Food & Drink

The chicken ‘n diet

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The chicken ‘n diet

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

Scary, innit?

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

So …

Waffles. Chicken. Here’s what I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUNTIE APRIL’S CHICKEN ‘N’ WAFFLES

Daily: 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

4618 Third St., S.F.

(415) 643-4983

Cash only

No alcohol

FARMERBROWN’S LITTLE SKILLET

Mon.-Sat. 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

360 Ritch, S.F.

(415) 777-2777

Cash only

No alcohol

Firelit: Coffee with benefits

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Firelit: Coffee with benefits

Since its release a couple of months ago, I’ve been savoring Firelit Spirits‘ one-of-a-kind coffee liqueur, featuring none other than Blue Bottle Coffee. Starting off with 1,800 bottles (which are just about gone, by the way), founding partners, Jeff Kessinger and St. George Spirits distiller Dave Smith have created a coffee liqueur that retains all the nuance and glory of fine coffee. It is robust with unaged brandy, Madagascar vanilla beans and just enough cane sugar to provide balance, rather than cloying sweetness. With a strong caffeinated kick and at a bracing 60 proof, this is coffee with benefits.

I had the privilege of chatting with Jeff Kessinger and Dave Smith, both gracious guys with a deep knowledge and passion for spirits, to discuss the story behind Firelit’s creation. The recipe and concept are Kessinger’s, and his story has been covered in various publications.

In speaking with Smith about what prompted the great St. George to embrace this project, my suspicion that the distillery receives numerous pitches for products or use of the facilities was correct. What made them take a longer look at Kessinger’s recipe? As he was an old friend of St. George’s, they decided to experiment with a trial batch, believing so much in what they initially produced that Smith took on distilling responsibilities. Smith and Kessinger shared a vision for making a unique, natural tasting (read: not sticky-sweet) coffee liqueur. Smith explored recipes himself over the years, even a chicory coffee liqueur after a New Orleans’ trip. Along with James Freeman of Blue Bottle, Smith and Kessinger tested a slew of iterations of the liqueur with every shade of coffee bean, achieving a consensus on the final product for initial bottling. Dave acknowledges that many spirits come out of what is more or less a “dare”, the risk becoming greater the more unexplored the liqueur style. “It’s not difficult to make a good product”, Smith says, “but it’s very difficult to make a great product.”

Understandably, Smith calls Firelit a product he’s “incredibly proud of”, expressing the unique thumbprint of each person involved, which is, in fact, a common goal at St. George. One of the most exciting aspects of Firelit is that it will be produced with different coffee beans and brands. Just as coffee beans reflect the terroir and climate of a region in any given year, Firelit will evolve and reincarnate, allowing varying coffees to take center stage, even as the base profile remains the same. This is a welcome new liqueur for any spirits (and coffee) lover… and also another locally made treasure.

Available at:
K&L Wines
The Jug Shop
The Wine Club
Swirl on Castro

Visit Virginia Miller’s culinary itinerary site, www.theperfectspotsf.com

Hot slice

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Hot slice

Check out more photos of Boot and Shoe Service here.

DINE Interviewing a pizza guy: predictable banter about perfect crusts and luscious tomatoes, right? But restaurant owner Charlie Hallowell completely caught me off guard with a mouthful about life and the oven that sustains it. His new Boot and Shoe Service joint is a short walk from Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater and a neighborhood away from his other popular pizza hub, Pizzaiolo. Hallowell loves pizza, like, really loves it, and now he’s going to use it to love you.

“I want to love the shit out of [customers],” he says, chomping on his lunch amid tables covered with chairs, as the dinner-only resto fires up its oven.

Two dozen tables and bar seats and a first-come, first-served, no reservation policy, means the place has been continually packed since it opened in December. The 800-degree oven toasts the fluffy, handmade crusts a crisp golden brown with a little doughy squish in the middle. Toppings like wild arugula, Monterey Bay squid, calabrian peppers, rosemary, mint, and pancetta (all 100 percent organic) make each of the fluctuating menu choices a full-on pleasure.

The peculiar name pays homage to the building’s former shoe repair tenants and ink drawings on the walls show leggy slices wearing kicky boots. Hallowell’s intentions for the new place were pretty simple: employ some talented young cooks, hang friends’ art, sell Bourbon, play Otis Redding, and hire hot girls with tattoos to run the food. And make damn good pies.

“It’s a fucking pizza — a circle of dough with shit on top of it. But there’s something beautiful about doing something over and over again,” he says of the process of slinging pies day in and day out. Spin a little dough lasso-style, smear on the sauce, throw on some cheese … um, not quite. Hallowell says it’s about building a special relationship with the oven and the fire.

“If you’ve had a fight with your girlfriend, or you haven’t been laid in awhile, or your mom’s dying from cancer and you try to throw in a log — the log will roll off the fire, maybe it won’t catch, or it lands on a pizza,” he says. “When you’re not there and you’re not present, the pizza burns.”

Hallowell has dedicated his life to pizza — and sometimes that freaks him out. Making pizzas may feel mundane at times, but he believes that the three most important things in life — fucking, eating, and sleeping — can all have a tendency to feel that way. So he kneads in a little extra love and hopes it comes through.

“I feed people. I fuel people. I cook with love so people can keep living. They can go home after dinner and make love to their wife and look after their children. They can wake up a happy human being.”

His main concern is helping his customers relax. He tells me he’s tired of how insecure this world makes people feel and he points the blame at the male anatomy.

“It’s all about your dick. It’s all about the size of your dick,” he starts shouting at me. “Your dick isn’t big enough.” He repeats the phrase about six times, louder and louder, and when I look around to see if anyone else is put off by the phrase and the sheer volume of his voice, not one of the chefs looks up from their work.

All this insecurity, Hallowell says, is what make people question if they’re truly lovable.

“Are you lovable?” he shouts to one of his chefs.

“Hell yeah, I’m lovable!” the chef shouts back.

Hallowell turns back to me. “Your mom doesn’t love you. Your dad doesn’t love you. Your friends … ” He lists off more people in my life, locking his eyes on mine. I put my notebook over my head and jokingly mutter to the chefs, “I’m getting a little nervous and maybe this interview isn’t going as planned.”

“And this is all why I promise to love the shit out of people,” Hallowell calms down. “They deserve love and respect. The business part is for the birds.”

BOOT AND SHOE SERVICE

3308 Grand Ave., Oakl.

(510) 763 2668

www.bootandshoeservice.com

Garcon!

David Talbot
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Garcon!

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When Garçon! succeeded Alma about four years ago, I thought: well, there goes the neighborhood. Alma had been a rather special place, a temple of nuevo Latino cooking, and it had a witty name that meant “soul” in Spanish while slyly referring to the owner-chef, Johnny Alamilla. “Garçon,” by contrast, is a word of near-abuse that gets shouted at servers in French restaurants in dumb movies — or, occasionally, in real life, at real servers by dumb people.

The word “garçon” should probably have an exclamation point appended to it as a matter of routine, and — huzzah! (or voilà?) — the signage at Garçon! includes the exclamation point! In the restaurant’s early days, the signage was dismal, a sharp falling-off from Alma’s, and I took this to be a bad sign: just cheap-looking banners rippling in the breeze, as if they were having a Labor Day clearance sale on washers and dryers.

The improved signage suggests that Garçon! has settled into its rather choice location. There is a certain amount of history to live up to. In addition to (and before) Alma, the nicely windowed corner space at the corner of 22nd and Valencia streets was home to the Rooster, which was interesting in a slightly odd way.

Garçon! isn’t odd, but it is a good, solid French restaurant in a neighborhood that has just about every other kind of restaurant other than. So maybe it’s a little eccentric after all, or maybe just unexpected. Certainly it’s good-looking; the Iberian-grotto look of Alma has been swept away in favor of metropolitan polish; Garçon! might be one of the most Parisian-looking restaurants in the city, with its vintage Dubonnet posters and individual lamps on each table (each fitted with a CFL, for greeniac cred). Their glow warms the dark wood of the tables.

Chef Arthur Wall’s food is of the hearty school. This is not a restaurant you will leave hungry. If you have any doubts about getting your fair share, you might be interested in the prix-fixe, $32 for three courses, which is a little high to provide true economy of scale but does ensure that you get three courses. It brought me, one evening, a substantial coq au vin, a dish I don’t see offered that much any more although, like its close relation boeuf bourguignon, is one of the staples of French country cooking. At Garçon! the coq turned out to be a whole leg (thigh plus drumstick) braised in red wine with bacon, carrots, and pearl onions — a fairly wintry dish to be offering in mild springtime, I thought, but the meat was tender and juicy, and a wonderfully thick sauce had gathered at the bottom of the earthenware crock.

The pork chop ($23) didn’t appear on the prix-fixe menu — maybe because it wouldn’t fit. It was a massive fist of meat, nicely cooked to a hint of rareness and laid atop a bed of symmetrically diced potatoes. A bit less overwhelming in scale, and more stylish, was duck-leg confit ($19 — not a bad price), stylishly presented with a potato mousseline, braised baby leeks, and sections of mandarin orange. Only the duck fiend would have had this after having had duck-liver paté ($9), a creamy, mild square like a thick slice of white cheese, along with toast points, arugula, apple slices, and a red wine syrup that could have passed for some kind of berry coulis.

As a Francophile, it does slightly grieve me to say that French handling of the hamburger can sometimes leave something to be desired. At Garçon! you can have your burger ($12) decorated with a slice of cheese ($2) of your choice — brie, say, to go with the brioche bun for what I thought of as the Frenchburger. The meat turned out to be okay if overcooked (I asked for medium-rare, got well-done), and the bun was fine if a bit puffy. But the cheese! Mon dieu! Brie does not belong on a cheeseburger; it resists melting and acquires an unappealing mustiness from the heat. The fries were decent but could have been more crisp and golden. If you need a rinse aid, you might be interested in the burger and beer ($15).

