Food & Drink

L’Ardoise

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The French love their chalk, and no wonder. Chalk makes possible some of France’s most prized wines, from the sparkling cuvées of Champagne to the wonderful, minerally whites of the Loire Valley. It’s also useful for writing on chalkboards, which tend to be ubiquitous in French restaurants and on sidewalk sandwich boards outside of same. One of the great pleasures of Paris is scanning these boards while strolling the city, pondering the plats du jour and formules as mealtime approaches.

The French word for "chalkboard" — actually, "the chalkboard" — is l’ardoise, and, in a slight slap of irony, there is no sandwich-style chalkboard on the sidewalk in front of L’Ardoise, which opened late in the winter in the old Los Flamingos space in Duboce Triangle. There are no sandwiches on the menu either, for that matter, which isn’t surprising since the restaurant only serves dinner. There is, however, a sizable chalkboard inside, hanging on a wall not quite opposite the bar. The board lists the day’s specials, and if it’s too awkward to crane your neck so you can read it, you can count on your server to report its offerings with efficiency.

The cheerful starkness of Los Flamingos has given way to the look of a fin de siècle literary salon. The floors are covered in claret-and-gold floral carpeting; the walls are a throbbing red, and the furnishings emphasize dark wood. It would not be difficult to imagine Proust in the next room, scribbling away. Of course, there is no next room. There’s just the kitchen, presided over by Thierry Clement, whose pedigree includes a recent stint at the enduringly fine Fringale. If his first menus at L’Ardoise are more neighborhoody than Fringale’s — which is, after all, a city-center restaurant with a broad and venerable reputation — they do as ably answer the urge to eat.

L’Ardoise, then, is the comfy local bistro this arboreal part of town has been waiting for. Its obvious near relations are Le Zinc (in Noe Valley), Le P’tit Laurent (in Glen Park), and Zazie (in Cole Valley), and it certainly matches up well against any of them. It helps that bistro cooking is a well-established culinary genre, and Clement knows the drill. But I did wonder why there was no pot of Dijon mustard to accompany the otherwise appealing, if mainstream, charcuterie plate ($9): an array of two squares of pâté (one made with liver), a shower of oily, garlicky saucisson coins, and a jumble of green and black olives, cornichons, and caperberries. The lack of mustard wasn’t fatal, but it was noticeable.

Better was a shallow bowl of tiger-prawn ravioli ($10) in an herbed cream sauce. Cream can be a silent killer, like being smothered by soft white pillows, but here the prawns were big, sweet, and juicy enough to assert themselves through both the butterfat and the free-form drapings of pasta.

Seafood gratin ($19) was very much like a seafood stew or even a bouillabaise, only less moist. The oblong serving crock swelled with sea scallops, prawns, halibut cubes, and diced potatoes, all of them toe-deep in a broth of white wine and herbs enlivened by a broad anise hint of Pernod (or some other kind of pastis). A sprinkling of bread crumbs had been baked on top for the gratin effect. What gave pause wasn’t the dryness but the undersalting; Chief Many Phones had to apply several jolts from the table shaker to revive the patient.

Steak frites is a bistro standard, but Clement’s kitchen isn’t above having some fun with it. The steak here turned out to be a chunk of seared Black Angus filet mignon ($27), plated with a heap of confit potatoes (basically homemade chips), a woodpile of steamed green beans (too broad to be proper haricots verts, so Blue Lake, perhaps), and some nicely dressed mésclun. Despite the reassuring nomenclature, I had doubts about the beef before it arrived; "filet mignon" is a grand name but often dry and tasteless in fact. Not this time.

Our side order of sautéed spinach ($5) reached the table in a miniature Le Creuset crock, red enamel on cast iron, complete with top: a nifty flourish in the manner of Fleur de Lys, and the spinach was well-seasoned, although whenever you’re eating low-fat spinach you can’t help but think wistfully about the times you’ve eaten creamed spinach.

Pears: as much as I like them fresh (at least if they’re crisp), I am left disappointed by most pear desserts. Pears poached in red wine? Pass. I would rather have a glass of Poire William (the pear eau de vie), or, better, armagnac. But L’Ardoise’s kitchen has come up with a splendid use for the pear: It’s the star of a tarte tatin ($7), a disk about the size one of those single-serve cheesecakes, with the pear slices caramelized to a voluptuous amber. They’re neatly arranged atop (or, originally, underneath, since tartes tatins are baked pastry side up, then inverted for serving) a layer of pastry we found to be undistinguished even beyond its thinness. Pastry should be flaky, not tough. But at least there wasn’t much of it, and the pears were absolutely winning.

