My Go-To Places for Regional Italian Food in San Francisco

Craig Lee for The New York Times

Salsiccia cruda di Bra, spiced veal and pork sausage on grilled crostini and salumi, at Perbacco. More Photos »
By MARK BITTMAN
Published: January 28, 2011

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ABOUT 20 years ago a friend took me to Caffe Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach for an espresso. It wasn’t easy to find a stand-up espresso in those pre-Starbucks days, but — more to the point — it helped me to recognize the strength and authenticity of that city’s not-especially-large Italian community.
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San Francisco’s Italian Flavor

Northern Italians, mostly from Liguria (specifically Genoa), were among the first European immigrants to arrive in San Francisco in significant numbers, right about the time of the Gold Rush. Perhaps because their arrival coincided with the region’s development, and because much of California is essentially “Mediterranean” in both climate and topography, their impact was profound.

It’s not novel to say that so-called Californian cuisine is essentially Italian (perhaps “Italian-dominated Mediterranean” would be more accurate). But no comparably sized city has more authentic and better regional Italian food — of all the cities in Italy only Rome has the audacity to support restaurants whose food originated in other regions — and, really, with the possible exception of New York, it may be said that San Francisco is the world’s best city for regional Italian food.

There have been better-than-average Italian restaurants in San Francisco for as long as I can remember, but at no time have there been more than there are right now. (The East Bay is equally good.) In addition to those described here, there are Pesce, 54 Mint, Dopo, A-16, Incanto, SPQR, Ragazza, Little Star, Odesso, Corso, Boot & Shoe and others. These four, all in San Francisco proper, are my go-to places for regional Italian food.

Perbacco

Now nearly five years old, Perbacco would be the best restaurant in the vast majority of American cities; here, where the cult of the new dominates, it’s become an afterthought. (It doesn’t help that it’s in the financial district, which is not exactly happening, at least at night — more’s the pity.) Few corners are cut and few accommodations made to timid eaters; this is not what the Italians would call a trattoria (unlike the other places here, more or less), but a real ristorante, an establishment that focuses on traditional dishes done in the highest possible style. The space is large and elegant — if anything, a bit sterile, though not unattractive. The emphasis is on the food of the Piedmont, among the most luxurious of regional Italian cuisines.

Yet two perfect examples sound anything but luxurious: tripe, slow-cooked in white wine and diced aromatic vegetables, with big white beans, rosemary and of course garlic; and pig trotter meat made into cakes, cooked very crisp, with a vinaigrette — known locally (in Piedmont, that is) as batsua, or “silk stocking.” Indeed, the latter dish, though as humble in origin as they get, is really high-class eating — carefully prepared and beautifully served — while the first could convert many who are repelled by offal.

Not that all the food here is challenging. The pastas are accessible and just short of incredible: agnolotti stuffed with veal and cabbage and sauced with a reduction of veal stock and grated cheese (a must); taglierini with a ragù of pork and porcini, with Parmesan; and gnocchi that were light, not eggy or doughy, topped with sheep’s cheese and hazelnuts. They all left our party clamoring for more.

Meat dishes keep the quality level high: a plate of salumi was brilliantly varied and heavenly; meatballs of pork and veal, lightened with apples, is a creation I wanted to replicate at home; hare cooked in its own blood — a dish I’d never previously taken to — was easily the best I’ve ever tasted. Everything was spot on.

Unlike too many good San Francisco restaurants, it’s open for lunch. The wine list is fantastic (there are 20 wines by the glass, most of them interesting), and the desserts are almost as good as the savory dishes. It’s a winner, and one that promises to stay that way.

Perbacco, 230 California Street; (415) 955-0663; perbaccosf.com. An average meal for two is about $100. (None of the prices include drinks or tip.)

La Ciccia

On my last visit to San Francisco I found myself near the once-remote corner of 30th and Church (I think this is called Upper Noe Valley, though there are disagreements) three times. One visit was to Incanto — which is good — and to Tataki, my friend Casson Trenor’s excellent “sustainable sushi” restaurant. The third was my now-regular visit to La Ciccia, the Sardinian restaurant that holds close and well to its roots. Its menu, written in the Sardinian dialect (translated, fortunately), is small and appealing.

Start with pani guttiau, a kind of carta musica, or super-thin flatbread baked with oil, rosemary and pecorino. (Sardinia is one of the world’s best places for sheep’s cheese.) It wouldn’t be amiss to order a thin-crusted pizza or two, also; the one with big fat capers, pecorino, a little mozzarella, oil and oregano is a personal favorite. There is good salumi here, too, including cooked pancetta and cured raw bacon, both of which are divine.

