Investing in One's Identity: Eating Out

Ordinarily, when I write for this blog, it's about multi-billion dollar stuff like . And, my position is that it's a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.

This time, I want to make an exception and write about a modest investment; that is, a meal at a restaurant. I've never done that before, and this may be somewhat amateurish, for which I apologize.

However, I do have some minor credentials. I love food (and wine, which I consider a food) and I've worked as a prep. chef in the kitchen of a restaurant. I won't mention the name in order not to embarrass the owner. I still do a lot of cooking at home and have the scars on my hands to prove it.

The restaurant I'm reviewing here is the in Menlo Park, on Oak Grove Avenue, or, to be more precise, Maloney Street, which is an out of the way alley just off Oak Grove. That makes this eatery a 'destination restaurant,' as we say in the trade. 

The venue used to be a homey Italian restaurant, but now it has become ethnically Polish. While Italian, Asian and Mexican restaurants are plentiful on the Peninsula and even in Menlo Park, Eastern European ones are scarce.

This one is, to get to the bottom line, superb. It's quite small, almost cozy, and does have a European feel to it. (Further disclosure: Although I was born in Germany, my father was Polish. I've travelled frequently in Europe for both business and pleasure .)

If you go, you must order 'Polish' on the menu. Not in Polish, of course, (unless you know how, in which case, you're welcome to do it) but from all those choices that have words with lots of cz's and w's in them. The chef knows what he's doing. There's nothing formulaic about the recipes.

My wife and I had different soups and we shared. Pickle Cream Soup (Ogorkowa) and Red Borscht (Barscz Czerwony). Both were wonderful. The opposite of bland.

The Borscht was a little like drinking hot wine; it had a bouquet. There were little dumplings floating in the soup that were just about perfect. Both soups had a tang that probably came from a hint of vinegar and gave it a European quality that, like Proust's Madeleines, gave me a remembrance of things past.  It's like mother's cooking, if your mother was a really great cook.

Our entrees were also distinctly Eastern European, and my wife and I shared both the Stuffed Cabbage Rolls (Golabky) and the daily special which on that day was Kielbasa with sauerkraut. . .richly flavorful. The Cabbage Rolls were light, rather than dense and heavy, and the sausage and sauerkraut with horseradish and mustard struck a chord not heard in my inner ear since my childhood.

The superb dessert crepe with cheese and blueberry sauce completed a meal that suggested home cooking and Gemutlichkeit.

Let's be clear here. This is not an upscale, trendy restaurant where you go to see and be seen. Instead, it appeals to one's personal inner self without making any hip social statements. (As my restaurant chef-mentor once said to me,"In a great restaurant that survives over time, it's really about the food.")

I'm grasping for appropriate metaphors when I say the experience was a high level of what one imagines a romanticized grandma's cooking to have been like. As they used to say, this food warms the cockles of the heart.  I can see ourselves returning frequently.

For more info, check out online.