L’Ardoise doesn’t seem to have suffered from the lack of sidewalk sandwich boards. The place is already jammed in the evenings, with well-dressed groups of thirty- and fortysomethings waiting just inside the door for tables. The door has an annoying way of flopping open, so if you’re averse to drafts, ask for a table well inside. It’s nice and toasty under the chalkboard.

L’ARDOISE

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.

151 Noe, SF

(415) 437-2600

www.lardoisesf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Muffled loudness

Wheelchair accessible

Yet

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS "Well, sweetie, what did you expect?" my mother said after I came home crying from the beating I took for peeing on my kindergarten teacher’s melted dog. "You can’t piddle a puddle of poodle without getting paddled!"

… crickets …

Oh, Christ. You’re not buying it, are you?

I know because ever since my punch line and I were so heartwarmingly reunited, I’ve been telling that joke — the joke I wrote — to everyone I know, and a lot of people I don’t. The idea: to grind it like so much Cheetos dust into the very fabric of American consciousness, in case I forget again.

The problem: it ain’t funny.

Nobody’s buying it, and the blank stares and exaggerated death bed groans are starting to hurt. Real bad. I literally have gone door-to-door, trying to sell this joke like vacuum cleaners or life insurance, and I have taken a figurative beating. You can’t peddle a puddle of piddled poodle without being paddled, either.

But I mentioned spaghetti-cue. This was a couple weeks ago, and not that anyone’s necessarily wondering, but … it didn’t work. Nothing does the first time you try it. I just don’t want to rule out the possibility that someone, somewhere has better culinary instincts than I do. Far-fetched as that might seem.

I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being immodest. Barbecued pasta is the best idea ever. It just doesn’t work. Key word (only I didn’t say it yet): yet.

And I might yet be the best comedienne ever, even though my first-ever joke kinda shat the bed.

Take the small bright dots that sunlight leaves on a countertop, slanting through the kitchen window, then through a cheese grater, still somewhat carroty from last night’s salad. You see? Those dots, those slanty, imperfect rows and columns. Why do people still sometimes believe in things?

That’s a stupid question. Let me rephrase it: why would anyone wash their dishes at night when they could leave them ’til morning? When the circus of sunlight filtering through a carrot-crusted cheese grater might change the color of your day …

Or turn you into a poet. (Yet.)

Well, for starters, since answering my own rhetorical questions seems to be one of my specialties, maybe your kitchen window faces west. Or north. Life is hard. I could be terrified right now. Instead, I am casually digesting my lunch, which is pretty easy work considering I spilled all but about two spoonfuls of it all over my shirt, lap, and bare feet. Green salsa, homemade chicken soup … I give new meaning to the phrase, "Dinner’s on me!"

Grandma Leone baked the meat for her meat sauce in the oven. I’m not a cook (yet), but I guess that’s how you do it. Key word: you. You bake the pork bones, the oxtails, the ribs, whatever, transfer it grease and all to a sauce pan, garlic, tomatoes, and leave ‘er be.

That’s what you do. I do the same thing, only I cook the meat in a wood stove with smoldering applewood. And that’s how to make spaghetti-cue. Which doesn’t work.

But don’t forget that barbecued eggs didn’t work either until the fourth or fifth try, and now they are generally considered (by four or five people) to be the best thing since cinnamon-swirl raisin bread.

I’m not being immodest. I’m just spinning you in circles. After we pick up speed, I’m going to let go and you’ll be on your own, sailing over tent tops and parked cars, every bit as dizzy as me.

———————————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is La Piñata. There are six of them around the Bay Area, but the one I’ve been to is in Alameda. Sockywonk’s been talking this place up for a long time. Chicken soup, she says. Guacamole. We got both those things. And carnitas, beans, rice, tortillas, and of course plenty of fresh, warm tortilla chips and salsa. All good. But the soup … the broth really was something special. I might have dreamed it, but I think there was a tall frosty glass of fresh-squeezed limeade somewhere in the picture, too.

LA PIÑATA

1440 Park, Alameda

(510) 769-9110

Daily, 7 a.m.–3 a.m.

Full bar

MC/V/AE/DISC

Thrill of the kill

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› paulr@sfbg.com


WITHOUT RESERVATIONS In our age of euphemism, it is shocking and/or refreshing to find a cookbook author using the word "kill" when talking about where meat comes from. The author is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall, and the book is The River Cottage Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, $35). Fearnley-Whittingsall is English, as we can guess from his hyphenated surname (a "double barrel," as my single-barrel English friend calls the complexly-designated), and the English perhaps suffer less from euphemism disease than we do. We suffer rather severely. People no longer die in America; they "pass" — "pass away" is apparently too vivid now — or "transition," which isn’t even a proper verb.

