Food & Drink

FEAST: 6 voluptuous buns

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: 6 voluptuous buns

Pools of ink and its electronic equivalent have been expended helping SF’s legions of night-crawlers find the best drinks, beats, and eats. Not so for our less numerous early-risers. But there are plenty of reasons to get up early: seagulls materializing out of the fog, the sun rising over the bay, first pressings at Ritual, parking spaces, and, perhaps most important, morning buns. Specifically, warm morning buns.

Unlike the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana‘s rules on pizza (dough no higher than 1/8 inch thick, hand-kneaded only), the French-inspired morning bun has some latitude. Buns can be made with brioche dough or croissant dough; flavored with cinnamon, or orange, or both. Puff pastry does not raise cries of quelle horreur! But whatever the yeast-risen dough base, the ideal MB should be a “turned” pastry, layered with butter and spices, then dusted with sugar and baked to caramelized crispness. Nuts, raisins, or frosting mean you have strayed — egad — into snail or danish territory.

Like bagels, MBs also are the perfect food ephemera. By 9:30 a.m. the chances of finding a still-warm one have passed. By 11 a.m., they have aged out completely. So set your alarm and get in line. (Diane Sussman)

 

SANDBOX BAKERY

This small Bernal Heights newcomer is already making a name for itself for its superlative sandwiches, kashi pans, and pastries (I’m talking to you, Valrhona pain au chocolat), and its MB is no exception. Starting with a brioche dough, Sandbox MB has a crisp, flaky top that gives way to fragrant, generous layers of cinnamon, sugar, and orange doughy bliss. Even better, this is one bun source where you can still get a warm one even if you sleep in (sort of). Although the bakery opens at 7 a.m., one staffer revealed that its MBs don’t usually come out of the oven until 7:30.

833 Cortland, SF. (415) 642-8580. www.sandboxbakerysf.com

 

TARTINE BAKERY

Scoring an MB at Tartine requires a strategy. Well before it opens (times vary), Tartine has lines out the door. Granted, not everyone is there for an MB, but that doesn’t alleviate fears among MB heads that the person ahead of you line won’t order five dozen. In addition, Tartine Mbers have subgenres of preferences, preferring “light on the bottom.” But not to worry. All colors of Tartine’s MBs (which start with croissant dough) have crisp, sweet, flaky, muffin-like tops with soft, yeasty, buttery centers sprinkled with orange, cinnamon, and sugar. In addition to competition, Tartine’s MBs are also more expensive ($3.75 compared to $2–$2.50 elsewhere).

600 Guerrero, SF. (415) 487-2600. www.tartinebakery.com

 

 

DELESSIO MARKET AND BAKERY

Delessio is the MB slug-a-bed’s dream joint. The combination deli-bakery doesn’t open until 8 a.m., and even then the bakers often run 10 to 15 minutes late. (Value add: sometimes the friendly staff will let you pluck your own MB from the cooling rack — use paper!). Delessio’s offering is moist, flaky (it uses a brioche dough), not too sweet, and generous with cinnamon. Delessio does have one tragic flaw, though: it doesn’t bake those buns every day. Call first or learn a vital lesson in flexibility with the breakfast brioche.

1695 Market and 302 Broderick, SF. (415) 552-5559 and (415) 552-8077. www.delessiomarket.com

 

LA BOULANGE

Stare into one of the pastry cases at Boulange and you’ll see the signs for “morning buns.” But Boulange’s morning bun isn’t really a morning bun, as one staff member readily acknowledged. “We call them cinnamon-orange buns,” she said. “They are our own version of morning buns.” Starting with a croissant dough, Boulange MBs are flatter and rounder than a traditional morning bun, don’t have the crispy, caramelized sugar muffin top, and have a bit more orange than others. While purists may shriek, “Wrong!” iconoclasts are likely to counter with “Nice!” (Whole Foods also carries Boulange’s buns in its bakery cases.)

Various locations, www.laboulange.com

 

MATCHING HALF CAFE

The small neighborhood café at the corner of Fulton and Baker streets in the Panhandle doesn’t bake its own MBs, but it does get a daily stash from Bakers of Paris. Shunning tradition, Bakers of Paris uses puff pastry and rolls its version with orange zest, making for a light, refreshingly acidic, not too sweet treat. Although you can’t get one fresh out of the oven (Bakers of Paris’ bakery is in Brisbane), Matching Half staff will heat it up for you. (Bakers of Paris also sells its buns at the Sunday farmers markets on Grove in the Divis Corridor and Irving in the Inner Sunset.)

1799 McAllister, SF. (415) 674-8699. www.matchinghalfcafe.com

 

SEMIFREDDI’S

Sorry, you can’t go to the source, and you won’t get a warm one. But if you have access to a warming device — and you can wait — you can opt for one of Semifreddi’s goodies. The bakery, which has its baking operations in the East Bay and no retail outlet, trucks its wonderfully carmelized, brioche-based MBs to numerous grocery stores, including Mollie Stone’s, Berkeley Bowl, and Faletti Market. Perfect for when you really slept late. www.semifreddis.com

La Trappe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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La Trappe

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Trappist monasteries are renowned for their contemplative silences, during dinner in particular, as well as for their beer-brewing. To get a sense of how these conflicting tendencies work themselves out in the great world, all you need to do is step into La Trappe Cafe, which could be the city’s only Belgian restaurant and whose signage describes it as a “Trappist lounge.” If this is true, it’s certainly in the beer sense and not the silent sense. Of course, beer does not conduce to silence, especially in the young — at least not right away — and La Trappe is nothing if not a haven for the young. And it’s in North Beach! North Beach has young people, tons of them, not just aging Italian tailors. They come pouring through the door in groups of two, three, and more and head immediately downstairs.

Downstairs is where the action is at La Trappe. Upstairs, on the main floor, is a perfectly nice North Beach storefront restaurant with lots of windows and an exhibition kitchen. But descend the curvy stairway and you find yourself in a moodily lit realm that’s like a cross between a speakeasy and a medieval monastery — only louder. St. Benedict, the sixth-century figure whose rules guided Trappist monks from their beginnings in 17th-century Normandy, surely would not be pleased by the din. But he might well approve of the many varieties of beer on offer; some of the labels, such as Chimay (brewed by “pères Trappistes”), are among Belgium’s best-known exports.

How different is Belgian food from Dutch food or, for that matter, German food? The potato plays an outsize role in all these cuisines. In Belgium, the spud is turned into glorious fries, served with mayonnaise for dipping (a hint there of French influence, about which more anon), and La Trappe’s version ($6) of this national dish is beautifully rendered. The fries are properly ectomorphic, with sturdy, crunchy exteriors and voluptuous, creamy insides. That are served in the traditional paper cone along with two dipping sauces of your choice. These range widely and include several kinds of mayo (regular, wasabi, Dijon) as well as curry ketchup, which will be familiar to aficionados of the German treat Currywurst and is quite gingery — an index of freshness, I would say.

Belgium, though small, is an interestingly fractured land. The capital city, Brussels, is mainly French-speaking, while in the more northerly city of Antwerp the dominant tongue is Flemish, a language related to Dutch and Low German. La Trappe describes its asparagus ($8) as prepared “Flemish style,” and this means the spears are steamed, then sprinkled with what looks like a light snowfall of grated Parmesan but is in fact shredded hard-boiled egg. I would have preferred the cheese. The egg added nothing to what is one of the most prized vegetables in French cuisine.

But such blips are a rarity at La Trappe. The food is solid and satisfying across a broad range that runs from California familiars like calamari salad ($10), dotted with halved cherry tomatoes and dressed with a red-wine vinaigrette subtly sweetened, I thought, with a dash of balsamic, to Belgian dishes such as Oostend fish gratin ($12), which looked like a small shepherd’s pie: a crust of melted cheese atop mussels and chunks of cod swimming in béchamel sauce. One of its near relatives has to be macaroni and cheese, with seafood substituting here for the pasta.

In a city of bad burgers, La Trappe’s ($11) is exceptional. The menu card announces that the beef is grass-fed and organic, from Marin Sun Farms, and usually I would interpret these proclamations of virtue as a warning that the burger will turn out to be dry and tasteless. But not here. If you order it medium-rare, you’ll get it that way, with a well-seared crust around a succulent, rosy core. Add a slice of Gouda on top ($1.50) and have the brioche bun, and you might be holding the best burger in town, certainly one of them. The fries are probably superfluous, since you’ve almost certainly had a coneful or two as a starting nibble, but they’re also irresistible.

The dessert menu contains at least one item of genuine interest, a parfait ($6) layered with strawberries, whipped cream, and pulverized Belgian biscuits our server likened to ginger snaps. You even get a whole biscuit so you can see what it looks like in its pre-pulverized form. By order of St. Benedict?

LA TRAPPE CAFE

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 6–11 p.m.

