Thomas Hill Organics: Simple Deliciousness in Paso Robles

America's current obsession with the farm to table movement may have its roots in 1970s Northern California, where it's still going strong. After spending three food and wine intensive days in Paso Robles, though, I can say quite assuredly that the movement is alive, well and thriving along the Central Coast as well.

Now mind you, the organizers of a press junket, designed to focus attention on the high points of wine and food in the Paso Robles area, are not likely to take their guests to the local BK or Denny's for a bite to eat in between stops on the farm and wine trail. Nonetheless, even wearing my full strength skepticles (yes, that's a play on skeptical and spectacles, not the other word I know you're thinking of right now) for the duration of the trip, I left Paso impressed by the quality and ambition — and mission — in evidence at several of the eateries we visited.

While, as that suggests, there were multiple culinary highlights on the trip, one of the meals that most satisfied my constant quest for deliciousness happened to be among the simplest, and the most casual.


The Thomas Hill Organics Market Bistro first opened its doors for business just over a year ago, on January 15, 2009. The business actually has its own roots on the farm, for that's exactly what the primary business is at Thomas Hill Organics: farming. Husband and wife owners, Joe and Debbie Thomas, started their farm about five years ago, launching a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program a year-and-a-half later. The bistro, located just off the central square in Paso Robles, is simply the newest facet of the farm's organic growth.

While all of the food served at Thomas Hill is locally produced — including meat and poultry from local farms, fish from nearby fisheries and bread from Paso-based bakeries — it's in the produce arena that the bistro really sets itself at the forefront of the locavore movement. All of the fruits and vegetables served at the restaurant are grown and produced on the Thomas Hill Organics farm, from the leafy greens to the avocados, the kumquats to the strawberries, even the almonds and garlic. In keeping with the farm-fresh, seasonally driven menu, the cooking at THO — even though the lengthy menu descriptors may suggest otherwise — is based in simplicity, allowing the quality and flavor of the ingredients to take center stage.

Among the appetizers that were served and shared family-style at our table were (above, from top to bottom) a Shaved Cauliflower Salad with Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette and Candied Kalamata; Early Spring Pea Salad with House Saffron Ricotta and Mint Italian Salsa Verde; Bagna Cauda of Purple Potatoes and Farmed Fresh Hard Boiled Eggs; and (below) Thomas Hill Arugula Salad with Blood Oranges and Bacon Avocado. Everything was impeccably fresh and well prepared, but that cauliflower salad may just have been the single tastiest thing I ate on our entire trip — eye-openingly delicious.


The open fireplace located in the Thomas Hill's courtyard patio doubles as a wood-smoker and, later at night, a wood-fired pizza oven. Those of you that have been following my Paso trail may recognize the shot below as a variation of one I posted during the trip itself.

While that earlier shot may have seemed like gratuitous bacon porn when presented on its own, it was inspired by my chosen main lunch course, the Winter Sandwich of Wood Burning Oven Smoked Bacon, Sauteed Broccoli Raab, Pickled Raisins, Avocado and Roasted Garlic Aioli, served with a Field Green Salad (pictured below). The sandwich was more than satisfying, the bacon more primally pork-y than intensely smoked and salty. I don't know if there's such a thing as West Coast-style bacon, but the bacon at Thomas Hill, as well as one or two other examples I had during our trip, was meatier, cut thicker and far less intense in its cure and brine than most East Coast artisan bacon I've eaten.


Rather than beating-up a not entirely wine focused group with a barrage of winery visits, the organizers of our Paso junket were savvy in combining events, often bringing one or more winery owners and/or winemakers to us. The approach carried with it the added benefit of allowing us to do almost all of our wine tasting at the table rather than in the more clinical, sip and spit setting of a lined-up trade tasting.

Joining us for lunch at THO were Alex and Monica Villicana (pictured above at center and foreground), husband and wife owners of their eponymous Paso Robles winery, Villicana. The Villicanas produce roughly 1,800 cases a year from their 13.5 acres of vineyards, growing about 95% of the fruit necessary for their overall production themselves.

The 2009 Villicana Paso Robles "Vin Rosé" was produced from a blend of early-picked, whole-cluster pressed Syrah, along with saignées of both Grenache and Mourvèdre, and finished with a dash of Viognier (2-5%) for aromatic lift. Their 2007 Estate Syrah, actually a blend of 80% Syrah with 10% each of Grenache and Mourvèdre, was aged for 20 months in French oak barriques, 40% of which were new. All of the wines at Villicana are fermented with inoculated, selected yeasts but do not show any other overt signs of manipulation. While both wines were a little on the polished (and oaky, in the case of the red) side for my personal tastes, both were well-crafted and, most importantly in our setting, paired well with lunch.