But when Fearnley-Whittingsall has a pig killed to make some bacon, blood sausage, and charcuterie, we hear about it in blunt terms. On occasion he eases off the throttle slightly, switching to "slaughter" from "kill," but this might just be to keep things interesting. Soon enough we are back to the k-word. One appreciates the candor, of course, and the unvarnished elaborations, which culminate in the author’s declaration that he "didn’t find it all that distressing" when he delivered his first pair of home-raised pigs to a local slaughterhouse and waited about 20 minutes until the animals were "done."

"I went home," he writes, "with a bag of innards, a bucket of blood, and a clear conscience." Jolly good!

Among the planet’s carnivores, we’re easily the most effective and, at the same time, the only ones subject to pangs of conscience about our food-related violence. Hence the supermarket culture of shrink-wrapping, which protects ordinary individuals from having to consider the brutality that results in their pork chops. Fearnley-Whittingsall quite rightly suggests that people who enjoy eating meat should raise and kill a food animal at least once. Still, there are those who would never have the heart to do this. Are these people lily-livered softies, or can we identify, in their reluctance, signs of an evolutionary shift, an awareness that animal consciousness is kin to our own?

It’s hardly unnatural for humans to kill and eat animals, but it’s more of a luxury now, and one of the bloodier ones. Of course, cultured meat, when it finally comes, will make clear consciences more widely available to flesh-eaters, and The River Cottage Cookbook might need a revision.

Prana

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Prana has a soundstage look of the sort we haven’t seen in restaurants around here since the late 1990s, when Entros and Mercury lived their firefly-brief lives. The main dining room is a vast hall whose ceiling is supported by two parallel columns of whitewashed pillars. With some flagons of mead and a clutch of bit actors in Viking period costume, it’s easy to imagine a scene from Beowulf being filmed there — maybe an early moment in which the warriors are sleeping one off while Grendel comes creeping from the bog.

But no. Prana, despite dim lighting and shadows high in the corners of the great room, is too festive for such gory spectacle. Its incipient energy is that of a nightclub or discotheque, and late at night it actually does become a club called Temple. This isn’t surprising, since the space for more than a decade was home to DV8, a haunt of international reputation. (A few years on, toward the end of the millennium, it became Mercury, an unforgettable hall of glass and mirrors that lasted only a few weeks despite serving pretty good food.)

Chef James Jardine’s cooking, pan-Indochinese with a dash of Filipino, is elegant, stylish, and imaginative. It also tries harder than it needs to; it’s overachiever food, determined to be stimuutf8g at all times. Perhaps the kitchen feels it’s in competition with the relentlessly antic setting. Prana starts tugging at your sleeve and winking at you before you even get inside; the main doors are a set of funhouse mirrors that make you look skinny going in and fat going out. Once inside, you’ll find the music thumps steadily and rather loudly from clusters of huge speakers mounted overhead. As if that weren’t enough, there’s a huge display screen mounted behind the bar. The whole experience seems to be tuned for restless young people with short attention spans who might panic at any interruption in the stream of external sensation.

In such an environment, we can’t really blame the food for raising its voice a little. And it does, practically from the first moment, when the server appears with a basket full of deep-fried wonton skins and toasted pita triangles, along with a trio of chutneys: chipotle, cilantro-mint, and tomato. Certainly there’s more drama here than we would expect in a simpler, more traditional presentation of bread and butter or olive oil, and we found the chutneys to be excellent. But neither the wonton skins nor the pita triangles were of much use in dipping or sopping, and the result, for us, was a tablecloth decorated with dribblings ("It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting," my friend said) before we’d even ordered.

No spattering marred our enjoyment of spicy peanut soup ($9), weighted with basmati rice and shreds of roast chicken and amended with a pesto of vanilla bean and habañero chili that talked a big game but didn’t bring much. It didn’t need to; the basic soup was irresistible in a satay-sauce way, and a sprig or two of cilantro would have been an elegant, less effortful, finish.

The kitchen also cannily reinvented the lumpia ($10) — a Filipino cousin to the egg roll — by stuffing it with ahi tuna and serving it with a dipping sauce of garlic vinegar softened by açai, the Brazilian rainforest berry renowned for its antioxidant properties. Here the berry contributed mainly a pretty bluish-red color, while the tuna’s creamy sweetness made an attractive contrast with the deep-fried skins of the lumpias.

Cooking a lamb shank ($22) in a Filipino adobo marinade of vinegar, garlic, soy sauce, and peppercorns was another fine idea executed with high skill. The resulting meat was lightly crisped at the edges but tender enough to fall off the bone. The shank was plated with a disk of forbidden rice, like pebbles of porphyry arranged into some kind of monument, and a heap of baby mustard greens for discreet healthfulness.

Vegetarian choices are lively. A curried vegetable potpie ($16) was a shade sweet for my taste, though the pastry itself, with its Shar-pei folds and Hershey’s-kiss spire, was spectacular. The filling’s sweetness was cut a bit by the sharp salad of peppercress and halved cherry tomatoes on the side.