800 Greenwich, SF

(425) 440-8727

www.latrappecafe.com

Beer and wine

DS/MC/V

Deafening downstairs

Tricky wheelchair access

 

That po’ boy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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That po’ boy

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS There is something pretty exquisite about being stood up by a date. When I find out what it is, I’ll be sure to let you know. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Words.

The stander-upper was someone I’d bonked back before I accidentally fell in love with whatsername. We’d had a long coffee date that turned into a long walk in the park that turned into making out for a long time on a park bench, which of course turned into going to the grocery store to buy pork.

And a bottle of wine.

Now, I had a very strict policy back then of never having sex with someone on a first date. I have since added an amendment forbidding me to have more than one date with a person in a single day. Because somewhere between the pork and the wine we determined that since we’d driven separate cars from the grocery store to my house, this dinnery business was technically our second date.

So, yes, sex happened. Then, like a lot of guys who sleep with me once, he became obsessed with two seemingly contradictory thoughts: how to sleep with me again, and how to never ever, under any circumstances, sleep with me again. Thus he would e-mail me every other night: He had to see me immediately or else, as I read it, his hair would catch on fire and his penis would rocket away from his body, through the roof of his house, into outer space, and then back down into the atmosphere where of course it too would be consumed in flames and therefore ruined.

Not wanting that, I would cancel whatever plans were cluttering my calendar and we’d make a date — which he would cancel at the last minute because his mom had a tumor, or his car blew up, or his son or sister (or in many cases both) had been taken aboard an alien spacecraft and needed everyone’s prayers for a while.

I’m a trusting sort, and pretty patient, I think, but after 60 times I told this cat to get lost. Instead, he went into therapy. So I got lost. In Germans and Germany and so forth. Well, around the time things were busting apart for me there, I got another e-mail from him here saying he can’t stop thinking about me, he can’t believe he blew it with me, he’s gotten his shit together finally and wondered if I would give him another chance.

The man is tall. Very tall. So tall that I can wear four-inch heels and still only come up to his chin. For the first time in nine months, I wrote back. I said I was a broken woman, that I was coming home, and that eventually I would have coffee with him. That that was all we would have this time. No pork.

So we did, eventually, have our second first date — just coffee — and then, even more eventually, a very nice and only slightly less platonic dinner date, which ended with a soft, sweet kiss in his car.

It was our third (or in other words, fifth) date when he stood me up. And as I sat there waiting at my for-real favorite restaurant, Just For You, listening to live violin music, I decided that being stood up was pretty exquisite, maybe because it implies just dating, which implies uncertainty — and then when you finally give up and place your order, and the waitressperson as-discreetly-as-possible clears away that other place setting … then you do know. It’s decided, done, or over before it started, and sad, yes — but it’s a delicious sadness, because you still get to eat.

As I drenched my fried oyster po’boy in Crystal hot sauce, which somehow seemed even more romantic than violins, I decided that even if he was in the hospital having heart attacks, I would not give this tall man another “another chance.”

Three days later I finally heard from him. By e-mail. He’d been in the hospital, having heart attacks. Hopes I’ll still see him.

That same day eating with Last Straw’s childerns at Sunflower, Larkstraw, age 10, who aspires to be a writer, asked how long I’d been writing about restaurants, how much I get paid, do I ever write about the same place more than once, and if so, why?

“Any excuse I can find,” I said. Happy 20-Year Anniversary to: 

JUST FOR YOU

Mon.–Fri. 7:30 a.m.– 9 p.m.; Sat.–Sun. 8 a.m. – 3 p.m.

732 22nd St., S.F.

(510) 647-3033

MC/V

Beer and wine

 

Appetite: 3 food memoirs with heart

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 food memoirs with heart

While reading Kim Severson’s new gem of a food memoir that came out last week, I started reminiscing about other food memoirs in recent years that travel well beyond food… the kind of books that leave one simultaneously comforted, satiated and challenged to live a more authentic life.

Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life by Kim Severson
Kim Severson, a New York Times food journalist, just debuted Spoon Fed, sharing about eight cooks who taught her important life precepts. I read a lot of food memoirs but when this one hit my desk a few weeks ago, I couldn’t put it down. It contains stories (each accompanied by a recipe) of food trailblazers, from Alice Waters to Marion Cunningham. I related not only to Severson’s stories of life on both coasts (and in the Midwest) or as a food writer, but was touched by her tender honesty, blanketed in warm frankness. Severson’s life lessons are never heavy-handed and, in fact, are so vulnerable, I came away renewed to face my own hang-ups, while understanding others’. I particularly loved “Popular Girls,” a chapter on Ruth Reichl and self-acceptance, or lessons on faith and tenacity in New Orleans from the wonderful Leah Chase, even embracing authenticity and ambition from Rachael Ray. Severson’s own stories carry impact due to the heartfelt candor with which she shares her insecurities and fears, and what she has achieved in facing them.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg
Molly Wizenberg is an author who grew up in Oklahoma (where I was born), exhibiting a youthful yet mature-beyond-her-years hominess in her writing and comforting recipes. A Homemade Life pulsates with accessible heart but not naivete. This was a favorite memoir in recent years, laden with bittersweet sadness from her father’s cancer, the rejuvenating joy of re-discovering herself and her love for food upon returning to Paris after his death, the surprise of starting a blog, Orangette, that gained her an international following… and even more suprising, meeting the love her life through the blog. Her recipes are delicious, whether cider-glazed salmon or a ginger chocolate banana bread that’s become a staple in my own kitchen.

Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples by Ruth Reichl
One of Kim Severson’s aforementioned inspirations, Ruth Reichl has also long been a favorite of mine. Her memoirs are enjoyable reads, including delightful stories of life and disguises as a NY Times food critic in “Garlic and Sapphires”, or understanding her mother in “Not Becoming My Mother”. Reading Severson brought to mind Ruth’s first two memoirs, Tender at the Bone (1998) and Comfort Me with Apples (2002). Whether bluntly proclaiming she wasn’t “pretty or funny or sexy” but could attract people with food, or, in “Comfort Me…” (I recommend this one if you haven’t read her books), where she reveals, via colorful food and travel stories, the heartbreak of the dissolution of her first marriage or the agony of nearly adopting a child. Ruth’s bright candor, adventurous palate and lack of self pity make these food memoirs worth returning to.

Visit Virginia Miller’s food itinerary and review site, www.theperfectspotsf.com

Appetite: A course of courses

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: A course of courses

On a sunny Saturday morning, 3/27 in Menlo Park, Chef Guillaume Bienaime led a small group of us through cooking a five course meal, finishing with a leisurely lunch, all in Marche‘s well-outfitted kitchen and dining room. Groggy upon arrival  — it was 10am; not early, but I had to make it down from the city — Guillame was steaming cappuccinos and serving awesome banana dark chocolate scones to get us properly fueled for a couple hours of cooking. Guillame and staff are about as laidback it gets. This isn’t the kind of class where’ll you’ll get intense instruction or detailed technique, but Guillaume and staff are right there in the mix the entire time, offering tips, showing you how best to chop, hack, grill or puree.

I’m glad I didn’t get the job of dissecting a saddle of lamb. I’m sure it would do me well to learn such butchering technique, but fresh off a recent, deep cooking slice into my thumb, thoughts of hacking fat and bone with a cleaver gave me chills. But my fellow classmate fearlessly tackled the meat, with fine, orderly cuts to show for her efforts. Seared and roasted with an olive and caper relish, the lamb was medium rare and juicy.

Veggies were truly beautiful: from grilled aspargus with tender morels and spring onion to a creamy, soup-like fennel & potato veloute, it was a garden cornucopia. My favorite vegetable dish we made? Nantes carrots, toasted in a blend of coriander, sesame seed and hazelnuts. Buttery, nutty and fresh, this is one I can’t wait to make at home. Watching the carrots sizzle in giant ovens gave me a little thrill as they simultaneously smelled divine. The next class on April 24 focuses on Spring vegetables so I imagine there will be more along these lines.

I personally took on summer-redolent strawberry soup with rhubarb poached in grenadine, sugar and water. The sous chef patiently showed me a more aesthetic way to cut up rhubarb stalk. Pushing strawberries through a powerful juicer was a plain, old good time. We topped the lovely soup mixture (with lemon, orange and strawberry juices plus a splash of kirsch for good measure) with fresh, house-made yogurt. Since that needed more prep time, it was already pre-made by Marche staff.

Lingering over our decadent, farm-fresh lunch with other South Bay foodies and cooks, we enjoyed an Alsace white, sweet on the nose, while conversation centered around food, naturally. It’s a pricey class and more for those who want to try by doing (which is how I best learn), rather than receiving step-by-step instruction, but it’s another of those many educational food pleasures available to us in the Bay Area. Guillaume and staff are hands-on but relaxed and you’ll be cooking in a fine dining kitchen, a rare opportunity for many of us.

