Cheap Eats

Grids and gridiron

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Coach and me went to Benders many nights in a row. "Benders," she likes to say. "It’s what’s for dinner." But I don’t know. I love their burgers and tots. And their pulled pork, come to think of it, rebounded me nicely from that dollop of whatever-the-crap-that-was at Bonnie’s last week. But my sense of adventure begins to feel compromised after more than one night in a row at the same place.

Nevertheless, neither one of us has a TV. And we thought we should watch us some football. I swear our intention was to go to poetry readings, too. But we tended not to want to leave the bar.

It’s weird, liking football again, this time from a softer, less angular angle. For me, the football part of my friendship with Coach is the perfect blend of strategy (possible color-combinations, baggy vs. tight uniforms), surreality (keep reading), and camaraderie. It reminds me of watching the Niners with Wayway back in the day, only Coach and I seldom look at the TV and the plays we draw up on our napkins look a lot more like fruit trees in the end.

Moreover, I’m pretty sure Wayway never said (although he may well have been thinking it) during Monday Night Football: "This would be a lot more interesting if they were lesbians."

"They will be, Coach," I reminded her. "For now, just imagine."

The Ravens were playing the Texans.

We talked about relationships. We talked about depression. We talked about the holidays, and who I will meet and where we will be and who will like me. And always eventually it came back to the little TV at the other end of the bar.

"I like when the little guys dart around," she said. "They’re like shortstops, and second base."

"That’s the spirit," I said. "Now we’re talking."

Coach has a little notebook that she writes her football information in. There is a column of names. Most of our friends already know that they are playing football come spring. One or two even know how. I do! That’s why I get to be Coach’s coaching staff, confidant, and — if I don’t blow it — on-field captain. We already know who our quarterback will be and have a pretty good idea of the blockers. Less certain is who will play weasel, and the ever-important position Coach calls the "far runners." Myself, I am proud to be penciled in, according to her little notebook, at shortstop.

Which looks to me a little like the position formerly known as tight end. But when I mentioned this to Coach she got the giggles. "Tight end!" she said. "That’s perfect!"

I should stop writing about us. We are going to take this league by storm. And it might be better if no one sees us gathering on the horizon, like dark, sexy, undertalented and overburgered but height-weight proportionate clouds.

I’m just too excited to leave it alone!

OK, focus. My secret agent lady Sal and me didn’t want to sit in her rental car at the beach and watch surfer boys change clothes in her rear view mirror on an empty stomach, so we stopped off first for Korean.

Every Saturday a group of three or four food trucks circle the wagons down at McCoppin and Valencia around lunch time, and then some. I tried to go there once before with Mr. Wong when we were on our kimchi burrito kick, but Seoul on Wheels musta had a flat tire that week.

This time it was there! That’s the good news. The bad news is that its Korean burritos, which it calls korritos, are premade and have sour cream, which is a big mistake. An even bigger mistake: way too much rice and way not enough meat, or kimchi, or therefore flavor.

Weak. Weak. Weak.

On the other hand, I had a bulgogi taco and it had no rice at all. Small small small. But … delicious!

There’s also a Filipino truck there, which is pretty good, and I forget which taco truck — taco tacos, I mean. Next time I’ll try those.

SEOUL ON WHEELS @ OFF THE GRID

Sat. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

McCoppin and Valencia, SF

(415) 336-0387

Cash only

No alcohol

Ducking the cold

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I know I’m not the only one. December rubs a lot of people the wrong way. This year, to combat my usual seasonal depression, I am moving to Norway. Oh, I’m sure I’ll be back to the Bay Area to visit, now and agin, but just in case I’m underestimating the inherent cheerfulness of Oslo and wind up coming back to live, I will of course continue to write Cheap Eats from abroad, no worries.

Then when I have finished unlocking the secrets of Norwegian cuisine, in general, and of Oslo’s burgeoning restaurant scene, in particular, I will write letters to Earl Butter again, or Cheap-Eats-length poems about how happy I am, whaling, playing Scrabble on the beach, eating lutefisk until the wee hours, and running with the moose, or whatever it is that people in Norway do for happiness.

I’m kidding of course. I would never in a million years go whaling! Didn’t you ever read Moby Dick? I did! There’s a guy in it named Queemquack, or something like that, and in the end they all get eaten to death by a whale.

Oy, my poor father, a Melville scholar, would be rolling over in his grave right now if he were 1) still reading my column and 2) dead, but he is neither, that I know of. Why, I just talked to him on the phone a little bit ago and he didn’t mention anything at all about Cheap Eats or having died.

Man, I love my dad! Happy birthday to him. When I was eight, I helped him write his dissertation. No lie, he had underlined all the participial phrases in Melville’s major works, and it was my job to tally them up — my first quantitative analysis of a major literary figure, give or take Dr. Seuss.

It’s uncanny. First I became a writer like my dad, then I became a musician like my dad, and don’t look now but I believe a couple paragraphs ago I may have established myself as a Melville scholar in my own right. Anyway, I read Moby Dick twice. Twice! (Technically I read it once as a literate adult, and leafed through it the other time, as a literary scholar who also pretty much knew how to count.)

From my mother I inherited my athleticism (which is no less dear to me than all-of-the above) and my peculiar knack for migrating north in winter and living in the woods, literally and figuratively.

You have to have good, strong legs, like mine and mom’s, to run with moose, don’t you know. And you have to be at least a little bit crazy, as I understand it, to eat lutefisk. Especially when you can just stay here and have burritos.

Or, actually, I’m kind of stuck on duck noodle soup now. Again. It being cold season. And I was house- and dog-sitting for Crawdad for a while in Berkeley, where there are a lot more duck soups to be had than here in the Mission. Not to mention Oslo.

All kidding aside, although I did briefly consider going home for the holidays this year, I’ve decided to weather them here where my turntable is. I don’t have any records anymore, but I do have my kitten, Stoplight. And if I turn my turntable on, with Stoplight on top of it, the result is more entertaining than Merle Haggard or anything.

It should be enough to get me through the darkest time of year.

But I wonder if old Merle ever had duck noodle soup with three scoops of hot sauce in it, or hung around with lesbians. For the former, my current recommendation is Your Place on University Avenue.

It’s on the lunch menu, for like $7, but probably they’ll give it to you any time of day. And it’s a big bowl, with rice noodles, no-bone roast duck, celery, green onions, cilantro, and maybe even a few spinach leaves.

Very very very good. Nice place, friendly service.

Then you can always go to last week’s new favorite restaurant, Lao Thai, for a bowl of sweet duck soup for dessert. In this very way, I will hop, skip, and waddle my way to March, and warmth, and happiness, and hopefully I hope a li’l love.

If we make it through December …

YOUR PLACE THAI CUISINE

Daily 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

1267–71 University, Berk.

(510) 548-9781

MC,V

Beer and wine

 

Trans action time

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS And then there was Kiz’s wedding, and I was honored to be a part of her get-ready team. Although: I had nightmares about branding her face with a curling iron or, worse, catching her hair on fire.

She must have had the same nightmares, because when the big day finally came, she barely let me touch her hair. This was probably for the best. She looked awesome and entirely unmismanaged by her get-ready team, and anyway the ceremony was held outside, at the lighthouse in Santa Cruz, in a wind so strong that the four women holding the chuppah damn near missed the vows for parasailing to Reno. Kiz’s naturally fantastic hair was pretty much horizontal the whole time anyway. It stayed fantastic, but horizontally fantastic.

Wind notwithstanding, both she and her dude went ahead and said they did, and that was it, give or take a lot of other things.

For example: three times in the past 30 days I have heard straight newlyweds include, as a part of their ceremony, shout-outs to California gays. Meaning straight people with a conscience are feeling increasingly weird about their participation in a bigoted and discriminatory system that excludes many of their close friends.

Cool!

Cooler yet will be when straight couples start to stop getting married, in protest. Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact antiquated marriage laws undermine marriage, whereas queerness might could rejuvenate it.

Coolest of all will be when I get married. Won’t that be a hoot? Won’t that change the cynical way everyone feels (or at least I feel) about the eroding, outmoded institution?

For the moment, of course, there is nothing preventing trans people in most states from being married — legally (as long as no nasty dispute ever arises inspiring someone to prove for the sake of financial gain or custody or some such that their marriage was never really valid — which, really, how often does anything like that happen in this neat, clean world we live in?)!

My more immediate concern is one no amount of legislation can ever redress, undress, or even approach: how to get on the menu. As it is, there are not a lot of guys willing to be seen in broad daylight with girls like me, let alone take us home to mother. Let alone stand on some windy precipice and say they do. I’m working on this. I have ideas. Big ‘uns.

But speaking of going behind a rock and yipping like a coyote, there’s Los Coyotes right there near the 16th Street BART station. I’ve walked by it a zillion times without it ever registering, until Earl Butter was kind enough to notice the picture in the window of meat and melted cheese all over a bed of french fries.

He did what you’re supposed to do: he told me, so at the next imaginable mealtime we were there, sharing a big plate of carne asada fries and a pretty small bowl of birria.

The birria was greasy and bare-bones. In this case, that means we found a lot of weird pieces of bone without any meat on them. But there was a lot of meat too. And nothing else. Oh well … that’s birria, as the saying goes. Just goat and goodness, and you gotta love that.

Well, I do. Points for serving it any old day of the week. And points for adding carne asada fries to the Mission District burrito scene. It wasn’t the best carne asada. Or the best cheese, or the best fries, for that matter. But somehow when you added them all up, it was a damn great thing to be eating.

And we each drank a lemonade and each ate some green chips with a variety of salsas, including a mango one. And one that was just strips of pickled nopales and onions, speaking (still) of coyotes.

The atmosphere is really good, too. A lot of cool, colorful tile work, and color and brightness in general, plus Mexican soap operas on TV.

New favorite taqueria? Next time I’ll get a burrito, and weigh back in.

Taqueria Los Coyotes

Mon.–Thu. 9:30 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat. 9 a.m.–3 a.m.