The dessert menu includes a glimpse of the sublime: a chocolate ganache tart ($9) accompanied by sour cherries, mint, and a puff of whipped cream that one time was made with goat cheese and another with plain sweet cream. The accompaniments are nice, but the tart, with its flaky-crisp pastry crust and voluptuous chocolate filling — like a cross between pudding and fudge — can stand on its own. I’m tempted to add an exclamation point but won’t. 

GARÇON!

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., Sun. 5–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

1101 Valencia, SF

(415) 401-8959

www.garconsf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

No-fry zone

David Talbot
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No-fry zone

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GUSSIE’S CHICKEN AND WAFFLES

Tue.–Thu. and Sun.: 8 a.m.–10 p.m.;

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

1521 Eddy, S.F.

(415) 409-2529

MC/V

Beer & wine

Appetite: A couple April openings worth visiting

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: A couple April openings worth visiting

Parada 22 brings some much-needed new blood to the Upper Haight. It’s cheap, tasty Puerto Rican food with Cuban influences in a bright, aquamarine space showcasing an eclectic mix of South American antiques and knick knacks, while Latin jazz plays over the speakers. The concept is current and breezy: order at the counter, eat at picnic tables or stools, or take to go. I’ve been twice so far and the food has been consistently good… it’ll will be even better once they’re serving Sangria from next door neighbor, Cha Cha Cha.

Early menu recommends: Camarones a la Criolla ($11.50): sauteed shrimp, tomato and onions in a light pepper cream sauce. Pernil Asado ($9.50): confit-like roasted pork leg in garlic and oregano sofrito. Cubano ($9): pork, sweet ham, pickle, Swiss cheese, mustard, pressed sandwich. Maduros/Plantains ($4.50).

PARADA 22
1805 Haight, SF.
(415) 750-1111
www.parada22.com

 

Lafitte’s delectable Iberian pig. Photo by Virginia Miller.

Lafitte comes with revolutionary manifesto and stunning waterside perch along the Embarcadero. The menu is a moving target as it evolves daily, not just due to available ingredients but also inspiration and vision from Dissident Chef Russell Jackson. Jackson leads his team, many who were with him during his Dissident Chef dinner days, in an open kitchen showcasing their creative style. This approach will surely not please everyone, requiring strong vision to execute with room for variance from one meal to the next. Having visited twice, for dinner and their newly launched weekend brunch, I experienced deliciousness and high quality ingredients, even if sizes were too small at brunch. Read more in The Perfect Spot.

Early menu recommends (check the website for a limited menu of the day, ranging from $8-28 – appetizers on the lower end, entrees in the $20’s): any dish with prized Ibérico Pig Jackson has shipped over from Spain; Anchovy Onion Tart;“Bangers and Mash” (sausage over mashed potatoes in duck jus; also available at brunch for $12); Fried Duck Egg over butter-grilled asparagus, Green-Eyed Monster Cocktail ($12): Hendrick’s Gin, green chartreuse, jalapeno, lemon and sage; brunch non-alcoholic drink, The Dandy ($7): lemon, thyme, bergamot zest, cream, egg white, soda.

LAFITTE
The Embarcadero, Pier 5
(415) 839-2134
www.lafittesf.com

Southend Grill ‘N’ Bar

David Talbot
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2
Southend Grill ‘N’ Bar

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If “i” comes before “e” except after “c,” then “bar” comes before “grill” … well, I would have said always, but recently I came across an exception to this rule. This would be Southend Grill ‘n’ Bar, which opened toward the end of March in a Valencia Street space long occupied by Café Arguello.

The flipping of these two words from their familiar, not to say ossified, positions is more than just a bit of wordplay or a flouting of some alphabetical-order rule. When “bar” comes before “grill,” the subtle implication is that drinking is the first order of business and that food, while not exactly an afterthought, is supplemental. Eating while drunk can mean that standards loosen as to what one is eating (and, for that matter, drinking). Putting “grill” first, on the other hand, advises us that a place isn’t serving food just to help move the booze — that while the feel might seem little different from a standard B&G, the emphases have shifted.

Southend doesn’t look much changed from Café Arguello. The long, high-ceilinged box of a dining room (which sits right at the corner of Valencia and 26th streets) still has a slightly formal, slightly hushed tone; the walls have been repainted, but they’re still hung with artwork, including an impressive piece by Rafe Mischel, and candles still flicker in the evening air.

And the bar still stands, in a far inward corner of the dining room, where perhaps it serves as a kind of magnet. At dinner one night we bore stoic witness as three raucous female police officers whooped their way through the dining room to the bar, where they whooped some more before departing (with yet more whoops) in the direction of Mission Pie.

The food is very different from the Spanish cuisine of Café Arguello days, of course. Southend’s kitchen takes its cues from around the world — though not from Spain. There is a certain amount of bar food, including firmly crispy onion rings ($4), a dish I dislike as a rule, but not here, and potato skins ($7) baked with cheese and bacon and served with sour cream. If there is a food more redolent of 1980s happy hours at boîtes in the suburban Midwest, I can’t think what it would be. These were slightly underseasoned but plush to the tooth and very satisfying. Also a bit underseasoned was a bowl of (meatless) pinto-bean chili ($5), although a skin of melted cheese and a strong cumin charge made up most of the deficit; I just had to add a sprinkle or two from the tabletop salt shaker to bring the chili into trim.

Little flaws permeate the cooking, but without seriously diminishing its pleasures. The ground beef in the Thai lettuce wraps ($7) was a tick or two past well-done, but it remained tasty and quite spicy. And because the lettuce leaves were fresh and moist (as if just sprayed by one of those sprinklers you see in supermarket produce sections), the meat’s lack of moisture wasn’t fatal.

We were told that spinach ravioli ($10) was dressed with what our server described as a “creamy” pesto sauce. (You can also get the ravioli with alfredo sauce.) The pesto might indeed have been creamy when made, but when tossed with the ravioli it turned soupy. Still, the dish remained flavorful. And we did find real creaminess, along with the dulcet breath of tarragon, in a side of cole slaw ($4). The crispness of the cabbage shreds (a mix of red and green) suggested that it had been made just recently.

Bigger appetites will be drawn toward the chicken milanese ($12), a full (not half) boned breast of chicken, breaded and sautéed until crisp and golden, then served on a bed of wilted arugula. Chicken is often quietly dissed as characterless, but, as this dish proves, it can sometimes stand on its own without high-powered sauces and rubs.

A salmon filet ($14) didn’t get the breading, but otherwise it was similar, with wilted spinach substituted for the arugula and a nice pool of spicy aioli as a further enhancement. Our only squawk here was that we’d ordered the salmon burger. Our server did acknowledge the mistake and took responsibility for it; she also said she would charge us only for the burger but only knocked 20 percent off the filet instead. The multiple stories irked me more than the few dollars, but it is probably a sign of how tight things remain that those few dollars matter.

Consolation: an ice-cream sandwich ($5.50) made with oatmeal-raisin cookies. We whooped, discreetly. *

SOUTHEND GRILL ‘N’ BAR

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5–10:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m.; Sun., 5–9:30 p.m.

1499 Valencia, SF

(415) 648-8623

www.southendsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not as noisy as you might expect

Wheelchair accessible

 

Original’s sin

David Talbot
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0
Original’s sin

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

I woke up early.

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

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

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

Problem: I like it soft, and slow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which I promise not to write about.

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

ROSCOE’S HOUSE OF CHICKEN’N WAFFLES

Daily: 8 a.m.–12 midnight

1514 N. Gower St., L.A.

(323) 466-7453

MC/V

Beer and wine

Appetite: 3 culinary gifts for mom

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 culinary gifts for mom

Last minute Mother’s Day gifts needed? Here are a few delectable possibilities:

WINE OF THE MONTH CLUB
There’s nothing like having Mom reminded of your thoughtfulness and love all year… no, not a Christmas Vacation disappointment like the Jelly of the Month Club. Something better: wine. This is the “original” (family-owned since 1972) Wine of the Month Club with a slew of gift options from 1 red/1 white per month for four months to one year of reds or whites only. The club averages $29 a month for the Classic Series or upgrade your wine selections to Vintners Series ($39) or Limited Series ($49). With hand-selected wines from literally all over the globe, the biggest plus if Mom doesn’t like one of the wines is that they promise to send out another selection, no questions asked. In trying out the club for a short time, I can say the Classic level is not for the wine expert as the red in any given month might be a 2007 Frosted Cake Merlot from Napa or a 2006 Gerard Bertrand Syrah/Mourvedre from France. So upgrade your membership if Mom is a wine snob, or if not, she’ll enjoy a broad cross-section of solid wines for every day imbibement, with descriptions, tasting notes and stories behind each region, winery and wine itself. All gift memberships come nicely wrapped so your Mother will feel like it’s Mother’s Day all over again every month.

CLARINE’S FLORENTINES
First trying local (Berkeley) Clarine’s Florentines at the Chocolate Salon, I was impressed… trying them again later, I was hooked. I think your Mom will be, too. This buttery, crispy, golden Almond Brittle on Guittard bittersweet chocolate, is a recipe from Clarine and her Mother, so even the roots of the product have special meaning for Mother’s Day. You can buy a bag at shops around town like Bi-Rite or order directly from Clarine’s to have it shipped.

KUSMI TEA
A favorite of late has been Kusmi’s luxurious teas. Founded in St. Petersburg in 1867, these Russian-style teas have been Paris-based since 1917, so there’s an Old World elegance and refinement with modern sensibilities (even Lady Gaga is a big fan, though that may not be as much of a selling point for Mom!) They’re offering Mother’s Day blends, like Rose Green Tea, though there are crowd-pleasers everywhere, from a lovely Moroccan Spearmint to Sweet Love, a blend of Black China tea, pink pepper, licorice roots, guarana seeds and spices. If Mom’s on a health kick, their Detox mate/green tea with lemongrass is particularly popular… and a rich antioxidant.

