Well, old Richard would have gone bananas over this cliff that upstages Valhalla and then some. If Richard the Second, Richard Strauss that is, had ever travelled to California — if I remember right he never got west of my great aunt’s house in Hyde Park Chicago — he would have felt impelled to write a sequel to his Alpine Symphony. Alps be damned, Mein Gott, this is the Sierras. And Mr. Handel? If he’d seen those epic Yosemite Falls with their triple fortissimi of audience-chilling spray he would have thrown out his Water Music and started again.

        But not before lunch. As for us, a blizzard of sights filling our memory banks to the brim, we hastened to the Ahwahnee Hotel for the midday a la carte. This delightful stone maiden, a kind of cross between Arts and Crafts and Santa Fe Style, seemed to me the most enchanting of sizeable out-in-the-country hotels I’ve experienced here or abroad. Its gestures are monumental, what with a 32-foot ceiling in the dining room and so on, but not bossy. It has style galore, but remains a cozy charmer. Even if the dining room suggests the first class feeding space on one of the conspicuously impressive Atlantic liners of the Titanic era.

        We ordered the luncheon dishes I associate with grand old hotels, a Shrimp Cobb Salad with Louie dressing for me, a Monte Cristo Sandwich for Macy. The olivey Cobb delivered by an attentive middle-aged server (”Hello, my name is Edgar” is still in force out there in America as opposed to ultra-cool Frisco) had the advantage that the numerous ingredients were quite visible, not hidden beneath a tricky Wald of boring lettuce. If the dressing wasn’t quite as light as the supernal Louie at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel it was still plenty good. Meanwhile Macy’s Monte Cristo was pronounced a miracle of quick deep frying, its fascinating puffiness a work of art. A basket of yummy breads that tasted house-made completed our lunch, a battalion of Japanese tourists seated nearby, nature knocking at the tall windows, the maitre-d with chest puffed out asking if everything had been all right. Yes indeed.

        And now for a hike!?

        At all events I’ve long felt that the chicken bouillabaisse of the excellent Ms. Wells was hiding a fish or fishes that wanted to get into the recipe and send its fowl neighbors scampering across the nearest turf. So I’ve adjusted the recipe so it contains a good hunk of cod and also dispenses with the potatoes that always seemed redundant, or at any rate difficult to get soft in the appointed time, and there’s not a poulet in sight.

Herewith the new and improved product:

        About three hours before your scheduled fish soup dinner for two persons combine in a large casserole 2 chopped tomatoes, a large onion in quarters or eighths, a fennel bulb trimmed and chopped, 2 pressed garlic cloves, 2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil, as much saffron as you dare, plus thyme and pepper, also bayleaf if you have it. Stir all these ingredients well, then add a cod steak, cover the lot and refrigerate.

        Next, about 40 minutes before serving, commence cooking the lot, still covered, over medium heat, adding 20 minutes later a couple cups of vegetable broth. Serve with large croutons spread with saffron mayonnaise, a mix of lemon juice-pressed garlic-and saffron stirred into mayonnaise homemade or store-bought. Feel free to play with the balance of these heady elements.

        Well, those fellows by the Marseille subway exit were in full accord with the oo’s and ah’s of the metro passengers from San Francisco suddenly finding Mrs. Fisher’s considerable town thrust upon them, boat sails as far as the eye could see and Notre Dame de la Garde up on the hill as if playing inspiration for San Francisco’s Coit Tower seen from a pier by Fishermans Wharf. Naturally the fellows posed for pictures, and snapped us in turn.

        Then we checked into the Beauvau (Chopin and Ms. Sand slept here), eyed the olive markets of North African provenance, ate an exemplary bouillabaisse at Loury, and listened to the little Saturday night Renaults humming by our window till dawn.

        Sequel: a few months later we were debating whether to cross the threshold of an oldtime “family style” Italo-American restaurant in a somewhat sagging hamlet west of Cotati, California — there’d be a hearty minestrone, lasagna, a meal painted red — when out sauntered the red-neckiest sort of fellow, middle aged, beer bellied, a sort of Marlboro Man put out to pasture so to speak, and he strode toward a mammoth ancient Cad convertible. Well, we got talkin’ and it wasn’t long before he was extolling the gastronomical virtues of a certain fish restaurant down in central California.

        ”They’ve go the best darned Boshbash around!” he exclaimed. And who were we to disagree with the Marlboro Man of bouillabaisse?

        I set a mental timer, you see, so I’d be magnetized out of sleep about halfway between the midnight bells and first light, because I wanted to look out over the vineyards — we had a room with a view, it was pure E.M. Forster — and experience the utter peace of night spread before me, a stray light or two in the distance, a barking dog or two to punctuate the almost humming silence. It was if I’d ordered the whole experience off the bill of fare: everything was just as I thought it should be, a five star experience. Well, there were more twinklers in the sky than that.