After lunch, Thomas Hill co-owner Debbie Thomas, came out to say hello and to field a few questions from the group.

For dessert, a little something to cleanse the palate and highlight the brilliant flavors that only fresh ingredients can deliver: Strawberry Terrine with Champagne Granita and Sliced Kumquats. I, for one, left refreshed and ready for the rest of the day's adventures.

Thomas Hill Organics
1305 Park Street
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 226-5888

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Seeing Paso Robles on the Jeep

A small slice of the 500 acres under vine at Steinbeck Vineyards, just off Union Road in Paso Robles, as seen from the back of Cindy Steinbeck-Newkirk's military issue 1975 Jeep M715.

Though Cindy and her husband Tim began producing wines under their own label, Steinbeck Wines, in 2006, they still sell 99% of the grapes grown on their 500 acres to other producers. For those interested in getting a close-up look at a conventionally farmed, relatively large scale vineyard, Cindy and Tim offer tutored farm tours — called "Crash Courses" in honor of the B26 that crash landed in their vineyards in 1956 — out of their side project, The WineYard.

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The Other Side of Hearst Castle

"You lay down your life to the outfit as a cowboy."
— Cliff Garrison, Ranch Manager, Hearst Ranch

Cliff is pictured above, at right, along with Roland Camacho. They are two of the seven cowboys working and living full-time at Hearst Ranch in San Simeon, California.

What makes the Hearst Ranch such a unique entity in today's world is not the quality of their beef. We tasted oak-grilled examples of their sirloin, New York strip (on the bone), and rib eye. All were very good but the strip steak, for my $$/pound, was the standout.

It's not their farming practices. Purely grass-fed beef, all free range, with a "never-never" approach to hormones and antibiotics. If antibiotic treatment is medically necessary, which is apparently rare given the bracingly healthy environment, the treated cow will either be sold or put to pasture, never processed and/or sold under the Hearst brand.

It's not the sheer size of the ranch, though that's undeniably impressive. Just over 80,000 acres, nearly 128 square miles, stretching along fourteen miles of coast land hills from just south of San Simeon all the way to the Monterey County border. And that's not including the other 70,000-acre "parcel" located further inland.

It's not the fact that those seven cowboys, working with only their own trucks, horses and the team of cattle dogs they each maintain, manage that entire 80,000 acre ranch.

What does make it unique is what makes it all possible in the first place — the curious mix of ostentation, privacy and philanthropy that have been part and parcel of the Hearst family legacy for the past 150 years. That and the sheer beauty of the place....

I'll let the following pictures, and just a few more words, round out the story of the ranch. Our visit was a rare privilege, one I fully savored.

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Views like this greeted us at every turn as we climbed the ranch road from PCH1, just above sea level, to a high point of around 1800 feet.

The cows, an assortment of primarily Angus, Hereford, and Red Hereford, seemed just as inquisitive about our sudden appearance on their turf as we were in awe of their surroundings.

Hearst Castle, just over the ridge from the part of the ranch we visited, sees approximately 700,000 annual visitors. Groups like ours, though, are apparently a rarity on the farm, which is a very private affair. Even so, the ranch facilities aren't without a certain sense of humor.

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On The Abalone Farm: Partaking of the Ocean Rose

Up and over a short but steep stretch of hard-packed dirt road, just beyond the hills separating California Pacific Coast Highway 1 from the Pacific itself, somewhere along the relatively untouched stretch of coastline between San Simeon and Cayucos, lies a most unusual farm. There are no grazing animals in sight, no furrowed fields of lettuces or crucifers, no orchards or berry bushes. There's nary a vine, for here we're too close to the ocean for the practice of viticulture. And no, (I know what you're thinking), there's not even a camo-netting system hiding a grove of what might just be California's largest cash crop from the prying eyes of fly-by DEA agents.

What you would find, were you to be an accidental trespasser on the site, are a handful of relatively nondescript, weathered outbuildings along with what might easily be mistaken for some sort of water processing plant. A pumping station sits at the highest point on the property, below which lies, in a stair-stepped line to the sea, a series of concrete tanks, water bubbling from one to the next in serial fashion.

Remember now, this is a farm. What's passing through those tanks is nothing other than unfiltered sea water, pumped directly from the Pacific and fed by gravity from one level of the farm to the next. It's all for the sake of the crop being raised in that poured concrete network: abalone, red abalone to be exact, what they call the "Ocean Rose" here on the farm. And in spite of relatively humble appearances, this happens to be the largest abalone farm, albeit one of only a few, in the United States, lending credence to its simple name: The Abalone Farm.

