Food & Drink

Appetite: Rogue wines and hearty burgers

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Rogue wines and hearty burgers

B3 — or B-cubed, as in “Bottles, Burgers and Bites” — should finally see the light of day on July 20 (call to confirm as this is the hoped-for grand opening). I had the privilege a couple months ago of being part of a test dinner for B3, which set up shop in the former Senses space on Valencia, redone in warm, neutral tones. I’m delighted to give you the preview scoop (see original details in The Perfect Spot), as I have been following this concept since inception.

Basically, B3 is part wine tasting spot, part full-service restaurant with a burger and sausage emphasis as well as a retail wine source. You taste wines as if you were at a tasting room (don’t call it a wine bar!) and can purchase what you’re tasting by the bottle or case at retail prices rather than at restaurant mark-up.

Rogue wines for days. Photo by Virginia Miller

Wine guys Johnny Gato and Ron Elder invested personal passion into a hand-selected list of affordable local bottles difficult to procure from small-production winemakers — most don’t even have a wine tasting facility. Many are influenced by Old World technique with modern interpretations. Just start talking to Gato and Elder and you’ll begin to discover all kinds of Wine Country gems you had no idea were there… not your typical California wines. Initially the focus will be Napa and Sonoma producers, but they eventually plan to showcase wines (roughly 50 on hand at any given time) from regions like Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley, or Santa Barbara, with a goal to rotate wines monthly.

The wine aspect of B3 is called the Winemakers’ Speakeasy, an idea in development since 2008, referring to the underground status of the type of wines they want to share with the consumer… truly “small batch”, without wine tasting facilities, “by appointment” tours, or major distributors. In many cases, you wouldn’t be able to try the kind of wines served here unless you bought a bottle at one of the few restaurants or shops that carry them. They’re what Gato calls “rogue” or “punk rock” wines.

Through Gato, who has worked at Moussy’s and Bouchon in Napa, I’ve discovered incredible wineries such as Napa’s Forlorn Hope, bittersweetly named after the term used to describe the front line of soldiers in a high-risk military operation. I’m smitten with their floral, bright ‘08 La Gitana Torrontes, fabulously layered ‘07 Nacre Semillion, and ‘05 Gascony Cadets Petit Verdot. Then there’s Poem Cellars in Yountville, who’s wines are often sold out completely, particularly their light and spicy 2006 Tastevin Napa Valley Red (only 140 cases produced). Or Beaucanon’s ‘07 Cabernet Franc, Y. Rousseau’s ‘08 Russian River Valley Colombard and ‘08 ‘Milady’ Mount Veeder Chardonnay, Peripolli’s ‘06 Sauvignon Blanc. Just ask Gato, who has followed these wineries closely in his Napa years with a dream to bring them “on the road” to the general public, and he’ll tell you about the wine itself but also stories behind winemakers and wineries. Each glass becomes something personal, fascinating.

Chef Kevin Ahajanian, who worked with Gato at Bouchon, is keeping it solid with a burger and sausage menu. If the test dinner and initial menu is any indication, you won’t suffer on the food front. You can top your burger with everything from a fried Petaluma egg to Humboldt Fog cheese. There’s lush salads, like a B-Cubed cobb with chicken breast confit, bourbon brown sugar Hobbs bacon and Point Reyes blue cheese.

Yep, there’s some luscious salad in there, too. Photo by Virginia Miller

Or maybe you want a Boudin Noir (aka blood) sausage with choice of pineapple salsa, roasted apples, roasted red peppers or house slaw on top? Ahajanian doesn’t leave vegans and vegetarians out — there will be burgers for them. He has fun with the details, like making his own ketchup, blanching fresh-cut potatoes in rice bran oil, or serving sausages in buns layered with mashed potatoes. In a nod to all things local, dessert is Humphry Slocombe ice cream (including those addictive foie gras ice cream sandwiches), Mission Mini cupcakes or Recchiuti chocolates.

The B3 crew eventually plans to launch lunch and weekend brunch, becoming a go-to for wine lovers and a pre and post-shift source for industry types to stop in for a bite or drink. Though wine is clearly the focus, they’ll also offer six beers on tap, another 8-10 by the bottle. And with a twice nightly happy hour, it’s going to be an unusual wine and burger spot where you can meet lovingly-made, truly small batch wines… and even take them home with you.

Tue-Sun, 3pm-2am (wine happy hours: 3-6pm, 10pm-12am)
1152 Valencia, SF.
415-401-7258
Reservations: should have Open Table reservations by opening date

Osteria Stellina

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Osteria Stellina

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If you think food Valhalla is the Ferry Building, you haven’t been to Point Reyes Station lately. The Ferry Building is just a building full of food — a nice building with interesting food, I concede — whereas Point Reyes Station is basically a village consecrated to food, Foodville USA. It’s full of produce markets, butchers, bakeries, creameries, and restaurants, seemingly to the exclusion of everything else. The village, which sits on Highway 1 near the foot of Tomales Bay in the far west of Marin County, is just a few blocks’ square, but those blocks are chockablock with people wandering on foot from one little food heaven to the next.

If Marin County doesn’t make my list of favorite places, it’s mainly because of the dense population corridor along U.S. 101 in the east. To the west, though, beyond the Mercedes-clogged tracts of Fairfax and San Anselmo, the land relaxes into open, rolling country plied by cyclists and dotted with stands of oak trees and boutique agricultural concerns, many carrying the “Marin Organic” label. And the capital of this peaceable (if kingless) kingdom is Point Reyes Station.

Given the bucolic setting, I was a little surprised to step into Osteria Stellina, one of the newer and most heralded restaurants, and find myself in a rather plain gunmetal-gray dining room. It was like being in the officers’ mess on a battleship. Gray is a nice color for flannel suits, but on the walls of a restaurant — a restaurant, moreover, serving a Cal-Ital menu that bursts with flavor — it struck me as overcautious.

Still, the nautical hint isn’t entirely misplaced. Point Reyes Station was once a port, and nearby Tomales Bay produces a wealth of farmed oysters. Naturally, Osteria Stellina offers these (from Hog Island) raw, and also (from Drake’s Bay Family Farms) atop a pizza ($18). This was as improbable a home for oysters as I’ve ever come across, but it did work. It helped that the rest of the pie was liberally spread with leeks braised in cream (from neighboring Straus Creamery), lemon thyme, and parsley — a tasty, green-yellow paste like a less manic gremolata. A small downside: the paste made the crust slightly soggy.

Damp bread isn’t always a disaster. We were smitten with Stellina’s version of panzanella ($18), the salad whose key ingredient is stale bread, moistened with vinegar and proof that thrift need not be dull nor otherwise feel like deprivation. This panzanella was the kind the king might be served, if west Marin had a king; it was made with heirloom tomatoes and (non-stale but perhaps toasted) Brickmaiden sourdough bread and further fortified with shreds of local chicken, Point Reyes mozzarella, greens, olives, and a balsamic vinaigrette. Panzanella is irresistibly flavorful, easy to make and share, and wonderfully redolent of both summer and elegant frugality, and I wonder why we don’t see it offered more often on menus.

Another Italian favorite that seems underrepresented in this country is the combination of cannellini beans and tuna. At Stellina this dish ($13) was made with conserved tuna (which I supposed to have been poached in olive oil), and it took an additional charge from celery and organic baby fennel, along with lemon quarters to squeeze over the top.

Even something as unassuming as a grilled-cheese sandwich ($14) can become special if it’s made with superior bread and interesting cheeses (fontina and, from Valley Ford, Estero Gold) and plumped up with braised veal shanks and caramelized onions. A kind of osso buco sandwich.

Stellina’s desserts have an artisanal intensity. The strawberry “pop tarts” ($10), a pair of shortbread-like pastry squares wrapped around a layer of fruit preserves, were enhanced by a scoop of lemon-buttermilk ice cream. This dessert was a whimsical reimagining of a Saturday-morning breakfast favorite from the 1960s. The fig crisp ($10), on the other hand, was direct and powerful — mostly fruit (including some blackberries) with just enough pastry and ground almonds to give context through texture.

The wine list is neither too long nor too short, and it offers local and Italian wines at moderate prices. Organic house wines (sauvignon blanc and zin) are available on tap, and all the wines except the sparkling are available in carafe or bottle. I was thrilled to find a greco di tufo, an obscure Italian varietal grown mainly on the far side of Mount Vesuvius. It goes well with oysters, and pizza too.

OSTERIA STELLINA

Dinner: nightly, 5–9 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

11285 Hwy. 1, Point Reyes Station

(415) 663-9988

www.osteriastellina.com

Wine and beer

DS/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

To barflys

David Talbot
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To barflys

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I went into the liquor store and bought a bottle of Extra Strength Excedrin, that was all.

“Bag?” the guy behind the counter said. Like the rest of the store, he was aflicker with fluorescence.

I was afraid to shake my head. “No thank you,” I said, very very softly.

He gave me a bag. I decided to look at it like this: I had a bag! I could fold it up and keep it in my purse, I could recycle it, write a poem on it, make a funny hand-puppet for the kids, pack a lunch … a small brown paper bag has many uses. I remembered my mother leaning forward in a soft chair in a darkened room, her eyes rimmed in red, breathing into just such a bag.

The rest of the family had found better things to do — playing outside, getting married — but I sat cross-legged on the living room carpet, a discreet distance away, watching my broken-down mother breathe into a paper bag, and learning loneliness.

