351: Aura Bora

21:00It's just green bean and sage. But it was very fun. And last year, I think it was a few million impressions. Drew Barrymore drank it on our show. This year was on the Today Show a couple of times. So it's been, you know, no, we don't sell a ton of units of it. I mean, you're following the Dr. Brown's model. 100%. I mean, Dr. Brown's, everyone knows they do a Thanksgiving and, you know, but that's also a very different product. I mean, Joan Soda and Dr. Brown's. Joan Soda has done a turkey and gravy flavor, I don't know, maybe for 20 years. So, yes, there was a tried and true path for doing this.

21:34I think for us, I'm trying to take people from like disgust to delight as soon as possible. Very cool. I get the product, pass it on the Thanksgiving table. Oh, this is so disgusting. And then hopefully you and your uncle and aunt try it and like it. What I do love, absolutely, absolutely love is Dry Guys. Thank you. Which is an N.A. bottle. It's an N.A. martini. You collab with Grazze. Shouts to those guys. You sent me a case. It went in like two weeks. I love it. I love that product so much. I'm a former martini fan when I was drinking, and I just think this really fills the gap for me. Brilliant product.

22:14Congrats. Thank you. It was really, really fun. And making anything with Andrew Bannon is really fun in general. He's got great energy. Yes, totally does. Yeah, it was a totally non-sparkling water for us, and the reception was strong enough that we'll have a few more for you next year. Oh, cool. So Dry Guys, is that just like a subcategory of Ouroboros. We wanted a, uh, this is a drive that Maddie and I were taking and trying to think of, okay, we hate the word mocktail. It sounds just so condescending. Um, I don't really like saying N-A cocktail, even though that's what it is. Cause it just kind of feels like a word jumble.

22:48What if we found something that suggested that of course there's no alcohol in this, but it's a separate little thing below Ouroboros and dry guys that we came up with. Um, yeah, we're quite fun it's cool and and so when you're thinking about a martini how does olive oil play into the mix because it was a puzzle i think obviously people snarked it hard when it dropped because you're like what's up with that but that's what you want you want people to like before tasting it but then you taste you're like man i love this so it was initially i have to give credit to andrew again he was we were at expo east two years ago he had a very big launch a few months before that.

23:25And he came over and said, hey, what if we make a olive oil martini? And I just thought, you know, Andrew's has so much energy, so many ideas, but I can't give any real credence to this. And then a few months later, I thought about it and said the same thing to him and vice versa. He went back and forth for more than a year to realize, you know, let's just do this thing. Let's just try to formulate it. And felt like, okay, olive oil, yeah, people have dirty martinis. They're familiar with the olive and martini, of course. And thankfully, really, really liked when it started to taste like. Okay, we can actually make a very convincing, non-alcoholic olive oil martini that hopefully folks that have given up drinking really enjoy it as much as folks that do drink, but want a couple of days where they're not drinking.

24:02No, totally. So dry guys, I mean, that could be even bigger than Ourobori, I feel. Possibilities are endless. I mean, where do you take it? And you just hinted that there's a couple of products coming. What can you tell us? I would say similar to this one, we would love for it to be a product that it clearly has a actual alcoholic product in mind, but is not so close to it such that you can't distinguish it. Like I hope you had this experience with the olive oil martini of, no, martini is so much alcohol. It wasn't actually heavy the way a martini is. You can drink a few of them. We'd love to do a similar thing where, hey, this is the sort of thing you can have at 5.30, but if you wanna have three of them, that's fine too.

24:39We're not gonna weigh it down with kind of heavy alcohol replacements that I think a lot of non-alcohol companies do in an effort to try to make it almost identical to the alcoholic product. We were thinking, hey, it doesn't have to be almost identical, kind of just a hint of this, but giving you a similar use experience. You were wise in that you funneled the flavor of vermouth over gin. I felt vermouth right away. And that's like, for me, that's the iconic flavor profile of a martini over the gin, or you can do a Vest of Bruns 50-50, all that shit. Great. Yeah, that was, again, more credit than Andrew's do because he had so many good ideas in that formulation.

25:19Yeah. Well, I'd be here for a G &T. I'd be here for any of these, like, you know, quote unquote NA drinks. And please stay in touch with all that stuff. I will. Paul, let's talk about the year in media. I think you're really plugged into food media. It seems like this year there's been a real transfer of energy, maybe slightly away from recipes, towards CPG, towards beverage. and it seems like the coverage of the quote unquote shoppy shop, shout out to Emily Sundberg, has really gotten people interested who maybe haven't thought about products. And I think I wanna get your sense of like, you know, we've got Andrea Hernandez at Snackshot, Nate Rosen, you got all these folks, just many more and plus the trades covering what you do.

