Craw-Daddy-o!

So, wait; you’re telling me that I never wrote about the little town of Isleton, California? It’s this little town of fewer than 900 people, located along the Sacramento River/San Joaquin River Delta that defines our Oakley old vine vineyards.

Kathy and I drive through Isleton every time we make our increasingly frequent trips farther east along the Delta water levee to 3 wine company in Clarksburg (FYI: the highway diverts you through downtown [well done, Isleton town fathers!] but there’s usually a California Highway Patrol cruiser at the trough of the road: speed trap!). But Kath and I always reminisce about the time we actually stopped for lunch in Isleton, a couple of months after we relocated to Oakley around Labor Day 2009.

Movin’ on up from a 1,000-square-foot Seattle bungalow to a joint three times the size in Northern Cali, we were in the market for some new accouterments. In the autumn of 2009, we found ourselves in a shop in downtown Berkeley purchasing an area rug. The loquacious cashier was the coolest, despite at least six customers behind us; upon learning that we were East Bay transplants, he immediately drew us up a list of towns to visit once we cross the big divide from CoCo County into the great beyond of Sacramento County. Yeah, like we’re not in das sticks as we are.

But our Crate&Barrel guide was prescient: Isleton, first on his list for us, was a wonder. OK, it has seen boom and bust, better days, with a huge Asian population working in the dozen or so canneries that made Isleton “The Asparagus Capital of the World.” The main drag can be walked in 15 minutes, and its now-mostly empty 19th-century storefronts just beg for creative tenants. It’s like a set for the movie “Westworld,” (which I shamelessly watched again the other night, and remembered that the novelization of the screenplay that I checked out of the Ottawa, Canada, public library in my youth, along with an Amarillo Slim guide on the then-new Hold’em Poker).

The 70’s Woody Guthrie bio-pic, “Bound for Glory,” directed by Hal Ashby, was shot in Isleton.

So, November of 2009, Kath and I go to Isleton for lunch. We wander, see lots of empty, closed storefronts, a bit of seismic work indicating commitment, and some great plaques. Chinese “tongs” (a gang term now, but one that truly means “community organization”) had actually been the original influence on at least one side of the street. The local history museum indicated that Chinese kept to one side of Main Street, Japanese to the other.

But gotta tell ya: If ever a group of artists, bakers, winemakers, brewmeisters, ceramicists and writers decide to descend on real estate, this is the hook-up.

Oh, yeah, lunch in fall of 2009. So Kath and I park, walk, and are ready to leave. The professional drinkers’ bar across the street brings back ‘Nam flashbacks of White Center, WA’s taverns. But the diner across the main drag is das bee’s knees.

Isleton Joe’s posts a banner touting the “Isleton Crawdad Festival.” Sadly the economy dealt a blow to this annual celebration; it has been canceled for the first time in years; an event that allegedly tripled the population of “The Little Paris of the Delta” every Fathers’ Day weekend.

Oh, yeah, lunch. We sit in a booth, order two rations of crawdadi. OK, Kath likes them more than do I, but a couple of glasses of house white make the medicine go down. In the most delightful way. Isleton Joe’s is famous for serving crawdads, and the place has a distinct “Northern Exposure” vibe (see photo with this post). There’s an old bar on one side of the joint, and the diner on the other side of a dividing wall. The clientele was a mixture of bikers, seniors, tourists, families and farmers. And we had just happened, on that visit in 2009, to have stopped in for lunch on one of Isleton Joe’s Saturday afternoon oyster barbecues held out on their outdoor side patio.

We ended up staying for hours. After our lunch. Outdoor karaoke was being hosted by a dapper older gent who, Kath and I were convinced, just had to be Isleton’s mayor (kinda like Maurice from “Exposure,” but friendlier). We had plates of big barbecued Pacific oysters on the shell, smothered in garlic butter. We shared a table with strangers who quickly became new friends. We listened to bad Elvis performed by one of the local old-timers known for his Elvis, and even got up to dance when we weren’t running into the bar for wine refills. It was a blast, and I can’t believe that it took Kath and me until yesterday, Mother’s Day 2011, to return.

So yesterday, Kathy had a yearning for crawdads, so we motored out over the levee to — as Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean sing in the picture “A Mighty Wind” — “E _ _ A _ _ _ OE’S.”

We ordered the Crawdad Platter for Two and a couple of glasses of the house white, and then settled in to soak up the Cicely, Alaska, vibe. First, we spied signs that exclaimed that the Crawdad Festival was back this coming Father’s Day weekend. But now it’s called the “Cajun Festival” because apparently during Isleton’s yearlong hiatus from the fest in 2010, some other municipality or organization bought the trademark to the name!

Unfortunately, I also spied a wall notice that we had missed another oyster BBQ held just the weekend before. But there still seemed to be a fair amount of activity out on the patio: no karaoke with Mayor Maurice, but tunes pumped outside from the interior jukebox, with a steady stream of patrons of all stripes coming and going for drink refills.

Our crawdads came in a huge bowl, were seasoned outrageously with a great blend of Old Bay and other spices, and accompanied with cocktail sauce, lemon wedges, hardcore garlic bread, one Wet-Nap and not nearly enough napkins for the damage I was doing to our surroundings (Upon looking at her own hands after using the moist towlette after the meal, Kath remarked that her poor hand cleanup made her look like she’d applied self-tanner really, really badly). We ordered another glass of wine and mosied out to the patio to soak up some sun and relive as much as we could from 2009’s BBQ event. Yeah, there were no oysters this time, no family-style seating and no karaoke.

But the vibe was pretty darn close. Isleton, and Joe, probably demands nothing less.

On the drive home, we decided to stop in to the new Delta Farmer’s Market stand at the intersection of Highways 160 and 12. The sign said “Wine Tasting Saturdays and Sundays” and you don’t have to ask me twice. Our host was hilarious, she waived the $5 tasting fee, knew her stuff (she used to work for Beringer), and despite the fact that they were pouring into those little plastic cup things, Kath ended up loading her arms with a half-dozen selections, one of which was a 2007 Andrus Island Merlot from California Cellars located on Isleton’s outskirts.

Andrus Island itself is an Isleton neighbor on the Sacramento River, cooled down at night by that Delta breeze we experience here in Oakley. Coming from Washington state, which cut its teeth on Merlot decades ago, we rarely seek out a Cali Merlot. But the Andrus Island 2007 sneaks up on you. It’s got an earthy garnet color in the glass, almost like a Pinot disguise. The nose reveals bright cranberry fruit and a certain spiciness. It’s tight on the palate, nowhere near the lapel-grabbing Merlots in WA state’s past (present?), but the mouthfeel is of earth and cloves.