Food & Drink

Nopa

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

A hoary bit of wisdom teaches that we should be careful what we wish for, because we might get it — and if we are a new restaurant wishing for a meteoric rise, what might we expect? Few restaurants in recent memory have soared as sensationally as Nopa, which opened near the Panhandle in the spring of 2006 to widespread acclaim. By the end of that year the place was anointed by the San Francisco Chronicle as a "classic" and admitted to the pantheon of the area’s "Top 100" restaurants.

The only comparable spectacle I could think of was the birth of Firefly, whose first menus in the autumn of 1993 attracted the instant and adulatory attention of the food media, followed by galloping herds of the trend-involved. There are meaningful differences between the two narratives: Firefly was a fairly small neighborhood enterprise in a quiet neighborhood, whereas Nopa is a much larger operation on a busy thoroughfare in a bustling part of town. But the basic question remains: how does a young restaurant handle instant and massive acclaim, and what happens when the circus leaves town? Does the venture survive the decompression and adjust itself to life in the light of common day, or, having been over inflated, does it pop like a bubble? Bubbles do have a way of popping.

Buzz, like infatuation (of which it is a form), is a temporary condition, and people under the influence of buzz are in a state of altered consciousness in which they can fail to notice all sorts of sins, from uneven food to erratic service — problems that are most likely to afflict restaurants in their early, teething stages. But when the buzz wears off and the media turns to the business of telling everyone what to think about some other place, people regain their senses and start to notice what is in front of them at the place nobody’s talking about any more.

Nopa, like Firefly, has survived its passage through this crucible. The restaurant’s proprietors, Laurence Jossel and Jeff Hanak, have kept a steady hand on the tiller, and the result today is a buzzing convivium of mostly younger folk, animatedly gathered at the restaurant’s several foci, including a Chaucerian communal table at the front, a bar along the north wall, and a mezzanine overlooking the exhibition kitchen with its wood-burning oven. There’s even a gathering place for service staff, a round table near the foot of the stairs to the mezzanine, well-stocked with napkins, flatware, and other gear for resetting tables.

And there is Jossel’s excellent food. He made a splash a few years ago at Chez Nous, and he’s brought a similar urban-rustic flair to the kitchen at Nopa. An iconic Jossel dish might be a small crock of cannellini beans ($9), baked in the wood oven with tomatoes, feta cheese, and oregano for a distinctively Greek effect. One is tempted to describe this dish, which is crusted with bread crumbs, as a gratin, but it isn’t, really; there isn’t quite a word for it, and this is a big clue about the kitchen’s intentions and methods. Recombinant cooking carries its share of risks, but if, as here, it’s pursued intelligently, with a sense of place and past — if it’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary — it can produce exquisite results like this one, novel yet grounded.

God is in the details, in the kitchen as elsewhere. Most of Nopa’s dishes are recognizable, with small, gracious twists and innovations to set them apart. Calamari ($9) are braised in a golden-bronze saffron broth along with quartered new potatoes and a scattering of fried chickpeas. A soup ($8) of white beans and kale, along with plenty of bacon and a base of chicken stock, is like an unpuréed version of the Portuguese soup caldo verde. And flatbread ($14) resembles a little square pizza, topped perhaps with slivers of red onion, white cheese, and prosciutto.

We were particularly impressed with the pork chop ($22), which distinguished itself through a tender juiciness that could not entirely be attributed to gentle cooking. (The meat was done to about medium, I would say, with a broad hint of pinkness in the middle). Our server confirmed that the pork had indeed been brined for several hours in brown sugar; it ended up being plated on a bed of soft polenta dotted with roasted root vegetables and ribbons of fried taro root.

Quite as good in its own way was a braised lamb shank ($25) — still on the bone, Neanderthal-style — nested in a salad of toasted farro grains, shreds of chanterelle mushrooms (a pretty yellow-orange, though not as spectacularly colored as the examples I saw at a Helsinki farmers market in August), and a pile of mustard greens. There are only so many ways to describe meat so tender that it falls away from the bone at the touch of a fork or knife, and I have not found a new way. But this was meat of that sort.

The hamburger ($12), made from grass-fed beef, is simply sublime, one of the best I have ever tasted in the city or anywhere. It’s presented on a toasted bun of discreet robustness — not a fancy, fluffy focaccia but not a skinny hack job, either. Even the sometime vegetarian was impressed by the burger’s rosy juiciness, or perhaps he was faintly disappointed by his tagine ($17), a medley of root vegetables (mostly parsnips and turnips) gussied up with lemon yogurt. He described the tagine as "good," which would have been fine if everything else hadn’t been excellent.

Among the desserts, the primus inter pares is the sopapillas ($8), an array of pastry pillows, deep-fried, dusted with sugar, and ready to be doused with burnt-orange caramel sauce. You pour that out yourself from a ceramic flask, no sweat.

NOPA

Dinner: nightly, 6 p.m.–1 a.m.

560 Divisadero, SF

(415) 864-8643

www.nopasf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Eating out

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter had just called out for Chinese food when I called him to see if he wanted to go out for Chinese food, or any kind of food, for that matter. I didn’t have anything in particular in mind. Just food and seeing Earl, because it had been a week. And you start to miss a guy like Earl. I do.

"I just ordered Chinese," he said. "It’ll be here any minute."

"Delivery?" I said. "Why would you do that?"

He said he gets bored, he gets lonely, his cat won’t even sleep with him anymore. He’s been sleeping in the kitchen. The cat.

"Wait, you get bored and lonely, so you order in?" I said. "That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make any sense. That doesn’t make one lick of sense."

If making sense were my strong suit any more than it’s Earl Butter’s, I might have pointed out instead of repeating myself that people and changes of scenery tend to happen in restaurants at a greater frequency than in one’s own studio apartment.

But I’m not a logician. I’m a restaurant reviewer. So I asked him where he’d ordered from.

"Red Jade," he said. "I got two things. Do you want to eat them with me?"

I thought about it while I was pulling into a parking space near his house, my mind clacking through a Rolodex of names of Chinese restaurants I’d been to. I knew I’d been there. I knew I’d written about it. The tricky part is remembering what you had to say, and whether or not you made it up entirely, or just parts of it.

I turned my car off, closed my eyes, thought, and said, "What did you get?"

Chicken with something, and chicken with something else, he said.

"I’ll be right up. I’m already here." But I had just played soccer, first game back after a more-than-one-month layoff, and after that I’d helped Sockywonk move from her new apartment to her even newer one. I might have fallen asleep for a minute.

For sure I was moving slowly, and by the time I climbed the stairs to his 3rd-floor studio, the delivery had been delivered. It was in a tied-up plastic bag on his kitchen table, and Earl Butter had changed his mind. "Let’s eat out," he said.

So we walked back down and got in my car. "What do you want to eat?" I asked.

"Anything but Chinese."

"Vietnamese?"

"I like bun," he said. So we beelined for the ‘Loin, and Pho Tan Hoa, where I’d tried to eat before but failed because, astoundingly, they close at 7 p.m. Why a red-blooded restaurant would close at 7 p.m. I will leave for better minds than mine to figure out. But this one does. So it was a good time to go there, not quite six.

I’d heard about their pho, and that’s what I ordered, a small bowl with rare steak and beef balls ($6.50). Small = gargantuan. I took some home for lunch.

Earl Butter got bun, vermicelli with imperial rolls and grilled pork ($7). I tasted, and I liked.

We also noticed, after we’d ordered, that they had Bo Tai Chanh ($8), the raw steak appetizer that I love, you know, sprinkled with ground peanuts and mint, and marinated in lemon juice and fish sauce. So we after-ordered that, for dessert.

When it came, it took my breath away. It was a mountain of meat, thin sliced and folded over on top of and on top of and on top of until you had, basically, well, yeah, a mountain of meat. Roughly the size of the biggest burrito you ever saw. Except it was all meat.

Except it wasn’t, we found out soon enough. Hiding under the just meat was a somewhat smaller mountain of just onions. Which barely broke my breathlessness because I love onions too. And anyway, even with the oniony underpadding, it was still way more meat than anyone else gives you with this plate. And it was raw and red and just delicious. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Atmosphere: fish tank.

New favorite restaurant.

PHO TAN HOA

Daily: 8 a.m.–7 p.m.

431 Jones, SF

(415) 673-3163

No alcohol

Cash only

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

Cafe Mystique

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

If you squint — hard, on a night of driving rain, and you earlier washed your contact lenses down the sink by accident, leaving yourself legally blind — you might just catch a hint of a glimpse of a shadow of the Castro Street that figures so prominently in the movie Milk. Today’s Castro Street, like its 1970s antecedent, is dominated by the Castro Theater’s gigantic sign (a colorful spectacle even to the grievously nearsighted), and it’s still just a few blocks long, a brief run from Market Street to 19th Street. In college, driven by stomach-churning curiosity, we navigated this little stretch one night and wondered what all the fuss was about. This was it? Yes, it was and still is.

Oscar Wilde is said to have said that anyone who disappeared would sooner or later be seen in San Francisco. He might have had a vision of Elvis, or perhaps a premonition about Castro Street, which remains a semi-mythical — and yet quite real — Main Street for gay America and maybe the world. Sitting in a window seat at Café Mystique recently (on an evening of no rain and with contact lenses securely in place), I noticed several familiar faces from epochs past, not seen by me for years but still quite recognizable, like a parade of Fezziwigs from my own private version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In between these sightings, with the huge "Castro" sign glowing like a beacon across the street, we discussed Milk, a movie full of saintly intentions and virtually barren of actual characters except the tortured Dan White and the gently droll Scott Smith (Harvey Milk’s onetime lover), as played by James Franco.

Franco is tasty, with mystique: if he were a café, would he be Café Mystique? The food is tasty at Cafe Mystique, which until recently was a joint called Welcome Home. If Harvey Milk might have felt vaguely at home at Welcome Home, he would almost certainly be astonished by Café Mystique, which on the one hand is still a recognizably gay restaurant from the old school and on the other is dramatically good-looking and serves a Moroccan-inflected menu that would have seemed noteworthy anywhere in the city as recently as a decade ago.

First, the good looks: they’re neither North African nor Castro-homey but faintly central European, like a Vienna hotel or a Bavarian hunting lodge. The long north wall is clad in impressive wood wainscoting, punctuated by pillars topped with sconce lamps, for a street-light effect, while the paint scheme, of butter washed with caramel, enhances the sense of woodsy warmth.

As for the Moroccan touches, they’re all over the dinner menu (there are breakfast and lunch menus too), from the flatbread triangles accompanying a warm fava bean dip ($6) — like a slightly soupy hummus — to the mint in a cup of excellent, if under-seasoned, split green pea soup ($2). (Just add salt and voilà!) There are hints of influence from elsewhere around the Mediterranean as well; a bowl of cucumber sticks bathed in yogurt and boldly charged with lemon and garlic ($4) could easily pass for the Greek condiment tzatziki (itself an obvious relative of the Indian condiment raita).

None of these flourishes seems at all pretentious, since the cooking on the whole remains earthy and friendly. You can get a grilled cheese sandwich ($9), for instance, and it comes with really good fries, and if the cheese happens to be halumi wrapped in lavash, well … that just adds to the mystique. Halumi is a not-soft white cheese typically made from a blend of goat and sheep’s milk and is most closely associated with Cyprus; its firmness means that it resists melting under heat, retaining its shape and solid texture even while taking on a smokiness.

Grilling cubes of meat on skewers is common practice around the Mediterranean — and elsewhere — and at Café Mystique the mixed grill ($15) includes chicken and beef. Beef takes easily to the simplest preparations, such as grilling, while chicken typically needs some TLC to show at its best, so if I’d been asked to bet beforehand on which of these two contestants would command the plate, I would have chosen the beef. But the beef turned out to be rather tough, gray, and flavorless, while the chicken (boneless breast meat) was perfectly cooked, tender and juicy, with a nice dusting of spice. This uneven confederacy of flesh rested on a bed of couscous (which in its white coarseness resembled corn snow), and its chunks were interspersed with examples of grilled vegetables, among them onions, plum tomatoes, zucchini coins, and strips of red and green bell pepper. The bits of green and red on a carpet of white reminded me of Christmas trees and mistletoe wreaths left at snowy curbs in the Januaries of my youth.

Wilde might or might not have anticipated Elvis, but could he possibly have anticipated the Elvis crepe ($8), a gigantic dessert of bananas, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, nuts, and melted Nutella sauce, all piled, ladled, and scattered atop an actual crepe? Plowing through this mass of sugary calories was a little like eating a banana split that had been neglected for an hour or so on the hottest day of summer. And a cautionary note on Nutella, the wondrous Italian spread of chocolate and hazelnut that appeared from the ashen privations of World War II: it used to consist largely of hydrogenated vegetable oil, i.e. trans fat, which, as we now know, is a no-no. I stopped buying it even when it was on sale. Have they changed the formula? Reading ingredient labels now involves considerable squinting.