Little Chihuahua

David Talbot
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Little Chihuahua

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE On the hunt for the Little Chihuahua one unsettled April evening, we came upon … a little cockapoo, or maybe a Tibetan terrier. The dog, wrapped in a coat of shaggy fur the color of milky coffee, was moored to the façade of a Lower Haight storefront and had been provided a stainless-steel water dish, which seemed superfluous. Since the storefront was occupied by the Little Chihuahua, a Mexican restaurant opened by Andrew Johnstone two years ago, we naturally wondered whether the dog was just waiting for its person (or persons) to finish eating within or was a mascot of sorts. Did Little Chihuahua’s chihuahua take the day off? The dog lay on the sidewalk, staring intently through the open door, which I interpreted as a clue that a vigil was being patiently held. Or maybe the smell of the food appealed.

Mexican food gets my vote as one of the world’s most underappreciated cuisines. Recently I made this claim to a health-nut friend, who scoffed at first but gradually warmed to the evidence. This includes: the dominance of whole-grain corn (in many varieties and cultivars), the omnipresence of beans, a light hand with red meat, a wide range of vegetables, herbs, and spices, many of them indigenous, and of course salsa, whose flavor-to-calories ratio is unmatched among condiments I can think of.

Little Chihuahua lays out an impressive salsa bar to enhance the chip-dipping experience, although the chips are pretty good naked — warm, with just enough salt to make the corn flavor pop. The salsas themselves range from a rather mainline version (tomatoes, garlic, chili, cilantro, lime), to a spicy tomatillo kind that looks like melted emeralds, to a chipotle-charged concoction with the innocent face of ketchup.

A small irony of pozole, the wonderful soup-stew of hominy in chili broth, is that it traditionally features pork, a meat brought from the Old World by the conquistadores. La Chihuahua’s pozole ($7.95) deploys pork, in the form of a small semi-slab of baby back ribs, but its most striking elements are the rich, slightly viscous guajillo-chile broth and an abundance of hominy kernels and pinto beans. It’s more stew than soup and very sustaining.

If Mexican food’s reputation has suffered on this side of the border, a good part of the blame must be attributed to the burrito, a neither-here-nor-there hybrid that emphasizes mass at the expense of just about everything else and, worse, comes wrapped in a flour tortilla. The flour tortilla must have its virtues — I’ve never seen burrito-sized tortillas made from masa — but we eat more than enough wheat flour in this country already. Having said that, the quesadilla with shrimp ($8.95) is lovely, with a blistering like that of a good pizza crust and a pronounced melody of marine sweetness proclaiming itself through the cheesy murk. For a bit of refreshing balance, the spicy cabbage salad ($3) makes a good choice; it’s basically like cole slaw without the mayonnaise (and fat) and is a bowlful of virtue, though we didn’t detect much spiciness, just plenty of lime juice.

There is a slight party atmosphere to the Little Chihuahua. Seating is mostly at long communal tables, and the clientele is young. So it’s no surprise that the nacho plates pack some real throw-weight. Even the meatless one ($7.95) will keep three or four hungry people busy for quite a few minutes. Of course it isn’t quite meatless if you get it with the refried pinto beans, which are spiked with chorizo and bacon. But there is a wealth of avocado, salsa, and sour cream, along with enough melted white cheese to make it seem like somebody spilled a bottle of Elmer’s Glue all over the chips.

The one element of Mexican authenticity the Little Chihuahua seems to lack is the presence of actual Mexicans. The crowd is heavily Anglo, and somewhere in this detail is a story about a hipster neighborhood that simultaneously resembles and differs from the city’s great hipster neighborhood — the hipster superpower — the Mission. It might also help explain why the Little Chihuahua will soon be expanding, not to 22nd and South Van Ness streets but to 24th and Castro streets — the heart of Noe Valley. That’s as dog-friendly a neighborhood as there is in this town. *

THE LITTLE CHIHUAHUA

Continuous service: Mon.–Wed., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Thurs.–Fri., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.;

Sat., 10 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sun., 10 a.m.–11 p.m.

292 Divisadero, SF

(415) 255-8225

www.thelittlechihuahua.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Wiped clean

David Talbot
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Wiped clean

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

For example: Greenbrae.

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

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

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

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

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

Not to mention meeting your future ex-wife there.

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

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

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

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

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

WIPEOUT BAR AND GRILL

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun 11 a.m.– 10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

302 Bon Air Center, Greenbrae

(415) 461-7400

MC/V

Full bar

Appetite: 3 blanco tequilas for Cinco de Mayo margaritas

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 blanco tequilas for Cinco de Mayo margaritas

Cinco de Mayo is nearly here, and you know what that means: time to stock up on fine tequilas, kick up your heels, and start mixing margaritas. I taste-tested these tequilas side-by-side, then used each in the very appealing classic margarita recipe from Chronicle Books’ Ultimate Bar Book, a classic tome that came out in 2006:

PAQUI SILVERA TEQUILA BLANCO
Paqui Silvera Tequila has such a smooth, agave-rich profile, with hints of smoke, white pepper, citrus. I’m happy to drink this one neat: a tequila where blue agave properties the spirit is known for are properly showcased. It is complex, robust but entirely drinkable with a gentle finish. No surprise, it worked beautifully in a margarita, presenting itself once again as smooth and all too easily drinkable. This may be my strongest recommend of the three as it is one to please both the tequila aficionado and novice. $45

DULCE VIDA SILVER TEQUILA
From a distillery based in Austin, TX, Dulce Vida is a 100 proof tequila that fires on all cylinders. Receiving top honors in its category in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition this past March, it’s a fiery spirit in all three forms: blanco, reposado, anejo. Made from 100 percent organic blue agave, the Blanco is unaged, crisp, lemony and straight-up boozy. In a margarita, it’s more potent and less smooth than the Paqui, though as the ice in an on-the-rocks margarita melts, it grows increasingly balanced and delicious. $45

CORRIDO “CRISTALINO” BLANCO
Though I am particularly partial to Corrido‘s Anejo, their vibrant, uber smooth blanco tequila makes for a fine margarita. This 2009 International Review of Spirits Gold Medal winner is smooth, citrusy and bracingly astringent. In a margarita, it partners well with lime juice and triple sec, while being the best value of this high-quality threesome at around $35.

Using the elegant Combier triple sec, here’s a margarita recipe also highlighting Dulce Vida:

Combier Margarita
.75 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz Combier Liqueur d’Orange or Combier Royal
1.5 oz Dulce Vida Tequila
Shake with ice; strain over ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with a lime wheel.

Appetite: 3 coffee table books with expert cocktail recipes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 coffee table books with expert cocktail recipes

Aesthetics matter. Beyond quality recipes, fine photography and presentation can make one cocktail recipe book stand out over another. Whether you are a cocktailian who interprets measurements for the modern day from Jerry Thomas’ 1800’s standard-setter, formerly known as The Bon Vivant’s Companion, or a cocktail appreciator who wants to make more than Lemon Drops (or anything “tini”), here are three books with recipes to please a novice or cocktail expert alike… and they’re beautiful to thumb through.

The Modern Mixologist by Tony Abou-Ganim with Mary Elizabeth Faulkner
Just out last month, Tony Abou-Ganim’s The Modern Mixologist is a coffee-table-showcase of a book with a clean, minimalist look. Abou-Ganim made a name for himself back in the day at SF’s own Harry Denton’s Starlight Room, then with Mario Batali (who wrote the book’s forward) in NYC and Steve Wynn in Las Vegas. Half the book is devoted to mixology history and basics, such as mixing methods, glassware, ice and garnishes, while the second half lists 60 “contemporary classic” recipes, like a Bayou Zinger with Southern Comfort, Grand Marnier, lemon juice, and iced sweet tea. Abou-Ganim has a knack for making craft cocktails approachable and crowd-pleasing.

Artisanal Cocktails by Scott Beattie
Scott Beattie put Healdsburg’s fabulous Cyrus on the map for more than food with his cutting edge, garden-fresh cocktails. His book, Artisanal Cocktails, is the standard for creative, seasonal drinks, which are also works of art. It isn’t always for the novice: intricate recipes contain additional instruction for making your own spiced simple syrups or dehydrating fruit for edible garnishes, so it is a welcome challenge for cocktail lovers. Other recipes are simpler and just paging through this book is sheer inspiration for the possibilities and beauty inherent in a glass.

The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks by Dale Degroff
Dale DeGroff is often single-handedly credited with initiating the Cocktail Renaissance back in the ’80’s at NYC’s Rainbow Room when he brought classic cocktails and technique back into mainstream consciousness. He’s written two cocktail tomes, The Essential Cocktail being his most recent, with gorgeous photography and a classic elegance. He takes popular classics and elevates them, like Dale’s Hemingway Daiquiri, adding in Maraschino liqueur and grapefruit juice, while expounding with instruction, drink lore and helpful techniques.

North Beach and Chinatown lift forks for Noodlefest 2010

Andrew Lam
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North Beach and Chinatown lift forks for Noodlefest 2010

I do love me some noodles. As do we all — just ask the cooks carving them from a solid, gyro like block of pasta at the Seattle Chinese restaurant I once blissfully attended, or the happy fettuccine eaters at the sidewalk cafes on Columbus Avenue. The world would be a better place if we could all put down our weapons and pick up our forks and spoons.

Which is roughly what is happening at this weekend’s Noodlefest 2010 (Sun/2). Sure, the days of armed warfare between North Beach and Chinatown may be safely behind us (were they ever in existence), but the two adjacent neighborhoods rarely come together to plan community happenings. Harken to the candlelit dinner scene in The Lady and the Tramp — it takes a pasta strand to break the ice, and bring you snout to snout.

But why eat a strand when you can sample six different pasta meals? Entry to Noodlefest gets you a taste of three steaming mountains of Chinatown noodles, and three from North Beach, in addition to live noodle making demonstrations and entertainment of all stripes.

So grab a fork. And to reinforce what this peaceful coexistence of culinary traditions signifies in the history of our city, two long time residents of the neighborhoods, Reverend Norman Fong of the Chinatown Community Development Center, and Dan Macchiarini of the North Beach Merchants’ Association, sent us their memoirs of growing up in the city’s historically Chinese and Italian ‘hoods. If the following tales of downtown SF life in the ‘50s and ‘60s don’t make you feel all noodley inside, then I don’t know what will.