Better-balanced was a portobello mushroom "scaloppine" ($16). The cap of the fungus had been coated with rice flour, which turned an appealing crunchy gold in the sauté pan. The heat released the mushroom’s juices, as if it were a piece of steak. The cap was presented as a fan of slices, and the juices mixed with the chili-lime butter to make a slightly thickened sauce. The rest of the story was a small hedge of grilled Chinese broccoli and a neat square of polenta, wearing a strip of nori like a prize ribbon.

No matter what hoops a kitchen has set itself to jump through, there are certain dishes that don’t need to be tinkered with, and one is crème brûlée ($7). But Prana tinkered, on a theme of bananas, and this turned out to mean not a banana-flavored custard but three thin strips of banana laid over the custard in lieu of the standard cap of caramelized sugar. Taste: good, but the banana strips were tough and unwieldy. More texturally pleasing was a shortbread tart ($8) filled with lemon curd and topped with a royal flush of ripe mango slices. They were soft, and soft was good. Now about the music …

PRANA

Dinner: Tues.–Fri., 5:30–10 p.m.

Sat., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

540 Howard, SF

(415) 978-9942, ext. 319

www.pranasf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The punch line

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I wrote a joke. I don’t mean that I tried to write something funny. I’ve been doing that (which is to say, this) since I was nine. I mean that for the first time, I wrote a joke joke, the kind that gets told by comedians, barbers … basically everybody in the world tells jokes. Except me, cause I can never remember the punch line.

For the joke I wrote, I made the punch line first. It was twisted, diabolical, clever, goofy, and just generally pretzels — such an amazing and unthinkable payoff that it took me hours and hours and hours to earn it, to craft the hard part of the joke, the long part, in my head. I was driving. By the time I got the getting-there down, I had forgotten the punch line.

Not really. But I knew I would. So as soon as I got out of the car, I wrote it down in an e-mail and, to be mean, sent it to my most inquisitive, most curious, most questioning, most nearly neurotic friend. I said, "I wrote a joke. Here’s the punch line."

Then I forgot it. I could find it in my out box, maybe, but it’s more fun, in my opinion, not to remember the punch line to the joke you wrote, or not to know the joke to the greatest punch line in the history of humor. My friend probably disagrees.

I never said I was nice. Sweet, yes. Cute. And sometimes, like when I’m not splashing green salsa or dumping noodle soup all over myself (admittedly the moments are rare), I can be charming, dignified, even ladylike. But I’m not a good person.

For example, I hate dogs. I don’t know what dogs ever did to me, or what I ever did to dogs, but I hate them and the feeling seems mutual. I do know what I did, actually, but it was so long ago! I was five! And socially awkward! And incontinent!

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Plant, left her toy poodle Muffy in her car, windows closed, on the hottest day of the year, and the poor little feller just melted. When, from the playground, we heard Mrs. Plant’s shriek, we of course went running to see what was biting her.

Well, poor little Muffy had been perched on the armrest, scratching at the passenger seat window, when she gave up the … whatever. Thus, when poor shrieky Mrs. Plant finally opened the car door, Muffy just sort of oozed out into the parking lot. Rigor mortis had not set in. I mean, this dog was practically liquid, sort of steaming, sort of wavy, like a mirage.

Here’s where accounts vary. I say: while my angelic, dog-loving classmates wrapped themselves comfortingly around Mrs. Plant’s considerable legs — I believe there were two of them — I stepped up to little liquid Muffy and, with a perfectly healthy and appropriately morbid curiosity, touched it with my toes. At which, quite naturally, considering the magnitude of the moment, I wet my pants, kind of adding to the mess.

What Mrs. Plant told the principal was I squatted over her dear, departed doggy, lifted my skirt (figuratively speaking) and "scatologically degraded its corpse."

Truth be told, I prefer her version. It’s so punk!

In any case, not to date myself (although it might eventually come to that) … but this was back when corporal punishment was quite in style at public schools. Our principal’s weapon of ass destruction, as we called it, was nicely varnished at the handle, then raw wood at the business end, scuffed and scored to encourage splinters.

I was still crying when my mom, a top-shelf linguistics prof with poetic powers (or at least a liking of alliteration) came home from work.

My mother was a sensible, kind, instructive woman, and at this point anyone who knows her suddenly realizes, without a shred of doubt, that this is a joke. However, exactly what my mother said to me after I tearfully told all, only one person in this wide world knows. And it isn’t me, and it’s certainly not my mom.

What’s in it for you is dinner.