Brad Buckley, Sales Manager at The Abalone Farm, led our group on an informative, hands-on tour of the farm. You'll see plenty of his hand(s) in the pictures to come.... Brad's a bit of a jack-of-all-trades around the farm, overseeing production and distribution in addition to sales and marketing.

The concept of sustainability, in many and sundry of its nebulous manifestations, was bandied about throughout our trip. But one thing that struck me over the course of our tour was the thoroughly self-sustaining nature of the operations at the abalone farm. It's occasionally necessary to head to Bodega Bay in Northern California to dive for and harvest wild abalone for breeding stock, as it's currently illegal to harvest wild abalone along the Central Coast. Otherwise, just about all of the needs of the farm, from breeding to feeding, rearing to harvesting, are handled right on the farm or provided for from the farm's immediate surroundings.

The farming cycle begins with breeding stock selection: a combination of the best he and she studs from among the specimens on the farm along with wild abalone, brought in from up north to foster genetic strength and biodiversity. Abalone are broadcast spawners, meaning the females release their eggs, males release their sperm and fertilization ensues in the water. For control purposes, the sexes are kept separate in the farm's spawning tanks — which look very much like smaller, shallower versions of the tanks shown below — and the eggs and sperm are then introduced. This is the only point in the process at which the sea water is filtered in any way; the filtration being necessary at this stage to reduce the incidence of bacteria-induced mortality during the abalone's larval stage of growth. Spawning is conducted, as it would occur in the wild, at full moon in the lunar cycle.

What came first: the abalone or the egg? I should make it clear that I have no pretensions to being particularly well versed in marine biology. The descriptions that you'll find here are simply based on my understanding of what we learned during our visit. Please feel free to elucidate if you see fit....

Once larval stage is reached and the brood stabilized, the crop is moved to the hatchery, a simple structure housing row upon row of circular, open-top tanks (shown above). The orange/brown matter in the tanks is the mixture of algae and seaweed upon which the infant abalone feed. At this point in their development, the abalone themselves are not much larger than coarse grinds of black pepper. The strip around the top of the tanks is AstroTurf, which, after some experimenting with various materials, proved to be the ideal texture to deter the little critters from crawling up and out of their tanks.

Sheba the guard cat, who apparently doesn't enjoy eating abalone nearly so much as she does keeping an eye on them.

Once the infant abalone reach a certain size and vitality, it's outside they go.... The juvenile abalone cling to sections of PVC tubing, which serve primarily to increase the surface area within the submerged baskets.

As the abalone approach adolescence, the PVC pipes are removed and the creatures are free to roam within the confines of their submerged baskets.

Finally, as adulthood approaches, the baskets are removed, giving the abalone free range within their respective concrete tanks.

As the abalone grows, its shell grows with it. The holes along the top of the shell allow oxygen to flow through to the animal's respiratory organs. With age, the oldest holes will close while new ones grow. The notch at the front of the shell in the picture above, just over the abalone's head, is the beginning of what will eventually become a new hole.

Abalone, by the way, are one-shelled, one-footed marine snails. Though they fall within the phylum of mollusks, they are generally not considered to be shellfish. It takes four-to-six years for a farmed abalone to reach harvestable size. During that time frame, the abalone are constantly sorted for size, as some will mature and grow more rapidly than others, shutting out their smaller counterparts if left together.

At any given time, there are approximately five million abalone on the farm, with an annual harvest of about one million. Those five million snails go through a combined average of 60 tons of kelp, dulse and algae per week.

Dulse (above) is grown in seawater tanks on the farm. It makes for a pretty tasty snack if I do say so myself.... Algae forms naturally in the abalones' tanks. And kelp, the primary constituent of the abalone's diet, is harvested (if I understood correctly) just off shore; a very sustainable model given that the kelp grows back just as quickly as the abalone eat it.

When The Abalone Farm was established in the 1960s, the majority of its produce went to export markets in China and Japan. In more recent decades, however, the US has become the farm's largest single market, no doubt helped along by the explosion in popularity of sushi and other styles of Asian cuisine that most often utilize the abalone.

When dining on the farm, it's tough to divorce one's association between food and from whence that food comes.... Most abalone is sold in two forms: whole, live abalone and abalone "steaks."

Fresh abalone is crunchy and just a little flexible and fleshy to the bite. If you've been served rubbery abalone at a sushi restaurant, it had either been frozen or kept around for too long. It doesn't get much fresher than this....

For his sashimi preparation, Brad simply shucked the abalone from its shell, trimmed off the fringe and the majority of its black pigmentation, gave it a quick polish to remove a little more of that pigmentation, and then sliced away. Just a spritz of fresh lemon juice can be used for flavor, never enough to acid-cook the flesh.