Noodlefest 2010
Sun/2 3-7pm, $15
Grant, between Pacific & Vallejo, SF
www.chinatowncdc.org
———————-

The yin and yang of Chinese-Italian relationships
By Reverend Norman Fong, Chinatown Community Development Center

During the 1950s and 1960s,  it wasn’t all fine and dandy growing up in Chinatown and North Beach, although I wouldn’t trade my life experience for anything. In my younger elementary school years, I was a Chinatown kid; all my classmates were Chinese-Americans.

Then I had to cross Washington Square to head to Francisco Jr. High, where I learned about other races.  I remember having a crush on one very cute girl who lived in North Beach but I was too shy to ever ask her out and there weren’t too many cross-cultural relations back then. I also remember some very negative moments when groups of Italian boys would harass me.

One time I was chased by these boys who screamed “let’s get the Chinaman” and they tied me to the fence near St. Peter & Paul and they threw water balloons at me. I went home and I told my mom “I hate italians” and explained what happened.

My mom said life was about balance. “Did you know our landlord is Italian? He only charges us $90 rent and never raised the rent?” I didn’t fully understand at the time just how much that meant, but I do now. Years later, when I was about 18 years old, we were evicted from our home — by a Chinese landlord who bought the building.

Life is about balance, the Yin and Yang of life. Dan Macchiarini and Kathleen Dooley of the North Beach Merchants Association are friends because we shared the same block at the Chinatown Community Development Center office at 1525 Grant. I bought my Valentine’s Day flowers from Kathleen for my wife a number of years.

This Noodlefest is not just about noodles, spaghetti versus chow mein… It’s about relationships… and building cultural bridges… and “balance.”

Fireworks and noodles
By Dan Macchiarini, North Beach Merchants’ Association


Back in the day of the day, back when I was around 9 years old in the early 1960’s, I was among a bunch of kids my age from North Beach and Chinatown who would regularly play pick up games of football in Washington Square. Park Saturdays, Sundays, and whenever we could during the summer. We would have played baseball but the adults using the park wouldn’t let us and we could only play softball down at the Joe DiMaggio playground.

This was also a time when there were no real playgrounds at all in Chinatown, so a lot of the Chinese kids would come across Broadway to play in North Beach at Washington Square Park with us Italian kids. Some kids from Chinese ancestry lived in North Beach already. We got along fairly well too, considering the nonsensical historic animosity between a lot of our parents from our two distantly different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

We also hung out and played tennis dodge ball in the alley streets in both communities. These alleys during the day were very safe and were the kind of the place where car drivers looked out for and expected us kids to be.   Chinatown and North Beach both share a network of smallish streets and alleys. We made these “kids turf” when we weren’t in the park.

However, the most fun time for us was around mid February every year. It was always rainy and cold but this is the time of Chinese New Year. None of us Italian kids, even on the fourth of July, had access to fire works like the Chinese kids did. This made for a great trading relationship between us, everything from baseball cards to candy and sometimes even money changed hands for us to get the fireworks and use them. We had great contests blowing up tin cans, setting off stings of fire crackers to see how much noise and smoke we could make, until we got nailed by our parents who would attempt to restrict our alley pyrotechnics antics, commerce and careers on both sides of the ethnic divide.

The Chinese kids seemed to be at greater liberty to get and use these fireworks than we Italian kids were. It didn’t seem fair to me. I asked my father why this was. He said it was part of their culture and explained the “lunar new year.” He and my mother regularly took us to the Chinese New Year parade during the late 1950s and early 1960s. There were massive fireworks and firecrackers there, mostly still in the rain but spectacular at night during the parade of dragons and lions.

Before the parade, my parents would take my sister and I to dinner in their favorite Chinese restaurant and they would order all kinds of exotic dishes.  The restaurant, still there, was up Washington Street just off Grant Ave., three block off of Broadway and, literally, under the building. You walk down concrete steps to the doorway. Very “old school” Chinatown. My father knew all the waiters and the owner would greet us with broad smile.  Somehow, they knew each other back in their day, the 1930s, when everyone was struggling just to survive. So we got the VIP treatment there.

The food was incredibly good, although as a nine year old, I was somewhat picky — which my father had a VERY low tolerance for. I loved the Chinese noodles, all the chow mien dishes, and was okay with the rice dishes, but I had a lot of trouble with egg fu yung types; they tasted runny and raw to me. My mother insisted that my sister and I “try everything” they ordered, and my father would cuff me in the head to get my attention and tell me to “eat all your food.” I evolved a plan through; it involved a conspiracy with my sister because she loved egg fu yung. When my parents were distracted and not looking, we would change plates under the table. This all worked out fairly well until one time when we dropped one of the plates we were exchanging under the table. The food hit the floor and my father hit the ceiling. I was good at ducking, though. Luckily, the waiters and the owner were in fits laughter over this so my father’s temper cooled off fast but my mother made us kids sit through the rest of the meal without ANY more food as well as having to help the waiters picked up the mess.

I complained to my father, asking him why I couldn’t just eat the chow mien, like the pasta we made and ate at home. He told me that he brought me out to a Chinese restaurant so “you can learn” the taste of the way other people make food — and beside, the Chinese invented pasta too.

He said it was part of history, that about 800 years ago Marco Polo, an Italian merchant, went to China from Europe to Asia along the silk road to trade — and brought the idea of pasta to Italy and Europe (along with gunpowder).

He went on about this history, lecturing about how food was part of culture and we, as kids, should experience all kinds of food to learn about all kinds of cultures.  This lasted about ten minutes, but it still didn’t get me to like egg fu yung — although a thought pushed itself into my nine year old mind that those Chinese kids I played and “traded” with in the alleys of North Beach and Chinatown for fireworks were my “Silk Road,” and going between North Beach and Chinatown was truly great adventure.

Oyaji

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Oyaji

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Life does serve up the occasional delicious paradox, such as getting one’s first glimpse of the new iPad while sitting at a sushi bar in the outer Richmond. The iPad is elegant, yes, a jewel of a device whose colorful icons zip across the screen at the swipe of a finger, like images glimpsed through the windows of an accelerating train. But it is also the latest in a series of increasingly powerful devices that mediate our relations with the rest of the world. You do touch the iPad, true, to make it work, but mostly you stare at it, as if it’s a television.

The sushi bar, by contrast, is an unmediated encounter between customer and chef. No machines get in the way, not even servers, unless you order a beer or sake. There is no swiping unless and until you pay by credit card. The sushi bar in this sense resembles a New York deli: people at a counter full of food, looking and pointing at the food, the chef nodding and preparing the food and handing it back, maybe even watching in approval as it gets eaten. Directness.

This revelation — if that’s what it is — came to me recently at five-year-old Oyaji, a Zagat-rated Japanese restaurant at the edge of Lincoln Park. (The name means, more or less, “daddy,” in the Sean Connery sense.) The iPad was enthralling and magical, but I was more enthralled by the sight of our young sushi chef at his labors, expertly forming his rolls and hand rolls, wielding his sharp ceramic knives and handing us the results. Gleaming gizmo wizardry at one elbow, and spicy tuna at the other. Give me … well, it would be greedy to say both, especially since I don’t want an iPad.

Oyaji is good-looking in an unassuming way. Its most striking design features are the L-shaped bar, fashioned from blond wood and glass, at the rear of the storefront dining room and, overhead, a grid of beams laid out to form large squares, like upside-down seed beds. The lighting is low and moody, the crowds tending toward young and lively. I did notice one evening that most of the people sitting at the tables toward the front appeared to be occidental, while those at the bar were all Asian — at least until the iPad hipsters showed up.

The food is pretty conventional, mostly excellent, with a few blips. We thought very highly of goma-ae ($4), a boiled (but served cold) spinach, which had a faint sweetness and a bit of crunch from a gratin-like topping of crushed white sesame seeds. We thought nearly as highly of the wakame ($4), or seaweed salad. Less impressive were the sliced tomatoes with mayo ($3.50) — but then it was probably stupid on our part to order tomatoes in early spring — and the avocado roll ($3.50), which was dry.

Also a bit dry was the so-called Christy roll ($6), chunks of grilled albacore in a rice casing. I love albacore and prefer it to the more exalted sorts of tuna, perhaps because it’s more likely to be taken locally. But it does seem to be less fatty, and that reduces the margin of error when cooking it. The dryness issue recurred in the Hawaii roll ($5.50), though it was muted, if not mooted, by the presence of spicy mayonnaise. The spicy hamachi roll ($6.50), virtually the same dish, except with yellowtail instead of tuna and no clever name, was better.

Yellowtail also evidently helped lift the Crunchy Wedding ($7), one of those near-blockbuster assemblages that here included (in addition to the fish) avocado slices and tempura batter, again for a quasi-gratin effect. Similarly loaded was the Stirling ($7), with crab, avocado, fish roe, and crunchy protrusions of tempura shrimp. And for sheer elegance, it would be tough to top the spicy scallop hand roll ($7), a papery, dark-green cone filled with rice and scallops turned in spicy mayo, for a nice contrast between sweet brininess and creamy bite.

You’d have a hard time eating a handroll while dealing with your new iPad. The iPadders to my left seemed to have come to that conclusion; they had little discourse with our handsome young sushi chef and seemed to prefer the small plates of cooked food that were prepared somewhere out of sight in the rear (behind a battlement of beer boxes) and rushed out by acrobatic servers carrying one atop each upturned hand, as in the movies. A plate of meatballs flew past; I was tempted to swipe one but didn’t.

OYAJI

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5:30 — 10:30 p.m.;

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

3123 Clement, SF

(415) 379-3604

www.oyajirestaurant.com

Beer and sake

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Glum and glummer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Glum and glummer

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Standing in my funny little yellow kitchen, 10 at night, pressing a package of frozen peas to my swollen jaw and looking glumly at a plate on the table, leftover from dinner three hours earlier. It was a half-ravished pork steak, long gone cold and congealy. Which is one of my two favorite ways to eat pork — the other being warm and nice. The frozen peas?

