This Is Camino

Starred review from July 20, 2015
Chef Moore opened Oakland’s Camino restaurant in 2008, after working at Chez Panisse for 21 years. Hopelain is his wife and partner in the well-received eatery, known for dishes that are cooked in a specially built nine-foot-wide fireplace. While, in this collection of 100 recipes, the couple dedicate a chapter to fire, with a shout-out to their Uruguayan-style metal fire basket for making coals, even the home cook with limited access to open flames will benefit from the authors’ focus on intense flavors and their spiritual connection to food. It’s a wandering, wordy, and romantic work, meditative in a quintessentially Californian way. “Duck is a self-esteem builder,” they declare, then show off their bravery in slow-cooked duck legs with savoy cabbage, prunes, and duck cracklings. The vegetable dishes are equally noble and complex, as with the eggplant-tomato-mint gratin with black-eyed peas, fenugreek, and grilled artichokes. There’s even a fiery dessert: grilled fig-leaf ice cream and grilled figs. If the recipes are not example enough of the restaurant’s quirkiness, a chapter entitled “A Week at Camino” provides a diary and photographs of behind-the-scenes action. A typical passage reads, “Fred Niger Van Herck, a Frenchman with pale eyes and salt-and-pepper hair, drops in to give notes to the waitstaff about such things as the breaking of the musk and the nuances of biodynamic farming.”

October 15, 2015

Moore is chef and co-owner of Camino, a restaurant in Oakland, CA, that serves locally sourced food cooked over a massive fire. His improvisational style of cooking (Camino's menu changes nightly) and virtuosic flavor combinations take front and center in this restaurant cookbook, which features artfully rustic recipes such as kabocha squash and grilled new onion salad with yogurt, pomegranate, and almonds; slow-cooked duck legs with Savoy cabbage, prunes, and duck cracklings; and Puerh (a type of tea) ice cream with poached quince and prunes. Writing with wife and co-owner Allison Hopelain and journalist Chris Colin, Moore instructs readers in butchery, live-fire cooking techniques, vinegar making, and other cooking and preservation methods. He concludes with cocktails, many incorporating California citrus. VERDICT A compelling look at an innovative restaurant. Aspiring chefs and advanced cooks may also enjoy Suzanne Goin's The A.O.C. Cookbook and Nancy Silverton's The Mozza Cookbook (also from California restaurants).

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