Outside the fluorescent liquor store 30 years later was a bright, lovely day, and I knew I had to get out of it. I unhitched my bike, then rehitched it, walked five or six parking meters down the street, and ducked into a dark bar with two old guys and a bartender.

I sat between the two old guys. One was reading a newspaper, the other was just blinking.

“What can I get you, young lady?” the bartender asked, though my guess is I’m older than him.

“A Coke and a glass of water.” I smiled at the old man who wasn’t reading the newspaper, and he blinked. Maybe he was trying to focus. If so, we had that in common.

I opened my new bottle of pills, popped two, drank some water, drank half my Coke, and the bartender said, and I quote, “Headache?”

I nodded. I love bars. I wish I loved to drink, too. I would spend more time in bars, and then my life would be different. I met Crawdad de la Cooter in a bar, and a lot of great people in bars. People I didn’t meet in bars include: the German asshole, an Argentinean asshole, that Canadian one, and a whole lot of home-grown crap.

“I have a date for dinner,” I said, after we had discussed print media vs. electronics, children, the neighborhood, Proposition 8, and sports. I’m talking about me and the bartender. The newspaperman was only interested in his newspaper, and the man who blinked had left, his mood no doubt ruined by young women and Cokes and such.

“Oh yeah, where are you going?” the bartender said.

So then we got to talk about neighborhood restaurants. The neighborhood was Rockridge, but where we ended up eating was in Temescal, at the tapas place across the street from Pizzaiolo, which was closed.

And, no offense to the tapas, but I wish I had cancelled that date instead of curing my headache with a Coke and Excedrin beforehand. My mom, for example, doesn’t believe in Western medicine, not even aspirin. She thinks your body can take care of itself, and now I have to wonder if sometimes my headaches are trying to tell me something: “Stay in this bar, with these friendly and harmless people, and with at least 15 TVs to look at,” my headache was saying. “Eventually it will be tomorrow morning and soccer will come on.” Or: “Go home and go to sleep.”

Also, I remember now what I love about sports — fandom, I mean, in this case. It brings people together. In sports bars and stadiums and living rooms, where there are things to eat and drink.

At the Phoenix, where I managed to watch a lot of the soccer that I watched during this World Cup, I sometimes ran into people I knew, and sometimes sat and twitched or stood and cheered with people I didn’t. It was crowded in there, always. And people stood on the sidewalk on Valencia Street, looking in.

More important, bangers and mash: two big smoke-tinged sausages that were soft like butter inside, baked beans, smasheds, and a great Guinness gravy drenching everything. New favorite bar:

THE PHOENIX

Mon.–Fri. 11 a.m.–2 a.m.; Sat.–Sun. 10 a.m.–2 a.m.

811 Valencia, SF

(415) 695-1811

D/MC/V

Full bar

 

Appetite: Bar buzz

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Bar buzz

Shuffling action around SF’s best bars has been steady in recent weeks: Neyah White leaves Nopa to become Yamazaki’s brand ambassador, Brooke Arthur exits Range to head up the bar at brand new Prospect, Reza Esmali departs Smuggler’s Cove to revamp Long Bar on Fillmore, Steven Liles journeys from Fifth Floor over to Smuggler’s Cove… Thankfully, there are others holding steady offering new seasonal menus or launching a new pop-up bar:

RICKHOUSE — It’s been a rewarding summer thus far for Rickhouse and its talented bar manager, Erick Castro, already. First, Castro won one of two mixologist of the year awards at StarChefs Rising Stars, then Rickhouse was nominated for three awards (more than any other SF bars) in the international nominees list for Tales of the Cocktail this year: Best American Cocktail Bar, World’s Best Cocktail Menu, World’s Best New Cocktail Bar. So it seems as a good a time as any to re-visit Rickhouse to try their brand new Seasonal Summer Cocktail menu — with eight original drinks plus one new punch — especially when they’re as good as Ginger’s Trois ($8).This was tops of the few I tried last week, effervescent with sparkling wine, smooth with Plymouth Gin, fresh lime and mint, balanced with bitters, lightly spicy with ginger. I hope this is a permanent menu fixture. A Cherry Blossom Cobbler ($8) is a sno-cone tower of ice, topped with a cherry, rich with Yamazaki 12-year whisky, organic cherry blossom jam and lemon juice. On the spirituous side is a Paper Plane ($9), refreshingly strong with bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon juice.
246 Kearny, SF
415-398-2827
www.rickhousebar.com

 

CLOCK BAR — Clock Bar’s fairly new GM, Phillip Barcio (formerly of Ramblas), launches his first seasonal menu, one of three throughout the year (“seasons” being grouped by produce): a May-September/berry season menu ($12-14 per cocktail). At a preview night last week, it was a joy to witness farmers and producers congregated at Clock Bar who provided much of the produce or ingredients for the menu’s cocktails.

Clock Bar’s inviting decor

The menu is ambitious, playful and farm fresh, with every drink featuring a different spirit and seasonal produce or local and house-made sodas and syrups. An Oregon 609 is complex but bright with Bols Genever, olallieberry marmalade, Cynar, Benedictine and lemon, though maybe my least favorite of the three I tried. Carl is a lighter take on absinthe (featuring Swiss Kubler absinthe) with apricot reduction and a zippy house root beer. Nutty, creamy dessert comes in the form of a Mission Flip with Pampero Aniversario Rum, house cane syurp, Mission fig reduction and a whole fresh egg. It seems a locally-embracing new season has dawned at Clock Bar.
335 Powell, in Westin St Francis Hotel, SF
(415) 397-9222
www.michaelmina.net

 

PICKLED at ABSINTHE — Yes, it’s a pop-up bar called Pickled, happening on the last Monday of every month in Absinthe’s private dining room, with ever-changing drinks created by bar manager Carlos Yturria.

Carlos Yturria behind the bar at Pickled at Absinthe

I stopped in inaugural night, June 28. A wide range of spirits are represented, from armagnac to mezcal ($10-12 a cocktail), and there’s also a revolving offering of bar bites to go with. Pisco showed itself beautiful in Carlos’ crushed ice presentation with figs, sage, lemon and a candied fig chip on top. Kudos for using my new local favorite pisco, Encanto. Close the night with a little finish of Carlos’ candied strip of rhubarb.
Last Monday of every month, 5:30-10pm
388 Hayes, SF.
(415) 551-1590
www.absinthe.com

La Briciola

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
La Briciola

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Seven years ago — I long to say, “four score and seven years ago” but that would be stretching a point — I considered an Italian restaurant, Vino e Cucina, on a SoMa stretch of Third Street notable for its grit. After dark, in the shadows of the crumbling viaduct carrying traffic to and from the Bay Bridge, you could easily imagine yourself being inside one of Tim Burton’s Batman movies, and to step into Vino e Cucina was to find refuge.

These days the neighborhood’s aspect is quite different. The viaduct has been rebuilt, tony-looking housing has popped up all over, and Vino e Cucina is now La Briciola. The refuge angle is less sharp now, but La Briciola is still welcoming in that distinctive Italian way that manages to be informal and formal at the same time. The interior is done in shades of brown and cream; if it were a cup of coffee, it would be a macchiato, an espresso marked with some foamed milk. And the service staff practices a well-mannered demonstrativeness that will probably seem familiar to anyone who’s ever eaten at a trattoria in Rome.

The food, rooted mostly in the cuisines of Tuscany and Piemonte, tells us a nuanced tale about Italian cuisine’s complex relationship with innovation. If a dish has been made the same way for generations — has, in effect, been perfected — then why tamper or fiddle around with it? Yet this is America, where newness is celebrated with an almost religious fervor. So which will it be, perfection or newness?

Executive chef Gian Luca Toschi’s best dishes are the traditional ones, though these aren’t necessarily old warhorses. For instance, I’ve never seen fagottini ($14) or Italian crepes on a menu before; these turned out to resemble a pair of giant dim sum pouches, wrapped up like gunny sacks and filled with chopped mushrooms and carrots. The earthiness of the filling was enhanced (and that’s putting it mildly) by a cream sauce of mushroom and truffle oil.

Veal, on the other hand, tends to be ubiquitous in north Italian cooking, and La Briciola offers a lovely version “alla valdostana” ($22), the name referring to an alpine region known for its fontina cheese. The veal was cutlets, pounded thin and rolled around a core of fontina cheese and speck (smoked prosciutto) into stubby cigars. If you like chicken kiev, you’d like this.

At the side of the plate lay a berm of vegetables, lightly steamed but still bright with color — broccoli, carrots, quartered new potatoes. If food were a game of chess, they would be pawns, worthy but not of enormous interest. These pawns did attract my interest, though, because they were exactly the same as those on a plate of food across the table, seared tuna with sesame sauce ($22).

The fish was fine. The sauce, like liquid amber dotted with black sesame seeds, was beautiful rather than flavorful despite the presence of shallots and vin santo. Sesame belongs mainly to the cuisines along the rim of the Indian Ocean; it’s not a natural part of the Italian kitchen, so it wasn’t shocking that the kitchen didn’t do much with it. But it was the sameness of the vegetables that captured my attention. It was as if they’d been slung onto passing plates in some kind of hash line. Of course restaurant kitchens are assembly lines, and of course economies of scale are important — but so too is the illusion that each plate has been carefully and lovingly assembled by hand, like a Louis Vuitton bag. And the illusion is so easy to create; a single variation — green beans instead of broccoli — would do it.