        There were more lights-in-the-distance another year when Anne and I were staying in Les Roches de Condrieu south of Lyon and my nocturnal Bulova shot me out of bed like Gromit’s Wallace so I could run to the window and spy in the distance what must have been the Blue Train, the posh Paris-Nice all-sleeper train.  There it was, over there, gliding relaxedly by — this was no TGV — lit up like a great gleaming yardstick along its plush and dowdy corridors.  I couldn’t help fantasizing for this famous overnighter a manifest of duchesses and spies, Maigret in this compartment, Poirot in another . . .

        And speaking of 2 or 3 a.m., I love to look out the window from a cozy Amtrak sleeper as a dozen silvery cars are steered carefully through the otherworld of DARK. Small town stops are especially magical with their stage sets peopled by lone cyclists tooling off into limbo while faithful single taxis wait dutifully for their apparently accustomed phantasmal fares — in the case of Thebes, Greece, add a pair of sauntering nocturnal cats, our friend Juliana experienced that.

        Lunch in San Gimignano puts me in mind of other romantical meals, like the buffet breakfast on the ferry carrying our night express across the sound between Sweden and Copenhagen. Seagulls worthy of a Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes or Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony squawked atmospherically outside the portholes as we dug into an array of cheeses, breads and superior strawberry jam.  Then we went out on deck — brrr! — to watch the ice crack like the crinkly top of a spoon-pummelled five star custard.

        And in the Nocturne department: – just before I woke up this morning I dreamt a kindly waiter set before me a plate of luscious fettuccine orchestrated with chanterelles and scallions.  Calling the gastronomical Dr. Freud!  “But tell me Mr. Bloomfield, why are you assigning the waiter who served you sardines at the Hayes Street Grill on Thursday the job of delivering you the unctuous homemade fettuccine you devoured  at Il Borgo on Friday?” 

        Simply boil them up, six minutes max, and top them with a warm chocolate sauce zapped with a little cayenne for a buzzy touch of Reality. Sauce for one portion would be two squares of ultra-dark chocolate (melted in a little water) and a quarter teaspoon of the cayenne. Zounds, the pumpkin and chocolate marry as easily as the chestnut puree and chocolate sauce in those wonderful crepes at Ty Couz over on 16th Street. Well, I had a hunch they would.

        As for the spinach ravioli I was writing about — another sauce you could try for them is plain low-fat yogurt specked with mint or dill and enlivened by as much pressed garlic as you can tolerate!

        Meanwhile, in another book I’ve been reading, Lord Peter Wimsey the Piccadilly sleuth is dining with a friend at a London club. Time for soup. “Clear?” asks the waiter, standing stiff in his braid, “or thick?” Can you imagine walking into San Francisco’s Delfina and asking for a bowl of thick?

        YOUR CORRESPONDENT has fallen in love with the pumpkin ravioli one can buy in boxes of 54 at the Lucca delicatessen out at 22nd and Valencia, this in San Francisco of course. Pricing and welcome at this deli are, by the way, the best I’ve found among the dwindling fraternity of sausage-pasta-olive oil emporiums in the City. But how to sauce them, pray tell. Especially with 324 sitting just offstage in one’s freezer! Well, I googled the question and found quite a discussion proceeding on the web. Most of us seemed to agree: a simple brown butter and sage sauce is the most appropriate for these rich and scrumptious objets d’art gastronomiques.

        There is a viable alternative, however, an innocent little orange sauce I invented. It’s mostly orange juice, a tumbler-full say, with a half jigger of Marsala for bite, a little butter for body, and nutmeg and rosemary if you have it for punctuation. And golden raisins — these top things off very nicely. Recipe for 2: just boil the lot lightly and pour over 36 ravioli. Bonus: this sauce is marvelous, I think, on salmon steaks done briskly in the pan.

        And the sauce for spinach ravioli? I found it inadvertently by feeding myself a dozen of said ravioli with brown butter and sage and accompanying this lovely minestran mess with a chicken leg I’d baked for 40 minutes in olive oil and a LOT of lemon juice. Result: the tingly drippings from the chicken when poured over fowl and the already lightly sauced pasta created a new and greater SAUCE of wonderful rich flavor.

         BULLETIN!  Like a hot rod with special fenders and ultra-chrome hubcaps, our recipe for Grillade des Mariniers du Rhone (see chapter 9) has been tarted up to advantage. Our new suggestion is you add some sliced potatoes and a bit of bacon to the round steak or ribs-over-onions, then bake the full complement to kingdom come and serve with large cannellini beans warmed in a little olive oil and sage and have some mint jelly at the ready.

         IT’S SCARCELY news to speak of the wonders of the internet in planning a journey when the screen is full of websites devoted to this-that-and-the-other country inn in France, Italy, wherever. Room after room parades before you, 360 degrees of ‘em — should I reserve the one with the four poster, the one with the view, the one with the cute eiderdown? And the menus — what shall I order when I visit the Auberge de Watcha-ma-callit six months hence? Surely that Confit Surprise will still be on the bill of fare.

