Odyssey: A shining star on the food scene

<p>BY JEFF COX</p><p>FOR THE PRESS DEMOCRAT </p><p>There’s a master chef at work in Windsor. His name is Rudy Mihal and his restaurant is Odyssey. Make a note of it.</p><p>Odyssey is as good as any restaurant in Sonoma County. His food isn’t outlandish, but rather simple; yet the flavors are so perfectly harmonious that each dish is astounding. He creates familiar dishes, but they’re so good they become unfamiliar, as though you’ve never had them before.</p><p>Take, for instance, his Burger ($22 ****). Twenty-two dollars for a hamburger?! No, this is not a hamburger. Well, it is a hamburger — sort of — but it’s like no other hamburger you’ve ever had. From the menu description, “black truffle, braised short ribs and foie gras enclosed by beef sirloin with frites and garlic aioli,” you might expect something over-the-top, even coarse. But this is just the opposite.</p><p>The choicest cuts of beef sirloin are ground in house. The meat is removed from slow-cooked short ribs and flavored with black truffles. Foie gras is cut into bits. These ingredients are lightly seasoned. The rib meat, truffles and foie gras are laid on one side of a patty of ground sirloin, and the other side is folded over them and sealed, and then the “burger” is perfectly cooked, topped with grilled, sweet onions and set on a sesame seed bun.</p><p>This is a hamburger the way that the Berlin Philharmonic is a band.</p><p>One hardly knows what to expect from a burger like this. What you get is the most luscious, beefy, earthy, fatty, rich, sweet, soft-textured mouthful of food you’ve ever experienced. It’s seductive. You haven’t even swallowed the first bite when the desire forms in your mind for bite number two. It’s a siren song of a hamburger. Lash me to the mast lest I eat the whole thing! No wonder he calls this place Odyssey. I may never get home again. I might just stay and eat and eat and eat until I die.</p><p>And it wasn’t just the burger. I had to literally force myself to stop eating the frites (fries) out of their paper cone; frites that gain paradisiacal flavor when dragged through the faintly garlicky aioli that accompanies them.</p><p>Who is Rudy Mihal, and where did he learn to cook like this? Like anyone, his story is finely detailed. But suffice it to say that his heritage is Italian, Czech and French, and he defines his style of cooking simply as “French and Italian inspired cuisine with an emphasis on seasonal ingredients.”</p><p>He’s being modest. He worked in the Manhattan kitchens of two James Beard Foundation “Outstanding Chefs,” Daniel Boulud of Daniel, and Tom Colicchio of Gramercy Tavern. His wanderings have also taken him to faraway places, where he added to his knowledge of how to make good food great.</p><p>Odyssey is a small place — just nine tables and a long, glowing counter lit from within. The walls are a gentle moss green. The tables are bare wood and set with cloth napkins. Wine glasses are, thankfully, huge, so the wine can be properly enjoyed. Reservations are not taken except for parties of six or more. Mihal has chosen the one-eyed giant Polyphemus as the emblem of his restaurant. Although Polyphemus comes to a bad end in Homer’s poem, his head is a striking image as the giant stares out at you from his single eye.</p><p>At the dinner hour, which starts at 5:30 p.m., a projection TV shows movies on a screen fixed to the east wall. Anita Ekberg splashed uninhibitedly in the Trevi Fountain as “La Dolce Vita” flickered on the screen on a recent night. But you hear no sound from the movies. Instead of the framed static photos or paintings you usually see in restaurants, Odyssey has motion pictures, and motion seems to be the operative word here. The sound system plays an eclectic mix of world music that reinforces the peripatetic theme.</p><p>The wine list certainly skips around the world. Bottles come in from Sonoma and Napa, sure, but also Mendocino and Amador counties, California’s Central Coast, Italy and France, Alsace, Oregon, Germany, Spain and Hungary. Prices range from $27 to $115, with plenty in the $30-$40 range. Corkage is $20.</p><p>As for the food, Mihal rang up perfect scores like a pool shark running the table. Marinated Local Anchovies ($12 ****) were filets of ultra fresh anchovies piqued by a tangy marinade and laid across sweet, dead-ripe tomato halves oven-roasted to evaporate their juice and concentrate their flavor. These in turn sat atop a wide strip of puff pastry. These delights were accompanied by an arugula jus — notable as much for the mellifluousness of its pronunciation as for its flavor.</p><p>Country Pork and Swiss Chard Terrine ($13 ****) showed the mastery of technique and conception Mihal is capable of. The terrine (like a country paté) mixed coarsely ground sweet pork and piquant chard in a perfect balance. Pickled baby red and yellow beets joined fresh herbs — chervil, tarragon, watercress, parsley and mache. Little crunchy bursts of salt added an element of surprise from the few crystals strewn among the herbs.</p><p>Fresh flavors were forefront in the Peekytoe Crab Fondue ($13 ****), a rich, creamy mix of pureed fresh garden peas, bits of crabmeat, small dice of crispy bacon and the tender tips of pea shoots. A Hearts of Romaine Salad ($12 ****) was the best of everything: small, uncut inner leaves of romaine lettuce joined by luscious and salty sheep’s milk feta, meaty cerignola olives from southeastern Italy and roasted tomato “petals,” which were more of those intensely flavored oven-roasted tomato halves.</p><p>Since he is Italian influenced, Mihal makes three pizzas. The basic Margherita Pizza ($14 ****) would be instantly recognizable by Italians — perfect thin crust not baked so hard it turns black in spots and blisters, a delicate tomato sauce and real mozzarella di bufala. In other words, it’s pizza handled with care. Handmade Potato Gnocchi ($18 ****) were also handled with care and instantly became my benchmark for gnocchi. These succulent little dumplings were covered with a savory white sauce containing bits of organic chicken, plus earthy hen-of-the-woods and oyster mushrooms.</p><p>For dessert, Three Cheeses ($7 ****). The restaurant doesn’t deserve high marks for making the cheeses, but does for selecting them for its 11-cheese list. Five cheeses are $11 and seven are $15. Kannitu is a Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese that tasted like it came from deep time. I could imagine Ovid snacking on it while writing his “Metamorphoses.” Marzolino Rosso del Chianti is a sheep’s milk cheese whose ripening crust is treated with tomato juice. Pungent, soft and velvety Taleggio is mountain cows’ milk cheese. All are winners.</p><p>To sum up: Chef Rudy Mihal is a person with excellent taste, which he gladly shares with his customers. And he’s a brilliant new star on Sonoma County’s culinary scene.</p><p>Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for A&E. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.</p>