 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
Sunday, August 13, 2000
There are downsides. Traveling round-trip from Pittsburgh to Cleveland means six hours in the car. We left after breakfast, rolling back in after midnight, stiff with fatigue.
Parker's Restaurant, 2801 Bridge Ave.; 216-771-7130.
One Walnut Restaurant, 1 Walnut Ave.; 216-575-1111.
Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Boulevard; 216-421-7340. From Aug. 27 through Oct. 15, the museum will hold a special exhibition of outstanding examples from its master drawings collection. Major works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Durer, Rembrandt, Turner, Degas and Picasso will be among the 120 works on display.
The parking lot across the street from the downtown restaurant where we stopped for lunch wanted $2.50 for every 15 minutes. We parked on the street. At a dollar an hour, we had to monitor the meter, and, drawing the short straw, I ran out in the rain to deposit the second set of quarters.
One Walnut proved to be an interesting restaurant experience, and not because we all liked it. There were five Pittsburghers from Point Breeze on this trip, Lori and Alan Hornell, my daughter, Ani, Gene and I. I enjoyed my lunch of a wholesome cream of chicken soup and a watercress almond salad over a crispy cracker intensely flavored with Parmesan cheese. Gene liked his hamburger.
Ani thought her sandwich of salmon, cured like pastrami and served on grilled bread, was delicious but too rich to finish. The flavor of the duck meat in the sandwich Lori ordered was overpowered with hoisin sauce. Alan was plain-out offended by the chicken served to him. He sat at the table glumly, and when the waitress approached he made a two-thumbs-down sign. "Zero," he said. It had the desired effect. She reported it to the maitre d'. He took over our table.
After desserts were ordered (the women wanted them), we were told they would be complimentary. It was the equalizer. The good chocolate cake and the lemon tart with blackberries went a long way toward making the meal a success. Most welcome was the restaurant's attention to our needs and their efforts on our behalf.
We chose One Walnut and Parker's, the restaurant where we would have dinner after an afternoon at the Cleveland Museum of Art, from reviews in the June issue of Gourmet magazine. We bought into critic Alison Cook's apparent conclusion that they represented culinary Cleveland.
The day's main event was the museum. Museums are notoriously closemouthed about their finances, but two things make it clear that the Cleveland Museum is well-endowed. First, the museum charges no admission, and second, in a highly competitive market, it continues to buy beautiful things. I have heard that the museum's philosophy is not the most, just the best.
The best makes one's eyes bulge. My memory of myself in the Cleveland is of someone twirling, twirling, twirling from one room into another, made dizzy by the splendid objects over here, over there, across the hall, around the corner. It is almost unpleasant. Sometimes my throat swells until I am almost choked with greed.
I want it, I want to hug that stunning object -- that tureen by Juste-Aurele Meissonnier, using such a slosh of silver as you've never seen. The soup tureen sits on a torrent of silver and is washed with a great wave of silver carrying in its wake seaweed and lobsters.
Or, over there, that extraordinary combination of red porphyry, cloisonne, niello, precious stones, glass and pearls scatter over two pure gold crosses and a small portable gold altar. They are part of the Guelph Treasure commissioned by Countess Gertrude of Brunswick in the year 1030. The Cleveland owns six pieces, and I have heard that the museum's director in the 1930s, William Milliken, got down on his knees before the board of trustees and begged them to buy what a consortium of German dealers was offering for sale. I love the image of the museum director as penitent, his hands pressed in prayer, his eyes raised to heaven like some Renaissance holy man or a saint by El Greco.
There were many paintings I wanted to roll up and take home. My favorite that day was Winslow Homer's stunning "Early Morning After a Storm at Sea." The sky is beginning to clear, the curl of the waves, no longer threatening, are like flowers bursting into bloom. Homer considered it "the best picture of the sea that I have ever painted."
The curator on the audio guide I rented suggested that the painting had allegorical elements. With calm acceptance, Homer saw the stormy controversy that had filled his life, now nearing an end. At 75, he was equating tranquillity with death. I loved standing in the empty gallery feeling that the picture was mine.
But I was glad to sit down when we moved on to dinner. Parker's is a very pleasant place a mile or so from Jacobs Field. (I had made the reservations, and both restaurants were happy to send maps, as was the museum when I requested one.) Several years ago, my friends Elaine Light and Nancy Hanst had met Parker Bosley at a food conference at the Greenbrier. They were impressed by his knowledge of food and thought he might be a good cook. We got in the car and went for lunch. We liked it so much that we went back for dinner. I wrote about it. Parker says Pittsburghers came, but, strangely enough, Clevelanders didn't. They're there now. The Gourmet article has made reservations a must.
With five people willing to share, we were able to order almost every appetizer, entree and dessert on the menu. There was not one disappointment. Here is a random sample from the four-course priced-fixed dinner, $43 per person. Appetizer: pan-seared scallops on caramelized onions, leeks and shallots with bacon cream dressing. Entrees: Grilled rack of Western American lamb with lamb reduction, or, roasted free-range poussin (spring chicken) from the local Ray-Mar farm, or braised veal sweetbreads with Ohio mushrooms and port wine sauce. Dessert: Parker's Classic Lemon Souffle. One word describes them all. Delicious.
