Play the Cat ~ Spring Cocktails are here!!

Ray gets these giant bursts of creativity that always follow the same trajectory ~ she comes in mumbling for a few days, then goes into a flurry of chopping, infusing and cooking up a storm. Pacing behind the bar mid-service comes next, as she second guesses every step in every drink she's considering. All this is AFTER she’s researched and ordered a bunch of stuff she can’t source from any of Ryan’s farmers or purveyors. By the time she presents the list to me with ‘certain’ members of staff hovering nearby (they shall remain nameless but you know who you are, Cathryn) we’re all as excited as kids the day before a trip to the fair. Kids who drink.

I’m not sure when the tradition of presenting the new season of cocktails all at once started, but I don’t remember it taking on the formality it has before Ray. It usually takes a few days after the initial tasting to finesse the ingredients, which gives me time to come up with the names, but this week she had me scrambling because the first four were absolutely smashing, ready to go public. Lift #4 takes the current interest in vinegared digestifs to another level with a fennel shrub, cucumber water and verjus around a base of house infused lemon peel vodka. Play the Cat (think Lawrence of Arabia by way of Montaigne), starts out a classic gin with Pimm's Cup, but a lashing of mint syrup and a bright three citrus juice brings it decidedly fruit forward. Casa de Gumby is rosemary infused tequila, shaken with a creamy rice water with cinnamon notes reminiscent of Horchata, but light on the palate, until the peppered syrup hits you. The Neverending Now is strawberry infused vodka with rose water honey, orange bitters, Navarro Gewürztraminer grape juice and a flash of champagne at the finish.

By this weekend Ray, George and Sara, our most excellent bar team, should have the entire 2014 Spring Cocktail Collection ready for you to taste. If you are off spirits but still hanker for a little cocktail time, Ray has also concocted three great NA (non-alcoholic) cocktails for Spring to add to our Lift, Flirt and Slide series. Rum and bourbon cocktails will be added in the next few days. If you want the story behind the names of our cocktails you need to come in.

I’ve worked with a good number of gifted mixologists over the years, but Ray has been the sleeper. She doesn’t play the mad scientist, hang with the boys or throw down in bleary cocktail contests. Self taught, she’s grown into her talent, growing stronger with every season. The full range of house bitters she made last year were a testament to how seriously she takes the art and the science in this profession. What I love best is that for all the time she puts into crafting, she gets that cocktails are fun. They set the mood, but the best of them linger. These do. But don't just take my word for it.

Rhubarb is Back

The botanical description of Rhubarb is a rhizomes with long fleshy petioles, but celery dressed for a night on the town is a more apt description of the plant, which Europeans consider a vegetable but we Americans call a fruit. With its large green leaves and florescent fuchsia stalks, it's tart and slightly bitter if not cooked with something sweet. A vegetable cross-dresser then, that makes a colorful appearance just when you’re sick to death of winter’s gray palette. The plant is ancient ~ used by the Chinese as a laxative before it traveled along the silk route and ingratiated itself into the cuisines of the Middle East and European. Chef pickles and ferments it, serving it in ways you'd never expect, but he admits most of us come by our fond memories of rhubarb (often mixed with strawberries) baked into pies, cakes and cobblers.

At the French Laundry he remembers an Austrian chef who would prop the oven door open with a spoon so he could slowly cook the rhubarb at the lowest possible temp, the best way to sweat the water out and soften the fibrous stalks. This week Octavio poached it in grenadine with a touch of Grand Marnier, then dropped the slivers to sink luxuriously into a baked frangipani tart. The Hazelnut flour brought out a nutty richness.

Join Us for Easter Brunch

All text Jil Hales. Photos © Jil Hales

Beardsley behind the bar

When Rachel Beardsley applied for a job behind the bar at Barndiva three years ago, the first thought I had was that she was too damn pretty to survive. Audrey Saunders (Pegu Club) notwithstanding, bartending and mixology are still very much boy's clubs. Sure, you can find women bartenders from time to time, but stellar female talents who really command the space, creating exciting, transformative spirit based drinks? Not so much. Historically the only permanent place women have thus far carved out for themselves in this profession have been serving drinks, not making them.

