Sitting in a room full of people raised in the Bay area, it’s hard not to see that they’re different from us Angelenos. Words like provenance and terroir trip off their tongues. They’re acutely aware of where that oyster comes from, down to the inlet where it made its home. They revel in their ingredients, and—just come out and say it—they’re proud, and rightly so.
There aren’t many places in the world where people stay if they possibly can. Not like us pack o’ itinerant dream chasers in LA. A lot of us love LA, but how much of the time do we say it’s the best place in the world?
Of course you can only really passionately care about where that oyster came from, and making sure it’s its best self, if you can afford the surcharge. But it’s a question of values too. Local. Artisanal. Sustainable. Conscious. Think of those things, and you think of Marin.
This past weekend, I went to Cavallo Point, the Lodge at Golden Gate. Built inside the former officer’s barracks of Fort Baker, a fort and battery from 1901 through World War 2, it’s steeped in atmospheric history. You can walk to the cement bunkers built to protect San Francisco Bay, peer into their little slots and imagine actually shooting a cannon at a submarine, just surfacing like a shark in the pewter waters of the Bay. There are egrets, herons and endangered blue butterflies. There’s the bridge right over there, looking glamorous in its International Orange coat of paint. When it’s foggy, the horns moan through the night. A collaboration between the owners, the city of Sausalito and Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Cavallo Point is a LEED Gold-certified sustainable tourism lodge which has also received architectural honors from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It’s got to be one of the coolest hotels around.
I was there for the Chef’s Counter dinner at the cooking school. Chef Jeff Chase was presiding in the upstairs country kitchen, along with sous-chef Leina Bryson. The dinner turned out to be not only over the top delicious, but surprising too.
Chef Jeff is self-taught. You can tell he’s a guy who doesn’t overthink food, but also respects his ingredients. He knows all the fine dining techniques, but he’s constantly tweaking them in a very Bay Area way.
As he and the other three guests told me, when you grow up there, as in LA, you’re exposed to all kinds of food early on. Japanese, Chinese, Filipino. All of it seems normal to you. Maybe that’s why an Asian influence grew over the course of the menu before it settled into amplified French. It was a progression that belonged to a culinary city with a polyglot footprint. It was also one where “luxe” ingredients like lobster and Niman Ranch filet were not only respected, but enlarged.
Consider the oysters. Jeff layered flavors like a fennel soubise, crispy shallots, and Black Sterling Caviar to both bring out their natural brininess as well as shifting them a degree or two towards funky and sweet.
The lobster tails were grilled in front of us and served with cauliflower tempura and a coconut milk sauce infused with lemongrass. The richness of the coconut and the lobster complemented each other, yet escaped being overwhelming with a chili oil and a leafy pop of micro cilantro. You got the feeling Chef Jeff was allowing all his influences in, whether Japanese, Chinese or Thai, and honoring everything by acknowledging provenance, influence and, yes, terroir.
But it was the Sonoma duck that most blew me away. I don’t like duck particularly, mostly because of that rim of fat that no one seems to be able to figure out. Jeff rendered it over many hours over a low heat, just enough to melt it away, then marinated the breast the Japanese way, in sake, mirin and soy. This duck was tender, barely pink, and not fatty at all. He paired it with a light scallion pancake and a complex red cabbage marmalade that took three days to make.
Which brought us—staggeringly—to the Niman Ranch filet. By then we were in French territory, with a peppercorn studded demi-glace sauce that played careful homage to tradition, gorgonzola fritters (I know!) and grilled trumpet mushrooms.
Dessert was a chocolate souffle sprinkled with a rain of chopped pistachios, the whipped Chantilly perfectly melting from its heat, in short, pretty great. It was the kind of dessert where you remembered how much you’d always loved souffles, along with how many times you’d tried to make them, and all the times they’d caved.
Afterwards, walking into the cold evening, the firepits burning, the moon over that gorgeous red bridge, it was hard not to feel in a rare place. Cavallo Point could have done fine dining hotel food with their cooking school, but Chef Chase made it something more. He encompassed a Bay Area childhood of eating his way through a city, allowing us to see a culinary persona based not only on roots, but environment.
The cooking school series goes on through the summer with events every month. At Cavallo Point, you can also do brave things like paddle boarding and para sailing in the bay, hiking, checking out charming Sausalito, and whipping over the bridge to SFMOMA (the 1500 foot Pan-American mural by Diego Rivera shouldn’t be missed). Or, you can just smell the eucalyptus, have a massage at the spa and stare at that glorious bridge—worthwhile as well.