3036 16th St., SF

(415) 861-3708

MC,V

Beer and wine

Carne, carnival

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I fell in with some bad people. One was a clown. You don’t expect to even like clowns, let alone fall in with them, but this one was brilliant, in a Charlie Chaplinish way. Or early Woody Allen, meaning: all you have to do is look at him and you pee your pants.

And that’s when he’s out of character. In character, on stage, forget it! You’re going down. This actually funny clown works with a couple of other actually funny clowns, one of whom I talked to for a long time about food because she lives — like me — in San Francisco.

We were sitting around a campfire in front of the stage, after the show. Behind us, a lot of musicians were playing a lot of songs, but not me. I didn’t feel like jamming. I felt like making new friends. Fun, fucked up, and circus-y friends.

They call it a chautauqua, but in addition to the music, storytelling, and political humor, there were these clowns, a contortionist, a slack-rope walker, and a one-ball contact juggler — which, if you’ve never seen contact juggling, you should probably go see you some.

It’s beautiful.

My own role among this talented riff-raff was very, very background. I played bass in a three-piece band for a 25-minute micromusical about sea monkeys. Still, everyone hugged me backstage, or at least patted me on the back, and admired my hot water bottle.

The third night was more than sold out. More than a couple hundred people huddled together in the west-county, wine-country redwoods, oohing and ahhing and laughing our asses off, and afterward the resident pyro lit another careful bonfire. The musicians and nonmusicians among us jammed. I stayed until at least 1 a.m., talking mostly to the girlfriend of one of the sea monkeys. Or I guess technically she was the tank aerator. I hadn’t actually had the pleasure of seeing much of the play from the orchestra pit. Which wasn’t a pit so much as a platform or tree house.

Meat, was what me and the tank aerator’s girlfriend talked about. Her girlfriend, the tank aerator, was a vegan. A lot of the people were vegetarians. The two meals a day they made us in the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center kitchen were always delicious, but in a meatless, meatfree, where’s-the-meat kind of way. So we missed it, me and the tank aerator’s girlfriend, and we discussed this missing, our preference for meat over dessert in general, and where one might could find bacon cheeseburgers, for example, at 1 a.m., in Occidental.

"Rohnert Park," she said. She was thinking of an In-N-Out Burger, but that was 30 minutes away.

Which is, admittedly, closer than Brazil.

My own personal new favorite restaurant is in El Cerrito. Has anyone ever been to Rafael’s Shutter Café? You have to go way up San Pablo, past the Hotsy Totsy, past Albany Bowl, and then, I don’t know: keep going. It’s on your right.

They have live jazz on weekends, but when I was there, on something like a Wednesday, there was opera playing on the stereo. Which went perfectly with my sausage omelet, potatoes, toast, coffee, coffee, and more coffee.

I was sitting at the counter, waiting for the traffic outside to die down so I could cross the Richmond Bridge and go up and fall in with bad people, such as clowns and meat-eating girlfriends of tank aerators.

After I drank too much coffee there was nothing left to do but chat up the guy who runs the joint. "Where do you put your musicians?" I asked him.

He said I reminded him of his sister-in-law. He said, "Are you French or Spanish?"

"Italian," I said.

He said he was married to a French woman.

"Me, I’m waiting," I said. His phone rang. I said: "Traffic."

RAFAEL’S SHUTTER CAFE

Mon.–Thu. 9 a.m.–4 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat. 9 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

10064 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito

(510) 525-4227

MC,V

Beer and wine

Witchy ways

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS How to tear down a chicken coop: Step one, build a chicken coop. I used scrap wood, found objects, and recycled nails and screws to make this one. At the time, I was going through a divorce, so my spirits were all light and buildery, and I whistled while I worked and didn’t get too upset if I got a splinter.

Suffering for one’s art, not to mention eggs, seemed noble and not at all frightening. I was in love with the woods and fresh air, high on my new sense of self, which I have come to see, in retrospect, as merely a phase: for five years and change, I found myself involved in a kind of a secular witchcraft.

No incantations or Shakespearean hullabaloo; without any belief whatsoever, barely even with intent, I lured little children into a large pot and cooked and ate them. Often in omelets! I didn’t know what I was doing. In fact, it took one of these omelets to point it out to me. The youngest, and one of the first, she stood before my brand-new-yet-already-ramshackle chicken coop, took one look at my outdoor bathtub, half a look at my black and pink punk rock rubber ducky, then stared at the 25-gallon pot on a propane burner that almost blocked the door to my crooked little shack.

"You’re kind of a witch, aren’t you?" she said, her great big eyes getting ever even bigger.

"Um, no, well, I think more of a chicken farmer, if you ask me," I said.

"But this is all so … so … witchy," she said.

So, OK, so I went with it. It’s my nature to just go with things. But I didn’t have any idea what witches do, except for live in funky shacks in the woods (like me) with their big noses (like mine) and crazy black cats (like Weirdo, R.I.P.) and either oversized ovens or giant pots for cooking kids in.

Before anyone burns me at the stake or, worse, tries to ruin my career as a nanny, let me explain metaphor to you. No — cut metaphor, let’s skip straight to dada. The children who I made into omelets were for the most part 40- and 50-something-year-old men with hairy bellies and hardly any heart, who had somehow or other neglected to grow up. They were off-the-beaten-path truck drivers, errant farm hands, recovering ax murderers, and homeless mushroomers. Whereas the little girls, the little girls were two: a psychotic psychologist and the above-mentioned big-eyed young ‘un, 29, a highly educated and queerish knows-a-witchy-woman-when-she-sees-one college perfessor.

In my experience the brainier they are, the harder they hurt. Step two, set down that rusty, dull hatchet and fix your drill. It’s true you are liable to think of ugly, downlifting things while deconstructing your chicken coop. All the spider webs, moldy hay, and fossilized chicken shit … how can you not be reminded of heartless, hopeless, imaginationless fucks?

Thing is, this is not the time for anger. That time has passed, and hopefully you have kicked and screamed and howled and yowled and beaten your poor pillow (or in my case, reading public) into submission. Deconstructing a chicken coop, on the other hand, requires precision. Ergo: Step three, stack all the neatly de-screwed boards and things in a Future Dump Run pile.

Step four, roll all the chicken wire in tight-as-possible rolls and stack it separately. Neatly. Remember: what you are doing is more sacred than building; you are tearing down. You are creating blank space — empty, meaningless, and therefore full of potential. You will want to leave this site as clean as possible for the next person, who is somewhere in the world creating just such a space for you. In the name of which …

Step five: rake, scrape, shovel, and dump what was the floor into what will be the next tenant’s garden. Now, city girl, get your city ass back to town, slow and stylingly, and find yourself a new favorite restaurant. No meat for you: half a falafel sandwich drenched in tahini and a cup o’ cream o’ broccoli, babe. You deserve this.

TWILIGHT CAFE

Mon.–Fri. 8 a.m.–7 p.m.

2600 McAllister, SF

(415) 386-6115

MC, V

Beer and wine

Let’s date!

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS While the Maze’s mom was fighting for her life, he sat and stood by her side, in San Diego, and talked to her, even though she couldn’t hear him, or respond.

Her coma was induced, more-or-less medically, according to the Maze, who went to med school. After seven days, they more-or-less medically weaned her back into life as we know it. Where you breathe, you know, air, and eat, you know, food, and go to the bathroom. When he left San Diego, she could do some of the above, plus take six steps.

Coincidentally, as misfortune would have it, for the two weeks the Maze was with his mom, the woman the Maze dates was also bedridden back home here, on account of broken legs and surgery and shit.

I gave her a lot of movies, and some lasagna, but that was about it. And I thought about her a lot, and the Maze’s mom, who was only in her 60s. And the Maze: how the women in his life were all down, but not for the count.

Nor did it escape my attention that I am, in many respects, a woman in the Maze’s life, so I was careful to look both ways before crossing streets, drive defensively, and wash my hands many times during a day. I might have even eaten more healthily, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Whatever the reason, I was very, very hungry when the Maze called me from the airport on Monday. Did I want to get something to eat?

"I do!" I said. I told him I’d been thinking all day about barbecue. This meant nothing to him, not because he’s cruel but because he knows me well. I might as well have said, "All day long my heart has been pumping blood through my veins and arteries."

Or: "Yep, I checked, and I still have hands!"

Since the Maze is one of many friends I suspect of being a closet vegetarian, we settled for pizza. At … Delfina Pizzeria. Finally!

Because I live on one side of it, and park on another, I have been walking past this place for years, often with my one-string water-jug-on-a-toilet-plunger bass, the smell of diapers all over me, or some other symbol of my not being able to eat there. And I have slowed down and stared. Not at the beautiful people who litter the sidewalk in front of Delfina, lunchtime and evenings. I have stared at their pizzas.

I think it’s cruel and unusual for establishments to serve food that looks and smells that damn good on narrow sidewalks with a lot of foot traffic in not entirely affluent neighborhoods.

I’ve seen me some pies with some pretty amazing things on them, like fried eggs, and I have fantasized about sitting down with some party of two or three and pretending like I know one of them. Or just grabbing a slice and flying. I’m pretty fast for an aging ex chicken farmer.

It’s not like Delfina’s out-of-reachably expensive, either. I think of it as a date place. I just don’t, as a rule, have dates. So when the Maze nixed my barbecue idea and suggested Delfina, if there wasn’t a line, I jumped on it.

Here was a special occasion. His mom was alive! He was coming home! I still had hands! And — and this is a big and — it was early enough that we wouldn’t have to wait in line. So there we had it, and you have it, everything stacked up so that at 6 p.m. on a Monday. I ate my first Delfina pizza.

It was good. As good as it always looked. And in spite of the fact that we didn’t get one of the meat ones, the Maze being a closet vegetarian. I think the pizza, with broccoli raab, olives, mozzarella, and hot peppers, was $14.50. Share-able, sure, but barely so. Put it this way: either one of us could have eaten the whole thing alone.

