What Changes When the Season Does.

A menu has two halves, even when it does not look like it. There is the part that holds still, the recipes people drive over the hill for, and there is the part that moves with whatever is coming out of the ground. Get the balance wrong in one direction and you are boring. Get it wrong in the other and regulars stop trusting you to have the thing they came in for.

The Part That Stays

Al pastor, birria, recado rojo, the snapper taco, the roasted cauliflower. Those are not going anywhere. They are what the kitchen is built around, and rotating them out for the sake of novelty would be a strange thing to do to someone who just wants their usual.

The only way they change is by running out. We make a set amount of al pastor for each service and when it is gone it is gone. That is a seasonality of its own, measured in hours rather than months.

Winter Is Soup

When the rain sets in, the chicken tortilla soup goes on. It is a cold weather dish in the most literal sense. Nobody wants it in August and everybody wants it in January, and it tends to appear more or less the week the first real storm comes through the valley.

It is also the right dish for a kitchen like ours. Tortilla soup is a corn dish as much as a chicken dish, built on broth, chiles and tortillas, which are three things we already have in quantity. When you make your own masa, a soup that leans on tortillas is not a stretch. It is the obvious thing to cook.

Fairfax in winter is wet. People come in off the trails soaked through, and a bowl of something hot does more for them than anything else we could pass across the counter.

Summer Is Fruit

Then the weather turns and the menu moves to the cold side. The pineapple agua fresca with mint and lime is on all year, but summer is when we start playing: whatever fruit is good that week, blended, strained, sweetened lightly and poured over ice. Agua fresca translates to fresh water, and the honest version is fruit, water and restraint. Too much sugar and you have made a soda. It should taste like the fruit and then get out of the way so you can go back to your food.

The seasonal margarita runs on the same schedule for the same reason. Strawberries are worth drinking for a few weeks a year and merely fine for the rest of them.

The horchata stays put through all of it. Ours is toasted corn, rice, cinnamon and lime, and there is no dairy in it, which surprises people who assume horchata has to be milky. Toasting the corn is what gives it the body.

The Produce Decides, Not Us

The salads are where the calendar shows most plainly. Our lettuces come from Star Route Farms in Bolinas, just over the hill from us, and the seasonal greens plate is genuinely seasonal. It is whatever they are cutting, with a white wine vinaigrette, feta and toasted pepitas to hold it together.

The beet and citrus salad is a winter and early spring plate, because that is when Cara Cara oranges are worth putting next to gold and red beets. The three sisters salad leans cold weather too: lacinato kale, brussels sprouts, butternut squash, hominy and Rancho Gordo lima beans under a jamaica vinaigrette. Jamaica is dried hibiscus, and it is one of the few things we use that is sharp enough to cut through a heavy winter bowl.

Three sisters, incidentally, is the old planting method. Corn, beans and squash grown together in one mound, each doing something the other two need. It makes as much sense in a bowl as it does in the ground.

How to Know What Is On

Ask at the counter. The specials are not printed on the menu because they change faster than we can reprint it, and whoever is working will know what came in that morning. Or join the masa list below and we will tell you when the soup goes on.