25:58And it seems like consumers, like people we wanna focus in here at Taste, really interested in hearing about the Ouroboros drops as opposed to maybe like recipe content. What do you think? Definitely true. I think some of it is, I'll give credit to media first of one. They've done a great job writing about it. I mean, Andrea has made such a fun item that's in your pantry. It's like so unique. Imagine if I was telling you, hey, this movie that's coming out, it's in your home. I'm like, oh my gosh. Completely. I'm intimately part of the story. I've bought that before. Or you can go buy it anywhere.

26:30100%. Buy it online. Any store you'd like. So that's the first piece. The second is the retailers. Retailers have done such a good job in the last few years of not just introducing new products to consumers. Of course, that's the retailer's livelihood depends on, hey, we sell 90 % of the same products and we take 10 % and give new products every year and we need people to pick up a few of those new products. I think what they've done even better in the last few years, and I can name retailers too that have done an exceptional job of this, is not just give the entrepreneur space on the shelf but kind of space in their own owned media.

26:59Maybe they have a newsletter. Maybe they have – Whole Foods does such a great job with people's faces in the aisle of, hey, made in New Jersey, made in New York, made in Pennsylvania. It's local. And consumers care so much about that. I've been joking this year that the farmer's market is just a new mall. Like that's just completely, that's totally the new mall. What a good call. Except when I was a kid in the mall going to like Lids and Sharper Image, I didn't get to meet the man or woman that started Lids or Sharper Image. I get to actually meet and shake their hand and talk about this particular snack or beverage.

27:25How fun. How fun. And you can also pick it up for like$3.99. Exactly right. It's not like a crutch filled, like, you know,$8 ,000 stereo system. I was just in Phoenix this weekend and I got to go to Monsoon Market. I think it's a great example of the way they merchandise, the way they have all the founder profiles. And it's like a major credit to the indie retailers that are doing the work to help promote you guys. 100%. Love Monsoon Market. I could name probably a few of those in every town that have done an awesome job. Maybe none as well as Monsoon Market. But yeah, they've done a great job of making consumers who might not have read the snack shot care even just wandering into a store.

28:00Completely. And I think it's just starting. I think we're really just at the start of like products as content. And I think someone smart is going to write a great piece about it. Maybe it's Emily. Maybe it's somebody else about we're at this wave of kind of changing our energies. Okay, let's talk about formulation and like the way you R &D. How do you actually come up with your next SKUs and your quarterly drops or your monthly drops it is? I mean, I want to get a sense of are you seeking out flavor profiles through restaurants? Are you cooking at home a lot? Is it your friends and family making requests?

28:31So it started, I'll go way back to the beginning because we've gotten smarter and smarter at it. Way back at the beginning, I was just selfish and I thought, what do I want in a sparkling water? And I hoped that others would too. Turns out I want lemongrass coconut in a sparkling water. Cool. Others don't. That's what the sales data shows. So we thought, okay, we have to get a little bit smarter. Can we use similar ingredients you've seen in other category players? It's way easier to convert someone to something they kind of know. Almost like if you're building a cult, you need to start with something you're familiar with of, oh, you like hiking?

29:02Our cult likes hiking as well. It's Trojan horse, baby. Yeah, we just hike and, you know, worship goats, et cetera. So for us, it felt like, okay, you drink sparkling water. I drink sparkling water. You drink lemon sparkling water. We actually have a Meyer lemon and we've added ginger to it. And it's just close enough that it ends up being, one, hopefully a fresh new formulation you haven't tried, but also close enough to something you're familiar with that you don't have to go way out on a limb the way you might have to with, say, lemongrass coconut. For our monthly drops, I'd say we think less about that because we know, hey, it's going to our owned audience.

29:31We're sending it to our list. They are clearly sparkling water aficionados. So for example, in January, we're selling a cherry key lime flavor. That one was entirely crowdsourced. Sent out a survey. I think we got 2 ,500 replies. And cherry was the number one ingredient. And somewhere down the list was lime. And we thought, ah, key lime is a little more fun. and actually some, a consumer I need to, I wish I remembered their name said, make me a, they said make me, which I thought was so funny. Make me a zero calorie Sonic cherry lime drink. Sonic sells this cherry lime drink. Yeah, it's great.

