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Ever since the Cascade Theater reopened gloriously in 2004 with that sublime Mark O'Connor concert, there's been a certain mumbling and rumbling from patrons: why isn't there anywhere to go downtown after a show? Well, there's Spoon Me... and... Bombay's.... aaaannnnd.... uh.... ummmm... well... let's go to Denny's. Or IHOP. Or home.

To that end, Cafe Paradiso opened in early 2013 to fill a need: a place to go late at night for a drink and a snack without going to a bar. Housed in the former Thai Bistro location on Yuba Street between Sally's (Salvation Army) and a florist, it's an unlikely bistro home of French cooking. A very small space of about a dozen tables seating two to four and a limited menu ensures service doesn't become overwhelmed. More importantly, the food is prepared to order, not defrosted or waiting on a steam table. The interior is painted olive green, gold, and orchid; bare-topped tables at lunch get the white cloth treatment in the evening.

Femme de Joie was interested in trying this new venture downtown. While the food is quite good, there were a few things that made her go, "Hmmmm...."



Caesar salad, $5.00

This Caesar salad was lovely to look at and delicious to eat, once Femme de Joie located the part of the salad that had dressing on it. For reasons untold, the top inch or so of Romaine was sprinkled with Parmesan cheese but otherwise was naked as a jay bird. Once she prodded around in the dish, the dressed salad was located underneath the first layer of inexplicably plain lettuce.



Fettucine with shrimp, scallops, and crab, $12.00

Let us be honest: this was the smallest serving of fettucine - nay, of any kind of pasta - ever placed before M. de Joie. Ever. She wondered if perhaps this was some kind of test to see if she would explode in righteous indignation, or if she would shut up and eat it. Not one to make a scene on most occasions, she ate it. Four large grilled shrimp were perfectly cooked with a slightly crisp exterior and tender meat. Two or three scallops had been sauteed to a light brown - not easy to do well - without being dried out. The crab was completely lost in the mixture of fettucine, cream, and cheese, though the fettucine was al dente and not gummy. However, the dish was on the dry side and needed more sauce.



Cream of mushroom soup, $4.00

Creamed soups often remind one of Campbell's Cream of Mystery, but the version at Cafe Paradiso was excellent. Fresh sauteed mushrooms floated in a delicate creamy base of half-and-half tempered with broth so as not to feel fatty and globulous. One of the few versions that doesn't make the diner call out for a defibrillator afterwards.



Large Southwestern Salad with avocado, $8.00

This started out as a $6.00 Southwestern Salad with an addition of avocado to make it an $8.00 Southwestern Salad. If you look closely, you can see four scalpel-cut slices of avocado on the upper left side. Crispy tortilla strips, diced tomato, corn kernels, and cotija cheese decorated a lovely stack of arugula-strong mesclun. Served with an addictively tart lime-chipotle aioli, this was a very good rendition of a salad that's become a staple on many menus. As Femme de Joie happily worked her way down through the salad, she discovered a stratum of chopped Romaine underneath the mesclun. Normally, all green leafy participants in a salad are tossed together like college youth of yore in a telephone booth, so she was bemused to find the Romaine looking like a poor relative of the privileged lettuces, hiding its head in embarrassment, Perhaps the person assembling the salad started to make a Caesar, then rather than toss out the Romaine, covered it up. Perhaps this is the Bump-it of salads - like Snooki wearing that plastic dome on her head, Romaine is used to artificially floof up the mesclun. Perhaps this is the new trend in salads - rather than mix all the greens, they will be layered like cakes. It's a mystery. The truth may never be known.



Wine flight, $8.00 for one person, $15.00 for two people

A wine flight is a offering of several wines, usually (but not always) with a common theme - varietal, terroir, maker, and so on. This wine flight is served as an appetizer and seemed to not have anything binding them together. From left to right, a Ruffino white from Tuscany with Granny Smith apples, a Mouton-Cadet Bordeaux with aged Cheddar on a Carr's water cracker, and Chocolate Shop with a house-made brownie. By far the Ruffino and apple was the most successful pairing. Mineral and flinty, the cold Ruffino bounced off tart apples that was stimulating and exciting. Mouton-Cadet sounds prestigious but it is a brand - perhaps the first brand name of wines in France - and the wines are generic and inexpensive. Owned now by Constellation, it's a wine to not get one's hopes up over. After tasting the Ruffino, the blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc was disappointing and muddy. A flake of aged Cheddar needed a little stage to star on, but what it got was a Carr's Water Cracker. For a thankfully brief time, M. de Joie thought it was a sign of good taste and prestige to serve Carr's; she now knows that if you're going to serve crackers, be sure to get ones that don't taste like burned cardboard. Merlot infused with chocolate sounds like a dessert wine, and it is, but it went surprisingly well as part of this flight. The brownie was on the dry side but it made the chocolate wine sing.