My new least favorite restaurant is La Corneta in Glen Park. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it. Now it’s hate. The green salsa, which I love, got stuck in the squeeze bottle. Why anyone would keep salsa in a squeeze bottle is beyond me. But there it was, and stuck it was. Until I squeezed too hard. It became unstuck in dramatic fashion. My face, my eye, my hair, my new dress, my cousins, the wall. I’m still finding green salsa in places where no color salsas should be. Bullshit!

LA CORNETA

Mon.–Sat., 10 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

2834 Diamond, SF

(415) 469-8757

Beer

Cash only

Jam of lords, lords of jam

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Blenheim, as those of us who feel the occasional twitch upon the thread of Anglophilia will recall, is the ancestral home of the dukes of Marlborough as well as the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, a figure much admired by, though not at all resembling, le George W. Bush. Blenheim is also a type of apricot, and Blenheim apricots were indeed grown on the grounds of Blenheim Palace in the 19th century; in due course the fruit, taking its way ever westward, arrived in California. You can occasionally find Blenheims at farmers markets; in addition, if you like or even love jam, they can be found in the jam produced by welovejam.com, a tiny San Francisco concern that until recently was making its entire production of apricot jam from the fruit of a single Blenheim tree in the Santa Clara valley.

The Blenheim, despite its grand pedigree, has recently fallen on parlous times. Its fruit is smaller and slower to ripen than other varieties of apricot and, in my experience, can have a greenish tinge when bought fresh. ("Let them ripen for three or four days," I was told when I bought some last year. I did, and several rotted, which was rather irritating at $4 per pound.) These delicate qualities, while redolent of Old World charm and languor, do suggest that the fruit is at least as well-served being made into jam as harvested, shipped, and sold fresh in our mechanized agricultural economy. As with canned tomatoes, the right sort of processing — loving processing — can show Blenheims at their best.

The duo behind WLJ, Eric Haeberli and Phineas Hoang, don’t use the word "love" lightly. Their entire enterprise (whose roots are traceable to some impromptu jam-making in 2002) is about passion, not money, from the saving of a particular type of apricot to the packaging of everything they make (including barbecue sauce and superlative biscotti) in containers that are either recyclable or, in the case of their cellophane sacks, compostable.

At the moment, WLJ looks a little the way Recchiuti Confections did a few years ago: it’s a tiny and unlikely freckle on the face of the food business. But (as the young Alfie so gloomily observed in Annie Hall) the universe is expanding, and WLJ’s products (available through the Web site) could soon be coming to Bi-Rite — and from there, who knows?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Alembic

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If Cheers had served good food instead of cheap beer and persiflage, Dr. Frasier Crane might never have fled to Seattle to start anew. Also, the place might have come to resemble the Alembic, a smallish installation along upper Haight that has been distilled from that nearby citadel of suds, Magnolia Pub and Brewery, now an institution. Unlike Cheers, the Alembic isn’t in a basement; it occupies a storefront that was most recently home to Maroc. But, like its distant sitcom relation, it does have a bar scene that radiates human energy, not to mention a bar that looks the way a bar should: busy and used.

The bar is a spectacle, but it isn’t there for show. The bottles arranged on the high wall shelves aren’t all perfectly turned so the label faces outward, and they’re not all in immaculate rows. This is because the bartenders are constantly reaching for them, then reaching for measuring cups, strainers, napkins, and glasses for the whipping up of various libations, from simple to complex. (There’s wine too, and if you’re a fat guy named Norm, you can even get a beer.) The action is blurring but precise, and Sam Malone probably wouldn’t last five minutes under the strain. Like so many other food industry jobs, bartending is a game for the young.

Speaking of the young: there are tons of them at the Alembic, and not just behind the bar. The clientele has a modern Mission District look, yet the Mission, for all its cultural variety, has no street to match Haight Street, no comparable collection of goofballs, edge-dwellers, hustlers, dropouts, and misfits prowling the sidewalks, or just sitting on them. But that’s outside, and inside … well, out is out and in is in, as Kipling might have put it, and never (or at least hardly ever) the twain shall meet. Getting to the Alembic can be an excellent adventure, but once you’re inside, you might as well be at 16th and Valencia streets.

Because the front of the small space is dominated by the shrine-like bar, it’s possible to overlook the dining area toward the rear. Here people are eating food, and it’s surprisingly sophisticated food — sophisticated for a bar, sophisticated for the Haight, which despite or because of its international reputation is a little short on interesting places to eat.

Let’s say you were interested in a dish with truffles, for instance, and you could only look on Haight Street. You might try RNM, which is probably the best restaurant on either Lower or Upper Haight. But the Alembic has truffled dishes; one is the macaroni and cheese ($9), which carries the definite black-earth perfume of truffles as relayed through infused oil. The mac and cheese is also made with Gruyère (another discreet flash of toniness) and, we thought, a bit of bacon or pancetta for some meatiness. If the truffle is an incitement to class warfare, how clever to put its essence in dish that’s the very picture of Middle American modesty.