Next class: 4/24, 10am-1:30pm — number of courses depends on size of class
$105 per person (limited to 14)
898 Santa Cruz Avenue, Menlo Park
(650) 324-9092
www.restaurantmarche.com

Visit Virgina’s personal culinary itinerary site at www.theperfectspotsf.com

RN74

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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RN74

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE As we wait for someone to open a restaurant called Highway 29 — the ultimate Napa Valley wine-country spot — we are comforted in the knowledge that we already have RN74. You are absolved for not knowing that RN74, the road, is the Highway 29 of Burgundy. It runs south from the provincial capital of Dijon to Beaune, in the heart of the Burgundian wine country.

I am not thrilled with the local trend toward naming restaurants after European highways — the names sound too much like car names — but there is no denying the force behind RN74. That force is Michael Mina, and if there is a more lustrous name in the recent annals of San Francisco restauranting, that name has escaped my notice. Mina was the man who, for a decade, guided the kitchen at Aqua (after an opening starburst of George Morrone); he then went on to open his (first) eponymous restaurant in the Westin St. Francis in the summer of 2004, with another following at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

The themes here would seem to be luxe and empire, but in both of those senses, RN74 upsets expectations. It is beautiful and elegant inside but not overwrought, and it is (so far) one-of-a-kind. The main disappointment, for me, pertains to location; as at nearby Roy’s, the windows gaze out onto Mission Street and the romantic spell fades. Maybe that’s why such effort has been spent on the window treatments, with row after row of louvered screens lending a sense of warm summer evenings while subtly filtering out much of the actual view.

The other tremendous design element is the huge wine board hanging high above the east end of the dining room. It resembles the big boards you see in French railway stations, black with ever-changing white letters, like a huge mechanized chalkboard. In train stations, the board gives destinations and platforms; at RN74, the data involves last bottles of wine.

Given the immense scope of the wine list, the mechanized chalkboard must be close to indispensable. You could easily get lost in the printed version, which runs for many pages in small print and includes bottlings from France, Italy, Spain, California, and elsewhere, more than a few of them running into the hundreds of dollars. But the big board flashes deals — we snagged the last of an Italian gamay for $42 — while the prix-fixe option, three courses for $39, also includes a crack at the sommelier’s choice of red or white Burgundy for $30.

The food is exemplary: much less intricate and overbearing than at Michael Mina while losing little or nothing in inventiveness and polish. I was especially impressed by the smoked-sturgeon rillettes ($9), which incorporated a responsibly farmed fish into a classic French technique to produce a beguiling result — a kind of shmear to be spread on toast points. (The fish had been combined with crème fraïche for extra velvetiness.)

When your risotto wins the approval of someone who dislikes risotto, you must be making pretty good risotto. RN74’s leek version ($15) included plenty of Parmesan cheese, green peas, trumpet mushrooms, and watercress; it had the look and texture of corn snow, and the grains were perfectly cooked al dente, with just a hint of chalkiness. No mush. And when your grilled Monterey Bay sardines ($14) are gobbled up by someone who doesn’t like sardines … well, Q.E.D.

The main courses are marginally less compelling, mainly because they are star-driven and tend to rely on large masses of protein rather than artful interlacings of varied ingredients. Still, protein has its charms: halibut ($27) poached in olive oil to an almost confit-like denseness and plated with asparagus and snap peas; a pair of rounds of center-cut ribeye ($30), still gorgeously purple-pink in the middle and riding a coarse magic carpet woven from green garlic and trumpet mushrooms, while a ravioli filled with potato mousseline sat to one side like a cupcake; a filet of striped bass ($28), intoxicatingly scented with herbs and served with little pebbles of crisped chorizo.

Beignets seem to be well on their way to joining crème brûlée and molten chocolate cakes on just about every dessert menu around. At RN74, the beignets ($9) look like little throw pillows someone spilled sugar all over, and you dip them in a whiskey-caramel sauce with a little whipped cream. More interesting was a chocolate-praline bar ($9) — if your tailor made bespoke candy bars, they’d be something like this. You can get throw pillows anywhere.

RN74

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

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

301 Mission, SF

(415) 543-7474

www.RN74.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Bearable noise even when full

Wheelchair accessible

 

Hugs and kisses

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Hugs and kisses

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

You keep that up now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You keep that up, now, Pod.

RICO’S DINER

Mon.–Sat.: 10 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

400 15th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-8424

Cash only

Beer

Appetite: 3 non-whisk(e)y highlights from Whiskies of the World

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Appetite: 3 non-whisk(e)y highlights from Whiskies of the World

Whiskies of the World is a little smaller in scope and selection than Whiskyfest, both of which come to few cities in America — and we’re lucky to always be one of them. On March 27, WoW, as Whiskies of the World is known, was chaotic and overly packed in a Hotel Nikko ballroom. Bushmills Pipe and Drum band kept it festive walking through once an hour with rousing bagpipes, while classes, like the Craft Panel Discussion (led by craft distilling masters, including our own Fritz Maytag of Anchor Steam), were an educational high point.

Read more about the event and whisk(e)y tasting highlights in the upcoming 4/15 edition of The Perfect Spot; overview and vendor list link in my 3/22 Guardian column.

For your imbibing pleasure, I’m highlighting just three of the non-whisk(e)y treasures at this year’s WoW:

Bend Distillery: Already a favorite and properly stocked in my home bar, Oregon’s Bend Distillery makes award-winning vodka and gin —  but do what you must to get your hands on these unique, wonderful vodkas they’ve created: Cofia is a lush blend of roasted hazelnuts and fresh-brewed coffee. Only lightly sweet, it’s aromatic, robust, dark. Mazama-infused Pepper Vodka is named after a volcano that erupted to become Crater Lake. A blend of six different sweet and hot peppers, blissfully hot (as in spicy) it also tastes of fresh pepper skins. Recommended in cocktails or with mango juice on the site (and even for cooking), I actually love a splash of it on its own.

Death’s Door Spirits: I’m quite taken with Death’s Door Spirits, a small-batch distiller out of Wisconsin (Washington Island, to be specific, near Madison). Their latest packaging is elegant, turn-of-the-century classic, and their spirits are made sustainably and from local grain. Reflecting the terroir and ingredients of Washington Island, their awesome white whiskey is one of the best in the genre. But in the non-whiskey category, its gin, is amazing – a recent favorite. Plenty of juniper and botanical notes dominate in this clean, beautiful gin.

Corsair – This is a small artisan distiller out of Kentucky, I’m at first titillated by the hip packaging. While Corsair’s Wry Moon rye may not be the stand-out for me, I find the Pumpkin Spice Moonshine a playful white whiskey with the spirit of a pumpkin ale. RED Absinthe particularly intrigued with a pinkish-red hue from hibiscus and floral fennel notes on the tongue.

Where can you get it? Bend has a Web site list. Death’s Door is on its way to California but is already served in savvy, local bars like Nopa and The Alembic. Corsair is tougher to locate as its only available in four states at the moment.

Uproot: Notes from the underground food scene

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Uproot: Notes from the underground food scene

Recently Kitchen Table Talks, a monthly series of discussions on the US food system, invited a panel of SF entrepreneurs from the emerging underground food scene for a QA, hoping to answer big questions like what’s driving the trend and whether or not it has a future. As Iso Rabins from forageSF, Leif Hedendal, a veteran chef of secret suppers, Lucera Muñoz Arrellano, the owner of a bacon-wrapped hot dog cart in the Mission, shared their stories, I got a sense that no one had an overarching theory about the recent surge of popular interest. But it’s clear a lot of passionate people are firmly committed to redefining our food culture whether the man likes it or not.

Rabins originally began forageSF as a way to educate people about wild food with guided foraging tours that served to recontextualize nature as not an abstraction but an integrated environment to which we are inherently bound; it can even feed us. As he saw more and more people’s interest in preparing food grow and their resources dwindle, forageSF evolve to include the Underground Market, a venue for foragers and other uncertified producers to sell their goods. He’s had a few run-ins with the health department, but since he’s now operating under the quasi-legal status of a club he said he pretty much plans on running the market till forced to shut down.

In the long term, though, Rabins doesn’t have much interest in “legitimizing” the market considering enough certified farmers markets already exist, and to him, adjusting to the regulations would circumscribe the innovative spirit of the project. But he does see it developing into more of a launching pad for those wanting to make the switch over to the mainstream.

Hedendal, after working in brick-and-mortar food establishments, became disillusioned with what he described as kitchen culture — the demanding schedule and strict hierarchy that disconnected workers from the community, and thus, one of the main pleasures of cooking. He’s also critical of the “cheating” that many restaurants resort to in order to still be considered sustainable and not go broke. After getting out of the professional world almost a decade ago, he’s been involved with various food projects and secret dinners that sought to uphold the values of community, affordability, and creativity — it’s a pretty long and impressive resume. As of right now, he’s cooking for Dinner Discussions, which brings together food and socially-engaged artists. But for all his negative experiences working in restaurants, Hedendal’s ultimate goal is to open one that satisfies his values of true sustainability and community—maybe impossible now but who knows what will be eventually possible with the changing tides in our food and economic culture.