Ahi with lemon, garlic, butter, and capers ($19.00) and twice-baked potato ($4.00)



Beet salad, $5.00

Ahi (tuna) resembles beef more than other fish; slices of prime ahi look very much like rare steak. The texture is firmer than many other fish and it lends itself well to strong seasonings and sauces. It is frequently served seared so the interior remains dark red and meaty. At Cafe Paradiso, it was served medium, meaning the narrow end of the steak as well at the edges were well-done - which is overdone. Coated with a lemon, garlic, butter, and caper sauce that seemed to be losing its emulsion rapidly, it was a disappointment compared to what it could have been. On the side, a twice-baked potato was leaking butter that mixed with the caper sauce, creating a lemony oleaginous puddle. In a separate bowl was beet salad - roasted cubed beets reclining on greens. It tasted like beets and nothing but beets - M. de Joie could not detect any flavorings, sauces, dressings or other garnishes. She likes beets quite a lot, and these were tasty enough, but there was nothing about it that made her want to order it again.

Femme de Joie would like to see Cafe Paradiso succeed. The food is quite good, though the preparation and presentation are uneven. She has a little laundry list of opinions, of course:

• Every French restaurant in France - and every Italian restaurant in Italy - includes bread as part of the meal. The cost is worked into the price already. Why isn't it here?


• Include one or two prix-fixe meals. A la carte is fine and dandy but the cost adds up faster than one imagines. Femme de Joie pictures a young couple out for a nice dinner who fall over in a dead faint when they get the bill at the end of the evening - and then have to call someone to come bail them out.


• The premium wine list is delightful but if someone is paying $26.00 a glass or $95.00 for a bottle of wine, the year should be printed on the wine list. The not-premium wine list has some bright spots such as the Darcie Kent Zinfandel, but it would be lovely to see Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and/or Syrah offered by the glass.


• Rethink the fettucine serving size. Really.

Cafe Paradiso, 1270 Yuba Street (between Pine and East), Redding, CA 96001. 530-215-3499. Open Monday through Saturday for lunch, 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM, dinner 5:00 PM - 10:00 PM. Open late nights Thursday through Saturday for wine/beer/special menu, 10:00 PM - 1:00 AM. Closed Sunday. Beer and wine. Vegetarian and vegan options. Street parking. Website here or follow them on Facebook.

It was financial necessity of one Yoshiaki Shiraishi that morphed the traditonal sushi bar from a tiny space with few seats into a novelty production that coincidentally involves food. The owner of a sushi restuarant on the outskirts of Osaka in the 1950s, Shiraishi was going broke paying master sushi chefs during times of slow business, as well as trying to please a customer base who demanded high-quality food. After visiting the Asahi brewery and observing the efficiency of conveyor belts moving beer bottles, he thought he could keep costs down by slowly moving plates of sushi past customers, allowing them to quickly choose and eat without ordering via waitstaff. (At first, Shiraishi also eliminated tables and chairs - an unpopular move he had to rescind.) If the sushi chefs were in the center of the conveyor belt, they could keep an eye on which dishes were most popular and make them up as needed. During slack times, the chefs could make up some of the most popular dishes in advance and be prepared for the next rush.

Fast forward to 1991, when Len-Sun Lai of Milpitas was issued a patent for "Interlinked watercourses for sushi boats," and the sushi floating boat theme restaurant boom was on. It's been good for the sushi business - but how good is it for the food?



Yama Sushi opened in 2008 in the space vacated by Pellegrini's Brazilian Steakhouse (a victim of the Cypress Street Bridge construction). Though there is table service available, there's no doubt that the floating sushi boats attract most of the attention. There are photo charts around the bar to guide diners through the offerings, as well as pricing guides (match the design of the little plate to the picture on the chart to see what it costs).

Rather than keep careful watch on the chart, it's more interesting to just grab a likely-looking dish from the boat and see if you like it. Though M. de Joie made an attempt to catch the names of these little plates, she was not near a chart and so just grabbed a few plates to try a variety of dishes.