Truffling the gnocchi ($9) might be riskier — the word is harder to pronounce, for one thing. But the truffle infusion goes nicely with the hedgehog mushrooms nestled next to the gnocchi pillows themselves, while splintered asparagus stalks bring some green and speak of spring.

The menu is notably vegetarian-friendly, even beyond the gnocchi. The kitchen performs discreet wonders with that revolting winter beauty, the beet, by turning both red and yellow examples into carpaccio ($6) and topping each slender, glistening, geutf8ous coin with a dab of goat cheese and sprig of watercress. And let’s give some extra credit for the presentation, which is on a slightly concave porcelain rectangle like those used for serving sushi rolls. (All the plates and platters are handsome, incidentally. Very unbarlike.)

Then there are the little snacks, or nibbles, among them slightly sweet nuts roasted with sage ($3) and a cone of excellent herbed frites ($5) spiked with lemongrass and accompanied by with a small tub of chipotle aioli. We found the nuts underpowered; they could have used some salt and maybe some chili heat to balance the sweetness. But the fries were svelte, crisp, and sublime.

They also went nicely with one of the menu’s handful of meaty dishes: Moroccan-style sliders ($10), halves of a beautifully juicy, medium-rare lamb burger served on toast points, with harissa aioli, roasted peppers, and tapenade. The burger doesn’t come with the fries, but you might think about having them together, in part because burgers cry out for fries, and if you’re interested in a burger you’re probably pretty hungry, and this burger isn’t that big. A man in full dinner mode could easily eat three, and that would put the tab at a Manhattan-ish $30.

If that seems a little(or a lot) steep, you could go to Plan B: dessert. No one would ever mistake the Alembic for Sweet Inspiration, but the kitchen does manage to turn out some respectable confections. A strawberry beignet ($7), for example, turns out to be an actual freshly fried doughnut, complete with a tight hole in the middle, but the strawberry refers only to the pat of strawberry ice cream on top, which was a pretty pink but too sweet. Better balanced are the troika of s’mores ($7), with homemade marshmallow, lengths of fresh banana on top, and a chocolate hazelnut sauce slithering around the plate. The sauce is tasty but difficult to eat, since the s’mores themselves aren’t very absorbent and have a way of disappearing in a single, gratifying bite. A smaller s’more need not be a lesser s’more.

ALEMBIC

Dinner: nightly, 5 p.m.–midnight

Lunch: Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.

1725 Haight, SF

(415) 666-0822

www.alembicbar.com

MC/V

Full bar

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Chickens and cake

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I put the chocolate chip cookies in my purse and of course forgot about them. There were three, homemade and perfect, and the small plastic bag that they were in immediately entangled itself with feed store receipts, directions to junkyards, takeout menus from restaurants I’ve been meaning to eat at for 14 years, a barrette, some lipstick, and hand cream. The pills, pen, loose change, and wads of ones go without saying, I presume. And the sunflower seeds.

My chickens, who will go to their skillets believing that grass falls out of the sky, have more of a sweet tooth than I do. Which is saying something if you know anything at all about chickens. And especially if the thing you know is that they don’t have teeth. That’s why they need stones and grit, to churn around in their gizzards, like nickels in a purse, and grind up the wads of grass, grain, bugs, and birthday cake that make up their diet. And sunflower seeds.

Oh, and grass does fall out of the sky, by the way, if you are one of my chickens, and you live in the woods, and the floor of your woodsy world is redwood needles and dirt but you are lucky enough to have a caring and dedicated farmer whose time, in defiance of tens of thousands of years of human thinking on the subject, is not valuable. Meaning she will happily goat around every day in greener environs, on the "other side of the fence," pulling up grass and throwing it over to your side.

Long pause.

Even longer pause …

As long a pause as you will let me get away with without losing you to your horoscope or the page with pictures of even sexier trannies than me.

Then: birthday cake?

Well, yeah, what were you expecting? Chocolate chip cookies? Didn’t I tell you I forgot about them? And that they were perfect? Whereas the cake, on the other hand, was already leftover when it was left at my shack by some superheroes. And that was more than a week ago. And my birthday isn’t until May. And I don’t have a sweet tooth or a sweet gizzard.

Still, I would have eaten the whole, huge, three-quarters of a cake, instead of none of it, in the interest of having healthier chickens, and therefore healthier eggs, and therefore being healthier myself … except that the superhero who made the cake, first time ever from scratch, insisted that it sucked.

If it doesn’t taste good or have nutritional value, I’ll still eat it, but not if it’s cake. I’ll leave it on the counter until it’s almost moldy and then, at the risk of one day getting my head chopped off by chickens, I’ll let them eat it. As the saying goes.