The octopus in dark tomato sauce is simply magnificent; it must have been cooked for many hours. Fresh spaghetti with grated bottarga is a classic and very likable dish; most people I’ve eaten with prefer it to the powerful and possibly hard-to-take sauce of pecorino and tuna heart, which is decidedly “fishy.” Fregola (something like toasted big couscous) with squid ink and a sauce of many different seafoods, is meaty and very good.

Not everything succeeds. Shrimp in a credible but uninspired tomato sauce thrilled no one; lamb with beets, honey and truffle oil felt less than authentic; and the house bread — which you probably won’t eat much of anyway — is weak. But the Sardinian wines are fine and not expensive; most of the food is local and/or organic (though no fuss is made about it); and the desserts, like saffron ice cream and ricotta rosemary cake, shy away from cloying sweetness — a welcome change.

La Ciccia is small (about 40 seats), with an intentionally and elegantly simple design that some might find generic. It’s also homey, if a tad noisy. I intend to keep going until I get sick of it, which hasn’t happened yet.

La Ciccia, 291 30th Street; (415) 550-8114; laciccia.com. An average meal for two is $80.

Delfina Pizzeria

It’s now 12 years since I wrote about the original Delfina, so I can’t be accused of jumping on the bandwagon. But in recent years I’ve become a bigger fan of the operation’s two pizzerias, one of which is in the Mission, next to the original restaurant; the other, which I favor, is in Pacific Heights. (Full disclosure: my daughter is a server there, though it doesn’t help me get reservations, because there aren’t any.)

The place is a joint, and it’s noisy and crowded — the best seats are probably those on the sidewalk, and on my last visit that’s where I sat, semi-sheltered by a canopy, in a light drizzle — and the food is sensational. (To get anyone over the age of 25 into the place, it had better be; this isn’t an atmosphere for unwinding. And often it seems that those who are unwinding do so at high volume. I know, I’m old.)

Anyway. This is southern Italian food done well. I suppose it’s closest to Neapolitan, but there is much here that reminds me of Rome. The cooked vegetables — a simple plate of escarole or chard with raisins and pine nuts, grilled fennel, cauliflower with garlic, capers and bread crumbs — are just perfect, and seem to me the best way to start a meal here, while you’re waiting for a pizza. The pigs’ ears with chili and lime will turn some people off, obviously, but they’re super-popular, for good reason: nothing is crunchier.

There is a lot of disagreement on which are the best pizzas. My favorite, hands down, is the Napoletana, made with tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chilies, olives, oregano — and no cheese. It’s the kind of pizza I grew up eating on Avenue A in New York City, actually, right down to the slightly burnt crust. But if you prefer cheese or meat, there are plenty of good options.

Delfina Pizzeria, 2406 California Street; (415) 440-1189; pizzeriadelfina.com. An average meal for two is $60

Farina

Liguria comes to the Mission at this bright, modern and pretty restaurant with a big open kitchen. The region is represented most vividly here by the focaccia di Recco — golden, poofy, cheese-stuffed dough made in a hill town southeast of Genoa known for little else. I’ve never even seen focaccia di Recco tackled elsewhere, yet Farina has made it a staple here, and they do it well, and in the open — which is fun.

Much of the rest of the menu follows suit. You can get pansotti, another dish you rarely see outside of Liguria. Stuffed with cheese and greens (chard, perhaps, or nettles, or spinach, depending on the month), this triangular pasta is served with a “pesto” made largely from walnuts and is rich, filling and delicious. Mandilli (pasta handkerchiefs), served with classic pesto, is also irresistible, as are raviolini with shrimp, butter and sage. In fact I have not had a pasta dish here that wasn’t perfectly cooked and well worth eating.

Second courses are not as reliable; they’re simple — broiled or roasted or grilled or sautéed pieces of fish or shellfish or meat, barely sauced — but the modest treatment they receive here works only when the ingredients are absolutely superior, and that’s not always the case. Maybe I eat too much pasta, but that was my judgment more than once.

Farina’s front wall is nearly entirely glass, so it’s bright during the daylight hours; there is a lovely sidewalk seating area, and the interior is modern and pretty. The wines are pan-Italian, fairly priced and interesting. And I left there happy each of the three times I visited.

Farina, 3560 18th Street; (415) 565-0360; farina-foods.com. An average meal for two is $100.