This isn't a screed on why women should run the world, or at least have an equal place in it. (don't get me started). And I get that when it comes to an environment comprised of low lights, soft seats and seductive music, Sheryl Sandberg's advice to lean forward is more likely to get you a customer's phone number than their respect. But that doesn't explain why, on the creative side mixology is still so gender sensitive. There is a lot more science involved at the cutting edge these days, but it's truly sexist to think women can't master the math. More to the point great cocktails, like great dishes, flow from a place where intuition leads. Women are intuitively programmed; to survive in what has always been a man's world we have learned to adapt. To thrive we have learned to master the art of finessing the variables.

From the first sip that hits the nose to the last lingering grace note, a great cocktail's success rises or falls on it's ability to bring disparate elements ~ spirit, sweet, bitter, herbal, floral, spice ~ together, without losing the unique elements that made those ingredients right for the drink in the first place. We like to say the name barndiva flows from a desire to hit the high notes, and nowhere is this combination of a refined taste narrative presented in seductive surroundings showcased more than at the start of a meal, the beginning of a great evening, when the customer expects a perfect moment delivered in liquid form.

Turns out I needn’t have worried about Ray. Now Barndiva’s Bar Manager, she’s a consummate professional with guests and a joy to work with creatively. In bar programs like ours you are dealing with a staggering selection of bespoke spirits from around the world, a constant flow of seasonal ingredients from the farm and the kitchen. With our syrups, juices, purées and infusions already all made in-house, I should have not been surprised when Ray came to me a few months ago with a plan to push the boat out further with a program to develop a full range of house-bitters. She said she wanted "to start" with 11.

First thought that came to mind this time?  You go, girl.

Ray's Gingered Orange bitters (above) are used in Millie the Wise, a chai infused vodka cocktail that incorporates vanilla bean and orange peel steeped honey, lemon juice and black tea syrup. It’s finished with an Early Bird egg white foam and a grind of black pepper.

The 'Millie' in Millie the Wise is Matilda of Flanders, Queen Consort to William the Conqueror, a woman who lived during one of the most fractious times in the history of England, managing not only to keep her head but remain married to William "the bastard" for life. She bore him nine children, two of them future kings. I love the spirited spicy balance Ray achieves with this cocktail, the robust way the pepper hits the nose followed by a soft ethereal foam that allows you a peek around the corner before encountering the full complexity of a drink redolent of ancient flavors.

Half the bitters on the list below are now featured in the new fall cocktail list; the rest will be ready by Christmas. Spiced Pear Bitters and Apple Bitters (used in our knock out bestseller Why Bears Do It ) incorporate heirloom dry farmed fruit from Barndiva's farm in Philo.

Apple bitters American Oak bitters Sour cherry/Almond bitters Ruby Grapefruit bitters Lemongrass Lime bitters Rhubarb bitters Meyer Lemon/Thyme bitters Orange bitters Gingered Orange bitters Spiced Pear bitters House Aromatic Bitters

We entered, we won, we pressed juice for you!

Our apples aren't just winners in the new fall cocktail list ~ at this year's Mendocino County Apple Fair Barndiva Farm won ribbons in seven of the nine categories we entered! We took first place for our Red Romes, second place for Winter Banana, Yellow Bellflower, Splendour and third for Melrose, Jonathan, and Sierra Beauties. It's not too late for you to taste these winning varieties ~ a few days after the fair we blended them into juice at Apple-A-Day, Ken Ratzlaff's wonderful Ranch in Sebastopol. Apple-a-Day is a family run apple farm with a new state of the art press that pasteurizes but does not 'cook' the apples. Ratzlaff Ranch is a Sonoma County treasure. Check them out on Farm Trails.

If you are in town and have a few minutes to kill, come in for a complimentary apple juice shooter. Or better yet, stay for lunch or dinner and enjoy it by the glass or in a Millie the Wise. For a limited time only we are also selling half gallons at the host stand in the restaurant. 