I set half of three-quarters of the homemade chocolate cake on the ground and watched them treat it the way any small group of women would. Chickens see one thing out of one eye, and something else out of the other. They looked and they looked, with adoration and with horror, and then finally one took a peck and ran away. Then came back. Then they all started doing that, eating, retreating, chattering. And then they didn’t bother to retreat or chatter — they just chowed down.

I put the rest of the cake in their coop, closed them up with it, and went to the city, half-expecting to come home the next morning and find them not only dead, but dead on the ceiling instead of the floor.

As we speak I am inventing spaghetti-cue, lest anyone think me a slacker. There’s a bag of cookie crumbs in my purse, a carton of post–expiration date milk in the fridge, and chickens in my yard, alive, well, and running. Like every day, they have left me a nest full of eggs, some smudged with chocolate frosting.

My new favorite restaurant is Robata Grill & Sushi in Mill Valley. Not that I ate there. They let me use their phone and ladies room when my engine popped en route to the city. One of the last four or five people without a cell phone or a reliable car, I stood outside on the corner, cold night, lamenting these facts and others, waiting for my rescue. The people on the other side of the windows seemed warm, happy, well-fed, and yeah, a little bit rich. I was wearing my sexiest skirt and my rabbit. Late for a gig. Probably looked, from the inside out, like a prostitute. New favorite restaurant.

ROBATA GRILL & SUSHI

591 Redwood Highway, Mill Valley

(415) 381-8400

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.; Dinner: Mon.–Thu., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

Beer and wine

AE/D/MC/V

The water cure

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The recently launched campaign against bottled water in restaurants — Food and Water Watch’s "Take Back the Tap" program (www.takebackthetap.org) — makes a number of sensible points, most of which have to do with the drastic wastefulness of bottled water. Bottled water has to be bottled, typically in plastic vessels (whose manufacture uses 17.6 million barrels of oil a year in the United States alone, according to FWW); those bottles then have to be shipped — more fossil fuel used, who knows how much? — and disposed of once they’re empty. Recycling is a noble ideal, but FWW says 86 percent of our plastic water bottles end up in landfills. Many of the rest can be found in urban gutters, along with the dead leaves.

But this is only part of the story. Of course bottled water is a socioeconomic affectation in this country; it’s an aping of a European practice that isn’t completely irrational in the old country, where there is a long tradition of waterborne illness and where many large cities still take their municipal water supplies from heavily used rivers. If you’ve ever drunk a glass of tap in Berlin, you know it’s not Evian.

These exigencies don’t apply here. But we’ve certainly been told, through relentless advertising, that bottled water is chic and somehow more healthful. Bottled water can be branded, and branding is a powerful instrument of class identity, whereas tap water is a public resource, practically free, and didn’t Ronald Reagan convince us a generation ago that if it was public it was probably bad? Even if municipal water doesn’t give you cholera, it won’t confer social standing on you either, not the way a bottle of Voss will.

Tap water in this basic sense is part of the commonweal, the public square, which free-market evangelists have spent several decades trying to cut up and sell off to private interests. Doubtless there are those who would charge us for breathing if they could figure out how. This is why choosing tap over bottled in a public setting is a statement of political as well as environmental awareness. We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to drink it anymore!

Suggestion to restaurants: don’t even tell patrons you have bottled water, if you do. Treat it like tobacco: legal but neither preferred nor promoted. Maybe those who insist on bottled water should be obliged to join the smokers outside.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

CAV Wine Bar & Kitchen

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› paulr@sfbg.com

You could, if you were inclined, step into CAV Wine Bar & Kitchen and do nothing but drink wine. The establishment opened on mid-Market in 2005 as a wine bar, after all, and the wine list is so extensive that it’s actually presented as a bound volume. I’ve seen less impressive Bibles. But you could also, if you were inclined, step into CAV and eat food while not drinking wine, and you wouldn’t necessarily think you were missing out. Of course, the people at CAV don’t want you to sunder food and wine, since the whole point of the restaurant is to bring them together — with wine first among equals, for once. But it’s a tribute to chef Michael Lamina’s kitchen that the wine-friendly food can stand on its own. This is a nice corollary to one of my own cherished postulates: that many food-friendly wines are quite good on their own.

The name suggests a certain Iberian romance. It falls just one letter short of cava, the Spanish word for Spanish sparkling wines made in the méthode champenoise and also for "dig," with an implication of caves and candlelight. There is no dinner quite so atmospheric as one held in a candlelit underground chamber at a winery — and unfortunately CAV isn’t underground. It is narrow and deep, though, with a zigzag floorplan and a large multilight window at the very back of the rear dining room. The view through that window is of the famous alley where Zuni Café (which is next door) used to do its charcoal grilling nearly 30 years ago.

