In Woodside there is a one-star Michelin restaurant called The Village Pub which serves Fine Dining type food. And, we got there in our friend’s Tesla that drove itself from our house all the way to the parking spot, including navigating the often tricky 85 to 280 interchange merge at Foothill Expressway. It got an easy roll though, Northbound traffic on a Friday night is usually light and the other cars were particularly cooperative. The self-driving mode was set to “hurry”, and so it kept the speed about 10-11 mph over the speed limit and we arrived early; the only hesitant, jerky bobble was turning into the parking lot when an oncoming car was getting near. It did park a little further away than was strictly necessary.

Greg, our waiter, was rifling the Prix Fixe menu at us about as fast as he could, and out of order, which made it hard to follow along. We sorted it out after he left, things like “what is kampachi” or “why does this dish have vegetable ash in it, what does that mean, exactly”. A lot of the menu was like this, which if I understand correctly, is a feature of fine dining. I ordered the most absurd thing that I remembered Greg shooting off about, the summer melon consommé, a kind of soup. I had to confirm if it was hot or cold, and Greg was a little bit surprised by the question, his answer was more natural and genuine than the rest of his prepared material. The broth is lukewarm, er, sort of room temperature. Thank you, Greg, that will be fine.

The table service was actually kind of in your face. The bus boys, bus men, I should learn the French word for this role so they can sound as important and integral as they are to the meal, whatever they are called, the service was a show and we weren’t meant to ignore or miss it. Greg and an assistant brought the amuse bouches, and then Parker house rolls, which were perfect. When we ran out of rolls and weren’t sure if we actually wanted more, for the gainz, our hesitation was interpreted as politeness, or perhaps a demurring, when it was in fact a real decision that we were all sorting out at the table. More rolls arrived, along with more sculpted butter. Forceful, vigorous, and sometimes a little too proximal service was the tone, and while it was never delinquent, it was also never invisible either. The only woman on staff that I saw was the hostess, confirming reservations.

Greg insisted on straightening the silverware whenever he passed by, until more customers arrived, anyway. I gave him a hard time by putting them back exactly where I had them as soon as he moved them. I’m not sure if he understood that it was all a joke, I do not know how seriously he has to take all of this for unknown to me reasons.¹ He did seem to lay off the touching of my fork and spoon a bit, but he could have just been distracted. The bus-men had no such compunction, and there seemed to be about a dozen of them so it could be that they just didn’t consistently visit our particular table as the evening proceeded. They took the plates and silverware when they were going to take them, and whatever position our bodies happened to be in at the time, interfering with the urgent matter of clearing the table, well, we would just have to move out of the way. There was a service on, don’t you know, and it was kind of a war against these dishes and diners, a bit of collateral damage might just be the cost of doing business. Greg cleared the crumbs with one of those little aluminum scrapers that looks like someone cut a small pipe in half length-wise.

After the last bit was et, another round of amuse bouches- a tiny blueberry tart, a hand rolled salted caramel, and a tiny pâte de fruit that let’s be honest here tasted exactly like a fruit rollup, and the bill was given, left on the table for a while, finally paid and finally returned to us for signing, we continued finishing our water until they took away the tableside ice bucket that had held Loonen bottles, and we realized that the entire outdoor patio in which we had been seated and had had almost all to ourselves for much of the meal was now completely occupied. We decided it was probably best that we not keep the table until Wednesday and so we grabbed our coats and made our way to the front of the building for one more picture with The Village Pub sign, and then we left, riding the self-driving Tesla off into the sunset.

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The treats they brought back were un-refusable. Ali had seen the message before Jan deleted it and tipped me off. Bouchon is one of the best bakeries around and so I surrendered my resistance and prepared for whatever they brought back to share. This would be a rare treat.

Jeff divided and plated the first four items evenly into five portions, but one blueberry muffin piece fell and was lost. Not everyone agreed that the rule for things touching the floor is zero seconds, maybe particularly so for delicately crumbed blueberry muffins. There was no disagreement about it once it had entered the trash can. No matter, there was tasting to taste and so we all proceeded to the back patio table and into the perfect September 1st evening.

