurant a friend of a friend swore by, or hanging out in a shop decorated with sticky vinyl chairs and soggy fries, I was on a mission. My hunt for the ideal fish and chips -- crispy on the outside, steaming hot and tender inside -- became increasingly elusive. Sure, I would occasionally stumble upon a place with decent and sometimes quite good platters of fish, but these were far and few between and hardly ever in the Bay Area. The sad truth is that there is more awful fish and chips out there than not.

Now I suppose I should explain that when I want fried fish I'm looking for the beer-battered variety. The type you would find in a first-rate British pub (although I've eaten bad fish and chips in the UK as well, so the problem isn't just here). I want my teeth to bite into a perfectly crunchy coating that gives way to a delicate flaky center. I want to taste the beer in the batter and I don't want my mouth to feel like an oil slick. Bread crumbs are not an option and curses on whoever tries to pawn off breaded fish with potatoes as fish and chips. Here is an example of the horrors that lie in wait.

So a few years ago -- after being served the soggiest bread-crumby fish I had ever encountered (and paying close to $15 for it) -- I decided to make my own fish and chips. I was happily surprised to find that making truly decent battered fish is both incredibly easy and straightforward. And, as is the case with all home cooking, you can control the results: want it really crispy, fry a little longer; interested in smaller pieces, cut them up; in the mood for a hearty batter, use dark beer.

Another benefit to making your own fish and chips is that you can easily batter and fry up some lemon slices to go with it. These are a heavenly way to garnish the dish and after trying them at your own fish fry, you'll never want to eat fish and chips without them again.

If you are lucky enough to live near a restaurant with wonderful fish and chips, I am happy for you. But if you're like me and you don't, I am here to tell you that you can make homemade fish and chips that will taste better than almost anything you can buy in a restaurant or pub, and cost a fraction of the price.

The recipe I use is tried and true. I've made it more times than I can count, and it has never failed me. Before you start, however, there are a few basic tenets to consider concerning frying the fish and also making and eating it.

Basic frying rules to get under your belt:

1. If you don't have a fryer (which includes most of us), use a non-reactive deep pan that can hold enough oil to submerge at least half the fish. I use my trusty large cast iron pan and it works great.
2. Use an oil with a high burn rate. I like to use canola oil. Don't use olive oil as it will scorch and flavor the fish.
3. Do not overheat your oil or it will burn the batter. I usually start the pan on medium high and slowly work my way down to medium and then medium low as the pan continues to heat the longer you fry.
4. Do not underheat your oil. Frying your fish in underheated oil leads to the batter sliding off the fish. Not a pretty sight. I'm not sure what the actual temperature of the oil should be, as I don't have a thermometer, but you can test the oil by placing a small teaspoon of batter in the oil. If it doesn't sink to the bottom of the pan and sizzles nicely, you should be good to go.
5. Use a fry screen if you have one as it will help reduce splatter and keep your stove from becoming a complete mess.
6. Be sure to gently lay the fish into the oil so you don't spatter it onto your hand (which really hurts!).
If you follow these rules, you should be in good frying shape.

General rules for making and eating fish and chips:

1. Dark beer gives the dish a more complex flavor while lighter beers are more subtle. Choose whichever you prefer.
2. Look for meaty white fish. Please don’'t use Atlantic cod as it's endangered and, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list, we're "fishing the last 10% of this population." Other great choices are Alaskan Pacific Cod and Pacific Halibut. I've also made it with catfish, which worked well.
3. Try to use fresh fish instead of thawed frozen, which tends to taste dry.
4. Pat the fish dry with a paper towel before seasoning and dipping in the batter.
5. Serve with malt vinegar, which perfectly accents the beer batter. If you don't have any, try fresh lemon juice.
6. Consider making your own tartar sauce by mixing good mayonnaise, chopped up sweet pickles, and a little horseradish.

As for the chips, I bake them. Yes... you heard me. I bake them. They come out crispy and seasoned perfectly. Best of all, my potatoes are not reduced to the sad fate of sogginess which often happens with home fried fries. Here's my recipe.