In addition to winning ribbons for our apples, DCWest (aka Daniel Carlson, seen here polishing apples with Lukka, Francesca and Emanuele) won two First Place Blue Ribbon's for his floral arrangements!

Follow us, like us, love us!

Barndiva is now on Instagram and Pinterest. If you have been following the blog you know we don't go in for superfluous bullshit ~ so if you add us to your social media dance card we promise we won't bore you or inundate you with anything we wouldn't want to see or read ourselves. Hopefully, we will keep you amused, connected to the Northern California food shed, the life of the restaurant and Ryan's kitchen, the art gallery, and our fabulous weddings and parties. If you are not already on Instagram or Pinterest, join us as we take the plunge!

Click to check us out on Instagram!

All text Jil Hales. Photos Jil Hales, Dawid Jaworski

Cocktails for Lovers

It’s harder to create ‘romantic’ cocktails than one might think ~ any drink themed to an ideal (as opposed to a season) comes with so many various interpretations. Valentine's Day runs the libidinal gauntlet from starter romances that don’t need anything more than a gentle nudge, to long married couples in search of a jump start. And then there’s everything in between.

Be Mine? is a Barndiva Valentine's Day favorite ~ a shy come-on of a cocktail that flirts with just enough flavor in an egg white lavender foam so the punch of citrus you get from Meyer lemon infused vodka comes as a nice, if unexpected, surprise. It's finished with a crème de violette and huckleberry syrup heart, which adds top notes both floral and forest berry. It's a pretty drink, one that's elegantly sexy.

It’s All About You (a.k.a me me me) is a cocktail for seasoned lovers ~ c'mon, if you haven't heard that refrain in an argument, chances are you've said it. Construction of the cocktail was also a response to the notion that men don’t order champagne cocktails. Gay or straight, they do, of course, but more often than not they like a kick to them. And while It’s All About You could read as hipster chic from a cursory look at the ingredients ~ Rishi organic white rose tea, St. Germain elderflower liqueur ~ its spirit (in both senses of the word) is Pisco, a fortified grape brandy which to our mind is not used often enough in great cocktails. There are so many directions Pisco can take other than sour! Rachel finishes It's All About You with a bracing swirl of creole bitters so you end up thinking New Orleans, not Brooklyn.

Then again, think whatever you like. At the end of the day what’s sexy about any cocktail is that it takes you where you want to go. What you do when you get there is another story.

Oscar Party!

Speaking of  One Night Only Cocktails ... Oscar Sunday is within sight and we have Tiger Blood on the mind. The hype around this year's Academy Awards continues to grow ~ latest from the mediaplatz is that Silver Linings Playbook is "surging," while Argo is falling back. Whatever. It's a great field of films this year. Our favorite, Beasts of the Southern Wild, is a genre hybrid of unsettling beauty, with bravura performances and a first time director who makes heartbreaking connections between the personal and political. Doesn't have a chance in hell of winning ~ but let's hear it for the nominations! The best part about watching the Oscars is all the schmoozing going on ~ a good indication of who will get work next year.

There is no prix fixe menu this year ~ come in for a drink and fill out a ballot or stay all evening ~ but come ~ schmooz with us! We've been hosting an Oscar party since the year we opened, it's great fun, and to make it more exciting this year there will be a $50 Barndiva gift certificate for the winning ballot. Voting starts at brunch on Sunday, and you need not be present to win.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales, Dawid Jaworski. Oscar Graphics: k2pdesigns.

Wednesday at the Barn Says Adieu As It Welcomes in 2013

Hello, Goodbye

It would be boorish indeed to post images of our guests wearing silly hats they've donned after imbibing copious amount of drink, but when it comes to our staff all bets are off.  Chef may have slipped out the back door with Bekah and the baby just after midnight, but the rest of us partied on to a playlist of Prince, MJ, Barry and an extended homage to Donna (RIP, girl).