The frozen peas had to do with a friendly, casual pickup soccer game from which I had just returned and during which — in a friendly, casual way — I had been elbowed in the jaw so hard that my ears clogged and my head hurt. There was a loose lump of something in my chin, which was, in spite of the ice-pack peas, witching ever outward and rapidly turning as purple as a purple Popsicle.

Worst of all though, as I was just finding out the hard way, it hurt like hell to chew. This is like when piano players get their fingers mangled in a mining disaster. Everyone goes: Oh, how tragic! Except some people go: What were piano players doing in the mine?

See? So, similarly, while I have your sympathy (I feel certain) I have also raised the question: What was I doing leaving half a pork steak on my plate in the first place? It’s not like me, I know, I know, to not finish my dinner. Me!

Not to mention: pork!

Well, but I was running late for the stupid soccer game, you see, and so I thought, innocently enough, that I would leave this warm, nice meat on my table and come back in three hours to take care of it, cold and congealy.

Oh, the tragedy! Am I right?

Yes, but I wasn’t alone, either. Misery does love company, and my co-miserable comrade, the Maze, was looking even glummer than me, albeit less clobbered. He showed up at Garfield Park toward the end of the game just to walk me home. Plus he gave me his last two ibuprofens. How romantic, huh?

You wish! He doesn’t like me like that, which wouldn’t normally stop me from going after someone, true, except that he doesn’t like pork, either. And that is the deal breaker.

The Maze’s misery was less physical than my own. Poor cat, he doesn’t play competitive team sports, and so his wounds tend to be less responsive to ibuprofen, or peas. Like a lot of people, he just vaguely sort of hurts. Feels unfulfilled artistically, lonely in general, and doesn’t know what to do. What he needed was someone to talk to, whereas what I needed was a bath. A bath, a good night’s sleep, and some heavy duty makeup or I was going to have to cancel dates.

“Maze,” I said, mustering up all my compassion, empathy, and social skills. “Get the fuck out of here. Go home.” And I held the door open.

Well, but all kidding aside, I doubt he went home feeling any less lonely. While my bath was running, I tried to chew pork again, and couldn’t. And the next morning my jaw felt better but looked even worse.

I had pork and oatmeal for breakfast.

For brunch I went to Chilango, with Sockywonk and her badass hockey playing cross-dresser boyfriend. Me and her talked about heartache and hair, and me and him talked about sports and hair, and heels, and everyone was happy. Plus the duck flautas were fantastic, so …

Duck flautas? This is going to cost a fortune, isn’t it? Nah. It ain’t no taqueria, true, but even though you can get $12 filet mignon tacos at the Castro District’s new(ish) fancy pants Mex joint, you can also get huevos rancheros for $6. Which is right in line with Chavas and other cheapo joints.

The duck flautas were $9.

Tortilla soup, excellent. Guacamole, good. The chips were warm and homemade and the salsas were delicious. But best of all, at 11 a.m. on a weekend morning, there was nobody there but us. Of course, they don’t open until 11 a.m. 

CHILANGO

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

235 Church, SF

(415) 552-5700

MC/V

Beer and wine

 

Appetite: Anchovies three ways

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Anchovies three ways

One (of many) of my great pleasures traveling in Italy is eating fresh sardines and anchovies along the coast, whether baked, brined or any other way. Thankfully, anchovies are plentiful — and often out of local waters — in the Bay Area. The anchovy, in particular, gets a bum rap as a too-salty pizza topping. That’s too bad, because it’s fantastically flavorful in the right preparation. Here are three places doing anchovies proud, with their own unique takes on one of the most healthy of fishes.

Moussy’s Basque Anchovies
Moussy’s (named after owner, Jean-luc Kayigire’s, father’s hometown in the Champagne region of France) is a welcoming basement bistro in Alliance Francaise, where you can drop in after French films or language classes (or just go straight there). With new chef, Nathan Ivry, the already charming space becomes a destination for comforting dinner bistro fare: burgers and frites, grilled prawns and salads (more details at The Perfect Spot). Ivry cooks a fine dish of Basque white anchovies ($8), flaky and bright, over avocado yogurt.
1345 Bush Street
(415) 441-1802
www.moussys.com

 

Lafitte’s Anchovy Onion Tart
Open less than a month, Lafitte, with its picturesque Embarcadero waterside perch, is already getting a lot of buzz (see my Perfect Spot early review). Dissident Chef Russell Jackson, whose underground dinners have amassed a loyal following over the years, helms the free-form kitchen that only loosely adheres to a menu, which changes daily based not merely on freshness but inspiration. If you go with an open mind and give Jackson free reign, all kinds of goodness can happen, like an anchovy onion tart that pairs the sweetness of caramelized onions with the anchovy’s salty assets.
Pier 5, The Embarcadero
(415) 839-2134
www.lafittesf.com

Ooh la la, Lafitte!

 

White Anchovies at La Salette in Sonoma
Next time you’re in Sonoma, consider La Salette, just off Sonoma’s idyllic town square, for a Portuguese feast (brunch, lunch or dinner). I’ve not found a restaurant quite like this elsewhere in the area. Paired with Spanish or Portuguese wines, order a platter laden with cheeses, Spanish hams, marinated octopus, blood sausage and the like (your choice of 3 items for $15, 5 for $24, 7 for $33). Don’t miss briny, impeccable white anchovies that taste as fresh as the sea. They also bake a mean plate of sardinhas assadas, flaky and drizzled with olive oil.
452 1st Street E, Suite H, Sonoma
(707) 938-1927
www.lasalette-restaurant.com

 

Visit Virginia’s culinary itinerary site, www.theperfectspotsf.com.

FEAST: 10 kick-ass brunches

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: 10 kick-ass brunches

We here at the Guardian don’t survive on green buds and printer ink alone. We eat real food. Sometimes! But we do get up late and hungover. While we often forgo fancy brunch — unless we save our pennies for the amazing eggs-meet-legs “Sunday’s a Drag” buffet at Harry Denton’s (www.harrydenton.com) or dim sum nirvana at Yank Sing (www.yanksing.com) or Ton Kiang (www.tonkiang.net) — we’ll sure as shootin’ shell out for thrifty chilaquiles and bloody marys, especially the way the Bay makes ’em. Here are some of our dearest bleary-eyed, late-morning tummy fillers. (Marke B.)

 

BASHFUL BULL TOO

There are days when you wake up with a bladder full of Jameson’s and a fervent wish to sink into a salty, unglamorous world of egg and cheese. These are the mornings when bottomless mimosas and goat cheese frittatas sound like fightin’ words. Easy tiger, I got you — just slump into a booth at Bashful Bull Too, the most standard of Outer Sunset diners. There’s no live jazz band, no “scene” at all — just you and your greasy calories. Get down on their cheap plates of hash browns and bacon, or better yet, a burger. Slabs of ground beef are acceptable fare when, after all, you’re having breakfast at 2 p.m. (Caitlin Donohue)

3600 Taraval, SF. (415) 759-8112

 

BEAN BAG CAFÉ

In you’re from the Midwest, good brunch spots are distinguished by waitresses who call you “hon” and have your coffee waiting for you before you sit down. Become a regular at Bean Bag Café in the Western Addition, and they’ll do all that and more. Bean Bag’s extensive breakfast and lunch menu and progressive cooking staff means never having to decide if it’s too late for Goldilocks oatmeal (yep, it’s just right) or too early for pancakes and beer. Speaking of pancakes, the Bean Bag buttermilk, customized with bananas and caramelized walnuts on top, is a must-have. Pair it with scrambled eggs drenched in Tabasco, and you’re set until 3 p.m., when Bean Bag kicks off its happy hour with beer for $1.75. Other highlights: sunshine and a petting zoo of scruffy but wuvable dogs outside. (Diane Sussman)

601 Divisadero, SF. (415)-563-3634

 

CAFE DU SOLEIL

Lower Haight — known for its nicoise? C’est vrai! The salad nicoise at Cafe Du Soleil is a stunner, bursting with tender tuna, piquant greens, and enough fresh fixings to ensure some inner sunshine. But don’t stop there — or at the pastry case in front, with delectable goodies like croques madames and hazelnut chocolate croissants. Soleil’s salmon tortilla, a sort of deconstructed-quiche pyramid topped with lovely lox and drizzled with smoky romesco, is this laidback Parisian hang’s brunchtime piece de resistance. Bonus: hunky scruffsters and tattooed ladies. (Marke B.)

200 Fillmore, SF. (415) 934-8637. www.soleilsf.com

 

CHLOE’S

Let’s face it, one aspect of brunch — at least on a Sunday — is the wait. Chloe’s is no exception. The restaurant’s rep and tiny size mean that while weekdays are fine, on the weekend you will be waiting in a (loose) line. The upside is that Chloe’s is on a quiet corner of Church Street, so on a sunlit day, you’ll get fresh air and nothing noisier or more imposing than the people-watching pleasure of the J-Church sliding by. Once inside, indulge your sweet tooth: two highlights of the low-key menu are french toast made with croissants (served with strawberries and powdered sugar) and banana walnut pancakes, a Chloe’s specialty. Chloe’s offers some pleasant, simple variations on scrambled eggs, and the fresh fruit and white rosemary toast to compliment them. This may be Noe Valley, but the coffee is Twin Peaks good. (Johnny Ray Huston)

1399 Church, SF. (415) 648-4116

 

CHOW

The agony of brunch, since it allows for judgment-free consumption of lunch dishes or breakfast dishes, means having to choose between savory or sweet, sandwich or omelet, salad or hash browns. Ten minutes alone can be devoted to the age-old question of pancake or eggs benedict? Coffee or cocktail? Pancake or … This is where Chow ends the cycle of neurosis. At Chow, you can order one egg benedict and one pancake, accompanied by one cup of coffee and one wine mojito. Plus, Chow has two pancakes without peer: the blueberry with warm blueberry sauce and mascarpone cheese, and Marion’s ricotta pancake with lemon. Get one of each! Of course, if you want the chilaquiles or a cheesy scramble, Chow will happily oblige. Watch them start to emit a soft, warm glow when paired with a blushing bellini. (Diane Sussman)