1966: Rib Roast of Beef

By ANN SERANNE
Published: January 26, 2011

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This recipe appeared in The Times in an article by Craig Claiborne. Recipe adapted from Ann Seranne, a former editor of Gourmet.
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Food: Recipe Redux: Rib Roast of Beef, 1966 (January 30, 2011)
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2011: Grilled Prime, Dry-Aged Rib-Eye Steak With Savory Crust (January 30, 2011)

One 2- to 4-rib roast of beef, weighing 4½ to 12 pounds

Flour

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper.

1. Remove the roast from the refrigerator 2½ to 4 hours before cooking.

2. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.

3. Place the roast in an open, shallow roasting pan, fat side up. Sprinkle with a little flour, and rub the flour into the fat lightly. Season all over with salt and pepper.

4. Put the roast in the preheated oven and roast according to the roasting chart below, timing the minutes exactly. When cooking time is finished, turn off the oven. Do not open the door at any time. Allow the roast to remain in the oven until oven is lukewarm, or about two hours. The roast will still have a crunchy brown outside and an internal heat suitable for serving as long as 4 hours after removing from the oven. Makes about 2 servings per rib.

Roasting Chart:












No. of Ribs Weight Without Ribs Roasting Time at 500 Degrees
2 4½ to 5 lbs. 25 to 30 mins.
3 8 to 9 lbs. 40 to 45 mins.
4 11 to 12 lbs. 55 to 60 mins.

The Problem With Memoirs

The Problem With Memoirs
Illustration by Timothy Goodman
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: January 28, 2011

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A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS

By Heather Havrilesky

239 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95.

THE THINGS THAT NEED DOING

A Memoir

By Sean Manning

240 pp. Broadway Paperbacks. $15.

TWIN

A Memoir

By Allen Shawn

232 pp. Viking. $25.95.

AN EXCLUSIVE LOVE

By Johanna Adorjan

Translated by Anthea Bell

185 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Related

Excerpt: ‘Disaster Preparedness’ (Google Books)

Excerpt: ‘The Things That Need Doing’ (randomhouse.com)

Excerpt: ‘Twin’ (Google Books)

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Books of The Times: ‘Twin’ by Allen Shawn (January 10, 2011)

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There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.

But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you’re planning to browse the “memoir” listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it.

Sure, the resulting list has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it. Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually every­one who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an under­privileged child or been an under­privileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s. Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found religion. Held a job.

So in a possibly futile effort to restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre, here are a few guidelines for would-be memoirists, arrived at after reading four new memoirs. Three of the four did not need to be written, a ratio that probably applies to all memoirs published over the last two decades. Sorry to be so harsh, but this flood just has to be stopped. We don’t have that many trees left.

1

That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. This maxim, which was inspired by an unrewarding few hours with “Dis­aster Preparedness,” by Heather Havri­lesky, is really a response to a broader problem, a sort of grade inflation for life experiences. A vast majority of people used to live lives that would draw a C or a D if grades were being passed out — not that they were bad lives, just bland. Now, though, practically all of us have somehow gotten the idea that we are B+ or A material; it’s the “if it happened to me, it must be interesting” fallacy.

And so Havrilesky, a former writer for Salon who is now a critic for the iPad publication The Daily, spends 239 pages dragging us through what seems to be an utterly ordinary childhood in North Carolina. Her mother is a little odd, but no odder than yours or mine. There is a divorce, but so what? There are siblings. “We filled each other with fear and anger, then made jokes and laughed together, to soften the blows,” she writes — in other words, they did what all siblings do.

The prose isn’t particularly surprising, and, more to the point, neither is the selection of anecdotes: cheerleader tryouts, crummy teenage jobs and, that favorite of oversharers everywhere, the loss of virginity. Maybe the vignette about the time she and her sister wrote to Amy Carter at the White House would have made a passable subplot in an episode of a mediocre Disney sitcom. The rest belongs on a blog.

2

No one wants to relive your misery. Say you get stuck under a rock and have to cut off your own arm to escape. If, as you’re using your remaining hand to write a memoir about the experience, your only purpose in doing so is to make readers feel the blade and scream in pain, you should stop. You’re a sadist, not a memoirist; you merely want to make readers suffer as you suffered, not entertain or enlighten them.

Sean Manning did not lose any limbs, but he did watch his mother die a lingering death from cancer, and in “The Things That Need Doing” he pummels us with the details of every intubation, change in medication and debate with doctors. Why does he do this? It’s certainly not to memorialize his mother; not only does he tell us little about her, but he also strips her of any and all dignity by describing in voyeuristic detail her vomiting, diaper changes and such.