Plus salad plus drinks = yeah, not cheap eats. But damn good ‘uns. I can’t wait to have dates.

DELFINA PIZZERIA

Mon. 5–10 p.m.; Tue.–Thu. 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri. 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat. noon–11 p.m.;

Sun. noon-10 p.m.

3611 18th St., S.F.

(415) 437-6800

AE,D,MC,V

Beer and wine

Meow mix

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I was about halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge by the time I knew for sure: big mistake. Stoplight the cat was not happy. I was not happy. It was hot. No air conditioning. I required food. Occidental is an hour and 15 driving minutes beyond the bridge.

That’s a lot of minutes to have to listen to a cute little kitten that you love screaming and screeching in horror. Not to mention how many minutes it is to have to be that kitten. But I was running late for an important rehearsal for this thing I’m in, so there was no turning back.

"The show must go on," I said to Stoplight.

"You mother fucking fucker," he said, in so many meows. "If I ever get big enough I’m going to shred you into confetti, eat your internal organs, and leave your tangled intestines on the bed so I can spend the rest of my little life playing with them."

"Oh," I said. "Really? Say, have you ever heard of people who throw their pets out of car windows on the freeway? I’m not saying I’m one of those people, but what makes you so certain that every one of those people who are one of those people wouldn’t have said, 10 minutes before losing it, that they weren’t one of those people.

"I’m just saying," I said, "that the human psyche is a fragile and funny thing."

"Yeah, well, you think those little kitty scratches on your arms are bad, and the tiny puncture wounds all over your legs?" my little kitty said, partially overlapping me because he doesn’t yet have manners. "Wait until I pull your ears off your head, claw your eyeballs out, and swat them across the floor like ping pong balls until they roll under the refrigerator.

"I’m just saying," he said. "I wouldn’t go to sleep tonight, if I were you, I’m saying," he said. In so many meows.

"Fuck you," I said.

"Fuck you," he said.

We were off to a great start in our little long-term committed relationship. And it was all my fault. I decided to get off at the next exit with visible food, and just … eat. Something. Anything. Whatever. I just didn’t want to go all-the-way crazy, not in my brother’s stinking van. Not on an empty stomach. The first place I see, I said to myself.

The first place I saw was McDonalds. (What are the chances?) Luckily, I am not an honorable woman. I mean, technically, I keep my word where there are other people involved, but tend to break every single promise I make to myself. Including, to everyone’s cheap eaterly relief, this one.

I continued down that road, meow meow meow, until I came to the second restaurant I saw, which was Strawberry Gourmet Deli in the Strawberry shopping center.

As soon as the car stopped rolling, I poured out of it like a beer commercial, opened the sliding side door, grabbed the cat carrier, put it on the floor in the wayback, behind the third seat, and left that door open too.

He could see me through his little caged door as I ran-walked into the deli. "Get back here," he shrieked, "you stinking bitch!"

Or maybe he said, "Get cat beer! A pink sandwich!"

Whatever, it was loud, and it looped. You could still hear him at the counter.

"Can I help you?"

"The vet said it was okay," I said. "For a kitten. If you travel with them while they’re young, they get used to it. I want to die."

"Excuse me?"

I wish I could have got a salad or baked thing, such as lasagna, because it’s hard to drown your sorrows in a sandwich. But I needed something I could eat in the car. "Turkey sandwich," I said.

Opened it up on my lap in the drivers seat, cranked Green Day, and got back on the freeway. What a lame lunch. Not enough meat. Not enough anything, except bread. All of us, we drive like maniacs, and are lucky to be alive.

STRAWBERRY GOURMET DELI

Mon.–Fri.: 7 a.m.–5 p.m.;

Sun.: 7 a.m.–4 p.m.

1216 Strawberry Village Road, Mill Valley

(415) 381-2088

AE,D,MC,V

Beer and wine

Appetite: 3 gourmet cheap eats on Sonoma

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Not far off Sonoma’s idyllic town square lie these three unique gems – you can eat high quality Eastern European, BBQ or Mexican food at a reasonable price.

EL MOLINO CENTRAL: In a sea of taquerias lining Sonoma’s Highway 12, there’s a new addition I’ve been excited to tell you about that opened early this Summer: El Molino Central. I pulled over after doing a double take — it looks like a charming taqueria, but reading hand-painted “tortillas… tamales… blue bottle coffee” on the side of the building made me say, “Wait… what?”

With no dining space inside, there’s a leisurely patio out back. Inside, it’s an open kitchen where you survey Mexican street food prepared with a high level of care and quality ingredients. The staff hand-grinds corn masa and press tortillas in wood presses. There are even fresh tortillas and pre-prepared dishes to heat up at home. The menu offers merely a handful of items: chilaquiles, tostadas, enchiladas and delightful tamales (I like the white corn and cheese version).

What surprises is the Blue Bottle Coffee menu straight down to New Orleans’ Iced Coffee (perfect on a hot Wine Country summer day). You can get your individual drip or a cappuccino, happily savored with a tamale made from local ingredients.

The place looks plucked out of LA with palm trees and all, but exemplifying Slow Food sensibilities. The shock is the quality level (which costs a little more than an average taqueria, though still under $10)… and the Blue Bottle. You, too, can have your Blue Bottle and homemade tamales in a Mexican food joint. Sonoma is lucky to get this lovably quirky new addition.


Pork Schnitzel sandwich and white corn soup at Lokal

LOKAL: Just off the Sonoma square, Lokal has been getting some love lately from SF folk like Michael Bauer. I’m in when you say Eastern European and Hungarian food — difficult to find done well anywhere, much less in Wine Country.

Lokal won me over with shelves full of records and LPs in the dining room, then with sunny, back patio picnic tables. There’s a fine selection of beers making the patio beer garden-reminiscent. Service has it’s kinks, including a pricing discrepancy on their menu it took awhile to work out on my bill, but the food is a pleasure and is now a favored stop in downtown Sonoma.

Lokal makes a mean German Potato Salad ($5), sweetened by grilled red onions, punchy with mustard, maintaining a fresh profile despite starchiness. A Summer special of White Corn Puree Soup ($3.50 a cup) is sweet and bright. Count me in on the Eva Gabor’s Pork Schnitzel Sandwich/”Rueben” ($12). You almost forget there’s no pastrami in there with a breaded pork cutlet layered with mustard and sauerkraut. There’s a satisfying savoriness here reminiscent of a great Rueben. Lightly crunchy brown bread and house pickles seal the deal.


Jalapeno poppers stuffed with carnitas and cheese at Mondo

MONDO: Mondo, a short drive from downtown Sonoma, has the largest beer selection in the area: 23 on tap and more by the bottle, with a little beer garden courtyard through the restaurant. A couple years ago, this was a sausage and burger joint.

The burgers remain but there’s also the kind of bar food that puts a grin on my face: plump Jalapeno Poppers ($7.50) oozing with cheese and shreds of carnitas (pork). There’s fatty Braised Beef Brisket Sandwich ($9.50) piled with crumbly blue cheese and shaved red onion. For a little healthy balance, try specials like Sweet White Corn Salad ($5) tossed in lime, cilantro, red peppers and red onion.

This is a welcome Wine Country respite where you can break from excess wine for beer and cheap, gourmet bar fare. 

Face-offs

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS One day Clara de la Cooter would like to go to Ohio and play with my nieces and nephews. One day she would like to play soccer with me. And baseball. One day she wants to take the BART train. One day she would like to have pierced ears, and wear earrings, and ride a motorcycle. It’s cute to hear her begin all these distant little longings with, "One day" …

She’s three years old.

"One day," she asked me the other day while I was making cheese-eggs for her and her little sister, Kate. "One day," she said, "can I wear Kate’s head?"

My friends are all closet vegetarians, or in San Diego. Or Hawaii or Florida, for the week. Earl Butter has never quite recovered from the cleanse he went on. And here was a little girl who wanted to wear her sister’s head! Which can’t be a very healthy idea for either party, but you hate to discourage these things out of hand.

"Absolutely!" I said. "Of course you can one day wear Kate’s head, Sweetie!"

I’m just kidding. I said, "It would be really, really hard to take someone’s head off."

"Uh-huh," she said, looking up at me like she does when I’m explaining something important, all eyes and heart, and then for days and weeks and sometimes months afterward she repeats her little life lessons back at you, in the form of a question, by way of locking it in.

She’ll surprise you with them. A million new adventurous and wonderful things have happened in the meantime, and then all of a sudden, between poaching plums from a neighbor’s tree and sitting on a stone wall watching deer down below in the fog, she will turn to you and say, "It’s really, really hard to take someone’s head off?"

"That is correct," I say, and leave it at that. Later I’ll explain some of the legal, ethical, and medical implications — like maybe when she’s five. Telling a three- or four-year-old that her little sister might not like — let alone survive — a thing, only sweetens the trend toward experimentation.

Boink used to bonk his baby sister over the head with a hammer, until he turned five and — seemingly overnight — was able to grasp the concept of metaphor. We have more fun than ever now, and one day will own a restaurant together. And be in a band. We’ve already started a newspaper, which we sell to his mom for a nickel. I’m the food editor.

Speaking of which … something about hamburgers … oh yeah, Earl Butter still hasn’t recovered from his cleanse. It’s been months! For my birthday, he watched me eat buffalo wings. And that was in May! And he’s from Utica!

He has a blog about pineapples, which is, if anything as good as his last blog, which was about tuna fish. Seriously, they are both the funniest blogs ever written, but he will not eat a burger with me. Earl Butter! Meanwhile, we have made butternut squash curry with wild rice, like, five times! (It’s good, to put it mildly.)

I tried to trick him by inviting him to shop with me at Rainbow. Alice Shaw, the Person, told me about a new little burger place right behind the store, on 14th Street. I thought after we filled up my brother’s van with quinoa and red lentils and shit, he’d get a little hungry for lunch and then …

But no. He had work to do. He gave me his 20 percent off coupon and asked me to get him dried lima beans and whatever other kind of beans looked "fun."