30:04I love it. I hope that's what this tastes like. They can tell me in January. Oh my gosh. And then the February is gonna be hitting soon, which we just tasted on. Correct. Yeah, we made this yesterday. This is pineapple, holy basil. I think pineapple was probably more like stats of, okay, people are really enjoying pineapple drinks. It's my favorite Spindrift. I mean, that pineapple. It's so great. It's so good. So great. And anything I've tried pineapple in this year, I thought, wow, that's like just a delightful, different experience. But you can still, it's still chuggable. Which I think some odd fruits are not, they're more sippable.

30:37And we tried it with a number of things. I liked kind of the vague, sweet, herby note from the holy basil. And we were going to call it Tulsi, but I just thought holy basil is such a fun thing to put on the camera. It's fun. Yeah. They both are great. Yep. Have you ever played with kimchi? That's so funny. I got sent a kimchi spritz yesterday that I need to try. So I will 100 % try it, but I love kimchi. We should collab. We're putting on our book in April, Shouts to Korea World. And you know what? I feel like if anyone's going to put kimchi in a really cool sparkling water, it's going to be Ouroboric.

31:10Thank you. That is a very nice compliment. I'll take it. All right. Where do you want to be in five years? I guess in five years, we'd love for people to say, oh, my favorite sparkling water, My favorite premium sparkling water is Ouroboros. When you're talking about craft, it's Ouroboros. That's not to say, I'll speak to beer drinkers for a second, of, hey, plenty of people that drink Bud Light also drink Sierra Nevada. I hope when I ask them their favorite beer, the one they'd won on their birthday, they want Sierra Nevada. That's not to say they can't drink something else at the tailgate. So I would love to occupy that same space in a consumer's mind.

31:39And obviously, the category is growing and growing and growing. And we have juice-infused sparkling waters. We have CBD sparkling waters. We have sparkling waters that drink more like sodas. So it's getting to be a very large category, which is great. And I hope that's how consumers think about it. Probiotics. We haven't even talked about that. Probiotics sparkling waters. Absolutely. Oh, gosh. So I don't want to create a functional drink. I'd like to just be in that world of, oh, if I'm a creative person and I'm looking for a unique artisanal craft experience, Ourobor is the one I'm grabbing.

32:08So in five years, I hope you can find us at any retailer that you can currently find, say, San Pellegrino. Oh, man. That means like Walmart. That would be great. Yeah. Have you pitched them yet? Uh, we have, we have. How does that go? Like when you go to like, I mean, cause I've heard from plenty of founders that Walmart's actually a great brand to work with as a small founder. It 100 % is. Yeah. I think they were very fast on post-ecom movement. Obviously, I can't remember what year it was when they bought jet.com, but Walmart was one of the fast-movers. 18, 17, maybe even before that, 16. Yeah.

32:37That didn't work out so well. I think they knew, okay, there's something going on here where new products have a route to market around us, we want to be a part of the conversation. So in 2024, we'll be in about 600 Walmarts. Oh shit, you're there already. Oh my gosh, I'm feeling ignorant. I see you at specialty, but how many actual stores are you available in right now? Today, we're in about 8 ,000 stores. I hope we'll probably end next year somewhere between 11 and 12. That's amazing. How big is your company? How many staff members? 13. Oh my Lord. You're doing well. I love to hear this. This is so cool.

33:13You put your phone number on every can. Yes. So how, and that's like your phone number, like literally the phone you have in your pocket right now. Correct. Like how often does it ring? Uh, I bet I get 20 ish missed calls a day. Um, from consumers though, probably only, you know, eight or nine. A lot of those are just random folks that have since, because the number's on the can, they now can sell us freight services or boxes, et cetera. That's the challenge I would imagine. I know. Unfortunately, I've said this to too many people and they don't know. Oh, I can just like text or call this number.

33:39So eventually someday I'll change my number. But for right now, yes, it's on the can. But I bet I get one or two delightful conversations with a consumer seven days a week, which is really fun. So, I mean, this could be called like a stunt. But the fact that you're like, you know, following through with the bit like years later, it seems like, you know, how do you like manage your life by being like having a phone number in your pocket? But I mean, maybe not. Maybe that's like what you thrive on and drives you. I am a chaotic person in general. So I was already kind of disheveled before this business.

