Dining with Food Bloggers at Oliveto

Posted 22 August, 2007 at 12:19am by Michael Chu

(Filed under: Cooking For Engineers, Dining, Food, What I Ate)

Last night I dined with twelve other food bloggers (including significant others) at Oliveto in Oakland, California. I had never met any of the other bloggers, but it was a lot of fun to eat good food and chat with other foodies.

When Food Bloggers Dine

I sat between Shuna Lydon (who writes Eggbeater) and Deb and Alex from Smitten Kitchen and chatted about food, The French Laundry, Martha Stewart, and this year's crop of wine grapes, stone fruit, and melons while sharing a plate of salumi with Shuna, Deb, Alex, and Cheryl (Chockylit from the Cupcake Bakeshop).

Salumi Platter
Particularly of note was my main course - charcoal grilled pigeon that was served with some just cooked peaches. The pigeon was the best fowl I had ever tasted. The flesh tasted like an unbelievable blend of duck and perfectly cooked rib-eye of elk. It was incredibly tender and amazingly flavorful.

Charcoal Grilled Pigeon

2 comments to Dining with Food Bloggers at Oliveto

Daniel Brown, August 26th, 2007 at 2:14 pm:

• I was hoping to read a longer review from a group of bloggers!

  Mine is on my site. Probably contains less praise…

  For example, how many of you could decipher the entire menu on your own? Or did it turn into a round (or rectangle) table of "anyone know what this is?" surrendering, finally and perhaps repeatedly, to asking the server.

  Food is awesome, but the menu should be a tour guide to the food, not a drawbridge requiring the right password to open.

  Just some thoughts…

  db

Michael Chu, August 26th, 2007 at 11:40 pm:

• Yeah, I write about food enough on Cooking For Engineers that I don't relish doing it in detail on my "evertyhing else" blog. I'll probably be posting some more "shorts" like this one with photos of other meals.

  The Oliveto menu was difficult - I looked up several of the items before arriving at the restaurant, but the menu had changed from the previous day! (The menu is posted online each day.) We relied heavily on our waiter who was very good at answering our questions.