CAFE MYSTIQUE

Daily, 8 a.m.–11 p.m.

464 Castro, SF

(415) 865-9810

www.cafemystiquesf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderate noise

Wheelchair accessible

Fanning the flames

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS When your rats grow bigger than your chickens and you can hear them at night in the chicken coop, laughing at your traps … them’s hard times.

I mean to pack it in, as a chicken farmer. But what am I going to farm? Rats?

What am I going to eat for lunch? What am I going to give to my friends for their birthdays?

What am I going to give to complete strangers when I love them for one reason or another? Besides eggs, eggs, and eggs, respectively?

Is it even possible for a chicken farmer not to be a chicken farmer? I have gone through brief periods of chickenlessness in my life, but I forget what they were like. Purgatory, probably. And in my theological opinion, purgatory is worse than hell. Hell, you can bring hot dogs and a stick, settle in. But purgatory is waiting by the phone, or running to the mailbox, or checking your e-mail 999 times an hour, wondering if you got the job.

I looked down and my slippers were on the wrong feet. Instead of switching them, I stood up and walked around like that for a while. I’m eating leftovers that are more than a week old now, and when repercussions happen, instead of throwing out the rest I go, hmm, better eat this for dinner too, to get rid of it.

Hey, maybe that’s why my chickens are smaller than my rats. The rats are eating their feed, and the farmer’s eating their scraps. That’s hard times.

I intentionally left Fanny’s off my little list of Hard Times Handbook cheap cheap chirpies because I wanted to give it a whole fat column of words to itself. Not that it’s the best, or the cheapest place out there, but it’s good and cheap, and it’s my new favorite restaurant simply for having duck soup, which is rare for Chinese restaurants, period. It’s even rarer for Chinese/American greasy-spoon dives.

Which is of course what Fanny’s is. South of Market, Bryant and Eighth streets, plain, spacious, and unspectacular. But the pa of the presumed "ma and pa" was talking passionately to their one sit-down customer about some recipe or cooking technique when I walked in, and I took this as a good omen.

An even better omen: how easy it is to eat for under $5. Two eggs with bacon or sausage, hash browns, and toast, omelets, French toast, pancakes, sandwiches, or two-item combos of Chinese food … all five and under. And then even if you’re going to splurge, say, on a big bowl of roast duck soup with wontons or noodles, you’re still talking sixes and sevens.

Not bad!

The catch is that I haven’t actually tried the duck soup, because I went there at eight in the morning on my pre-caffeinated way to work, ordered off the wall, to go, and grabbed a take-out menu (by way of reading material) on the way out.

I didn’t read my reading material until days later, the same way I read everything I read: rocking chair, toasty fire, cat on lap, hot tea … ah, literature!

Under the chapter heading, Soup (Wonton or Noodle), I read the words "roast duck" and followed the dots to the six and the fitty. My rocking chair squeaked to a stop, Weirdo the Cat woke up, the fire popped, I bookmarked my little fold-up take-out menu, and set it on the side table.

My eyes blurred with hot tears (I am easily moved), I scanned the bookshelves next to my wood stove: Jane Austen, Robert Benchley, Chekhov, Dickens … I didn’t have any E’s, so would file Fanny’s between Dostoyevsky and Fante.

I would go there again first chance I got — for lunch, because they’re not open for dinner. If anything is amiss or astounding, I will get word to you. Meanwhile, for me, it’s enough to know that it’s there, like Moby Dick.

And I can vouch for the breakfast: great hash browns, eggs done right, toast whatever. True, I ate these things in my car, driving over the Bay Bridge and listening to a recording of an old Booker T & the MGs LP played at 45 rpm … but that doesn’t mean I’m not a real restaurant reviewer.

Does it?

FANNY’S RESTAURANT

Mon.–Fri. 7 a.m.–4 p.m.; Sat.–Sun. 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1010 Bryant, SF

(415) 626-1543

No alcohol

MC/V

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

Cafe Kati

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

If the second half of the 1990s stands to be remembered as an era of golden bubble baths in San Francisco, the decade’s quite different first half (less opulence, more calamities) might be remembered as a magical era of neighborhood restaurants. With the Great Freeway Shift that followed the 1989 earthquake — demolitions, re-routings, rethinkings — the city’s relationship with its suburbs changed forever; suburban diners could not be counted on as before to fill city restaurants, and young chefs migrated into the neighborhoods to start their own places in what amounted to a culinary diaspora.

Among the earliest of these pioneers was Kirk Webber, who opened his Café Kati in the borderland between the Fillmore and Japantown in 1990. Webber brought a high pedigree to the venture; he had been trained at the California Culinary Academy and had worked at Silks (in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel), among other places, before opening Kati. The restaurant, nonetheless, was a neighborhood restaurant, snug and warm, with a handful of tables and a sense that each dish was being carefully handmade in the small kitchen behind the dining room.

And so it remains. From the rustic, wood-cut-style street signage (reminiscent, for me, of Chez Panisse’s) to the intimacy of the dining room (which seats no more than 20 or so) to the wall art that resembles the famous cave paintings at Lascaux, France, Café Kati feels personal. It has been shaped by human hands and reflects a steady, guiding sensibility. Even the slightly retro black track lighting on the ceiling reinforces our sense that Café Kati has evolved and accreted — has earned its look over the years rather than having been sculpted all at once by a hired-gun designer who then was hired elsewhere and moved on, never to revisit.

Webber is one of the first, and remains one of the purest, of the so-called fusion chefs, the people who brought Asian touches to classic French cooking. A central goal for Webber was to cut down on the fattiness and richness of the traditional dishes without having them deflate altogether, and in this sense his food shares a root with nouvelle cuisine. Even after nearly two decades, it retains an element of invention and wonder without becoming contorted or attention-seeking.

The appetizers are the main, most overtly Asian dishes on the menu. One of Kati’s longtime customer favorites, in fact — the dragon roll ($18.95) — is as good a sushi-style roll as I’ve had in any Japanese restaurant. The roll includes avocado, cucumber, and wonderful crisp-fried shrimp, with flaps of smoked salmon laid like tarpaulins over the top of each rice round. And instead of serving the wasabi and soy sauce separately, Webber mixes them into a glossy sauce that shows signs of being thickened and softened with a bit of honey.

In another signature dish, Vietnamese-style spring rolls ($8.95) the sweetness of mango is modulated with plenty of cilantro, Thai basil (a little sharper than the Italian kinds), and, above all, mint. Webber doesn’t stint on plate decoration, either, having a particular fancy for complex coilings of ruby-red beet and for colorful heaps of cut carrots and microgreens. Plates can look like dioramas of a flower shop.

Main courses open out from Asian influences without forsaking them entirely. Hanger steak (at $29.95, the priciest item on the menu) gets a slightly sweet marinade of soy sauce and sesame oil before being grilled, cut into slices, and served with Blue Lake beans and sautéed spinach. The deft touch here is the pile of spicy Spanish fries, really a version of patatas bravas, the gently crispy quarters of waxy (in this case some kind of baby yellow) potato.

From steak and potatoes to fried chicken ($16.95) — in this case a Cornish game hen, given a Cajun-scented batter, then lightly fried and served with buttermilk mashed potatoes, a mop top of wilted pea tendrils, and a marvelous, bewitching gravy inflected with citrus. If there’s a heaven, the home cooking there will include something like this.

Desserts are all $8.95 — a price point I would describe as neither high nor low — and sing in a more mainstream key. You might find a sundae, a flourless chocolate cake, a crisp, a butterscotch pudding. The last is presented in a parfait glass and consists of layerings of homemade butterscotch and whipped cream — like a sundae with no ice cream, or a planet (like Jupiter) with no definite surface. Butterscotch is basically caramel with vanilla, and Kati’s version is barely sweet with a faint, keen edge of smoke and a rich color like that of tarnished gold. These are strong hints that the butterscotch has been made by a practiced hand, someone who isn’t afraid to skate near the edge of burnt sugar and to give character to the result. (The big giveaway for commercial, mass-produced desserts is that they are predominantly, often overwhelmingly, sweet; they taste as if they were made from sugar and little else.)

Kati’s wine list is substantial though not overwrought, with quite a few decent choices by the glass, and service tends toward flawlessness. As in many pint-sized restaurants, the door opens right into the dining room, which can be disconcerting, especially in the season of cold drafts. I mean wind, not beer.

CAFE KATI

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

1963 Sutter, SF

(415) 775-7313

www.cafekati.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

New year, new pho

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Rang Dong happened out of anger. So don’t let any new age it’s-all-good hippie dips tell you that anger is not a constructive emotion. Without it I never would have been ranting about Pho 84 in the first place.

And Mod the Pod wouldn’t have heard me and wouldn’t have said, "What were you doing at Pho 84 when you could have been at Rang Dong?"

And I wouldn’t have said, "Rang Dong?"

Because, see, I’d never heard of it. It’s in Oakland Chinatown, at Webster and Eighth streets, right where Vi’s used to be, and it might be as good as Vi’s used to be, only better, because it’s still there.

Pod and the Attack have been on this place forever. And such is my trust in my buds’ buds … I’d have grabbed them up and gone right then, even though we’d all already eaten, except it was after 10 p.m. and everyone had to work in the morning. Oh, and Rang Dong closes at 9:30.

Not that I was going to get any sleep anyway, having just dropped over $30 with Deevee at Pho 84 for a bowl of soup and a bowl of bun, no drinks. And here’s the worst part: it wasn’t even good!

She had to pick all the catfishes out of her soup, and I — me, your simple-minded chicken farmer, L.E. for Loves Everything — left pork on my plate! When was the last time I left anything on my plate, let alone pork? Let alone grilled pork in a Vietnamese restaurant? But it was inedibly overcooked.

Just to be sure we weren’t having some weirdo shared hallucination or nightmare (Pho 84 having been pretty good to us in the past), I tried Deevee’s catfish and she tried my pork and we agreed that they both sucked ass. It’s one thing to raise your prices. Everybody does it. When the price goes up and the quality comes down … that’s just bullshit.

So Rang Dong. Next chance I got I gathered up all my West Oakland grillfriends — the Pod, the Attack, Deevee, and Kiz — and Kiz had a pal visiting from New York. So there were six of us, but me and the friend were the first ones seated, and she looked at me and said, "So you’re going to review this?"

"Well, I don’t want to jinx anything," I said. "I’m sure going to try. It’s kind of a New Year’s resolution sort of thing."

She gave me a look. "Wait," she said, "aren’t you a restaurant reviewer?"

"Fifteen, sixteen years," I said, proudly.

"And you’re going to try?" she said, still giving me still the same look.

"To write a restaurant review, yes," I said.

"So … your New Year’s resolution," she said (still the look), "is to do precisely what it is that you already do."

"For a living, yes." I said. "But I’m not making any promises."

The look. She’s a math teacher, turns out, and is rather accustomed to things adding up. Speaking of which: $9.95 + $6.55 + $7.50 + $7.50 + $7.95 + $9.95 + $10.95 = not a lot, really, for six people, especially compared to Pho 84, where hardly anything is under 10 bucks anymore.

And Rang Dong is many many times better. The raw beef salad was as good as any I’ve had anywhere. The thin slices of steak were actually raw, as in red. A lot of places give them too much of a citrus bath and they start to actually cook in it. I get a little turned off by browned "raw" beef.

The salt-and-pepper calamari was lightly breaded and perfectly fried, and I tasted some imperial roll out of someone’s bun, and that was perfectly fried too. The pho was fantastic, really flavorful. In fact, the only dish — out of seven — that I wasn’t absolutely gaga over was the lemongrass chicken. But it wasn’t bad. It was a matter of taste. Other people loved it.

See? So there wasn’t any chicken left on the plate at the end of the meal. And there wasn’t any grilled pork left on any of the plates either. Well, maybe just a little in Kizzer’s New Yorker friend’s bowl, but you better believe I was eyeballing it.

New favorite restaurant!

RANG DONG RESTAURANT

Daily: 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

724 Webster, Oakl.

(510) 835-8375

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

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

Anchor and Hope

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

If there are more architecturally compelling restaurants in the city than the troika assembled by the troika consisting of the Rosenthal brothers and Doug Washington, I don’t know of them. The Rosenthal brothers are, Steven and Mitchell, who ran the kitchen at Postrio for years before leaving to open Town Hall, while Washington (who’s worked at Postrio and Jardinière, among other places) has long been their front-of-the-house presence.

Town Hall was launched in 2003 on the ground floor of a handsome and historic brick building at the corner of Howard and Fremont streets. In 2006 the trio opened their second spot, Salt House, just a few blocks away, on Mission near First, in an old printing plant. And in April came Anchor and Hope, in a gorgeously made-over brick warehouse on Minna Street, more or less wedged between its older siblings.