212 Church and 1245 Ninth Ave. 415-552-2469; 415-665-9912, www.chowfoodbar.com

 

HOMEMADE CAFÉ

It’s Saturday morning-slipping-toward-noon, and there are few reasons to expend the effort to pick your fuzzball head up off the pillow it dropped onto in the after-party wee hours. Curled in your cocoon, there is but one comforting thought: breakfast! Few places can revive the soul and satisfy the belly as proficiently as Homemade Café. You’d be wise to choose the spinach, mushroom, and feta omelet. Sweet or spicy is a tough choice, though, since there are spectacularly fluffy blueberry pancakes to be had as well. It’s crucial that you remember this magical phrase: “Upgrade to Home-Fry Heaven.” They’ll arrive smothered in cheese, salsa, sour cream, and a choice of guacamole or pesto. You will feel alive again — at least until naptime. (Rebecca Bowe)

2454 Sacramento, Berk. (510) 845-1940

 

LIME

I love Lime. Not just because it offers a pretty good assortment of belly-filling foodstuffs on Sunday mornings or the hip and lively atmosphere — but because of the bottomless mimosas and bloody marys. Now, I could try to compare Lime’s eggs benedict to others I’ve eaten, but why bother? There are bottomless fucking mimosas and bloody marys, people! Who cares about the food when I can get stupid drunk with my friends at 11 a.m.? In fact, I can’t recall a time when we weren’t asked to leave, albeit very nicely by the wait staff. Just be careful, those drinks will knock you on your ass and give you a hangover by 4 p.m. Guaranteed. (Ben Hopfer)

2247 Market St., SF. 415.621.5256, www.lime-sf.com

 

LYNN & LU’S ESCAPADE CAFE

Lynn and Lu, I heart you. Snag a quaint table under an umbrella on Grand Avenue or find a spot on the back patio for a beautiful sunny brunch. The morning portions are fat, happy, and classic. Three-egg omelets come bursting with your filler of choice and arrive sitting next to a pile of yummy roasted potatoes. Those with stomachs bigger than their eyes will be relieved to see that the Escapade frittatas look more like a crowd-pleasing tower of peppers, veggies, and eggs than a paltry single serving — everyone will waddle away with a smile. The service is fabulous, the price is just right, and the food comes quick enough to whisk away any dream-soaked cobwebs. (Amber Schadewald)

3353 Grand Ave, Oakland, 510-835-5705

 

MAMA’S ROYAL CAFÉ

Imagine a John Waters time warp with rickety counter chairs, a napkin art gallery, and a suggestive painting of female softball players with a giant bat, and you’ve just about captured the quirkiness of Mama’s Royal Café. The home fries, hollandaise dishes, and rib-sticking omelets are consistently satisfying, but weekly specials also offer seasonal and delicious treats like lemon-ricotta pancakes with blood orange curd. The wait staff often serves on hipster time, which, quite frankly, works out perfectly since Mama’s is best enjoyed with friends on a lazy Sunday as you discuss, or help each other remember, last night’s misadventures. (Robyn Johnson)

4012 Broadway, Oakland. (510) 547-7600. www.mamasroyalcafeoakland.com

 

STACKS

After a recent multihour hike around the Presidio, I found myself ravenous. You know the feeling — fully prepared to combine breakfast, lunch, dinner, a multitude of snacks, and dessert into a single meal. Where better to do that than at Stacks, the San Francisco location of a mini-chain (others are in Menlo Park and Burlingame) that looks like a Denny’s that got an upscale makeover, with some of the biggest floral arrangements you’ll ever see. Speaking of gigantic, Stacks’ portions are robust, and their menu is a monster: over a dozen omelet choices; copious varieties of pancakes, crepes, and waffles; sandwiches and burgers; daily specials; and at least seven different smoothies. (Cheryl Eddy)

501 Hayes, SF. (415) 241-9011. www.stacksrestaurant.com

 

TAQUERIA LOS COYOTES

Being on a tight budget has forced me to get creative, and this underdog taqueria located on a block full of distracting alternatives has become my favorite spot for a weekend breakfast burrito. There are never any lines, the food is as cheap as it comes, and the egg and chorizo burrito with beans, cheese, and rice is guaranteed to soak up a whole weekend of leftover mischief hanging. It’s even big enough to share with any co-conspirators still hanging out as well. (Paula Connelly)

3036 16th St., SF. (415) 861-3708. www.taquerialoscoyotes.com

 

ZAZIE

Yes, there’ll be a wait — but it’s more than worth it at Zazie, a French bistro that is San Francisco’s best patio brunch spot. The heart of the menu resides in the poached egg dishes (my favorite is La Mer, with real Dungeness crab, avocado, and green onion), seven to choose from, each with a choice of one, two, or three perfectly poached eggs, wonderfully tangy hollandaise sauce, and a side of potatoes fried up with, get this, roasted garlic cloves. Yum! Everything on the brunch menu is awesome, from challah french toast to scrambled eggs Fontainebleau to the full-on trout du sud. C’est magnifique! (Steven T. Jones)

941 Cole Street, SF. (415) 564-5332, www.zaziesf.com

Appetite: 3 upcoming events covering sips ’round the world

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 upcoming events covering sips ’round the world

From Dry Creek Valley barrel-tasting  to the snowy peaks of Austria, here are a trio of flavorful events that encompass a full range of delectable vino.

4/22 Wine Enthusiast’s Toast of the Town

One of the big wine events each year, this swank soiree in the War Memorial Opera House hits major cities (like NY and Chicago), often selling out. Tasting runs the gamut of the US (from Cali to South Carolina), through Tuscany, France, Chile, New Zealand, and so on. Food is almost an equal highlight here from Wine Country favorites such as the girl & the fig and Mustards, or Urban Tavern, Farallon, Chez Papa, even Oakland’s Home of Chicken & Waffles.

5-7pm VIP; 7-10pm general public grand tasting
$89 general; $169 VIP
War Memorial House
401 Van Ness, SF.
www.wineenthusiast.com/toast

4/24-25 Passport to Dry Creek Valley

A Wine Country locals’ favorite event annually, this weekend focuses on Dry Creek Valley and starts off with a classy shindig at Dry Creek Kitchen on Friday night. Then it uncorks the weekend with two days of barrel tasting (yes, you can purchase futures) and newly-released wines at over 60 wineries, Mingle with winemakers and growers as bands play (from blues to rock) or belly dancers dance. There’s food at each winery, everything from oysters to BBQ, even games of bocce ball and early morning vineyard tours.

11am-4:30pm
$120 for 2-day passport; $70 Sunday only
At participating wineries around Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County
www.wdcv.com

 

5/3 Austria Uncorked

How familiar are you with Austrian wines? Well, it’s time you became acquainted. Bottlenotes is selling tickets to this unique event (only held here and New York City) on a mellow Monday in Fort Mason. There’s more than 80 Austrian wines represented with Austrian cheeses and snacks to boot. The entire evening becomes one pleasurable education on top sips from this gorgeous country.

6-9pm, $60
The Officers Club, 1 Fort Mason
www.austriauncorked.com
facebook.com/austrianwine
twitter.com/AustrianWine

FEAST: Free crystal glass!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: Free crystal glass!

culture@sfbg.com

Should ceaseless hangovers and clumsy, inebriated behavior ever sour you on the drinking scene, you could do worse than while away an evening in one of SF’s many pan-Asian dessert cafes. Cheap prices, pleasant late-night crowds, cultural cachet … the sole caveat being that, for the neophyte dabbler in casual Asian cuisine, menus can approach this side of incomprehensible. This thought came to me midway through ordering at Tapioca Express (1522 Fillmore, (415) 346-6600. www.tapiocaexpress.com). A whim had struck me for bubble tea, but in my naiveté, I had come unprepared for what lay ahead. A universe of flavors, forms, and toppings were at my fingertips — it’s not unusual for a café to feature more than 80 bubble tea options; variations on form, flavoring, and toppings (“free crystal glass,” which to me sounds like a great deal on street drugs). Even ignoring the savories, I was at a loss. But I squashed the disorientation and walked away with an avocado snow, a tapioca-beaded milkshake whose creamy taste will dispel any hesitation you have toward desserts made from nacho ingredients. Sitting with my prize and savoring the peaceful, nonalcoholic hum around me, I knew: I was hooked. I needed more dessert cafe. And thus it began, the adventures of a white girl in the land of taro, grass jelly, and tadpoles.

As if the culinary adventures at Creations Dessert House (5217 Geary, (415) 668-8812, www.creationsdessert.com) weren’t enough food for thought, the ambience, as in other specimens of its genre, strikes an odd balance between coffeehouse and sit-down restaurant. Rather than highlighting its bubble teas, the ginormous menu focuses on hearty snacks, from fast food-like “value boxes” to potato polenta-esque radish cakes topped with fish sauce, and elaborately plated desserts (bowls of cubed fruits and ice cream nestled neatly alongside each other, rather than the helter-skelter mix-up found on most Western plates). The waitress will bring you complimentary hot tea while you ponder your options.

An after-school crowd and a more fast food vibe prevails at Quickly (2116 Irving and various SF locations, (415) 665-3090, www.quicklyusa.com), a global megachain that provides a gateway to bubble tea from New Zealand to Singapore. I learned about Quickly’s ubiquity from the café’s helpfully excessive signage, which also alerted me to its “new healthy fashion food” with “fiber green milk tea, black rice, and colis milk.” Eschewing the fried mini octopi and hot grass jelly, a plant-based pudding treat, I opted for a saccharine sweet rose bubble tea. And, in a bit of providence, I tried the Hong Kong egg puff, which turned out to be a crispy, waffle-bubble wrap marriage. It’s folded into a paper envelope, which fit nicely into my heart. New favorite thing!

