My first stop in the Bay Area has always been Bette’s Ocean View Diner in Berkeley. When I am home, I dream about Bette’s. I sometimes find myself dreaming about Bette’s when I am eating breakfast at Bette’s. That’s because I have eaten so many good breakfasts there.

Bette and her gang are so great because they understand the egg, the concept of crispy home fries, the theory behind the pancake, the subtlety of French toast, the absolute commitment to real maple syrup, the unwavering devotion to the perfect breakfast meats, and I haven’t even mentioned their culinary invention of inventions: the soufflé pancake. The one I eat has bananas and rum, and it tastes so good that I can’t stand it! The bananas are melting, the rum is strong, and the pancake tends to float out of your mouth if you don’t keep it closed while chewing.

When you cook eggs, the final product must be moist. (When I make scrambled eggs, I always add an extra yolk; and I don’t break it until the other eggs have finished cooking. I like my eggs rare, like my chickens and game birds.) Omelets, too, must be moist and the fillings, top notch. The chefs do all this and season everything with a master’s touch. Also, the O.J. is freshly squeezed, the baked breakfast items (like sticky buns) are delicious, and the fruit salad is made from ripe local fruits. Ahh, Bette, you’re my gal.

You know, I also find myself dreaming of Burma. I never went there, but I had a delicious meal at a Burmese restaurant in San Francisco. Burmese cuisine draws on ideas from its left and right (India and the far east), and the resulting dishes are astounding. Samosa-like items are more delicate than their Indian cousins, and “green tea leaf” salads are refreshing and unique. Shrimp curry isn’t at all like an Indian curry; the spices are different and the shrimp are crunchy, meaning that they were cooked correctly. The “falling apart pork” was good, but not as good as the Japanese one in my next culinary adventure. I’m not a member of the “falling apart” school unless there are some fantastic flavors involved, like Texas barbeque and Kyushu-style pork.

Leaping ahead to dessert, we find an interesting thing called litchi smoothie. It was so tasty and refreshing that I have suggested to our R&D person (my wife) that we make both a litchi mousse cake and a rose water mousse cake. Litchis and rose water have a similar ancestor (teradactyl?, australopithicus?), and now I am reminded of another taste from Archestrate 30 years ago: poached pears filled with creme patissiere in a crème anglaise sauce infused with earl grey tea. And that reminds me of our original espresso chocolate truffle cake where we “brewed” Turkish ground espresso in butter before adding it to the chocolate.

The thing about California that drives me crazy when I am not in California is the vegetable and fruit sections of small grocery stores. There are 15-20 types of lettuce, 10 kinds of tomatoes, 10 types of wild mushrooms, etc. Everything is fresh and natural and grown in accordance with a certain California code of how to live well and eat well and not screw up the land on which we depend. The fish is also spectacular. I made a fish in beurre blanc and a salad with every green available. I made my chocolate truffle cake with Scharfenberger chocolate. I deglazed a pan, after sautéing a piece of beef, with Sattui Madeira from California and then made a cream sauce.