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CURRENT ISSUE / ISSUE 42 / MARCH 2013

Last Dance

by DANA TOMMMASINO • March 2, 20132 Comments

SUFFERING SUCCOTASH DINNER MENU

Here it is, unless things change...

  Glass of Prosecco

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BRUSSELS SPROUTS, TOASTED HAZELNUTS, POMEGRANATE, PARMESAN

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ACE BEET RAVIOLI, RASPBERRY, BROWN BUTTER, 

CARAMELIZED ONIONS

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    BRAISED MAPLE LEAF DUCK LEG, TURNIPS, GRAPEFRUIT 

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  HONEY-ROASTED QUINCE, TALEGGIO, 

ALMONDS

❉ 

Dinner is $45 per person and includes a glass of Prosecco (does not include tax & gratuity), Friday February 8th, 6PM at our Garden.   

Please make reservations through OpenTable, for 6PM and note in the 'Special Requests' area that you are reserving for the "Suffering Succotash" dinner.  

More information at Stephanie's blog.

We look forward to seeing you! 

Suffering Succotash Dinner

The lovely, twittering Stephanie Lucianovic of Grub Report, will host a dinner built around her humorous, illuminating Suffering Succotash, a book about her transformation from picky eater to cooking school graduate and food writer. We will do happy-making things with foods that have been known to upset picky eaters: Brussels sprouts, beets, root vegetables & long braised meat. Stephanie will give a reading and discuss her work.  

Dinner is $45 per person and includes a glass of Prosecco (does not include tax & gratuity), Friday February 8th, 6PM at our Garden.   

Please make reservations through OpenTable, for 6PM and note in the 'Special Requests' area that you are reserving for the "Suffering Succotash" dinner.  

More information at Stephanie's blog.

We look forward to seeing you! 

C Magazine at the Perfumed Garden

This was an evening, friends.  To read more:  C Magazine at Woodward's Garden Scent Dinner...

Scent Dinner with Alyssa Harad Featuring the Scents of Local Perfumers, Thursday, March 29, 6:00pm, Woodward's Garden

My scent intelligence has been cracked wide open through Twitter in the last year.  All sorts of smell-besotteds linger there, perhaps because the presence of scent blogs has exploded recently, and blogging so organically ties into Tweeting (like so much else). 

One of my first scent tweeter finds was Alyssa Harad, and it turns out that was über-fortuitous.  Trained as an academic (with a Ph.D. in Literature), Alyssa is a kind of self-taught connoisseur who became so obsessed with scent she wrote a book about her journey into its world, coming out this July: Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride.  And it is intoxicating.  Here are a few moments:

I became passionately interested in the useless beauty of perfume. 

It depends on the heat of your body to give it life, and on your memories and fantasies to give it depth.

(W)ithout language, without a name and a context, even the most familiar smells can be fugitive, teasing things. 

(P)erfume became a way to consider questions of art and difficulty, to conjure up the dreams and yearnings of another era, or to remember and clarify...

And to sit and talk with Alyssa about perfume, as I have several times, is to be in the presence of someone articulate, riveted, & steeped in its gorgeous language.  So imagine having her guide you through a scent course meal, featuring the scents of five local perfumers, including our own amazing Mandy Aftel,  

At Woodward’s Garden...

Infinite Beauty: Rebecca Solnit Reads at Woodward's Garden with Mapmakers & Essayists from "Infinite City"

Wednesday, May 18, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses 

Like Venice, San Francisco is small; they are vast not in territory but in imaginative possibility. 

-Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City

I have been sitting with Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City for months now. I dip in randomly, lovingly gaze at its queer, gorgeous maps, read favorite essays over and over. It mesmerizes that way.  To this longtime San Franciscan, Infinite rings true in infinite ways. It gets the ever-shifting subtleties of place; of neighborhood (of course Solnit would). It is a muli-visioned, nuanced poem to our stunning, fragile city.  After getting caught in its infinite cosmos, you can't help but think that every city should be lucky enough to have its own beatifying Solnit.

And in a stroke of pure poetic random, Solnit has also written extensively on Muybridge (River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West), who not only haunted 19th century SF himself, but 'mapped' our city keenly, and whose gorgeous photos of the original Woodward's Gardens (1866-1891) - our namesake - are infamous.  They are images we used in our original menus.

