Pilgrimage to Plymouth

Friday, June 29, 2018--We made a pilgrimage to Plymouth, California, in Amador County for cigars, wine and hamburgers.  It sounds strange, but the restaurant for lunch, Taste, is in Plymouth, about an hour from Sacramento, in Amador County, the site of many wineries.  One of the dishes they serve for lunch is a mushroom cigar, a stuffed Chinese style roll, standing on a small patty of mashed potatoes.  Absolutely exquisite.  Wines that never leave Amador County, made in small amounts, predominate on the menu and are available at the local tasting room about a mile away, Amador 360.  

Taste is an upscale restaurant in a downscale town.  In fact, except for a few buildings, Plymouth is hardscrabble, fighting to regain some of its lure from its Gold Rush days.  But it's on the way.  We enjoyed the visit a lot:  when was the last time your hamburger was made of trimmings from New York strip steaks?   Ben enjoyed carrot and ginger soup, Richard enjoyed steak tartare followed by an open faced steak sandwich with an egg, and John enjoyed that house hamburger, served only on Fridays.  We all had a flight of wines--Ben and Richard enjoyed local reds while John enjoyed local rosés--some very dry rosé of zinfandel.  Very pleasant.

Along the way we stopped at a roadside farm for vegetables.  It has obviously been around for quite a while, with its old tractors and farm machinery and ancient shipping labels plastered on the barn walls.  The local vegetables are straight from the fields, but the imported, non-local, veggies seemed very pricey.   We loved the garden ornaments in the shape of animals and, yes, even a dragon.




We returned to Sacramento to prepare for another lovely meal out.  This time at Allora, a restaurant that has been open for three months east of Sacramento.  Ben enjoyed three different types of Pacific oysters, John an insalata di friuti di mari.  Richard had a fine anchovy laden salad and Andres a mixed salad.  We moved on to short rib for Richard, bucatini with sea urchins and sea scallops for Andres.  John enjoyed cavatelli with veal sweetbreads, while Ben had a reprise of the seafood salad.    Andres and Richard know the maitre-d.  That made the evening more fun. We introduced Richard and Andres to one of our favorite wines:  aglianico, an Italian wine, but this one was made from the aglianico grapes grown by Italians in  Paso Robles.