         And this isn’t all when it comes to getting-the-picture of exactly what your trip will be like, presuming of course that defective mattresses or obsessive creakings of the plumbing worthy of a haunted house won’t be part of the deal. For instance you can go to You Tube and for eight minutes or so watch, yes watch, in real time, the Clermont Ferrand-Marseille express tooling down the Allier River gorge, diesel engine put-putting across your computer screen. Or see a picture, from maybe May 26, 2007, of the station master giving the silvery five-car Le Cevenol the high sign to ease out of Villefort station.

         The thought struck me: why, I could save big bucks by staying home and just watching Languedoc roll by on my office screen. But I guess I’d have a little less to tell you afterward. No train strike, no missed connection, no distressed mattress, no Garbo in the corridor. And just how did that confit taste?

         SPEAKING OF travel, I see that I neglected in my account of the years 2002-07 to mention that I traveled by train, three trains actually, from eastern Holland to London in ‘07 — anything to avoid Heathrow! It was a mission of some delicacy; I was consoling a dear friend who’d had the misfortune to develop a crush on an ambivalent woman, even following this intermittent fondler via The Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh, where a beastly but perhaps just conclusion to l’affaire platonique on a dreary streetcorner forced him to crash land out of his preoccupation, in a handy Chinese restaurant yet — it wasn’t far from the Robert Louis Stevenson house — a process that took several hours but was apparently totally successful. When I met him at Kings Cross he looked mightily relieved.

         A bonus of this novelistic paragraph in the life of a gastronomical tourist is that I chanced to stay in London at Durrants (accent on the first syllable), that low-ceilinged, much-mirrored hotel of unimpeachable eighteenth century provenance just behind the Wallace Collection. A bit pricey, and more bowing-and-scrapin’ than I require, but good old St. Margaret’s, my Bloomsbury stand, had just closed down — no more “duay boiled eggy” as the Italian waiter would shout, kicking his way through the kitchen door at breakfast — and Durrants proved an enchanting nest.

         The lunch in its restaurant was excellent, even if the only sound one could hear was the click-clack-clink of cutlery politely maneuvered by the three or four other people dining in this elegant tomb, a pinstriped gent over there and in the corner wasn’t that the Duchess of Denver and some satellite spinster chattering with her sotto voce. But best of all were the afternoon scones served in one or another of the many little panelled sitting rooms lined up like enlarged train compartments down the hall from the reception desk where the bowers-and-scrapers hang out. Such scones! Buttery good and just moist enough not to lose their patrician culinary manners, and with nothing more than currants inside. Yes, these weren’t those Gibraltarian rock cakes masquerading as scones in American chain coffee houses.

        DELFINA PIZZA where, I hasten to add, the fare is much more than just pizza, is a hip spot all right, as nerve-jangling as Heathrow on Boxing Day (or any day, come to think of it), but one can hide in the eye of the din several seats down the handsome blond-wooded counter, right in front of the prep station where pert kitchenists plate non-pizza items from the slightly changing menu of medium-sized offerings. Meanwhile bouquets of breadsticks beckon.

        The food here is what I call Berkeley Nouvelle Italian, one big Panissian shade more refined and inventive than the majority of dishes, however sensible and delightful, one finds in the trattorias and country inns of Italy itself. And naturally it’s sixteen shades more elegant than Eye-talian food such as one spills on one’s jeans in American red sauce emporiums of the six-pack sort. Vinaigrette might be the alternate name of Delfina thanks to pestos and salsa verdes so felicitously deforested they come off as first cousins to salad dressings.

        Like Leporello rattling off the list of Don Giovanni’s conquests let me offer a catalog of what I’ve consumed in ten or so consciousness-raising lunches at that counter, surrounded of course by mysterious beauties consulting their blackberries and ladies of the district reporting on their travels to Irkutsk and Timbuktu. The donwbeat, please, Herr Furtwaengler. Thank you . . .

        Fish first! Nothing at D.P. has enchanted me more than an order of grilled sardines split open for a spreading of mellifluously pureed white beans, all swimming lightly in a non-dense salsa verde constructed with let’s say four parts extra virgin olive oil to one of champagne vinegar with punctuations of parsley and capers for greenery and tang. A grilled swordfish with the aforementioned vinaigrette-like pesto is another laureate in the piscatorial department, flavor intense.

        Now to pork. A bracioline with ditalini proved to be a rouladen of cylindered meat accompanied by a “mac and cheese” with a PhD degree, and maiale al latte, a dish I’ve seen in many a cookbook (and have even made it myself) but almost never in a restaurant on U.S. soil, was “no-knife-needed” snizzles of pork soaked in milk for an hour and braised to their moment of titillating truth, served in this case with a sage buttered polenta of unrivalled delicacy. If oatmeal were like this I wouldn’t have turned it down at childhood summer camp.