No, the sole purpose of this memoir, like many, many others concerning some personal trial, is to generate sympathy for its author. Manning, who was in his mid-20s when he took his lengthy turn at the bedside, seems on every page to be looking for someone to say, “Poor Sean; how about a hug?” But it’s the reader who will need a hug after choking down this orgy of self-congratulation and self-pity. That’s what happens when immature writers write memoirs: they don’t realize that an ordeal, served up without perspective or perceptiveness, is merely an ordeal.

3

If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it. Imitation runs rampant in memoir land. There can’t be just one book by a bulimic or former war correspondent or spouse of an Alzheimer’s sufferer; there has to be a pile. And lately, the biggest pile of all has been books by parents, siblings and teachers of people with autism.

Allen Shawn, who teaches at Bennington College, is the latest to climb on this heap, with “Twin.” The gimmick: his twin sister, now in her 60s, is autistic. Seems like a potentially interesting variation of the overworked theme. Until, that is, you start reading the book and realize that Shawn’s parents — his father was William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker — had his twin, Mary, institutionalized when she was 8, and that, psychic twinship or not, Allen Shawn doesn’t really know a thing about her.

Shawn describes how the family would arrive in a limousine for their occasional visits with Mary, an image that will infuriate those who have not had the luxury of paying someone else to make their problems go away. “Only a more naturally unified and self-sacrificing family than ours could have tolerated the enormous challenge of bringing her up at home,” he writes of Mary, part of a stunningly tone-deaf attempt to explain away the institutionalization as necessary because the rest of the family was quirky and William Shawn was busy not only with work but also with being a lifelong adulterer.

Institutionalization was just what people did back then, you say? “I am awestruck that, even in the time of my childhood, there were families that had the love, fortitude and resourcefulness to incorporate such children into their world,” Shawn writes near the end of this appalling example of coattail-grabbing. Yes, there were. And they’re the ones who are qualified to add to the heap of autism memoirs.

4

If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it. That is basically what Johanna Adorjan has done in “An Exclusive Love” (translated by Anthea Bell), her spare, beautiful exploration of why her grandparents killed themselves. Adorjan, a journalist in Berlin, artfully reconstructs the day in 1991 when her grandparents, who lived in Denmark, took their own lives in a suicide pact. Although she is part of the story, she wisely keeps herself on its edges, occasionally noting personality traits or mementos she inherited from her grandparents, but mostly bringing the two of them to life through her recollections and the memories of contemporaries she interviews.

“We all felt the force of her thrift,” she writes of her grandmother. “Her presents were always received apprehensively: what were we not going to be pleased to get this time? I remember T-shirts much too small for me, and you knew from the smell of them that they had been in my grandparents’ house for a long time (in fact they smelled as if they had been stored in an ashtray). A book that looked as if it had been read. A bottle not quite full of bath foam.”

This fascinating couple, who had survived the Holocaust and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, come slowly into focus for the author and the reader simultaneously, or so Adorjan makes it seem. That’s what makes a good memoir — it’s not a regurgitation of ordinariness or ordeal, not a dart thrown desperately at a trendy topic, but a shared discovery.

Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.

Neil Genzlinger is a staff editor at The Times.

The Minimalist Chooses 25 of His Favorites

January 25, 2011, 7:11 pm

By MARK BITTMAN

Evan Sung for The New York Times Pernil, garlicky slow-cooked pork.

Picking 25 favorites out of more than 1,000 recipes from The Minimalist — the last weekly column appears this week — is an awesome task. But each of these, listed in order of appearance, represents something special either to me or to regular readers of The Minimalist, or in a couple of cases — most notably Jim Lahey’s bread — to a wider audience. It’s a list that will make you want to cook, I think. What are your favorites?

RED PEPPER PURÉE The first Minimalist. Check out the roasting technique; it works. (Published Sept. 17, 1997)

CHICKEN UNDER A BRICK So popular that a group in Santa Cruz, Calif., made a T-shirt that reads, “We love chicken under a brick.” (Oct. 22, 1997)

PEAR, GORGONZOLA AND MESCLUN SALAD Not my invention, but truly a ’90s classic. (Nov. 19, 1997)

SPAGHETTI WITH FRIED EGGS Made this the other night; insanely easy and soothing. (March 10, 1999)

BRAISED SQUID WITH ARTICHOKES Braised fish, artichokes, sometimes potatoes, always garlic and powerful olive oil; that’s Liguria. (April 28, 1999)

PASTA ALLA GRICIA The basis for some of the simplest and best pasta dishes I know. (Nov. 8, 2000)

PUMPKIN PANNA COTTA The headline on this Thanksgiving column said it all: “No Time for Crust? Who Needs It, Anyway?” (Nov. 22, 2000)