Those little orange dots: tobiko, or flying fish roe. Not too salty or "fishy," they offer a nice little pop on the tongue. However, the sweet sauce drizzled on the plate tended to mask the delicate taste.



This vegetable egg roll was not quite as delightful as it could have been, as some of the ingredients had been mixed too far in advance and were on the mushy side.



M. de Joie enjoyed the surprise of a hot and spicy dish amongst the sushi and sashimi, but her dining companion was put off by the heat packed in these little meatballs. It appeared there was an attempt to add some sort of cooling sauce on the plate (see squiggles of mayonnaise-like goop on plate) but the it didn't disguise the heat.



This was a generous portion of teriyaki chicken for the price, but the bits were on their way to drying out by the time the boat came by. A last-minute light brushing of sauce before plating could have preserved the moisture.



After dining at the sushi bar, M. de Joie came back to try an off-the-menu item. Donburi is a lesser-seen dish around Redding, but one worth seeking out. Katsu don - breaded pork strips, mixed with egg and onion and made into an "omelet" on top of rice and topped with shredded carrot and scallion - made a surprisingly light lunch. It was accompanied by excellent miso soup with seaweed and a very good salad of spring mix with delicate miso-ginger dressing.

The floating sushi boats are an interesting way for sushi novices to see if they like it. There are some delicious dishes drifting around, but very often they are covered in honey sauce or a mango sauce. They're visually appealing and the sauce keeps rolls from drying out - but that extra sweetness obliterates the delicate taste of fresh fish. It's as if Disneyland had invented sushi.

It's fun to sit at the sushi bar with a friend and take guesses at what each morsel might be. Most of the food is tasty, and it can be a meal that doesn't break the bank if you order carefully. M. de Joie's one meal ordered off the menu was a delight. But with brightly-colored sauces and over-the-top tastes that resemble the subtle textures and flavors of raw fish about as much as Cheez Whiz resembles Stilton, this is not sushi for the purist. And unless you personally witness the chef slice and roll your sushi, it wasn't made to order. If you get there toward the end of a serving period, that lonely little plate could have been floating around and around for a while. It's tarted up to appeal to a wide audience.

Femme de Joie wouldn't complain if she was cajoled into eating at Yama Sushi, but there are more authentic sushi bars in town.

Yama Sushi, 40 Hartnell Avenue, Redding, CA 96002. Phone 530-223-6868, fax 530-223-6888. Cash & cards; no checks. Open daily 11:30 - 2:30 for lunch, 5:00 PM - 10:00 PM for dinner. Beer, wine, sake. Vegetarian and vegan options. Ample onsite parking. Website at www.yamasushi.net

That Peck's Bad Boy of the Travel Channel, Anthony Bourdain, recently commented in the New York Times that San Francisco is "a two-fisted drinking town, a carnivorous meat-eating town, it’s dirty and nasty and wonderful…" and Femme de Joie would pretty much agree on all counts. Never having lost her love of that deliciously wicked town and all its delights, she particularly craves the myriad restaurants of Baghdad-by-the-Bay and greedily anticipates the next eating adventure there.

Not long ago, M. de Joie and Amico del Signore decided to tread in a couple of Bourdain's footsteps to the House of Prime Rib, a bastion of unapologetic worship of beef and booze on Van Ness. A reservation was made by phone for a Saturday night at 9 p.m., and the House of Prime Rib returned a confirmation call two days before.

It was a lovely night in The City. M. de Joie and A. del Signore arrived on foot at the House of Prime Rib, bypassing the valet parking available. We were about 45 minutes early and said as much to the reservations clerk, who checked us in and directed us (naturally) to the lounge.

House of Prime Rib hasn't changed their decor since its inception: part faux-English Squire's manor, part private men's club, the enormous space is divided into manageable rooms with dim lighting and classic retro furnishings. We found a small table near the fireplace; the cocktail waitress arrived within three minutes. She was friendly but efficient and took our orders for two Bombay gin and tonics, extra lime ($8 each - a surprise bargain in pricey San Francisco considering we called the liquor).



