Iberico ham, legally procured & butchered in US

I kept hearing about this place that just opened 5 weeks ago, and had to attack it. A nice dinner out with Trudy Muller, another kickass PR chica, was way overdue, and I needed something that would wow her. And a setting that promoted deep chat.

Lafitte delivered! The space is open, rustic & modern along an otherwise cheezy food strip on The Embarcadero.

The handcrafted cocktails are totally inventive (think tarragon) but a bit to sappy sweet for my taste.

The wine list was muscular and not obsessed with California wines, so that was good.

The food blew our heads off. I went for the jamon Iberico (natch) and Trudy had the beef dish. The dessert pastry situation is a little crazy. I had the most powerfully zesty Key Lime Pie slice ever– and I have had me lots of this stuff in my life.

The Tweet from @laffitesf that lured me in.

“Just tasted the Iberico pork rack with braised globe artichoke and Meyer lemon…. And. Fuck. Lucky I brought a change of undies today..”..5:33 PM May 5th via TweetDeck

But can we talk about the ham? Rimmed with a thick, juicy artery-clogging layer of fat.

You have to go.

I mean, get a closer look.

Clos up image of Lafitte's pork dish-- see the globe artichoke and meyer lemon?

It was just a dreamy night. Trudy and I had a nice corner table and watched the bustling scene, next to a window that looked right out onto the Bay. We had lots to catch up on, and it was a great way to do it.

I actually got to meet The Dissident Chef– Russell Jackson– who is definitely a badass.  I slathered him with animated praise, due to our shared passion for the ham. He was absolutely receptive and polite and wonderful to interact with for sure. I told him I was friends with the Ghetto Gourmet folks, a group which really pushed the underground dining scene first in the Bayeria– in 2004 — and he immediately told me to tell Jeremy, “Hi!”–so doing that now. Russell shares the whole pirate chef aesthetic that the GG folks had for sure and kicked off Subculture Dining in SF in 2006.

I dig the whole underground food scene quite a bit. We even hosted one of the GG dinners when our friend SIN, or Cynthia Washburn, was doing the dinners for Jeremy. Current TV needed a place to film it, and we were happy to oblige. SIN is now doing more cool, large scale artworks for big companies with her boyfriend Patrick Shearn as their current business, called Poetic Kinetics.

Wow, what cool people, all!

Two more:  Eva Destruction, who is also starting up her own underground dinner scene in Oaktown called The Secret Kitchen. Find her @Eva_D_Edibles.  I went to her special dinner recently and was blown away! She does carmelised vegetables like nobody.

Molly Ditmore, who has two blogs and recently made a vow to just write for two hours each morning and focus on her amazing skills. She is one of the tighest, most rad girl writers I know. Go Molly!

And she is inspiring me to keep this damn blog updated. Obviously– I need to do this after such a blathering post as this one! Ha!

Overlooking the pool at Indian Springs

So, if you are going to make the roadtrip to Oysterland, why not continue on another hour or so through more bucolic splendor to enter wine country proper? You can easily get to Monte Rio, one of the nice parts of the Russian River, and go about tasting amazing Zins and Pinots from the area. Or you can veer a different way and end up in Calistoga, home to the best place to escape the chaos of life in the Bay Area.  Yes, that would be Indian Springs. I have been taking the waters at this divine place since 1997 when Susan Spencer, a friend and mentor from my first PR gig at GCI Group, introduced me to the pleasures of wine country.

Fuck the New York Times Travel section for writing up this place WAY too much in the past few years. The management has revamped it to have more of a modern buddha vibe, and I just learned they are going to expand the spa so more folks can come for mud baths, massages and other dainty diversions.

It will still be charming and therapeutic. The lemon/cucumber water will still be freely available. And the onsite geyser will still go off and form many mist clouds over the Olympic sized pool that it feeds, and that is all I care about.

Perfectly BBQ'd oysters

So, if you go to Hog Island to drop a fair amount of cash on 50-100 oysters, you may be tempted to pop a few open right there in the picnic area. But oftentimes, that area is too crowded. What do you do to satisfy the need for briny bivalves? Just keep chugging down the highway to The Marshall Store, that’s what. You can order up a fine fish taco, get a self-serving of clam chowder, or have the fine ladies behind the bar shuck you a sweet dozen of Sweetwaters while you wait.

Get the BBQ’d oysters unless you have the need for raw, which I also understand. They do a good job of heating up the oysters and dabbing a nice buttery garlic sauce on them in the shell to cook, then just a dab of a nice, tangy BBQ sauce just on the edge. They pair this with a piece of grilled and garlicked sourdough, which is perfect for sopping up the oyster likker that is left in the shell after you slide a whole one down your throat.

The tables alongside the road overlooking the boats docked on Tomales Bay may have you thinking you are in France.

Marshall-Petaluma Rd.

And the best way to get there from East Bay is off De Long Avenue from 101N.

8.	Take the exit toward I-580 W		1.0 mi
9.	Merge onto I-580 W Partial toll road		17.9 mi
10.	Take the exit onto US-101 N toward San Rafael/Santa Rosa		11.4 mi
11.	Take the De Long Ave exit towardDowntown Novato		0.2 mi
12.	Turn left at De Long Ave		0.5 mi
13.	Continue onto Diablo Ave		0.2 mi
14.	Turn right at Novato Blvd		8.5 mi
15.	Turn left at Petaluma Point Reyes Rd/Point Reyes Petaluma Rd/Red Hill Rd Continue to follow Point Reyes Petaluma Rd		6.8 mi
16.	Turn right to stay on Point Reyes Petaluma Rd		3.1 mi
17.	Turn right at CA-1 N		10.1 mi
18.	Turn left at CA-1 N/Shoreline Hwy		3.3 mi

The mobile team at Spark hosted an ‘Appy’ Hour gathering as a great way to mix and mingle with folks in town for WWDC.