WATERMELON AND TOMATO SALAD A Jean-Georges Vongerichten special; especially good with feta. (July 24, 2002)

45-MINUTE ROAST TURKEY Many readers swear by this one. (Nov. 20, 2002)

CRISP-BRAISED DUCK LEGS WITH AROMATIC VEGETABLES This has many of the qualities of duck confit — but no fussiness. (Dec. 25, 2002)

SICHUAN CHICKEN WITH CHILIES Overcook the chicken, overdo the chilies, you’ll be happy. (Sept. 3, 2003)

BLACK COD BROILED WITH MISO Yes, you can do this at home. (April 14, 2004)

STIR-FRIED CHICKEN WITH KETCHUP Perhaps the highest and best use of ketchup. (May 12, 2004)

CORN SALAD WITH SOY AND TOMATO Soy and tomato is a marriage made in heaven; the corn adds crunch. (Aug. 17, 2005)

PARSLEY-HERB SALAD Think of parsley as a green, not an herb, and you get the idea. (Sept. 7, 2005)

SOCCA (FARINATA) From my first taste of this, I’ve been an addict. Best made at home. (Oct. 19, 2005)

STIR-FRIED LAMB WITH CHILI, CUMIN AND GARLIC As soon as I tasted this, in Flushing, Queens, I knew I had to make it. (Sept. 20, 2006)

NO-KNEAD BREAD My most popular recipe, and it isn’t even mine. Credit Jim Lahey. (Nov. 8, 2006)

SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH SHRIMP I know of no dish that exploits the texture of shrimp better. (Jan. 17, 2007)

PERNIL Just the other day, a guy stopped me on the subway and said, “Your pernil is terrific.” It’s not really mine, but I made it that weekend, and it is terrific. (Jan. 2, 2008)

SOUTH INDIAN EGGPLANT CURRY If you are an eggplant fan, this will really turn you on. If you’re not, this will make you one. (April 2, 2008)

BRAISED TURKEY Cooked this way, turkey will remind you of pork. (Nov. 12, 2008)

FENNEL AND CELERY SALAD My wife’s staple. Try it with toasted hazelnuts or pine nuts. (Nov. 26, 2008)

MEXICAN CHOCOLATE TOFU PUDDING What? Yes. (May 20, 2009)

MORE-VEGETABLE-LESS-EGG FRITTATA Just enough eggs to hold it together. One of those transformative recipes. (July 15, 2009)

India, Through a Birder’s Eyes

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

Eyes on the skies at Chhatra Sagar, a luxury camp on the banks of a dam in parched western Rajasthan. Its reservoir attracts water birds. More Photos »

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: January 14, 2011

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IT began with parakeets, the brash, busybody rose-ringed parakeets of Delhi, with their lipstick red beaks and their irrepressible chatter, gossiping in the crevices of 15th-century tombs.

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Then one morning while I drank coffee, a shimmering blue-black sunbird came to drink nectar in my garden. At twilight one day, I looked up to see a hornbill perched on a neighbor’s tree. An interview with the prime minister of India was repeatedly interrupted by the calls of a cantankerous peacock in his garden.

And so went my discovery of the birds of India. It was an accumulation of accidental discoveries. A friend in Mumbai recommended that I check out the flamingos dancing in the stinky, mucky mud flats of Sewri. Then one day, not far from the Taj Mahal, a pair of sarus cranes, the tallest flying bird in the world, stood in a shallow pond. On a trip to the outsourcing hub of Bangalore, I was urged to drive off the highway to see pelicans roosting in banyan trees. And trekking across the Himalayan plateau called Ladakh one summer, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a black-necked crane flying across a still blue lake.

Most improbably of all, on a trip back to that clattering, honking, riotous city called Calcutta, where I was born, I woke up one morning to songbirds.

From the cold lakes of the Himalayas to the sand dunes of western Rajasthan to the tropical rain forests in the south, India hosts a dizzying variety of birds, like a dizzying variety of everything else. Residents and visitors, common and rare, more than 1,200 species have been recorded in India, which puts it somewhere between the United States (just under 900 recorded species) and Colombia (more than 1,800 species).

Several bird species in India are, however, endangered and their habitats are increasingly threatened, as this rapidly modernizing nation expands roads, mines and steel plants into environmentally sensitive areas. It helps that farming is done largely without the thrashers and tractors that ravage nests in more industrialized countries. Most of all, it helps that birds, just like millions of Indians, adjust to difficult conditions: They roost on rooftops. They hide their chicks in rice paddies. They fly away when they must.

“We think of nature as pristine,” said K. S. Gopi Sundar, an Indian ornithologist who studies cranes. “But it’s amazing what nature can do.”

