Weekend Escape: Central Valley : Going Nowhere : Into the state’s agricultural belly for beefy meals and a history lesson

Halfway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, up the monotony of Interstate 5, Harris Ranch is a familiar traveler’s refuge. Big red sign, can’t miss it.

Aficionados of beef began stopping for choice-grade steak and eggs, or steak and almost anything, when the restaurant and coffee shop opened next to the freeway in 1977. Ten years later the family company built a Spanish-style, beige stucco inn with Olympic-size pool, spa and gardens under the palm trees. As the greenery has grown, the inn has become a well-kept haven for tired drivers and aviators. There is a much-used landing field for small planes, some of them flown by farmers and ranchers dropping in for lunch.

We were in no hurry and liked the idea of a long, lazy weekend in the historically resonant agricultural belly of the state. So a few weeks ago, my wife, Judie, and I and a small black Labrador retriever named Blossom reserved a room at the inn. We found unexpected attractions.

One was the homey burg of Hanford, 37 miles east of Harris Ranch Inn. On a Saturday morning, we drove up from Los Angeles on California 99, the farm route, turned west on California 198 and stopped in Hanford for the day. We had dinner reservations at a legendary Hanford restaurant that night.

The charms of Hanford, a railroad stop since the 19th Century, have been preserved without turning the place over to T-shirt sellers. Hanford is the Kings County seat and a supply depot for the surrounding vast fields and rangeland. But the attractive older buildings in the center of town are intact and in use.

The Aborn Hotel, built in 1893, still has its original exterior, but is now a furniture store. The old firehouse is an auto-parts shop. The 1905 Odd Fellows building now houses the Hanford Antique Emporium, a sprawling catacomb with real collectibles and real junk. Another antique store, the Livery Stables, is only a few blocks away.

We had lunch in the park at Courthouse Square, between a wildly blooming rose garden and the antique carousel, run by volunteers, to which a steady trickle of local parents brought children for an afternoon wooden pony ride. We had bought a thick Swiss cheese and liverwurst sandwich and two tall chocolate-chip milkshakes to go at the Superior Dairy Products Co. on the other side of the square. Superior Dairy, with its original pressed-metal ceiling, is an ice cream parlor largely unchanged since 1929. The ice cream, made from local milk, has the clean, not overly sweet taste of homemade, and it comes in enormous proportions. A high point of Hanford was the remnant of its Chinatown, called China Alley, once the largest Chinese community between Los Angeles and San Francisco. We had called ahead to ask for a tour of the restored Taoist temple (request tours two weeks in advance), which is next door to the Imperial Dynasty, a legendary restaurant.

As it happened, docent Camille Wing invited us to join a family group touring the handsome old temple, a two-story red and teal building constructed in 1893.

Calvin Wing, a Fresno accountant and Camille’s brother-in-law, was born a few blocks away and as we moved from room to room he kept finding family heirlooms. Gong Shu Wing, his grandfather, had sold noodles from a pushcart in China, then came to “Golden Mountain”--California--and opened a Chinese restaurant in Hanford. After the tour, we ambled next door for dinner.

Judie and I dug into the appetizers and could have happily stuck to them. According to the restaurant staff, Ronald Reagan’s favorite, when he traveled the state as governor, was escargots a la Bourguignonne, snails grilled “on hot gridiron,” in garlic butter, Dijon mustard, Chablis and a dozen or so other ingredients. Neither of us are food critics, but we have never had a better snail.

By the time we had also plowed through delicately seasoned artichokes with smoked oysters, and a light cannelloni, we could barely stuff in a mound of fresh shrimp Louie and a half roast chicken Macau--billed on the menu as petit dinners “for people not so hungry.” When we mentioned Blossom, asleep in the car, the waitress cheerily donated a chunk of prime rib left by an earlier diner. We paid up and struggled out to find our bed at the ranch.

We woke in the morning to the chatter of finches, red-winged blackbirds and Scott’s orioles. We had left the balcony door open in the balmy evening and now Blossom was flopped down, gazing across the box hedges and flowers around the courtyard and pool. The inn charges a modest $10 cleaning fee per stay for pets. Second-story rooms with balconies are a good idea--you can keep the balcony door open to the breeze without having to leash the dog.

Sunday was a day of rest. Fresh pastries for breakfast from the Harris store (which also sells kitchenware, homemade cookies, candy and gifts, and ships cold-packed beef by Federal Express all over the United States). Reading by the pool. Naps. Lunch in the patio next to the bar.

Lunch in the Ranch Kitchen coffee shop is usually better. On Sunday, after a long wait, the waitress apologized, explaining that 30 small planes had flown in without warning from around the state, all with hungry diners. When it arrived, my sirloin steak sandwich was small, overdone and cold. Judie got the wrong salad.

Dinner that evening in the Fountain Court Grill dining room was better. I now know I don’t like rosemary on prime rib, but the 20-ounce ranch cut otherwise was a sizable and tender hunk of meat. My mate’s porterhouse was rare, as she can almost never get it.

Brunch the next day was an improvement again. I had a juicy, lightly grilled prime rib sandwich with sauteed mushrooms, peppers and onions. Judie’s corned beef hash (and eggs) was hash from a higher plane--not the salt-choked, dry shreds of most diners.

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We spent a few hours Monday in Coalinga, a dozen miles west of the inn, on the trail of Joaquin Murieta’s last stand. A couple of books on the long debate over California’s fabled Gold Rush-era bandit had been my Sunday poolside reading. To this day it’s unclear whether Murieta was only partly made up, assembled from the lives of five different Joaquins, or invented from whole cloth.

Coalinga is an old train town whose euphonious name derives not from a native bird or old romantic tale but from Coaling Station A, which was what the Southern Pacific Railroad first called it. Later, Coalinga became an oil boom town. An earthquake more than a decade ago nearly leveled the place, however, and little of its early architecture remains.

Helen Cowan, 74, curator of Coalinga’s R.C. Baker Memorial Museum, comes from a family who moved to Coalinga in the 1870s, two decades after Joaquin Whoever-He-Was died at Cantua Creek nearby. We drove to the spot Cowan pointed to on a map. It’s now a field behind the Three Rocks Shopping Center.

In the background were the green foothills leading to Tres Piedras, the three rocks, Joaquin’s hide-out, where he could watch for posses in the flat of the valley. Someday I’d like to come back with a couple of horses, to get back up into those rocks for a look myself. But today we had to turn the car and head south.

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Budget for Two Two nights Harris Ranch Inn, 10% AAA discount, $10 pet fee: $200.52 Lunch, Superior Dairy: 11.10 Donations, Carnegie Museum, Taoist Temple: 7.00 Drinks, Bastille: 5.00 Dinner, Imperial Dynasty: 41.71 Breakfast pastries, Harris Ranch: 1.50 Lunch, dinner and drinks at Harris Ranch: 91.77 Brunch, Harris Ranch: 23.88 Donation, R.C. Baker Museum: 2.00 Gasoline: 40.08 FINAL TAB: $424.56 Harris Ranch Restaurant and Inn, 24505 W. Dorris Ave., Route 1, Box 777, Coalinga, CA 93210; tel. (800) 942-2333 or (209) 935-0717. Hanford Visitor Agency, (209) 582-5024.