The question, as always, is the order in which to proceed. Plate One was the easier of the two. Obviously it is croissant to pane chocolate then blueberry muffin and finally the Oh-Oh. One could argue for swapping the last two, but it’s hard to know ahead of time when you are only estimating the flavor profiles. I don’t regret my choices, but I should have considered harder if I wanted to finish with the blueberry muffin. It had a bit of lemon.

The next pieces were cut into four, not five, and divided at the table al fresco. Jeff again did the cutting while the rest of us closely monitored the situation. Ordering the second plate posed a much harder challenge. Peach chiffon cupcake, cinnamon roll, Kouign-Amann, Better Nutter. Well, it’s an order but I’m not sure it’s the rightest one. My theory was that lightest to heaviest, in taste, and I’m not even sure if I followed that. In hindsight, cinnamon roll, chiffon cupcake, Better Nutter, Kouign-Amann would have been a better choice. Or maybe the chiffon first again. Nothing to be done about it now, and honestly I have no regrets with these choices either.

Ten out of ten, would do it again. But not for a couple of months, I hope. I’ve got goals for the gainz and my first lifterversary is coming up.

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The strong smell of fresh earth became noticeable in the dark night air. Ebi was digging again, and all of us began to pay her more attention and admonish her to stop with a sing-song “Ebi, uh-uh!” It was only once that we were too distracted by our own jokes and word plays and humorously strange logical fallacies that we had missed it when the greyhound started digging again. Ebi had quite the number of small excavations started around the backyard, but one pit in particular was big enough that her front half disappeared into it. When we called out the “uh-uh!” with just the right melodic notes, she would know we meant it and stop for a second to turn, bending almost in half to look over at us all seated around the patio table. Most of the time she did stop what she was doing and some of the times she considered carefully whether to start again on the next hole she passed on the way back to the patio and her bed.

The jokes continued. Well, they weren’t really jokes. Our nutty logic ran on while we sampled two different kinds of dates and three different kinds of chocolate chips. There was a single bowl of mixed nuts on the table too; almonds, peanuts, and cashews. There was a real difference between the two types of dates, something that we hadn’t realized before. The chocolate chips, while all different, were also all kind of the same. Even the sugar free ones. And the nuts needed more salt.

We retold our earlier conversation about chitin, chitons, and chitons to a bewildered friend that had stopped by to borrow a baking dish, and we laughed and re-laughted about it all. Our friend was just confused and we tried to reconstruct how we got there to begin with. Our friend said “you guys sure covered a lot of ground today,” and though she was remarking on our south bay tour from Morgan Hill to Santana Row and Valley Fair and then on to Whole Foods and the Bass Pro Shop, I think she was also talking about our limitlessly zany conversational leaps.

We paired crossbreeding savannah cats with house cats to Superman because they can jump unusually high, and the fact that the more generations that are again crossed with domestic cats, the smaller the next generation becomes, with fleas which also jump very high for their size. We tested the leaps against facts; savannah cats are known for their swimming, so jumping high is a necessary capability for catching flying fish! Are there flying fish on the savannah?

A lot of it had to do with rhymes, or echoes as one word begs for another and anything that we reach for injects more chaos and new entropy into the conversation. That entropy, oddly, drives the engine of our engagement; the ridiculousness of it all was loudly entertaining.

Ebi had snuck out into the yard again, in the darkness, and had tentatively started digging again. “Uh-uh, Ebi! Uh-uh!”

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Yesterday I noticed a pattern, or trend, or well, something. My first “new foods” in the last year. They’re not all actually new foods, only one was that.

First up: cottage cheese. I added this into my diet last fall. I made it palatable by adding grapes, cinnamon, maple syrup, or strawberry jam. Eventually I decided it was fine and not a struggle to consume and I could just add a minimum of maple syrup. If I had to, I would eat it plain. Kinda boring, but whatever.