Restaurant architecture is always relevant, but it’s particularly relevant in SoMa in these days of massive construction projects: gigantic residential towers, buildings of bare concrete, plate glass, and squiggly rooflines, with planes of mesh at odd angles, like giant mosquito screens half-toppled by the wind — all of it suggestive, somehow, of exhibitionism (by architects and occupants alike), an obsession with industrial materials instead of craft and technique, and a blithe attitude toward ugliness.

Too many of these buildings look garish and disposable, as if an artisanal human hand has never touched them, and I suspect they will look dated and cheap before it becomes necessary to tear them down and recycle them into lawn chairs or bidets. When they do come down, it might be that Anchor and Hope will still be standing, its patrons eating oysters and other delicacies from the sea while demolition dust swirls outside.

If there is something almost European in the troika’s architectural sense — an instinct to preserve old buildings and their memory of the past by polishing and refitting them to modern standards — the Rosenthals’ food continues to transcend categories. Town Hall serves a full-throated menu the brothers might have put together at Postrio, Salt House adds a hip-tavern note, and now Anchor and Hope gives us a version of that SF classic, the seafood house.

Step through the enormous plate-glass portal — your first big clue that this isn’t a rehash of Tadich Grill or Sam’s — and you find yourself in a huge open dining room under a peaked ceiling of exposed rafters. The chapel-of-industry effect is similar to that at Acquerello or Chez Spencer but much more imposing. A long bar occupies much of the east wall. Despite the hard flooring material, the noise level is well-managed. The high ceiling must help, while the brushed-steel chairs surprisingly don’t hurt. They can be a little chilly, though, on wintry nights, and you might need a little something to warm your hands over.

How about a bowl of fabulous crab chowder ($10), thickened with parsnips (a flavorful relative of the potato) and some black-pepper cream and heavy with crab meat? Crab doesn’t need much tinkering, in my experience, but in this simplest of soups, the crab flavor shone clearly.

We warmed our hands over a big bowl of clams ($10.50), steamed in a basil-wine broth that gave a teasing whiff of summer. Batter-fried smelts ($9) — "fries with eyes" — didn’t give off any restorative steam, but they were crisp and tasty, and the rémoulade served on the side for dipping the little fish had a serious pepper kick. My only complaint about tiger prawns ($12.50) simmered Thai-style in coconut red curry (with a side of jasmine rice) was that one has seen versions of this dish before, not infrequently.

I was surprised, and perhaps slightly disappointed, to find the menu devoid of sustainability information. Dungeness crab is presumptively local, as is petrale sole (roasted whole here), but the salmon was from Australasia, and the lobster (in a pot pie and on a roll) couldn’t have been local. When in doubt: throw caution to the wind. While I generally steer clear of cioppino, I was drawn to the server’s description of a special, cacciucco ($24), which means "little pond" in Italian. The dish (whose roots are traceable to the Tuscan port city of Livorno) turned out to be something like bouillabaise, a mix of salmon and cod cubes, shrimp, and mussels (of astounding, pillow-like plumpness) in a simple broth of white wine, garlic, and tomato paste that somehow managed to be smoky. The smokiness might have come from the chunks of grilled bread adrift like charred ice floes in the middle of the bowl.

Landlubbers turn up everywhere, even at seafood houses, and at Anchor and Hope they are not slighted. The kitchen even turns out a creditable cassoulet ($24) with duck confit, duck sausage, and pomegranate seeds scattered over the top like rubies. The pomegranate seeds did not sit well with the orderer of the cassoulet, a connoisseur of sorts, but I found they brought not only visual interest but a subtle fruity sharpness that helped cut the fat richness of the meat.

The dessert menu is terse, and the connoisseur thought the prices, which mainly hover between $8 and $9, were moderate. This is possible; today’s real cash cow is the $12 cocktail, which may have relieved some pressure on dessert prices. A rectangle of dense chocolate blackout cake ($8.50) was tinctured with espresso and adorned with a caramel-like brittle of sea salt and pistachio — an elegant and composed treat and plenty for three, if rather modest in the architectural flourishes that seem to define so many of today’s desserts. Still: in modesty, hope. Could this be an aegis for a new year, newer than most?

ANCHOR AND HOPE

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

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

83 Minna, SF

(415) 501-9100

www.anchorandhopesf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Well-modulated noise

Wheelchair accessible

Leftovers

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Rack of lamb. Smoked turkey. Smoked salmon. Seared tuna. Scallops in a saffron cream sauce. Roasted beets. Couscous. These things are in my refrigerator. They are leftovers from a holiday party I helped cater. Two, four, five, six people I called. None could come, so that leaves me, one person, your chicken farmer truly, to knock it all over, all by my lonely lonesome.

[Insert sound of chomping and chewing, tearing, lip-smacking, the gulping of bottles of cheap red wine, the grunting of 5,000 pigs, the burping and farting of four fat football players, a symphony of jackhammers, chainsaws, and meat grinders … and one small sweet-and-greasy chicken-farmerly sigh.]

Thus endeth a pretty weird year. Politics, the economy, my personal life … I’m not going to montage you, don’t worry. I’m going to sentence you. One sentence: Near the beginning of 2008 I left a sexy city boy to find me someone closer to home, and what I found was a woodsy, wonky couple watching slasher movies over barbecue, a couple of local married men, a foot fetishist, and a guy with lots of bondage gear and a rifle leaning against his bedroom wall who wanted to tie me up and I let him.

This is another sentence, agreed, but there was also the neighbor whose young son came out as bisexual while we were dating and probably could have used a little fatherly camaraderie (just a guess) … but dad couldn’t bring himself to tell the boy that, hey, he was sleeping with a tranny.

When, near the end of the year, I finally did fall in love, it was not with a Californian. Dude lived a couple thousand miles away and across an international border. Ah, and he was a wonderful man, but by the time the article came out and everyone started congratuutf8g me on my feat of Sir Reality, it was over.

I have a feat fetish. I like to take on absurd challenges, try to find innovative ways around them (usually involving rubber bands, duct tape, and wax paper wings) … and then invariably crash my latest weirdo flying contraption into the first tree stump I see, or get all tangled in hammocks and chicken wire.

You try to learn a little bit along the way. Like all great and not-so-great inventors, I keep records and take notes … hey! That’s what Cheap Eats is. Has become. But I have to confess (because I always do) that there is a small, strange thought buried deep in my inner bucket of bacon grease, which sometimes gurgles to the surface and astounds the crap out of me. It’s that twisted — a hankering to write actual restaurant reviews.

Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just saying.

I tried to squeeze in one more Mr. Yeah, Right before the end of oh eight. There wasn’t a lot of time left, so things moved way faster than usual. Coffee turned into dinner turned into a walk in the rain turned into his arm around me turned into me pressed against a brick wall, his hands on my breasts and his tongue down my throat. The sex was terrible. He accused me of being a good Catholic girl, which hurt, even though he admitted I was a bad Catholic girl too.

I dressed in the dark, at the foot of his gigantic bed. He got up too, put his clothes on, and then offered to walk me to my car, which was how I knew I wouldn’t see him again. I said, "Nah. Thanks. That’s all right."

And drove home in tears, as usual.

I’m thinking of an Alanis Morissette song. I ask too many questions, I learn. I leap, I learn. I cling, I learn. I’m needy, I learn. Bad in bed, I learn. Beat myself up, I learn. I expect, I learn. I’m neurotic. I lack motivation. I can’t sing for shit or remember the words. I’m demanding, fickle, and a dangerous driver. When I need a friend, I withdraw.

My New Year’s resolution is to get an egg poacher.

But Christmas Day morning, driving home to the woods, scenic route, I saw a coffee cup on the top of a car in a driveway where there weren’t any people. I thought this was the most beautiful thing I’d ever see, until moments later I crested the big hill on Walker Road and there were the greenest fields spooning the bluest sky ever, and, on both sides of me, cows and cows and cows.

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

Henry’s Hunan Restaurant

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

In ages past, I belonged to a small literary society — a sect, if you like. Let us call this society the Out of Print Society. (It actually bore another name, which decency forbids me from proclaiming in print.) The members of our little group met weekly at a Chinese restaurant to trade gossip and pour out the frustrations that have a way of accumuutf8g in literary life; although we did not drink beer from tankards or pound those tankards on the tabletop as a way of demanding refills, we did like kung pao chicken and Hunan fish, and we drank lots of green tea, poured from a pretty pot into dainty little cups.

The restaurant that served as our meetinghouse was Alice’s, corner of Sanchez and 29th streets. The food was cheap and good, and the location was both out of the way and central, perfect for our fugitive natures. At this time, in the second half of the mid-1990s, the Chinese-restaurant picture — indeed the entire restaurant picture — in upper (or is that outer?) Noe Valley was … sleepy. The whole neighborhood was sleepy, and Alice’s was the jewel in the crown atop this nodding head.

Although the Out of Print Society is no more — has gone out of print, we might say — Alice’s is still there. But these days it’s facing competition as the dominant local purveyor of fine, inexpensive, and spicy Chinese food, for just a block away, over on Church Street, an outpost of Henry’s Hunan Restaurant has opened, in the space that belonged most recently to Pescheria and, an iteration or two before that, the estimable but short-lived Café J.

It is one of my beloved maxims that oft-flipped restaurant locations sooner or later become sushi joints, but now there will have to be a new, or another, maxim in light of the spectacle of a Hunan enterprise moving in to cast a calm upon troubled restaurant waters. The look of the space doesn’t seem to have changed much since Café J days; the footprint of the dining room is the same, with the tables laid out in a kind of backward J around a long bar. The chairs, in brushed steel or nickel, are very urban modern, as are the red-shaded halogen lights suspended from the ceiling. In a bow to Noe Valley’s famed sunshine (which real estate people have a way of perceiving more keenly than the rest of us), a few tables and chairs sit outside, nestled against the building’s façade.

So Henry’s Hunan doesn’t look like a typical Chinese restaurant. This appears to be a trend, and is a welcome one. The food, meanwhile, is outstanding and moderately priced. As at Brandy Ho’s over in the Castro District, the menu includes a selection of Hunan-style smoked meats. The usual suspects of Chinese restaurants are also well-represented, from wonton soup to Mongolian chicken. But Henry’s also offers some dishes I’ve never seen before.

One of the most memorable of these is Diana’s special meat pie ($6.95), a stack of scallion cakes buffered by tasty minced meat (pork, I suspect) and plenty of shredded iceberg lettuce. The cakes take on an almost pastry-like flakiness from deep-frying, and the dish as a whole is like a cross between a club sandwich and a tostada: a layered golden disk cut into quarters you can eat with a knife and fork or with your hands, sandwich-style. (Here, incidentally, we have the heretofore unheard-of reality of a Chinese dish even an expert couldn’t eat with chopsticks.)

Henry’s chopsticks are the plastic kind, incidentally, which limits their utility. Dumplings ($5.50), a.k.a. potstickers, aren’t chopstick-friendly in any case, so it was a relief to find them served in a shallow bowl, from which they could be fork-speared without slipping around too much. And chopsticks are blissfully irrelevant in matters of soup, such as mo soi soup ($6), a sizable bowl of steaming chicken stock thickly invested with chunks of chicken, tofu, and egg and shreds of baby-spinach leaves. This is a lovely, satisfying soup, especially in cold weather, but you should make sure you have it before the spicy stuff starts coming, or it could seem lost and pale.

And the spicy stuff is spicy, although the heat is well-controlled, like a 104 mph fastball that shaves the outside corner at the knees. Henry’s special seafood dish ($10.50), a mélange of scallops, shrimp, and chunked chicken breast tossed with carrot coins and tabs of water chestnut, takes its charge from red chili garlic paste, whose distinctive flavor tends to be a little dominant. If you like that flavor, you’ll like it here.

More subtle is spicy curry show main ($7.50), which can be had with chicken, pork, beef, or vegetables. I am wary of curry dishes in Chinese restaurants; too often they taste of canned curry powder, which too often tastes mostly of can — a metallic harshness that overwhelms neighboring flavors, as a huge ugly building can cut off the sun to buildings around it. But Henry’s curry seasoning, though almost certainly a powder (to judge by the yellow tint it imparts to the noodles: a sign of turmeric), has an attractively rounded flavor that accepts the presence of other ingredients (meat, slivered scallions, julienne red bell pepper) and doesn’t stomp on them.

The dish (like Henry’s seafood special) is marked on the menu with a chili pepper — a sign of either welcome or warning, depending on your views about heat — but the kitchen will dial down the chili charge on request. Your server will ask you how hot you like it, along a range from mild to tankard-banging.