        Veal anyone? How about thin slices of breast of veal served over wispy dandelion greens in an anchovy vinaigrette: this is titled Vitello Tonino. And vegetables — grilled chicories are presented with breadcrumbs and a bagna cauda comfortably light on the anchovy element while cauliflower with capers-garlic-crumbs-chilies was hot but not too hot to this delighted tongue.

        Pastas are also on the bill of fare, highlighted by the house cannelloni which are characteristically light and different, with a bracing tomato-kale-olive oil sauce that tastes like white wine. My only complaint, and a minor one at that, would be that the escarole-ricotta-tomato-anchovy sauce entwined with pasta shells would have been tastier with fettuccine instead of those rather bland cornucopiettes.

         On the way out one day I asked the server, do the people who come in here realize how terrific the food is, how pure and focused are the flavors disarmingly rising from one’s trattoria plate like benign mushroom clouds, or do they just think of it as a hip joint to eat pizza in (the pizza by the way are thin-crusted and good). Some of each, he replied.

         Delfina Pizza — with scant signage because, well, you’re just supposed to be magnetized there by ineffable gastronomic vibrations — is on California Street across from the Molly Stone supermarket. SPQR, which doesn’t toot its sidewalk horn very loud either, is a couple blocks further down Fillmore, almost to Bush. This is a more intimate place, more bistro than brasserie, not tomb-like in its decibel level but consistently easier on the ear.

        AND THERE’S NOTHING haphazard about the welcome from the rather chic but totally friendly staff. I’ve always felt cozy at SPQR — although truth to tell, prime time here threatens to be challenging. Mondays at 5:30 p.m. give you a five minute advantage over the hordes of techies-yuppies-psychiatrists-architects-venturists-gastronomes-etc. who know a good thing too.

        I like to sit at the counter overlooking the pocket kitchen out of which deep tastes are harvested seven evenings a week. Nearby, between tables and kitchen, stands a stove traffic controller, calling out the orders as if from a pulpit — “Fritter”, “Fire a lamb” — in gentlemanly tones. Within his magnetic field young women in little chef’s head-coverings go about their tossings, squeezings, eye-droppings and so forth, these upscale babushkas putting the finishing touches on your stinging nettle torchio and so forth.

        Pastas here can be amazing. Chestnut nicchi, for instance (pronounced neeky), with spigarello and burnt orange sauce!

        This is a dish that might have turned up in one of the nouvellier albergos I’ve stayed in in Italy the past few years, The Posta in Moltrasio on Lake Como for instance, but I did not encounter it. I suspect the appearances of burnt orange sauces in the whole of Italy are as rare as performances of Leoncavallo’s Zaza. Or heavens, was that written by Mascagni? At any rate, this is a sort of ravioli stuffed with chestnut puree — a cousin, I suppose to the yellow squash-macaroon mush you often find served with brown butter and sage — and the ravioli are in fact made with chestnut flour. Snippets of fried guanciale, leafs of spigarello (from the broccoli family, I’m told) and of course that syrup of the gods, the burnt orange sauce, just one little penetrating bit of it, complete the orchestration.

        Saffron pappardelle with braised chicken and a sugo of sweet red pepper and baby black olives is another must at SPQR. And no dish on old Fillmore is more interesting than those stand-up dumplings, five of them lined up like pygmy pyramids and stuffed with a mince of beef cheek with a hint of horseradish. “Burro and parmesan” says the menu and they’re not totally absent but I think this number would be even better with a very delicate horseradish cream sauce or — at the risk of my sounding like a gastronomical hick — an extremely light marinara.

        Weekend brunch at SPQR brings the most buoyant and original baked egg concoctions imaginable (no Benedictine behemoths here) and the best American breakfast pancake in my experience, cornmeal cakes that is which are served with softened ricotta — no, that isn’t “whipped” butter — syrup and kumquats. Substantial but absolutely LIGHT, and just a bit crispy at the edges, these are true works of culinary art and fully comforting as well. They’re cozy. One washes them down with an exquisite citrus punch of meyer lemon, blood orange and tangerine.

        AROUND THE CORNER on Bush, even more incognito than its brethren — these places are like websites without a title page — you’ll find the nouvelle Vietnamese (East Vietnamese?) Out the Door, the latest eating place from Charles Phan of Slanted Door fame. This branch should really be called In the Door because it’s not primarily a Take Out emporium.

        Banquettes, a couple of counters and a literally “high table” for communal dining near the front and often sunbaked window are the choices of seating. The bill of fare is long, exotic, and, to judge by a couple of visits, elegant to the palate. The Chicken Pho (pronounced Phuh, of course, as in Phuh La La) is an intense bowlful of Vietnamese penicillin, with a clump of capellini-like noodles buried in the broth like a ball of wool. Sides of hoisin and chili sauce are provided for hotting up those noodles after you’ve dispatched the top half of that singing broth. A richer dish would be the noodle soup islanded with a comme il faut confit of duck. The French Connection, of course.

