Years ago, Joe and I stopped for lunch at an oyster shack north of San Francisco. It was a quiet autumn weekday. Only one other couple were there enjoying the oysters and the weather. Eventually, the woman asked me where we were from and a pleasant, brief chat ensued. They lived just north of Los Angeles, and, she said, they were having their “Highway 1 fix”.
That wasn’t hard to understand. To call it addictive seems quite reasonable. California’s Highway 1 runs close to the Pacific Coast for most of its length. If you’re a curious traveler who likes a varied landscape, it’s a fascinating and often stunning drive. I was, indeed, due for a Highway 1 fix, and for the first time in almost ten years, last week I had a chance to do that.
I’d wanted to go to Duarte’s Tavern for a long time, but never managed to hit the tiny town of Pescadero south of San Francisco around mealtime. This probably was because we were inevitably making a beeline for Randall Grahm and his merry band of winesters at Bonny Doon Vineyard, which is perhaps 25 miles south of Pescadero. Winemaker Grahm was a big fan of Stanley Elkin, the novelist who taught at Washington University. Joe was going to introduce them, an event that unfortunately never happened. Grahm survived the disappointment and continues to turn out first-rate beverages.
But I digress, as I so often do. Pronounced DOO-arts, the tavern has been around since 1895. Despite the road trippers from Baghdad-by-the-Bay and Silicon Valley, an appearance on the Food Network and a James Beard Award for American Classics, this is still mostly a very unassuming place. Several small dining rooms and a bar feel much like a few ancient spots in south St. Louis, with wood paneling, family photos and a seemingly random collection of art.
An early evening dinner visit started with a herd of unmanned fire trucks parked nearby. Inside, a sign announced self-seating, although they do take reservations – see their website, which has wonderful photos and even suggestions about what to do while waiting for a table. Sure enough, in the first dining room there were three or four tables of CAL FIRE guys, the folks who fight wildfires in California. Talk about local atmosphere – this was more promising than truck drivers.
It’s artichoke country hereabouts, the fields of the quirky-looking plant often seen from Highway 1, and the signature soup is cream of artichoke. Creamy and rich, it satisfies. The other house soup is cream of green chile, and the kitchen wisely offers half and half, a bowl with some of each ladled into it. The combination punches up the richness a little, and it’s a good pairing My pal and I shared a bowl; they don’t do cups. The bread seems to be made in-house, baguette-like, served hot and roughly cut, another mark of the home-cooking feel of things.
A couple of days of deeply inhaling the scent of the Pacific had made me hungry for oysters. The Fanny Bays on Duarte’s menu were large and dazzling, a fine example of what people talk about when they say an oyster is creamy. Certainly that mineral-y saline taste comes first, but after a moment’s chewing, the texture evolves and the tongue realizes there’s something else going on.
The Duarte family came from the Azores, so the roots of the cooking tradition is more or less Portuguese. The first clue may be linguica on the sandwich menu. But it’s particularly evident in another signature dish, cioppino. Despite its name, cioppino isn’t from Italy, it began in San Francisco, apparently out of the Italian-American community in the neighborhood of North Beach. The stew uses several kinds of seafood with tomatoes, onions, celery and parsley. Duarte’s includes cumin in theirs, which they say is Portuguese.
The star of the wide bowl of cioppino is a generous amount of Dungeness crab. The supporting cast includes shrimp, clams, mussels and a piece or two of fish. Nearly all are perfectly cooked – I found one of the large shrimp that had been overcooked, but that was the exception. The ruddy, surprisingly vegetal liquid, was not overwhelming with its notes of cumin at all, but I had hoped for a stronger flavor of fish stock in it. It arrives, of course, with a cracker for the shells, although they were often easy enough to do by hand before popping a segment of meat directly into a waiting diner’s mouth, and real cloth bibs, none of these static-y plastic things. It’s the most expensive thing on the menu at $40, but a very large serving.
Going in another direction entirely, a pork chile verde stew was satisfying, the meat tender but lean, the sauce thick with chile and with a fair amount of heat, easily calmed by the rice that accompanied it. A crisp red cabbage slaw with celery seed rode shotgun, the texture a nice contrast. This, and a number of other options were in a second menu that changes often – make sure you see both before final decisions are made, because this is the sort of spot that may well have quite a few local dishes arousing curiosity, things like sand dabs and abalone.
Duarte’s is a pie house, and while that cioppino was really good, I can certainly see making a meal out of soup and pie. For instance, the Pacific coast grows some berries we don’t see here in the Midwest. Thus, it’s wise to take advantage of the chance to have olallieberry pie. A 20th Century hybrid of the loganberry and the youngberry, the flavor hits somewhere between blackberry and raspberry, a lovely spot indeed. The pies arrived slightly warm, clearly never subjected to the duress of refrigeration, the crust remaining flaky and showing the irregularity that marks pies made by human hands. My pal went for pear pie on the list of specials, its honeyed flavor strong rather than the wan-ness pear can sometimes lapse into, and the lattice crust equally satisfying.
Service was small-town casual, very friendly and obviously used to folks asking detailed questions about items like the crab sandwiches. (Turns out it’s not a crab cake, more like a crab salad sandwich.) The presence of sandwiches is important to note. The prices are higher than most of us Midwesterners would expect from a place like this, but careful choices can help the budget. I suspect walking in at 10 a.m. for coffee and a piece of pie is far from unheard of. Speaking of time, they close at 8 p.m. every day. Do take a peek at the garden behind the tavern if you’re there in daylight.
Duarte’s is a worthwhile, atmospheric stop. It’s just not cheap.
Duarte’s Tavern
202 Stage Road, Pescadero, CA
650-879-0464
Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Difficult
Smoking: No
Entrees: $18-$40
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Sounds like a very enjoyable place. I’ve eaten there recently and the food (and the company) was exquisite and quite delightful.