And speaking of green: green is a color, and a little color would have been welcome in the octopus salad ($12), which consisted of pale white octopus flesh, (white) cannellini beans, and whitish barley kernels. Some color was provided by pickled carrot shavings, but these were ungainly and awkward to eat. Still, the salad, as amended with squeezes of fresh lemon, satisfied, and it did reflect the Italian ethic of simplicity.

Chocolate volcano cake ($8) has been widely done, but it seemed strangely appropriate to find it in an Italian restaurant since Italy is among the more volcanic of lands, and Italians do love their chocolate. An issue with these cakes is that the chocolate magma can sometimes be molten enough to burn your tongue, but here it was pleasantly very warm, not hot. This was a welcome variation.

LA BRICIOLA

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

489 Third St., SF

(415) 512-0300

www.labriciola-sf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Reasonable noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

The sporting life

David Talbot
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The sporting life

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

Appetite: More intriguing June openings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: More intriguing June openings

It’s been an exhausting, thrilling whirl of new openings this month (check out last week’s Appetite). As usual, I hit most new SF openings right away, then continue to revisit as they settle in (if they are worth revisiting, which is often the case). Here’s an initial take on more recent openings. For further details, check out my upcoming July 1st issue of The Perfect Spot)

SKOOL – On a sunny, Potrero Hill afternoon during Skool’s (soft) opening week, June 21, I wandered over to this new fish haven run by husband and wife duos, Toshihoro and Hiroko Nagano (of my beloved Bushi Tei) and Andy and Olia Mirabell (of Blowfish Sushi to Die For). The Zen-peace of the patio, enclosed in gorgeous Japanese foliage, is brightened by orange Aperol umbrellas. Inside it’s sleek, Japanese minimalism in the form of warm, brown woods and gentle lighting. I’m already plotting another visit this week and anticipating their addition of dinner once they get their liquor license (lunch only at the moment). They make good sans alcohol with fine teas, Illy coffee and virgin drinks like Teacher’s Pet ($4): apple juice, honey water, topped with ginger foam and a basil leaf. I almost don’t miss a cocktail.There’s hefty “lunch box” sandwiches, like Dungeness crab ($13) tossed in a light mayo with yuzu whole grain mustard, topped with avocado, butter lettuce, tomato, and a poached free range egg; or a Washugyu Sandwich ($15) with coffee-marinated washu-beef, mozzarella and Parmesan cheese, caramelized onion, pepper cress and wasabi aioli. Dessert offers a seductively jiggly Lavender Panna Cotta ($6), surprisingly light, delicately drizzled with a honey vanilla bean sauce. I definitely see a Bushi Tei freshness and creativity at work here. And how can you not fall in love with that patio?

1725 Alameda, SF
(415) 255-8800
www.skoolsf.com

SPICE KIT — Just opened June 28, this airy, high-ceilinged take-out spot with a few tables inside and out on a patio in the shadow of SoMa high-rises, Spice Kit keeps its menu simple. Choose a ssam (stuffed Korean rice paper wrap), Vietnamese banh mi or salad with five-spice chicken, beef shortrib, roasted pork or seared/braised organic tofu. Sides are simple (crispy lotus chips, grilled pork belly buns), as are drinks (Calamansi Limeade, Vietnamese iced coffee), and prices happily under $8. Spice Kit may not exactly be Momofuku West, but it does have hints of that ethos, opened by two self-proclaimed French-trained Asian guys who cooked at restaurants you may have heard of: The French Laundry and Per Se? I wouldn’t say travel across town for it, but if you work nearby, it’ll most likely be added to your lunch rotation.

405 Howard, SF.
(415) 882-4581
www.spicekit.com

 

ROAM ARTISAN BURGERS — I’ve tasted through all four burgers at Cow Hollow’s new burger joint, which opened on June 21: grass-fed beef, bison (lean, meaty), turkey, and veggie. All come with various topping choices, whether fried egg or Southwestern veggies, but the veggie burger especially impressed. Veggie burgers never taste like (or replace) meat burgers for me, but this is a unique, veggie sandwich with patties made primarily of quinoa and beets, loaded with avocado. Straus Creamery (http://www.strausfamilycreamery.com) shakes are lush in flavors like Salted Caramel and Matcha Green Tea. Kombucha on tap is refreshingly smooth. But Sweet Potato Fries cooked in maple syrup may have been my favorite item at this casually chic burger lounge.
 

1785 Union Street
(415) 440-7626
www.roamburgers.com

Appetite: Intriguing June openings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: Intriguing June openings

It’s been an exhausting, thrilling whirl of new openings in SF this month. And it’s not quite over yet… as usual, I hit most new SF openings right away, then continue to revisit as they settle in (if they are worth revisiting, which is often the case). Here’s a quick, initial take on openings of the past week or two, with more to come next week (for more details, check out my upcoming July 1st issue of The Perfect Spot):

SAISON — Walk through the side gate of Stable Cafe, with unique 1800’s carriage house setting, and enter Saison’s newly remodeled garden, evocative of an Italian or Mediterranean villa patio: white lights strung across the courtyard, lemon tree emitting a soft citrus scent, rocking chair and vintage ashtray stand inviting you to linger with a glass of wine, and wood-burning hearth (which will also be a bread baking oven with mention of whole animal cooking to come)? Entirely transporting.

Chef and owner Joshua Skenes has taken his acclaimed weekly “pop-up” and launched a full, Tuesday through Saturday restaurant, opened June 22.  Cooking on the only Molteni stove in the Bay Area, the 30-seat interior is minimalist, but warm and glowing, with open flow between dining room and kitchen. Prices are hefty for this unusual dining experience, from a one nightly seating, $98 per person/8-course tasting menu, to a four-seat chef’s counter at $200 per person, or a two-seat chef’s table with 20 customized courses at $200 to $500 per person (!) They were very smart to add the casual, enchanting patio to the mix with a la carte options for those not partaking in multi-courses. Something for everyone.

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Saison’s garden entrance

At a pre-opening dinner, I sampled possible menu offerings, while Sommelier Mark Bright kept us satiated with wine pairings like affordable 2005 Chateau de Montpezat Coteaux du Languedoc and 2004 Neal Ellis Shiraz. Dishes were delicate, tiny, artistic, and, of course, farm fresh, from hand-picked, local ingredients. Highlights include crispy sweetbreads roasted with caramelized honey and intriguing slant of berbere spicing, as well as a perfect rendition of one of my favorites: rhubarb as a sorbet on milk granite with tart strips of rhubarb decorating the sorbet.
2124 Folsom, SF.
(415)828-7990
www.saisonsf.com

 

PROSPECT — Nancy Oakes, Kathy King and Pamela Mazzola of Boulevard opened the long-anticipated Prospect restaurant with a stellar crew: Ravi Kapur as chef, Brooke Arthur (long a favorite for her cocktail menu at Range), and Amy Currens as Wine Director (formerly of Luce). You couldn’t ask for a better line-up, with all the elegance of Boulevard but more of an experimental, hip approach.

The space is huge, almost corporate-looking, but warmed by brown tones and centered bar. Granted, I haven’t dined fully here yet but at the pre-opening party, I sampled a wide range of the food (at least ten dishes), pretty much all of it stellar, as well as three fine cocktails. The kitchen is impressive, allowing a finely tuned team to crank out Dayboat scallops ($16) with summer truffles and shaved squash, better-than-Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches, and whole wheat crepes ($19) stuffed with ricotta, nettles and roasted mushrooms. I love black cod ($14) in red curry with snap peas, shiitakes, and lightly-fried shiso shrimp fritters. Desserts were equally intriguing from a blissfully dark, creamy chocolate mousse/cake topped with berries, to the truly unique presentation and taste of cherries atop a thyme pavlova ($8) with vanilla, black pepper and frozen yogurt.

Cocktails ($10-11) were all high quality from a tart, bracing Mr. White (Pueblo Viejo blanco tequila, St. Germain elderflower, strawberry mint shrub, lime) to a balanced Prospector (Wild Turkey Rye 101, Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur, Drambuie, pineapple gum, lemon). I suspect Prospect is going to become a key SF dining and drinking destination.
300 Spear, SF.
(415) 247-7770
www.prospectsf.com

HOOKER’S SWEET TREATS — The name continually prompts the obvious jokes, but all that aside, Hooker’s Sea Salt Dark Chocolate-covered Caramels are as addictive and bitchin’ as everyone says.

Hooker’s caramel and a capuccino

Visiting opening day, I found it’s not merely a storefront for the caramels (expensive at $2 each, $7 for 3, or $20 for 10), but also for wonderful coffee and capuccinos from Sightglass, serving the first of their own roasted beans here (returning the favor since Sightglass first sold Hooker’s caramels). They bake bread pudding daily (always wins points with me), a nod to the owner’s Louisiana roots (another point!) The space is cozy, with one communal table that gazes lazily out a window framed by a leafy tree, and turn-of-the-century country kitchen decor of dark blue and wood. Along with microscopic Farm:Table, there’s two linger-worthy, coffee mecca cafes in this neck of the ‘Loin.

442 Hyde, SF.
www.hookerssweettreats.com

Appetite: Elizabeth Falkner’s fantastic new dessert menu at Bubble Lounge

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Elizabeth Falkner’s fantastic new dessert menu at Bubble Lounge

Elizabeth Falkner is easily one of the widely acknowledged pastry greats in the US and chef of two SF restaurants, including Citizen Cake, which is moving to Fillmore Street, hopefully open by the beginning of July. Bubbly lover Falkner has created something sweet at Bubble Lounge, eager to take on creating desserts meant to pair with champagne/sparkling wine. She trained Bubble Lounge’s crew on preparing the menu which launched on 6/16.