NYE is a great night around here syncopated as it is to base notes of bleating horns and the clarion call of champagne corks popping, but for the staff it also serves a higher salutatory purpose. By the time the room emptied and the balloons had begun their inexorable drift into the new year, cliff or no cliff we were ready to say goodbye to 2012, happily done and dusted.

Incredibly, this is our 200th blog as Eat the View. Next week we will post one more time (wild sea bass) before taking an extended travel break. We hope to return ~ invigoration is an art around here ~  but you'll have to stay tuned to see in what form. New Year's may be over, but metaphorically (and, no doubt edibly) speaking, the night is still young.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales.

Oven Roasted Squab ...... Valentine's Day Menu......

Dish of the Week

Oven Roasted Squab with Huckleberries and Fois Toast

Squab may look like baby chicken, but with a thicker layer of fat beneath the skin these farmed gamebirds react to heat more like duck.  Cooked properly the dark meat is rich and delicious. Before I tasted this dish the best squab I ever had was at St. John’s in London, where they grill and serve the heart and liver alongside the whole bird, as close to nose to tail as you get with poultry.

Ryan used two kinds of sage in the dish. He stuffed the birds with garden sage before searing and oven roasting them; for plating, he pulled the petals off the flowering spikes of the pineapple sage we have blooming in the garden as if it were spring ~ probably as confused as we are by the unseasonably warm weather. Alongside the lush purple velvet of the huckleberries, the edible flowers added a tropical note of color to a dish which otherwise would have been all golden hued brown.  We sourced our pineapple sage from one of Occidental Arts and Ecology's popular plant sales a few seasons ago. Its fragrant leaves are wonderful in cocktails.

Chef cooked the squab in three stages. First, over high heat he seared the bird on all sides (including the ends), then popped it in the oven to roast before finishing back in the pan, basting furiously with garlic, thyme and butter as the skin caramelized. It's a labor intensive way to cook each bird but you can't argue with the result: a brilliantly crisp skin with meat the consistency of a medium rare steak. Seeing red when you cut into a gamebird takes some getting used to, but no worries: what the eye perceives as underdone, the mouth will soon convince you is moist and bursting with flavor.

Ryan served the squab over a bed of sautéed endive. He balanced the breast of the bird over the leg and thigh, placed a triangle of toast on top, grated the fois and then dribbled huckleberry sauce over the dish like they were pancakes on Sunday.  There was crunch and then creaminess from the shaved fois which bumped up nicely against the sharp tang of the huckleberries and the soft herbaceous notes of the sage.  Surprisingly, if you take fois gras directly from the refrigerator and use a fine microplaner, it grates into flakes as light as snow. They melt on the tongue, playing off the subtle but distinctly gamy flavor of the squab.

Strip away all the beautiful finesse Ryan brings to this dish and you could well imagine eating it on the ridge in Philo 100 years ago when all the ingredients could be found without leaving the farm.  Though most of the larger animals have fled farther north in the last decade ~ it’s five years since we’ve seen a wild boar around our place ~ we still have small game birds in abundance, wild sage grows everywhere, and huckleberries line the road in from Greenwood Ridge, plentiful when the deer don’t get them first. Even in low water years, shaded by the towering conifers and redwoods, they are one of the great delights of foraging.

Be Mine?

Last week Rachel and I came up with a great cocktail for the Winter Menu called What A Girl Wants. It would have been fine to star with the Valentine’s Menu, but I’m getting (happily) used to the fact that our new bar manager is never satisfied with one drink when she can come up with two.

Be Mine? is without a doubt a more girlie drink than What a Girl Wants ~ which is fine, as the "girls" who frequent our bar come in all temperatures, cool to smoking hot. Made with Tito’s handmade vodka and fresh Meyer Lemon Juice, with a hint of lavender infused simple syrup, it’s finished with a foamy egg white which Rachel will use as a canvas on the night for a simple Crème Yvette heart.

Click on menu to view.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales (unless otherwise noted). Valentine's artwork K2pdesigns.

Hangover Elixers .......A Barndiva Family Album of NYE.......