Lucero Muñoz Arrellano, though, kept the conversation grounded in the practical reality for a lot of those who informally vend on the streets. When asked why she began selling the popular Mexican hot dogs, she answered, assisted by a translator, that her biggest reason was to find a way to support her children, bringing it home that for many in this recession, underground food is a means to surviving in a shrinking job market that’s squeezing out the marginalized—especially those who might lack formal education or English language skills.

I don’t want to sell her short, though; her experiences and trials as an informal street vendor have given her a goal other than just subsisting. With her recent acceptance into the incubator program at La Cocina, a nonprofit geared towards nurturing low-income food entrepreneurs, Arrellano has been inspired to convince others to legalize their businesses. She’s intimately familiar with the hurdles that are almost impossible to navigate—like the bureaucratese of the necessary documentation that frustrates many non-English speakers or those who have limited education. And she also knows the risks that informal vendors suffer. At a minimum, the $250 citation fee can wipe out more than a day’s worth of work, not to mention the threat of having the cart confiscated and losing what may be their only livelihood. Some work in fear of arrest and deportation. A very big risk indeed.

In some ways the talk was illuminating and in other ways it confirmed ideas I deeply support. I suspect, given the wide-arching participation in decentralizing the mainstream food industry, the underground scene is not solely about hipster novelty-seeking. (Though, let’s not lie, that does play a significant part.) It also reflects the growing public re-evaluation of dysfunctional socioeconomic systems and support for those who are redefining how and what we eat.

Heart

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Heart

Duck me

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Duck me

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS My cowboy hat had mold in it. My chicken farmer coat had mold in it. Even the buttons were fuzzy. My brother doesn’t take baths, he takes showers, and so the outdoor tub was full of insect skeletons, spiders, spider webs, and junk mail. There is a rumor that a guest of his hid some weed in the chicken coop. Not that I’m interested, but I took a look anyway and only saw straw.

I am tempted to get chickens again. There is no buried treasure that chickens will not eventually uncover, and I’ve always kind of wanted stoner chickens. I’ve always wondered what it would be like if they, as a species, were a little more chill and slept longer. Not that it would matter much to me at this point. Ten years of chicken farming has permanently programmed me to snap awake at first-light. In the year or so since I last farmed actual chickens, nothing has changed on this front.

Anyway, I don’t know if I can keep this place. My brother, who had been subletting it, went bust and lit out for Ohio, leaving me, for the moment, his van. Which burns oil, has a badly cracked windshield, no horn or high-beams, electrical problems, and a slow leak in at least one tire. What this all reminds me of, naturally, is every other car I’ve ever had except for that last little one, the new one, which I sold last year when I sold my soul to the devil, and my heart to someone even meaner.

So wheels being wheels, I am able at will to visit my old, now-haunted shack in the woods, at least until the brother comes back.

Should I get chickens?

Can anyone help me pay the rent? Surely I must have me some friends in town who like to sneak away and be haunted for a weekend by the ghost of broken water heaters, all-night face-touching in the dark, and the squawks of long-ago stewed chickens, scratching and pecking from dusk to dawn in search of rumored grass.

The editor of the paper I write for, if not the world, wrote to me while I was still in Europe and said, “If you come back, I will buy you duck soup.”

Technically he said when you come back, but for fun I want to think of this — this duck soup business — as just that: business. Like a contract extension. Or a contract renegotiation. Or a contract.

So correct me if I’m wrong, my lawyerly readers, but I interpret it like this: If I come back (which I did), what’s in it for me is one bowl of my favorite thing to eat in the whole wide world, duck noodle soup, and — as a kind of a signing bonus — an unwritten, nonverbal, body-languageless, and in-no-way-even-hinted commitment to continue to publish this column for as long as I am alive and can make a sentence — whichever comes first.

Well.

That’s a no-brainer, innit? No brain, no heart, no soul, but I’ve still got me my stomach, don’t I? And a healthy appetite and this shit van for a month, and two places to live and at least two bikes …

So I wrote back just as soon as I was in the country, give or take exactly 13 days, and agreed in spirit to the editor of the paper I write for’s proposal. Then I donned my best business skirt and matchingest sneakers, hopped on one of my at-least-two bikes, and pumped it to the Tenderloin to iron out the details.

The details: wide egg noodles, one whole, delicious, fall-apart tender duck leg quarter, and wontons in a wonderfully businesslike broth. Times two. As a show of support and solidarity, Mr. Redmond ordered the same exact thing!

So I told him my story, like I tell all my friends, only instead of making him cry or puke or curse or have to walk around the block a few times to clear his head, he came back with an even better story. And by better I mean worse. Which makes me feel kind of actually, I don’t know, good — knowing that shit happens to everyone, even editors.

It’s no frills, not undiscovered, cheap-even-if-you-have-to-pay-for-it, and by far my new favorite restaurant.

HAI KY MI GIA

Thu.–Tue.: 8 a.m.–6 p.m.

707 Ellis, SF

(415) 771-2577

Cash only

No alcohol

 

Blink

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Blink

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she bought me a burrito for lunch.

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

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

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

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

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

Let alone a restaurant review.

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

This one:

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

There is more than one way to read this.

EL BUEN SABOR

Daily: 10 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

697 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-8816

D/MC/V

Beer & wine

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

Art/S Global Tapas

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Art/S Global Tapas

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE You walk into a restaurant that offers “global tapas,” and you see a sushi chef standing behind a sushi bar, like an extra player who’s been thrown into some mammoth baseball trade to sweeten the deal, a utility infielder or the fabled “player to be named later.” Apart from this apparent anomaly, the restaurant is good-looking, with a long screen of dark wooden louvers to separate the bar from the dining room, halogen lamps like dangling stars, and plenty of green paint. The place is called Art/S, and the worst criticism that can be made of the physical layout is that the large front windows are filled with Lombard Street traffic.

A few years ago, an excellent restaurant called Sangha, in the Glen Park Village, offered a menu that mingled nuevo Latino and Japanese elements with surprising success (although it didn’t save it from closing late last spring). Still, the Sangha run suggested that Japanese cuisine was not necessarily insular and could sometimes be mixed and matched with other cuisines.

At Art/S, the riff is match, not mix. There is no overt cross-cultural pollination; the two-sided menu card offers a California hodgepodge, with Iberian and Mexican touches, on its front face, while the Japanese items are to be found on the other side. The twain do not meet. Over the head of the sushi chef is a long chalkboard — a kind of scoreboard for the food-involved — listing delicacies such as paella negra (made with squid-ink rice), but he can’t see it.

Paella is one of the few full-sized plates. Most of the dishes are smaller, though large enough to be shareable, and they range in tone from classic bar food to exercises in sophistication that would play well in the temples of haute cuisine downtown. We were especially impressed, in the latter vein, by the yellowtail crudo ($9), which arranged flaps of fish in the shallow wells of a long, narrow porcelain tray, thatched them with shredded radish and slices of jalapeño pepper, and gently doused them with a tart truffle ponzu sauce.

The bar-food angle is well-served by such shamelessly fatty crowd-pleasers as cheese croquette ($9), a blend of white cheddar and mozzarella cheeses like molten lava in a crust of fried breading and served with a ramekin of balsamic vinaigrette, as dark and viscous as used motor oil and quite tasty, though superfluous. Another small plate with similar visceral appeal is the Cali chili-fried potato ($5), spears of Yukon Gold sprinkled with chili flakes and presented with an addictive caesar aioli.

The Iberian-tinged dishes, interestingly, caused some division of opinion. The pintxos chorizo ($7) sounded Spanish, even Basque (“pintxos” is the Basque equivalent of “tapas”), but the chorizo lengths in question were Mexican, made from fresh pork, with plenty of garlic and chile. (Spanish chorizo is air-cured, like prosciutto, and typically seasoned with smoked paprika.) Atop each sausage cylinder, a tab of sweet potato had been fastened with a toothpick, and I wasn’t sure why. The tabs were as pale as Monterey Jack cheese and didn’t add much flavor or texture — not that Mexican chorizo needs help in the flavor department.

The Galicia octopus ($9), an earthenware crock filled with octopus and potato chunks in a spicy dark tomato-based sauce, also left a hung jury. The sauce had the faintly bitter bite of smoked paprika, which perhaps is an acquired taste, and I long ago acquired it; I thought it made a handsome contrast with the faint sweetness of the octopus. Others disagreed. Further objections were raised (rather spuriously, I thought) against the potatoes. They weren’t exactly necessary, but they did add some ballast to the dish. On the other hand, everyone like the spiced chicken tacos ($6 for two), which were made with proper corn tortillas and enlivened with blue cheese.

Fish: several varieties are offered as “sizzling” plates, among them an excellent mahi-mahi filet ($10), dense, meaty, and juicy atop a jumble of bean sprouts, green peas, yellow zucchini, goji berries, and Meyer lemon in a garlic sauce. For unsizzling, flip the menu card and find an extensive list of nigiri, sashimi, and rolls, including spicy tuna — the “ultimate” ($7.50) — and Cancun ($9), with smoked albacore, roasted jalapeño peppers, avocado, and spicy radish. The Cancun struck me as a Californication (a quite nice one, though), while the former strongly appealed to a member of our party who’d never eaten a sushi-style dish before: an already small world growing a little smaller.