HENRY’S HUNAN RESTAURANT

Daily, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

1708 Church, SF

(415) 826-9189

www.henryshunanrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Mother trumpers

-
0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We had a slab of smoked salmon from Grocery Outlet, Ritz crackers, and a bottle of Crystal hot sauce. These things were on the coffee table. The Mrs. was in the bedroom, cracking up over something funny on television. She has a beautiful, booming laugh and a bad right shoulder. There’s a TV in the living room, too, but her Mr. and me were swapping crazy mom stories on the couch, and she likes to give us space when that happens.

"My mom believes in angels and space aliens," the Mountain said.

"My mom thinks people can live for 500 years," I said.

"My mom started a cult," the Mountain said.

"My mom’s been to jail," I said.

It wasn’t a competition. Now that I’m writing it down, though, I see we sound like school kids, instead of 40- and 50-something kooks-in-our-own-right. But it wasn’t a competition.

"My mom has visions, and students, and hears voices," the Mountain said. "An angel told her to move to Scandinavia."

"My mom calls late-night talk shows and the White House, and sends love letters to Garrison Keillor," I said. "She lives in Snow Belt, Ohio, without running water or electricity. Her phone’s tapped."

The Mountain pulled off a big chunk of fish with his fingers and hot sauced it and it wasn’t a competition but here’s where, if it was a competition, he played his trump card: "My mom has a beard," he said.

"My mom shits in a bucket," I said, playing mine.

And we sat there and shook our heads, chewing on smoked salmon with Crystal and Ritz.

"Do you want anything to drink?" the Mountain said.

I was already drinking a big glass of tomato juice with hot sauce in it, and as the glass got emptier and emptier, I kept pouring more and more hot sauce in so that now it was basically hot sauce, with a dash of tomato juice.

The Mountain was sipping red wine out of a beaker. I finished my juice and said I’d try some, and as he poured it he said it was leftover from Thanksgiving.

Oxidation builds character, but I realized, upon first sip, he meant Thanksgiving ’07.

"I ought to sue my mom," he said.

"I used to fantasize about killing mine," I said, swirling my swill.

"Here," he said. "Let me find a picture." And while he was rooting through his closet, I visited the kitchen sink and brought a bag of potato chips back to the coffee table. I noticed that our bottle of Crystal, which we’d just started, was already half empty.

Oh, and it’s great on potato chips too.

Funny, my case of fucking Floyd’s and fucking Fred’s hasn’t even fucking arrived yet, and already I have a new favorite hot sauce! Crystal is just cayenne peppers, vinegar, and salt. Floyd & Fred’s is lime juice, habaneros, salt, and xanthan gum. They both taste great, and are addictive, so now I’m going to have to start carrying two bottles of hot sauce in my purse, and pretty soon I’ll have a bad shoulder too, just like my mountainous seester.

But what’s nice about my new favorite hot sauce, compared to my old one, is that Crystal doesn’t break their bottle on a rock and then jam it shard-side first up your ass. My meaning here is figurative, and financial. See, Crystal is 79 cents for a 6 oz. bottle, compared to $5 for a 5 oz. bottle of F-ing F & F’s. You can get a case of 24 6-oz. bottles of Crystal for $18.93. Fuck and Fuck’s 12-pack of 5-oz. bottles? Fifty bucks. Um, that’s more than twice the price for less than half the goods. And, best of all, you don’t have to go to Whole Paycheck to get a bottle.

Now that that’s settled, I wish I could print a picture here of Mama Mountain, because she’s round, as advertised, and bearded and beautiful, in addition to insane. I’d sue her too, if I was her kid.


My new favorite restaurant is Talavera Taqueria in Berkeley. Two great green salsas, a tomatillo-based and an avocado-based. And the chips are good and fresh. It’s a nice place to sit and eat an al pastor burrito, or probably any other kind as well.


TALAVERA TAQUERIA

Daily: 9 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1561 Solano Ave., Berkeley

(510) 558-8565

Beer

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

Amber India

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

Whatever you think a tony Indian restaurant might look like, you’re probably not picturing Amber India. On the other hand, if you’re wondering what a tony Indian restaurant smells like, you probably already know: it smells like the regular kind, which is to say, it smells of curry. Amber India smells bewitchingly of curry while looking like, in its elegant stackedness, Postrio.

You step inside from street level — or lane level, since the restaurant lies along a pedestrian plaza, Yerba Buena Lane — and find yourself at the host’s podium, on a small platform, while the restaurant opens out below you like an enchanted, hidden valley. Amber India doesn’t quite have Postrio’s Gone with the Wind staircase or exhibition kitchen, but it does have gorgeous flooring (large tiles of what looks like polished sandstone); impressive columns; a partly coffered ceiling; square leaves of gilded, pressed tin tethered to some of the light fixtures; and atmospheric golden lighting in general. Given the hardness of the flooring material and the scale of the restaurant (which can accommodate nearly 200 people), noise is notably under control.

Amber India opened in the city just this past June, in a neighborhood that has seen drastic changes in recent years. (The restaurant’s siblings, scattered across the Peninsula and South Bay, have been a presence in the Bay Area for nearly 15 years.) For one thing, there is now an actual neighborhood, with people living just steps away — mostly overhead, in the condominiums above the Four Seasons Hotel, and in the many other residential buildings that have sprung up in SoMa. The restaurant is also convenient to shoppers, museum-goers (the new Jewish Museum is just across the walkway, while the Yerba Buena Center and Museum of Modern Art are barely more than one block distant), and out-of-towners.

Why would they come to Amber India, apart from its convenience and style? One reason might be that the food emerging from the kitchen is gratifyingly spicy. We were particularly exhilarated by the dal Amber ($12.95), a shallow dish of black lentils swimming in a thick, rust-colored sauce the menu described as consisting of "cream, tomatoes, and spices." "Spices," in the world of Indian restaurants, is a come-hither word that tells you practically nothing; it doesn’t have to mean "spicy" — i.e. hot — but it does here. Dal is often soupy and can be indifferently prepared in other restaurants, but Amber India’s version had a velvet smoothness that left an erotic tingle on the lips.

If you want the standards, many of them are here. But the menu offers a wide array of imaginative cooking, including the use of unorthodox ingredients. Duck? How about duck tikka kebab ($10.95), chunks of boneless breast meat marinated in spicy yogurt, pan-seared on skewers, and served with an eerily addictive dill-caper sauce the color and consistency of homemade mayonnaise? The meat was beautifully tender and didn’t even need the sauce, but once the meat was gone, we kept dipping out spoons into it as if it were a separate dish.

Thanks to saganaki and The Simpsons, many of us are familiar with fried cheese, but grilled cheese — as in actual chunks of cheese, not packaged in a sandwich — is another matter. Amber offers it as paneer tikka lal mirch ($15.95), elongated cubes of mild white cheese, marinated and grilled. If you’ve eaten grilled tofu, you’ll have a good sense of the look and feel of this dish, although the cheese has more tang.

As a boy, I was unimpressed by the cans of spinach devoured by Popeye the Sailor Man: I liked Popeye, but spinach was repulsive, period, new paragraph. Then, in early adulthood, I discovered saag paneer, an exotic version of creamed spinach punctuated with chunks of white cheese. Every Indian restaurant I’ve been to — except, now, Amber — offers an interpretation of this standard. Amber’s spinach dish is called teen saag ($14.95); it consists of spinach (plus some dill and mustard greens) wilted with cumin and garlic and, for counterpoint, mushroom caps and spears of baby corn instead of cheese chunks.

I would count that dish as vegan, despite a small suspicion that cream was involved. Indian cooking is expansively vegan- and vegetarian-friendly, but if you are a sometime or intermittent vegetarian, or a pesco-vegetarian — or even just some kind of poser — Amber doesn’t disappoint. Our tongues were left pleasurably smoldering by the "thecha" shrimp salad ($9.95), a clutch of small shrimp marinated with garlic and chilis, sautéed, and nested in mixed baby field greens. The masterstroke: a vinaigrette scented with lemon verbena, an herb that, like lemongrass, is lemony in a way distinct from plain lemons.

It’s possible that people eat in Indian restaurants without having naan, but I have never seen such a display. Amber isn’t the place to experiment with the naanless life, either; its flatbreads are wonderful exercises in blistered tenderness, and the signature Amber rounds ($3.95) come with a variety of toppings, including a fragrant and nippy blend of chili and thyme.

On the other hand … $3.95 for a disk of bread sprinkled with a few herbs isn’t exactly the steal of the century. Amber’s prices are, I would guess, about 50 percent higher than the Indian-restaurant average in the farther reaches of the city. So you pay a city-center premium that reflects convenience and the affluence of the surroundings. But you won’t find better Indian food, and in that sense the premium, although steep as a percentage, is modest as a fact.

AMBER

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

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon–3 p.m.

25 Yerba Buena Lane, SF

(415) 777-0500

www.amber-india.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Darkest day

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS For all I know you are reading this on the darkest day of the year. And for all you know I am sitting in a rocking chair in front of my wood-burning stove, not rocking so much as reeling, hands in hair, trying to get my head straight.

Wondering:

Why do I water my cat? Most people water their plants. I neglect mine, water the cat instead, and the cat chews on the leaves and then pukes, or not, and everything works out somehow, except: possible liver damage.

Except everything does work out, and Weirdo the Cat stays weird and alive and well, at 15. In people years I am less grandmotherly than her, but for the record we both like afghans and rocking chairs.

Wondering: Why do I watch opera? Why do I read the wrong novels? Why do I fall in love in winter when I could do so much more with spring or summer? Why is love, the word, never enough, like a hot water bottle under the covers, at your feet?

I sleep in my socks. I wear long underwear, flannel pajama bottoms, and a sweater, sometimes a sweatshirt and sweater. I wake up drenched in sweat, wonder why. Really really cold nights I’ll wear a hoodie, or a hat, or pull my headband down over my ears.

First Weirdo the Cat and then I will cease to become point-of-view characters, and the bed, the litter box, the faux brick wall behind our wood stove will miss us equally, our opposite-of-vacant stares and songs of complaint.

Because it’s dark here in the woods, even in summer, I decorate my shack year-round with Xmas lights. It’s one small room, x by x, with three overhead lights, two floor lamps, a row of track lighting, a utility lamp, and 9,999 strategically placed unblinking Xmas tree bulbs. Then the power goes out and I have to battle seasonal affection disorder with candles and flowers.

On the radio they said to put olive oil on your chapped lips. I’m a bad Italian. I prefer butter to olive oil, onions to garlic, and kisses to both. I’m skinny. At my age! I don’t eat enough pasta and never go to church, unless it’s to make fun of their idea of bread and wine.

I was standing at the stove pouring bacon grease from the skillet into the jar, for the working of future miracles, and as I watched the stream turn to strings turn to drops of dripping drippings, I thought, These are the clogged arteries of Christ. Put them in your refrigerator, in remembrance of Him. And also so they don’t get rancid.

Ceremoniously, although no one was watching, not even a cat, I dipped my middle finger, right hand, deep into the jar of still-warm bacon fat, and rubbed it all over my lips. Olive oil, my ass, I thought.

But that’s another story. In this one, in the spirit of giving, declaring truce, peace, and eggs, I grant my Catholic peeps, Protestant hens, roosters, and religious people everywhere their saviors, virgins, prophets, crowing, and high holy holidays. In fact, I’m so out of gas right now that I even give you eternal life. It’s yours. If that’s what you believe, you got it. I won’t argue.

For me, I don’t see the point. It’s not life to which I am insanely attached, it’s my point of view. This very particular chicken farmerly capacity for watching, wondering, waxing poetic, and waking up alone and deeply disturbed. Like that hot water bottle twisted in the covers somewhere near your feet, it’s little comfort to me, on the longest night of the year, your concept of heaven, or energy, or yet another go-round. Even if … if I ain’t there to call it, in my exact eyes and language, then what the fuck?

Thinking these deep, ecclesiastic thoughts, I put my jar of bacon fat in the fridge, washed and dried the frying pan, did the rest of the dishes, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror and ran my fingers through my hair. Looking good enough, I thought, I went out into the world in search of vegetarians to kiss.

————

My new favorite restaurant is Los Comales in Oakland’s Diamond District. A regular meat burrito (carnitas, in my opinion) is under $5, but you have to sweet-talk them into chips, or pay 50 cents. Or, if you’re really really poor, you can get a bean and cheese burrito for $2.40, and kiss me by way of meat.

TAQUERIA LOS COMALES

Mon.–Sat., 9 a.m.–8:30 p.m.

2105 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 531-3660

Beer

AE/MC/V

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

Hot and bothered

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS After breakfast we went to Whole Paycheck. I needed to pick up a chicken, an onion, and carrots and celery for work. Earl Butter needed a lot more than that, but of course couldn’t afford anything at all, since Whole Paycheck’s pricing is designed to keep out riffraff, such as teachers and newspaper columnists.