Cute mini-carafes of generic bar snacks came with our cocktails. The g-and-t's were perfect, with lots of extra lime wedges on the side. As we waited in the lounge, we took note of the mix of clientele: an older couple seated in brocade armchairs who never looked at or spoke to each other; a large party from Italy who were meeting an American relative; frat boys boisterously boozing; two middle-aged men of eccentric but expensive means, negotiating a business deal; a younger couple on a date which he appeared to be ill-prepared to pay for.

After draining our drinks, we waited for our reservation to be called. It was Saturday night, after all, and quite busy even at 9 pm. Femme de Joie ordered another gin - what the hell, she wasn't driving - and the minutes ticked by. The crowd thinned. No one looked our way.

At 9:40, after sending up a couple of flares, Amico del Signore got the attention of the house manager and pointed out that we had a table booked for 9 p.m. and it was now leaning toward 10 pm. There was a flurry of activity: they were so sorry, it was an oversight, please just one moment, and then we were whisked into a dining room and seated at a rather small table. M. de Joie sat on the banquette, which wasn't bad, but A. del Signore was perched on a wooden chair that stuck out into the walkway the waiters used. This was not going to work. We flagged down a busboy and asked if we could have a nearby table that was more accommodating.

And then... we finally got waited on. The restaurant manager escorted us to a much nicer table where we could both sit at the banquette, overseeing the room. We were assigned an experienced waitress (making us wonder just who we might have gotten had we remained at the Tiny Table), and the manager handed us a menu of wines-by-the-glass, apologizing again for their oversight, inviting us to order any glass of wine on the house. It seemed churlish to go directly to the $16 Duckhorn or Frog's Leap, so we both ordered the 2007 Clos de Bois Merlot for $8, which was undistinguished. Note: if this should happen to you, don't be modest. Go for the expensive wine.

The House of Prime Rib serves two things: prime rib and fish. Nearby was a table full of Japanese tourists who had all ordered the fish (making us wonder why they'd bother visiting this restaurant when there are so many fine fish restaurants in SF); each one had a large plate with a perfect but lonely salmon fillet in the center. We went for the prime rib: one Henry VIII cut and one English cut.



First came the salad, which is apparently famous for the dressing that takes three weeks to make, and which, we were assured, some people come to the restaurant specifically for. It was quite a production, the Making Of The Salad, whomping the salad bowl to make it spin on a bed of ice, pouring the dressing from on high to anoint the salad greens and beets like holy oil, finally presenting the spun-poured-anointed plates of salad with a chilled fork with which to transfer lettuce from the plate into one's mouth. Femme de Joie would like to say here that the Presentation Of The Chilled Fork is a ritual she finds exceedingly pretentious, if not downright silly, but it seems to be catnip to a certain genre of diners.



The Salad.

Well, it's a salad, isn't it? Despite the glam production, it tasted very much like a salad covered in bottled Seven Seas Russian dressing. That's not to say it was bad; it wasn't. But neither was it all that fabulous, either. It was lettuce and canned beets covered in a sweet red sauce.



Hardly had we finished our lettuce parfaits when the plates were whisked away and a triangular apparatus was set before us, containing three strengths of horseradish. We'd barely had time to slice some sourdough bread before our plates of prime rib were plopped in front of us.



They looked about the same except that Amico del Signore's more expensive Henry VIII cut contained the rib bone, which the waitress told us was good luck or a propitious augury or something like that. It may be, but it also is inedible and when you're paying by the weight for prime rib, it's a bit of a rip-off as well. Standard accompaniments are mashed potatoes and gravy (which were both good, albeit salty), Yorkshire pudding (used here to absorb the gravy, rendering it pretty soggy), creamed spinach (which is one of Femme de Joie's very favorite foods but here was on the dry side and salty), and creamed corn (the best of all the sides, nicely sweet and creamy with a little crunch to the kernels).

The prime rib itself was perfect: cooked as requested and meltingly tender with the mineral taste of aged meat. The horseradish was exactly as described: "mild, medium, and watch out," and we both piled on the Watch Out. We cleaned our plates. We had understood that when the larger cuts are ordered, that free seconds are offered, but this did not happen. Here's your hat, what's your hurry? The plates were removed, the horseradish tree disappeared along with the barely-touched sourdough loaf before we realized what had happened, and suddenly dessert menus were proffered. All the desserts were old-school: peach Melba, bread pudding, strawberry shortcake - classics all, but we'd barely had time to consider the dinner we'd just had, never mind sweets. We skipped dessert.