Imagine, then, my elation at discovering that this mysterious egg puff was not a solely corporate creation — that, in fact, a sojourn into the Outer Sunset (SF’s epicenter of Asian dessert pleasures) will reveal Eggettes (3136 Noriega, (415) 681-8818, www.eggettessf.com), whose specialty is the puff. Eggettes has the distinction of three flavors; original, chocolate, and honeydew, whose golden-brown crust cedes to a chewy green dough within. Eggettes features the usual phalanx of bubble teas, and for the packs of adolescents usually present, not just free wireless but free computers! Imagine! Should you go, try the rice rolls, flat noodles rolled into delicious chewy nuggets, accompanied by peanut and hoisin sauce.

The challenge of dessert cafes may be what relentlessly pulls us to them — the variety of their wares. After all, the menu at 37 Degrees Dessert Café (1155 Taraval, (415) 566-3887) is a solid 10 pages long, filled with evocative photos to guide your deliberations. Dare you try the Deep Sea, whose striated layers of sweet liquid and “coral jellies” resemble nothing more than the dentist office’s saltwater aquarium tank poured into a tall ice cream sundae glass? Will you opt for the crystal rolls at 100% Sweet Café (2512 Clement, (415) 221-1628), small rice paper sachets of sugary goo, fresh strawberries, and mangos that constitute the most difficult and slippery food item to eat ever?

All told, the dessert cafes made a distinct impression on me. Situated at a small table, plied with free hot tea, megalith menu in hand detailing lobster balls, black pearl barley, and cold tofu flakes curdled in a wooden bucket — it’s easy to lose a few hours contemplating the fact that one will never, ever know all there is to be eaten under the sun.

But a girl can try. Osmanthus jelly with a side of explosive eggs, please?

Throwing down with the Tablehopper

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Throwing down with the Tablehopper

The incredibly everywhere Marcia Gagliardi, a.k.a. the Tablehopper (www.tablehopper.com), has somehow canvassed, in-depth, every eatery, drinkery, and food-cartery in our fair city — while still maintaining her voracious appetite, sassy aplomb, and appealing figure. Her new book, The Tablehopper’s Guide to Dining and Drinking in San Francisco (Ten Speed Press) is one of those must-have recommendation books that truly opens your eyes and mouth to culinary nooks and crannies. Divided into a multitude of sections like “Shituations” (places for dumping someone), “Morning After Breakfasts,” “Picky Eaters,” “Dude Food,” and “Ethnic Group Dinners,” it’s a fantastic thing to have on hand for every occasion, real or imagined. Marcia took a minute to answer some of our more “Guardian” questions about Bay dining and drinking. (Marke B.)

SFBG I’m pansexual and bursting with spring fever. What bars or restaurants can I go to where the boys and girls and everything-in-between are hot and open to everything?

MARCIA GAGLIARDI I’ve always thought the Lush Lounge (1221 Polk, SF. 415-771-2022, www.lushloungesf.com) has a good mixed vibe, and it seems Blackbird (2124 Market, SF. 415-503-0630, www.blackbirdbar.com) draws a mixed crowd as well. Orbit Room (1900 Market, SF. 415-252-9525) too. Or just go to Beretta (1199 Valencia, SF. 415- 695-1199, www.berettasf.com) late at night, sprinkle some Ecstasy on everyone’s crispy thin-crust pizza, and see what happens.

SFBG I have $5 for dinner. Where should I go?

MG I’d go to Balompie Café (3349 18th St., SF. 415-648-9199) or El Zocalo (3230 Mission, SF. 415-282-2572) and get a couple of extremely filling pupusas, which come with chips and salsa. Yep, you can get some hot pupusa action for less than $5. Hott!

SFBG Oh dear, I’ve doublebooked on date night. But then I get to thinking — why not take ’em both on at once? They might get into each other as well, and three’s certainly company! What’s a good place to have them both meet me and, once the initial confusion subsides, gently introduce the idea of a potentially delicious ménage à trois?

MG Well, hello, Ms. Popular. This is the kind of night that calls for some sexy atmosphere, and whaddya know, booze. The cozy downstairs booths at Oola (860 Folsom, SF. 415-995-2061, www.oola-sf.com) might fit the bill, and you can take turns licking the sauce from the yummy, sticky, baby back ribs off each other’s fingers.

SFBG My parents are on their way to take me out to dinner, but I just got really stoned. Where will my goofy demeanor blend right in?

MG Florio (1915 Fillmore, SF. 415-775-4300, www.floriosf.com) would work because its dandy-yet-friendly atmosphere is parental-unit approved, the lights are dim, the hearty food will jive with your munchies, and there’s usually enough going on in there that your parents won’t be watching your every move. There’s also a little alley around the corner where you can spark up if you need another puff before dessert.

SFBG Best place to announce my impending gender reassignment surgery to someone close to me who may be surprised?

MG Absinthe (398 Hayes, SF. 415-551-1590, www.absinthe.com). You can request a quieter table so not everyone hears your answers to all of your friend’s burning questions, and the spirited cocktails — a coquettishly tangy Ginger Rogers or bourbon-spiked Scarlett O’Hara, perhaps? — will help them digest the good news.

SFBG Someone took me out on a date to a really expensive restaurant and insisted on paying. Now it’s my turn to take them out, but I’m like, down to my last $20. Where can I take them so they feel I’ve treated them to something classier than my budget suggests?

MG Ah yes, the old smoke and mirrors. I’d go to Great Eastern in Chinatown (649 Jackson, SF. 415-986-2500), which has some bountiful deals on set menus, and the room is spiffy. Or you could take them to dim sum at one of my favorite places, S&T Hong Kong Seafood (2578 Noriega, SF. 415-665-8338) in the Outer Susnset, and you will feast fo’ cheap.

SFBG What wine bars have the best pours? I mean top-of-the-glass for $6. I’m a-thirsty, girl!

MG Well, the folks working the bar at Castro’s 2223 (2223 Market, SF. 415-431-0692, www.2223restaurant.com) know their clientele well and do pretty big pours. Same with Laszlo (2526 Mission, SF. 415-401-0810, www.laszlobar.com). I also noted a fuller glass the last time I was at the Hidden Vine (620 Post, SF. 415-674-3567, www.thehiddenvine.com). And based on the number of loaded folks at the Wine Jar (1870 Fillmore, SF. 415-931-2924, www.winejar-sf.com), I’d say the generous pours are to blame.

SFBG What would you say are the most “interesting” things you’ve ever eaten in the city?

MG Some of the dishes at Spices! (294 Eighth Ave., SF. 415-752-8884) have definitely pushed the envelope for me. (Stinky tofu, intestine stew — and I don’t care to have either dish ever again). The tendon pho at Pho Tan Hoa (431 Jones, SF. 415-673-3163) definitely rates on the funky meter — and I’m talking big hunks of tendon.

Pioneers! O Urban Pioneers!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Pioneers! O Urban Pioneers!

By Robyn Johnson

culture@sfbg.com

People are returning to land like it’s the 1970s all over again, but they’re not packing up for Vermont, letting their hair go au naturel, and unplugging from the grid to do it. Urban agriculture is sprouting up like, well, sprouts. And while we all feel strongly about sustainability and pay a lot of lip service to higher ideals, the majority of us probably aren’t willing to adopt the radical homemaker lifestyle and sacrifice cell phone coverage, The Colbert Report, or regular social interactions. The following cursory guide highlights a few urban farms in SF and immediate environs where you can volunteer or access food, as well as resources for cultivating your space in the concrete tangle (even if you live in a third-story apartment) and options for the time-honored tradition of gleaning.

 

MANY FARMHANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK

Community farms offer support not always available for the individual plots of community gardens (which typically have astronomically long wait-lists anyway), or even your own cramped Bay Area backyard. And for 60-hour-work-weekers, it might be taxing to grow more than a bit of basil or mold on that cheese in the back of the fridge. If you don’t have the time, energy, space, or inclination to follow famed urban farmer Novella Carpenter’s fantastic example (ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com), consider volunteering at the following places to satisfy your green thumb’s bidding.

As Chris Burley, the director of Hayes Valley Farm (www.hayesvalleyfarm.com) told me, “People are looking for a tangible way to get their hands dirty and address the impacts of our ecologically destructive, industrialized food system while doing something meaningful and connecting with their community.” And that’s exactly the goal that the farm, located off Laguna and Fell steets, has been aiming to fulfill since its inception as a way to revitalize an unused lot, once a freeway onramp, into a shared space.

Although the farm is still taking root, so to speak, the plan is to eventually grow enough fresh and organic food to feed the neediest nearby members plus the volunteers working to cultivate the space. Education also plays a major part in the function of the project, with Thursday and Sunday “work parties” where people can get that hand-dirtying experience, as well as regular classes on urban gardening and permaculture.

Altho Quesada Gardens Initiative (www.quesadagardens.org) primarily operates as a community-directed organization that seeks to strengthen the social systems of Bayview-Hunters Point, local food production has become one of the top concerns of the neighborhood. The resident-led nonprofit connects and maintain backyard farms and free food-producing community gardens throughout the area. In one of the neater facets of its food justice work, the group also helps maintain the kitchen garden of roving supper club Old Skool Café (www.oldskoolcafe.org), which employs at-risk or previously incarcerated youth. With such kick-ass people, it’s no wonder that urban farm hero Will Allen adopted one of the satellite gardens on his visit to the Bayview. Community volunteer meetings and gardening days tend to be informal, so e-mail for specific opportunities.

Sometimes the best things in life really are free. Located at Gough and Eddy on land kindly lent by the Lutheran Church, The Free Farm (www.thefreefarm.org) intends to give away 100 percent of its produce. Still in its initial development stages, the fledgling project welcomes volunteers every Saturday and Wednesday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. to help with the launch. Working in tandem with its sister organization, The Free Farm Stand in the Mission also offers fresh fruits and vegetables donated by other local urban farmers. Although places like Little City Gardens (www.littlecitygardens.com) and folks who glean from public land contribute, the bulk of the produce comes from the 18th Street and Rhode Island (www.18thandrhodeisland.org) farm maintained by the SF Permaculture Guild, which offers volunteer opportunities as well. With a goal to sextuple the farm’s output within the next five years, it could probably use a little bit more help. Work days are on Friday.