At a sneak preview tasting of the entire menu with Falkner, I was impressed by the range of tastes covered in these five unique desserts, as well as their approachability. It gets even better when paired with Bubble Lounge Wine Director, Sabawun Kakar’s fine champagne pairings (more on Kakar and Bubble Lounge in my Perfect Spot newsletter).

Falkner says, “I love the balance of acid, sweetness and richness these desserts offer and it makes pairing with champagne really fun. I want to wake up the palate with refreshing flavors, no overkill anywhere.” Her creative whimsy shows in the Spring menu:

LEMON DROP

Ingredients: lemon curd, yogurt, blueberry sauce, maple crunch, champagne granita – bright, tart dessert in a glass

Pairing: Fleury Carte Rouge – organic, biodynamic champagne, lovely and crisp on its own, but the only one that didn’t work for me with the dessert

UPSIDE-DOWN CHEESECAKE: A little sweet in the big city

Ingredients: creamy cheesecake-like dessert topped with buttery graham crust and amarena cherries – almost savory, strong, silky cheese; the most unique item on the menu and one of my favorites

Pairing: Gaston Chiquet Blanc de Blancs – lovely small producer; clean, with notes of herbal tea, tangy apple

OLIVE OIL MADELEINES (pictured above)

Ingredients: madeleine baked in brown butter and grassy olive oil, with olive oil ice cream, a Spring-fresh strawberry and fennel salad in rose vinaigrette; probably my favorite all around dessert for unique combination of savory/sweet salad with baked madeleine

Pairing: Pol Roger Brut – a gorgeous, flowery/toasty nose, dry with fruit and cream, bringing out the earthiness in the fennel; possibly my favorite pairing of the menu

ICE CREAM SANDWICH

Ingredients: pizzelle wave cookies, layered with three sorbets/ice creams: chocolate (with a brilliant whiff of tobacco), passion fruit, pistachio

Pairing: Jean Milan Blanc de Blancs – acidic, fruity, with light balance of toast

DARK CHOCOLATE PAIN PERDU

Ingredients: dark chocolate “French toast” in delicate orange-caramel sauce with genius pink peppercorn chantilly

Pairing: Bruno Paillard Brut – family run, small production; fresh fruit and spice

Heirloom Cafe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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8
Heirloom Cafe

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE The Gospel According to Matthew offers no restaurant commentary I’m aware of, but it does remind us that “you will know them by their fruits” — the King James Version of the holy book gives us the fruitier “ye shall know them by their fruits” — especially (to make a slight inference) heirloom fruits. Or restaurants. If you want to know what a neighborhood is like and how it might be changing, you look at the restaurants.

Recently The Wall Street Journal ran a story suggesting that the Mission District is rapidly being colonized by techsters who live in the city and commute to jobs on the Peninsula in shuttle buses provided by their employers, among them the colossi Google and Apple. The map showed the corporate bus stops, though not the location of Heirloom Café, which opened in April in a gorgeous box of a space at Folsom and 21st streets. But if the shuttle-bus routes are adjusted so that the techsters can be dropped off there and go straight in to dinner, I won’t be surprised.

Heirloom is the kind of place that, five or six years ago, you would have expected to find opening in Glen Park or outer Noe Valley. It is a respectful, conscientious restoration of an old Victorian space, with wood-plank floors, cream-colored walls, lots of natural light, ceiling fans, and tables (including the long communal table) simply but handsomely dressed with white linens. Its menu is refreshingly brief and implies a lineage, at least in spirit, from Chez Panisse and Zuni Café.

But it is an odd experience, I must say, to stand on the sidewalk outside the door and watch the local world go by. Heirloom sits in the very heart of the Mexican Mission, and might as well be the embassy of some faraway country no one has heard of. The neighbors pass by with scarcely a glance at the place or the menu card posted in the window. The people who do pause, and then step inside, all seem to be wearing Dolce & Gabbana eyewear, or at least look as if they’ve tried on a pair or two. Worlds collide, sometimes, but they can also coexist, in the same time and place, as if in parallel universes.

The cooking is as elegant and understated as the interior design. Small touches make a big difference, as in the wonderfully crisp matchstick frites scattered over a salad of smoked trout ($12), frisée, and haricots verts. The fries brought a lovely lightness and crunch to an already complex salad. A mushroom tart ($10) was similarly, subtly enhanced by the tang of bacon. The pastry crust had the tender snap and tastiness of real butter.

On occasion, the magic ingredient goes missing, as with the mussels ($10). These were served with a classic white wine broth, which was a little sharp and sour, especially if you’ve been spoiled (as I have) by such innovations in this area as Thai-style red curry or beer-with-chorizo broths.

And some special ingredients won’t be to every taste. The burger ($12), for instance was served on an English muffin in the presence of pickled carrots, but the dominant reality was the epoisses cheese, whose ripe pungency gave pause. At first bite I wondered if the meat had spoiled — the cheese was that strong. I continue to question the French-style cheeseburger, I must say. High-quality beef generally doesn’t need much support, let alone interference.

A nice illustration of knowing when to leave well enough alone involved the poached halibut ($22), which turned out to be nearly as rich and creamy as the potato purée it was served on. Halibut is something like the perfect fish — meaty and substantial, mild-flavored but not bland, wild but taken from well-managed fisheries. To find it handled with restrained grace is the jewel in the crown.

The menu offers a roaming cheese service from a wooden platter. For $3 per variety, you can treat yourself to such delights as fleur de marquis and tomme de savoie, and you don’t have to do it as dessert. You could have cheese as a starter or intermezzo if you wanted — and if you did it that way, you might scale down to a splendid postprandial cookie ($2), oatmeal with chocolate chips and walnuts. They left out the kitchen sink. Just as well. 

HEIRLOOM CAFÉ

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

2500 Folsom, SF

(415) 821-2500

www.heirloom-sf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Can quickly get noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Go … Germany?

David Talbot
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Go … Germany?

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Everyone assumes that because I love to play soccer, I’m interested in the World Cup. Rather than contradict them, I have become interested in the World Cup. How is that for flexing one’s codependency?

At first I merely feigned interest, but then the feigning turned into affectation, then adoption, and now I find myself legitimately, actually, gut-wrenchingly interested — albeit by accident.

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t care who the hell wins. I could probably root for Brazil, since that’s who most of my soccer buds back (I play on a team of Brazilians). I could get away with rooting for Italy, the defending World Cup champions, because that’s the flavor of the blood that I have, and, on the third hand, never in my life have I felt more patriotically-inclined, God bless America, given my recent failed attempt at expatriation. Plus I love an underdog.

But my capacity for love is temporarily out of service, thanks to a certain German person who absolutely, positively, and very very stroppishly hates soccer — not the sport so much as the hoopla. Or, in other words, go Germany!!!

May the streets of that fine, fucked country be filled with whooping fans, national songs, shouts, bells, whistles, shenaniganism, hooliganism, and general mayhem. May the peace be disturbed! May it be impossible for writers to write there, and for lovers to love, and may the spirit of lowbrow, sports-related celebration annoy the living crap out of every stodgy old lady and artsy fartsy middle-aged loser couple in all of Bavaria, in particular, the old-town district of Regensburg. Mwa-ha-ha-ha.

You thought I was going to go against the Germans, didn’t you? I thought I was too. I still do feel, or at least hope, that passion will win out over discipline on at least some playing fields, such as soccer ones. That’s why, while German national teams tend to do well, Brazil and Italy win more World Cups.

Nevertheless: Go Germany!

I tried to watch their first game at the closest Irish pub to my house, the Phoenix, but it was way too crowded so I walked to Mission Street. All my many friends who had asked me about my interest in the World Cup, inciting my interest … I called all of them but nobody could join me, and this was on a weekend.

So my only friend was my appetite.

Perfect! I wound up at La Oaxaqueña, the little corner hole-in-the-wall at Mission and Clarion, near 17th Street. I’d eaten there once before. It’s good. But more to the point, they had a fuzzy little TV going up in the corner, and in sharp contrast to the Phoenix, there was nobody in the place.

Nobody at all, eating.

So I stayed and ate and tried to put up with the TV. The picture kept locking up and making temporarily cubist photography out of live sports, and the audio sounded like bees. I have since come to realize that all World Cup soccer matches sound like bees, but at the time I didn’t know this.

Anyway, I didn’t let it ruin my meal, which was fish cooked in coconut milk with ginger. Points for them for taking forever to cook it, even though I was, as I said, the only one there. They must have sensed I was in it for the television, and kindly made it easy for me to nurse my way through as much of the second half as it was possible to watch.

The fish was great, the rice and the beans were fine, and the Australians played like chickens with their heads cut off. It started to look like Germany had one extra player out there. Which they did, one of the headless chickens having gone and gotten hisself red-carded.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember Germany ever even committing a foul, which reminds me of how nobody ever even jaywalks there. Not even in the middle of the night.

Christ, it’s going to be hard to root for a team like that.

LA OAXAQUEÑA BAKERY AND RESTAURANT

Daily: 6 a.m.–2 a.m.