Birding has taken me to some of the most extraordinary landscapes in this country — mangroves and desert, rain forest, cloud forest, mountains and miles and miles of coast.

But even in ordinary surroundings, birding has taught me to appreciate the rewards of being still. You hear a call. You look for a flutter. Suddenly something astonishing comes. And then goes.

What follows is a sampling of birding spots in North and South India. (The northeast and the Andaman Islands, two of India’s most important but least accessible birding areas, must be left for later.)

In an age of so much inconsequential tweeting, it’s worth recalling the advice of yogis: Sit still, they say, so still that a bird can land on your head.

North India: Delhi, Rajasthan, Himalayas

India’s crowded, boorish capital is an improbable haven of birds — and a natural place to linger for a few days, before venturing out to the wilds of the north.

In city parks, hoopoes and hornbills are plentiful; the haunting call of the koel can break the stillness of a muggy afternoon. Owls are everywhere. And on the flood plains of the Yamuna River, now a filthy drain that swallows the sewage of Delhi, a city of an estimated 18 million inhabitants, sits one of North India’s richest nature reserves, the Okhla Bird Sanctuary. At daybreak one scorching Monday at the end of May, I persuaded Mr. Sundar, the ornithologist, to take me there. A flock of garganey ducks was still hanging around before making its way to northern China. A purple heron — “rakish, with long thin neck” in the words of the Oxford “Pocket Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” — landed in a clump of water hyacinth.

Mr. Sundar pointed to a tailorbird stitching its delicate, egg-shaped basket of a nest. In a bird version of “MasterChef,” if you will, the males of the species compete to construct the finest nest. The female chooses a nest (and nest-maker) of her liking.

Winter is the best time to visit Okhla, particularly for water birds: storks, flamingos, geese that can fly over Mount Everest. But even in the peak of summer — not exactly prime birding season — Mr. Sundar pointed out at least 20 species over the course of two hours: a yellow-footed pigeon, an oriole, a pair of partridges that waddled across the road just as we drove out.

The road out of Delhi offers three distinct birding habitats: plains, desert and hill. The first option: Hire a car from Delhi and take an extra couple of days on the well-trodden trail connecting Delhi, Agra and Jaipur to visit Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, the former duck-hunting grounds of maharajas and now the country’s best-known bird park.

If you’re spending a day in Agra to see the Taj Mahal, drive two hours to Bharatpur by nightfall and retire early. There are a variety of inns within a mile or two of the sanctuary — as well as a spartan state-run lodge right inside the park. The Birders Inn, where I spent one Christmas Eve, offers clean, unremarkable rooms encircling a pretty garden. The Laxmi Vilas is a renovated 19th-century palace. No matter where you stay, the real charm of Bharatpur is to wake up before dawn and head into the park. Songbirds stir themselves awake. Sambar deer come to drink at a pond. Painted storks spread their pink-dipped wings and alight from their roosts.

If the rains are good and Keoladeo’s lakes are full, the park in winter can host close to 400 species.

A road trip across the North Indian plains usually takes you along a noisy highway, past fields, markets and truck stops. But if you time it right (mornings and evenings are when birds are most likely to reveal themselves), you may well spot the sarus crane in a paddy field, standing nearly five feet tall on spindly pink legs. It is considered good luck for a newlywed couple to see a sarus on their wedding night. Locals believe the sarus mates for life. This is probably apocryphal. But how can seeing a sarus on your honeymoon be anything but a boon?

A second option takes you to the Kumaon Hills, a favorite of many birders because it covers such a wide variety of landscapes: the grasslands and gently rolling hills of Corbett National Park, the alpine woods just above, and then, farther up into oak and rhododendron forests that stretch up to an elevation of 8,000 feet. The rhododendron blooms from February to April, painting the forest red and drawing flocks of nectar-thirsty warblers. The village of Pangot, at about 6,500 feet, is a decent base from which to explore the hills.

The drive up the razorback hills to Pangot is a tricky venture. You may be rewarded by the sight of the reclusive cheer pheasant crossing the road. But you might also find that unseasonal rains have shut the road for fear of landslides. My one trip to Pangot, at what I thought was the tail end of a monsoon, was blanketed by rain. The tour group I used, Asian Adventures, did not warn me in advance of the roads or the rain, and I spent a wet weekend cooped up in a cabin in their Jungle Lore lodge without much electricity; the power was out, and soon the generator conked out too.