34:11The business has just given me a good excuse to be disheveled. So I won't blame Ourobori for that. I was already like this, and now I just have more things to add to the chaos. I love it. Paul, in This Is Taste, we asked guests about their discerning taste. So to close this interview, here's a little rapid-fire, fast-and-furious taste check. Are you ready? I'm ready. The best breakfast food? Bacon, egg, and cheese. On a roll? Ideally. Oh, my goodness. The best dessert? For me, it's a chocolate lava cake. Okay. Let's go there. Why? You know, I kind of think when you see chocolate lava cake on a menu, chocolate lava cake had a moment in time and it's now kind of, it's almost, it's like playfully being in the past.

34:50Like you kind of know the moment has passed, but when you see it on a restaurant menu, whether you are at an Applebee's or the opposite end of the spectrum, you just have to order it. Yeah. I mean, there's a liquid molten lava inside of a salad. With a lot of chocolate. With a lot of chocolate, with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. I don't know how you could make a better dessert. That's peak. Your favorite American fast food chain? In-N-Out. Okay. Has Ouroboros been pitched to fast food? We have not. Or QSR. No, most of them have a pretty solid Coke or Pepsi contract. Right. We've talked to, I'd say, some of the fast, casual, healthy QSRs for sure.

35:28Yeah. And hopefully you can find us there in the next year. What about SG, Sweetgreen? What about it? What about it? We'll try our best. Yeah. We'll try our best. Seems like it would fit perfectly with those guys because they like doing limited drops. You guys have playful brands. I hope that's true. Let's get into grocery. Your favorite grocery store, we'll call it the National Chain Edition. So I grew up in the Northeast, but I actually didn't shop Wegmans because I grew up in Westchester County. We didn't have a Wegmans at the time. I've since rediscovered Wegmans, and it's like the most delightful regional chain.

35:58Um, if I had to throw out a similar one on the West coast of call it a hundred ish stores or 20 plus, um, new seasons in the Pacific Northwest is a similar example where they have really strong private label, a really great hot bar, amazing samples. And it's like a big open, delightful space. So Wegmans and new seasons are my coast. I love this call about Wegmans. I really don't talk about it enough. I want to get the founders on the show because it is truly my favorite regional in the Northeast. It's the greatest. Yeah. They, they know how to sell products, both their own products, and they're so good at introducing consumers to new products.

36:31Oh, my God. That's the truth. And they have the location now in the East Village, which is amazing. I can't wait to see it. I need to stop by. And I love their meat, too. That's an aside. The way they do chicken is just, the way they butcher it is kind of amazing. Okay, good. All right. Your favorite grocery store, we'll call it, like, quirky local edition. So I won't say Erewhon, even though I'm positive that's a popular answer here. In the Bay Area, I'm in love with Byrite. I think that's a pretty popular one. Luke's Local is a similar quirky local chain. Both of them do a great job with making their own goods.

37:04They have really intimate stores, which I kind of like. I like when you go to buy right, you bump into people. There's just kind of a funny idea of both of us leaving our jobs to try to get there at 530, and then we're fighting over Manchego. It kind of is a return to our caveman roots. In a very tech San Francisco way, I must say. Yes. Your favorite cookbook of all time. This is not a fair answer, but my mom has this amazing, her own cookbook of her own recipes, and then everything she's taken from her mom and grandmother, et cetera. So it's only not a fair answer because it's on my phone now.

37:37Yeah. Finally, my eldest sister, Emily, scanned through every page. Digitized it, yeah. She did it. Love it. Yeah. That's really cool. Great answer. I think that's perfect. Perfect answer. Do you have a recent cookbook discovery? Anything that's crossed your desk? Anything that you've seen online? I have loved cooking through, I probably cooked through half of it now, Molly Baz's book. I haven't tried the new one yet, but Cook This Book was so good. Fun, inventive, I think not overly technical for those of us that are not excellent chefs. Her new book's great. We published her here. That's a great call.

38:08I love that. Do you ever shop at Omnivore in San Francisco, the indie cookbook store? Oh, yes. It's in Noe. Yeah, it's in Noe. Exactly. Noe Valley. They are so good at recommendations. So good. There's a woman that works there that you just tell her the kind of thing you'd like to cook. And I imagine her kind of like Ollivander from Harry Potter. It's probably Celia, the owner. Probably right. Yeah, Celia is amazing. She's like an absolute legend in our industry. Oh, that's amazing. Okay, I didn't know that. It's a great store. Yeah, you could say, I'm looking for a lemon tart. And she'd go, oh, page 11, this book, top left shelf.