2128 Mission, SF

(415) 621-5446

D/MC/V

Beer and wine

 

Appetite: NYC food cheat sheet, part one

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: NYC food cheat sheet, part one

During my latest visit to my beloved New York for the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, I spent eight days gleefully eating my way around the city, as I have done on countless trips past. I am continually asked for NY recommends as many of us in the Bay Area are either East Coast transplants, do business in both cities, or are savvy frequent travelers to the Big Apple. Check out my Perfect Spot newsletter archives for much more NY food and drink, but this week, I give you a mini-list of recommends in varying categories:

PIZZA THAT FEELS LIKE HOME Roberta’s, in the Bushwick area, has the spirit of both Brooklyn and classic Neopolitan-style pizza, the likes of which we see almost to the point of overkill here in SF. At Roberta’s, every aspect of the place dares you not to be crazy about it: a sketchy, off-the-beaten path location in Brooklyn reveals a warm dining room with wood-fired pizza oven and rustic, eclectic decor. Eat at picnic tables indoors or head out back to the tiki bar (alas, no cocktails, but wine and quality beers on draft, like NY’s Ommegang), where there are more picnic tables, thatched roofs, smoking area off to one side, expansive garden and nursery growing herbs you’ll find in your meal. The menu offers charcuterie, cheeses, sweetbreads, cuttle fish, tripe and killer, blistered pizzas, like Millennium Falco, with tomato, Parmigiano, pork sausage, garlic, onions, bread crumbs and basil. You’ll feel like you never left SF.
www.robertaspizza.com

OLD SCHOOL NY BAGEL EXPERIENCE Russ & Daughters, a fourth generation, family-owned, Lower East Side deli has been around for over a century… and is quintessential New York. With amicably crusty staff, this pristine shop is efficiently doles out Bagel & Lox, the salmon cut fresh before you. Put it on an “everything” bagel with horseradish cream cheese and you have perfection. There’s a wide array of joys here, such as pickled herring, caviar, and a lovely whitefish salad.
www.russanddaughters.com

CHEAP, DELICIOUS AREPAS Caracas Arepa Bar is a cheap, utterly satisfying NY meal: Venezuelan homemade arepas stuffed with all kinds of goodness. The tiny, charming East Village spot became so popular, there’s a to-go side and now a Brooklyn location. Everything is under $7.50 and waits are long unless you arrive early, but you can order Camburada (banana cinnamon milkshake) and Guasacaca & Chips (Venezuelan-style guacamole with plaintain and sweet potato chips) while you wait outside. I love the La de Pernil Arepa stuffed with tender pork shoulder, tomato and spicy mango sauce.
www.caracasarepabar.com

Ironside

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Ironside

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When the Giants opened their new baseball stadium on China Basin 10 years ago, an improvement in ballpark food was immediately noted. You could have ahi tuna while watching Barry Bonds, and this was — at least for some, at least for a time — an ethereal combination. The ballpark even had a fancy restaurant attached, Acme Chophouse, but the shift in food culture rippled beyond the stadium proper into the surrounding blocks, which were rapidly becoming residential.

Because baseball is the core of all-Americana, it isn’t surprising that baseball-influenced food has a definite American flavor. Yes, in many ways San Francisco is the least American of American cities, and we love our ahi tuna, but we like mac ‘n’ cheese too. And no place I’ve been to lately in the environs of the baseball park more nicely captures in food this complex sense of city and country than Ironside.

The restaurant opened last autumn on Second Street, just a half-block or so from the ballpark. And if you sit at a window table on a mild evening, watching the crowd either assembling or dispersing, you have the pleasant sense of peeking in on a Fellini film: faces, body shapes, clothes, shoes, conversations, emotional fields, all drifting past like fish in a huge aquarium.

Not that the inside is hard on the eyes. It’s a handsome confection of wood, brick, glass, and stainless steel, the blending of rustic-industrial and über-urban that at its best, as here, is simultaneously minimal and warm. The look is a cozier version of nearby Zuppa’s. The food, though, is another story — a lovable hodgepodge executed with verve and presented with exuberance.

In the American grain we have the mac ‘n’ cheese ($9), made with Gruyère and (for aromatic effect) smoked cheddar cheese — just enough style to be distinctive but not so much as to become an overwrought mess. Also: meatballs ($8), in a spicy tomato sauce and presented with elegant but semi-useless points of toasted baguette. Incidentally, are meatballs American, Italian-American, Italian, or Swedish?

Salads (for me) seldom command much interest, but Ironside’s arugula salad ($10) is a modest masterpiece: a green carpet of baby leaves dotted with chunks of crispy prosciutto, ribbons of shaved fennel, spicy pecans, and sections of blood orange. The binding agent is nominally a white balsamic vinaigrette, but really it’s the lovely balance of salty, tart, sharp, and crunchy. To get the full reaction you have to be sure to get a bit of each constituent in every bite, which can be tricky.

Flammenkuchen ($10) is the German word for the Alsatian flatbread known in French as tarte flambée. I haven’t seen one of these on a local menu since the demise of mc2 in the dot-com crash of nine years ago. Ironside’s toppings — of bacon, beer-braised scallions, and crème fraïche — are pretty much the traditional ones. We liked the light, crispy crust but found that the pie as a whole needed a bit of salt, maybe because crème fraïche isn’t as salty as cheese.

Bigger plates are at greater risk for becoming dull than are their smaller siblings, probably because a main dish in our culture is usually a big chunk of flesh that tends to overwhelm everything around it. A seared filet of bluenose sea bass ($19) the size of a bar of soap is a sizable piece of protein, but at Ironside it isn’t permitted to take over the dish. In fact, it could almost be seen as an accompaniment or condiment to the large, colorful heap of shelling beans on one side of the plate and the berm of crispy kasha on the other, with a cordon of luminous carrot beurre blanc — a wonderful, simple idea — to sew things up.

Such a final saucing flourish would have helped at least one of the desserts, the brownie and banana sundae ($7), which was really more of a big — and chewy and moist — brownie flanked by banana halves and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and some whipped cream, than a sundae, which, strictly speaking, would be ice-cream-centric. The drizzling of chocolate sauce seemed unequal to the task of holding all this together.

Our handsome young server could have been an extra from Milk. I hadn’t seen such evocative facial hair since those long-ago days when actual clones roamed the earth. He thanked us profusely for everything. As Joan Crawford might have put it, just whom is thanking whom here?

IRONSIDE

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

680A Second St., SF

(415) 896-1127

www.ironsidesf.com

Beer and wine

Mc/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

All is bacon

David Talbot
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0
All is bacon

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

Appetite: 3 recent opening worth checking out

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 recent opening worth checking out

Out of all the new additions to our food and drink scene last month — and there were quite a few — these spots launch with the promise of becoming SF classics. As always, read more about restaurants, bars, travel, food and drink in my newsletter, The Perfect Spot.

*****

BURRITT ROOM If I could imagine a dream “speakeasy,” it would be one tucked away from the masses (maybe in the second floor of a hotel), rich with atmosphere (brick walls, chandeliers, a piano, black and red accents on velvet stools, couches, pillows), a reasonably-sized menu (say, 18 rotating cocktails?) of classics and inventive new drinks, classic jazz floating softly from the speakers, and a complete lack of pretension or “sceney” obnoxiousness. Enter Burritt Room, which quietly opened upstairs in the Crescent Hotel in the shadow of the Stockton Tunnel.

The master bartender behind Burritt is Kevin Diedrich, whose experience ranges from East (PDT and Clover Club) to West (Clock Bar and Bourbon & Branch). He sets the welcoming tone, devoid of snobbery, appealing to cocktail aficionados and those who want a classy, mellow place to sip a beer alike. There’s other fine bartenders on board here, like Kelli Bratvold (Bourbon & Branch, Rickhouse). You might want to ask for Bratvold and Diedrich’s off-menu creation, Black Rose, an unusual mix of Bols Genever and Junipero Gin with Creme de Yvette, rose water, blackberry simple syrup, splash of Maraschino liqueur and a rose/pepper tincture.

Pull up to the bar or get cozy on a red couch with a layered Evening Shade: cognac, Grand Marnier, lemon, orgeat, peach bitters. I’m impressed with the seemingly light (but it sneaks up on you), refreshing Hitachino Sour: bourbon, orange marmalade, lemon, sugar, orange bitters, topped with Hitachino White beer. A Champagne Julep comes beautifully frosty in a proper julep cup, bourbon intriguingly switched out for sparkling wine and cognac. I will always prefer a traditional julep, but this is a pleasing change of pace.

A spirituous, boozy Kentucky Stinger has a hefty hunk of Kold Draft ice allowing the punch of rye and cognac to stay strong, the drink accented with Amaro, dashes of Angostura and chocolate bitters, and a creme de menthe rinse apparent on the minty finish. End an evening here with the awesome Smoked Peach (scotch, sherry, lemon, muddled peaches) and just try not to fall in love with this place.

Second Floor of Crescent Hotel
417 Stockton, SF. (at Sutter)
(415) 400-0500
www.crescentsf.com

******

MR. & MRS. MISCELLANEOUS Dogpatch’s new ice cream shop believes in doing it (all) yourself. Everything here, from candies to brittle, baked goods to the main draw, ice cream, are all made in-house. Pastry chefs, Annabelle Topacio and Ian Flores, invite you into an airy, fresh space with Maldon Sea Salt Caramels (75 cents each) I’m pretty much already addicted to. On the ice cream front, there’s minty-fresh White Grasshopper ice cream, and the soon-to-be signature Ballpark Anchor Steam beer ice cream with chocolate pretzels and peanuts ($4 for 1/2 pint; $8 a pint). Dogpatch has its ultimate sweet tooth stop.

