Tales From an Urban Chef

I like beer. If you asked anyone who knew me if I liked beer, they would give you a resounding yes. We travel north in California very frequently. My birthday was coming up and it was time for us to make a change. We’ve been camping to San Luis Obispo before but never have taken an extended trip south. Our route was from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, squirreling through small towns and experiencing California first hand via our car. I conducted a beer dinner at my former employers restaurant and wanted to stop by for a tour. The beer is wonderful, the staff was very friendly and we had a great time, albeit a tad sick but beer has healing qualities aka feel no pain so here are a few pictures of our tour. I apologize in regards to photo quality. We aren’t photographers and being under the weather that day. I was shaking like a leaf. Enjoy. -Chef Kevin.

This is the outside of the brewery. It was friggin’ freezing that day.

Here are the grain holders. Only those containers hold the grain to make the beer. They were huge.

The beer list was comprehensive.

They offered plenty of S.W.A.G. and reasonable prices.

Various views of the bar and surrounding areas.

Shots of our wonderful brews including a sampler and the 14th anniversary. I bought a bottle there. Finished it last night. I don’t lay anything down but wine unfortunately. Cold beer is like a sirens trance.

These were the FSW DBA tanks we got to walk through. They produce 75% of the beer consumed in the central coast and they are by far the most productive of any brewery in that area.

Here are some pics of the machines that crack the grain used to make the beer. There is also pics of barrel fermentation. They weren’t aging the beer in the wooden barrels but simply fermenting it in the barrels to extract some of the oils but not in an aging process.

everything is automated

This is a very interesting read from a yahoo blog.

My menu at The Monk’s Kettle has morphed over the last two years. I’ve grown exponentially in regards to how I approach food, how I design menus and what people should eat when they enter the restaurant. I’ve also watched many documentaries on food, have researched animal husbandry and why people buy organic. Here are some of the products that I chose and why I chose them.

The approach I took with how I created the original menu at The Monk’s Kettle was the ingredients had to be natural. I’ve not always been able to do this in past restaurants because I was really never in the decision-making position to have these items available. There were always obstacles which were mostly surrounded around budget. I would see chefs I worked under being given direction to steer away from higher end products in order to keep their food costs in line. We took a different approach at Monk’s. We provide the best product that is available and the cost was passed along to the customer. They know what they are buying and will pay to have the best products presented to them.

I always used natural proteins like Creekstone, Naturewell and Premium Gold angus beef. There was never any other option. It had to be hormone, chemical free and humane cattle raising practices had to be in place in order for them to be able to sell the product to my restaurant. Our chicken, pork and lamb all followed suit. In my strive to keep moving forward with natural products took a turn when I watched the documentary Food Inc. I learned during the viewing of this film that beef cattle in the vast majority of ranches across the country were fed mainly on corn. This was not ever to ensure they had a vegetarian diet but was merely a way to increase the weight of the cattle to give the purveyors of this product a higher yield. Actually cattle cannot digest corn at all and have to be given antibiotics because of the acid produced trying to digest something that their stomachs are not designed to do caused ulcerations in their stomaches which could kill them so they were pumped full of chemicals to keep them healthy and keep them eating corn.

This practice raised serious questions in my mind so I made a call that evening to my meat company representative asking him what feed my steer were given since he said it was a vegetarian diet and low and behold, corn was used as a finishing feed to fatten them up right before processing. I immediately removed this product from my menu and went with two different types of grass-fed only beef. Estancia Beef from Uruguay and Humbolt Grass Fed beef from Humbolt County family farms in Northern California. There was no other choice. The bi-product of serving corn-fed beef to Americans has also helped in the increased obesity problem not to mention the resistance to antibiotics many Americans face from the diet they choose.

I take what I serve very seriously. If there is organic produce available, I will only buy organic. Chefs I don’t think are outspoken enough about the importance of buying grass-fed beef, organic produce and using products that do not contain trans fats. My olive oil I use in my vinaigrettes is thirty dollars a gallon. The honey I use for my cheese plates and dressings comes from a family owned California bee farm. Again, only the best for my customers. My eggs are cage free, my milk and cream are all natural. I recently read a food blog where the question was who had the best french fries and the overwhelming majority said McDonald’s. Do they know how many chemicals go into the making of those things including the use of beef fat? High fructose corn syrup? It is absolutely never to see my kitchens dry storage. I encourage chefs and restaurateurs to re-examine what they put on people’s plates before they serve it to them. It speaks volumes on their own philosophies on the appreciation of good, wholesome food.

I lived in the east bay for about nine years. Oakland was my first ‘hood,’ chock full of interesting places to eat and drink with local accents and some great world cuisine. After living back in San Francisco for over a year now, there are some things that I miss about the east bay. The accessibility, the ease of driving around on city streets without feeling like you were going to hear some crunch of a single geared hipsters bike under your front wheels…well maybe that’s not really a bad feeling. The dive bars were fun and were close to your door step. We also lived in a wonderful loft in the industrial section of Berkeley or as we fondly referred to it as “Bizerkely.” Fun, fascist and weirdly left winged and not always in a good way but affordable and some great places to eat and drink were very close to home. Here is a list of some of my favorite places to frequent when I’m in the twin cities of Oakland and Berkeley.

Sea Salt Berkeley

Luka’s TapRoom Oakland

Drunken Fish Oakland

Pizzaiolo Restaurant Oakland

Bar Cesar Berkeley

Camino Oakland

T-Rex BBQ Berkeley

Oakland Grill

Jupiter Berkeley

I don’t care about college students. They don’t faze me. They don’t bother me. I don’t care if I’m up to my eyeballs with them as long as I can still get a double IPA called the “Quasar” at Jupiter. Trust me, there are a lot of college kids that go there. They are just fine. Well mannered and they just sit there lazily drinking beer and munching on pizza which is what Jupiter does well. I highly suggest the mushroom pizza called the “Odysseus” and the shrimp called the “Circe.” Both are outstanding. The beers are solid as well. One word of advice if you snag an outside space. Take your time. If you order apps and any entree, make sure you tell your server to pace out your meal or it will plop all in your lap at once. We had to learn that lesson about the third time this happened. The outside is beautiful with teenage redwoods and plenty of seating space. Sunday is live Bluegrass First come, first serve.