Earl was sad, so I bought him a bottle of hot sauce. Floyd & Fred’s, extra hot. My new favorite hot sauce. It’s made out of key lime juice and habanero, and comes in a cute little bottle with a cute little picture of a distressed lime on it, mouth open, eyes rolling, and flames licking out of its head.

I first discovered Floyd and Fred in Crawdad de la Cooter’s refrigerator. Except back then it was just one of them, I forget which. Probably Floyd.

You can’t fit two people in a refrigerator.

"What’s this?" I asked Crawdad, way back whenever, because I’m always interested in new kinds of hot sauce.

"You can have it," she said.

Crawdad is 10 times the heat demon I am. In fact, she taught me how. So as soon as I tasted Floyd & Fred’s, back when it was Floyd’s or Fred’s, I could see why she didn’t go for them. Him.

It was so mild, I used half the 5 oz. bottle on one little bowl of soup. Well, the good news is they make an extra-hot version, which is pretty much perfect. And the bad news is I only ever seem to see it at Whole Paycheck. For $5 a bottle! Those of you who are paying attention, and good at math, will realize immediately that we’re talking, let’s see … 5 oz. bottle, $5 a bottle, carry the one … what? Roughly a dollar an ounce.

At which rate my standard size (10 oz.) bottle of my old favorite hot sauce, Tapatío, for example, would have set me back (hold on, I’m going to use a calculator this time) … $10, exactly.

Actual cost: oh, $3.65.

So you see? This is why I never shop at Whole Paycheck, except when I’m shopping for someone else. My Canadian says they’re union busters. I think, at $5 for a cute little tiny 5 oz. bottle, they’re busting a lot more than unions.

But it is good stuff, Floyd & Fred’s. I’m an addict. I keep a bottle of extra-hot in my purse at all times, and rarely if ever mistake it for perfume.

The other day, though, I was in a public restroom, rummaging frantically through my purse, not quite exactly saying but almost audibly thinking, "tampon tampon tampon" (I do this sometimes, by way of establishing ladies room cred) … when I came upon my little hot sauce bottle and noticed, for the first time ever, that there’s a phone number just below the nutrition facts, 415-987-LIME.

"Cell phone cell phone cell phone," I thought, rummaging. I had one! Took it outside, dialed, and a man’s voice answered. Just: "Hello?"

"Hi … Floyd?" I said. "Fred?"

Silence. Then: "Yes?"

I briefly summarized my situation, that I was a starving artist slash chicken farmer and a hot sauce junky and where I lived, in the woods, and so forth, and he interrupted me after 15 minutes and said, "There’s a Whole Foods right near you."

"Whole what?" I said. "I can’t afford to shop there! Do you sell directly to people?"

By the case, he said. How many bottles in a case? Twelve. How much? (You’re going to love this …) Sixty dollars! He must have heard my mathematical wheels squeaking through the phone because he made a quick adjustment: $50, free delivery.

Well, $4.16 a bottle is still steep. But addiction is addiction, and delivery is delivery, so I made the deal, and now won’t have to worry about hot sauce for a long, long time, fuck Floyd. Fuck Fred.

———————

My new favorite restaurant is Moki’s in Bernal Heights, because Sockywonk picked up the check. Great sushi, but the chicken coconut curry soup (which we expected to be something like Thai tom ka gai), didn’t have no chickens in it. Nor even the flavor of chickens. Fuck Moki.

MOKI’S SUSHI & PACIFIC GRILL

Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

615 Cortland, SF

(415) 970-9336

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

Andalu

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

Before small plates go the way of the brontosaurus and the leisure suit, I thought I should look in on Andalu, which has held down the corner of 16th and Guerrero streets now for the better part of a decade and was one of the progenitors of our much-discussed "global tapas" trend. The restaurant replaced a slightly dodgy taqueria called Maya back in the halcyon dot-com days — this would be two busts ago — and, with its neighbor, Tokyo Go Go, helped bring a luster of money and youth to a neighborhood that was a little lacking in luster of any kind. (Tokyo Go Go’s older sibling, Ace Wasabi’s Rock’n’ Roll Sushi, né Flying Kamikazes, is in the Marina District, to give you some idea of the social flavoring. I wouldn’t say the immediate area is Marina South, but I wouldn’t say it isn’t, either.)

From the beginning, Andalu has enjoyed at least one large basic asset — a surprisingly brick-and-mortar one, considering the restaurant’s birth in the age of Internet pixie dust: it isn’t just located at the corner of 16th and Guerrero, it’s right at the corner. It commands the corner, and it’s a busy corner. You can’t miss the place, with its distinctive green sign — a big green A with a swoosh, like something from The Jetsons — aglow in the twilight. The restaurant is, in effect, its own billboard.

The name, meanwhile, reminds us of Andalucia, that sunny province in the south of Spain, and the reminder subtly helps set us up for small plates. These will turn out to be wildly variegated, borrowing influences from around the world, but the menu does open in distinctively Iberian style, with several sherries and ports, along with a plate of seriously spicy Andalucian-style green and black olives ($3.25). The olives are marinated with fennel, lemon, chili peppers, and garlic — and it’s the last two you notice, since they appear whole, as pod and (peeled) clove.

But after this brief bow to the old country, the world is suddenly our oyster. Unlike nearby Ramblas, which does hew to a certain Spanish authenticity, Andalu’s kitchen turns out versions of items as diverse as miso-glazed sea bass and spare ribs braised in Coke. (The menu doesn’t offer oysters, incidentally; those inclined to shellfish will have to make do with mussels.)

Since I am perpetually curious about macaroni and cheese ($7.50), I was interested to see what freshening could be given to this most American of dishes. Typical restaurant fancifications involve the use of chic cheese — Gruyère is a frequent choice — but Andalu’s menu card described the mac and cheese as "crispy." What could this mean? A particularly heavy fall of buttered bread crumbs over the top — a kind of super-gratin? Whatever I was expecting, I wasn’t expecting what came: wedges of what must have been a kind of mac-and-cheese pie, breaded and flash-fried. The wedges themselves reminded me of slices of Brie or a runny triple-cream cheese within an edible rind. The wedges’ rigidity made them suitable for dipping in a stainless-steel ramekin — like a giant’s thimble — of herbed tomato vinaigrette.

Fish tacos ($10 for four small ones) — a SoCal favorite — were dolled up here with grilled ahi, but mostly they tasted of the mango salsa ladled over their tops. In other words, sweet. Better balanced was a hailbut paillard ($9.50), a thin disk of tissue dressed with a tasty mix of cilantro, ginger, soy, and hot grapeseed oil. The fish was like cooked carpaccio, with the flaw being that it had been cooked right onto the plate, so that eating it was like tearing up a sub-floor.

Who can resist Moroccan lamb cigars ($7.25)? Not me. Flutes of pastry filled with seasoned minced lamb and deep-fried to golden crispiness should have been spectacular — worthy members of the egg roll-flauta family — instead of just very good. The lamb seemed under-seasoned (rather odd, since Morocco is one of the lands of spice), and the accompanying yogurt-mint sauce offered only partial restitution. I had a similar reaction to the sliders ($9.50), a trio of miniature hamburgers on buns slathered with basil aioli and presented with a bird’s nest of battered, deep-fried shallot rings.

The rings were a lovely, more delicate version of onion rings, but the little burgers were overcooked and served on disappointingly thick, not-warm buns. They might have been better, ironically, if they’d been made with the lamb that went into the cigars.

One of the best dishes on the menu is bread salad ($9.25) — what the Italians call panzanella, cubes of stale (or, in this case, grilled) bread tossed with cut tomatoes and basil. Here the herb was arugula — a sly innovation — with the traditional basil being supplied through a vinaigrette. Toasted pine nuts probably aren’t unheard of in Italian bread salads, but I’ve never seen a recipe that called for blobs of burrata, a mozzarella-like cow’s-milk cheese produced in southern Italy. The cheese brought visual interest — it looked like patches of snow receding from a late-winter landscape dotted with hints of spring — and a suggestion of softening creaminess to the plate’s various sharpnesses.

Dessert at the end of a repast consisting of macaroni and cheese and hamburgers with onion rings would have to be something like brownies. Andalu’s version ($5) is pretty satisfying: a plateful of moist, cake-like squares, ankle-deep in warm chocolate sauce, dusted with confectioner’s sugar and each topped with a raspberry, like a ruby in a voluptuous display at a jeweler’s. Or, perhaps, a rose clutched in the hand of an unfortunate fellow clad in a chocolate-brown leisure suit with a red carnation, circa 1975: a Paleolithic era in the annals of style, and Andalu still ages off.

ANDALU

Dinner: Sun.–Tues., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Wed.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

3198 16th St., SF

(415) 621-2211

www.andalusf.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Can be noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Waxing fried

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I got a Brazilian. I play on a Brazilian soccer team. I pass for Brazilian. I pass to Brazilians. I figured, what the fuck, I’ll get a Brazilian.

My Canadian likes it like that. I happened to know this, and did it for him. That way, in case we become a couple and have a fight some day and he says, "What did you ever do for me?" I’ll say, "I got my ass waxed in the middle of winter," and, argument over, we’ll live happily ever after.

Why I don’t write restaurant reviews is illustrated by the following little story:

I ate at my always favorite restaurant, Just For You, three times in 10 days, and two of those times I ordered the hangtown fry. If you don’t know what a hangtown fry is … I feel so sorry for you that my eyes are watering.

My mouth is watering too, because what it is, see, is eggs with onions, oysters, and bacon. Or: everything that makes life lovable, give or take butter. And there’s always plenty of that on the table at my always favorite restaurant.

Just to be clear: this is not a review of Just For You. I already reviewed it eight or nine times. It’s my last-standing always favorite restaurant. This is just a story (true) that has a moral (iffy), and happens to be set at a particular place. In Dogpatch. San Francisco. California.

The hangtown fry’s creation myths center around Placerville, which used to be called Hangtown, and/or San Francisco, which used to be called San Francisco, during the gold rush. Miner walks into a bar, says, no joke, he struck it rich, what’s the most expensive meal they can make him? Cook invents the hangtown fry ($6) on the spot.

Six dollars!!! In the middle of the 19th century!! Do you see my point? Inflation be damned, 160 years later you can get the same damn thing for breakfast at Just For You for just four dollars more!

But that’s not my point. My point is that, if you ask me, the oysters should be breaded and fried — not because that’s the more authentic way to make the dish (although it might be, for all I know), but because it tastes better this way. Trust me. That’s how they made it on Friday. And if I were a restaurant reviewer I would have written, Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Ohmigod! I mean what else can you say about fried oysters and bacon on the same plate? With eggs and onions.

Cornbread …

And then when I went back on Wednesday, with Earl Butter, and ordered the hangtown fry again, the oysters were not at all breaded or fried and the dish was, like, yeah, whatever.

Don’t get me wrong, I love raw oysters. There is no oyster better than a raw oyster. But these wasn’t raw oysters. They were knocked out of a jar (I’m guessing) and cooked into some eggs. And there’s a world of difference between a not-raw jar-knocked oyster breaded and fried, and a not-raw jar-knocked oyster just knocked and notted and cooked into eggs, bacon notwithstanding.

Tell you what, I have never been madder at my always favorite restaurant than I was that Wednesday morning, Earl Butter as my witness. I was madder at them than they used to be at me 10 years ago for trying to keep the place a secret.

Which goes to show you that, in the words of Shakespeare, you never can tell, and therefore shouldn’t write restaurant reviews. You should get a Brazilian.

And a Canadian who appreciates Brazilians.

On exotic-bodied chicken farmers.

If you’re me.

My new favorite restaurant is Bombay. Indian. Only I’m madder at them than at Just For You. It was classic: small white girl orders something hot hot hot, and a knows-better waiterperson goes, "Oh, no no no, that’s already the spiciest dish on our menu." He talks her into medium, and the spiciest dish on their menu turns out to be as spicy as a bowl of corn flakes. Been in a bad mood ever since.

BOMBAY INDIAN RESTAURANT

Daily: Lunch, 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.; Dinner, 5 p.m.–10:30 p.m.

2217 Market, SF

(415) 861-6655

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

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

Good Pizza

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

Are hotel restaurants second-class citizens? Do they fly coach? Not all of them, certainly, in this city: several of our grandest restaurants, including Masa’s, Campton Place, and the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, are in (grand) hotels. Still, the hotel restaurant, as a general proposition, gives a brief shiver. One has the abiding suspicion that these enterprises serve a captive audience consisting of out-of-towners — people here for conventions or conferences, or maybe just plain old tourists. In a tourist town like ours, tourists are the objects of considerable ambivalence. They spend money, yes, which is a particularly attractive gesture during times of economic apocalypse, but they’re also suckers for cable-car rides and dishes like cioppino served in hollowed-out rounds of sourdough bread.

