The 55th annual Monterey Jazz Festival runs from September 21 to 23, with a terrifically varied roster of mainstage performers, from soignée chanteuse Melody Gardot, to iconic figures including Tony Bennett and Bill Frisell, to the Agenda’s pick for the most entertaining contemporary jazz musician on the touring circuit, Trombone Shorty. Over 500 artists will perform on 8 stages throughout the weekend-long event

On Thursday the 20th, the night prior to the festival opening, Jack DeJohnette will be honored at the non-profit festival’s fundraising Jazz Legends Gala. The evening’s host will be the Invisible Chair Whisperer himself, former Carmel mayor Clint Eastwood. The gala festivities will take place at the Hyatt Regency Monterey, home to one of SF Agenda’s favorite Bay Area escapes, the Accista Spa.

The deluxe couples’ suite at the Accista Spa in Monterey

If you like to feel jazz hands all over your bod, its well worth taking a break from the weekend’s concerts to treat yourself to a customized Accista massage. You’ll be asked to sample four different scents—from an almost medicinal herbal blend to a warm, sunny citrus—and select an aroma that matches your mood and the tone of the treatment you’d like to receive.

The spa’s most extraordinary offerings are its lavish couples suites, with private sitting areas, fireplaces, side-by-side massage tables, wine and cheese service available, and—in the largest suite—a hydrotherapy tub with room for two. Even if you don’t reserve a suite of your own, Accista’s hushed, sprawling post-therapy relaxation areas are arrayed with comfortable daybeds, encouraging dreamy naps to extend the spa experience (If you look drowsy, an attendant will likely offer you a soft blanket to snuggle up in, you little jazz kitten, you.)

Wake up! There’s a fierce Trombone Shorty video after the jump! Read more…

When the Drifters sang “Up On The Roof,” they surely weren’t imagining a scene as luxurious as the one you’ll find atop the Hotel Vitale. Along with a series of interconnected, astro-turfed decks that allow you to take a slightly disconcerting stroll above the Embarcadero, the Vitale’s in-house spa offers a signature rooftop “Bathing Ritual”. It’s a one-of-a-kind urban indulgence that leaves you feeling utterly relaxed and gloriously spoiled.

Step off of the Financial District into the serene, earthtoned environs of the Vitale (Chosen as one of the World’s Best Business Hotels by Passport in 2010) and ascend to the penthouse level. After changing into one of the spa’s incredibly comfy robes (Yes, all spas seem to have comfy robes…but these are actually worth mentioning), you’ll be escorted to one of two outdoor tubs surrounded by natural privacy walls of tall green bamboo.

Slip out of the office and sink into a tub atop the Hotel Vitale.

While set within raised wooden structures, these are hardly hippie-style Northern California hot tubs, but full length polymer bathtubs, scrupulously cleaned and refilled for each guest. Its a strange, soothing feeling to stretch out in a lotion-infused outdoor bath in the midst of the city, nibbling your tubside snack of fresh fruit and sipping a warm cup of herbal tea. The Vitale’s carefully curated soundtrack burbles from surrounding speakers, muffling the street sounds down below to help create an oasis of solitude as you stare up at  shifting clouds and drifting seagulls, letting the cares of the day slip away.

Before or after your soak, put yourself in the strong hands—and forearms, and elbows—of Kyle Woolley, or one of Spa Vitale’s other licensed massage therapists,  for one of San Francisco’s secret spa bargains. In a city where hotel spa massages generally run $120 and up, 50 minutes at the Vitale are $105 (and 10% less on weekdays before 3 p.m.).

This time of year is high season for free public movie screenings in the Bay Area, with terrific al fresco films series running as late as October in venues including:

• Union Square, every Thursday this month (Citizen Kane on the 30th is the highlight)
• Dolores Park, the second Thursday of August, September, and October (The Cove, Chinatown, Adaptation)
• Washington Square, Saturday, September 29 (Midnight in Paris)
• Jack London Square in Oakland, Sunday, Thursdays through September 20 (Highlights are hometown story Moneyball on August 9, and The Devil Wears Prada on closing night)

Dislocation: It’s about LA’s Chinatown, and it’ll play in Dolores Park

Let’s admit it. For many long-out LGBT grown ups, Pride Weekend presents a conundrum. Over the decades, we’ve spent hours of curbside time not only cheering on the Dykes on Bikes, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and a handful of fabulous floats, but also yawning our way through visually lackluster and seemingly endless contingents of Gay Parakeet Afficionados, Republican Lesbian Javelin Throwers, Second Cousins of Transgendered Podiatrists, ad infinitum.

The lipsmacking Little Hot Mess, served at cityhouse.

