YES, I HAVE EATEN LATELY TOO

On the advice of a friend who could be trusted, we went ‘tuther day to dine at a place just around the corner from our house.  The Main Street Garden & Café is an unassuming, remodeled house in the middle of a residential Soquel neighborhood and, if it wasn’t for a largish mosaic sign out front, you would probably never find it.

We didn’t have any preconceived notions so we were more than pleasantly surprised by what we found.  First off, everybody who worked there seemed to be twenty-something and when it came to wait staff, the owners must have called the employment agency and said, “Just send us one of each kind.”  One Nordic amazon, one curly-haired, tie-dyed hippie chick, one urban goth, a homo and a skater… plenty of ink and metal bits everywhere and much more than a passing acquaintance with the food and wines.  This works well because their customer base appears to be just as eclectic.

The kitchen staff were appropriately covered in body art and black t-shirts and dancing around the stove to metal music (which, since it was divided from the dining area by only a half wall pass-thru, occasionally conflicted with the dulcet strains of Loreena McKennitt in the front of the house…). This by no means implies that they don’t know what they are doing back there.  All their produce is organic and locally sourced and they buy all their meat on the hoof and butcher, cut and prep it all themselves, including smoking meats, packing sausages and the like.  There is a massive wood-fired oven where they produce their breads, slow cooked dishes and pizzas which gives everything that yummy, campfire dinner hint-o-smoke.

Tama had a slow roasted pork shoulder that came with boiled potatoes and mustard greens and I ordered up their classic goat pot pie which was slow cooked nanny goat in a savory sauce with taters and veg all wrapped in a crusty shell and wood-fired… served with a mint salsa. Wash it all down with a couple of pints of Murphy’s fine Irish Stout and you have one happy fat guy.

Having left a wee bit of room for dessert, we shared a fig & olallieberry galette. This is a wood-fired, flaky pastry dough wrapped around (obviously…) a fig and a puddle of olallieberries along with some sweet seasonings and a dollop of some manner of mascarpone style cheese, yum-yum. Boy, oh boy, it made the old taste buds sit right up and say howdy.

We were going through the list of our friends we wanted to bring here when they came to town but, when the check arrived, we pared that list down to friends who would like to come here dutch treat… It took a Franklin to get out the door, but we did have a$14 appetizer, several drinks, two dinners and dessert.  The only sense of being cheated was that we couldn’t afford to eat there all the time.