They’re also not too likely to be found at such places as the intersection of Seventh and Mission streets, where, after nightfall, the look and a good deal of the feel of gloomy Gotham City in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie set in. Scraps of stained newspaper rustle in the gutters, and passersby mutter to themselves. You wouldn’t expect to find a hotel here, and yet there is one: it’s called Good Hotel, it’s part of the Joie de Vivre chain (which has made something of an art of bringing alternative style to sketchy or otherwise unlikely sites), and its restaurant is called Good Pizza. Yes, a hotel restaurant that’s a pizzeria! This could be a first.

Tony pizzerias have been blooming in the city in the past few years, and Good Pizza is one of them. It emphasizes high quality ingredients — how about some fromage blanc from Cowgirl Creamery, or bacon from Nueske? — and it’s also bright and good-looking in a way that reminded me of IKEA. The main color is an orange-peach, but there’s plenty of warm wood trim, glass, and shiny stainless-steel for the Stockholm look. The bright and generous lighting, in addition to making the interior glow, also flows out to the street. The pizzeria is a lantern on its otherwise ill-lit corner.

The menu is quite limited, with a twist. On the non-twisty side, you can choose from among nine pies with predetermined toppings; the possibilities here range from a simple, classic margherita pizza (tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil) to a more oddball pie featuring the aforementioned fromage blanc in the company of seasonal organic apples, toasted walnuts, and scallions. The twist is that you can put together your own pizza, which, so far as I know, isn’t permitted at such places as Delfina, Pizzetta 211, Piccino, or Gialina.

Perhaps there is wisdom in not permitting people the freedom to command their own pies. Seinfeld‘s Kramer tried to put cucumbers on a pizza, until Poppie smacked him down. Let this be a lesson to us all.

Cukes aren’t an option at Good Pizza, but one evening we did order a pie that we supposed would be a splendid, if brief, monument to vegetarian possibility but didn’t turn out quite right. The culprit, we decided, was the sun-dried tomatoes, which in certain contexts can add a sausage-y weight but in others can be noisy and uncooperative. Our pizza, a 12-incher ($13), began with the included tomato sauce and a proprietary cheese blend, and we added (besides the sun-dried tomatoes), roasted mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and fresh tomatoes (an extra $1 each). We couldn’t quite put a finger on the exact nature of the clash, although artichoke hearts can be as recalcitrant as sun-dried tomatoes, and the fresh tomatoes had been added after the pizza had been lifted from the oven, leaving them raw and untethered to everything else.

Much simpler and therefore more coherent was the pepperoni pizza ($14 for the 12-incher). Has there ever been a bad pepperoni pizza? This one was made with Hobbs pepperoni, which made it sound a little hoity-toity. But the sausage was not only garlicky and peppery but greasy; it left little pools of orange everywhere, like chorizo in a queso fundido, which made me feel that it was half-time at a college football game somewhere.

No pizza is complete without a salad, and Good Pizza offers one, and only one: the good salad ($8 for the large version, with an herbed flatbread). The salad is basically a Greek salad without feta cheese; its players include tomato and red bell pepper slices, chunks of cucumber, kalamata olives, and artichoke hearts, all bathed in a memorable lemon-oregano vinaigrette.

No pizzeria experience is complete without some beer or wine. You could enjoy a Moretti ($4.50) with your pie — Italian beer is underrated — but a livelier choice might be a glass of red or white wine ($5.75) from Más Wine Company in Cloverdale. In a small irony, the beers (there’s also Coors Light) come in bottles, while the wines by the glass are on tap. The Más 2006-vintage vino was an impressive proprietary blend of syrah and cabernet (with a dash of petite sirah) that tasted strongly of cherries and was indeed, as the winery’s Web site promises, "food friendly" and "approachable."

Given the ovens that must be the center of any pizzeria’s kitchen, it isn’t surprising that Good Pizza’s shiny display cases are full of baked goods, including scones, muffins, and cookies — wonderfully intense lemon-sugar cookies for just 90 cents. Not bad. (The baked goods aren’t actually baked onsite but come from Pacific Baking Company.) The scones and muffins also clue us in that Good Pizza, like many another hotel restaurant, does a smart morning business. Who wouldn’t love the smell of breakfast calzones in the morning, with the sun breaking over the corner of Seventh and Mission and a fresh newspaper to read?

GOOD PIZZA

Mon.–Fri., 7 a.m.–3 p.m., 5–10 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.

112 Seventh St., SF

(415) 626-8381

www.jdvhotels.com/dining/good_pizza

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Cossu

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

Having spent many months — too many months — watching presidential aspirants address television cameras from cavernous halls, I stepped into Cossu recently and found it oddly familiar. The restaurant is cavernous, and it even has a spotlit stage, although not for presidential candidates or other bloviating politicos but live musical acts. It also, until recently, was called Pasha.

The place has changed hands and changed chefs, according to one of our servers, and it’s even (we were reassured) been redecorated. It didn’t look much different to me, I must say: the lighting tends toward nightclub dimness; the walls, flooring, and tented ceiling are all a red-burgundy shade — like being inside a huge box of red wine — and, in a slight ergonomic crisis, the square tables are still awkwardly low, with awkwardly low ottomans and banquettes to sit on. The tables are also still set with brass inlays that say "Pasha." I didn’t particularly care for Pasha, so I wasn’t particularly thrilled to see a recurrence of the name. On the other hand, it’s hard to read table inlays in dim light. So, a wash there.

The big change has been in the kitchen, where executive chef Hijam Senhaji turns out a "Moroccan fusion" menu. As one of our servers told us, the idea is (if I might be allowed a moment of Emerilspeak) to kick it up a notch. The result is mostly impressive; if you’ve liked the food at Saha, Medjool, or the original Baraka, you’ll likely like the food here. Of course there are traditional tagine and couscous dishes, but the cooking can soar well beyond the old boundaries. It can also catch the occasional wing in power lines.

The best dishes have at least one foot firmly planted on the soil of tradition. The bastilla, for instance — a packet of phyllo pastry filled with something savory, like a giant flaky raviolo — is a staple in Moroccan cooking (and, under various other names, throughout the Mediterranean). Cossu’s Essaouira version ($14) is filled with a mix of shrimp and calamari in a chermoula paste — a fragrant blend of garlic, herbs, lemon juice, olive oil, cumin, coriander, and (guessing by the color) some saffron. The bastilla reaches the table looking like a big fat wallet and isn’t sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. Some might account this omission a small mercy.

Another traditional Moroccan preparation is the salad of shredded spinach called bakoula ($8). It’s not exactly a beauty queen; in fact it looks like one of those clumps of wet grass you sometimes have to pull from the lawn mower, if you happen to have mowed a damp lawn. But it’s punctuated with slivers of green olive and imbued with the haunting, sour-salty flavor of preserved lemons. Even served cold, it casts a spell.

While you wait for the next treat to appear, you gnaw on your warm sesame-seed bun and nibble at your plate of green and black olives in their spicy marinade. (A word to the wise: most of the olives are pitted, but not all.) Maybe you’ve opted for the French fries ($6) as a kind of intermezzo; they’re wonderfully slender and tender-crisp, but they offer no discernable hint of Moroccan (or indeed any) fusion.

The kitchen saves the bulk of its innovative effects for the big dishes. Slices of Muscovy duck breast ($26) don’t, to me, suggest north Africa in the least, but the meat is expertly roasted to order (we asked for rare and got it rare — lovely reddish-pink flaps, with plenty of juice), and it’s sauced with a viscous, honey-like essence of apricot and cinnamon. As someone who is wary of the usual pairings made between fruit and flesh, sweet and savory (pork with apples or cherries comes instantly to mind), I found this combination to be winsome — and, in my experience, unique.

Well, semi-unique, since the sauce accompanying the black and white tuna ($24), also featured a cunning deployment of cinnamon, a supple and sublime spice we occidentals tend to underuse. Here the cinnamon was added to a tomato coulis, with the result being a distant relative of barbecue sauce. The fish itself, meanwhile, was sprinkled with black sesame seeds, seared to order, and presented on a bed of saffron rice.

So far, so good with these fusion dishes. The kitchen even served the duck with a pine-nut-and-parsley couscous, to distinguish it from the saffron rice. But both plates were piled high on one side with the same, not particularly interesting, medley of sautéed vegetables, mostly green and yellow summer squash, carrot tabs, and shreds of red cabbage. Of course these are all estimable — and colorful — foodstuffs; they are good for us and even, to a degree, seasonal. But they also suggest a kind of mass production that’s not quite consistent with the high ambition of turning out distinctive food, plate by plate. It’s especially jarring when the stars of each plate are so distinctive; it’s as if cheap tires have been fitted to a Lamborghini.

Is this disjunction a lingering ghost of Pasha? We attempted an exorcism by inquiring about dessert but were told our choices were limited to baklava and coffee. I like baklava well enough, but because it’s suffered overexposure on these hither shores — like tiramisù — and drifted in the direction of cliché, I almost never order it and didn’t here. Our knowledgeable and radiant server quietly supported us in this choice. She and her troupe, in fact, were altogether cosseting. *

COSSU RESTAURANT, BAR, AND LOUNGE

Tues.–Sun., 6 p.m. to closing

1516 Broadway, SF

(415) 885-4477

www.pasharestaurant.com

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Sticky buns

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS This Thanksgiving I am thankful for sushi, pre-cum, the hangtown fry, clam chowder, big green salads, soft-boiled eggs, carnitas tacos, biscotti, roasted chickens, cum, day-old sticky buns, and Canada. However, I have no plans for Thanksgiving dinner.

How can this happen? My favorite holiday! My only holiday!

Deevee and Gilley are going camping. I’m invited, but don’t like to be cold. The Maze invited me to San Diego for dinner with his parents. I like to be warm, but the train ticket costs $150 and you have to spend half the time on a bus. What kind of train ticket is that?

My new favorite country is Canada. Truth be told, Canada was my old favorite country too, only for different reasons. I used to like Canada because it seemed less like a country than other countries, the mouse sleeping next to the elephant. Its people, peaceful and funny.

Second City Television was my favorite TV show. "O Canada" stirred me more than "The Star-Spangled Banner." I almost died in Canada, in the late 1990s, and have only been back once since, to play cowboy songs for elderly shut-ins in Ottawa.

That was five years ago, and I was in a van. You don’t need a passport to get into Canada, just to come back. I learned. The hard way. I’m afraid to fly and can’t afford to and have no plans to visit my new favorite country, but that’s OK. Apparently, it will come to me.

In Canada all the animals are moose. If you have mice, and you trap one, you will find on closer inspection that your mouse is a little tiny moose. If you have a cat and a dog, you have a moose and a moose. Small ones. If you go to the zoo, or the circus, and they feature an elephant, it will be played by a humongous moose. And if you see an actual-size moose — say, on the side of a small road in the mountains — then that’s a moose too.

Thanksgiving in Canada happens in October and is not a big deal, according to my Canadian. After work I picked him up at the airport, and I took him out for sushi and then to a downtown hotel with clawfoot bathtubs.

We hardly slept that night, or the next, or the next. The groundwork had been laid online, which doesn’t sound right, I realize. But besides sex, we drove around and talked about food, and movies, and food. Fuck history, Canadians know as much about American barbecue as most Americans do. We’d eaten at a lot of the same places in the South. He knew where to get fried chicken in Missouri, and Buffalo wings in Buffalo. I showed him where to go for breakfast in San Francisco, lunch on the Sonoma Coast, and dinner in the wine country.

He bought me a bottle of great whiskey and a big book about road food. All weekend that weekend I didn’t check my e-mail or answer my cell phone, and my friends worried about me. They needn’t have. I was visiting Canada, in the comfort of my own county and country. And I found it infinitely sweet, hospitable, romantic, and, best of all, game.

The boys around here, you know, the too-cool-for-drool outside-the-box ones who describe themselves on the dating sites as open-minded, adventurous, looking for new experiences, blah blah barf … I hate to say this, my rad hipster sexually-liberated countrymen, but you were just schooled in all of the above by a middle-aged Canadian tweed with daughters and a favorite toothpaste.

He didn’t know I was trans when he first wrote to me, just liked my pics and words and food-itude. I told him right away. I told him and showed him: look, man, an outtie. And unlike you, he shrugged. Never been with a body like mine, he said, never even thought about it. But … he couldn’t wait to find out.

And did.

And loved it. And loves me. He said so.

"I love you too," I said. And I took him back to the airport and then went to play soccer as usual.

My new favorite restaurant is Sushi Man. Just for the name. That’s all. The sushi was … well, nobody got hurt or anything. I got sashimi hamachi and some saba, and the steamed spinach thing with sesame seeds, which was great. Better than the sushi. Nice atmosphere, surreal service, nobody there … *

SUSHI MAN

Daily: 5 p.m.–10:30 p.m.