I couldn’t get Alice Shaw the Person, either, on short notice, so I ate my burger alone. I got the one with grilled pineapples on it, thinking maybe I’d start my own blog, by way of healthy competition. But I’m scared. Earl Butter’s good.

But so is the Hawaiian cheeseburger at Café Zazo. Grilled onion, bacon, cheddar. Fresh cut fries. They serve breakfast all day and the pancakes look fluffy enough to put under your shirt, and be entirely comfortable.

Yep, it’s a friendly little family-run gem, and I thought you should know about it.

CAFÉ ZAZO

Mon.–Fri. 10:30 a.m.–7 p.m.;

Sat.–-Sun. 11 a.m.–4 p.m.

64 14th St., SF

(415) 626-5555

AE/D/MC/V

No alcohol

Truckin’

0

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CHEAP EATS Jo Jo Hoot is a kind of a guru of the Bay Area taco truck scene. Fifteen years ago, the first time I wrote about him, he was taking me on a taco truck tour of East Oakland. Now he lives in San Francisco in the Mission District, and I run into his bright-eyed and brilliant wife, Ha Ha Hoot, at the grocery store.

Ha Ha and me were in a band together for 10 minutes, so we have a lot to talk about. We talk about taco trucks. Also, of course: love. I’m pretty sure she was one of my friends who shed literal tears with me over my Germany story after I came back, but it might have been some taqueria’s carne asada having gone downhill that upset her.

Either way, of this I am certain: we were standing up.

But the recurringest theme of our chance neighborly meetings, all non-sequitage aside, has been a taco truck called El Gallo Giro in their neck of the Mission that, apparently, I needed to know about. They have the best carnitas within the city limits, it happens, and how lucky are Mr. and Mrs. Hoot? It’s just a block from their house, at Treat and 23rd streets. And they both — being graphically designfully inclined — work at home!

There’s a playground on that corner, and on my way to see them, finally, one lunchtime last week, a soccer ball came sailing over the fence and bouncing across the street right in front of me. Immediately, six or 20 little boys with 60 or 200 little fingers were latched onto the chain linkage, pudging through it (in some cases) and looking at me imploringly.

It was interesting to find myself, for a change, on the street side of this most basic of human interactions. They didn’t even have to say, "Little help?" I was off my bike and onto the ball.

For kicks I threw it back to them, only I threw it like a girl. Meaning: it barely even made it to the opposite sidewalk, let alone the fence, but, while their various groans were still caught in their little boy throats, I hitched my skirt, stopped traffic, crossed the street, caught the fourth bounce on the top of my left foot, flicked it up to my left knee, transferred to the right, popped it high off my head and behind my back, and no-look right-heeled it back over my head, and the fence — except it hit one of those damn power lines and plopped back down to the sidewalk.

They were like, "Little help?"

I just stood there. "Didn’t you see what I just did?"

"Ball," they said.

I picked it up and underhanded it over the fence to them, then, while play resumed, went around that intersection collecting my scattered sandals, shattered showmanpersonship, jewelry, bike, etc.

Jo Jo Hoot was happy to see me. We used to play in some bands together, for 15 or 20 minutes, so we have a lot to talk about too. Mostly taco trucks. Ha Ha and me and him walked back down the block to this one, El Gallo Giro, or, the round bad wine, and ordered our tacos and burritos. Which we ate in the little park there.

Where the kids were playing soccer. We sat on a small wall, side-by-side-by- side, with Jo Jo in the middle, and watched them fall down at the slightest little jostle, writhing on the ground in overdramatized and underbelievable agony, emulating their recent World Cup heroes. I didn’t see one single attempted bicycle kick.

The Gallo Giro truck, I’m just guessing, is associated with El Gallo Giro Taqueria in San Jose and various even southerner California locations such as L.A.

Their tacos are $1.25 apiece, $1.50 if you want carnitas, and let me just explain: you do. They’re the best, except for one other place in maybe South City or Daly City or Pacifica, I forget, according to Jo Jo Hoot.

Who is, as I said, the expert on the subject. He also told me where the best carne asada was, and the best al pastor, but I forgot and forgot those two already too — which, don’t worry, only makes life more interesting for you and me, or at least me.

Something about an owl, or gold, or something, on 24th Street? Anyone? Little help! *

EL GALLO GIRO TACO TRUCK

Treat and 23rd St., SF

Cash only

No alcohol

Jumping jack flash

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CHEAP EATS Rode my bike to my second favorite neighborhood, the Tenderloin. I was hoping to find the place where me and Sal the Porkchop ate crawfish and garlic noodles one night after watching dance, or something somewhat cultural, at any rate. I remember I was dressed a little dressier than usual and worried about squirting crawfish juice on my skirt.

After that my memory was erased — there’s a slight chance by space aliens. But it’s also possible that the crawfish were that spicy. That’s why I wanted to find the place. And will, another time.

This time I got distracted. Three lanes of oncoming traffic when you’re riding a bicycle the wrong way down a one-way street, such as Gough Street, will do that to you. I wish that didn’t seem like a metaphor for my life, but it does.

Because I do, ultimately, want to continue living it, I zipped over to the sidewalk and there was a bike rack. I started to lock up without even looking around first. I was on the other side of Market Street. Nothing else mattered.

Then, yes, I looked around.

With every intention of still going in search of crawfish afterward, I ducked into a place called Go Getters Deli, only the "o" was a green olive with a pimento in it. Plain block letters on the window advertised burgers and burritos, but that wasn’t why I chose the place.

I chose it because all six or seven of the people inside were sitting on the same side of their tables, facing the same direction, and looking upward. So I took that to mean there was a TV, with a soccer game on it.

And there was and there was, and so crawfish would have to wait.

But I couldn’t decide which idea I liked better: eating a burrito in a burger joint, or a burger in a taqueria. Since it was already almost half-time, I wouldn’t be able to do both. So, being predictable, I went with Plan C. Which, in this case, was a chicken sandwich with "flaming sauce," red onions, and tomatoes.

Flaming sauce = chipotle, and the sandwich was damn good. The bread tasted homemade, which seemed strange, unless they are in cahoots with Go Getters Pizza across the street and down a block. And, come to think of it, why wouldn’t they be? With a name like Go Getters Deli.

Well, the chipotle sauce wasn’t exactly "flaming." But that’s why I keep a bottle of hot sauce in my purse. With which … yum, yes, hot hot hot. And a lime Jarritos.

And an exciting half of World Cup soccer, and I forgot all about the crawfish place I had already forgotten about.

While the players were still hugging each other or else lying in the grass crying, taking off their shirts, and so on, I polished off my Jarritos, put on my sunglasses, smiled at my fellow sports fans, thanked the owners and kitchen and counter people (who had all come out to watch the end of the game), and walked into the doorjamb because I had my sunglasses on.

It was one of those days: on the edge between foggy and sunny. I buttoned up my jacket halfway, saddled my Schwinn, and huffed back to the Mission. Where some guy was doing jumping jacks on the sidewalk.

Normally I would have stopped and talked to such a someone, but he didn’t look quite crazy enough for me. He looked like a really fucking normal person, in fact, dressed in a regular way. Just happened to be doing jumping jacks on the sidewalk is all. Valencia Street. Facing a telephone pole.

And who am I to argue with that? I had a big scratch on my face. It looked like I’d been in a fight with a cat, or a catfight, but in fact (and as usual) the story was much less interesting. It starred a two-year-old, with a cracker. These things happen. Crackers are sharper than you think.

I mean, it was an accident.

I mean, physical fitness is important. *

GO GETTERS DELI

Mon.–Sat. 9 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun. 9 a.m.–6 p.m.

100 Gough., S.F.

(415) 863-4149

D/MC/V

No alcohol

The sporting life

0

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CHEAP EATS In defense of Emeryville, there’s the Emery Bay Public Market, where you can get duck noodle soup for $6, or almost anything else in the world. There’s a Caribbean booth, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Afghani, Cajun, Mexican, pizza, Peets … You can sit outside, if you want, and watch the trains go by.

There are train tracks in Emeryville.

Today I had a gyro. On a big screen near the main entrance to the market, South Korea was playing Nigeria, and on a small TV up over the Caribbean food, Greece was playing Argentina. I took my gyro to Jamaica. Tonight I have a date with an Argentinean with at least four names in his name, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have something to say on the subject in case he’s a soccer fan.

As you know, I’m not. But I am.

What in the world I’m doing in Emeryville — hanging out at the Emery Bay Public Market, drinking Peets, watching trains, and dating Argentineans who may or may not have anything to say about soccer — has everything in the world to do with my friend Kiz.

This may sound somewhat time-lapsed, but Kiz found her man, and they moved in together and got engaged and now they’re in Hawaii! He’s great, but he has a dog, is where I come in.

At first I didn’t want to do it. Why would anyone choose to be in Emeryville. For a week! With a dog. I’m more of a cat person. I love where I live and don’t like being more than one building away from Earl Butter (who lives upstairs) for hours and hours, let alone days at a time. But then I started thinking about it: Kiz and her man have a TV. Cable. DVR. And their apartment complex has a swimming pool and hot tub. I could record and watch soccer and soccer and soccer. I could throw my drool-soaked soccer-watching shirts in the dryer (which they have), jump in the pool, soak in the tub, and check out yet another international delicacy at the Public Market across the street.

So far, my favorite is Sergio Ramos of Spain. Although, damn, there’s this one guy on the Greek team … But I’m rooting for Argentina. Today. Tonight.

To boot, I became a basketball fan (also by accident) just in time to see the Celtics lose to the Lakers in game seven of the NBA Championship. Really and truly I was looking for fried chicken, of course; but I’d heard that it could be had in fine fashion at a bar in Emeryville called Scends.

My informant being a literary editor who has published and paid but never perked me, I accepted his invitation to dine there together. I use the word dine loosely. We sat on a bench by the backroom exit, eating off of paper plates in our laps and jostled by drunken sports fans hooting and hollering at a big screen TV behind our heads.