Homemade Beer Battered Fish

Serves: 4 people

Ingredients:

6 - 8 medium-sized pieces of white fish
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup beer
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Enough oil to fill half a large non-reactive pan (about 1 cup)

Preparation:

1. Pat fish dry and lay on a plate. Season with salt and pepper.
2. Heat oil in pan.
3. While oil is heating, mix flour, beer, salt, pepper and thyme in a large bowl. Whisk until everything is fully incorporated. The mixture should reach the consistency of pancake batter. Add more beer if necessary.
4. When oil is hot (test using method #4 in the frying rules section above), coat two pieces of fish in batter and then gently lie them in the oil. Be sure to fully coat the fish and be careful not to splash oil on yourself.
5. Cook fish until it is crispy and a rich brown color. Pick up each piece of fish with a fork and gently turn them over. Cook on the other side until done.
6. Drain fish on a plate lined with paper towels and fry the remaining fish pieces.
7. Serve hot with malt vinegar and battered lemon slices (recipe below).

Beer Battered Lemon Slices

Makes: 6 slices

Ingredients:

1 lemon cut into 1/4-inch slices (not including the ends)
Leftover batter and oil from your beer battered fish

Preparation:

1. Remove seeds from lemon slices.
2. Coat slices with batter.
3. Lay lemon slices in the hot cooking oil and brown on each side.
4. Remove from pan and serve with fish.

This swine diagram in the Oliveto back office pretty much sums it up.

Next to his desk in the Oliveto back office, Chef Paul Canales has taped a diagram that captures the restaurant's reverence for pork.

The diagram shows a hog divided into sections, such as the shoulder and the leg. All of these sections are labeled "Good," except for the belly. It is labeled "Real Good."

Pork is a constant at Oliveto. The menu revolves around it. On any given day, prep chefs can be seen breaking down a hog into various cuts -- shoulder, loin, leg -- and then processing them into porchetta, pancetta, scallopine, sausage or salumi.

For an uninitiated guest to the kitchen, it can be startling to see a pig's head simmering in a stock pot or a chef hefting a hand saw on one half of a 200-pound carcass.

Oliveto Chef Paul Canales seasons pork cutlets while Sous Chef Kelsey Bergstrom cuts into a pork leg with a hand saw.

Yet if you want restaurants to be respectful of the meat they serve, extracting every ounce of flavor and using all parts of the animal, then these scenes shouldn't shock you. Many chefs run a far tidier kitchen by relying on industrial meat processors to do their butchery, delivering meat cuts that are shrink-wrapped and ready to cook.

Oliveto's experiments with whole-hog cookery started more than a decade ago, when the restaurant, under owner Bob Klein and former Executive Chef Paul Bertolli, developed a relationship with Paul Willis and Bill Niman, founders of the Niman Ranch meat company.

Willis, a hog farmer from Iowa, met Niman in the mid-1990s, as industrial hog farming was transforming the landscape of the Midwest and North Carolina. Farmers such as Willis were trying to stay in business by marketing the quality and benefits of the pork that was raised without hormones and antibiotics, with the pigs allowed to range freely. That led to a partnership with Niman and the birth of Niman Ranch.

Paul Watson, seen left, heads a network of 500 small farmers who supply pork to Niman Ranch.

Today, Willis supervises a network of 500 farmers who produce pork for more than 1,200 restaurants, ranging from chains such as Chipotle Mexican Grill to high-end restaurants such as Oliveto. His success has inspired many other farmers, including some here in California, to grow their own pigs and market them directly to restaurants.

Every Tuesday at Oliveto, a truck pulls up in the garage of the building, delivering a split carcass pig, usually from Willis. For the last several months it has been my job, along with Oliveto butcher Pablo "Tigre" Mendoza Gavito, to heft and these split carcasses (100 pounds) into the basement meat locker.

Hanging meat from hooks can be dangerous, as former Oliveto Sous Chef Curtis Di Fede demonstrates.

This can be a dangerous job. Pigs are slippery and tricky to hoist. Usually Tigre would lift from the bottom, using a small meat hook to grab hold of the carcass. My job was to grab the hind leg, attach a meat hook to the trotter, and hang the hooked carcass on the meat locker rod while Tigre hefted it from the bottom.

The first time we attempted this together, I inadvertently left my pinkie finger in between the hook and rod. My finger was nearly crushed as the full weight of the carcass came down on the rod. Luckily, I pulled my pinkie out at the last split second.