38:36Love that so much. Your favorite beverage other than Ouroboros? I love chocolate milk. Okay, interesting choice. I think it's a really cool choice because there's so many bad versions of chocolate milk. There are. What makes chocolate milk great for you? I'd say two things. One, it needs to be very thick. I think, you know, Yoo-Hoo was fun as a kid, but that's just like a water-based beverage. We're looking for whole milk. This isn't 2%. It has to be whole milk if you're drinking chocolate milk. The second, I'm not looking for a Hershey's syrup chocolatiness. I can make that myself. I'm also not looking for a mocha, like it might get in a coffee.

39:09I'm kind of looking for like a candy bar, like a nice candy bar taste. Alexander Farms does like my favorite version in California. They have, I think it's called A2 Milk, but they make a tiny one that you can find almost everywhere. And it's like the most tempting toss in the cart at the last second grocery store purchase. Even if it's$6.50, you're just going to do it. Done. Doesn't matter. We have Ronnie Brook Farm chocolate milk here on the East Coast. I'm sure it's a similar thing. It's just amazing. They have a line of flavored milks and yogurts. So if you're in any, Murray's Cheese has a great selection of Ronnie Brook.

39:42Check it out. I love Ronnie Brook. Great. I'm on it. So would you ever play around with chocolate milk as a skew for Ouroboros? I mean, I say this because you're a water company, but man, you're like an inventive. You're creative. That'd be fun. Yeah, I'm not opposed to it. If I could find a way to ship milk even cheaper than we ship water, that'd be the best. Last one, your favorite sandwich. My favorite sandwich. I'm partial to buffalo chicken, a buffalo chicken sandwich. I love that. I mean, it's such a unique idea. I mean, I'm more of the wing guy, but man, buffalo and a cutlet's pretty great.

40:13It's pretty great. Yeah, we also have a buffalo cauliflower sandwich in my neighborhood in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco. It's a place called Palm City Wines. It's the best. Oh, I love that. And shout out to Toysso, the pocha out in the Outer Sunset. I'll go. We were talking off mic about that. I love that place. Paul Vogt, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining This Is Taste. Thanks for having me. This is great.

40:40Hey, Matt. How was your California road trip? Glad you asked, Eliza. You know, I've been planning this trip for a while. I went with my wife, Tamar, and my mom. So it was the three of us. Iconic road trip trio just right off the bat. Yeah. Totally. It was like really cool to like not be in New York in January and to go to California and actually drive. We flew into LAX. We ended up well north of Napa and Sonoma, rounded back to SF. But we went along the way. We obviously were seeing some ocean, seeing some sunshine. But we caught a bunch of cool, I would say some very iconic restaurants, some newer restaurants.

41:20And I had a lot of surprises along the way. All kind of positive. I wish you could say that there was a bad meal. I mean, I think I had sushi in Monterey. That was terrible. But that was like outside of that, it was like only one bad meal in the entire trip. Well, I'm excited to hear about it because I grew up doing the drive from L.A. to Northern California very often to see my family. So this is going to bring back a lot for me. Oh, I love this because I wanted to go this with you because I know like I'm doing a little bit of fresh eyes on it. But yeah, this is like your hometown, your homeland.

41:50I feel like you probably did. You take the scenic like PCH the whole way up kind of. We did not. We wanted to make some tracks. So we went the fastest route. You took the five. We took the five. That's the that's the locals route, I would say, because it's not as pretty. It actually smells quite bad at certain points in time because it's where a lot of cows are being raised in California. But it is the faster route. See, as an Angeleno, I was like, we can't talk about the road trip before we talk about your route because that really is everything. It's such a good point because we definitely didn't get lost, but we ended up in Petaluma one day, which is cool.

42:23I won't talk about that. We ended up up by Fort Bragg. Cool. Way on the coast. Yeah. I've been up there before because I've driven from L.A. all the way to mid-Oregon. Oh, that's a beautiful drive. And we went to Mendocino, which, you know, I went to a cool Irish pub in Mendocino and watched NFL football. That was that memory. Okay. I have some questions for you, but maybe you should tell me about some of your highlights. Let's start. Well, we went to Ojai for a couple of days and I was in Ventura, Ojai in that area. And I just have been going to Ojai. I think it's like my fourth time there. I just love going to this town.