In other words, my kind of place!

The fried was perfect. They have wings, oysters, catfish, snapper, and prawns. But my favorite was the lug nut in the porkpie hat who kept yelling above all the rest of the din: "Fumble!!!" And "Touchdown!!!"

Christ, I love people. Especially ones who can fry fried stuff the way Scends does, with lots of crispy crunch and — same time — enough succulence to float the sinkingest of ships, like me. Christ, I love juicy meat, and oysters. And mac ‘n’ cheese with lots of hot sauce on it.

So here’s to Scends, and here’s to Ponzo the Dog, whose shit I almost actually sort of don’t mind bagging, and Sloop the Non-Slacking Editor, whose shit I have not until this very sentence had any occasion to even think about — damn my convolutedness!

But it was Sloop’s idea to go there, also not realizing it was game seven of the NBA finals, and his tenacity and elbowing skills found us a little corner to imbibe in. Not to mention his hard-earned dollars that paid for our fried and beers.

So, yeah, so … Emeryville. Who knew? All this, and choo-choo trains. And all I have to do is walk Ponzo three times a day and find funny ways to cover up all the bridal magazines.

SCENDS

Hours: Mon. 2–8:30 p.m.; Tue.–Thu. 2–10 p.m.;

Fri. 2–11 p.m.; Sat. 3–11 p.m.; Sun. 3–8:30 p.m.

3627 San Pablo Ave., Emeryville

(510) 547-9238

D/MC/V

Full bar

All is bacon

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I had lunch with my agent, and then we talked all afternoon and wound up going to a party together. One interesting thing is that I don’t have an agent. I haven’t had an agent since the early ’90s.

"Write a novel. Write a novel. Write a novel," my old ex-agent used to say, because of course she couldn’t sell my short story collection.

So I wrote a novel, and she couldn’t sell it. In fact, she didn’t try. She read my manuscript and very efficiently dropped me, I think because my main character, who was pole-vaulting over a prison wall at the time, lost her nerve and, as a result, wound up suspended in the air for days — up over the barbed wire there, like a flag. As I recall, she was attempting to break into the prison. So that might have had something to do with it.

Anyway, I have never had an agent since then. Nor have I exactly needed one, thanks to my friend who isn’t my agent, but did help me get two of my books published in exchange for steak dinners. Which … I’m not sure, come to think of it, that I wouldn’t have gotten off easier at 15 percent.

Anyanyway, in a heroic effort to remind me to write another book, she came over. She brought me four books and a really pretty bra that doesn’t fit, but looks nice hanging from a hook in my closet. And then, as if that all wasn’t inspirational enough, she took me to lunch at Limon Rotisserie.

Where, though it is by no means a downscale establishment, you can eat half of an amazing chicken with two awesome sides for under $10!! Until they see themselves in Cheap Eats and raise the prices, that is.

In the interim, this will be my new favorite restaurant.

And my secret agent lady (slash) literary yenta Sally, or Sal the Pork Chop (as I call her for short) is my new favorite person — not only for bringing me book ideas that come with an editor already attached, and bras. This chick loves pork so much she dates a cop! With a pet pig! I mean, a cop with a pet pig!

Oh, but it ain’t so simple as it sounds. Get this. Um. Well, hmm, so the pig itself is technically the police officer’s ex‘s pet. He has custody. So let me see if I can say this without scrapping my last little shred of journalistic integrity …

Yes! You know how I sometimes substitute the word bacon for anything else in life that is divine and wonderful, such as good news, an amazing time, or love itself? In which case, one’s lover might also be described (by me) as their bacon. Right? Okay then. So one way of describing the situation would be that the pig’s ex-bacon’s pig is coming between the pig and the pork chop.

Necessitating couples therapy and so forth.

So I got to hear all about that, and she got to hear all about the other thing. But before I forget about this

The rotisseried chicken at Limon, in addition to being the best bargain on the menu, is marinated in something heavenly, rubbed by pure herbal bliss, and spin-roasted to perfection. In other words, it’s bacon.

We also had the ceviche mixto, which was shrimp, calamari, and halibut, and delicious — but, to warn you, it’s a small plate for the same price as half a chicken.

For our sides we chose vegetales salteados and yuca frita — that’s the fried cassava root, and I’ve had it before elsewhere, but never as good as this. Perfectly seasoned, crunchy outside, and soft-centered. And the other one was just different-colored string beans, but it tasted like, like, different-colored bacon, or something.

I love it when something simple, like beans, makes you want to sing or write poetry and books. We were walking. There was a special police car with a big white star on it — Special Task Something Something — blocking the crosswalk.

"You don’t look special," Sal the Pork Chop sassed into the passenger cop’s open window. I just stared at the star itself, and made me a little wish. *

LIMON ROTISSERIE

Sun.–Thu.: noon–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat.: noon –10:30 p.m.

1001 South Van Ness, SF

(415) 821-2134

D/MC/V

Beer and wine

Lock and load

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Speaking of pickup trucks, I borrowed the Pod’s for the weekend because Hollywood was coming to San Francisco. It was my turn to drive. As you may know, 20-year-old Toyota pickup trucks aren’t sports cars, but I figured this was a step in the right direction, especially since it’s lesbian-owned.

My brother’s 25-year-old Toyota van, which I babysit, was bought off of lesbians. Still, it’s got very little mystique at this point: just a badly cracked windshield, a badly battered body, one working low-beam, and no brights whatsoever. I feel lucky not to be pulled over by the police every time I move it for street cleaning.

My brother hauls boards and tools and garbage in this van. To pick up a date in it, I feel, would be the end of the date. Once I drove it to a probably-already-doomed-anyway first meeting at a Peet’s in a North Bay shopping center, thinking: shopping center … I could park anonymously! But the damn dude was waiting outside, watching for me, and saw.

So that date was over before it started. I’m not sure what it says about this one that Hollywood wound up taking a cab to the airport. I don’t know, is it a wild weekend, or a wonky one, when by Monday morning you have entirely lost the keys to your friend’s Toyota?

While Hollywood was taking an airplane to L.A., and even for a couple hours afterward, I was still running around like a chicken with its head still on, turning my purses inside out, emptying laundry baskets, unmaking and remaking the bed. I even looked in the refrigerator. I called or went to everywhere we’d been the night before.

After a tow-trucker let me in, I turned Pod’s pickup inside out.

The Club was locked onto the steering wheel, and no, no one had a spare key. There wasn’t one. I’d called her. In Oregon.

Finally I started going into places we hadn’t been the night before, and one of them, a restaurant that was closed (I’d thought) when we’d parked in front of it, had me my keys, praise the lard. And praise the person who picked them up and put them there, whoever you are. I love you.

Loving you, loving life, living lunch, I unlocked the door, unlocked the Club, turned the key in the ignition, and drove to West Oakland to feed Pod’s cats and swap out her truck for my brother’s van. In the act of which — no lie — I lost her house key.

Chickens and waffles is not brain food. It’s soul food. This week they happened at the Hard Knox Café in Dogpatch, and were particularly hard to order because the restaurant was crowded with people eating smothered pork chops, jambalaya, po’boys, mac and cheese, and other good-lookingly soulful woowoo that made me wonder why I only ever eat chicken and waffles.

It’s the perfect time for such wonderings, since I am officially out of ideas, chicken and wafflewise, as well as brain cells in general. If anyone else here does the duo … you tell me.

Hard Knox’s fried chickens were not as good as expected. The drumstick was perfectish, but both thighs were a little overdone and undermeaty. The waffle was great. Nevertheless, if I ever again crave chickens with them (and I might not for a pretty long time), you will find me up the road at Auntie April’s, or down it at Little Skillet.

Oh, but Hard Knox rocks, in many ways, one of which is collard greens with a few squirts of Crystal hot sauce, and then a few more. And then a few more. The Maze made some real nice noises when he bit into his fried catfish po’boy. Which in fact I tasted, and yeah, it was damn good.

And the sweet tea, too. And, like I said, all the smothered stuff sure looked good and smothered. Plus I just love the place! With its corrugated tin walls and old funky signs, you really do feel like you’re somewhere else. Like, say, the South. I love being transported by meals and atmosphere. In fact — trucks and trains be damned — food might be my new favorite method of transportation. *

HARD KNOX CAFE

Mon.–Sat. 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

2526Third St., S.F.

(415) 648-3770

MC/V

Beer and wine

Older ‘n’ wider

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS One night the Maze came over because that’s what he does. He comes over. Sometimes he brings his dinner with him.

This time he brought his dinner with him.

He started pulling things out of his backpack as if they were rabbits: part of a loaf of cranberry bread! Hummus! Broccoli! Rabbits! In the water bottle holder on his bike was a half-empty bottle of semi-important wine. Me, I’d already eaten.

Another thing the Maze does is worry. He hedges his bets, shakes his head, and assigns point values to things that most people just try to put into words. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes language doesn’t cut it, but given a choice between it and math … I mean, in matters of the heart, come on: poetry vs. calculus?

The Maze is, for example, lonely. He wants to write; he wants to edit; he wants to sing, soar, shred on the guitar, or at least be in a band. These are just examples.

I like to dance. I get the two-step. I look the Maze in the eye, run the numbers with him, shake my head, want and wonder what he wants and wonders, and just generally try to be useful.

Sometimes I even threaten to throttle or kick him.

"I don’t know, Dani," he said. "I just don’t know."

"Me neither," I said, having a sip of his half-full bottle of bike-rack red. We were standing in my kitchen. As opposed to sitting. I forget why. Maybe he was fixing to leave.

"I mean, I just don’t get it. What am I supposed to do?"

If I knew, I would have said. I’m a good friend. If he would have cried, I would have cried. Existential dilemma loves company.

"Is there something I’m doing wrong?" he asked, sincere pain in his voice, his forehead all wrinkled and labyrinthine (which is how he got his name). And he said it again: "Am I doing something wrong?"