The second one, the truly novel one, was caviar. I forget which kind it was, err, kinds because there were several. I didn’t seek this out, an opportunity presented itself a couple of months ago, and I was with good people who weren’t going to judge or pressure so I took a chance on it. Honestly, this one had been overhyped, it was really a non-event. Neither good nor bad, just an additional flavor to add to things, I guess. Confession: it was only a little and it was, ahem, they were not the strongest types. I had them with some steak, I had them by themselves, I had them on those little pancakes (blinis) and sour cream and chives or shallots. All the usual ways, or so I am told. I would do it again, but I’m not chomping at the bit for it. I wonder how much of the appeal of caviar is it as a food and how much of it is a symbolic eating money.

I’ve saved the best for last, and it’s a personal one, because it’s one I feel even more strongly, more viscerally. I did, anyway. Yesterday I got some salad at work, and after sitting down to eat I found a food that has been on my verboten list for basically my whole life. There, amongst the romaine lettuce and semi-dried corn kernels, tucked in there and semi-hidden, there was a slice of hard boiled egg. I have found that eggs can be eaten one way and one way only: scrambled. I did manage to survive a bowl of hard boiled egg soup (I swear it was but I can’t find a picture); I may not have eaten a lot, but I didn’t eat none either. And there was another time, in the mid-to-late nineties when a little old French grandma in Chambéry prepared a sunnyside up egg in a ceramic crock dish with bacon and served it to me and I had to eat it or be rude and, frankly it was basically perfect and I still remember how that egg and bacon tastes today but when I see any other sunnyside up egg cooked like that it just doesn’t look to be up to the standard and I don’t know what magic she did but these other eggs just don’t have it. Anyway, yesterday, when confronted by this particular devil food, I found that it had little power over me. I could eat that. So I proceeded to eat other parts of my meal as normal and checked in a minute or two later to see if I had found my sense of revulsion, but I had not. I circled back again and decided that maybe today is the day. And it was, yesterday was the day. I would eat another sixth of a hard boiled egg again sometime if the opportunity presents itself. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, I’m not seeking these other egg preparations out.

So, what is going on here? I mean, the cottage cheese is for the gainz, for the protein, for the gym. And the caviar was just a random fluke. Coulda happened to anybody. But the hard boiled egg? I wasn’t looking for that one. Yesterday, with that egg, I was alone. I could have kept to the same old habits and not eaten that and not told anyone and no one would know. Either way, eaten it or not eaten it, no one needs to know this.

What is next, seafood? I don’t think I’m ready for that.

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My plate is sliding away from me across the table. The pressure needed to coax shredded cabbage onto my fork is simply too great for the frictionless surface of this glossy white tabletop. The cabbage isn’t cooperating. No, that’s unfair. What’s not cooperating is the fork: it’s too small for the job. It’s a beautiful object, this fork. But as a tool for moving food from plate to mouth, it’s clearly inferior to the task. I give up my frustrated attempts at eating and glance around the room. The space is beautiful: black leather chairs, white tabletops above bright gold uprights, white cuboid room, very high ceilings, black trim, large tall windows, and dark gauzy curtains.

Ron asks the young waitress if it used to be a bank; the architectural details give it away. He wonders if the robots are where the vault used to be.¹ She doesn’t know, looks anxious and puzzled by these questions. Apparently she’s never been asked before.

Everything in the space is beautiful. Instagram worthy. The point.

The crepe tacos look marvelous, are perfectly plated, and have all the right ingredients. They’re not actually a hand food anymore; I watch the catastrophe unfold in real time. These are fork-and-knife tacos. Ron’s burger and fries come in boxes, fresh from the burger bot, but there is no plate with the kit. My plate is still sliding all over the place. Both Linden and Jeff’s bánh mìs, like the tacos, have been elevated. This poses severe difficulties with some foods, and bánh mìs are one. They are already engineered to perfection: the bread is just right, the type of filling and amount are precisely calibrated, and they’re wrapped to go. Giant wooden restaurant sandwich spikes will not compensate for these mechanical challenges, no matter how good the constituent parts taste. And everything tastes great when we can get it into our mouths.