The steaks are simply whole, fresh abalone that have been cleaned, pounded/tenderized into flat portions and then vacuum packed for shipping. They're available in two styles: polished and rustic. After first sprinkling them with salt to draw out moisture, Brad grilled up a few of each for us to taste, adding nothing else other than a light brushing of olive oil.

The polished abalone steaks, above, have literally been polished — lightly buffed on a grinding wheel to remove the black, pigmented portion of the flesh. They're mild in flavor, very tender, and reminiscent of fresh grilled squid but with a slightly richer and more mineral flavor.

The "rustic" steaks, pictured above, are left with some of their pigmentation still in place, rendering a more pungent, full-flavored result. I definitely preferred this version. Texturally, the rustic steaks were no different from the polished, but their flavor was more intensely of the sea. Think of the brininess of an oyster crossed with the earthy, umami flavor of squid ink and you'll be on the right track.

The Abalone Farm is not regularly open to visitors but private tours can sometimes be arranged upon request. You may find it worth the effort to contact them (especially if you've read this far...) when next you plan to be in the area.

The Abalone Farm, Inc.
PO Box 136
Cayucos, CA 93430
877-367-2271

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Templeton Gap at Dusk

Clouds dominate the skyline at the onset of dusk, as seen from a high point in the Templeton Gap, Paso Robles, CA, March 24, 2010.

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Taste You Later, Paso

It's 3:30 AM Paso time and I'm packing up to head for the airport, back to Philly. Just thought I'd leave you with a little something to set the tastebuds tingling: fresh bacon headed into the wood smoker at Thomas Hill Organics.


More to come in the days ahead....

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Spring in Paso Robles

March 24, 2010:
Bud break on a head-trained zinfandel vine in the Dante Dusi Vineyard, just off Highway 101 on the West Side of Paso Robles.

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Just in Case You Weren't Sure...

I guess you know you're in wine country when the turndown service at your hotel leaves an enormous cork on your pillow....

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Chardonnay Vines in San Luis Obispo

It's been a long day today, what with a pre-dawn start, travel across multiple time zones, flight transfers, and multiple meet and greets. So I'll bid you a quick goodnight and leave you with a photo from our first stop of the day: reasonably old Chardonnay vines owned by Sextant Wines, located adjacent to their tasting room in the township of Old Edna, on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo.

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Look Out Paso Town

By the time you're reading this, I'll already be on a jet plane, Paso Robles bound for a whirlwind three-day press junket. Yep, you read me right: a press junket. This is treading new ground for me. Not just the trip — I've never been to Paso (don't know if anyone calls it that but I've decided to) — but especially the idea of accepting an expenses paid, tourism-board-sponsored visit.

The offers have been coming fast and furious (at least relative to a previously absolute dearth...), this one landing hard on the heels of the invitation I was unable to accept to attend the Barbera 2010 meeting in Asti. The ringleader of that trip, Jeremy Parzen, along with my fellow band of brother (and sister) bloggers faced similar concerns when deciding to undertake that trip as I do now. And it all comes at a time when the s**t is apparently flying fast and furious around the Internet and Blogosphere regarding questions about the merits of wine blogs, the seeming futility of writing them, and the worthiness and credibility of their authors.

At least as much if not more so than my friend Jeremy, I've been trying to keep my nose above those waters, to avoid getting sucked into the fray. Instead, I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing. Enjoying wine, eating food, drinking an occasional beer, traveling, riding my bike, listening to tunes, working an honest day job in the wine biz and — when the mood strikes and I have something to say — writing about it all. Unlike fellow wine writers on the payroll of "brick and mortar" publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, etc., I'm not accountable to any editorial board or corporate parent. But I do hold myself accountable. Accountable to me. Myself. I. And you. And I can say with my head held high and an unflinching stare that that's enough for me. I hope you feel the same.

I'm going on the trip to see what there is to see, to find what there is to learn. I know there will be some destinations that I may not have normally chosen to visit, a winery or two that might veer more toward the market-driven norms than I'm usually prone to seeking out. I'm looking at that as a good thing, an opportunity to push my own envelope. If you only ever look at one side of a coin, you'll never know what's on the other... and that's no way to live a life.

Obviously, the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance (sponsors of the trip) and the various wineries, restaurants and farms we'll visit are hoping I'll write about them. Obviously, I most likely will. But like my other Asti-trippin' friend Cory, whose coverage of Barbera 2010 was not only extremely well done but also highly personal and sometimes stridently opinionated, I'll write only when I have something personally meaningful to say.

I'm looking forward to the trip and hope you'll look forward to reading about the experiences that come of it.

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Oh yeah, when this was all bouncing around in my head, along came a tune that wouldn't let go. Just replace "Jackson" with "Paso" and you'll hear it too.

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