699 22nd Street, SF. (at Third Street)
(415) 970-0750

******

COMSTOCK SALOON Comstock Saloon is truly a beautiful space in a 1907 building on the Barbary Coast trail restored to the glories of its past with antique mahogany bar, Victorian furniture, wood-burning stove (faux, though it may be), upright piano and the bar’s original spittoon. Jeff Hollinger (author of The Art of the Bar) and Jonny Raglin both came from Absinthe, bringing a mastery of cocktail classics to their own bar. Here you’ll find straight-up classics, the kind found in pages of The Savoy Cocktail Book or Charles H. Baker’s Gentleman’s Companion, the latter displayed (first edition) in glassed-in shelves lining the wall, along with other historical cocktail memorabilia… a mini-Museum of the American Cocktail, if you will.

Beside making perfected Sazeracs and South Side cocktails, they’ve honed other lesser-known classics, like a Hop Toad, with Jamaican rum, apricot brandy, lime and bitters. Though Comstock, like Burritt, is an ideal place for lingering on plush Victorian couches, or in wood booths, it is also much more than bar. It’s a restaurant with full menu, offering lunch and dinner, from Chef Carlo Espinas, formerly of Piccino Cafe. At first glance, a Beef Shank with Bone Marrow Pot Pie may look like a store-bought pot pie, but just sink your fork into flaky crust with a meaty, heartwarming interior and you’ll taste the love. I also adore tender Potted Pork with a side of country ham, mustard, veggies and warm bread to spread it on.

Johnny Raglin behind the bar at Comstock. Photo by Virginia Miller

A welcome addition to North Beach, this comfortable saloon is also a loving tribute to turn-of-the-century SF history and cocktails popular back in our wild Barbary Coast days.

155 Columbus, SF. (between Jackson & Kearny)
(415) 617-0071
www.comstocksaloon.com

Appetite: Persian Pub Grub paired beer and wine with Iranian bar food

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: Persian Pub Grub paired beer and wine with Iranian bar food

It’s joy when our city’s food and drink greats team up to form something unique. Such was Zaré at Flytrap‘s three nights of Persian Pub Grub, as envisioned by Zare’s chef/owner, Hoss Zaré, and Monk’s Kettle‘s Sayre Piotrkowski and Ryan Corbett.

The exuberant, hospitable Hoss created a menu lovingly melding traditional elements of his home country of Iran with creative expressions. Though Hoss admits that “Pub Grub doesn’t really exist in Iran” (nor would the alcohol pairings), he dreams up a Persian dinner as it might look in a modern, hypothetical Iranian Gastropub. Each course was happily far from typical, and most were downright heartwarming. My two favorites ended up being Caspian Seafood Stew, a smoky, saffron-heavy broth (enhanced by black garlic aioli and sour, pickled grapes) loaded with plump calamari, octopus, mussels and smoked sturgeon with a dollop of caviar. The other? A brilliant take on traditional Ghormeh Sabzi, an Iranian herb stew and national dish, one Hoss says would win your sweetheart’s affection if you perfect in Iran. This Persian Chili was redolent of herbs, paprika, harissa, and a spicy, crumbled lamb sausage mixed with organic kidney beans. I could not get enough.

Certified Cicerone, Piotrkowski, and his equally passionate-about-beer co-worker, Corbett, paired a stellar list of beers with Hoss’ food, facing off directly with wine pairings from Zare’s Wine Director, Mario Nocifera. At two convivial communal tables, we debated which paired best with any given course. I can honestly say there were no afterthoughts on either side. The final score? In my book, it’s two for two.

Beer, wine, and chicken wings with pomegranate sauce. Photo by Virginia Miller

My two favorite wines were the impressively elegant, layered acidity of Niepoort Codega‘s 2006 “Tiara” white from Branco, Portugal, and an earthy, dark berry/pepper, mineral, but balanced, 2008 Borsao Garnacha, “Tres Picos”, from Campo de Borja, Spain (quite a value at $14.99 a bottle at K&L).

On the beer front, though I was delighted to see Hitachino’s “XH” and Midas Touch for dessert, I was blown away by grapefruit brightness in Stone Brewing Co.’s dark, bitter Sublimely Self-Righteous, and the Belgian-style, caramel-y but bone dry Goose Island “Pere Jacques.”

Hoss has hosted other special Persian dinners and I hope will throw plenty more. Check their website’s event page for future dinners. Or go for dinner or lunch to sample Hoss’ heartwarming cooking paired with Reza Esmali‘s Middle Eastern-influenced cocktail menu (there’s a classic cocktail list, too) or Nocifera’s wine list. Monk’s Kettle is thankfully always ready to pour one of these fine or other equally exciting, and often, rare, beers.

Here was the Persian Pub Grub menu ($75 per person, including all pairings):

Sumac Couscous Salad with Dungeness Crab
Victory, “Prima” Pilsner, US| Yarden, Brut Traditional, Galilee Israel 
Caspian Seafood Stew with Mussels, Cod, Sturgeon and Black Garlic aioli
Hitachino “XH” Ibaraki Japan | Niepoort Codega “Tiara”, Blanco, Portugal
Chicken Wings “Fessenjoon” with Pomegranate Walnut Sauce
Stone, “Sublimely self-righteous” Ale, US | Coroa Godello, Valdeorras, Spain     
Persian Chili “Ghormeh Sabzi” with Spicy Lamb Sausage
Goose Island, “Pere Jacques” Belgian Style Ale, US | Borsao Garnacha “Tres Picos”, Campo de Borja, Spain
“Faloodeh” Lime Sorbet with Rice Noodles and Pistachios
Dog Fish Head, “Midas Touch” Ancient Ale, Milton US

www.zareflytrap.com

Lock and load

David Talbot
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0
Lock and load

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

Ruchi

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Ruchi

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE The boomlet in south Indian cuisine that began a few years ago with the opening of Dosa has now given us Ruchi — and meanwhile Dosa itself is on the march, having toted its dosas from the Mission uphill to Pacific Heights. Ruchi, like Dosa, offers dosas — pan-fried disks made from rice and lentils — but the two restaurants’ dosa styles are quite dissimilar, about which more presently.

Ruchi opened about six months ago on a stretch of Third Street in SoMa that, like so many stretches of so many streets in SoMa, is flooded with speeding traffic. The automotive torrent is certainly a hazard and almost certainly a disadvantage; (the original) Dosa, by contrast, occupies the old Val 21 space at Valencia and 21st Streets, with tons of pedestrians and a big public parking garage around the corner.

But Ruchi’s location does have its advantages. What was once an industrial neighborhood, largely empty at night, is increasingly residential, with new housing developments popping up right and left. There is even — almost — a quaint village feel to Ruchi’s block of Third. Across the way is a nice Italian restaurant, La Briciola, and if you were to wave at its patrons, it might be a little like waving at your fellow villagers across a placid creek, once a mere trickle through your settlement, that abruptly somehow became a whitewater. Still, they could see you and they might wave back.

Inside, Ruchi is a tasteful, muted modern, in earth tones. Just past the door is a length of slatted fence that looks like something to keep Spot the dog penned up in the kitchen instead of letting him run around peeing on every rug in the house. On the one hand the design is a little generic, but on the other it stands patiently in the background while the food steps up to be noticed. Our server one evening described south Indian cooking to us as “aromatic,” which for me helped explain the wonderful, pungent presence of fresh ginger in so many of the dishes.

Ginger, when combined with garlic and scallions, is strongly redolent of the wok cuisines, and whether or not Ruchi’s greens pullakoora ($8), a spicy spinach dish, was cooked in a wok, it had the sharp freshness of stir-fried vegetables you might find in a Chinese or Vietnamese restaurant.

The utappam dosa ($8), a house favorite according to the menu, surely hadn’t been cooked in a wok, but it did carry a strong charge of ginger, along with scallion and green chili. If you are used to Dosa’s dosas — thin, crisp, and folded in half — then you might find Ruchi’s version, which resembles a slightly spongy pizza scattered with toppings, unexpected. We were told to cut it up like a pizza, and we did, satisfyingly.

South Indian cooking might indeed be aromatic rather than spicy, but Ruchi’s menu doesn’t lack for spicy items. The mirchi bajji ($5), in particular — serrano peppers coated in chickpea batter and fried to look like little corn dogs — is as blazing a dish as I’ve ever had. Although I like spicy food, I could only eat two before the heat, building slowly but inexorably, forced me to pull off the road with steam billowing from under the hood.

Chili overheating, like influenza, is an affliction that just has to play itself out, and there isn’t much you can do except be patient. Sips of water and beer offered moments of respite, but I had higher hopes for the yogurt sauce surrounding the lentil patties in a dish called dahi vada ($6), until we recognized that there was chili heat lurking in the apparently cool, creamy, wintry yogurt. When the water gushing from your fire hose turns out to be gasoline, you experience a setback.

Kebabs of chicken tikka ($9) — boneless cubes of a rather orange hue, like tandoori chicken — were expertly seasoned and wonderfully plump and tender. But a kachoomar salad ($5), though a colorful jumble of diced onions, cucumber, tomatoes, and cilantro, was a little too salty despite the advertised (and presumably acidic) lemon vinaigrette. The saltiness came from what seemed to me like fish sauce — another hint of southeast Asia.

And, for the second week in a row, a winning dessert makes an improbable appearance. I’ve had plenty of kulfi (a kind of ice cream) before and never been particularly wowed. But Ruchi’s pistachio version ($5), though possibly the least colorful item on the menu (it looked like a bit of ice floe), gave intense pleasure both as flavor and texture, the latter a fudgy denseness with the faintest hint of granularity. Housemade, too; accept no substitute.

