Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [247]
Here is down-home dining, California-style: pork chops served with homemade apple sauce and chunky mashed potatoes; pot roast; beef stew; roast turkey with sage dressing. Seafood is something special, including big servings of Dungeness crab cioppino, calamari, sea scallops, and oysters baked in puddles of garlic butter. Even the house salad—a perfunctory gesture in so many restaurants—comes topped with beets, pickled beans, and tomatoes that come directly from Duarte’s gardens.
The farmland around Pescadero is thick with the thistle-topped stalks of artichoke plants, and artichokes are a Duarte’s specialty. You can get them simply steamed or elaborately stuffed (with fennel sausage), in utterly wonderful omelets at breakfast, or as the foundation of cream of artichoke soup, which several travelers have declared to us is simply the best soup in the world.
To conclude any meal at Duarte’s, you want pie—blue-ribbon pie made from local olallie berries, rhubarb, apricots, or apples heaped into feather-light crusts that are all the more delicious for being homely rather than symmetrical.
D.Z. Akins
6930 Alvarado Rd.
619–265–0218
San Diego, CA
BLD | $$
As folks who frequently complain that urban delis aren’t what they used to be, we were thrilled the moment we walked into D.Z. Akins. The air was perfumed with spiced beef and the bakery shelves up front held a spectacular array of ryes, pumpernickels, bagels, hard rolls, and challahs, plus countless macaroons and cookies, all baked right here. The sandwiches we got were fantastic: hot, fat-striated corned beef radiant with flavor, cut thick and piled between two slices of the best rye we’ve had in years: soft inside with a nice sour smack and a hard savory crust. Full-flavored roast beef was presented in a poppy-seed-spangled hard roll that was also impeccably fresh. And the kosher salami (Vienna brand, the choice deli’s choice) packed a garlic wallop.
We liked our sandwiches so much that we returned to D.Z. Akins for breakfast and plowed into a platter of matzoh brei that was nearly as good as the brei Michael makes (and he makes the best), homemade blintzes, and a plate of bagels and lox. Nothing was short of excellent.
This full-service restaurant also features a soda fountain, the menu of which includes sundaes and sodas of all kinds, from a traditional banana split to one called Prenatal Silliness: chocolate ice cream and pickles, with your topping of choice!
El Gallito
68820 Grove St.
760–328–7794
Cathedral City, CA
LD | $
So popular that it is frequently wait-for-a-table crowded, El Gallito has been serving California-style Mexican food in the Coachella Valley since 1978. It has a broad menu of familiar dishes such as tacos, chiles relleños, enchiladas, and burritos. They’re all quite good, in our experience, but we are especially fond of daily specials that include carnitas (shredded pork) every Thursday, chicken mole (Friday), and menudo (Saturday). The mole is smoky with a pepper zest, cosseting on-the-bone chicken that is ridiculously tender.
We also like El Gallito’s bowls of chili. They are not fire-hot, and they are mighty tasty: either chili Colorado, which is bite-size pieces of beef in a peppery red sauce, or chili verde, which is beef cooked with green peppers, onions, and shreds of tomato. The El Gallito Especial is a half-and-half plate of both kinds of chili. It is also worth nothing that breakfast is available, but starting at 10:00 A.M., when the restaurant opens: huevos rancheros, shredded beef and scrambled eggs, and egg burritos with rice and beans.
El Gallito is an extraordinarily clean and tidy place, outfitted in classic Mexican-restaurant décor (serapes, sombreros, velvet paintings). It operates according to a lot of rules that are posted throughout the dining room and written in the menu. A sign above the cash register warns, “Cash only.” A placard hanging over the dining