        BIOGRAPHICAL EATS — It’s not all that easy to find delectable meals mentioned in literary biographies. The cold ham and proper joints that Virginia and Leonard Woolf seemed to favor on the English side of the Channel sound pleasant but not exciting; there’s scant evidence of John Cheever sandwiching his highballs and skinny-dips with coq au vin; and I know my hero Nabokov cared more for metaphor than moussaka. This is not to mention a highly articulate John Adams going to Versailles but not telling Abigail what he ate there. But hark, I’ve been reading Hermione Lee’s superb bio of Edith Wharton, that witty and wealthy chronicler of doomed love in high places, and here is what she served her guests at one or the other of her two French maisons in the Twenties: rice and chicken livers followed by maximally tender roast chicken and peas, with strawberries and cream for dessert, or, a tad lighter perhaps, a good potage followed by grilled turbot and sauteed salsifis, with apple charlotte for dessert.

        And now I wonder what Edith had for her lunch break when she was home alone with the servants and spinning one of her meticulously crafted tales of faulty matrimonial carpentry, drenched of course in the sauces of satire. An omelette fines herbs, I’ll bet you, or a little mayonnaisy salade of leftover chicken. And no Charlotte, thank you, I’ve been putting on weight.

        A MILKY VARIATION — A recipe writer is permitted to change his mind and I’ve decided to do our Lemon Milk Chicken a new way.

Alterations as follows: 1) use chicken on the bone, 2) add Marsala to taste plus a few juniper berries in the lemon-milk mix, 3) bake the lot for a short hour at 350 degrees. The sauce will separate but taste lovely.

        IT’S A SOIR THING — Every once in a while I get down from a shelf in my cookbook corner a fifty-year-old volume I inherited from my mother called French Family Cooking, a collection, this, of translated recipes by one Philomene who was for some years a food columnist on France Soir, the man-in-the-street’s evening paper in Paris. In my salad days by the Seine, courtesy of Oncle Sam, you’d see retired civil servants and pinstriped supernumeraries as it were out of a Jean Gabin movie reading this sheet at places like good old Valentin on Rue Marbeuf, served by female waitpersons of a certain age dressed in black uniforms with those cute little tea aprons that have gone the way of the dinosaur — although, heavens, perhaps they still exist in the posh female persons’ luncheon clubs positioned like culinary nunneries behind colonial downtown doors in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Boston . . .

        At all events, a dish from the Philomenean files recently caught my eye, having just spotted some veal stew lined up pristinely at the butcher’s down the street. This was Ragout de Veau a l’Estragon, simply veal stew browned lightly, then floured and browned a little more, the next step the administering of a cup or more of warmed white wine (I opted for an unashamedly oaky budget Chardonnay), the lot simmered cover-on for an hour and a half, then decorated with plenty of chopped fresh tarragon before serving. Philomene doesn’t mention the option of reducing the sauce, which I found necessary, but just a little, because this is a dish in which the ingredients swim rather than drown. “A most delicate and unusual dish,” says Philomene from behind her trusty typewriter. Right she is. And she might have added that this ragout has the sunniest disposition. It’s not a grumpy steak, a coy quail or a slippery scallop.

        AND A MENU IN THE ATTIC — I’ve just come across a six foot tall and charmingly conversational bill of fare from Manhattan’s faithful Barbetta on West 46th. The date is about 1963. Well, I think I’ll order the Bolliti Misti Piemontesi Served from the Silver Wagon, price $4.75.

        DOSA, San Francisco — at Fillmore and Post — A temple of gastronomy in more ways than one, this high-ceilinged one-time bank is not intimate–you’re eating in the middle of a statement–but the elegant south Indian menu includes one of the most addictive bowlfuls in my experience, a cauliflower, red pepper & coconut milk soup that absolutely soars. Lentil dumplings topped with yogurt are a great short-subject on this bill.

        IZUMIYA, San Francisco — Post near Webster — A blonde-wooded boite upstairs in the Japan Center: I like to sit at the counter, watch the delicate workshop of white capped chefs wielding spatulas ready, it seems, to cue a lovely pentatonic passage by Ravel. Japanese food for me means shrimp and vegetable tempura and I’ve found none better in the City. In other words: light, not greasy.

        NICK’S COVE, at Marshall — more or less — on Tomales Bay — A tad stiff, perhaps, this Pat Kuleto “destination” restaurant in mock roadhouse garb out by that soothing plain-Jane stretch of water way up Marin — the look, of course, is quasi-Scots — but I’ve never had a better clam chowder. Actually it was a Potage Parisien, leek and potato, onto which a clam chowder had been grafted, sort of as if Paris and Brittany were holding hands.

