Ko-bar

A jewel box that serves as an airlock for another jewel box. We waited an hour and still left happy, and feeling like this had been good value.

The menu is a line cook's menu, heavy on meat, few vegetables, without a sense of seasons passing. This is supposedly a bar menu after all, fat and salt for lining the stomach. Yet this is a bar that serves 25 dollar glasses of wine, servis compris, attached to one of the city's most ambitious restaurants. It is touted as a testbed for the dining room next door, but much of the menu doesn't seem to have changed since Pete Wells ate here for his review.

Why should it have changed, though, when it is so apt? If you are sitting in this room and drinking cocktails and Côte-Rôtie, sausage and pork pie and pickles in a hot dog bun and fried chicken and steak are exactly the right things to eat. The only problem here is claiming it's a testing ground. Maybe they felt there had to be something ambitious sounding about the bar at Ko, simply because it is the bar at Ko.

The same tension runs through the whole experience - a luxe industrial interior, nearly unlimited amounts of money spent to create the spare lines and hard surfaces of the early years. The laminate is perfect, the light fixtures extremely expensive, the steel barstools subtly over-designed. This hasn't been punk rock for years. Service veers from being hesitant, almost unfriendly, to endearingly earnest. Are we supposed to piss off the guests or is that only on Fridays?

But the food is actually good. It is even, within a particular aesthetic, delicious. In this of all cities and this of all economies, it is hard to eat better for this kind of money, and even harder to do so at a place with this much wine to drink.

Good years

Perhaps not fêted or legendary ones, but pleasing and honest. We poured this too cold, and that was a sin against it. We were hungry, and dinner sat on the table, and we had no time for nicety because we were moving in. Even warmed in our hands, the wine was little more than lean and stubbornly silent. But as the bottle sat, it withdrew its shell, and there was light. It became wholly, wholeheartedly Burgundian. The acid and fruit that initially marked it as Gamay were subsumed into this loamy mass, the occasional blackberry buried therein. The nose especially became celebratory - composed not restrained. It had, in the end, a great deal to say, and I was both sorry it was gone, and that we had not given it air and time before starting.

The clown car

A collection of supposedly great wines behaving badly. The only pleasant one was the Im Sonnenschein, taut, light, complex. The Von Winning 500 was a mouthful of oak and oxidized, raisiny sauvignon, with a subfloor of corrugated cardboard that has been there through every bottle I've had. Kastanienbusch was tired, and tasted like it was from a warmer vintage than actually produced it. Brunnenhauschen nearly made our host cry, disjointed, almost acetic, concentrated fruit feuding with acid at two rapiers' length. The Lemberger was undrinkable.

More supposedly great wines behaving badly. The Pattes Loup was delicious, if nothing unexpected. The Souteronne true to form, meaning slightly funky and rather natural. The Orion was a faceful of volatile acid and bubblegum factory fruit, rather than deep, raspy, leathery, and surprisingly light, as recent bottles have been. The Holger Koch Reserve, capable of greatness, bounced around like a chihuahua on speed, going from mute to ugly to briefly suave to delicious and back to ugly, tasting German one minute, Burgundian the next, and South African in between. The last bottle had been a steady, stately progression, an impressive and entirely expected flowering.

The Classics

Drunk from disposable plastic cups on a cold beach, with the sun in our eyes. We shucked the oysters sitting on a log on the beach, facing Tomales Bay. They were meaty and saline, tasting more of the east coast than the west, with none of the cucumber sweetness we associate with the Pacific. Muscadet is getting riper, fruit becoming more and more of a presence in this pairing, softening the salt and mineral and steel. I miss the spareness, the sense of this being a magic born of cold wind and dark water.

The domaine is under new ownership, Michel having retired and sold to one F. Lallier. The wines are the same, for now. 

A football field of fake yellow silk, the brilliant yellow of lemon peels in the noonday sun. Thunder and torrent drowning out the priest. The awning shaking with the weight of rain. Incense everywhere, in the air, ashes spotting the wet ground a moment, then dissolving. The chanting is inexorable, guaranteed to put you in a foul mood if you weren’t already. The prayer bells lend the occasion the somnolence of a zeppelin slowly deflating. 

The undertakers, efficient, are taking down the funeral decorations while the service proceeds. The deceased apparently do not mind. One accosted me as I brought the departed one more meal, I think he was worried that he would have one more thing to pack. The most clean cut undertaker acts as a conductor, timing our bows, herding us with the efficiency of a jaded sheepdog. Our guests line up to offer one last prayer, the family, arrayed around the coffin, bows deep to thank them. It’s the only human moment in the whole affair. We bow and go round the coffin and bow and burn incense and do not, even once, speak of the dead, her deep gentleness, her sweet tooth, the softness of her hands, the yellow enamel pots with which she cooked, the vibrant richness of her language, the history witnessed by those glittering eyes, the utterly unconditional love she showered on us.

Cherubic relations, with the smiles of the innocent, have their cell phones out, recording everything. I try to imagine when they’ll whip these videos out to show.

The undertaker calls for volunteers to carry the coffin. He has a decent baritone. My cousins and I lift grandma into the hearse. Her sons push the hearse, the family following behind. We wear thin white socks, meant to suggest walking barefoot. Actually walking barefoot is frowned upon. The storm sheets the road with a quarter inch of running water, our socks trap water like wetsuits. My feet embrace asphalt, concrete, tile, the unexpected calm of a street marking underfoot.

Passing from room to room in the crematorium. The decorations suggest politely nondenominational worship, but the organization of the space makes us feel like witnesses to an execution. The final passage is an architectural joke. The coffin rolls across a bare courtyard on an automated forklift, straight Amazon’s wet dreams. My mum’s last sight of the coffin came as it was shunted into a steel oven, roaring with flame.

Afterwards, the undertakers ladle water over our hands, from a pail filled with flowers. 

Vin de joie

Do we really gain by deconstructing joy?

Fer Servadou, carbonic, from the Aveyron. Made by a gentleman named Nicolas Carmarans, who used to run a wine bar in Paris - there seems to be something about the experience of selling wine in Paris that drives people to move to the countryside to make it.

He doesn't make this one anymore but if this was anything to go by, his wines are well worth seeking out.

Old School

90/10 Viura/Malvasia. 6 or more years in barrel. These wines are still fined with egg whites, a practice which speaks to the unyielding traditionalism of its makers, three sisters who are the fourth generation to run the winery.

It was a good year. This was a wine of depth and mystery. Drinking beautifully, but every sip hinting at something in reserve. Quietly aromatic, slightly oxidative, tautness without acid. A muscular and graceful poise.

Oh Montevertine. The first of many middle fingers raised to the Consorzio, and still one of the very best. Nearly all Sangiovese, the remainder Canaiolo, and the odd drop of Colorino. Also from a good year, as evidenced by the existence of Pergole Torte from that vintage. Not light, but with an impression of lightness created by perfect posture. Old fruit sighing out the last of its freshness, leather, the expected aromatics, but all thrown into a new light by that perfect, perfect carriage. Too little of this to go round.