The Patio Is Open Again

That was a rough one.

Four days in a row over 90, and up here we ran hotter than the coast. The marine layer left town, the nights stayed warm, and for about a week the patio was a place you looked at through the window.

You came in anyway. You sat inside, you ordered the cold things, you told us it was hotter at your house. We noticed, and we're grateful. A neighborhood restaurant only works if the neighborhood keeps showing up, and you did.

So here's your reward. The marine layer is back. The evenings have that first little chill again, the one where you think about a sweater and then decide against it. All three patios are open, the heat lamps are standing by just in case, and the kitchen is turning the oven back on for the first real baked dishes of fall.

Come sit outside. We've been waiting to say that for two weeks

Starting Thursday: Beef Lasagna. Then Baklava a la Mode, If You Dare.

Starting Thursday at dinner: Beef Lasagna. Sheets of pasta layered with a slow-cooked beef sauce made in our kitchen, cheese between every layer, baked until the top goes golden and the edges go crisp and the middle is the part everyone fights over. It's the chicken lasagna's bigger, louder cousin, and it only comes around a few times a year.

Here's a thing we didn't know until this week. The word lasagna comes from the Greek. Laganon: a flat sheet of dough, cut into strips. The Romans borrowed it, the Italians perfected it, and a Greek family in Scripps Ranch is serving it on Thursday. We think that's about right.

Drink it with the Fragospito Cabernet Sauvignon / Syrah, the Cretan red from last week's email. A beef lasagna is rich three ways at once: the meat, the cheese, the sauce. It wants a red with dark fruit and enough structure to keep up, and this one has both. Syrah in front with dried fruit and spice that lean into the sauce, Cabernet behind it with the tannin to cut through the cheese. Bottle only. The lasagna's name is Greek and so is the wine. Nobody at the table will object.

Then, for dessert: Baklava. Phyllo, which is just the Greek word for "leaf," brushed with butter and stacked sheet after sheet over walnuts and cinnamon, baked, then soaked in a cinnamon syrup while it's still hot so the whole thing drinks it in. Traditional Greek bakers stack it thirty-three layers deep, one for each year of Christ's life. We're not going to count ours in front of you. Order it and count them yourself.

Now the dare. Make it à la mode. One scoop of vanilla gelato on top of warm baklava. The gelato starts melting the second it lands. It runs into the cinnamon syrup, the syrup runs into the phyllo, and for about ninety seconds you have hot, cold, crisp, and soft all on one fork. Some of you are going to say that's too much. Those people are welcome to watch.

A double espresso alongside is the move. Bitter against the cinnamon. It's how they'd do it in Heraklion. Till it sells out.

The Adventure Continues

This photo is from lunch. A farm-to-table place in the middle of nowhere, Crete, the kind of spot you only find because someone's cousin tells you about it. It's not in the travel journal. We wanted you to have something the journal doesn't.

What IS in the journal is what happened after. Back in March, at a restaurant in Agios Nikolaos, Yanni had a glass of a young red he couldn't stop thinking about. He spent the rest of the trip, and most of the summer, trying to find the family who made it. This month he did. The Karapidakis family, in the village of Alagni, just outside Heraklion.

He and Denise showed up expecting a quiet tasting. It was not a quiet tasting. The rest is in the journal, in twenty-five photos and their own words.

P.S. - Vote for Us: Nextdoor 2026 Faves

You came in during the heat wave. Now we're asking one more thing: Nextdoor's 2026 Faves voting is open, and a vote for Yanni's takes less time than deciding on the baklava. We'll owe you one. We already do.