        LA PROVENCE, San Francisco — 22nd Street and Guerrero — I chase bouillabaisses the way some people do Wagner Ring Cycles and I can tell you that the trim little Frenchman who runs this restaurant, a former participant in the Tour de France, serves a version that wouldn’t be sneezed at in the starriest salle in Marseille — ah, the fellow who likes to make awful puns would say it’s well past third baisse. Now by chance I got talking to a retired maitre d’ of the old L’Etoile on Nob Hill the other day as I was watering some sick plants in front of my house, I told him about La Provence, he duly hastened there like a good Poirot to sniff for evidence, and when I saw him next he told me he didn’t consider the fish in the cyclist’s soup “authentic” (but how could it be since this isn’t the Mediterranean, except in spirit) but Jacques my new friend thought the broth itself magnifique, and coming from an old-time pilot of the crepes suzette trolley that’s something, n’est-ce-pas? Furthermore, everything else I’ve tasted chez Provence, the octopus salad, the aioli of cod and vegetables, the sabayon, has been prepared with great care and imagination. Worth the journey — and the parking!

        RIO GRILL, Carmel — The Crossroads — About a quarter century now serving the hip and preppy locals as well as tourist trap-wary folks from San Francisco, the Rio is still offering the “school of Cindy Pawlcyn” cuisine I always think of as the Carmel attraction second only to the beach itself. On a recent visit an orchestration of halibut-guacamole-bbq sauce wasn’t exactly zephyrean but certainly exuberant, stylish and fun. Meanwhile, oh dear, so much of Carmel is being erased by some mad professor of CHANGE!

        UNIVERSAL CAFE, San Francisco — 19th Street near Florida — With the exception of a tortured visit to a “Chinese American” diner in Chinatown where the food was bland, heavy, colorless, utterly without redeeming culinary value (while making me yearn for good old Sun Tai Sam Yuen where pensioners in hats enjoyed $2 slabs of roast beef back in the 70s), I haven’t had a bad restaurant experience in San Francisco for many a month. But a recent dinner in the echt-SOMA spaces (read metallic) of the Universal Cafe was, I think, the most inspired of 2009 so far. The opener was a foamy and unctuous sunchoke-celery root soup with a green garlic walnut crouton long as a barge, the main (actually a starter) grilled shrimp marinated with aromatic sliced & oiled kumquats and attended by salsa verde and breadcrumbs, what a marriage, that!

        ZITOUNA CAFE, Sutter and Polk — An engaging uplift for a dicey but improving corner at the tip of the Northwest Tenderloin, the Zitouna is the brainchild of a husband-wife team, he a Tunisian veteran of such estimable locations as Fleur de Lys and the lamented Doros (where Jacques of the Suzettes also worked!) and she a Moroccan. As my old friend the conductor Jean Perisson used to say, in France when a Burgundian guy marries a Norman girl the cuisine of the house must be Burgundian, and so it is here: to my imperfect ethnic palate the food seems more Tunisian than Moroccan. In any event, the Kofta Tajine, baby meatballs and poached egg in a red sauce with bell pepper suggesting in a single bite provenances both goulashian and Basque, is worth wading through more yards of Tenderloin than you need to navigate to reach this gem.

       “Your bird is here,” said the factotum to his colleague at Oakland International Airport’s gate 22 as our Boston airbus docked, and that was the beginning of my Sentimental Journey to Italy. I’d be stopping in places not visited in 30, 34 years – dangerous of course, you can’t always “go home again,” and the Villa Libano hotel in Barga, recently taken out of circulation, looked as abandoned as an operatic courtesan down on her luck. But the rest was all in the PLUS column, with son John as superb negotiator of hairpin turns on back Garfagnanan roads and your correspondent as a mostly reliable navigator.

        First stop was John and Lucy’s farm in New Hampshire. Woodsmoke greeted us at the eighteenth century salt box and Lucy had made a lovely soup I’ve christened Indastrone – Minestrone, that is, seasoned with turmeric, cinnamon and paprika and punctuated with yam. The next night was her awesome African Lamb Curry; we’ll give you that recipe a little later. But perhaps the best gastronomical news in South Hampton was that Celia (heavens, she just woofed from under the table where I’m writing!) did NOT demolish a Seven Layer Cake as she had three birthdays ago when we weren’t looking. That put her in the doghouse, you can be sure.

       We had a bit of an Italian culinary preview at the Black Trumpet, a cozy boite on tugboat row in Portsmouth NH, the brainy bill of fare including a risotto (“mountain paella” they called it) with sausage, rabbit, bacon, mushrooms, leeks and, take a breath here, snails. Overkill? Not at all. Then it was back to Logan, Swiss Air pretzels and a sunny dawn over the eastern Atlantic, clouds like slim maidens lying in state. Destination the newly scintillating Zurich                       where we’d take in the opera (we had front row seats for Aida and could watch the brass players rolling their eyes as the ballet boys took their bows) and catch a day train down the Gottardo (the sight of kayaks in the sunny mist on a ripply Lake Zug was almost unbearably beautiful).