731 Bush, SF

(415) 981-1313

Beer & wine

MC/V

Meatballs

-
0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter made the sauce and I put meatballs in it. You could smell this on the stairs. Between the first and second floors it was something, and between the second and third it was something else. The meatballs had beef and pork and cheese, garlic, parsley, an egg, some old bread crumbs … basically, whatever I could find in Earl Butter’s kitchen. I browned them in bacon fat; then, while they were bobbing in the saucy gurgle, I washed the soccer off of me in Earl Butter’s shower.

Five zip we’d lost. I tossed a salad, boiled spaghetti, Wayway brought the bread, and it was Sunday afternoon all over again. My hair air dries. I do not use hair dryers.

I use a towel.

The occasion: a visit from our own private Idahoan, Johnny "Jack" Blogger, né Johnny "Jack" Journalism, né Johnny "Jack" Poetry, the master of doing what he does, and being what he does, and words and I guess horses.

There were eight people total gathered around a couple of makeshift tables, spinning mismatched forks and raising glasses and bottles and eyebrows to bad jokes, good food, and questionable politics. We laughed until it hurt, ate until it hurt, and then one of us had to go give a massage, another was late for load-in and sound check, a couple needed a nap, and dirty dishes beckoned.

Somehow Johnny "Jack," our guest of honor, wound up doing most of them. I helped. When I go to Idaho, Johnny "Jack" and his wife, Mrs. "Jack," always have a big pot of something or other waiting for me. Mac and cheese. Red beans and rice. It’s a long drive.

When he showed up here, a couple nights before spaghetti, I had jambalaya, which is my new favorite thing to make. And eat. I am eating the leftovers as we speak, and I gotta say: yum. Every time I make jambalaya I have to call Crawdad de la Cooter five times to ask about this or that or rice, and I suppose that’s partly what I love about jambalaya. That tech support comes with it.

You can toast the rice first, or not, or sauté it a little with the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, peppers, and garlic, and, oh, you can imagine how a chicken farmer loves four-thing trinities!

But this time Crawdad called me. "What are you cooking?" she asked.

"Jambalaya," I said. "Here. Talk to John." And I handed him the phone. My two favorite laughs, his and hers, but I could only hear one of them and wished I had a speaker phone.

At the show that night three of our spaghetti friends were playing in two different bands. Everyone was there and I talked to a lot of people I hadn’t seen in some time and lost my voice. That’s just one reason why this column isn’t exactly saying anything.

On the way back to the woods we stopped at a late-night Chinese joint for something to eat. Up high near the ceiling in a corner was a medium-size fish tank with medium-size fishes swimming back and forth, winding around like letters, trying real hard to spell P-O-R-K and B-E-E-F and even C-H-I-C-K-E-N, and really only looking like fish in a fish tank. And tasty ones at that. Which reminded me of this article even before I started to write it.

Johnny "Jack" Blogger has been blogging and talking a lot about nostalgia. This ain’t that. My own happy happy sizzly sadness is set some time in the future. I don’t want to be fried, or cooked in a clay pot either, but there is something delicious in my medium-size heart, flop and roll and apropos of none of the above. I twist, I turn, I sink and spin, and can’t even begin to spell it.

My new favorite restaurant is Lee Hou, which claims to be "the very first Chinese restaurant on Clement." So … OK, so they’ve had a long time to perfect their salt and pepper chicken wings. We also got lamb sticks, because that seemed like good road food, but the wings were 10 times better and soared us, and we got crumbs and bones all over Johnny "Jack"<0x2009>‘s car, not mine. Damn it! Some things we didn’t eat: snails, duck tongue, and goose intestines. Oh, and fish. *

LEE HOU

Sun.–Thurs., 8 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 a.m.–2 a.m.

332 Clement, SF

(415) 668-8070

Beer and wine

MC/V

A long look

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

If you’re old enough to remember Loongbar — and I’m too polite to ask — you might experience a moment of confusion about Long Bar. You might wonder if there’s a familial connection, and why did the name of the restaurant split in two (some kind of verbal mitosis?), and what happened to the other O? But … no worries, as the Aussies say. Long Bar (whose principals are Alan Walsh and Bill Garlock) has nothing to do with Loongbar, the Mark Miller venture of the late 1990s that lived its brief life in a spectacular Ghirardelli Square setting before ending up in the hands of the actor Don Johnson under the name Ana Mandara.

Long Bar was, until spring 2007, the Fillmore Grill, a stalwart of that stylish street and a pubish sort of place. If your idea of a smart pub includes a long bar, then you won’t be too disappointed by the morph. Long Bar is aptly named; its bar (of Honduran mahogany) might not be quite the match of the big daddy that helped make Stars famous, but it is sizable, with seating for at least a dozen atop posh-looking stools, each with an unimpeded view to the large flat-screen television mounted on the wall, a window on the world of sports.

As impressive as the bar is, it takes up only a quarter or so of the dining room, with the rest given over to the usual suspect (tables and chairs in various configurations), a color scheme heavy on a cayenne or burnt-sienna hue — rich and warm, if under inflected — and, most appealing, a small selection of U-shaped, low-rise booths in a far corner. Long Bar isn’t what you’d call beatifically quiet (another sense in which the name is spot-on; will anyone ever open Quiet Bar?), but the noise level in the booths is far from unbearable, even as the restaurant fills up with Pacific Heightsers, some fresh from a movie at the Clay Theater across the street.

They’re hungry, of course, the P.H. crowd: they want good food but not fancy food, and they want it at a reasonable price, since, like everybody else, they must be feeling the wind a bit these days. What is a reasonable price? That, as Hamlet might say (in a yet-to-be-imagined turn as restaurant planner), is the question, and it’s a tricky one to try to answer in the midst of our present economic maelstrom. I will note that Long Bar’s main-course prices range mostly from the high teens to the mid-20s, which isn’t exactly bargain-basement country, but could be worse. A strong theory of relativity obtains in restaurant pricing, and any calculus must consider where the restaurant is located and who’s likely to go there.

So while it seems quite possible that the bulk of the clientele — vigorous, middle-aged-looking people who don’t appear to be poor — would consider Long Bar moderately priced, I would have to cogitate a bit before agreeing. Then I would agree. A grilled salmon filet perched on a bed of quinoa salad dotted with cauliflower florets, for $22? That’s not bad for casually sophisticated cooking.

Of course, no bar would be complete without a full complement of bar food, and bar food is so often deep-fried and greasy, maybe on the theory that the grease helps soak up excess alcohol, as if it’s some kind of blotter. (A friend recently told me a similar story about the therapeutic powers of tripe, which, prepared in a stew called menudo, is commonly served in Mexico on Sundays, when some people might need help clearing away the haze left by the previous night’s revels.)

Fried onion rings are often a spectacular example of this kind of cooking. Hence their migration to fast-food-land. But executive chef Ryan McDonald’s version ($6) was notable for its restraint. The rings were cut from red onions, for one thing, then given a tempura batter, which fried up strong and dry, without sogginess or a sheen of grease on the plate. We dipped the rings in the companion ramekin of plain ketchup, which was fine, though not quite as fine as the rings themselves.

Monterey calamari ($12) was a more typical item, with the rings and tentacles swaddled in a heavy golden coat of bread crumbs. Despite the slightly lurid look, the seafood itself was tender and gently sweet-briny, with a colorful salad of frisée and slivered carrot and lime aioli on the side for balance.

Comparably golden, though not as heavy, were crab cakes ($16), a matched pair of plump pucks made with a generous amount of actual crab meat (filler is a perennial problem for crab cake aficionados) and plated with a fabulously tart little salad of apple threads and tendrils of watercress. Lemon-caper aioli provided a final zest kicker.

Yes, the Long Bar kitchen has a flair for salads, of all things. Even the caesar ($9) was excellent, despite a lack of anchovies. The croutons were crunchy and plentiful, the Parmesan shavings were piled up like drifts in a blizzard, the dressing was notably lemony, and the romaine spears were immaculate and crisp. I did wonder why, given the considerable scale of the caesar, why no grilled-chicken upgrade is offered. With a little protein, this salad could easily pass as a light main course.

Desserts, we were told, are due for an upgrade, from a pastry chef whose arrival is imminent. In the meantime, the choices are a bit TGI Friday’s but perfectly serviceable: mud pie ($8), a fluffy chocolate mousse under a glossy cap of dark chocolate; and mango cheesecake ($8), also fluffy, in a graham-cracker crust that’s worth its weight in … well, graham crackers, at least.

LONG BAR

Dinner: Sun., Tues.–Thurs, 5–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

2298 Fillmore, SF

(415) 440-1700

www.longbarsf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

F-ing hippies

-
0

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS My friend Hoohoohaha has a son, a daughter, an ex, a small dog, and a hippie. She also has a wood pile, and has recently developed an allergy to fireplaces, poor girl, so I picked up a pizza after work and went over to console, catch up, and steal her wood pile.

So you know, in my first week of owning my first-ever brand new car pickup truck, the subcompact Honda Fit, I hauled: a wood pile, a Dumpster full of kindling, a new bed, a beautiful table and two chairs, a goth sympathizer, and a dump run’s worth of garbage.

Hoohoohaha’s son makes magazines out of magazines, and they are roughly the size of a postage stamp and entirely devoted to the topic of butter. At this rate of brilliance, I project, he will win a Pulitzer before he goes to high school.

The daughter scares me. She’s three.

The dog, a yapper, doesn’t scare me one bit, but wouldn’t leave me alone, either.

"It’s just plain pizza, pup," I tried to explain. "There isn’t even any meat on it. Now get outta here." I’m not a dog person, but I recognize that people like them every bit as much, if not more, than I like my cat. So I resisted the temptation to kick or even tease Hoohoohaha’s stupid new one.

Her hippie pretty much stays in the garage. She’d been talking about him for months and months. At first I suggested that she set traps, but it soon became apparent that Hoohoo actually wanted him there. In fact, she mentioned over pizza that he was moving on, or out, or re-garaging, or whatever it is that hippies do. The implication was that she would be looking for a new one, and the significant look, I gather, was because I live in hippieland and might know somebody. But I didn’t.

I have cats and rats and chickens and bugs. The hippies leave me alone. Except on Fridays, when I go to my tiny town’s tiny little farmers market, and then they try and sell me cucumbers. Maybe it’s the way I dress, or smell … something makes me exude meat-eaterliness. I was checking out these heirloom tomatoes at one booth and the woman hippieing it said, and I quote: "They taste like bacon."

I looked at her. I was holding a tomato and, still looking at her, I brought it slowly to my nose. It smelled like a tomato. "They taste like bacon?" I said.

"Bacon," she said. She was beautiful. "Yep."

"You realize you’re talking to a serious bacon eater," I said. "This is no small claim." I was thinking, I’m going to have to rethink my unreasonable prejudice against hippies. Just because I kind of am one, that’s no reason to hate a whole class of people. Maybe some hippies appreciate life’s more sacred institutions, such as bacon, every bit as much as the rest of us do. Maybe they not only love bacon, but they know how to grow tomatoes to taste like bacon. If so, I want a hippie in my garage too!

"Do you eat bacon?" I said. I don’t have a garage, but I was thinking maybe she could move into my storage shed, or chicken coop.

She said she didn’t, but used to, and now, with her amazing new bacony tomato variety, she could still enjoy a BLT with only the L and the T on it.

This is going to get my head blown off some day in an old Clint Eastwood movie, I know, but I can’t help it. I am one of those people who just has to know. So I bought a lot of tomatoes from this beautiful vegetarian hippie chick, and I left them on my counter for a couple days, like she said, and then ate them and they didn’t taste anything at all like bacon.

Fucking hippies. I’m setting traps in my chicken coop and storage shed, and it’s obtuse, so I’ll tell you: the moral of this seemingly silly story is that if you voted Yes on Proposition 8 here in California, you are, whether you know it yet or not, a homo.

———-

My new favorite restaurant is Gioia Pizzeria for giving me an alternative to what I usually tell transplanted New Yorkers who ask my advice. Now I can choose between "give up" and "Gioia." Super thin, super saucy, and very very similar to actual New York style pizza. Check it out.

GIOIA PIZZERIA

1586 Hopkins, Berk.

(510) 528-4692

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Chinafornia

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

The specter of linoleum haunts the neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Many of us have paid visits to these purgatories, where the food is tasty and cheap but the lighting is harsh and fluorescent and the flooring looks as if it had been laid down, without much love, during the Eisenhower administration. One ponders this trade-off, wondering, in particular, whether it’s inevitable. Then one goes to Kathy’s California Chinese Cuisine and finds an answer.