42:53It's really special. It's just beautiful and has a lot of like really unique, like hippy dippy shit that I enjoy in California. Feels like California and only in California kind of place. But I ended up going to a couple of restaurants there that I really want to highlight. One is The Duchess. And I think you and I were texting frantically about this choice. Well, this is like Zoe Nathan and her husband Josh is one of their restaurants, right? Absolutely. And it's their kind of extension north of LA. And the chef is Sanang and it's a Burmese, California menu, which I think is really smart. And I had some crispy rice salads and I really enjoyed really the way that Burmese cuisine can be thought of as like a California only concept.

43:39And really the food was super fresh. But the highlight to me, there's no but. I don't want to even come with a but. Semicolon, a highlight is, of course, the pastry in the morning. Zoe Nathan, legend, obviously. She has huckleberry. It's like a great breakfast pastry spot. Milo and Olive, also they do pastries there. And then their ice cream store, Sweet Rose, is quite good. Yeah. And up there she was doing a citrus olive oil tea cake and a passion fruit chiffon slice. You know, I was going like citrus passion fruit zone. There was some nice morning buns up there. Did they have any pixies when you were there?

44:14It was actually a little early for citrus. It wasn't in the stands quite yet. We were there the first week of January and it was still a little early. I've been there in late February and it's been like super awesome. I think it was a little early. If you're a listener, pixies are a kind of tiny tangerine that are grown a lot in Ojai and they're a very big part of the town's identity. They have a festival every year, I would imagine. That's cool. Yeah, it was great. And you know what? Also in Ojai, so there's like a lot of restaurants there. And Rory's place was not open, unfortunately. They'd had a little fire and they were closed temporarily, wishing them the best.

44:48But I got to go to this really cool place called The Summit that is like a roadside, both taqueria and hamburger stand. Cool. That's about 20 minutes outside the downtown of Ojai. And my good buddy, Daniel Holtzman, knows Ojai really well and he had suggested it. And man, I loved a rolled taco hamburger combination on a sunny afternoon. Just beautiful. I'm saving this to my map right now. So after Ojai, where did you go? So we went to Central Coast. So we ended up driving. We were on the road and we ended up in Los Alamos. And everyone who follows food media, listens to this podcast, reads Glossy Magazines knows when you go to Los Alamos, you go to a restaurant called Bell's.

45:30Yes. Okay. I've been. You've been. Okay, so super, super fucking hyped restaurant. Like everyone's like, you gotta go to Bell's, gotta go to Bell's. And I'm like, yeah, of course I'm gonna go to Bell's. It's like a great midway point driving up to Monterey and Carmel. So we went and oh my God, I went for lunch and it exceeded expectations. It was so great in every way possible. And I think it really, really starts with the service. I have to say that. Yeah, they have like a fine dining background, right? And it is it's not quite a fine, fine dining restaurant, but it is definitely like a nice restaurant.

46:06I remember I had a really good steak sandwich for lunch when I was there. We also had some incredible sandwiches, including egg salad with tomato jam. And we had this amazing, amazing salad to apples, currants, midnight moon blue cheese and nutritional yeast dressing. It's fine dining in the evening. It's a fixed menu and then a la carte for lunch. And I think it's a beautiful time to go at lunch. If you drink wine, it's obviously right in that central coast. And, you know, we've been reading about this part of California. It's like two, two and a half hours north of L.A. And it's worth a drive from L.A.

46:40And it's totally worth visiting. Yeah, it's really special. They have some nice – I stayed at like a cool old school motel that had been revamped when I was there. They also have this really incredible like old, old West style tavern in the town. Yeah. That I think is closed now and they only open it for weddings, et cetera. but if you ever see a wedding and you could try to crash it, that would be on my bucket list. That's a really good idea, actually. Crashing a wedding. To crash a wedding. I was out in Joshua Tree on a separate trip and I thought about crashing a wedding out there. I saw some weddings happening in the old town.

47:13Oh, yeah. That's kind of how it goes. Let me just kind of go quickly through the rest of that central coast. I ended up at this amazing bakery called Ad Astra in Monterey, just truly doing California sourdough at the highest level. Really, really highly recommend it. I also went to Cat and Cloud, got to pay homage to my favorite coffee podcast and cafe in Santa Cruz, hung out in Santa Cruz, which, you know, on a sunny day, no better place in California than Santa Cruz. Check out the surfers, just beautiful place. You're shaking your head in a good way or bad way. I mean, I would say I am from other parts of California.

