Chef Bradley Ogden’s tasty book tour (and a podcast)

The more I learn about food the more I get this wave-like image in my mind of the generations of influential chefs overlapping. I should really sketch it out someday – maybe I’d come up with something MC Escher-esque. The early icons like James Beard, followed by Julia Child, then their proteges, and their proteges’ proteges, and so on – it’s a different kind of family tree.

With the rise of the creative class, and the polar transformation from a time when being a chef wasn’t at all seen as glamorous, this family tree’s branches are propagating like crazy. After all, who doesn’t want to be called a star chef?

I’m excited about the proliferation of good, thoughtful food, and as someone who thrives on imagination I’m ecstatic that creativity is becoming more important and valued. However, I’m far from smitten with all the new restaurants. I don’t unequivocally love everything termed farm to table, and I shutter at unjustified pretension. It is rare that one of the newer, shinier, dare I say precious cookbooks lands in my lap and gets me this excited so quickly. Holiday Dinners with Bradley Ogden has only been in my possession a matter of days, and it has already become a companion. So let’s rewind a little.

I was graciously invited to meet with iconic California chef Bradley Ogden at one of his greater Bay Area restaurants, Parcel 104. He has a new book coming out just in time for Thanksgiving, and as a fun and delicious sort of book tour he is doing meals from the book alongside the restaurants regular seasonal menu. Cool idea. The fixed price dinners ($34), and lunches ($24), continue through the holidays at myriad locations (listed at the bottom of this post).

I happily followed my GPS and ended up just yards away from the Great America adventure park, in the heart of Silicon Valley. An unlikely spot, I thought, but Parcel 104 is one of the few honest remnants of the once-bountiful orchards that used to blanket the South Bay. (A friend did point me to one acre of Blenheim apricot trees residing in the depths of Sunnyvale, I’ll save that story for another time…) Parcel 104 gets its name from the lot of Bartlett pear trees that were there before the restaurant, and the Marriot complex in which it is located.

On the menus, which are adjusted to highlight the best ingredients that arrive each day, there are things like black Mission figs from One Tree Farm – a single tree that’s so abundant that the harvest is enough to satisfy the demand of this 60-plus seat restaurant.

My fig arrived as an amuse, dusted with fragrant thyme on a cloud of whipped Laura Chenel chevre. As I waited on my first course, a corn-gilded version of his Shellfish Chowder taken from the book, I caught Chef Ogden buzzing around the dining room as if he were hosting a party. He held the door to the comfortable outdoor dining area where I was seated while greeting my server Nicole by first name and following her out to sit with me in between signing books. This is just one of 14 restaurants he owns with his wife Jody and industry veteran partners Michael and Leslye Deller, and I think he knows each of his employees by name, whether they are dishwashers or his head chefs.

As much as Ogden is a celebrity, he seems more comfortable casually chatting than putting on airs. It’s clear he’s ready to snap into action or cook a ten-course meal at any moment, or at least the gears in his head seemed to be in constant motion. He listened intently to my burgeoning theories about how human brains may have gotten bigger because we learned to cook food (thus having less chewing to do, requiring less jaw force and a smaller jaw muscle that allowed the room for our skull to expand – see? I’m not completely out there…).

He threw back humble banter about cultivating the perfect chicken and his fond memories of making sausages in his early San Francisco days when he was training Charlie Trotter and others at the Campton Place Hotel. He’s the relaxed and grounded father of California cooking who teaches through his actions, not overbearing words.

His new cookbook, pigeon-holed as holiday feast book, could never have been executed by someone who wasn’t ready to learn every day, someone who understood ingredients from 35 years of cooking – well beyond Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. The recipes are resounding classics; they are true to what they are. I’ve made four of them already: the vegetable broth is simple but interesting, with a pantheon of flavor; the banana sour cream cake is more moist than moist; the beet and apple borscht a sensation; Rose Levy Beranbaum herself would marvel at his sour cream pie crust.

There are serious meats and delicate desserts – a complete cookbook that outgrows its timely appeal for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. I agree with Ogden’s sentiment to share holiday dinners, but with this book I couldn’t imagine waiting for that kind of annual excuse. Maybe that’s the point, that every day is a holiday with one of Ogden’s recipes. The composed classics that came to my table certainly had that feel.

The dynamicism of his skills show on every page, there’s even a personal guide to hangover cures and practical poetry on the benefits of a ban marie and a double boiler. Not a book I’d judge from the cover, but rather from the candor and refreshing personality of a masterful chef.

Before I ate we sat down to talk. Listen in and you’ll see what I’m saying.

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Lunch and Dinner events to come: Oct. 22 at One Market, Oct. 23 at Lark Creek Walnut Creek, Nov. 6 at Fish Story, Nov. 7 at both LarkCreekSteak and Cupola, Nov. 8 at Yankee Pier Lafayette, Nov. 19 again at Parcel 104, and Dec. 3 at The Tavern at Lark Creek. (Note some are lunch or dinner only, call ahead or check here for reservations and to confirm timing.)