"I don’t think so," I said, because I honestly didn’t. But then a possibility occurred to me. "When you make pasta," I asked, "you’re not rinsing it after you strain it, are you?"

He looked more confused than before. "No," he said.

"Good, then, no, you’re not doing anything wrong."

I wasn’t exactly joking. As far as I know, this is the only real, unequivocally always wrong mistake one can make in life. And even then, it could be argued that if you’re cooking noodles for soup, a cold rinse might not be a bad idea. You know, so they don’t overcook in the broth.

But how did I get here? Speaking of existential dilemmas.

It was my birthday, and for my birthday I listened to Abba without guilt. I ate at Boogaloos. I got older. Had late-night hot wings with Earl Butter. Lunch: a smashed sandwich at Tartine. For my birthday the Pod bought my ticket and we all watched a baseball game at the Coliseum. I had a hot dog and a beer. For dinner I ate grilled salmon with a squeeze of lemon over quinoa and swirled kale with tamari sauce.

Kidding!!! I had chicken and waffles, of course. This time at Frisco Fried, which is cheaper than anything I have come across, chicken-and-wafflewise. Six bucks for two thighs and a waffle! You can barely get a burrito for that price anymore.

But before you move to Bayview, this is not the cheapest chicken and waffles in the Bay Area. A bird named Jay just told me: Oakland’s Home of Chicken ‘n Waffles, or Home O’ as I call it for short because chicken and waffles now goes without saying (as does the letter ‘f’), has a weekday happy hour special. Between 4 and 7.

But I have to go back to Frisco Fried first and find out what a burger dog is. I can’t speak for their Rice-a-Roni, but the mac ‘n’ cheese was really wonderful. The waffle was okay. The chicken, fried to order, was super-hot and crazy juicy — not quite as flavorfully battered as Auntie April’s or Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet if you’re keeping score, Maze, but definitely up there. *

FRISCO FRIED

Tue.–Thu. 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Sat. noon–9 p.m.; Sun. noon–7 p.m.; closed Mon.

5176 Third St., SF

(415) 822-1517

D/MC/V

No alcohol

The chicken ‘n diet

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We went down there, the Mountain and me, way down South of Market, and we found the little alley, placed our little order at the window, and sat on the loading dock, our feet dangling in the street. We sipped sweet tea and ate our breakfast out of boxes, with our hands. All my other friends, even Earl Butter, are fasting, doing cleanses, or otherwise flirting with vegetarianism by way of getting healthy — in response to which I have been eating nothing but chicken and waffles.

There’s good news out there. I’ll tell you what it is, and then I’m going on strike. But I wonder if I can trust the Guardian to print a blank page with just the words "Cheap Eats is on strike" in the middle of it. So maybe I’ll hold the spot with dada and gobbledygook … but wait, but that would be pretty much business-as-usual.

Hmm. It has also occurred to me of course to write restaurant reviews until my demands are met — to review the most boring restaurant(s) I can find, in the most boringly straightforward language I can mustard.

Think: completely unbuttered sentences without any grill marks whatsoever, stacked one on top of the other until you feel bricked in by important information, yet entirely unentertained.

Scary, innit?

Well, certainly flavorless, but I can do this, I think. The problem is it would be way more work than I am accustomed to, and I’m not sure that when you go on strike you’re supposed to work harder. Help me, labor organizers. It’s a topsy-turvy world, my world, and I am essentially (don’t forget) a chicken farmer. I don’t know anything about getting anything — except maybe eggs.

So …

Waffles. Chicken. Here’s what I know.

Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet is a good place to get greased, goo’d, and sweetened. And I mean all over your clothes, too, because there aren’t any tables to eat at. That’s OK, we’re human. This is why we have Laundromats. Not to mention napkins, but I don’t always remember about those.

You place your order at the window, then you eat across the alley on a loading dock or little wooden bench. And if you think that sounds just wonderful, wait’ll you crunch your teeth into that juicy fried chicken. It was the best I’d had since Auntie April’s, which was the best I’d had since Gravy’s. And suddenly we’re saying something.

Suddenly, chicken and waffles are alive and well — maybe even trendy — and not in Oakland this time, or even L.A., but right here in the city known as "The City." Where I live.

Auntie April’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles is on Third Street in Bayview, and it’s an actual sit-down restaurant. Their Belgian-style waffles are about as satisfying as Gussie’s, but the chicken (fried to order, of course) is way, way better. And the combo is cheaper.

Even Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet, which is associated with Farmerbrown’s fancy-pants Tenderloin soul food restaurant, is cheaper than Gussie’s. Two pieces and a waffle for $8. Pick your pieces.

Not bad, considering one piece and a waffle at Gussie’s is $7.79, $9-something if you want a breast. (You don’t.)

Farmerbrown’s waffles, also Belgian style, were perfect: crispy outside with a soft middle. And their sweet tea was spectacularly sweet. Probably goes better with the pulled pork sandwich — which I think was the only other thing on the menu.

So I don’t know what to say. Slight edge to Auntie April for the fried. But Farmerbrown’s got her beat on the iron. Guess I’ve got two new favorite restaurants. Maybe more. There’s Frisco Fried, also in the Bayview, and Sockywonk says Hard Knox is doing chicken and waffles now too.

It’s an exciting time to be a restaurant reviewer. On a chicken-and-waffle fast. Send money. Someone. *

AUNTIE APRIL’S CHICKEN ‘N’ WAFFLES

Daily: 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

4618 Third St., S.F.

(415) 643-4983

Cash only

No alcohol

FARMERBROWN’S LITTLE SKILLET

Mon.-Sat. 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

360 Ritch, S.F.

(415) 777-2777

Cash only

No alcohol

No-fry zone

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS A loud sound peeled my skin off, strip by strip, top to bottom, like a banana. We had just walked into the restaurant, just walked past the fire alarm, headed toward a cozy corner booth, and … I mean, I know I’m hot, but this was ridiculous. I grabbed the Maze’s arm, turned him around, and slipped back out to the sidewalk, aswirl in electronically piercing shrieks, potassium, instant headache, flashes of white light, and other symptoms of stroke.

Having played three games of soccer earlier that day, running was out of the question. So was eating anything in the world other than chicken and waffles. I had to get the taste of Roscoe’s out of my mouth. So we waited for the fire trucks.

Some people stayed in the restaurant, having dinner, as if it weren’t the end of the world all around them. I took this as an endorsement. Gussie’s was going to be good. It was just going to be impossible to be in there.

Although … the fire alarm had nothing to do with me, or the restaurant. Apparently this happens — I think because the whole block is all one building, so if someone in apartment 937 burns their toast, the poor people minding their own waffles all the way down Eddy Street at Gussie’s have to hear about it. And the clear winner is Excederin.

Luckily we hadn’t sat down yet, let alone ordered, so none of our food was getting cold while we milled about on the sidewalk with one-tenth of the Western Addition, waiting for the fire trucks to come squirt some toast somewhere at the other end of the block. We looked at the menu in the window, wondered what we would order, and talked about love and shin guards.

The Maze doesn’t play soccer. On the other hand, I’ve been threatening for some time now to kick him real hard.

"My mom said to tell you hi," he said. "She asked how you were doing."

Aargh, it was Mother’s Day, and I’d forgotten to call the Maze’s mom! Whom I’ve never met, by the way, or talked to — but we do have this mysterious mutual solicitousness for each other, the Maze’s mom and me. I don’t know why this is, but for many many years — in fact for much longer than I have known the Maze — I have been tempted to go to San Diego and have Thanksgiving dinner with his mom. And dad. Once I did eat peanuts with his brother, and I guess that makes me something like family.

I don’t know.

But I do know about love. I just do. I wish I knew how to write about it, or talk about it, but I don’t, and that’s why I’m going to focus on chicken and waffles for the next couple years.

Gussie’s chickens are about as bad as Roscoe’s, but her waffles are better. But her greens are worse. But if you pour a lot of hot sauce and a little bit of maple syrup into them …

Speaking of which, Gussie’s does have real maple syrup, for only $1 more. Plus they have their own homemade brown sugar syrup concoction, which is also pretty good.

What I don’t understand is how places that specialize in fried chicken can possibly not bother to fry their chickens … you know, to order. This seems like a no-brainer. It doesn’t take that long to fry a piece of chicken. I’m sure they don’t pull the waffle off of a pile of waffles, because waffles are only good if they come hot off a waffle iron. Right?

Well, fried chicken is only good if it comes hot out of the oil. Any amount of time in a basket or bin or bucket, it’s just not going to work. It isn’t. Not if you’ve ever had real fried chicken like at Gravy’s, or Grandma’s, or at Wayway’s, or Rube Roy’s, for that matter.

I have high hopes for next week’s chicken and waffles, but then, I always have high hopes. What I need is a good pair of cowboy boots. Pointy, with a steel toe.

GUSSIE’S CHICKEN AND WAFFLES

Tue.–Thu. and Sun.: 8 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat.: 8 a.m.–midnight; closed Mon.

1521 Eddy, S.F.

(415) 409-2529

MC/V

Beer & wine

Original’s sin

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS This Cheap Eats column is going to be the most carefully researched and least relevant Cheap Eats column I ever wrote, just to warn you.

I woke up early.

I threw some clothes into a bag. I threw a half a stick of salami, a chunk of cheese, a knife, and a couple of leftover bagels into another bag, and put it into the same bag with my clothes.

I walked to BART, took BART downtown, a bus to Oakland, a train to Bakersfield, and another bus to Los Angeles, where I have spent the last 24 hours flicking poppy seeds off of my arms and legs, picking them out of my belly button, brushing them out of my hair, and grinding them out of my butt crack.

For the latter I did have help. Ladies and gentlemen, of all the straight men and German posers I have ever befriended and/or bebonked, never have I ever once been treated with more sweetness and chivalry, or fucked harder, than I was by this L.A. lesbian chick I was trying to tell you about.

Problem: I like it soft, and slow.