Proud as we are of our community’s diversity, standing in a crowd to watch it go by can get tired year after year. Yet skipping the parade doesn’t feel like quite the right option.

The Agenda’s recommendation is a reservation for lunch and cocktails at cityhouse, the swanky second floor bar and restaurant at the Parc 55 hotel (Market and Cyril Magnin). A wall of picture windows provides grandstand quality views. And its just a quick dash out to the sidewalk to holler support for any parading pals’ groups as they pass; then you can return to your civilized, climate-controlled indoor festivities.

To help you recall the hedonistic, risqué Prides of times gone by, slurp down a Little Hot Mess (or three); it’s cityhouse’s signature concoction for Pride.

Little Hot Mess

1 oz X-Rated Fusion Liqueur 
Splash of Orange Juice
Splash of Soda

Cheers!

A fabulous (fictional) view at the Palomar Hotel

There’s a 100% guarantee that your view of the bridge will never be obscured by fog in the newly tricked out Golden Gate Suite at the  Palomar Hotel.

Sure, that’s because the “view” from room 512 is a giant, 5-window decal—the Palomar is located way across town from the bridge. Still the whimsical window treatment, headboard, and pillows capture the spirit of the city’s year long celebration. And the nightstands and coffee table–by local artist Richard Bulan—are made of actual bridge steel, salvaged when a pedestrian handrail was replaced in 1993.

Meanwhile, the Hotel Vitale is also jumping on the Golden Gate bandwagon by promoting its views…of the Bay Bridge.

As it happens, San Francisco’s other glorious span is in the midst of its own 75th anniversary year (The Bay Bridge opened to traffic in November, 1936).  For all the Golden Gate hoopla around town these days, the Vitale will become the place to stay come autumn, when the Bay Bridge begins its two-year display of The Bay Lights, Leo Villareal’s site-specific art piece. Over 25,000 white L.E.D bulbs positioned along the west span will be triggered by traffic, weather, and the sway of the bridge to create ever changing patterns of illumination over a mile wide and over 200 feet high. That’s one hell of a night light for your hotel room.

Sweet view from the Vitale Hotel: That's not the Golden Gate either!

Chef David Bazirgan of the Fifth Floor

Back in the 1990s, I covered movies, books, and music for daily and weekly newspapers. Being a literal as well as cultural omnivore, I was invited to do some restaurant reviewing. I balked.

Not because I was uninterested in the notion, but because, for all the intellectual enjoyment that turning critical thinking into shareable prose can provide, I wanted to keep one of my greatest pleasures- eating -to myself and my chosen dining companions. I wasn’t ready to regularly run another of my passions through the the gears of verbal translation and writerly angst.

Over the years. I’ve become much less interested in serving as a de facto promoter for the industrial product of the film and music industries. And as my writing on those topics has fallen by the wayside, I’ve come to enjoy the more personal aspects of writing about dining and travel: accounts of estaurant meals and trips can be miniature narratives in which the writer is also a character.

I mention all of this in light of a dinner John and I enjoyed a couple months back at The Fifth Floor. It took me right back to those selfish days when I didn’t want to “share my food.” Chef David Bazirgan and his team put together such extraordinary dishes, so smartly conceived and flat-out delicious, that I’ve resisted writing about them here. I’ve wanted to hold them as pure, vaporous pleasures in my memory, not try to pin them down with the insufficiencies of language.

From a culinary standpoint, it was the best meal I’ve had in the Bay Area over the past two years. And I’m afraid I’m going to remain cruelly withholding about it. Please, please manufacture a special occasion to try it for yourself (“I need to take my tongue on a date” or “It’s the first anniversary of today last year”).

“C’mon,” the reader coaxes, “Just show a little leg.”

Of lamb, perhaps? Well…It was perfectly accompanied with a sweet and piquant mix of pickled raisins, cauliflower and cippolini onions.

I’ll also tease you with Bazirgan’s signature Mendocino uni flan, which is like the best chawan mushiyou’ve ever had, exponentially enriched with not only urchin but also a palate-haunting blend of kaffir lime and saffron. Read more…

In the hot seat at the Clift (Photo: P.J.Ohm)

Whenever I think about the Clift Hotel, I start humming “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” It’s the last link in a free associative chain triggered by the Clift’s memorably outlandish lobby decor. That 1984 tune, of course, is from Tears for Fears’ fey-tastic 1984 album Songs from the Big Chair.

My bouts of nostalgia notwithstanding, the Clift plays host to a series of musical events that are utterly au courant. The next two shows are coming up soon, and if you click on the links below, you can get on the guest lists, gratis.