ART/S GLOBAL TAPAS

Dinner: Sun.–Wed., 5:30-10 p.m.; Thurs.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

2353 Lombard, SF

(415) 931-7900

www.artsglobaltapas.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Nihon Whisky Lounge

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Nihon Whisky Lounge

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Among the stand-tall, manly-man libations, none stands taller than whiskey, or (for Caledonophiles) whisky. Caledonia was the Roman name for Scotland, of course, and in Scotland the manly men drink whisky. And wear kilts. What is the implication of all this for us fey, pampered, urban Americans? At the edge of our very own Mission District, a five-year-old restaurant called Nihon styles itself a “whisky lounge” and serves the small plates known to the Japanese as izakaya. So: take Japanese food, present it in a gorgeous, moody setting, sprinkle far and wide with Scotch whisky (including 400 varieties of single malt) as if watering your Chia Pet, and and lo! you get hipsters. Hipsters don’t wear kilts — yet — but they do like to wear their tight-fitting shirts untucked. Why?

Nihon’s whisky installation is impressive: a soaring architecture of bottles behind the bar. The bottle battlement dominates the main floor (which you enter through a set of huge, frosted-glass doors trimmed with wrought iron) and rises nearly as high as the mezzanine, the place to go if you seek some coziness. On your way up, note the porthole and, at the rear of the second floor, a semi-private lounge set with comfy chairs and a sofa under exposed roof joists. The only fly in this rich design ointment is the view: the windows gaze onto the unromantic intersection of Folsom and 14th streets and the immense, neon-glare parking lot of Foods Co. No wonder the panes are hung with screens of fine steel mesh.

Izakaya-style food reminds us that Japanese cuisine includes cooked as well as uncooked items, although it’s probably a stretch to call Nihon’s cooking Japanese in any purist sense. Evidence of California whimsy is laced throughout the menu, perhaps nowhere so plainly as in the rolls, which bear clever names and, like the fancier sorts of burritos, emphasize variety and plenitude. The thunderbird roll ($16) is a cornucopia of tempura soft-shell crab, gobo, and daikon sprouts, topped by a roof of eel, avocado, tobiko, and a glaze of tsume — a sweetish sauce made from boiled eel. A bit too sweet, I thought, like over-honeyed barbecue sauce. Better was the quite spicy samurai roll ($13) with spicy tuna, rounds of pickled jalapeño pepper the color of black olives, daikon spicy sesame sauce, and habañero tobiko. The chili heat here was measured but intense and sustained. The kamikaze roll ($15) resembled the thunderbird more than the kamikaze, with the chief difference being salmon instead of tuna. Salads abound. A familiar wakame edition ($5) mixed the blackish threads of seaweed with baby greens for a nice textural contrast; the salad looked like a small wig someone had plugged into an electric socket. We did find the dressing too salty. The Nihon salad ($8), by contrast, a tangle of somen noodles and cucumber slices within a ring of thin-sliced, nori-wrapped rice coins, benefited from a white miso dressing that, like ponzu sauce, found a balance among salt, sweetness, and acid.

You can go spicy or not. On the mild end of the scale, we found that a plate of broccoli and cauliflower florets ($5) had been roasted just enough to give them a hint of give and char while (as with a proper stir-fry) leaving them with plenty of snap. Not much else was done to them beyond a splash or two of ginger-soy sauce; they were left to speak for themselves. At the far end: Dr. Octopus ($10), a row of broiled octopus flaps seated on cucumber coins and squirted with some sort of fiery red chili paste. Red chili paste can be a doomsday weapon, obliterating every flavor around it — and that was pretty much the case here, although (also as here) such obliteration can be exhilarating. Notable was the tenderness of the octopus, which can toughen so quickly when cooked. If it’s beautifully tender, who cares about some chili overload?

Green tea might offer many health benefits, but it’s problematic as a dessert player, with a tendency to be pale and bitter at the same time. Green tea ice cream? Wake me up when it’s over. So when our attentive, smiling server mentioned green tea cheesecake, I saw a set of lips across the table crinkle with distaste. But the cheesecake ($4 for a slender slice) turned out to be sublime, with the tea’s edge wrapped in creaminess and sweetness, like a chef’s knife in a handsome leather sheath. Across the way, those skeptical lips smacked with pleasure.

NIHON WHISKY LOUNGE

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 5:30 p.m.–2 a.m.

1779 Folsom, SF

(415) 552-4400

www.nihon-sf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Neighborliness

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Neighborliness

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS My soccer team is good. They win without me by gaudy scores like 18-1. When I’m there we still win, mostly, but with better manners. And sometimes we tie or even lose, but only when I’m there. This makes me feel needed.

After games the guys drink beer out of Dixie cups then go grocery shopping, because they’re married, and the girls, being single, go out for brunch or lunch or breakfast and talk about the guys. We wonder what they said, since they speak Portuguese and we don’t. My assumption has always been that they are yelling at me.

They play hard, but then they seem so nice, with their Dixie cups and shopping lists. Of course I am in love with my city right now, and all the people, grocery stores, and restaurants in it.

Even Tartine, which is the view from my new window, and on weekends especially is loused with line-loving wahoos. I love Tartine because I ate a sandwich from there once, a few years ago, and as I recall it was pretty fucking great. But also I love them because they represent a very special challenge to me, and you all know how I appreciate a good challenge.

So: my long-term goal in my new go-round at 18th and Guerrero streets is to annoy Tartine out of business. Just for fun! And not by saying mean things about them either. Obviously some talented folks are putting out some cool beans over there, to line ’em up like they do. No, I have in mind a more neighborly way to undo them.

First, let me fire up my tiny shitty old studio-size gas oven, then I will have to learn how to make morning buns better than theirs. Check that, then I will have to learn what a morning bun is. Hold on a second.

(Insert sound of idle whistling here)

I’m back. OK, mmm, hold on a second, my fingers are pretty sticky. OK, don’t worry, this is not a review of Tartine. I’m not going to say a word about their morning buns, only that it might take me a long time to put them out of business. But that’s fine, because time is a thing I have. Time, a tiny oven, and the means to make a cup or two of coffee.

My plan, then: to swing my gated window open and play my steel drum so enticingly that everyone standing in Tartine’s line will cross the street to see what gives. Then … I will give. I will offer them morning buns, mugs of coffee, and semi-intelligent conversation, for free of course, and so dazzled will they be by my neighborliness that they will eventually forget all about why they came to the Mission in the first place.

It’s a dream, and a distant and misty one at that, I know.

Meanwhile, for the last couple Sundays while all of Chestnut Street has been lined up outside my Mission District window, I have been on Chestnut Street having brunch, lunch, and breakfast at the wonderful and empty Chestnut Diner.

My new favorite restaurant! It was turned on to me by Alice Shaw the Person, who, having a car, carts us to and from our soccer games, which have been conducted lately in the Marina.

The omelets are great. The hash browns are fine. The décor is fantastic: light-blue-topped chrome stools around a J-shaped counter, with booths on either side.

I just can’t recommend the burgers, because they don’t understand rare there. Listen:

Me: Can I have that rare please?

Waitressperson: Half?

Me: (thinking, half?) Huh? No, Rare.

She: Oh, well.

Me: No, rare.

She: Half?

And so on until I gave up and ordered an omelet. But she looked sad about this, so I explained what rare meant and ordered a bacon burger. That way, when it came overcooked (which of course it did), it would still taste good. Which of course it did. *

CHESTNUT DINER

Daily: 7 a.m.–3 p.m.

1312 Chestnut, SF

(415) 441-1168

MC/V

No alcohol

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

Urban Tavern

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Urban Tavern

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE A cardinal rule of urban living is that hotel restaurants are to be approached with caution, especially if the hotel is a tentacle of one of the national chain monsters. Some of San Francisco’s best restaurants are in hotels, but those hotels tend to be chic and boutique-y. In the bigger, blander establishments, you’re likely to find yourself eating cioppino from a hollowed-out round of sourdough bread while the whole restaurant spins slowly, like a sideways Ferris wheel in some sad circus.

Urban Tavern is in the Hilton near Union Square — an ominous portent — but once you’re inside, you’d never know you were on the ground floor of a gigantic corporate box. The space doesn’t look like any tavern I’ve ever been in, but it certainly is urban in the best sense: designed but not over-designed, with a few big touches — such as the multicolored horse, sculpted of metal — and plenty of small ones, such as the lampposts made to look like the trunks of slender trees. The restaurant is also bigger than it looks from the street; it runs deep into the building, and maybe this is one reason that noise, which from the signs (many hard surfaces and a general modernist edge) should be a horrific problem, is hardly an issue at all.