RUCHI

Lunch: Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5–9 p.m.

474 Third St., SF

(415) 392-8353

www.ruchisf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Appetite: Celebrating Sailor Jerry, tattooist and rum

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: Celebrating Sailor Jerry, tattooist and rum

What do tatooing and rum have to with each other? Well, there’s a rum named after one of the most legendary tattoo artists of all time, Sailor Jerry. It’s his own personal recipe, distilled in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and is truly a beaut. Bracingly strong at 92 proof, it’s got a spiced, caramel burn that goes down smooth on its own as it does in a cocktail (Dark & Stormy, anyone?) It lingers pleasantly while also delivering a punch. Kind of like the colorful Jerry himself?

This Saturday, June 12, marks the anniversary of Sailor Jerry’s death, a Northern California native (Ukiah, to be exact), born in 1911, making his name as a tattoo artist in Honolulu post-WWII, influenced by and fascinated with all things Asian. (He also harbored some extreme right-wing, libertarian leanings.) American flags mix with dragons and naked women in what a colleague describes as his “balls-forward, old school” tattoo style.

Celebrations for Sailor Jerry’s life are going on this week in four cities: Portland, Austin, LA and our own. RSVP for free screenings of the award-winning documentary, Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry, at the Roxie on June 9th or 10th, written and directed by Erich Weiss. Watching the 73 minute film is certainly entertaining, intriguing, and often hilarious. With rare interviews of many legendary tattoo artists, protégés and contemporaries, you witness not only the history of tattooing, but a different kind of elderly crowd: foul-mouthed, rough-and-tumble, covered in tats, full of lively stories of early days in tattooing’s U.S. popularity. Particularly engaging is the uber-crusty Eddie Funk, who’s scratchy voice and incessant swearing represent the kind of crowd that knew the paradoxical Sailor Jerry (aka Norman K. Collins) best.

Collins was ahead of his time, wandering the country pre-Beatnik, pre-Keroauc, finding his bliss in Hawaii by creating innovative tattoo art, closely mirroring Japanese tattoo masters (called Horis), earning him the moniker ‘Hori Smoku’. No surprise such a unique character created his own rum, the bottle embellished with his artwork (a hula girl strumming on a ukulele)… and it’s a fine rum at that.

Free but must RSVP at:
http://horismokumovie.com/sanfran_screening
Wed, 6/9; 6:45pm and 10pm
Thu, 6/10; 6:45pm and 10pm
ROXIE THEATER, 3117 16th Street
www.sailorjerry.com

Appetite: 3 delectable events for June

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: 3 delectable events for June

6/5-6/6 – SUNSET CELEBRATION Cruise down to Menlo Park this weekend for Sunset Magazine’s annual celebration weekend, a key South Bay event for foodies and wine lovers. Plenty of the Bay Area’s best will make an appearance, with a street food spirit pervading this year’s line-up. Our own Ryan Farr grills up special dogs for the event: Crispy Crunch FrankaRoni (deep fried mac n’ cheese squares with franks) and cheddar brats (pork/bacon/cheddar sausage). Food trucks are parked on-site, like Liba’s Falafel Truck, Sam’s Chowder House, and two of my tops: Seoul on Wheels and Gelateria CiCi. Chefs and Food Network stars host cooking demos, such as Roy Choi of the insanely popular Kogi Korean BBQ in LA. There’s wine seminars (for an additional $10; sign up ahead of time), live bands, Sunset’s special glam camping exhibit of tricked-out, funky campers, and an Artisan Food Pavilion housing cheeses, breadmakers, cured meats, sweets (like 479 Popcorn and NeoCocoa truffles) for sampling or purchase.
$16
Saturday (6/5) and Sunday (6/6), 10am-5pm
80 Willow Road, Menlo Park
More info here

6/12 – SLOW FOOD’S GOLDEN GLASS WINE EVENT Seven years running, The Golden Glass Wine Event (www.thegoldenglass.com) is Slow Food’s (www.slowfood.com) annual fundraiser with over 100 sustainable international wine producers. Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties all represent, but so do South Africa, France, South America, Italy, Spain, Greece, Australia, and so on. Golden Glasses are awarded to the best “slow” wines in the world, those that follow Slow Food principles of “good, clean and fair” production practices. Sample-size plates of local charcuterie, cheeses and other bites will flow, as will food from restaurants like Delfina, Il Cane Rosso, One Market, Thirsty Bear, A16, Perbacco, and the much-anticipated Plum Restaurant. And, yes, proceeds benefit the “Slow Food in School” programs, so you’re imbibing for a good cause.
$60 pre-purchase; $70 at door ($55 for Slow Food members) – includes unlimited wine and five food tickets (additional at $20 for 5 tickets)
Saturday, 6/12, 1-5pm
Fort Mason Center, the Festival Pavilion
www.thegoldenglass.com

6/16 – BAY AREA RISING STARS AWARDS CEREMONY StarChefs.com (www.starchefs.com/tickets) hosts their Rising Stars Revue and Awards Ceremony for this year’s Bay Area Rising Star winners at Ghirardelli Square. Hosted by Gary Danko’s (http://www.garydanko.com) chef de cuisine, Martin Brock, the night is a walk-around tasting gala featuring signature dishes and cocktails from Rising Star chefs, pastry chefs, sommeliers, restaurateurs and mixologists. Celebrate (and sample the best from) the winners, many of our local favorites, who were chosen from more than 90 candidates:

Chefs
Matthew Accarrino, SPQR
John Paul Carmona, Manresa
Maximilian DiMare, Wood Tavern
Louis Maldonado, Aziza
Thomas McNaughton, Flour + Water
Scott Nishiyama, Chez TJ

Pastry Chefs
Melissa Chou, Aziza
Catherine Schimenti, MICHAEL MINA

Mixologists
Erick Castro, Rickhouse
Brian MacGregor, Jardinière

Sommelier
Sarah Valor, Commis

Concept
Joshua Skenes, Saison

Restaurateur
Shelley Lindgren, A16 and SPQR

Hotel Chef
Josh Thomsen, The Claremont Hotel Club & Spa

$95; $150 VIP tickets, including pre-event reception with champagne and Petrossian Caviar
Wednesday, June 16; 7:30-10pm
Ghirardelli Square, 900 N. Point Street
www.starchefs.com/tickets

Appetite: Giant legs and Willy Wonka — adventures at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: Giant legs and Willy Wonka — adventures at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic

I was one of the lucky ones, spending eight days in NY, my old stomping grounds, for the first annual Manhattan Cocktail Classic, which highlights and celebrates the art of the cocktail and its greatest talents. Or so I thought… I won’t gripe too much, though I will say that despite the stunning transformation of the already gorgeous New York Public Library for the opening gala, a scene rife with cocktail luminaries like Dale DeGroff, Audrey Saunders and Dave Wondrich, along with some of the country’s best bartenders, the crowds were not quite the cocktailians I expected, while some events were far from what was advertised. For example: at the May 17 “contest” at Keen‘s, the competition and notable judges had completely wrapped up and left by the listed START time of the event, leaving only a few cocktails to sample and the incomparably cool, old school Keen’s space to stand around in. I could have spent the same money with more exciting results at any of NY’s great bars.

Let’s recap a few of the best and worst moments of the racous week that was the 1st annual Manhattan Cocktail Classic:

WORST

1. Starvation : At the opening gala, despite spotting Mario Batali, the guy who had supposedly cooked up something special for the night, I never once saw his food. Every other whiff of food was devoured by the time I got near it, mainly in the one air-conditioned room in all of the NYPL, where beloved Fatty ‘Cue served up giant legs of meat, an odd “cocktail party” choice, but hilarious to watch others gnaw on a leg with drink delicately in hand. Once I finally got to the last table with any food, the line was so long it wasn’t worth the wait, despite food-less hours endured with sips of multiple drinks (many of the fruity, vodka, soda, flavorless kind)… a bite never came until I hit a diner at 2am.

A wasteland of unfinished drink & chewed-up meat at Opening Gala. Photo by Virginia Miller.

2. Non-Cocktailian Crowds at the opening gala: I expected a slew of the country’s and NY’s most hardcore drink fans, the kind that mix Jerry Thomas recipes at home, await Mud Puddle book releases, and value craft and taste above a “scene”. Um, try drunken carousers breaking glasses and leaving trash lying around in the historical NYPL? What about having your photo taken with vodka models? Seriously: you, a bottle of vodka, and sexy models in a brightly lit, LA-style photo shoot. Or maybe I’m still just creeped out by the Oompa Loompas or the giant Queen Victoria towering over us in the Hendricks’ Gin area (at least there was Charlotte Voisey mixing cocktails below the Queen).

3. Events not as advertised: I’ve already mentioned the misleading representation of the cocktail competition at Keen’s and the drunken, packed-to-the-gills mayhem of the opening gala where check-in, getting a drink or even entering a room, meant yet another 15 minute wait. And where were the fine cocktails? Several came from our San Francisco crew who manned a number of tables (negronis!), or the playful Willy Wonka-themed candy counter, but there were few even tolerable out of four floors of cocktails.

BEST

1. Astor Center bar and bartenders from around the country: The Astor Center was ground zero for many of MCC’s daily events, panels and classes. The best part was having bartenders from all over New York and the country cover varying shifts. I met mixologists from St. Louis, LA, San Fran, and NY bars like Employees Only, Clover Club and Rye House. Not only did these guys whip up some of the better drinks of the entire event, but they were friendly, chatty, engaging, making the Astor Center feel like your favorite watering hole.