• On Thursday, May 24, experimental trip-hopster Shlohmo ushers in the Memorial Day weekend. GUEST LIST 
• On Friday, June 2, Diego Garcia—brainy Brown graduate and former leader of Elefant—brings his dreamy, Beatlesque pop to town. This one’s a must catch. GUEST LIST

The free shows, in the hotel’s swank Velvet Room, will get underway around 10 p.m. (Doors at 9ish). But since you’renot spending anything for tickets, consider showing up early to kick off the night with luxe libations in the adjacent Redwood Room, one of the most indisputably alluring cocktail lounges in town. Most weeknights, the post-work crowd thins out around 7:30 and the handsome room maintains a comfortable level of volume and crush for a couple magic hours, the ideal time to tap the staff’s creativity and knowledge of locally sourced spirits.

One of the handsomest bars in town (Photo: Clift Hotel)

Crackerjack barman Anthony Kim recently joined me in lamenting the sparse supply of Hangar One’s bracing chipotle-infused vodka, but made up for it with the Redwood Room’s signature House of Pisco cocktail, which blends pisco (Peruvian eau de vie) with pineapple and clove gum syrup, and green chartreuse. A skinny helix of lemon peel straddling the glass provided a bitter aromatic counterbalance to the drink’s slight sweetness. Kim is a master pisco mixologist; his concoctions using the locally imported Encanto brand recently won him a trip to Peru for the annual grape harvest.

Pour yourself a drink and check out Diego Garcia on video after the jump

Read more…

John Russo gets a buzz on

It was a year ago this month that I took my father to spend a couple of special days together at the Carmel Valley Ranch, just a couple hours south of San Francisco. It was a ‘just the two of us’ getaway that was a long time coming:  in the more than 4 decades I’ve spun around on this planet, I’d never spent more than an hour or two of one-on-one time with Dad before. I wrote an essay about our experience that appeared in the April issue of PASSPORT magazine (I’ll add a link to this post when it becomes available online…but feel free to buy a copy at Books Inc. or another fine retailer!).

In any case, May is the start of bee season at the Ranch, one of the activities that makes a weekend getaway at this particular resort a little more special than the typical R&R experiences you can find at many spots throughout the Bay Area. John Russo—who runs Carmel Lavender, a nearby commercial flower farm—is  the Ranch’s beekeeper-in-sorta-residence. He tends to over 60,000 Italian honeybees on the resort property,and harvests their wares for guests’ delectation. More importantly, guests are invited to join Russo every Saturday and Tuesday for hands-on lessons on bees and beekeeping.

You’ll get to don one of those crazy white suits like they wore in The Swarm and handle (with thick gloves) vibrating trays thick with hundreds of live bees. You’ll also learn lots of fascinating stuff about how honey can work as an allergy treatment, how bees communicate via pheromone emission, and the history of apiculture in California. Russo is a big, brainy, Brown-educated bear of a guy who will keep you thoroughly engaged for an hour or so, and then keep you thinking about his lore and lessons for days to come.

Michael Silacci of Opus One appears April 11

It’s April and spring is in the air. The days are longer, the sun is warmer, and its the perfect time of year to get back into that romance-revivifying ritual, the weeknight date night. Every Wednesday evening this month, there’s a wonderful opportunity to indulge your significant other at the Berkeley Wine Festival‘s winemaker dinners in the chateau-like Claremont Hotel.

Each week, the sprawling, romantic resort will play host to a different Northern California vintner in its dramatic, high-ceilinged Meritage dining room. Chef Josh Thomsen—whose CV includes the French Laundry—specializes in wine-pairing cuisine and will craft menus to showcase the offerings of each evening’s winemaker guest.

• Wednesday, April 4   Daniel Baron of Silver Oak Cellars will present several vintages of Alexander Valley and Napa Valley cabernets as well as  Twomey Cellars pinot noirs and merlots.

• Wednesday, April 11  Michael Silacci of Opus One will lead diners through an array of his internationally acclaimed, wines.

• Wednesday, April 18  Dennis Cakebread will feature Cakebread Cellars‘ Napa-grown sauvignon blanc, merlot and reserve wines. Who knew that Cakebread was a family name?!

• Wednesday, April  Justin Baldwin comes north from Paso Robles’ Justin Vineyards  to present the Bordeaux style blends that have helped him make his mark among American oenophiles.

After a Bacchanalian mid-week feast, it will be understandable if you don’t want to drive home. So why not turn Hump Day into Hump Night, and check into one of the Claremont’s suites with your sweetie. After an morning stroll through the gardens and a detoxifying spa treatment, you’ll be ready for the one-and-a-half more grueling workdays before the weekend. Cheers!