And there was some of that too, but I knew from the moment she picked me up at the train station with a big colorful bouquet of flowers, then raced me real fast around town in her cool, dark green sports car, talking beautifully with me and laughing and gesticulating, meanwhile receiving and responding to text messages with her other hand … I knew. I was in for a ride, a wild one, and would not be sorry I came.

Her cozy, cool Hollywood apartment was filled with tulips, my favorite — she’d asked! In fact, she’d gotten me more flowers than all my previous lovers (in this millennium) ever got me, combined. In the bathroom there was a towel and washcloth, a fresh bar of soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, all piled neatly under a cute card with my name on it, and three more tulips.

Hollywood drew me a bubble bath, and I washed all those trains and busses off of me, dried, and dressed in my favorite new brown skirt and cool lacy brown print shirt, plus 2 million, 500,000 poppy seeds.

Then, as promised, she took me to Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles.

But I forgot to mention that when I came out of the bathroom, she greeted me with a file folder full of information about Roscoe’s in particular, and chicken & waffles in general. Which was not only unnecessary but impressive, considering she’d never been to Roscoe’s, or had chicken and waffles together on the same plate, and would clearly have preferred to take me to Animal, or any of about a hundred other shall-we-say higher-brow L.A. eateries she’d mentioned in her e-mails and in conversation.

No, but I had to know about the legend, the original, the Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles, which — I am sad, sorry, and chagrinned to report — sucks.

The waffle was mush and the fried chicken was dead-dry — and I’m talking about the juiciest of jucies, the thigh. The worst chicken and waffles I’ve ever had in the whole history of the San Francisco Bay Area was 10 times better than the legendary original Roscoe’s in Hollywood, proving yet again that authenticity is overrated, or that we do everything pretty much better than pretty much everyone else in the world, give or take pizza.

As if she needs another workout, my new friend and new favorite lover is with her personal trainer and I am sitting at her desk in my underwear, writing real fast so when she comes back we can go eat at five or six better L.A. restaurants.

Which I promise not to write about.

Tomorrow early I will wake up before it’s light out, make her bacon and coffee, make her French toast, make her drive me back to Union Station, then bus, train, bus, BART, and walk back home. And next week, I promise, you will read about at least one of San Francisco’s recent rash of chicken-and-waffle spin-offs. *

ROSCOE’S HOUSE OF CHICKEN’N WAFFLES

Daily: 8 a.m.–12 midnight

1514 N. Gower St., L.A.

(323) 466-7453

MC/V

Beer and wine

Wiped clean

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS You never know where in the world you’re going to be when the time comes to regroup. Or in my case re-re-re-re-re-re-re-regroup. I keep having to have these little sit-downs with myself. Or lie-downs, if I happen to be at home alone or in the woods, where one can assume a fetal position and howl without attracting too much comment. Is it possible she knows what I’m going through?

For example: Greenbrae.

Must stop wondering. But is it a state of mind, or a suburb of San Rafael? Or Larkspur? Or is it Larkspur? Whatever the fuck, a river runs through it, or at least a creek. And there is also the Bon Air Shopping Center.

The best way to forget Angela Kreuz, according to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, is to meet, make, and fall in love with new people. Since Rachel (Mila Kunis) is a fictional character, I decided to focus my attention on men again. Why not? They are reliable and brave, and, if one day Angela Kreuz changes her beautiful mind, I could just tell my future ex-husband, "Oops, I’m a lesbian."

And what could he say? He would just have to sit there and be brave and reliable — while I explained who Angela Kreuz was: some woman who doesn’t respond to my e-mails but does Google herself; someone I’d known many, many years ago who pretended to be a man but wasn’t, but it didn’t matter because I loved her beyond gender, beyond fear, who tore my heart out one New Year’s Day morning in Germany, before coffee. Then wrote to France to tell me, in some of the most poorly worded English I had ever seen in any language, that I was mentally unstable, she’d been afraid to eat with me in the end because she thought I might poison her —

"Wait!" My future ex-husband, having been handpicked by me from all the world’s really top-shelf men for precisely this purpose, would bravely, reliably interrupt me. "Before coffee?"

So, yeah, so that was pretty much "the plan" as I drove my brother’s shitty van to the Bon Air Shopping Center in Greenbrae. To meet a man I’d met online who must, I don’t know, live in Greenbrae or some such something, because why else would you drink your coffee in a shopping center?

Not to mention meeting your future ex-wife there.

But the really depressing thing is — and after this sentence it’s going to be all sunshine not only to the bottom of the page but sideways into next week, I promise — that I find myself willing to overlook all these crap shortcomings (e.g., drinking coffee in shopping centers) to potentially meet the potential doofus-of-my-dreams, because — hey — who knows? Right?

They know. Immediately. She drives … that? Wait, did she just spit getting out of her car? Is that a sunflower seed shell between her teeth? Hay in her hair? And what’s that smell?

My soccer scrapes and bruises don’t show up on photographs. I do let my adoring male public know, before they behold me in actual person, that I am essentially a chicken farmer, but what’s charming in words, and missing from pictures, breaks deals in person. Or in other words: dudes ain’t buyin’ it. Still. And I had to wonder, sitting by myself at the fake fire pit outside on the sidewalk, Bon Air Shopping Center, beautiful Marin County evening, how much longer … Who? … What? … I just had to wonder.

Which you can only do for so long, in my experience, before you need a hamburger. Or better yet a pulled-pork sandwich with fried onions on it. Besides Peet’s, the Bon Air Shopping Center has a goofy surfer restaurant called Wipeout.

Like a good faux cowgirl chicken farmer, I ate at the faux fire, dripping real pork juice and hot sauce all over my favorite jeans, and I swear, just when I started to think, Fuck Angela Kreuz, I’m going to become a man-hating old-school lesbian … my cell phone shook. An accidental poem from a beautiful woman in Hollywood: "I love your punctuation. Your sentence structure turns me on. Especially your use of colons: like this."

WIPEOUT BAR AND GRILL

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun 11 a.m.– 10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

302 Bon Air Center, Greenbrae

(415) 461-7400

MC/V

Full bar

Hugs and kisses

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We left space for The Attack at our table. She wasn’t dead or anything, just at work. Some people are dead. And some are only faking it. Still others of course are in line at Walgreens, or otherwise alive and well and just generally off doing something. So they can’t have breakfast with you at Rico’s Diner, damn!

My mind is boggled and my knees are buckled and rug-burned, but apparently I have a little prettiness left, according to an old-school pimpishly attired dude in a cape and fedora, downtown Oakland.

"You are beautiful ladies," he said to me and Pod, in passing. "You keep that up now!"

You keep that up now. Keep it up. Keep up the beauty.

Pod has a curling-iron burn on one of her cheeks.

When we saw the guy again he smiled even bigger, pumped his fist instead of tipping the fedora, and said pretty much the same things: "Beautiful" and "you keep that up now." I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, a few flakes of last night’s mascara, and chicken-fried steak flavored lip gloss.

You keep that up now.

Beauty is hard to define. Like wet soap, life, and a live fish, beauty — once defined — is also hard to hold on to. It requires concentration. Sometimes you need a coach. Sometimes you need a lover, and sometimes your lover sucks, strains, and presses the beauty right out of you and then you need coaches and cheerleaders again to get it back.

Thank you, pimpishly attired fedora-tipping and fist-pumping dude. Thank you Pod. Thank you The Attack. And thank you Rico’s, for supplying the chicken-fried steak flavored lip gloss.

And, oh, so many other kinds of hot sauce. It gave Pod and me the idea to have a "hot sauce tasting" instead of a "wine tasting" party. And this gives me the idea to have a "lip gloss tasting" party after that.

Which reminds me of a rainy day in La Rochelle, a beautiful port town on the west coast of France where, as a recent romantic refugee, I participated materially in this January’s humidity levels.

I was with my chicken farming comrade on her one day off, shopping for All Things Brown, when we saw a tall, cute man standing in a crowded square with a small sign saying, in English, "Free Hugs." And he didn’t seem to be collecting money or selling anything. And he didn’t look like he smelled bad. And I have never been more in need of hugs so I walked right up to him and hugged him. If nothing else, this gave my chicken farmer’s daughter, who is 11, something to giggle about for the rest of this year. Plus I got to learn my first French phrase, Lâchez moi, or "Let go of me."

Now I don’t need hugs anymore. I need kisses, and to learn how to say ne lâchez pas de moi, s’il vous plaît in English.

"Mmm," says the dreamy dreamboat of my dreams, "What’s that hot sauce you’re wearing?"

El Yucateca. Extra extra hot. Which goes very good with chicken-fried steak and gravy, by the way. Not that Rico’s needs the boost. It was one of my favorite chicken frieds that I can remember. And the over-easies were good, and the omelet I had the first time I went there was great.

I love this place. It’s simple, delicious, and cheap. They do standard American breakfast stuff, plus burgers (which I haven’t tried yet), and veggie and vegan things (which I never will). And it feels like you’re eating on a train, I think because the kitchen’s in the middle of the room, and you have to place your order at a counter there. Plus all the windows. Although, I have to admit that the corner of 15th and Franklin streets does tend to stay a little still.

One of the most beautiful things I ever saw: my curling-iron burnt pal Pod — who is a dot artist, after all — carefully dispensing drops of I-forget-which hot sauce around the breakfast sandwich on her plate. I don’t know exactly what she was going for, but it was a Goldsworthy worthy masterpiece.

You keep that up, now, Pod.

RICO’S DINER

Mon.–Sat.: 10 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

400 15th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-8424

Cash only

Beer

Blink

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS He was tapping a red-tipped cane, staying close to the buildings, and sometimes bumping into them. We greeted each other in passing. And the second person I saw that morning, walking to BART in the dark, was using a red-tipped cane too, but also holding onto her man’s arm. Her hat was tall and adorned with either fruit, flowers, or both. I took off my glasses and wiped them on my shirt.

The children have been wonderful. Boink, who started reading books to his little sister while I was away, says "I love you" about a million times a day now. One of the first things we did was make gnocchi, and now Popeye the Sailor Baby is old enough to help roll them too.