        Bellinzona, Lugano, Chiasso, Milano (big change of car-mates here), Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Padova, on we rolled in fading light to Venice. Twelve years on and the Agli Alboretti Hotel was as serene as ever enjoyed from a room overlooking back gardens, and since the October weather was positively balmy and the air of course pollution free, we dined outside, on the street, shepherded through the menu by a comic waiter on his way to winning the lottery.

        Risotto, what else? I always preach that you can put anything in risotto except maybe pasta, and our reward on this occasion, seated next to some expat Americans with a miniature Italian greyhound and an Italian Aussie with his own canine friend, was the combination of rice and – for me – bits of orange-fleshed melon and shrimp, and – for John – duck and Amarone red wine. We opened with steamed octopus slices gritted with walnut in a heady walnut oil vinaigrette, and the evening’s wine, a light, smoky, fruity Primitivo di Manduria, was, according to our delightful server, quite an idiomatic and zesty English speaker, “your Italian Zinfandel.”

        There are two Venices, the insanely crowded one that might be Disneyland East, and, my preference of course, the Venice of the locals. From our hotel, near that great waterway the Zattere and its engaging promenade, it was easy to operate in the more digestible of these somewhat overlapping opposites. And then of course one could go to San Marco piazza after dinner and the crowds and listen to the battle of the café orchestras, not, thanks be, playing simultaneously but in carefully clocked succession. My favorite was the hot five that played six or eight variations on “I Could Have Danced All Night,” in Hungarian style, Viennese, Paris-in-the-rain, you name it.

        We also enjoyed the organist at the Salute church who, as the 11 o’clock service approached, teased promenading listeners with coils and coils of Bach never quite resolving until the Hour had struck. Addictive! Venice also has big bossy bells that bong dramatically at 7, 10 and 6, not quite as endearing as the gently creaking boat docks and mundanely harrumphing vaporetti. A word here, too, for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection which was featuring a comprehensive exhibit of American painting 1850-1950, from Eakins to Man Ray. I’d never before experienced this particular Guggenheim with its enchanting gardens, a near Alhambra North.

        Forty two years ago my Persian friend Lotfi Mansouri introduced me to Alla Madonna, the Sam’s or Tadich Grill of Venice with its no-nonsense slabs of piscatorial delight (no tartare sauce, though) and waiters in crisp white jackets. This trip we braved the Anaheim-ian crush of tourist humanity by Rialto Bridge to find this alley-tucked prize and lo, the Scandinavians at the next table were eating the same squid ink pasta dish Lotfi had insisted I try back in ’66. A “home again” moment, one of many.

        I’ve saved for last the gastronomic revelation experienced in Venice at Casin dei Nobili, a Zattere-side restaurant of uneven quality but capable of hitting the culinary jackpot. This it did with a platter of hard white cheeses served with HOMEMADE mostarda di frutta, that wonderful mustardy syrup of preserved fruits, a decent version of which you can buy at home in an import jar from Cremona but said comestible simply doesn’t have the unctuous tang of the made-in-the-house concoction that blew my mind one warm Venetian evening.

        Next day we rented a nimble Fiat, negotiated somewhat better than a dozen years ago the tagliarini tangle of freeway on’s-and-off’s heading where we did-or-DIDN’T want to go and emerged, correctly, on the road down the Adriatic coast to Ancona. Stopping, as one must, at an old favorite of Sam Chamberlain the riveting ancient abbey of Pomposa north of Ravenna, one of the few skyscrapers you’ll find in the bittersweet valley of the giant Po.

        Ancona, tucked into its hilly coastal crescent like a miniature Genoa, with ferries to Croatia and Greece steaming off in the evening fog just beneath our hotel window, is an underrated city. A little dowdy perhaps, not a town of snappy dressers, it’s homey and stately at once, with beautiful piazzas, spacious arcades, excellent fish soup at La Moretta, where the conductor Riccardo Muti likes to dine, and aged soulful alleys twisting upward to the lion-guarded cathedral perched inscrutably on a promontory rather in the manner of San Francisco’s Coit Tower looking down on the Embarcadero. No Tamalpais in the distance but green countryside lapping at the edges of the town.

        And at La Moretta we drank with our aristocratic cioppino a full bottle of Boccadigabbio, a light chewy Macerata red the hangover from which was worth it. The maitre d’, by the way, had friends in Palo Alto and was happy to hear about the blog you see before you. Breakfast overlooking the vibrating port at the Grand Palace – at tables or a stand-up bar — was farm fresh eggs yellow as a Van Gogh painting and coffee cake to die for. A quick check of the cathedral lions, a dip down the spectacular Conero Riviera just south of town, a foraging for Adriatic stones on Numana beach, picnic spot of yore, and we were heading back north.