And another thing: the almost bare cubic space has a be-shaded DJ working his laptop station from the corner. There is, as usual, the ordinary restaurant din, which is already a challenge if sound isn’t carefully managed. The DJ is just pumping this reverberant space with so much more noise. There’s nothing in here to absorb it but us. The music is fine, maybe even good. I can’t tell. The problem is just too much of it. We are really struggling to hear each other, hear the staff. Sometimes hearing our own thoughts is difficult.

Like I said, the food tastes great, everything is fresh, prepared and served with care. And it’s all so beautiful to behold. Just wish I could eat here.

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This place is a hotel restaurant at the end of Menlo Park on Sand Hill road, past SLAC but before 280. Could it be the local spot for the ultra wealthy that live in the hills past the freeway, up in La Honda or wherever? Hotel restaurant is sometimes a bad word, but this one used to be the spot back in the day. I’m unclear which day that was. It wasn’t yet built when the dot com boom was on. The other tech boom has been a sort of continuous series mini-booms and busts all happening in parallel. The AI boom is on right now, but so is the AI employment bust. It’s all very confusing and stressful.

But at Madera there is no stress. It is a place that has the right amount of space between the tables, is not too bright or too dim, is quiet for conversation and your own voices are absorbed into the special air they use so your party doesn’t disturb any other party, or vice versa. I don’t know how they do it, but I wish more restaurants would stage this way. Not all, of course, but being able to hear each other is a nice experience.

I haven’t yet mentioned the view. How do I capture this, because it is not a postcard view. I would assume that the spectacular feature is the marine layer clouds falling over the crest of the hills, something that happens quite often and is always a delight. Well, it wasn’t on today. Perhaps Madera was saving a little for bigger guests. We just got a normal cloud layer, even diffuse light on the green oaks and ridge lines and a bit of freeway poking around one corner behind the pool. It is a view that I enjoy and I am pleased to have been seated near the large windows and facing them so I could look out and savor those hills and ridges and trees, even if they didn’t include any spectacular falling clouds in evening light. Maybe next time, maybe I can be on the lookout. We were there for brunch.

I am glad to say that the food was every bit as carefully selected and prepared as the atmosphere. Lemons were bright, greens were perfectly crisp and fresh, vegetables each a piece of art, and all the entrees were just so. This is dependable quality, reliable luxury. The people back there preparing this stuff are perfectionists and notice the details and address them. They probably use tweezers. They are craftsmen- people, crafts-people, and highly skilled technicians of food. An overseer is directing this orchestra, the menu was very coherent, none of the dishes were present only to fill a hole. I can see why it’s not the spot right now, but also, please, for the hope of letting us keep some nice things, do not throw out this gem. Everything was delicious and perfect and to me worth every penny. I would go again anytime I wanted that experience. It ranks with Dio Deka, another house of perfected food that I have experienced lately. I cannot imagine ever being disappointed by either. Nor would I go there to be surprised or wowed or shown something new. You go to a place like this because you know exactly what you are going to get and it is going to be as perfect as possible because all imperfections have been either edited out or that thing is just not possible to serve right now so it will not be offered. The gluten-free Lemon and Ricotta pancakes were absolutely worth every bite and they are also among the least “California” dishes on the menu. The avocado toast was a work of art, a living still life, right down to the jammy egg on top. The artichoke hummus was so amazing that I couldn’t resist the drop of oil that had fallen on the table because the lemon infused-ness was that good. The mixed vegetables looked like something out of a painting and the green goddess dressing was bright and tangy and frankly a small revelation that such things are still made with such attention and care in today’s world.

I haven’t mentioned the staff. They were excellent. And invisible. There to do their job, all elegantly poised and perfectly dressed and immaculate. Frankly a bit of the Edwardian house staff about them, a little upstairs/downstairs in the air. I’m not sure how that would have arrived here on the western end of the world, but I swear I felt it. Must have come with the clientele. It did take a few minutes longer than we thought it should to get some extra slices of bread for the remaining hummus. I assume they needed to bake and slice it and butter it at just the right temperature and the baker was refusing to rush the cooling period, that bread would be perfecto when it reached the table or there would be blood on the kitchen floor. That we even asked for it probably betrayed that we’re not that clientele. Who knows.

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