Last Great Party of the Year

Hometown Celebration

While we understand (and greatly appreciate) most of the sold-out crowd on NYE came to be wowed by Chef's glorious menu, in the front of the lounge some very special friends also shared a great evening...

 Isabel Hales took time away from her studies in London to DJ;  brother Lukka with Chef's wife Rebekah Fancher.

 Studio Barndiva's manager Dawid Jaworski and his lovely wife, Priscilla.

 Daniel Carlson took time off from planning the spring gardens at the farm in Philo to string roses and create fabulous NYE decorations.

The beautiful Amber, Lukka's special events assistant, with her husband the writer Scott Keneally

Chef and Bekah announcing great news: they will be new parents in 2012!

Our incredible kitchen staff (minus Pancho and Danny) before last service of 2011.

Perrier-Jouet electrified streamers lead to an indelible Donna Summer 'Last Dance" moment, (Lladies, drinks on the house!)

Hangover Cures from the Barndiva File

There are hundreds of hangover remedies in the world, but aside from Dean Martin’s “Keep Drinking,” none of them really do more than get you over the hump of a groaning morning after too much fun. One of the great mysteries of life is why, after the age of five, there’s always hell to pay after too much fun, but it's way too soon in the New Year to think Kingsley Amis was onto something when he wrote, “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness, anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you... start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover.” Far better to hope all we suffer from this week is a bit of over-indulgence that time, aspirin, a pot of coffee and that whack-a-mole known as the Human Spirit will eventually remedy.

But should you ever find after a night of too much fun that you lack any one of those things and are suddenly needed to hold up your end of a scintillating conversation, here’s two words you should commit to memory: Fernet Branca.  Though it shares the main qualities of all bitters, which have been used for centuries to revive the senses and open the palate (why they figure it is in so many cocktails), Fernet is more than a simple Amaro (Italian for 'bitter').  First concocted in 1845, Fernet reputedly contains somewhere in the region of 27- 40 herbs and spices used for their restorative medicinal properties. In any given year (the recipes are secret and despite claims to the contrary, known to be mutable) these have been thought to include:  myrrh, chamomile, cardamom, aloe, saffron, mushrooms, fermented beets, cocoa leaf, rhubarb, gentian, wormwood, zedoary, cinchona, bay leaves, absinthe, orange peel, calumba, echinacea, quinine, ginseng, St. John's wort, sage, peppermint oil and, reportedly in the 1940's, codeine.

Two of the favorite hangover remedies we favor at Barndiva, one of them starring Fernet, were revisited and revised this year by our bartender Rachel Beardsley with the thought they might be welcome right about now. They were inspired by my late ex father-in-law, the redoubtable gourmand and world class drinker Tex Feldman, who introduced me to Fernet many years ago after a memorable night drinking and dining at Maxim's a few feet away from Jean Paul Belmondo. A judicious use of Fernet the night after too much fun was one of three bits of drinking advice he gave me which I’ve tried to live by  ~ the other two were pace yourself, and if you can’t afford the good stuff, walk away.  While he never did get around to explaining how once in your cups you remember to pace yourself, trust me, I’m working on it.

Fernet Old Fashioned

Muddle 3 fresh cranberries, a wedge of ruby red grapefruit, 1 sugar cube, and 3 dashes of  Fee Brothers Whiskey Barrel-Aged Bitters* Add 1 oz of buffalo trace bourbon, 1/3 oz of Fernet Branca and shake gently. Top with soda.

Bite the Dog

1 ½ oz Tito’s Organic Vodka 1 ½ oz coconut water ¼ oz fresh squeezed grapefruit juice ½ oz fresh orange juice ¼ oz Amaro Nonino Bitters

Shake and serve over rocks.

*Fee Brothers, Peychauds and Regan's bitters ~ among the best bitters in the world ~ are all but impossible to source retail, which is why we have carried a limited selection of them in the Studio for our clientele since we opened.

From all of us here at the Bar we wish you a wonderful Happy New Year.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales and Dawid Jaworski (unless otherwise noted).