So how perfect that Solnit - along with some fellow Infinite essayists and mapmakers - is coming to our SF Garden (located on the border of 'Love of Sex' and 'Desire for Liquids' according to the Phrenological SF map!) for an evening of dinner, readings and mappings. We'll talk zen, butterflies, gardens... We'll also make a menu of classic San Francisco dishes.  

At Woodward's Garden, Wednesday, May 18, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122.

                                'Entrance to Woodward's Gardens' - Muybridge

                               ‘Animals at Woodward’s Gardens’ (1870) - Muybridge

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books about ecology, environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, most recently the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a volume of 19 essays and 22 innovative maps, for which she commissioned and coordinated contributions from 27 writers, artists, and cartographers. Other books include A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper's and regular contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com.

Atlas contributors Genine Lentine ("Dharma Wheels and Fish Ladders" essay and map), Paz de la Calzada (Phrenological San Francisco's hair), Lisa Conrad ("The Names Before the Names" essay and map), Ruth Askevolt (Once and Future Water map), and Alison Pebworth (Phantom Coast map, cover, title page) will be joining Solnit.

Paz de la Calzada

Cheryl Strayed, Karen Karbo & Carolyn Cooke at Woodward's Garden, Tuesday, May 10, 2011:

Spring Dinner and Three West Coast Writers Reading from New Works 

At Woodward's Garden, Tuesday, May 10, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122. Menu will be posted on website soon.

I first found Cheryl Strayed on Twitter (of course), which somehow led me to me to her dazzling essay "The Love of My Life," about - among other things - death, desire, grief, infidelity... and really, about not looking away. I had not read anything like it before. My body actually stopped moving, slowed-down into the essay's unexpected, achy orbit - it was so close to the bone and relentlessly brave. 

It is a kind of ultimate memoir/essay to me now. And it made me realize how completely rare her voice is, and how much I crave it. In some ways Strayed reminds me of Rebecca Solnit, whose unique, brilliant work, it seems to me, almost always involves our lost/foundness and the unresolvable tension between the two, and staying with that hard, beautiful friction. So what a gift to have Strayed read at our restaurant.

Cheryl Strayed

Strayed’s forthcoming memoir, Wild, will be published by Knopf in March, 2012. Her debut novel, Torch (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year by writers from the Pacific Northwest. Strayed’s personal essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Allure, Self, Brain, Child, The Rumpus and The Sun. She’s won a Pushcart Prize and her essays have twice been selected for inclusion in the Best American Essays. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and their two children.

She will read from Wild, which is about the 1187 mile hike she took alone on the Pacific Crest Trail when she was 26 and the life circumstances that compelled her to take such a long walk in the wilderness. "Wild is smart and funny, and often sublime," wrote bestselling author, Chelsea Cain. "And it’s got something for everyone. A fight for survival in the wilderness. A bad girl’s quest for redemption. Grief, sex, drugs, and the proverbial (and literal) bear in the woods, all in the hands of a brilliant and evocative writer."

Karen Karbo

We are also thrilled to have Karen Karbo, whose three novels and memoir have all been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year.  Her memoir The Stuff of Life won the Oregon Book Award and was a People Magazine's Critics' Choice. Her most recent book is The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman. Her essays and non-fiction have appeared in a number of anthologies, including the best-selling "The Bitch in the House," and in The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, MORE, Outside, Entertainment Weekly and salon.com.  She is a recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose and a winner of the General Electric Younger Writer Award.

Karbo will read from her forthcoming book, How Georgia Became O'Keeffe: Life Lessons on the Art of Living. It is coming out in November.

Carolyn Cooke

Finally, we are delighted, too, to have Carolyn Cooke.  Her first novel, Daughters of the Revolution, will be published next month by Knopf.  Her short story collection, The Bostons, was a winner of the PEN/Bingham Award, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway, and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and in two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.  Her nonfiction has appeared in New California Writing 2011 (Heyday Books) and The Nation.  She is a core faculty member in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. 


Cooke will read from her new novel of the sexual revolution, which National Book Award finalist Kate Walbert praised as " Smart, visceral, sexy . . . absolutely brilliant.” 


At Woodward's Garden, Tuesday, May 10, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122. 


Menu to be posted on website soon.