Once the pigs are in the locker, the chefs assemble a game plan for breaking them down and preparing dishes. That plan changes weekly, depending on the whims of the chefs and what dishes they haven't recently prepared.

"Technically, you want to use the loins and legs first, since those are most subject to spoilage," says Canales, who replaced Bertolli as executive chef in 2004. "The shoulders will last the longest."

Why do the shoulders last longer? As Canales notes, shoulders and other heavily used muscles tend to have high levels of myoglobin, a protein that causes the red color in meat. Birds such as ducks and pigeons have high levels of myoglobin, because they fly such long distances. As a result, ducks and pigeons resist spoilage in a refrigerator longer than chickens do.

After a hog is delivered, Tigre tends to get the assignment of breaking down the hog into its component pieces. He also can be regularly seen trimming up the loin for one of the restaurant's prized dishes, the spit-roasted porchetta.

Oliveto butcher Pablo "Tigre" Mendoza Gavito prepares sausage in the back kitchen.

Porchetta is pork rolled with spices and salt into a log and then set on a rotisserie. As it roasts over hot coals, the fat renders out of the meat and keeps it juicy and savory. Slices of this log are then served with an accompaniment, such as a diavolo sauce made with chili peppers.

By contrast, Oliveto generally takes cuts from the leg and turns them into scallopine or salami. Scraps from the leg are ground in a meat grinder and used in a ragu, a pasta sauce. The shoulders, meanwhile, are generally reserved for sausage.

As you can imagine, all this cutting and trimming results in numerous scraps that some butchers might be tempted to throw away. At Oliveto, all these scraps are further trimmed to separate meat from fat. The meat pieces are cooked down into sugo, a heavily reduced pork stock, similar to a demi-glace. The rest might be used for a ciccioli, an intensely rich concoction that is made by cooking down fatty pieces of pork, compressing them and drying them.

Outside of the pigs it breaks down, Oliveto also receives special orders of pork, particularly pork bellies for pancetta. These bellies arrive every other week from Heritage Foods USA, which originated as the online marketing arm for the Slow Food movement. Now a private company, it sells meat from small farmers who are raising and preserving heritage breeds of pigs, turkeys and other animals.

"I try to support them, because they are trying to do the right thing, by these animal and the small farmers," says Canales. "These guys have no outlet. Either they find a niche market, or they get forced out by Tyson or the big outfits."

The author trims fat off of a pork belly for pancetta.

While apprenticing at Oliveto, I had a privilege to trim and cure pancetta a few times. It is not terribly hard, as Michael Ruhlman demonstrates in this post. The slabs of pork are seasoned with salt, curing salt and peppercorns, and then hung in cold storage for a week or so.

By the time it is dried, thin sliced and then served, it is belly, belly good. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

For Oliveto, the true test of its pork obsession comes in February, with the annual Whole Hog dinners. The menu offers nearly every part of the animal, from the brains down to the trotters. Last year's menu(pdf) featured a wild boar scaloppine alla Milanese, a spaghetti with pork cracklings and a spit-roasted pork belly with Sicilian chestnut honey.

A basic summer dish at Oliveto - cured coppa and melon.

Preparations for these dinners are an all-year affair, since some types of meats - such as prosciutto and coppa - take many months to cure and dry.

I missed this year's Whole Hog Dinner, but plan to be there in February. After six months of trimming, slicing, browning, simmering and curing pork, I feel a closer connection to this noble animal, along with an awareness of how much more there is to learn.

Stuart Leavenworth has concluded his apprenticeship at Oliveto, and this is his final post for Bay Area Bites. On Monday, he starts a new job as The Sacramento Bee's editorial page editor. You can contact him at sleavenworth@sacbee.com.

Everyday cooking means taking lots of shortcuts. For the most flavor with the shortest amount of time in the kitchen, especially when you've splurged or gone out of your way to buy good ingredients, it's a delicate balance between paying attention to the details and just trying to get dinner on the table.

We've all done it -- cooked tomatoes with their peels and seeds, served pureed soup unstrained, fried the potatoes just once, not twice. It's healthier, right?

As a cook, I embrace shortcuts. But as a cooking teacher, I always try to explain to my classes why, over the centuries and millennia, certain techniques have developed. Sometimes it's cultural. Usually, though, there's a very real change in texture or flavor, nutrition or shelf-life.