For West Oakland residents, two nonprofits have been power-housing to combat the food desert that plagues the area. City Slickers Farms (www.cityslickerfarms.org) operates several all volunteer-run farms throughout the neighborhood that could always use a few extra work hands. Collectively these six lots cultivate ducks and chickens, bee hives, veggies, fruit trees, and medicinal herbs, the produce of which are distributed through the Saturday Farm Stand on a sliding scale or work-trade basis — no one’s turned away. And if you still have a mighty urge for some composting, weeding, planting, and mulching, People’s Grocery (www.peoplesgrocery.org) runs three farms that constantly need tending. The 55st Street location tends fruit trees, culinary herbs, and vegetables; 59th Street is a slightly less cultivated space in collaboration with Berkeley’s Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project (www.spiralgardens.org), which runs its own food garden off Oregon and Sacramento streets for you West Berkeleyites. People’s Grocery’s newest land acquisition, the plot behind the California Hotel off of 35th and Chestnut streets, hosts a greenhouse and a biointensive microfarm that replaced its 3.5 acre Sunol site last January.

 

HOME SWEET URBAN HOMESTEAD

If you have access to private land to cultivate, or even if you don’t, the following resources will set you on the path to food freedom. These classes, demonstration sites, and professional landscaping services will help you turn backyards, rooftops, and even windows into humming generators of small-scale urban agriculture.

Before you even think to take a shovel to your virgin backyard or start a worm bin, visit Garden for the Environment (www.gardenfortheenvironment.org). A one-acre demonstration garden in the heart of Golden Gate Heights that also teaches organic food production and sustainable landscaping with weekly workshops, you can see how it’s done before trial-and-erroring on that graywater irrigation system or chicken coop. The resource directory on its Web site also serves as an invaluable aid for at-home troubleshooting. Hotlines for gardening and composting issues, where to find recycled lumber, how to test your soil, manure suppliers, wasp removal companies — it’s all there.

DIY food production classes abound everywhere in the Bay Area but the one-stop shopper won’t find a better resource than the Institute of Urban Homesteading (www.iuhoakland.com) in Oakland. It offers a comprehensive curriculum ranging from beekeeping, butchery, goat farming, brewcraft, herbal medicine, bread making, fermentation, berry patches, and other topics of the same ilk. It’s a real crash course in manifesting your inner Laura Ingalls Wilder. With no central location, classes are taught in the teachers’ homes, which presents a neat opportunity to see real-time urban homesteading and the different ways people create sustainable places in an urban setting. Also consider Urban Kitchen SF (www.urbankitchensf.com) and BioFuel Oasis (www.biofueloasis.com) in Berkeley for supplementary courses.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and green behind the ears, several services will landscape your yard into a cornucopia of organic delectables and even continue the maintenance if you just can’t do anything with that black thumb of death. Star Apple Edible Gardens (www.starappleediblegardens.com) provides a range of services throughout the Bay Area, the simplest being consultations and composting tutorials. You also can order ready-made kitchen gardens or go whole kit and caboodle and have customized “garden design and installation, pathway and hardscape installation, irrigation design and installation, planting, plant feeding and cultivation, regular harvesting of your garden crops, and design, installation, and maintenance of composting systems.” Other similar businesses include All Edibles (www.alledibles.com), which specifically works with East Bay dwellers, and Chris Sein of Wildheart Gardens (www.wildheartgardens.com), who also consults on backyard chickens and mushrooms.

For a lot of us in the Bay Area, the dream of having a backyard is about as likely as Glenn Beck admitting that Obama is not a herald of an impending Orwellian dictatorship. So what can the more dispossessed among us do to return to the soil? Popular in Europe and becoming more so here, rooftop gardens are a great solution to space issues. Graze the Roof (www.grazetheroof.blogspot.com), the community vegetable patch on top of Glide Memorial Church, hosts rooftop gardening workshops. You can also gain experience by volunteering on work days every Thursday or first Saturdays. For those feeling less than philanthropic or sociable, pop over to your local bookstore to pick up the Use Your Roof Guidebook by Bay Area Localize (www.baylocalize.org). Seven bucks and four easy chapters gets you on your way to a more edible roof.

For balcony-less apartment dwellers, and maybe those with vaulted ceilings, window farms have become the new rooftop gardens. An open-source project that’s evolved over the past year, Windowfarms (www.windowfarms.org) gives how-tos for its innovatively cheap and space-conscious hydroponics system — jerry-rigged from repurposed plastic water bottles, tubing, and fish tank pumps that hangs in vertical columns in the window — as free PDFs on its Web site. It also hosts community boards where members share improvements to the system, which is constantly being updated. Alas, window farms can only really successfully raise leafy greens, but having a homegrown salad in a studio apartment is still pretty darn amazing.

If you already have your urban farm bustling along — or even just a prolific citrus tree — then yard-sharing is a great way to spread the fruit of your labor throughout the community. Neighborhood Fruit (www.neighborhoodfruit.com), SF Glean (www.sfglean.org), and Produce to the People (www.producetothepeople.org) will gladly help you to unload the excess bounty and distribute it to the hungry.

FEAST: 5 farm-fresh cocktails

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: 5 farm-fresh cocktails

We’re used to well-crafted, artisanal cocktails year-round in our city, and some bartenders showcase the bounty of the seasons in their cocktails, using local fruits, herbs, vegetables. It’s easy to take the abundance of the region for granted, but let’s not and remember to enjoy what can happen when fresh produce and spirits get into the right hands. Here are a few places and drinks we recommend as winter turns to spring. (Virginia Miller)

BEET COCKTAILS AT THE ALEMBIC


The Alembic offers quite a selection of spirits and beer, plus some of our city’s best cocktails, including New Orleans’ classics done right. (Thankfully, the bar doesn’t let the small space get too crowded, it regulates crowds at the door during peak hours. Even so, I prefer "off" times during the afternoon or early weeknights). The staff knows its stuff, so go ahead and ask them to make you something off menu with your favorite spirit as a base. In recent weeks, I’ve seen wonders worked with fresh produce on hand, whether it beets, ginger, or even galangal. A couple versions of a beet cocktail wowed me each time, the latest being a Rittenhouse Rye base with dry vermouth, red wine vinegar, orange zest muddled with sugar, and plenty of beets for a glowing red hue. Topped with a celery leaf and splash of sparkling wine, it’s a tart, earthy, slightly effervescent delight. If no beets are in house, you can’t go wrong with menu staple, Southern Exposure ($10), a Junipero Gin cocktail brightened with mint leaves, lime, a touch of sugar and a shot of fresh celery juice.

1725 Haight, SF. (415) 666-0822, www.alembicbar.com

KUMQUAT CAIPIRINHA AT NOPA


If you want to be ahead of the curve tasting a new small batch spirit no one has heard of or cocktails unlike anyone else’s, Nopa is your spot. Bar manager Neyah White, who’s always ahead of trends and has a pioneer’s taste for the untried, has introducing me to spirits I’ll later hear everyone talking about. Neyah and the Nopa bar staff create luscious cocktails — try one of their sherry or white whiskey renditions for a proper use of the spirits. If you’re lucky, the kumquats they’ve been procuring for weeks will still be on the menu for a kumquat caiprinha ($9). I’ve had kumquats in a number of cocktails — the juicy tart is a lifelong favorite taste. Not only are Nopa’s kumquats the best I’ve had in recent memory, but the use of Boca Loca Cachaca and fresh lime with the plump, tart citrus makes for a bracing drink: pleasantly sweet, floral, tangy. I ate every kumquat out of the glass.

560 Divisadero, SF. (415) 864-8643, www.nopasf.com

KENTUCKY BUCK AT RICKHOUSE


Rickhouse has one of those dream menus for cocktailians: pages and pages of flips, fizzes, and punches. The atmosphere holds the magic mustiness of a dim old bourbon house — without the must. (You just have to brave — or avoid — the Financial District happy hour mobs). From Rickhouse’s beverage director, Erick Castro, comes a drink created last spring that has thankfully stuck around: the Kentucky Buck. A refreshing bourbon and ginger beer cocktail ($8), it is one of the best-balanced bucks I’ve tasted. ("Buck" is the historic name for drinks involving a base spirit, citrus, and ginger beer or ale). Bourbon is served with organic Monterey Bay Farms’ strawberries, lemon, Angostura bitters, then topped with ginger beer. Refreshing and spring-like, it’s nuanced, showcasing all the strawberry’s best assets without overstepping into sweet territory.

246 Kearney, SF. (415) 398-2827, www.rickhousebar.com

EVERGREEN AT RANGE


Range sets the standard for experimental but refined cocktails. This is one of the great neighborhood restaurants, but it’s also a worthy bar destination. You can expect fresh and inventive here every time — with classic cocktail sensibilities. The Evergreen welcomes spring with gusto in the form of citrus and herbs. Plymouth Gin and St. Germain accompany fresh kumquat juice, sage, and lemon. Smooth and bright, not one flavor overpowers the other, but all meld nicely. If tequila is more your speed, try the Malia with Pueblo Viejo blanco tequila, lime, egg white, cinnamon bitters, and a winning duo of quince and apple.

842 Valencia, SF. (415) 282-8283, www.rangesf.com

TRACK 42 AT 15 ROMOLO


Thankfully, this cocktail has been on the menu a while, a glass of layered delights from one of our city’s best all-around bars, 15 Romolo. Track 42 ($12) is an exhilarating fresh garden of a drink made with 42 Below Manuka Honey Vodka, basil, unfiltered apple juice, lemon, and egg white. You won’t go wrong with most anything on (or off) the menu, but this treat involves more complexity and nuanced flavor than the "vodka cocktail" label would suggest, and is a favorite among many, many delectable drinks. Other highlights: I love the Prohibition-era elegance, laid back staff, and legendary Chartreuse Gong Shows — American Idol-like karaoke shows with judges, a giant gong if you suck, and, yes, shots of chartreuse for everyone. 15 Romolo is the bar I wish was in my neighborhood.

15 Romolo Place, SF. (415) 398-1359, www.15romolo.com

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