The Works

It’s clear that this food thing that's taken hold of me is a kind of run up to Thanksgiving and probably will not desist until the last kale chip has been crunched. . . . Yet even as I continued to complain bitterly about the plethora of weird veggie dishes lurking far, far west of the New England border, as it turned out my shock and awe at being thrown on the mercy of SoCal cuisine paled next to the realization that there are things even worse than braised broccolini twists, and that everything is indeed relative. . .

Amid the unrelenting blaze of a sun an hour or so south of LA, with rays so trenchant and searing they actually burned through your clothes, in my ultra violet haze I had all but forgotten that another “country” existed in the Golden State too, the ultra cool Bay Area, and that this part of the land had its own particular set of trendy horrors as well.

It all started a few years before when I had occasion to visit San Francisco and wound up having dinner in Berkeley one evening. Almost everything in the area, every business, every eatery, every yogurt stand, had a tendency to give itself a name that ended in “collective” or  “works,” or worse, “worx,” with a dive called Wok Werx being the last straw; eventually we’d had enough and were looking for something a tad more grown up. Through word-of-mouth we found a restaurant located on the main street of a quiet residential neighborhood; a modest store front that led us into a small, squarish dining room, with a tiny bar at the front used mainly for waiting. There was however a lovely little garden in the back visible through a floor to ceiling window wall and the effect was one of space yet intimacy; needless to say, every table was taken and the chatter was the proverbial lively yet subdued. Had we finally struck pay dirt?

It was late in June and the days were long, though thin shadows already were forming at the dinner hour. Ravenna was the type of place that struck you as low key and unassuming and yet quizzically reminded in some way of the Italian Riviera or perhaps an exclusive English club peopled entirely by the Energetically Hip and Environmentally Enmeshed. The wait staff was efficient and professional, almost to the point f making you feel as if you didn't quite measure up, though they stopped just short of that, leaving you dangling on the precipice of insecurity and self-doubt. The menu- the essence of nouvelle cuisine- took itself tres seriously, and the diners albeit casual in attire were anything but cavalier about their vittles; they read their menus intently and there was a quiet insistence in the way they grilled their servers about the special nuances of each and every ingredient. The end result for me was one of hesitancy about ordering anything for fear of making a mistake; it was clear no one would help if you faltered and the atmosphere could best be described as hipster-formal. I recall sitting rather stiffly on my chair with a half smile plastered to my lips, hoping not to reveal my total ignorance of the culinary refinements and eccentricities of NoCal cuisine, either to our waiter or the nearby diners with their impeccably perky yet knowing restaurant deportment, lest I be found out as the uninformed east coast naïf that I was. . . .

To make matters worse, after putting in our prosaic request for two poached salmons and a salad, we noticed the couple next to us had self-devised a kind of intricate tasting menu, wherein they would share each mysterious little dish that was successively placed before them in the middle of the table for sharing, then comment to each other with a kind of thumbs up/ thumbs down action before signaling the waiter to bring on the next delicacy. This obvious display of expert knowledge and discernment made us feel even more clueless and callow. What kind of cave people soothed their palates with two slabs of fish amid such esoteric choices? We continued however to bravely nurse our wine- thin stems with giant bowls and about an inch of chardonnay at the bottom- and were much relieved when the house mesclun salads finally appeared, determined as we were to get through the evening with egos somewhat intact.

It was just after our entrees arrived and the neighbors were up to their tenth or so tiny tasting dish that the first rumblings began. The sound was like distant thunder but much deeper in pitch and a bit longer lasting. The diners momentarily ceased their activity for a second or two with a kind of brief and fleeting suspended animation almost like an afterthought before the clatter of cutlery noisily started up again. A couple of minutes later the rumblings began anew, only this time louder and more persistent with eerie echoes in the background, and everyone more or less froze in place, forks in hand. All eyes shot to the garden for some strange reason, which suddenly had taken on a vaguely sinister air. It was as if these belching tremors of the earth were making an announcement over a cosmic PA system: Look at me goddammit!!! Stop with the gourmet shtick already and drop your butter knives! I am here to introduce the coming of the Big One! Hey everyone, it’s the Big One, the Big One!! The one you’ve all been dreading. . . .

The terror was palpable on people’s faces even as they attempted to tamp it down by pretending to be merely mildly concerned. With this latest round of roaring kabooms all the activity in the room instantly had propelled itself into a kind of terse, silent pantomime that lasted at least ten agonizing seconds, after which the tension spontaneously dissipated into a mildly hysterical collective buzz, and the whole uptight atmosphere turned into one giant Love In. Everyone suddenly was consumed with the desire to make small talk with their neighbor. Cheese Doodle lovers were hangin’ with coq10 addicts and Wise potato chip aficionados schmoozed with the au gratin set. The tasting twosome next to us insisted on knowing our names while politely averting their gaze from our poached salmons. It was party time! The Big One had been forestalled yet again, at least for one more day.  And this was a way to live??? An entire population of flax seed aficionados swam before my eyes as I pictured them slowly downing that last strip of gently marinated rhubarb before the earth opened and swallowed them, for good. 

We passed on dessert as the portions were fairly large, and honestly we felt as if we could not digest another morsel. All in all probably not the most relaxing ambiance, but I will say that the place was clean and the food fresh, if a tad overpriced.

I give it three and half stars mainly because of the location, a major fault. . . .