Menu: Bodies of Water, Created for Installation and Screening of 2 Feet by Kalie Granier
“… each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.”― Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
Welcome Drinks
2Feet Cocktail: Umboshi plum, Meyer Lemon and Nori Simple Syrup with Gin or Vodka & Tonic, Garnished with Sea Grapes
Non-Alcoholic: Sparkling Mulberry & Kombu Shrub with sea grape garnish.
Monterey Bay
Black Cod Chowder
Monterey Canyon starts at Moss Landing Beach and forks its way along the bottom of the bay, stretching 292 miles and descending into a 2.5 mile deep alluvial plain. It rivals the Grand Canyon in size and grandeur. When storms hit, they push silt and algae from shore and the sea surface deep into the canyon, tumbling past the rocky walls and gentle slopes, until it deposits in the deep, deep alluvial plains. This nourishes sea creatures that dwell in the depths. It’s also a “carbon highway” as carbon sequestered by bull kelp is deposited in the deep sea where it remains buried indefinitely. World-wide, an estimated 200 million tons of carbon dioxide are being sequestered by macroalgae like bull kelp every year. The terrain of this deep canyon, combined with prevailing winds, creates an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water that feeds the abundance of sea life found there, including black cod, who live at depths of down to 9800 feet.
Muir Beach Watershed Grazing Table
Grazing Board with local, seasonal vegetable crudite & anchovy aioli, vegan dips, seaweed bread & butter
The watershed begins and ends at the ocean, from where our DNA once belly crawled onto shore and started the long dance of evolution with the plants and animals and fungi and algae. Our skin has the same bacterial content as soil; we are earthlings, little fractals of water and dirt. Buffering land and sea, the dynamic and difficult ecosystem where creatures learn to breath air in preparation to live on land, are generous nori, social kombu, kinky bladderwrack, glamorous feather boa. Come spring the alga inhale and grow by pulling carbon from the air; come fall, they exhale by tossing spores for next spring, and then disappearing into the crashing winter waves.
Tomales Bay
Oysters on the half shell with sea lettuce and preserved sakura cherry blossom mignonette
In this fog-capped crooked crevice of an estuary, wetlands and river tributaries, nutrient-rich waters, upwelling currents and intertidal activity create a constant flux of salt and freshwater, making it prime oyster habitat. In return, the clams, mussels and oysters that thrive here are filter feeders, keep the water clear so the eelgrass can thrive. Shellfish and estuary create a perfect symbiosis, a mutual forming of one another, a shape shifting with the confluence of streams running into the sea and tides rushing to shore, eelgrass bending to the coming and going of currents.
San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay herring bottarga cara cara oranges, wakame seaweed, shaved fennel & kohlrabi salad
The San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the West Coast and each winter bright silver, omega-3 rich silver schools of fish are ushered in on King tides to lay their eggs on the eelgrass. The sea lions, seals, pelicans, cormorants, dolphins all feed on the herring and become plump, healthy, and fertile for spring mating. The arrival of herring isn’t spring – it’s pre-spring, or the fertile void. The Fertile Void is the cycle that the creative process takes. This is the pause between breaths, the dark stillness, the bog of uncertainty, the calm.
Vegan Option- Seagrape caviar instead of bottarga
Bodega Bay
Dungeness crab brioche toast with avocado, pickled shallots & kumquats, and cilantro
Bodega harbor is rich in eelgrass meadows, habitat for a multitude of native species like amphipods, isopods, tiny fish, shrimp, mollusks and bi-valves – all favorite foods of juvenile Dungeness crabs. The crabs grow and molt and grow and molt in the muddy bottoms of the estuary. Many adult Dungeness crabs migrate out to deeper waters of Bodega Bay, while others stay shallow, preferring the eelgrass meadows of the harbor.
Sonoma Coast
AKUA Kelp sliders with uni aioli
Bull kelp spores grow rapidly in the nutrient-rich, cold waters along the Northern California coast, forming kelp forests each spring that shelter and feed a whole host of other marine life. Since 2014, the Sonoma and Mendocino coast have lost more than 90% of its bull kelp forest due to a perfect storm of climate change related events. The result has been an ecosystem out of balance, and purple urchin populations have exploded and other bull kelp feeders like abalone are starving. One solution to save the bull kelp forests is to eat the purple sea urchin. The company Urchinomics has been hiring divers to gather them, and then fatten them up in pens on land. In this dish, ranching of urchins is paired with regenerative ocean farming on the Atlantic Coast. Imagine a one acre-ocean farm where kelp grows up to 12 feet long in a few months and these micro farms can grow 30 tons of seaweed and a quarter of a million shellfish per acre with no feed, no inputs, no watering. Just pure carbon sequestering and delicious food. Welcome to the delicious future of farming.
Monterey Bay Watershed
Organic shiso- koji Brussel sprouts with togarashi
Soil is a collective verb of the earth's skein, a jumble of minerals and bacteria from our biosphere. It’s live oaks brushed with lichen, dead crab and damp sea lettuce, dust from exploded stars, lava from long ago volcano eruptions, wild animal scat rich with the fur from their prey and tiny spores of mushrooms, an ancient ocean, an oyster midden, a jumble of kelp tangled by a storm, a million stories of evolution and symbiosis and our bodies and our breath. And when there’s water from rain or irrigation, it runs into the sea, into the underwater canyons, and estuaries and meadows and alluvial plains. Soil always matters.