The respite of the Virgin Room. Photo by Virginia Miller.

2. The Virgin Room at the opening gala: What is normally NYPL’s staid, lovely Periodicals Room became the Virgin Room, a detox refuge in the midst of the body-to-body storm of revelers, ego-tripping bodyguards and completely frazzled staff. Coolers were stocked with energy drinks while the latest copies of Interview magazine lined the tables. Never mind that one couldn’t find a bit of water anywhere. At least I could read about Madonna staying sexy in her ’50’s via lamplight.

3. Gin Masters: Let’s call this third one a tie between the gracious English class and knowledge of master distillers, Desmond Payne (of Beefeater Gin) and Sean Harrison (of Plymouth Gin), at the English Gin Seminar on May 16.

4. The Stork Club: At the opening gala, one could catch a welcome respite from the oppressive heat of the rest of the building in the rarely seen NYPL basement, dubbed the Stork Club for the night. Thanks, Diageo, for turning the room into a relaxed but funky party with brassy Budos Band and proper cocktails, including a Bulleit Bourbon Mint Julep and a Mary Pickford made with Zacapa 23 year rum.

Golden Era

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Golden Era

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When you step into Golden Era, you pass through a narrow door and descend a few steps, as if into a subterranean world of disrepute. But you land on a landing, instead of at a bar crowded with sooty Mafia dons, as you might have expected, and from the landing you descend another brief staircase to the dining room, which opens out expansively around you. The experience is a little like the one long offered at Postrio, Wolfgang Puck’s (now closed) restaurant near Union Square.

One difference is that while Postrio was very much about au courant glamour, Golden Era shimmers with a sense of lost glamour. The large dining room, with its high ceilings and wooden arches, is a little dowdy, but its bones are impressive. It’s like a beaten-up pair of good shoes. Local lore teaches that the building was once a residence hotel run by Swedes and the spacious dining room a space for the serving of a Swedish menu. And I can’t imagine a Swedish menu without meatballs.

You won’t find meatballs on the menu at Golden Era — in fact, you won’t find any meat at all, or dairy, since the restaurant is vegan. (Another huge difference from Postrio.) And you won’t find anything Swedish. But you will find wonderful Southeast Asian cuisine, including many dishes that traditionally include meat, with vegan artifice substituting for flesh. As a rule I don’t quite like this kind of vegetarian cooking — a "steak" concocted from a portobello mushroom or some such, often fails to convince. Menu cards that make liberal use of quote marks, as Golden Era’s does, also raise a flag or two.

Despite the quote marks, the food is splendid. It compares favorably to that of Millennium, the fancier and pricier (and worthy) spot in the Hotel California. While a vegetarian or vegan kitchen might seem limited at first blush, with so many fundamental ingredients off-limits, the best such kitchens respond with verve and innovation. Because they can’t rely on the innate impressiveness of a beautifully cooked steak or a fish roasted whole, they must redouble their attention to other details, like composition, color, and texture. This the Golden Era kitchen consistently does.

It would be hard to put together a dish that better demonstrates these attentions than crispy chow mein ($7.95), a bird’s nest of crunchy noodles filled like a savory pie with a wealth of vegetables, including broccoli, carrot, bok choy, and mushrooms, all steamed to a slight tenderness while retaining their resiliency. The miracle flavoring was (we thought) mushroom soy sauce, slightly thickened and glossy, almost as if butter had been added — but butter is a vegan no-no, so how was the transformation accomplished? If by corn starch, then the hands in the kitchen are skilled indeed.

The Vietnamese crepe ($7.50), a huge yellow mezzaluna, arrived with a bouquet of fresh herbs, cilantro, mint, and basil. We were given instructions on how to combine the two, but either we didn’t understand or just forgot, and we ended up just slicing the mezzaluna into strips (like a quesadilla) and scattering bits of the herb bouquet over the top. The crepe’s filling seemed to consist largely of underseasoned rice noodles, so the flavor boost from the herbs was important.

No flavor boost was needed for the potstickers ($5.50), which were filled with a ground substance very like pork (tofu?) along with plenty of ginger. Just to make sure, and for that last kiss of verisimilitude, the potstickers were served with a shallow dish of nuoc nam laced with carrot threads. We also found no flavor shortage in the seaweed salad ($7), a tangle of green filaments, like spinach vermicelli after a bad night of tossing and turning, dressed with crushed sesame seeds and plenty of sesame oil.

For sheer wallop — and proof that lively spicing goes a long way toward compensating for lack of flesh or dairy — there’s the spicy noodle soup ($7). The fat noodles and chunks of tofu offer attractive ballast, but the charge lies in the complex, incendiary vegetable broth. To alert the unwary, red sheets of chili oil shimmer on the surface, like rays of a summer sunset glinting from a pond.

"Vegan dessert" sounds like what the late Herb Caen used to call a "self-canceling phrase." But Golden Era’s desserts could pass at just about any restaurant in town. Both the blueberry cheesecake ($4.75), creamy and lemony with a liberal dribbling of blueberry coulis, and the mocha chocolate cake ($3.50), as velvety and rich as a cashmere greatcoat, were accomplishments any Swedish pastry chef would have been proud of.

GOLDEN ERA

Wed.–Mon., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

572 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 673-3136

www.goldeneravegetarian.com

No alcohol

MC/V

Muted noise

Difficult wheelchair access

Older ‘n’ wider

David Talbot
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0
Older ‘n’ wider

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

Chile Lindo

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Chile Lindo

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE “Errata” is one of those delightful words with an undelightful meaning. It means, basically, “oops” — assuming we are in polite company. In less polite company, you would probably hear a number of variations on a plain Anglo-Saxon word beginning with f.

For a writer, there is scarcely a more mortifying experience than to realize — too late! as Othello says to Desdemona before snuffing her — that some hideous mistake or error has leaked into print. When I was in college, we used to type up our essays on erasable-bond paper, so if you messed up you just rubbed out the offending words and phrases and typed in the right ones. But newsprint does not offer this luxury, although the cheaper sorts of ink do sometimes smear your fingers.

In years past, I wrote a side column on this page in which, from time to time, I noted various blunders of my own. In part, these acknowledgements helped salve my own conscience (yes, I was wrong or wrote something stupid, but I admit it); but in larger part, they amounted to a small public service. Although an error printed in a newspaper is not erasable, at least it can be mooted by more accurate information.

Foul-ups are, along with death and taxes, an inevitable part of life. One’s fondest hope in this regard is not to reach the epic heights of Gerald Ford, who in a 1976 presidential debate claimed that Poland was not subject to Soviet domination, to audible groans from the audience. This writer is content to bungle much more modestly than that, as in (as once happened) getting the title of a book under review wrong. Or, more recently, in asserting that La Trappe (discussed in these pages on April 21), “could be” the only Belgian restaurant in town. Leaving aside the spongy equivocation, the claim overlooked the years-long (and spreading) presence of Frjtz, which the errant writer (i.e. me) had once reviewed. I would only add that, because in error as in myth there is often an element of truth, La Trappe is a full-service (i.e. full table service) restaurant, whereas Frjtz wasn’t, at least when I last went. (You ordered at a counter and carried a little number to your table so the food-bearers could find you later.)

Of more import was the granting (on May 5) of “wheelchair accessible” status to the Little Chihuahua on Divisadero Street when in fact (according to an irate reader) there is a blockading step at the entryway. Of less import was the misuse of the Japanese term “izakaya” (March 24), not a descriptor for a particular style of cooking but a noun for a place where that particular style of cooking is offered. I can’t imagine anyone was misled or otherwise inconvenienced by this (what in the law would be called “harmless error”), or by the misspelling (March 10) of “matcha,” the green-tea powder that has an unfortunate way of ending up as a flavoring for ice cream.

These are the recent boo-boos I know of. If there others (and how could there not be?), I would be glad to hear about them. Well, maybe not glad. Maybe grateful. Also mortified.

“Empanada,” the second of today’s E-words, means, basically, “embreaded” in Spanish. We in California tend to associate these calzone-like stuffed envelopes with various Latin American cuisines, but they were brought to the New World by the Spanish, and to Spain by the Moors, whose Muslim roots reached deep into the Middle East. So the heritage of empanadas is entangled with that of pita and lavash.

At Chile Lindo, a tiny empanada emporium on 16th Street near Theater Rhinoceros, the menu consists of three kinds of empanada, each $5. The traditional ground-beef stuffing is known, in Chile, at least (the owner is Chilean) as pino (made here with Niman Ranch beef), and there is also a vegan version made with soy. Each strikes a distinctive balance between savory and sweet. One is aware of the presence of both black olives and raisins — a signature combination of the eastern Mediterranean — and also of cumin and paprika. If you were served either of these in Turkey or Israel, you wouldn’t think twice about it. Only the cheese empanada, stuffed with melted jack and cheddar and lengths of japaleño pepper, strikes a note we might think of as Latin American.

Chile Lindo does offer limited seating on a line of barstools on the sidewalk under the window, but plenty of the traffic appears to be takeout. There is also a giant, gleaming espresso machine for morning people. Chocolate empanadas would be a nice touch in this regard — patience, my pretties! *

CHILE LINDO

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

2944 16th St., SF

(415) 621-6108

www.chilelindoempanadas.com

No alcohol

Cash only

Street noise

Problematic wheelchair access

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