Burning Question: Why is it hard to find good paella on restaurant menus?

It’s a mistake to ask Chef Brandon Miller where to go for paella.

Don’t get me wrong, he knows his way around a paella (the pan). After all, he runs a paella catering operation in Monterey County that gets calls from up and down the Central Coast. It’s just that Miller is likely to direct you to the airport.

“The best place I’ve been [for paella] is in France,” he says.

Great. Despite the marbled opulence of the Weekly’s newsroom, there’s surprisingly little budget set aside for international travel. Besides, Miller has rarely been impressed by restaurant paella.

“There isn’t a lot of great paella, even in Spain,” he points out. “You have to have someone’s uncle doing it.”

Of course, it’s possible to find the dish in area restaurants, though not many. And the results of asking a random uncle to whip up a batch for your next gathering might result in a rash of hospitalizations. Miller is simply suggesting that, like tamales, paella is at its best when a family recipe passed down over generations is involved.

And yet it’s a popular dish. One of Miller’s recent outings drew 80 people. He had to borrow a larger pan and enlist the aid of another chef, Gabe Georis. One would think more restaurants would dabble in paella.

“It’s a scary thing to have on the menu,” explains Mario Garcia, chef at Estéban in the Casa Munras Garden Hotel and Spa in Monterey. His kitchen prepares perhaps the area’s most favored paellas. The kitchen has a 10-burner range dedicated to the dish and is considering adding another. They also host a “Paella Tuesday” special. 

But, Garcia says, with prep and cooking knocking off up to an hour, if you accidentally scorch the rice at the end, you have to send a wait staff member to the table to explain “it’s going to be another hour.”

Like risotto, paella is both easy and annoyingly particular. It requires a certain pan—large and flat, with a dimpled surface and a low rim (devotees will tell you which knuckle of which finger the edge should not exceed in height). The dish is, after all, named for the cooking vessel. 

It wants to sit over an open flame, although propane will do. It also demands to be left undisturbed once ingredients are in place, but also insists on being tended to constantly.

“You have to let it go and say a little prayer,” Garcia observes. “Each component has to be perfect. It’s simple, but there’s a lot of room for error.”

Take seasoning. During the time required for cooking, flavors reduce and become concentrated. Taste it early in the process and think it needs more salt? Things aren’t going to turn out well. There goes all that money you shelled out for saffron.

Irritating as hell. And to make matters worse, the pan itself needs attention. Thin and attracted to rust, the thing must be cleaned and oiled after each use or someone will have to break out the steel wool.

There’s more.

“You have to have good even heat,” Miller says. So chefs with three or more going at the same time are in constant motion. Even as they keep their hands off the bubbling paella, they have their hands on the paellea, keeping it turning.

Watching the action, Garcia adds, “is like an orchestra.”

Two steps are critical and they come at the beginning and end of all this turmoil. It starts with cooking down a sofrito of onion, garlic and other aromatic ingredients until they can almost disappear into the rice (which, of course, has to be of a particular kind from Spain—definitely not long grained stuff from grocery shelves). Before presenting paella to the table, chefs finish by developing socarrat on the bottom—rice heated to the point where it crisps up, but doesn’t char, lending a texture valued by aficionados to each bite.

Who would invent such a taxing thing? Well, flat pan cooking has been around for millennia. But a recipe for Valencian rice can be found in the 1700s page turner Avisos, i instructions per lo principiant cuyner. A century later the dish became synonymous with the pan itself.

One story has servants of Moorish kings gathering leftovers from the royal table and tossing them into a pot of rice (which is why some argue that paella the word can be traced to the Arabic “baqiya,” although more of these linguistically-minded sorts settle on the Roman “patella”).

Most food historians, however, believe peasants working the fields of Valencia would gather around large cooking vessels and fill them with rice and whatever—rabbit meat was common; snails, too, but no seafood. That would come as the dish spread and evolved.

“There’s a paella for everyone,” Garcia says. “You can never get tired of it.”

At Estéban they sometimes have all 10 fires going at once. Miller’s popups sell out. But only a few restaurants—Bistro Giovanni and Grasing’s in Carmel, for example—place it on their menus.

And if you read this far, you know the answer to this week’s Burning Question.

“That’s why,” Miller says.