One of my mother’s and my favorite places to spend a girls’ day out is the College Avenue/Rockridge area of Oakland (just a mile or two down, College Avenue turns into Berkeley and leads directly to the campus). A couple Sundays ago, we met up at the Rockridge BART station, stashed our cars and began walking. Yeah, OK, the lot is supposed to be for BART patrons only—but it was virtually empty on a Sunday morning.
    Our girls’ days are usually comprised of two goals: shopping for a particular item, and eating ... um, anything. The shopping goal for the day was to find myself a pair of black flats for me. It was a moral imperative, as I was currently flouting the UWL (Universal Womens Law) by not owning a single pair of black flats. (No, that doesn’t mean that I actually owned several pairs.) Anyway, in short order, I found these at Tootsie’s (5525 College Ave., (510) 595-7272).
    When it came to lunch, though, we were at a standstill. It’s not as though there’s a lack of restaurants within the vicinity. Oliveto’s is always one of the better options, but I didn’t see much on the menu that appealed to me that particular day; and the other restaurants we passed (a bar and grill, Mexican, Chinese) seemed sort of pedestrian. We were in the Bay Area! Give me some good California cuisine. We kept walking, shopping and talking, and after about another hour, discovered and decided to try Somerset Restaurant, just a couple blocks from the Rockridge BART station.
    The restaurant was small, on the dark-wood side, and bustling, with diners on the left 2/3 of the room, and a bar (with one of those old-fashioned Read Weight Free machines) on the right. Though the place was full, we were immediately seated. However, the table for two was squooshed up between a larger table and a short wall. Mom, looking a little claustrophobic, asked if there was anything else available. Within a few minutes, we had a larger table, more in the open and not hip-to-hip with another party.
    The menu was chock-full of your standard California cuisine selections, many with a slight twist, and all of them sounding tasty. Some of the more intriguing lunch items included were an artichoke-black olive tart with spinach and feta cheese, broiled petrale sole with coconut-lemon rice, eggplant cutlet sandwich, and a roasted corn salad. (The dinner menu listed a carmelized Prosciutto and Black Mission fig dish with goat cheese, pistachios and port sauce, which made me wish we’d been there later.) Mom ordered the Cobb salad without the egg. Although I’m a sucker for salad, because she ordered one, I opted for the veggie pizza du jour. We also ordered a side of biscuits and iced tea.
    Mom’s salad was huge and tasty, as most Cobb salads tend to be, with a very nice honey-mustard-Champagne dressing. Easily half of it was left by the time she was full. My pizza was delicious: the thin crust was crunchy, the veggies fresh and flavorful. Although I abhor raw onions of any sort, carmelized onions bring just the right touch of zing. And the fontina—well, it’s cheese. Is cheese ever wrong?
    The Iced Tea Report: “It was a nice color, but a little on the weak side,” Mom reports. “There was enough flavor to pick up, though it wasn’t strong. It needed body. I wasn’t bowled over by it.”
    Our server, incidentally, forgot our biscuits, but brought them right away when we mentioned we were still waiting for them. They were your standard buttermilk biscuits—freshly made, but nothing extraordinary.
    One of the drawbacks of the restaurant is that the acoustics were terrible. It was crowded and so loud that Mom and I, even though we were seated off to the side, had to raise our voices to be heard. After lunch, we went to the antique store next door, and we could easily hear the diners through the wall.
    Would we go there again? Yes, definitely. (However, Mom might bring her own tea next time.) —A.C.

Posted on Thursday, February 28, 2008 in Permalink