Urban Tavern styles itself a “gastropub,” but it could as well be a wine bar since the wine list is extensive and interesting — and, as an added fillip, all bottles are half-price on Sundays. (The mark-down includes half-bottles, which are as well-represented here as any place I’m aware of.) But whether your fancy is beer, wine, or a soigné cocktail, chef Colin Duggan’s cooking holds up its end of the deal, and then some. Duggan was present at the restaurant’s creation in August 2008, and his current menu reflects a tasty dynamism with, as seems to be de rigueur at the moment, a German touch or two, such as a wonderful fresh pretzel ($11), served with slices of grilled caggiano beer sausage (garlicky, like kielbasa), and a broad smear of country mustard.

If your heart lies on the other side of the Rhine, you’ll certainly respond to the cheese puffs (a.k.a. gougères, $5 for three), which are indeed puffy — like little domed stadiums with big pockets of warm, fragrant air inside — and also impressively glazed, I would guess from a proper egg wash. In a similar vein we find a pair of turnovers ($10), pastry triangles the size of sandwich halves filled with crab and king trumpet mushrooms for a sea-sweet, if slightly muted, effect.

The main courses do tend toward tavernishness. There is a burger, along with steak frites and a couple versions of ribs, baby-back and spare, the last being served with a red-wine-based jus we found meaty and slightly sweet. But there is plenty of sophistication too, as in a sturgeon filet ($22) plated atop a jumble of green lentils, sun-dried tomatoes, and braised winter greens. Sturgeon are best-known for their roe, which we call caviar, but their white flesh is dense, meaty, and possibly the most delicious of the freshwater fish. In this country, sturgeon are also farm-raised to an environmental standard that makes them a “good alternative,” according to the Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Of course, no gastropub menu would be complete without a vegetarian option, which at Urban Tavern is called a stew ($15) and consists of an iron skillet filled with a variety of roasted vegetables, including broccoli and cauliflower florets, butter beans, carrots, butternut squash, split brussels sprouts, and zucchini, all liberally seasoned with Parmesan cheese and moistened, at your discretion, from the pitcher of vegetable reduction on the side. It takes a certain nerve to do so little to vegetables and a certain faith that from the babble of different voices, a melody will emerge. But it does.

Desserts seem a little pricey at $9 a pop. We very much liked the peanut butter cup, a big disk of peanut butter mousse lacquered with dark chocolate in perhaps the ultimate marriage of New World delectables. The cup was presented with a wafer of peanut brittle and pat of peanut butter ice cream, which we found creamy and peanut buttery but slack somehow, as if a contrasting ingredient had gone missing. The banana trifle, served in a milk jar, was like a slice of banana-cream pie transformed into a parfait with good banana flavor but a bit too much sweetness. Even sweeter than German wine, and that’s pretty sweet.

URBAN TAVERN

Breakfast: 8:30–11 a.m.;

Lunch: 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; Dinner: 5:30–10 p.m.

333 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 923-4400

www.urbantavernsf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Well-controlled noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

Homecoming

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1
Homecoming

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

Thank you for putting real flowers and tiny plastic battery-operated candles in your closet for me. I slept like an angel that snores like a truck driver. Speaking of which, thank you for the chili and cornbread too. It made my homecoming that much sweeter and spicier, in addition to giving me gas. Which I am happy to have, and allowed to have, praise God, now that I’m back in a Free Country.

Plus the Maze of course, being beautiful, was waiting for me at the airport with a huge colorfully hand-painted sign that read, “Welcome home, Dani. We love you.” Signed: “The Bay Area.”

He admits having had help with the wording from at least one person, and with the painting from a couple more, so maybe there is some truth to this. If so, the feeling is very very mutual.

I will never leave the Bay Area ever again, not even to go camping. Just think, while my ex and my ex’s ex-ex are holed up together in their dark, cold, provincial town in southern Germany, clinging to each other’s small corner of obscurity, writing and editing their mediocre novel that is set in San Francisco, I get to live here. And love and be loved, and play and work and eat here.

I can’t speak for working, exactly, but it’s the greatest playing and eating place in the world that I know of. Here.

There, do you know what they eat, Earl? Well, the ex’s ex-ex doesn’t cook, and my ex’s specialty is ramen noodles. That’s what they call cooking. When they go out, it’s for sushi. Really really bad landlocked German sushi. Imagine!

Meanwhile, I have been shucking fresh-picked oysters and scallops on the west coast of France, inventing home-raised cherry chicken-heart stew, eating up Paris and Rome, hobnobbing with extraterrestrials, crunching into crack conch in the Caribbean, and passing the guitar with a couple Haitian boys outside their single-family chicken-coop shack.

And now … now I get to go get a burrito. Whenever. The fuck. I want. Because that’s what San Francisco is. It’s “what kind of beans,” the best of all-things-edible, and raw onions and garlic no matter who you might breathe on afterward. No problem. We live here.

Anyway, I do. You do. And I do again. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to celebrate my 20-year anniversary of moving to San Francisco than moving back to San Francisco.

St. Patrick’s Day 1990 was the day. I still remember my amazement, the air and the sky. Thank you for getting me back in, Earl — albeit on the ground floor, literally, with an option on your upstairs apartment’s closet. But I breathe better in closets than I did in small-town Germany, and I see more sky in one heartbeat here, through my dirty, barred sidewalk window, than I saw all this winter there. The Winter of My Discombobulation.

And now, if you will excuse me, m’dear, I have to go recombobulate.

Peace and pickles,

Your L.E.

Dear Lady of SF,

That is great. We went to Urbun Burger because the Mission has a lot of places to eat. You wanted to walk around because you have returned. I know the area and fear I will never be able to leave, except, perhaps for my parents’ funerals. We went to the Community Thrift where 15 or so years ago, you found that really neat 49ers glass, and that made me jealous because I never, ever found a glass I really liked. Years later, when I read in your column that it had broken, I was happy. Karma, sigh, is on me.

But Urbun Burger. Lotta money, lotta meat. These burgers are 1/2 pounders. It was not $10 for my California Sensation burger, it was $9.50, and naturally I did not pay. There are a couple of burgers over $10, but they come with good fries. Super selection of condiments and a real nice, lively atmosphere. I enjoyed the colors in there. So did you.

And so it ends, my fit of usefulness to the good people of San Francisco. Yours begins anew. Welcome back. I hear it is a very good town.

Earl Butter

URBUN BURGER

Mon.-Thu. 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–3 a.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

581 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-2483

MC/V

Beer & Wine

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

 

5A5

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
5A5

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE How odd that the world’s best beef should come from Japan, a small island nation where pastureland is scarce and whose gastronomic renown largely has to do with the sea. Beef’s natural home is a big, flat place: the pampas of Argentina, say, or our own Great Plains. Throw in a few zillion acres of wheat — for the refined white flour whence come soft buns — and you have the culture of mass-produced, drive-through hamburgers that defines us. Given the powerful connection between the burger and the car, it’s a wonder that someone hasn’t yet closed the circle by putting tread marks on a burger: the Treadburger.

At 5A5, a next-generation steak house in the Barbary Coast, beef is treated as the delicacy it can be, and not surprisingly the restaurant’s tones and accents are Japanese and east Asian. Beef is a — pricey — delicacy in Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun but not the 32-ounce steak. The name refers to the wagyu beef the restaurant actually imports from Japan and sells for prices beginning at about $16 an ounce. On that scale, your 32-ounce steak would cost you … well, let’s say bailout money

But the 32-ounce steak represents life out of balance in a particularly American way — “koyaanisqatsi” is the Indian term and title of the 1982 movie — and 5A5 is all about a Zen-like equilibrium. The restaurant reposes in an unassuming brick building on a narrow, quiet street. Inside, the look is thoughtfully understated, with cream-colored, 1960s-looking chairs, nests of horseshoe banquettes, lots of open space (a witty hint at prairies?), and a ceiling of perforated concavity that looks like a giant, upside-down, backlit colander.

For a steak house, 5A5 lays a surprisingly light hand on the meat. Chef Allen Chen’s menu contains a full page-and-a-half of smaller courses, including shooters, bites, starters, soups, and salads — many of them as clever, elegant, and meatless as you would find in any temple of California cuisine — before you reach flesh country. Even the list of main dishes transcends beef to include buffalo, fish, poultry, and a vegetarian option. And vegetables here aren’t an afterthought. Behold a platter of glisteningly green-white bok choy ($8), tossed with chunks of meaty bacon and crumblings of macadamia nuts, or a berm of baby spinach ($8), sautéed with onion and garlic and topped with a fine thatch of shredded, fried naan.

Flavor patterns are polycultural but vigorous. A shooter of hamachi ($4), for instance, includes not only a small chunk of yellowtail (a fish familiar to sushi lovers) but a creamy, tangy blend of avocado, ginger, yuzu juice, and tobiko. It’s like a piece of sushi roll liquified into a health drink and presented in a wide-mouth, heavy-bottom shot glass. A plate of ribs and chips ($12) gives you several exquisitely tender spare ribs in a spicy hoisin glaze, accompanied by a stack of lacy fried-potato disks. And truffle fries ($8) introduce a distinctly occidental note, though modified by the ramekin of sriracha aioli. Sriracha is a Thai hot sauce, but in aioli it produces an outcome quite similar to cayenne or other hot red pepper.