We decided to do this at Pat Kuleto’s newish Water Bar. It’s really close to the Sparkpr offices and is swanky, yet classy.

The scene was a buzzy one, with clients EA Mobile and Shortcovers showing off their new Pre apps. Also, Bart Decrem of Tapulous decided to give an impromptu press conference around the news of a new Tap Tap Revenge game with uber smoking hot artist Lady Gaga as part of a giant Universal Music Group deal.

We enjoyed the amazing Bay Bridge view and of course enjoyed many fine wines, champagne and oysters. There is just so much of an app explosion we had to celebrate!

A fine set of folks on the balcony

We had at least 45 folks and 7 clients there as well as our friends from AdMob, which made for an incredible evening.

Lots of press friends came in from out of town as well as the locals. Great to see John Dvorak, the original Cranky Geek himself, after so many years. See him below with Sascha Segan.

This is just one of the best parts of PR. With good wine, sharp company, nibbly bits & a gorgeous atmosphere everyone is happy.

There are few things I enjoy MORE than planning a little party. Especially when I have the chance to mix up the peeps in the room. THEN, it’s all about facilitating a lovely good time. Making sure you have top-notch booze and delicious tasty bits in a dramatically gorgeous setting helps, too.

So that is what we are going to do at some fancy new Pat Kuleto restaurant overlooking the Bay Bridge coming up here real soon.

This time, it is with a handful of folks who are pushing the envelope to make our mobile phones a helluva lot more useful. This naturally includes some Sparkpr clients, like EA Mobile, GetJar (new! yes!), Tapulous, Tiny Pictures, waze, Zhiing, (BOTH just launched, actually!) and a few others. I think our friends at AdMob will make it by, and some VCs checking out this crazy space.

It also means we get to hang with some extremely cool and highly intelligent press people. It’s amazing how many gadget blogger types are on the invite list!

And we can all dissect, step on, cogitate and thrill over whatever the Apple (and Pre!) news of the day will be.

Good times. More later!

It must have been my 10th CTIA.  This time I was there with a lot of other Sparksters and a lot of our clients which made it really busy but very exciting. We even threw a late night “Last Call” drinks party to get everyone together at cheezy Cleopatra’s Barge at Ceasar’s Palace.

These events are great for PR people because we get to really support our executives who are promoting the latest thing AND are able to put lots of names to faces, which is more and more impt these days. Oh, and there are open bar parties which keeps things lively. Opera rocked it this year at the Wet Republic, an airy cocktail lounge by all the pools at MGM Grand. Great DJ, good drinks and tasty bits, and comfy deckchairs and couches to relax into for jolly chatter with whomever was around you. Nice people and had a great time hanging with old colleague Rick Loughery and reminiscing about our days working on the Skype acount together and talking mobile PR shop.

The big news theme was around mobile application stores. Miscrosoft and RIM announced theirs, as expected, and someone told me Samsung launched two! Finally, apps are going mainstream.  It should become less and less difficult to tell the app story now which is quite a relief to me.

The Palm Pre and Google Android phones did not make news but remained big topics of speculation. Of course, all things mobile-y from Apple were referenced ad nauseum. I think the Apple WWDC will actually be a giant event, sell out earlier, and draw more attention than ever this year. This is the only place to see Apple’s direct participation in the industry, which is such a shame. I wish it wasn’t such a closed party all the time. It is frickin’ $1,300 to go so not sure it will be happening for me, even though most of my clients have apps here. Maybe we can work something out. TBD.

Still enjoying my Day One iPhone, but the battery problem sucks more and more. It is impossible to attend a trade show and stay constantly connected without needed to recharge by 1:30pm. This is bad. According to this review in PC World, the Pre will have a removable battery, and a few other tricks that iPhone does not have. Wonder if I will wander?

Once the 3 day event was done, my best friend growing up @drgooey got me hooked up with her masseuse friend David at Encore, the newish Steve Wynn hotel.  Now this was a good $150 spent! The spa is amazingly beautiful, spacious and luxely decorated for maximum rejuvenation. Powerful steam room, lots of lounging areas with iced cucumber water on tap everywhere. The ladies there wore bathing suits in the hot tub, which was a drag. Uppity chicks.

Then Gooey picked me up in her truck with 6 little beige doggies packed in. Screaming at me in the Limo line at the Venetian to “Come ON!” and all the weekenders (mostly Europeans it seemed) stopping and starting at the commotion. She whisked me off to the town’s outskirts where she lives on an amazing compound called Cactus Joe’s– a nursery for palm trees, all kinds of cactus & other succulents, lots of pottery and colorful ceramic garden decorations. We had a little bday party for one of her friends and enjoyed relaxed conversation. Not a bad way to end Vegas. I think I’ll be back!

Blogs have now become a trip report service.

I am a fervent believer in limiting expressions of many kinds to 140 characters. Our society needs this kind of enforced discipline! Leave it up to extreme social geeks to lead us to it! Go Ev & Biz!

You can follow me @clocklear. Heh.

PS: If someone can ‘splain to me in regular speak how to get my Twitter feed automatically integrated into this here blog, I will forever bow down at your feet.

She was the one who encouraged me to do the same over a year ago (Jan 1st 2008 to be exact).

Welcome Lisa! I expect tons of great stuff from you. That pesky Twitter thing can get in the way, tho.
And thanks for inspiring me to add Tweets to my damn blog. Gonna do that now!