May 17, 2002
Oliveto -- all of it!
By Patricia Unterman
Special To The Examiner
 Food product developers on a research tour sample unconscionable amounts of food. They pack in the maximum by hiring knowledgeable locals to line up the best and newest. Last week, I took on the task of guiding three of them from England around the Bay Area.
When they checked into The City's W Hotel, they already had rampaged through New York and Chicago for eight days. I scheduled them for lunch at Hawthorne Lane and they had reservations at the Cafe at Chez Panisse that evening. I joined them the next morning at Citizen Cake, and then we were off and running to Draeger's, the ultimate upscale grocery in San Mateo; Saigon Cafe for Vietnamese meatball sandwiches; Taqueria Pancho Villa for fresh fruit drinks, tacos and salsas; full lunch at Zuni; tamales and pupusas at La Palma Mexicatessen; and small-plate sessions at Destino and Andalu for dinnner, crying uncle when I suggested a third, butterfly.
The following morning, we ate cheese, bread and produce for two hours at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market; then lunch at the Slanted Door (which has temporarily moved to the Embaracadero while expanding on Valencia Street); followed by corn and cilantro pizza at Berkeley's Cheeseboard; then anchovy toasts and fried potatoes with herbs at Caesar; and finally dinner at Oliveto in Rockridge. Needless to say, no one was famished when we arrived at our dinner destination.
I took them to Oliveto because this restaurant, headed by purist Paul Bertolli, sets the standard for Italian cooking anywhere, including Italy. But could we face it?
 As we walked upstairs, the aromas of roasting pork turning on a spit above a wood fire tickled even our jaded appetites. When we sat down at one of the coveted window tables overlooking the street, with a bowl of marinated olives, crusty white Italian bread, sweet butter and a bowl of kosher salt on a clean canvas of linen, we couldn't help looking forward to what would come next. The smells of roasting herbs and meats, the simple demeanor of the table, the sprawling, busy, candlelit room with an epicenter of wild, 6-foot-high branches and flowers fanned our flickering hunger. We were at it again, and the odd thing is that we ate as if we hadn't had a bite all day.
Oliveto can do that to you. Just reading the spring menu makes you crazy because you can't possibly consume all the things you want to try. But being full allowed us to edit our meal more easily. We passed up all the house-made salumi -- the Genoa salami, the soppressata, the smoky salami pimenton. Unfaithfully, I turned my back on a favorite, terrine of beef tongue, and snubbed my beloved, spit-roasted Willis Farm pork, the best pork dish in the world. No one ordered the fragrant, spit-roasted Watson Farm leg of lamb with potato and new-garlic gratin nor the hunky skewer of grilled Niman Ranch beef sirloin with anchovy sauce and fried spring onions rings. No, we didn't go there. We ate light.
Instead, we demurely dipped spring-sweet baby artichokes into tuna-and-anchovy-infused mayonnaise -- an artichoke tonnato ($9). We disagreed about the cohesiveness of a bracing chopped salad of cooked, celery-like cardoon with a bitter edge, raw celery heart, chopped egg and slivered anchovies ($11), but cleaned the plate. (I liked it.)
Of course, we ordered Paul Bertolli's pastas. No one can resist them. I was wild about chittara nera ($13.50), thin strands of pasta tinted jet black with squid ink, briny as the sea but spicy with hot red pepper and garlic. Thin slices of calamari tossed into the noodles were tender, sweet and intrinsic to the dish. The creation was a triumph of pasta cookery.
No other cook could possibly turn out ravioli as ethereal as the white shimp and spring-onion pillows swimming in butter sauce ($15.50) that we practically inhaled.
Just to show he hadn't abandoned the rustic, Bertolli made tagliatelle out of farro, a chewy ancient variety of wheat, and dressed the thin ribbons with a long-cooked hen ragu ($14) that reminded me of a dish I had just eaten in a mountain taverna in Greece, served there with orzo, rice-sized pasta. The sauce in Oakland was deep and round, and it melded with the grain in the pasta.
We had to try the unusual chicken-and-lobster sausages ($28), a dialectic of tender and chewy in each bite, slathered with tiny bright-green fava beans and silken, barely wilted māche. It tasted like May. And we called for all the vegetable side dishes: sweet, juicy braised fennel with a toasted parmesan crust ($3.75); spicy braised beet greens ($3.75); and Bertolli's signature fresh-milled polenta ($4), thick, toothsome and smelling like popcorn.
We even had room for a shimmering panna cotta ($8.50) -- cream ever so tenuously suspened in gelatin and surrounded by strawberries. It was the best I've ever tasted.
We drank wines that were new to us: a Sinskey Pinot Noir Rosé ($35), a pale pink drink signifying summer; and a contrasting, lush Fiddlehead Cellar 1998 Pinot Noir ($85) from Oregon. (Somehow our wine appetite never flagged.)
The waitress assumed we would share everything, and she and an attentive staff brought endless side plates and fresh utensils. She choreographed the meal so that one course flowed seamlessly into the next, and we always had a little wine in our glasses.
The product developers told me the meal was the highlight of their whole trip and I believed them, because I, too, was moved by it. I've been to Oliveto many times, always with anticipation and with preparation by eating lightly all day. Often, I go for special events -- truffle dinners, tomato festivals, a celebration of the pig; but this time, on a regular night, choosing from the regular menu, the food was so sparkly, unique, artfully prepared, and resonant of Bertolli's deep knowledge of and respect for beautiful ingredients, that it made four overstuffed food nuts genuinely hungry again.
Would I go back? At every opportunity.
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