As for the meat: even the plebeian cuts of Angus are sensuous and delicate. Like cheesecake, their texture is soft, with just enough firmness to hold their shape. And, perhaps in a nod to a pair of unsettled Zeitgeists, financial and cardiovascular, you can have either a smaller or larger portion of several of the main courses. I thought the smaller, six-ounce portion of filet mignon ($23) was just right: enough to register as a proper serving of meat but not so much as to induce that sickening feeling of overload. Better yet, the meat was juicy and flavorful, which, if you’ve ever cooked filet mignon yourself, is far from a given. Tender bonelessness does carry its price. For a bit of extra insurance (and a bit more money, $29), you can get your filet on the bone.

After all that, dessert should be light-hearted, and maybe just plain light. A nice example is the plate of green-tea doughnuts ($8), presented with a globe of macha ice cream and a pot of intense, coarse, barely sweet raspberry jam. Hints of bitter, sour, sweet, creamy, crunchy, gooey — and we have at least one small slice of life in balance.

5A5

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

Sun., 5:30–9 p.m.

244 Jackson, SF

(415) 989-2539

www.5A5stk.com

Full bar

AE/MC/v

Gentle noise

Wheelchair accessible (elevator to restrooms)

 

Cooled and pickled

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Cooled and pickled

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS  

Dear Earl Butter,

I think I know what the essential-oil-wielding hippies meant when they talked to me about personal growth and evolution. For example, I now believe in marriage. State-sanctified, and with as much paperwork as possible. I know it’s still only a 50-50 proposition, but at least it might weed out complete posers and the temporarily sane.

Stormy weather. The sea is choppy. We made it about halfway to the shipwreck then had to turn back, on account of motion sickness. That was a couple days ago and it’s been blowing ever since.

This morning I woke up in a state of disrepair and utter existential itchiness. Sitting on my air mattress, I leaned back against the bare wall, looked around the bare room in the empty guest house I occupy, and listened to the wind. I scratched my many insect bites and various rashes and wondered what I’ve wondered since I got here: how much will it cost me to change my return flight to tomorrow?

Instead of going over to the main house to wake up Jean-Gene and borrow his cell phone, I got out of bed and put my clothes in the refrigerator. I’m not sure how I knew this would help, but it did! Refolding my shirts and skirts, I felt finally soothed by the knowledge that thenceforth when I looked in the fridge I would be deciding what to wear. On the door, where ketchup goes, I put my socks, bras, and panties, and my bikini went nicely into the butter drawer.

When I finally went to get my brother it wasn’t to plan my escape, but to report that all my clothes were in the refrigerator.

“Right on,” he said.

I spent the rest of the morning in an artistic frenzy that was way more healing than arnica. I dragged our blow-up kayak into the dining room, turned its little yellow seats to face each other, set a cooler in the middle, and put a flower in an empty spinach can on top.

My three dildos I hung where wine glasses would go, upside down over the bar, and in lieu of liquor I staged all my lotions and sunscreens, some work gloves of Jean-Gene’s, a dust mask, and rolls of toilet paper and duct tape. Don’t tell Phenomenon, but I prayed all day a prospective buyer would drop in.

Thank you for finding a way to get a message to me here on this Web-forsaken island. The bottle washed up at sunset, and the words in it were just what I needed to hear. Food!

Indeed, since you’ve already given up, and I really ought to, I’m thinking we should probably get married. In church. Joel’s younger than us, right? He can be our kid. Between me and you, I think that boy could use some fucked-up parenting for a change, and I know I’d kill for a crack at eventual grandmotherhood. Think about it. It would make great copy, and anyway we might all be living in the same building.

Dearest Lady, Dearest-Dearest Lady,

Hello, I love Mr. Pickles! First, let me say — how could you not? Second, let me say they are great! And third, I love sandwiches! It’s hard to decide at Mr. Pickles because everything looks and sounds great. Joel got the Tony Soprano, which is salami and ham and mortadella and provolone cheese and Italian dressing ($6.99), and I got the Bear, which is hot roast beef and BBQ sauce and melted cheddar cheese ($6.99), and Joel paid. Imagine, way back when, Joel could have picked a different friend, and they could be enjoying Mr. Pickles on this guy’s yacht instead of Joel having to pay all the time.

— Sigh — nothing can get me out of the funk I just put myself in.

Except Mr. Pickles!

And Mr. Pickles himself stands outside the place like a pickle bandito with a mustache made out of hair. Imagine a pickle like that in the jar! A mustache made of hair! In his holster, mustard and mayo! I once had a goal to have more sandwiches in my life, but you know how things work out. Mr. Pickles makes you want to yell Mr. Pickles a bunch of times. I bet kids love to yell Mr. Pickles. I do too. Mr. Pickles! Mr. Pickles! Try it. Mr. Pickles! Hoorah!

MR. PICKLES SANDWICH SHOP

Mon.–Fri. 9 a.m.– 6 p.m.;

Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.– 5 p.m.

3380 20th St., No. 103, SF

(415) 826-0143

Cash only

No alcohol

 

Specchio

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Specchio

paulr@sfbg.com

Success brings penalties as well as rewards, and if you are a successful cuisine in America, one of the penalties involves banality. Banality is the essence of mass culture. You are Italian food and everybody loves you, but Chef Boyardee puts you in a can and sells you from Wal-Mart shelves, and (just a bit higher up the shame scale) you can find yourself being dished out in hackneyed versions in hackneyed settings, squishy cannelloni in bland Bolognese sauce at quaint spots with tabletop candles set in empty bottles of cheap Chianti.

Yet there’s much to be said for the tried-and-true. Europe might be the Old World, but it also has its ultramodern dimensions. In my observations, the resolution of old and new has generally meant that the latter is fitted gracefully into the former, another piece of a puzzle being forever assembled. The American way is to raze whole blockfuls of hideous, shoddy buildings so a new generation of hideous, shoddy buildings can replace them. The past in America is as disposable as everything else, from razor blades to auto workers.

Specchio is a newish Italian restaurant in America (in our very own San Francisco, in fact), but it has the Euro-modern feel of a glam place in Milan or Barcelona. The embrace of the new is fervent and obvious; the name means “mirror,” with an implication of a dusty article you might find atop Granny’s chest of drawers, but Specchio’s interior design doesn’t emphasize mirrors and certainly not dust. There are, instead, textured concrete walls, concrete floors, a gleaming stainless-steel exhibition kitchen at the rear of the soaring main dining area, and spare furniture of a post-Bauhaus flavor. It is the sort of setting you would expect to be deafening even without people in it, but the noise, while not inconsiderable, is surprisingly well-managed. In this respect Specchio resembles Delfina.

The au courant setting does not quite prepare one for chef Gino Assaf’s poised, traditional menu. (Assaf grew up in Venice and was the chef at Gondola in North Beach for several years.) It’s the photographic-negative, or mirror, effect: a reversal, with the old as an inlay on the new. It has been many years, for instance, since I last tasted vitello al tonno — veal topped with tuna sauce, as classic an Italian dish in its way as spaghetti with meat balls — and that version had been made (with scaloppini-style cutlets) by a home-schooled Italian friend. Specchio’s version (part of a $48 prix-fixe) featured slow-roasted veal in thin slices, almost like carpaccio or bresaolo; these were laid like mats on a wide plate and topped with the creamy, caper-sharpened tuna sauce, pipings of crème fraiche, plenty of lemon, and a small garden of arugula leaves.

More thin-sliced flesh: salmon carpaccio (also a prix-fixe item), scattered with shreds of fennel root and green peppercorns and dressed with a lemon vinaigrette. This version was visually more arresting than the traditional beef interpretation — translucent orange salmon flesh trumping opaque red meat — but the overall flavor effect was less rich and tangy.

Lobster is overrated and problematic, and (for me) the less that’s done to and with it, the better. The flesh is best when plucked right from the shell, swabbed with a bit of butter, and eaten. So lobster ravioli in a lobster bisque sauce (again, prix-fixe) sounded as if it might be overwrought. It wasn’t. The meat inside the pasta pockets remained sweet and firm, with its distinctive tactility, while the creamy sauce was intense with crustacean essence. For a bit of color, the kitchen added asparagus coins.

Swordfish, as the meatiest of fish, needs no introduction and very little help — just some tabs of braised leek and grapefruit sections, say, atop a grilled steak (prix-fixe), itself seated atop a bed of roasted potato, zucchini, and red bell pepper. The leek and grapefruit made an unexpected and appealing combination: a fruity sharpness with an undertone of earth.