47:46There are a lot of good places in California, but Santa Cruz is really special. You're shaking your head. You grew up in Santa Monica, so you got... But I really do love Santa Cruz. Did you see any banana slugs when you were there? I didn't see the banana slugs, yeah. We just like rolled through. Santa Cruz is cool. And then I ended up in Oakland and Berkeley and saw some old friends. And I went to a couple places. The quick spots I want to mention, I went for this. I think if anyone was listening from Oakland, I think of this as, to me, the perfect Oakland one too. Controversial it may be. Atani Ramen, my favorite ramen on the West Coast.

48:21It's so great. Kyle Atani is an old friend. And then Fenton's. Ooh, I have never been to either. You've never been to Fenton's? I haven't been to either. Oh, my God. Fenton's is, you know, raise your hand, listener, if you're a Fenton's fan. Old school ice cream parlor and diner in Oakland, a real institution. Shout out to the O's and Kim's. Jason O., my buddy from college, went there with his fam. And we had such a great time. And we just had the, like, the largest Sundays. And just, like, I love that place. I like that. And I think a good ice cream sundae. I'm trying to remember. Oh, I like Colonial Donuts in Oakland.

49:00Yeah, that place is cool too. I wonder, it's a 24-hour donut shop. So I wonder if you could bring your donut to the ice cream place and do some combining. Well, I think you probably could. I'm going to actually think about doing a mashup of Fenton's and Mendy Foods in Oakland. I think it's a really good spot. All right. So the next day was the day I had circled on my calendar for this whole trip. And shout out to Andy Baragani for getting this reservation, but I got to go to Chez Panese for lunch. Wow. Yeah. And I'd never been there. Me either. And I, again, like Bell's, everyone knows about Shape and E.

49:31Alice Waters. Talk about it on the show a lot. We talk about David Lee Witz recently. He worked there for 12 years. And wow, a Saturday lunch on a rainy January day. There's nothing better in life. I felt it was a really, really beautiful lunch. And they were just wonderful people who owned it and ran it. And I have to say from the menu, I had a great radicchio salad. It's really like straightforward food. They're not really doing anything like they're not throwing in like curries randomly. They did a little bit of, I would say the Moroccan spice chicken was like in that kind of global pantry, but they're doing like California French cuisine, which is what they're famous for.

50:10And I just loved the Petite Oli cold plate, which had this like really great poached albacore, which was super composed. It was a salad composé, and I just loved that. I had some Monterey Bay cod that was like delicately poached. They served us some nice mint tea to end, had a sorbet. I mean, it was like really light and really perfect. I like that. I think to me, like I would want to go to Chez Panisse in the spring or summer if I was going to pick any season just because I know they're doing so much with the produce. But even in January, especially in California, it seems like they have a lot of good things to be working with.

50:48I mean, good point and a reason to return. I will say one thing about the dining room, like very touristy, like dudes in Kith, like just like kind of like definitely a destination. That's not a negative because obviously you want a place that does such high level that everyone's going there. And then you also look around and you've got, you know, we were walking in at the same time with this couple. They were clearly local and they said they were celebrating their 60th birthday. That was cool. There was a group of eight, I would say, around the same age in their 50s. They had like eight bottles of wine on the table for lunch, just like having a great time.

51:25I wanted to know what they were up to. Like there was definitely an interesting mix of people. So it is touristy. You're going to see like people with like the guidebooks on the table potentially. But ignore that. It's a really special place. Yeah, you were among the tourists also. Absolutely. Of course. I'm owning my truth. I was absolutely there taking selfies with the bowl of produce that was sitting on the bar at the cafe. As you should. And then you went north even more. We did. We kept the journey. Thank you for keeping listening to this because I had such a good time. I wanted to do an extended B segment about my trip to California.

51:57Ended up in Napa and Sonoma. Had never been there. Had never been to this part that's like historical when talking about American food. There's very few regions that are more important to the American foodways than Napa and Sonoma. Ad hoc was a spot that I went to that I don't want to say too much about because the menu changes all the time. But I would say this. I've never seen so many drunk people in a restaurant at 9 o 'clock on a Sunday in January in my life. AM or PM? PM, but still. It was supposed to be like a sleepy Sunday, like post-holiday, dry January, all that shit. And like, yo, people were hammered.

52:36Wow. And so the concept there, I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to talk about it. Okay. Ad hoc. Changes daily the menu, hence the name. You could get everything from fried chicken to what we had was waggis, meatballs, and spaghetti. An amazing Caesar salad. Truly was amazing. Great Caesar salad. And, you know, lots of other things available for adding on. And then there was Sundays at the end. So that was nice. And donuts, too. They were like little mini donuts, too. Cool. I mean, so, like, listen. Mileage may vary with ad hoc and Thomas Keller restaurants with this listenership. I'll leave it there.