In all that rain and wind, the birds hid from view. But they couldn’t hold back their song. As I walked through the forest during an early morning dry spell, they sang and sang, like a choir performing for a blind woman in the mist. My guide could identify each bird by its call. A pair of rufous sibias screeched at each other from across the trees. A gray-headed canary-flycatcher trilled. White-throated laughingthrush giggled like schoolgirls. “Birdsongs,” says the blind narrator of “To the Wedding,” a novel by John Berger, “remind me of what things once looked like.”

The wind shook the rain off the trees. Two men, their bald pates shining, walked slowly up the gravel road, hands clasped behind their backs. The smoke of cooking fires rose up through the dark, damp forest. This is one of the great rewards of birding: In searching for birds, you end up hearing, seeing, smelling a great deal more.

In pursuit of a less rustic sensory feast, I went this winter to a luxury camp, Chhatra Sagar Nimaj, erected on the banks of a dam in parched western Rajasthan. I woke up before sunrise to the twitter — “see here, see here” — of a small, reclusive gray francolin. Mist hung above the water as I stepped out of my tent. Terns dived in for fish. A cormorant sat on the steps of the dam, jerking its neck forward and back, as if peering into the future, and then nervously turning right back to the past — or, more likely, just hunting for fish.

Even if not a storied birding destination, Chhatra Sagar can be a lavish one for the senses. A hundred years ago, a local Rajput noble known as Thakur Chhatra Singh dammed a stream that ran through his fields to store Rajasthan’s most precious resource: water. Ten years ago, his descendants cleverly leveraged it to draw tourists.

The reservoir, full this year, thanks to good rains, is the centerpiece of the resort. Thirteen spacious tents face the water, including two that sit on a nearby hill.

On a guided walk along a dirt trail that encircles the reservoir, I could see through my binoculars a flock of bar-headed geese pecking at the grass on the far edge of the water. An antelope, known in Hindi as nilgai, ambled ahead of us on the path; it had lost one of its horns, presumably in a neelgai version of a barroom brawl. At night, from my tent, I heard jackals.

At sundown, a full bar was laid out under the stars. An inventive kitchen created a meal for a spice-averse Western palate: peas dipped in coriander pesto and a local delicacy of smoked, lightly curried lentil cakes. The spacious tents were equipped with space heaters, often fired by a generator, I later learned, because the electricity supply here, as in much of rural India, remains erratic.

Guests are served bottled water, a common amenity in luxury hotels in India, but excessive, it seemed to me, in a place where locals use and re-use everything nature gives them. (Properly filtered water is safe to drink across India.) And the service was characterized by too much ritual servility for my liking. Waiters bowed, holding trays laden with juice and rose petals, and a porter was deployed to haul a scope and guidebook during our walk, along with bottled water.

Western Ghats: Goa and Kerala

The Western Ghats is a mountain chain that runs nearly 1,000 miles parallel to the Arabian Sea, from just above Mumbai to the tip of the Indian peninsula. It contains craggy hills, tropical evergreens and several rivers that pour down into peninsular India. So rich is its variety of birds, snakes, frogs and butterflies that the Western Ghats is considered a global biodiversity hot spot in urgent need of conservation. Mining poses the greatest threat.

“You pick any spot in the Western Ghats,” said Rajah Jayapal, an ornithologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in India, “and you will see no less than 300 species.”

The Western Ghats also run through two of India’s most popular tourist destinations: Goa and Kerala.

Goa is a treasure trove of birds. There are shorebirds, forest birds, birds that forage in the mud flats along the Zuari River, great raptors that hover over paddy fields. I have spent entire mornings in a friend’s garden doing nothing but listening to bird songs: orioles, coppersmith barbets, Malabar trogons.

But the richer bird habitat in the Western Ghats lies in Kerala. Like the Kumaon range, it offers a variety of landscapes. You can fly into the spice coast port city of Cochin, drive past paddy fields and within two hours reach a low-altitude deciduous forest. After a day or two here, you can take a narrow, winding highway to highland cloud forests near Munnar. Then, a half-day’s drive east and you’re in the Indira Gandhi National Park in the Annamalai Hills, with its tropical wet evergreens that shelter the great hornbill.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I went with friends to the edges of the Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary, a mosaic of 11 habitats packed into about 50 square miles about a two-hour drive from Cochin. Salim Ali, India’s most famous ornithologist, identified Thattekkad as having one of the richest concentrations of bird diversity in the country. But alas. The sanctuary was closed when I went — a fact disclosed by the tour operator, Kalypso Adventures, only after I had already reached its camp.