        Thirty years ago, playing travel-planning roulette before the days of websites full of pictures of prospective hotel rooms large and small, spacious or claustrophobic, Anne and I guessed right with a chanced-upon brochure for the town of Ostra, up in the hills from Senigallia. We spent a couple of extremely tranquil days there, I waxed gosh-awful eloquently about it in the Tenerumi d’Agnello recipe some pages back, and now John and I were taking a new look.

        Lost at first – I’d forgotten the ancient part of town, one long neat street up and another one down, with scarcely anyone about at 1 p.m. – I summoned the courage to ask directions to La Cantinella from a grocery lady who poured out a flood of directions (“after the gas station,” I caught), gave me a good fraternal slap, and sent us on our way. Soon we were digging into a wonderful mush of sautéed chard at the Cantinella dining room, which looked sort of familiar. It was after lunch, and a walk a few metres down the hill to the hotel itself, that, ta-tah!, I suddenly had THAT TRANQUIL FEELING again, almost overwhelming as March 1978 with John’s admirable mother came instantly into soul-drenched focus.

        Next stop, the faithful Rosetta in beloved Perugia, reached after a curvy-curvy run through a brace of hill towns in the stepchild province of the Marche (Markay), the tip-toppest being Arcevia very high indeed on its impressive perch. The Rosetta dining room steers confidently through the decades, offering elegant but unpretentious fare to a rather hip and stylishly nerdy clientele (I’d swear that fellow at a neighboring table was a veteran film director, others might have been archaeologists taking a time out). And of course that crazy pasta in the patty shell was still being served, as in 1978, as in 2003, a wonderful cholesterolic nightmare.

        The revelation this time was a starter plate of sautéed leaf chicory liberally bathed in oil, cicoria they call it, not to be confused with the salady chicory which resembles endive. I said to the waiter this scrumptious veg with its floral bitterness seemed rather like spinach, or chard, and he answered, with superb logic, “spinach is spinach, and chicory is chicory.” So there!  I also want to mention a carpaccio drizzled with balsamic vinegar and dotted with juniper berries – you could do the same, I think, with prosciutto or mortadella at home.

        Now a wiggle through the cozy Garfagnana north of Lucca, the festival hill town of Barga as exquisite as 34 years ago, ringed by sharp-peaked mountains even more dramatic than I remembered. This is the corner of fabled Tuscany no one’s ever heard of! Next day the superbly organized freeway up to Lake Como, stopping at a roadside Auto Grill where a little lady in a cap out of Breughel stirred risotto as she manned the cafeteria line, piling juicy roast pork or comme-il-faut pesto onto traveling businessmen’s plates.

        Travel, Paul Theroux has written, is most rewarding when it ceases to be about reaching a destination and “becomes indistinguishable from living your life.” I couldn’t help thinking of this pithy observation when we settled into the Posta in Moltrasio, a calm and gorgeous little town arranged at a near-dangerous angle above the Como shore, lake waters gurgling, church bells performing their riffs, evening lights on the hills about to dance, the air virtually shampoo’d with fragrance. Yes, nothing to do but float on these felicities. Serendipity had propelled me to this heaven a couple times before by accident: this time one of my favorite nirvanas was reached by design.

        And the food! The family-run Posta was offering turnip top ravioli sauced with cheese fondue and decorated with tiny sausage meatballs, risotto with quail, bacon and pan juices, a whole encyclopedia of temptations. I would return — that was the mantra on the flight back to Boston.

And here is Lucy’s curry, a party dish for six to eight . . .

Combine in a small and pretty bowl the following spices and herbs:

about 2 teaspoons each of paprika and ground coriander

4 crushed cardamon pods

2 bay leaves

hefty pinches of fenugreek seeds, ground cumin, oregano and basil

a little more than a teaspoon of turmeric

1/4 teaspoon of powdered saffron

3 or 4 small cinnamon sticks

and 1 teaspoon of black peppercorns

Then in a large Dutch oven sauté in

a melted stick of unsalted butter

2 chopped red onions

6 to 8 crushed garlic cloves

approximately 7 inches of peeled and chopped ginger root

2 chopped bird’s eye chilies, ribs and seeds removed.

Now add the spice/herb mixture, stirring well, followed by 2 pounds of cubed leg of lamb and about 6 chopped tomatoes. Simmer all uncovered for a few minutes.

Next, add a can of coconut milk and a cup of water; simmer covered for two hours. Then add 6 or 8 Yukon potatoes, peeled and halved, and another cup of water. Simmer all, covered, for 45 minutes, adding a box of frozen peas in the last few minutes.

Serve this abundant curry with plenty of good quality yogurt and steaming basmati rice.

Now to the guest list . . .