The Chunks de la Cooter remember all our songs and games, and Chunk II hardly ever lets go of me when I’m there. As if, more than even me, she can’t believe I’m back and ain’t lettin’ go this time.

I feel like I’ve just woken up from a really, really bad dream, rolled over in my sweat-soaked life, and blinked into the also-blinking eyes of my four True Loves, age two, two, three, and four. These four, they give my heart right back to me.

Boink thinks we should open a restaurant together. Inclined to believe him, I picture the boy 14 years from now, standing on a step-stool next to me, lightly dusted in flour from his fuzzy blond head to his pink tennis shoes — only I guess by then he’ll have flour in his beard too.

Maybe in the meantime — his parents and child labor laws willing — I can practice him in my imaginary guerilla Guerrero Street pastry war against Tartine. He can sell lemonade to the liner-uppers across the street while I learn to cook. Or better yet: limeade.

The burritos I have eaten have tended to be from Cancun, of course, with Earl Butter, and of course El Farolito with Dan-Dan the Fireman and Phenomenon. With one exception. That was El Buen Sabor, with Last Straw Sullenger, who is helping me to curtain and depression-proof my new hovel.

And she bought me a burrito for lunch.

Now I was never very fond of Good Taste during my previous stomps through the Mission, I forget why. But Earl Butter told me El Buen Sabor got better, and I trust him, as you know.

As you also know, if you’ve been reading Cheap Eats while I was out there getting my ass kicked, the buttery one just doesn’t venture beyond a two-block radius of his house at lunchtime or dinnertime. Or breakfast time, for that matter.

So what I think he likes about El Buen Sabor is that it’s the closest beans to home for him, and now me. Well, their two table-top squeezy-thingie salsas are excellent — both the red and the green. They both have some seriousness to them, and are good not only on chips and burritos, but back home poured over slightly stale and heavily buttered drop biscuits. I speak from first-hand leftover experience. But personally, I don’t think the place is any better than I think I used to think it was. That is: nothing special.

They do have brown rice and spinach tortillas, as Last Straw proved by asking for, and getting, both. With her vegetarian burrito.

Whereas I got my vegetarian burrito with as much unhealthiness as possible: white rice, refried beans, and carnitas. It was good, but honestly, unless you live one block away and are Earl Butter, or have recently eaten Mexican food in Regensburg, Germany … it’s nothing to write home about.

Let alone a restaurant review.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I would like to go back outside again, before it gets dark again, and look into one of those stenciled sidewalk gems again, for a while longer.

This one:

I WOULD STEAL THE STARS FOR YOUR and then I can’t quite make out the last word but I believe it to be HAT.

There is more than one way to read this.

EL BUEN SABOR

Daily: 10 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

697 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-8816

D/MC/V

Beer & wine

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Shipwrecked

1

 le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS

Dear Earl Butter,

As you go through life, never underestimate the importance of somewhere to sit. In fact, stand up right now and kiss your chair. Kiss one for me, too — the comfy cat-hair chair that I like — and use your tongue please, Earl. For me. I dream of that chair, and hope to be sitting in it two weeks from today.

Let’s not ever, ever again take furniture for granted, OK? Everyone talks about a roof over your head, clean water, something to eat, honest work, etc. Those things are important, sure, but my message is this: so are chairs.

Probably you are wondering about the process of soul-searching and/or method of meditation that led me to such a discovery. Well, welcome to the less sisterly aspect of my loopy family. I know you know what I’m talking about.

This time: As a favor to and from our brother and your friend Phenomenon, Jean-Gene the Frenchman and me occupy two multimillion dollar houses on North Caicos, which is an undeveloped island in the Caribbean. It’s not only not Ohio, it is also the furthest thing from Germany I could ever imagine — if not geographically, at least in tone. Think: 80 degrees, fluffy white clouds, a continuous breeze, palm trees, the sound of surf, powdery beaches, and swimmably soft blue water. For free!

Can I complain? Well, since I am drawn to impossible challenges, let me try: There’s nowhere to sit. Our spectacular beachfront houses, which Phenomenon helped build and lost more than his shirt on, are of course unsellable, and, for our purposes, unfurnitured. We eat lunch on the beach, which is nice, but breakfast is a stand-up affair, and for dinner we sit on coolers and eat off of luggage.

My brothers are, like me, undiluted (and therefore deluded) optimists. As such, we are susceptible to posers, and prayer. We are here to work. Well, anyway, Jean-Gene is always hammering, sawing, landscaping, and just generally trying to nicen up for the banks that will likely soon own these doomed homes. I’m washing windows, sweeping, mopping, and pruning. But let’s face it, most of the meaningful work I’ve been doing is on my tan. Not only because I hope to attract some emergency rebound loving upon my untriumphant return to San Fran. It also happens that the only place I can breathe is the beach.

A couple miles out there, where the reefer is, where the waves break, where the water gets deep and darker blue, is a very visible and highly metaphorish, to me, shipwreck. At night we sing Belafonte songs to it. I brought my steel drum.

By day, I can’t stop looking. I dream. I think I probably might be pretty beautiful. I know my steel drum is. The front half of the ship juts proudly out of the water, and then, after a gap, there’s the back half, cracked and tilted, a complete mess.

Like a crosswired siren, drawn fatally to shipwrecks, I am tempted to swim it. But Jean-Gene, always the peach, has an inflatable kayak. I’ve never been in a kayak, canoe, or raft that didn’t spill, but I can swim forever. I can float. I’m strong, right?

Same time, I know that I’m also in many respects myself a shipwreck. For example: this longing to be explored.

Dear Lady,

That is great. Me and Joel, we went to the NYBuffalo Wings, in which Joel got the BBQ steak sandwich ($6.49) and Earl got himself the chili cheese hot link ($4.98). Joel said, “This is hitting the spot” and later described the sandwich as very tasty. And with lettuce that really helped it along, Joel did say, crispy, and very fresh. Earl will say that when you get a chili dog, it’s one thing, but when it’s a chili hot link dog, and there’s cheese (sauce, I think), it is not out of line to expect a lot of flavor.

But Earl was left out in the bland cold a little bit. If your chili and your link don’t cut it, you can hit up a meal like this in all sorts of ways, condiments for example, like raw onions, relishes, jalapeños … there are literally a million of them, but none were offered. Also, Joel paid because Earl is broke.

NYBUFFALO WINGS

Mon-Thurs., 10 a.m.–11:30 p.m.;

Fri-Sat., 10:00 a.m.–2:30 a.m.;

Sun., 10 a.m.– 11:30 p.m.

665 Valencia, SF

(415) 863-7755

AE/MC/V

No alcohol

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

 

Souls and stars

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

I have accidentally fallen into the hands of hippies. They come from Pleiades, which is not a planet but a star cluster. How cool is that?

I used to love to be able to say, "I come from San Francisco." Suddenly it seems boring. Still, I bet we have better Mexican food than they do on Pleiades. Or in the Pleiades. (Not sure how to say this. I’ll have to ask.)

Other important points to remember are the number seven, some thing (or place or person or pizza joint) called "the Source," and that the universe is pure love. Like every other believer in reincarnation I have met, these ones claim to be "old souls."

I asked what I always ask: if time doesn’t really exist, as they also claim, how can one soul be any older than another?

They look at me like I’m a very young soul — which I would rather be, between me and you, because your face isn’t wrinkly yet and you sleep better. But technically I haven’t figured out yet about soul, meaning I don’t believe I exactly have one.

As for the universe being pure love … all I can say is I miss the smell of chicken shit and the feel of cold, dead, free-range chicken hearts in my small white hands. Not to mention the livers, and the taste of liver. And the fresh scallops we cut still pulsing from their shells and fried in butter with garlic. I miss these things, and love.

It was hard to be in Paris, too, without a heart. My brother-in-law’s brother and his girlfriend were immediate sympaticos, but they had to go to work, and so I wandered the streets and museums in almost utter amazement and disbelief — mostly that I was alone, but also the architecture and art.

I should have never left Paris, like I should have never left the chicken farm before that. But here I am in the South of France, which reminds me of Northern California, except substitute olive trees for vineyards. Jean Gene the Frenchman, who met me here, is traveling with a German disaster of his own. She’s more depressed than I am, in spite of being an old soul from the Pleiades, and her German accent is not good for me.

Back at the car after a day of hiking and sitting on cliffs high over the Mediterranean Sea, she offered me her hand and said, "Let’s make a pact. We each give it six more months, and then kill ourselves."

I just looked at her like she was from some other planet, or star cluster. "I only have one life," I said, finally. "For me, suicide is not an option."

She seemed surprised. Nevertheless, she’s a very good driver. Today we went to visit an obscure half-ruined chapel in the mountains called Notre Dame de Oeufs, or Our Lady of Eggs. No lie. People light candles and leave eggs there. The hippies said some prayers. I looked at the eggs.

Dearest Dani,

That is great. I should stop saying so much great stuff about Joel, but here is one thing. He will eat lunch with you if you are in a pinch. We went to Schmidt’s. It is right near Joel’s office. It is a little pricey for me for lunch, but I enjoyed myself nevertheless. We had lunch for $10 each.

We each got the grilled sausage. Joel got the kielbasa, which I am familiar with from my childhood and from Timmy Binko. And I got the smoked wild boar.

Modest size plates with a good-sized sausage, delicious potato salad, and sauerkraut, sweet and hot mustards, absolutely great! We both picked the wrong day to go, because neither of us could have a beer, but they’ve got a beer list longer than the menu. We were both dying to have one. Plenty of other stuff on the menu, and chalkboards of specials. This place is dark and elegant, but simple. And what I enjoyed most was that it was quiet. If there was music playing, I didn’t hear any, and I found this very refreshing.

SCHMIDT’S

Daily: 11 a.m.–3 p.m., 5:30 p.m.–11 p.m.

2400 Folsom, SF

(415) 401-0200

Beer and wine

Cash only