Doug LeMoine | CHEESE | carnia altibut mezzano

| carnia altibut mezzano | lynne | 03.11.2003, 10:16 AM

Last night at Delfina I sat by myself at the counter and made a new friend: mezzano, a playful mix of cow and goat milks. It's from Friuli, one of those Italian mountain areas, and it tastes the way you would expect---like cows and goats grazing on tender grass at a high altitude, surrounded by rocky outcroppings. It's tangy and creamy, yet has a strong, rugged character, just like a mountain range. You taste it and you think of Giorgione's shepherd, standing watch over the storm. It's not unlike a mancheog; Delfina served it with quince paste. It's the kind of cheese that makes you glad you're sitting at the counter, just you and mezzano, rather than sitting at the table next to you, where the man keeps stroking his goatee as he bores his companions.

The goatee-stroking man should be silhouetted and made into Delfina's logo. I know you love Delfina, Lynne, so I will limit my comments to the following: When I was there a year ago, there was a party of, like, eight who spent the first 20 minutes complaining about the fact that parking was so, so bad. Not to be snotty, but as it turned out they had driven from Noe Valley. So, not to be snotty again, but Noe Valley is less than a mile away. The goatee-stroking guy logo should have a latin phrase around it that is some loose translation of: "Parking your Humvee will be problematic; loudly discussing the difficulty of doing so will be grounds for disdainful looks from other patrons."

doug | 03.14.2003, 1:46 PM

I think one of the interesting things about Delfina is that there are all kinds of people there and it is fun to sit and identify out-of-towners, and people from pacific heights, and people on dates, and friends of the staff, etc. the goatee-stroking man was notable mostly for his pretensions to foodie-ness, and was of a type that in high school we used to call "art fag." he had a shaggy yet asymmetrical hair cut, was wearing a black skirt-type thing over pants, or possibly those Indian dhoti pants but in black, and decidedly did not drive a hummer.

lynne | 03.14.2003, 2:48 PM

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