Rumors of Kathy’s’ culinary excellence had been reaching me for some time. I had seen the place often enough, certainly, in its snug little commercial strip at the dizzying confluence of Dewey and Laguna Honda boulevards and Woodside Avenue, just steps from Muni’s Forest Hill metro station. But I only recently stepped inside for the first time and felt myself transported to … Vienna! Of course, I had only just been to the real Vienna — for the first time — over the summer, so that wedding-cake city in the heart of Mitteleuropa was on my mind.

Kathy’s isn’t about wedding cakes or Mitteleuropa, but it does offer surprisingly gracious old world atmospherics, if one discounts the burbling aquarium just inside the front door, the scattering of gourds on the floor (in honor of Halloween and the autumn harvest), and the general storefront-spaciness of things. (There is no host’s podium, just the fish tank, while the server’s station is all the way at the rear of the dining room, like the check-in counter for an obscure airline in an obscure country.)

The floor is laid with handsome tiles that look as though they were quarried from a stormy sea, the walls are a discreetly sensuous peach color, and soft light flows from a pair of rather resplendent glass chandeliers, as well as from sconce lamps on the wall. From an unseen sound system I heard playing one evening — for our final Viennese touch — the final movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E flat major. Also some Bach. The music was present but not obtrusive, which these days seems to be very much the exception to the rule. Considering that Kathy’s does a lively takeout business, the restaurant’s dining room is a startlingly attractive place to sit and have dinner, at least if your idea of having dinner includes conversation.

When "California" is used as a modifier with respect to some traditional cuisine, I immediately think of zucchini. Zucchini grow like weeds in our part of the world, and they turn up in highly unlikely spots, such as hor mak talay, the Thai dish of coconut milk and red curry. And they turn up at Kathy’s, along with eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. Somewhere in the kitchen is a ratatouille crying out to be made.

Kathy’s isn’t that Californianized, or Californicated, but there is a nice plate of stir-fried vegetables, the vegetable deluxe ($7.95), that features plenty of shredded napa cabbage, carrot coins, broccoli florets, and chunks of Japanese eggplant, with plenty of garlic and ginger and — the special touch — a ring of tissue-thin tomato slices arranged around the edge of a platter, like a link fence. The fence is both visually attractive and the source of a subtle acid zip.

Most of the food has a familiar north-China look, although there is the occasional wrinkle, such as red dumplings ($6.95), an octet of Chiclet-shaped, half-dollar-sized dough packets filled tight with minced, gingery pork and bathed in a thick, glossy reddish-orange sauce that’s both sweet and hot.

Similar dumplings recur in the wonton soup ($6.95 for two), although the real stars here are the chicken stock (intensified through reduction and not too salty) and the wealth of vegetables bobbing alongside the wontons. The roll call here includes more shredded cabbage and broccoli florets, along with quarters of button mushroom and (a non-vegetable) peeled shrimp.

Our intel source, a local, suggested that we would find the walnut prawns ($10.95) exceptional. Since I have never found walnut prawns exceptional, I was prepared to be disappointed. But … Kathy’s walnut prawns are exceptional! The large, plump shrimp are shelled, then stir-fried in a creamy sauce spiked with some sort of liquor (brandy or rum?), and scattered with candied walnuts and raisins. It is very tricky business to introduce this much sweetness into a savory dish; a balance must be struck, lest you end up with some kind of shrimp dessert. Kathy’s version strikes that balance.

Tangerine beef ($10.95), meanwhile, left me secretly chagrined, since the flaps of beef, while tasty, were not coated and deep-fried to heart-stopping crispness before being tossed in a thick and glossy orange sauce. The drill here was more of a conventional stir-fry (with a medley of vegetables) in a soy-based sauce, with the tangerine figuring as an occasional burst of zest. More interesting, or at least unexpected, or unadvertised, were the lithe slices of green apple ringing the platter; their sweet-tartness helped balance both the saltiness of the soy sauce and the richness of the meat.

Other pluses: service is practiced and friendly. You can get brown rice instead of white. Transport logistics are, apart from the terrifying intersection, rather painless, with Muni just steps away and street parking quite easy. The relaxed, well-mannered crowd is easy to take. And, on that happy note, I’m done with Chinese food for a bit. Probably.


Kathy’s California Chinese Cuisine

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

408 Dewey, SF

(415) 665-6888

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

My kingdom for a dumpling

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

As kingdoms go, Kingdom of Dumpling is a rather Lilliputian affair — a runt, actually, if that word can be used in conjunction with "kingdom." Dumplings are small objects, of course, even the Bavarian ones made from potatoes, also known as knödel, and they seem even smaller when described in the singular. Kingdom of Dumpling? Is there only one kind of dumpling, or only one permitted per customer, or (our worst-case scenario) only one of one kind permitted per customer? The answers are No, No, and No — but I leap ahead.

The Kingdom (an adjunct of Kingdom of Chinese Dumpling, on Noriega) opened last spring, in the snug Sunset space once occupied by the excellent David’s Kitchen. That restaurant was a culinary multilinguist, fluent in the major idioms of east and southeast Asian cuisines; it was like a miniature Straits Cafe. The new place has retained much of that spirit, right down to the Magic Marker board that hangs above one corner of the dining room proclaiming the day’s specials, such as duck curry. David’s Kitchen offered a similar dish, if I remember rightly.

What is different is the massive infusion of dumplings, steamed buns, and general dim-summery. If you’re a haunter of noodle bars, this is an alternate universe. It’s as if some restaurant geneticist created a hybrid by mixing the DNA of a pan-Asian place and a dim sum house — and did so in a space that would feel crowded with a dozen people inside. But the space is still an attractive shade of creamy yellow, the tables and chairs are comfortable, and the food is excellent.

The truly fresh, handmade Chinese dumpling is a revelation, when you actually find one and bite into it. KoD’s are warm and juicy inside their soft pouches of dough; eating one is like biting into a piece of perfectly fresh fruit that’s been warmed by the sun, except the flavors aren’t fruity but (in the main) meaty, with generous tweakings of ginger and garlic. I liked the pork dumpling with napa cabbage ($5.95) slightly better than the chicken dumpling with corn ($6.45), mainly because the chicken didn’t assert itself with quite the same quiet sensuousness as the pork, and the peak-of-the-season corn was a little too sweet. But either way, you get a dozen for about six bucks, and the individual dumplings aren’t small.

The appeal of warm food is primal — does the heat sound an ancient echo of fresh kill? — but cold dishes have their own charms, especially when they’re as tasty as KoD’s. Marinated seaweed salad ($3.95) is a treat I associate with Japanese restaurants, but KoD’s is just as good, if in a quite different way. The seaweed itself, for starters, isn’t a mass of green, crinkled threads but a bowlful of what look like julienne poblano peppers, or perhaps tiny eels that have only just stopped writhing. And while Japanese seaweed salads are typically dressed with some form of ponzu sauce, KoD’s carries another charge, more savory and with less citrus-tart balance.

A salad of bean stick ($4.95) consisted of flaps of bean curd — corrugated, like Ruffles potato chips — and tossed with plenty of chopped cilantro. With some minced garlic and grated ginger, this simple ensemble became addictive, and the fact that was served cold — not cold, really, more on the low end of room temperature — faded from one’s consciousness, bite by bite.

More minced garlic was assigned to enliven crispy lotus root ($5.95), an enormous platter of cream-colored disks punctuated by vacuole-like interior spaces. I had the brief sense of examining a cross-section of bacteria under a microscope. The root sections themselves were indeed tender-crispy, as if they’d been briefly stir-fried, steamed, or otherwise tenderly handled; lotus root is really a starchy rhizome, and while some authorities compare it to potato, it reminded me of a cross between jicama and daikon. The root is rich in various vitamins and minerals as well as dietary fiber and is widely enjoyed throughout east Asia.

XO sauce, as browsers at Asian markets may know, is an irresistible, if pricey, confection — a lumpy paste — of dried seafood (including shrimp and scallop) along with various seasonings and degrees of chili heat. It’s quite good right out of the jar, as I am embarrassed to say I know from personal (though not recent) experience. How much better, though, to use the precious XO to flavor a dish like beef chow fun ($6.95), a Cantonese festival of wide noodles, strips of tender meat, and bean sprouts. The color palette here was a little too thoroughly earthen to be ideal, but the glistening of the noodles and beef did bring a bit of joy to the eye.

It’s not surprising that a restaurant serving food this tasty, interesting, and carefully prepared at such modest prices should attract young people, nor that — given the restaurant’s location deep in the Sunset District — so many of those young people should appear to be of Asian ancestry. Their presence suggests that some kind of college or university campus must lie nearby, but we couldn’t think of one. City College? Not too close. San Francisco State? Closer, though hardly at hand. The Sunset might be a neighborhood not a kingdom, but it’s a pretty good-sized neighborhood that shows signs of reinvention and renewal — and now it has a place where you can eat like a king, for a lot less than the king’s ransom.


KINGDOM OF DUMPLING

Daily, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1713 Taraval, SF

(415) 566-6143

www.kingofchinesedumpling.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Bearable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Can have

-
0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Me and Boink at the counter, aprons on, hands washed, ready to go … "I’ve been looking forward to this all week," I said. "You’re my new favorite person to cook with."

He looked up from his step stool with all the earnestness in the world, which seems to be his for the asking, and asked, "Do you love me?"

"I do, Boink," I said. And I kissed him on the head. "I love you very much."

He said he loved me too, and asked if he could kiss me. (So polite!) I said that he could, and he gave me a cute little peck on the cheek.

You were expecting what? Diarrhea? Well, I did get sick again. The thing about working with kids is that you wind up with every communicable disease in the world, on a daily basis, especially if you kiss them and eat food right out of their mouths, like I do. Gotta stop that. I’m getting sick of being sick.

On the other hand: I, your chicken farmer truly, bought a new (as in new new) car. Thanks to Boink, and Popeye the Sailor Baby, and Big Chunk and Little Chunk de la Cooter, and all their various and sundry parents, I can now afford to make me a monthly payment or two, or 60. And, yes, for the first time in my farmerly life, I am the proud driver of an actually reliable motor vehicle.

All the gears work and everything! Horn … Check this out: it has seatbelts that actually lock when you get in an accident. And, most meaningfully to me, what with winter coming, you don’t have to pop the hood and leave the vehicle to turn the headlights on!

How stylin’ am I?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re going to miss my little tales of sitting on the side of the road for exactly 52 minutes, waiting for my old pickup truck to start, aren’t you? I know I’m going to miss all the colorful people one meets in such a manner. Tow-truck drivers, police, drive-by mechanics, and so forth. Yesterday, out of habit, or nostalgia, or both, I stopped at my local car parts store. I bought a roll of paper towels.

My new pickup, which I named Alice Shaw after my hero, Alice Shaw, is the ever-popular Honda Fit pickup truck. Light blue, almost silvery. It’s so beautiful I cold lick it, and often do.

Now I’m not a car reviewer, I know, but this Fit is the damnedest thing on four wheels. A miracle of modern engineering, it’s the first car ever to be twice as big inside as out. Even more cargo capacity than my old Chevy Sprint! You can carry two bales of straw at once, and still have room prolly for a sack o’ feed and a little load of scrap wood.

First thing I did, before I even drove it off the lot, I folded the back seats down. "Pickup truck mode," I said to the dealer, who nodded unknowingly and handed me my balloons, for the kids.

Then I drove around town looking for Dumpsters, playing with all the buttons, and just generally showing off.

"Wait till you put your first ding in it!" all my friends keep saying.

I don’t know what they’re talking about. I dinged the dang thing at the dealership, I was so nervous. I’ve never been in debt before, not even a credit card debt. Are you kidding me? I had to scratch the driver’s door with my key just to get myself to sign my name.

The idea here, so you know, is to teach myself that I can have and might even deserve something nice in this world. Because I didn’t grow up knowing that. You get so used to can’t have that you forget how to even want. I thought of this a lot, last few months, dating married men, creepy redneck couples, and other unloveables.

My new blue beautiful car = can have.

And I tell you this now so I can say I told you so when you see me, one day, walking around the world with a loving, shiny, and reliable man. With a ding in one cheek.


—————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Hometown Donuts #7. It’s in Richmond, off the same exit I take to go to my favorite Dumpster. So I needed a haul for my new car, and a haul for me. Check it out: two things, plus rice for under five bucks. Chinese. Fried and barbecued. I got spicy pork and a fried chicken thigh hot out of the fryer. Yum! A pretty plasticky place to eat, but I’ll take it. And a donut to go, please.

HOMETOWN DONUTS #7

2315A Cutting, Richmond

(510) 237-2652

Mon.–Sat., 5 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun., 6 a.m.–7 p.m.

No alcohol

Cash only

1...343536...55Page 35 of 55

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org