Two simple techniques increasingly omitted from recipes now are salting eggplant and browning butter. Neither are absolutely necessary. Both, however, are worth doing every once in a while to remind yourself just what amazing flavors you can create in the kitchen.

BROWNED BUTTER

Simmering whole butter until all its water bubbles off and its protein solids separate accomplishes several key improvements. It allows the butter to sit at (tropical) room temperature much longer without turning rancid. It significantly increases the butter's smoke point to allow high-heat cooking. And it transforms the milks sweet flavor, adding deep, nutty, caramel tones. Indians call it ghee, while the French call it beurre noisette, or hazelnut butter for its rich color and flavor.

You need just five or ten minutes to make browned butter. Melt good-quality, unsalted butter in a small, heavy pan over medium heat. (A lighter colored pan will allow you to judge more easily the color of the butter as it cooks.) Continue cooking it through the foamy bubbling stage, while all the water evaporates off. Reduce the heat if you want to give yourself some extra buffer time, especially if this is your first time browning butter. As the bubbles subside, swirl the pan occasionally and keep an extra close eye on the butter. The protein solids will sink to the bottom. When they turn light brown, transfer the hot butter immediately to a heat-proof bowl. Be sure not to scorch the butter, as blackened protein will taste sharply acrid, not pleasantly nutty. It will darken a little more as it cools.

For frying or long storage, be sure to separate the milk solids: skim off any remaining foam and spoon or pour off the oil while still liquid, leaving behind the darkened protein at the bottom of the bowl.

Browned butter can be used while still melted to saute or to garnish. It's excellent for vegetables like asparagus, broccoli, and green beans. If you're trying to use less butter, deepening its flavor will accentuate the effect from smaller amounts. For a super simple yet elegant entree, sear chicken breast, pork chops, or fish fillets in browned butter and then serve with fresh lemon wedges.

Let browned butter solidify and substitute it in baked recipes for extra delicate cookies and cakes. (Remember that less water means less gluten development in flour, so be sure to allow for some trial and error as you figure out the fulcrum point between flavor and structure.) Use it in rice pilaf to serve with full-flavored stews and roasts. Or simply offer it at the table in your regular butter dish and spread it on crusty bread or flaky biscuits for a flavor epiphany.

SALTING EGGPLANT

With ever smaller, younger and fresher vegetables making their way to our markets in the past decades, old rules have lost much of their imperative. Peeling, trimming, salting -- these were techniques required when vegetables were allowed to mature completely on the plant, transported long distances without the benefit of refrigeration, and served within days not weeks of harvest. Tender carrots no longer require peeling. Young celery stalks can be cooked with leaves. And most eggplants now, especially the narrow Asian varieties, are fine going straight from the cutting board the pan.

Occasionally, though, salting eggplant is critical and will remind you just why this vegetable has been embraced in classic dishes around the world. It's a hassle, but the extra step draws out bitter juices in older vegetables, whether those missed in the back corner of your garden or forgotten in the bottom of your refrigerator. More importantly, salting alters the cell structure of the vegetable's flesh, creating that famous silken texture while preventing excess absorption of oil.

To salt eggplant, halve, dice or slice it as needed. Sprinkle generous with kosher salt and set aside in a bowl or colander. To encourage the purging of juices, weight the eggplant. (The most effective way is to fill a zip bag with water and plop it on top of the pieces. The age-old method is a flat plate topped with a rock.) Leave the eggplant for 30 to 60 minutes. When you return and peek into the bowl, you'll see a surprising amount of dark brown liquid at the bottom. Rinse the eggplant quickly in cool water, drain well and then dry it by wringing in a clean cloth or patting with paper towels.

Salting eggplant will noticeably improve recipes that call for stuffing eggplant halves or rolling thin slices around a filling. It's also a good technique for dishes where keeping its shape is important, such as stews, curries, ratatouille, or parmigiana. If you're deep-frying eggplant, salting is essential for preventing greasiness.

And what if you're making baba ganoush or using tiny, little adolescent eggplants? Nope, no one will care or notice if you skip the salting.

Cooking is an investment of time and money, energy and love. Like all decisions, judging the costs requires knowing the benefits. And then choosing wisely.