It was barely a minute later that our bill arrived: $119. We were aware of the prices when the reservation was made so it wasn't a shocking total, but when we considered all that had transpired, the disappointing quality of some of the dishes, and the rush to get us served and out the door, it seemed very high. By 10:30 p.m. we were outside on Van Ness again, slightly dazed and wondering if things would have been different had Anthony Bourdain been with us.

House of Prime Rib, 1906 Van Ness Avenue (between Washington and Jackson), San Francisco, California. 415-885-4605. Valet parking available, but MUNI lines 1, 10, 12, 17, 19, 47, 49, and 76 all run within a few blocks. Full bar. Open for dinner nightly. Reservations essential; call restaurant or book at OpenTable.com. Vegetarians and vegans: nothing to see here. Website at houseofprimerib.net.

Of necessity, sushi restaurants are usually quite small, little more than a mini-van’s worth of seats. It takes time to turn out sushi and it does not lend itself to sitting around like McWhoppers, so the number of diners allowed in has to be limited. And this is not a food that can be turned over to summer job seekers: sushi chefs in Japan train for years before they ever lay knife to fish, though in America a 12-week course suffices.

There are numerous restaurants around town that attempt to combine several Asian cuisines with varying degrees of success. Now and then Femme de Joie has picked up a comely slice from a sushi roll to discover that what she is tasting is less like a delicate scallop roll than it is more like Nigiri Fish Bait.

A big reason for Tokyo Garden Japanese Restaurant's continued success is sticking to Japanese cuisine. The kitchen is focused and not so spread out with Cajun teriyaki or soba marinara that the purity and essence becomes dilute.



Tako salad, $5.95

Tako salad ($5.95) is a great way to find out if you like octopus. If you didn’t know, you might think this was bits of sweet, chewy squid. Tokyo Garden’s version makes a terrific appetizer with loads of piquant ginger and strips of seaweed. If you’re unsure, share this with a friend, but this little salad is enticing enough to keep to yourself.



Seafood noodle soup ($11.95 made with soba, $1 extra for udon noodles)

Femme de Joie had this on a blustery cold afternoon and it was just the ticket - a savory-sweet broth filled with soba noodles and a surfeit of scallops, fish, vegetables, and shrimp. Though the fish was overcooked, the rest was perfect and tender. The serving was much larger than the photo indicates and it isn’t a speedy meal to eat - you want to take your time to enjoy every bite, or you’ll wind up with a splattered shirt front.



Bento box lunch special #5 ($7.95) with beef teriyaki, assorted tempura, California roll, salad, and rice

Assorted tempura included fresh mushrooms, asparagus, and shrimp in a fragile-crisp non-greasy batter. Creamy avocado dominated the taste in the California roll - the “crab” taste was lost. Though the steak was tender and had good beefy flavor, the teriyaki sauce had a weird glutinous mouthfeel and a slightly off taste.



Spicy tuna roll, mackerel roll (saba), Crazy Monkey Roll

After Femme de Joie had spent a few months trying sushi at different restaurants around town and being disappointed, Tokyo Garden really delivered. The fresh clean taste of tuna came through. Fresh beads of masago (smelt fish roe) that popped in the mouth accented the rice and spicy sauce gave it a kick. Oily mackerel can either be overpoweringly fishy or bland, depending on how it was cured, but this version had a pleasant taste of the sea and texture. Crazy Monkey roll (snow crab, imitation crab, avocado, cucumber, topped with unagi (freshwater eel), masago, and special sauce) was almost as delightful to eat as it was to order: none of the tastes dominated or concealed the others. Each bite had a slight cucumber crunch that then melted into the softer crab and avocado.

If you’re not of a mind to wait for a seat at one of the sushi bars around Redding or you aren’t quite sure about whether you like sushi, Tokyo Gardens offers a more Americanized option. There are menu choices that will appeal to the fishphobic and more adventurous palates alike. Though fresh fish of a quality for sashimi and sushi is not cheap (do you really want to eat day-old discount salmon?), lunch specials start at $5.95, so there’s a little something for everyone here.

Tokyo Garden Japanese Restaurant, 1675 Hilltop Drive, Suite M, Redding CA 96002. Phone 530-221-6888, fax 530-221-5168. Open 7 days a week from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Lunch served from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Cash, cards, no checks. Beer, wine, sake. Sushi bar. Loads of parking. Vegetarian and vegan options. Website at reddingtokyogarden.com.