Gastronomique: Phoenix Ashes
How less Berkeley can you be? The Phoenix Pastificio will move out of its Shattuck ave. location in Berkeley and has already stopped serving lunch. We don't know all the details, but it looks like a greedy landlord has other plans for the space and served them a notice to vacate the premises. Owner Eric Sartenaer, dubbed "the nicest man in the universe" by our significant other, who used to live a block away, would not say anything mean about the situation, so he said very little.
This is a tragedy, of course: the pasta store will move to a new location, at the corner of Strawberry Creek Park in Berkeley, but without the space for the restaurant, and with only a diminished retail front. The wholesale business of the fresh pasta sheets and ravioli is unaffected, but does it mean we won't be able to find the most olive-loaded olive bread again? The chewiest pecan-and-chocolate chewies? Will there be enough foot traffic outside of the gourmet ghetto to make it worth their while to bake the goodies?
Rabbit picture courtesy of artist Aimee Baldwin
We are not worried about the survival of the business, just selfishly concerned about our convenience and some our favorite items which could be lost in the move. The Phoenix will recover: it's built on its name. And Eric, along the "nicest" tag, has definitely earned the "hardest working" label. How many times, when we were dating his neighbor, have we seen him at night, long after closing, finishing this and prepping that.
When we heard about the move, we had to come and say our good-byes over lunch last Saturday. We arrived at 2 p.m., and still had to wait for a table to clear: Obviously we were not the only ones trying to grab a last farewell lunch. We were brought a plate of the irresistible oven-warm fresh olive bread with butter, which we could not help but wolf down. Then we drank up a bowl of vegan asparagus, sweet peas and carrot soup. We tasted more ginger than asparagus, but we licked the plate clean anyway.
We ordered three kinds of pasta: They were out of the rosemary pasta with a beef roast, (bummer), so we settled for a spinach pasta with a creamy morel mushroom sauce; a roasted bell pepper and habanero pasta with okra, red onions, crumbled feta cheese and some shiitake mushrooms, and a porcini pasta with a fiery red pepper paste, potato wedges, wilted spinach and smoked bacon bits.
That it was so good was of course painful: where else could we get these dishes now? And more importantly, where else would we get them with a complimentary and generous helping of wine? That was the beauty of the restaurant: since the liquor license process got lost in the Berkeley bureaucracy, wine was on the house. The meal we ate turned out at $40 for 3 entrees, one bowl of soup, the best bread you could find, and two glasses of wine.
We'll miss the quirky space with the painted murals and the hanging piñatas and that giant rabbit seating at the counter. We'll miss the service, which was amateur in an eager and charming way (on the other hand, the staff on the retail side of the pasta shop could afford to lose some dead wood: we've had our share of passive aggressive behavior there). And we'll miss the convenience of the location, where we could stop after a visit to Cesar or the Cheeseboard. Damn you, dirty greedy Berkeley landlord.
We picked up some fresh pasta: sweet pea pasta, porcini pasta, and key lime-cilantro pasta, all cut into fettuccine, and a loaf of bread to go. Plop them in boiling water and 5 minutes later it's ready. They were out of our favorites: chestnut pasta, lemon meyer pasta; and rose petal pasta are not in season yet. Since then, we've been trying to re-enact the Phoenix experience in our kitchen: that's all we got left.
Phoenix Pastificio new location
1250 Addison St. (at Bonar) in Berkeley