Complaining about tiramisù is almost as cliché as tiramisù itself, so I am pleased to report that Specchio’s tiramisù was as good as could be: moist but not soggy, with a nice balance between the competing charges of espresso and liquor. (The great weakness of tiramisù is too much booze, which leads to sogginess and drunk-breath.) Equally impressive, in the Italian tradition of classic simplicity, was a pat of lightly sweetened ricotta cheese topped with a syrupy strawberry reduction that was more fruit than sweet. It was like a small piece of cheesecake, with no crust. Is there a Chef Boyardee take on this? I hope not.

SPECCHIO

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

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

2331 Mission, SF

(415) 958-5528

www.ristorantespecchio.com

Wine and beer,

AE/DS/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

Shipwrecked

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1
Shipwrecked

 le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS

Dear Earl Butter,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Lady,

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

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

NYBUFFALO WINGS

Mon-Thurs., 10 a.m.–11:30 p.m.;

Fri-Sat., 10:00 a.m.–2:30 a.m.;

Sun., 10 a.m.– 11:30 p.m.

665 Valencia, SF

(415) 863-7755

AE/MC/V

No alcohol

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

 

Bin 38

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Bin 38

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If we agree that the Marina District is a sort of Castro District for heterosexuals — the het ghetto, or hetto — it should follow that food in the neighborhood’s restaurants is something of an afterthought. Restaurant food in the Castro has long been a swamp of mediocrity (though there are signs of improvement), and restaurants in the Marina have likewise tended to be more about convenience, speed, and affordability — like refueling race cars — than an experience in their own right.

At a glance, Bin 38 would seem to conform to this pattern. The restaurant and wine-beer bar occupies a narrow storefront space on a run of Scott Street between Lombard and Chestnut streets already chockablock with eating places pitched to the young. From outside it looks like a typical box, but once you’re inside the door, you find a dodge-and-weave of rectangles: an entryway with host or hostess, a bar with a nest of intimate tables opposite, a passageway, another dining room rich in alcoves, yet another passageway, and a garden. There is a snug, cave-like quality to the layout — it reminded me of a lost beloved, Rendezvous du Monde, which back in the 1990s occupied a similarly burrow-like abode on Bush Street in which splendid food was served.

I could say that Bin 38’s food is as good as Rendezvous du Monde’s. That’s saying something, and it is as good, but what is most immediately notable about the dishes emerging from head chef Matt Brimer’s kitchen is how gorgeously everything is composed and plated. The designs aren’t so fussy that you feel like a Visigoth trashing the treasures of Rome when you start eating them, but they are striking in their combinations of shape, color, and texture. I hesitate to describe food as art, but I hesitate a little less here.

Color is perhaps the most arresting aspect of food that has yet to be eaten, and winter, the bleakest season, offers surprising possibilities to the color-minded chef. Beets, for instance, of gold, ruby, and rose. Bin 38’s roasted-beet salad (part of a $29, three-course prix-fixe) looked like the contents of a jewel box: an array of richly gleaming disks, arranged on mache with dabs of mild, creamy French feta, and scatterings of equally jewel-like pomegranate seeds. The whole thing is dressed with a citronette, basically a vinaigrette made with lemon juice instead of vinegar. The finishing touch was the platter itself, a long narrow rectangle such as might be used for presenting a sushi roll.

Just as colorful was a wide, shallow bowl of hand-cut tagiolini (also a prix-fixe item), ribbons of pasta a little wider than fettucine, tossed with a colorful mélange of spinach, tomato, baby carrot, turnip, and chunks of braised pork, with flavor amendment provided by olio nuovo and square flaps of Parmesan cheese. What was most remarkable about the sauce was the way in which the various ingredients kept their individual identities while managing, at the same time, to become part of a greater whole.

If I mark down the winter salad — again, prix-fixe — a bit, it’s mainly because the color scheme wasn’t quite as intense: Belgian endive (white with hints of green), fennel shreds (white with even fewer hints of green), sprigs of watercress (green but small), sections of blood and mandarin orange (gorgeous), and pink peppercorns (too small to add much visually). The arrangement was appealing, though, with the leaves of endive neatly lined up along the platter like canoes tied up in the marina of a summer camp. Dressing: cherry vinaigrette.

Bin 38 enters the burger derby with the BIN burger ($13), a well-seasoned disk of ground beef enhanced with smoked gouda and mayonnaise, served on an English muffin and presented with a heap of sliced cornichons. You have to order fries separately, which isn’t the worst thing. You might want a small bowl of spiced nuts ($3) instead — better for you — though they’re at least as sweet as spicy. Or you might want neither, if you opened with wild Gulf prawns ($12), served sizzling on a fajitas-like cast-iron platter with chile arbol oil, very spicy, and garlic, and levain slices for mopping up.

Desserts are also arty. A toasted almond panna cotta arrives as little hemispheres that resemble white-chocolate truffles, topped with chunks of strudel, interspersed with blood-orange segments, and bathed with a reduced hibiscus tea that looks as if it leaked out of a joint of beef. Chocolate pudding cake is distinguished mainly by the pat of brown-butter gelato on the side, tasting rather caramely. Hetto heaven!

BIN 38

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.;

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

3232 Scott, SF

(415) 567-3838

www.bin38.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Tuba

Andrew Lam
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0
Tuba

A score or so years ago, the corner of 22nd and Guerrero streets was one of the gastronomic hotspots of the city. (A score, as we will all recall from our civics class parsings of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, is 20 years.) On one corner stood, from 1989, Arnold Tordjman’s eclectic and imaginative Flying Saucer, replete with neon flying saucers in the windows, while across the street was Robert Reynolds’ Le Trou, which from the early 1980s offered a monthly rotation of regional French cooking. By the early 1990s, a glam trattoria called Mangiafuoco completed the triad.

But these sorts of convergences, like all magic, tend not to last too long. A city’s tectonic plates shift. Both Flying Saucer and Mangiafuoco vanished shortly after the turn of the millennium, becoming (respectively) Tao Café, a handsome Vietnamese restaurant, and (after some throat-clearing) La Provence, a handsome Provençal restaurant. These successors are good restaurants, but they are not as compelling as the restaurants they replaced.

Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the Le Trou space. The first successor was the Moa Room, which served New Zealander food. Then came the dot-com edition of NeO, with its white walls, white tables, white everything — it was like being inside the sperm scene from Woody Allen’s movie Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. All-white was evidently a bit much, for NeO was soon reinvented along Day Glo-Cubist lines before vanishing altogether. It was briefly succeeded by a good Indian restaurant whose owner ended up moving to Dallas, but not before painting the walls red, and those red walls constitute part of the inheritance of what is now a Turkish enterprise called Tuba.

Tuba opened early in the new year and is already packing them in. In a flaccid economy, it’s good to see any small business thriving, but Tuba, like its many predecessors, isn’t laid out to accommodate a crush of patrons. There is no host’s station or waiting area at the front; instead the door opens to rows of tables on either side and a clear if narrow path to the bar at the rear, where the staff congregates. On a crowded night, you might make it all the way back there before bumping into the host.

Why the big crowds? Part of the reason must be that the neighborhood, once edgy, is now well-to-do, and the array of restaurants (there’s also a nice sushi spot just a few doors down) draws strollers who scan posted menus. If this place doesn’t appeal, walk a few steps to that one or — in the extreme — cross the street. Tuba’s prices are also gentle; even the menu’s highest peaks scarcely rise to the mid-teens.

Then there’s the draw of the Turkish food itself. It’s Mediterranean, and eastern Mediterranean, with obvious affinities for the neighboring cuisines of Greece, Lebanon, and the Arab Middle East. It suggests simplicity, honesty, healthfulness; there is plenty of yogurt, lamb, and eggplant. At the same time, it has its own character and distinctive dishes.

The signature Turkish specialty in America might be sigara boregi ($7), cigar-like phyllo flutes filled with feta cheese and some spinach and deep-fried to a delicate, flaky crispness. When fresh, as at Tuba, their texture is wonderful; the cylinders are like edible (and still slightly molten) gold. But I found the feta’s assertiveness and saltiness to be near the border of acceptability, even as softened by the spinach. They’re also incredibly rich, which is a factor you have to weigh in relation to the fabulous round loaves of warm, focaccia-like bread you’re brought at the outset and might have trouble resisting. (The bread, unlike focaccia, contains no oil, our server told me. But it’s just as pillowy.)

White bean salads are common throughout the Mediterranean. Tuba’s is called piyaz ($6), and is heartily spiked with garlic, lemon, and parsley. Then there is the baked eggplant casserole musakka ($13) — layers of eggplant and potato dressed with cheese, a spicy tomato sauce, and béchamel sauce. Many of us probably think of this as a Greek dish while tending to forget that Greece was the subject of a hostile takeover by Turkey for several centuries.

Among the most appealing of the larger courses is beyti ($14), a flatbread rolled into a cylinder around a filling of spiced ground beef and lamb, sliced into disks and plated with yogurt and spicy tomato sauce. It’s very shareable, so don’t be shocked if others at your table score their fair share.

TUBA

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

1007 Guerrero, SF

(415) 826-8822

Alcohol pending

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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