53:10I'm going to leave it there. Okay. I went to a place called Mustards. And I have to say this was probably my highlight of dining in Napa Sonoma. And Cindy Paulson is the chef owner. It's on its 41st year right now. And we here at Crown published at 10 Speed Press published the Mustards cookbook in the early 2000s. And I just love this restaurant so much. It has things like seafood tostadas. of sweet corn tamales like a ribeye they have onion rings that are like blooming onion style it's like all the things you want to pair with wine and this list it says at the top too many wines and you can order like a 300 cab or a 75 half bottle split of harsh pinot noir if you want or you can get like a flight that's 35 so it's not like pretentious and truly what i experienced in Sonoma and Napa was not, I didn't find pretentious places.

54:08I think that's maybe a little bit of a misread of the region. There's not a lot of, I mean, there are, of course, places that would be like wine centric, but I thought it was like definitely like accessible and kind of fun to be in this part of the world, the wine world. But I thought mustard was the real highlight. I love that. I haven't been, but, you know, I normally don't make my way through this part of California. So it's nice to have reasons to go. I went to Guts Roadside as well. This place is pretty famous. I had a cold crab salad, I like that place a lot. And I'm going to end this trip and thank you so much, Eliza, for helping me tell this story.

54:44Probably, I would say, like, mustard was special because I just, like, connected with the vibe and we have this history of the cookbook. But probably my pound from my favorite meal of Sonoma and Napa was El Molino Centro. That's been on my list for such a long time and I haven't been. You can definitely go there and keep going north and go to wine or you can just go there for the food. It is tremendous. It is a really, really good restaurant that I would say does a rotating menu of California Mexican with like a root in Mexico City in the taqueria style. But also a great mole, a great pozole, and a great beans.

55:20I would say the best beans I've had probably ever. Whoa. Were they like charro style beans? They were. Absolutely. So good. And like, you know, order the counter, sit down, get the number, do the thing. Very chill. Sit outside. I love that. Okay, I have two follow-up questions for you. Yeah, totally. The first is when you went to Fort Bragg, did you happen to go to CPAL Cove? I wish we spent a lot of time in Fort Bragg. We just dipped through that. Yeah. Thank you for reminding me. We actually went further north, went to a couple places to not be fully, like went to Mendocino. We went to Petaluma.

55:53We went to all these wonderful towns. No, tell me about that place. It's just like a super local spot on the docks, clam chowder place. Oh my God. That sounds like really good. It's really good. And I, Fort Bragg is like, you know, you're getting up into the state of California at that point. Like I went there because I was kept on driving into Oregon and it felt like a very different part of California than where I had spent a lot of time. It was very gray. It was very coastal. There were people who were just working all in the boats that were eating their clam chowder there. And it was really fun.

56:23What an amazing drive around there. Yeah. So that's my one question. My second one is if you went to Casa de Fruta when you were driving up to five. No. What town is that in? This is on me because I should have told you about this. Yeah, you should have. Because this to me is like the growing up in California road trip experience is that you're driving up the five and you're hungry or like someone has to pee. And so you go to Casa de Fruta, which I have just looked up the exact town that it's in so I can tell everyone. And it's by Gilroy. Yeah. It's kind of between Hollister and Gilroy. Oh, it's up there.

56:55So it's a little bit further east. It's further east. I think like when I was driving to visit my family in San Jose area growing up, we would stop there a lot. But they sell all sorts of dried fruits and nuts. They have a full restaurant. They have a small train that runs through the premises and a petting zoo and all these things to attract children. They also have an offshoot called Casa de Nuts that I just think is really funny. Gotta get the t-shirt. They dropped the Spanish halfway through on that one. But it is just such an iconic, particular part of California to me. So the next time you're doing this drive, before you go to Gilroy to get your garlic, go to Casa de Fruta.

57:34Casa de Fruta is on the list now. Have you been to Sea Ranch ever? No, I know about Sea Ranch, but I have never been there before. That's probably my next trip to that part of California would be staying in Sea Ranch. Yeah, well, I'll meet you there and then we can go to Casa de Fruta. Let's do it. I appreciate getting a real Californian's take on my trip. Did I do okay? Did I represent your state well? I think you did a great job and I wish that I could go do that right now. Thanks, Eliza. I appreciate it.

58:05This is Taste is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.