At the Hornbill Camp on the banks of the Periyar River, the tents were clean and comfortable, with a pair of lounge chairs on the porch, facing the river. Unwittingly, our visit coincided with one of Kerala’s most important Hindu pilgrimage seasons. So, at 5 a.m., I was jarred awake not by songbirds but by Hindu hymns blasting from loudspeakers at a nearby temple.

The clouds hung low as we drove uphill into the forest that morning. We parked and walked, following the droppings of elephants that must have passed by earlier that morning. A pair of white-bellied treepies flew ahead.

The Malabar parakeets — smaller and screechier than their cousins in Delhi — flitted through the forest. We watched three hill mynahs fly overhead when we heard the long, lilting song of the Malabar whistling thrush. We found the thrush, nearly as black as a crow, with a streak of blue across its head, sitting in a tree, just below a woodpecker. Our guide, Jijo Mathew, reckoned the thrush was happy to be singing like this. I couldn’t argue. So was I.

Late in the day, as darkness crept over a grove of ailanthus, Mr. Mathew extracted an MP4 player from his backpack, hooked it up to a small, plastic Radio Shack speaker and played an unusual track: the territorial call of a jungle owlet, going “kook, kook,” like a terrified kitten, drowning the silence of the forest.

The trick worked. Being territorial creatures, an owlet is irked by another owlet in its lair. And so, just as Mr. Mathew had intended, the recorded call prompted a real jungle owlet — indeed barely bigger than a kitten, with big curious owl eyes — to reveal itself. It fluttered in the trees. Then it came and sat on a branch right in front of us. Owlet stared long and hard. We stared long and hard back.

The forest soon grew dark. Owlet disappeared from view. Mr. Mathew dug into his bag of tricks and pulled out a flashlight. He shone the light across the forest, searching for small, bright eyes in the dark.

PLANNING

A word to the birder going to India: First, ask your tour agency or lodge operator about weather, road conditions, park closures and rain. If you’re visiting a body of water and there hasn’t been enough rain that year, water birds are unlikely to come. Second, do not assume that India’s ecological treasures are always well cared for. After I tried to visit Thettakkad and found it closed, I read in a newspaper that a local citizens’ group had sued the owners of a stone quarry for blasting near the sanctuary.

For the North Indian destinations, fly to New Delhi; there are many international flights daily. For the Western Ghats, Mumbai and Bangalore are the closest international airports; from those cities, take local flights or trains.

WHERE TO STAY

If you go to Corbett, there are a number of inns and cottages on the periphery of the park, including Camp Corbett (cornwall-online.co.uk/camp-corbett; cottages are $68 a person a night, double occupancy), run by Siddharth Anand. His guides can take you birding into Corbett and up to the Kumaon hills.

In Pangot, Mr. Anand runs a lodge called Mountain Quail (blazeatrailadventures.com; 2,400 rupees, or about $54 at 44.8 rupees to the dollar, for two). Its wood-paneled cottages are inviting, and the large windows of the dining room overlook a wide expanse of the Himalayas.

At Jungle Lore (pangot.com) two nights, with meals and birding guide, came to just under 16,000 rupees. I was first offered a cottage next to a neighbor’s barn. The aroma of cow dung was a little too overpowering for me. I asked to be moved. Corbett and Pangot are accessible by train (rctc.co.in).

In Goa, avoid the beach resorts and stay in a village inland; try to take a boat ride on the Zuari River. If you go to Munnar and Top Slip, there are a number of home stays, particularly in old plantation houses, listed in guidebooks and specialized Web sites like homestayskerala.com.

Chhatra Sagar Nimaj (chhatrasagar.com; double rooms 19,800 rupees, including meals and tours) is a two-hour drive from the medieval fort city of Jodhpur, one of a handful of luxury resorts in Rajasthan that offers tourists a respite from the frenzy of India’s human habitats.

To go birding usually means dawdling for hours at your lodge or camp, which for me means that the food had better be good. At Hornbill Camp (thehornbillcamp.com; 5,000 rupees for two) in Kerala, the meals were among the highlights — fresh, local fare like vegetable avial, simmered in coconut milk, spice-rubbed fish, sweet buttery halvah for dessert.

Birding lodges should have proper coffee, since birding demands early morning wake-ups. I have been uniformly disappointed. If you care for good coffee, carry your own.

WHAT TO READ

Salim Ali’s autobiography, “Fall of a Sparrow,” offers a window into the making of an unlikely early Indian naturalist. For visitors to Kumaon, “Man-Eaters of Kumaon” is an old-fashioned, though amusing chronicle of how Jim Corbett went from being a hunter to a conservationist. I find the Oxford “Pocket Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” easy to use.

Somini Sengupta is a former bureau chief in India for The New York Times.