Last Saturday, Aron and I drove out to Sonoma to celebrate the release of Andrew Tarlow’s and Anna Dunn’s new cookbook, Dinner at the Long Table, with Scribe winery. It was a particularly special evening for many reasons—most of all because it brought together some of our fondest memories of both New York and California, giving a homecoming feel to it. It’s likely that Tarlow’s restaurant Diner, which sits under the Williamsburg bridge in Brooklyn, will forever be given that designation of “our favorite restaurant”—even as other places may come to, in actuality, supplant it. It’s like that book that you read when you were seventeen. Who knows if it would be your favorite today? And yet it will always be.
It’s always a little intimidating to walk into a party where you don’t know anyone, but that changed very quickly as the wine started to flow and the oysters were slurped.
Dinner was on Moon Mountain, where it’s rumored that the beautiful views make beautiful wines: on a clear afternoon, you can see all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. I couldn’t help but take some photos to share…
We bought the cookbook, which seems a bit more grown up than Diner (not surprising, as Tarlow’s restaurant list has grown to include Marlow & Sons, Romans, Reyard, and Achilles Heel, as well as the Wythe hotel), and which has an intimidating level of comfort with large cuts of meat, but which is intriguing in its exuberance. I’ve already dog-eared some cocktails to start with while I work up my confidence to dive in. On the back, there is a quote from the comedian Aziz Ansari: “Andrew’s restaurants are great and I assume these recipes are from there and not from some bad restaurant I don’t enjoy.”
That sounds about right to me. There’s a romance to these menus, a romance to those restaurants, that one wants to be a part of whether or not one does the cooking. I felt lucky to be a part of it on Saturday.
P.S. Our Marlow & Sons. And becoming regulars.
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