And the food does have its Spanish touches. The wine-friendly cuisines tend to come from the wine-producing parts of the globe, and this means, heavily, the Mediterranean basin and its California cousin. But we mustn’t forget Germany, which produces many lovely, if floral, white wines and some reds too — not to mention spaetzle, the butter-fried noodle squiggles that, in CAV’s rendition ($6) are so delicious that we actually asked for seconds, long after we’d run out of other dishes we might have spooned the spaetzle alongside. Spaetzle would go very nicely with some grilled bratwurst, but at CAV it also makes a fine starter or share plate or just a little something extra to fill in the corners.

As for Spanish accents: we noted them in baby octopi ($13) expertly braised (meaning neither mushy nor tough) in a smoked-paprika broth littered with shavings of fennel root and fried chickpeas. Smoked paprika is possibly the most distinctive of the Spanish flavorings, whether in the cured pork sausage called chorizo or in a seafood dish, as here.

There was also a Castilian note in a salad of arugula leaves ($9), tossed with sections of satsuma mandarin oranges, almonds, shavings of Zamorano cheese (a hard, Parmesan-like sheep’s-milk cheese produced on Spain’s central plateau), and saba, a balsamic vinegar–like dressing. (Bear in mind that Italy and Spain spent centuries ruling parts of each other.)

In keeping with CAV’s wine-bar roots, portions are not huge, and even the big plates, such as beef tenderloin ($25), are on the modest size. But for any number of reasons, this is fine; it helps restrain both expense and gluttony, it encourages exploration and sharing, and it tends to keep food and wine in balance. The tenderloin, a boneless but juicy piece of meat, had been pan-roasted to the rare side of medium rare, plated in a pool of jus-like marrow foam (foam! reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated) beside little heaps of blanched haricots verts and black trumpet mushrooms, then topped with a purée of caramelized onion. Earthy would be a succinct description of this dish; also autumnal — perfect in a city of eternal autumn.

Not all the culinary influences are Mediterranean-derived nor otherwise associated with the lands of wine. We came across a plate of sashimi ($9) made from tai snapper (a sea bream from New Zealand), arranged atop a set of kohlrabi-stuffed spring rolls that looked like Tiparillos, and, for some color, slivers of kumquat and squirts of arugula puree. Beer would have been fine here, but so was a small glass of Schmelz grüner veltliner. (As is the case at several other wine-intensive spots around town, wines by the glass are available as 2.5 ounce tastes or 5 ounce glasses. Two cheers for sobriety.)

Desserts were startlingly good and not pricey by recent standards. There was a sniff of disdain from across the table at the prospect of a butterscotch tartlet ($7.50), since there are those who don’t care for butterscotch. I’m not one of them; I’ve always responded to what seems to me to be a simple and irresistible blending of vanilla into caramel. The creamy butterscotch filling of the tartlet was that, yes, but it also had … liquor breath! Someone had discreetly spiked it with Scotch whisky, and eating it was like giving a peck on the cheek to a boozy but lovable old aunt on Christmas Eve.

The chocolate–peanut butter cookies ($5 for three) arrived on the wings of higher expectations, and they did not disappoint. They resembled Oreos, except with an intense peanut-butter mousse as a filling rather than the sugary white stuff in the commercial kind. And as if that weren’t enough, the kitchen threw in a bonus: a scattering of candied peanuts, like peanut brittle without the brittle. We dug that.

CAV WINE BAR & KITCHEN

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–11 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., 5:30 p.m.–midnight

1666 Market, SF

(415) 437-1770

www.cavwinebar.com

Wine and beer

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Poetry

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CHEAP EATS We took the board outside and, like any other civilized wine-country people, we ate our cheese and our bread. We sipped our wine out of jelly jars, and it was cheap shit. Birds. Frogs. Crickets. The redwood trees catch fire in the sunset, and the pink peach blossoms and the white cherry ones glow a little after like phosphorescent stars on a teenager’s bedroom ceiling.

The Jungle told a childhood story about worms, gathering them for his uncle, who, for show, would grill them on the barbecue. There were three of us: him, me, and this visiting friend of his from Bumfuck, Wash.

"So I get how it is that we return to the soil," I said. "But how exactly is it that we come from the soil?"

They looked at me. It was almost dark. In private, I had been wondering this since I was six. Geologically, biologically, ill-logically, I had wondered. Becoming worm shit seems pretty easy. The reverse blows all sorts of fuses for me. Not to quote myself, but I put it best 20 years ago, in a song: "I can make a dead cow into steaks but how can I make a live one out of stew?" People danced. Nobody answered the question.

Now seemed like as good a time as any to ask again. The Jungle is one of my go-to conversationalists and thinkers. We’ve spent many hours together, in vans, trying to wrap our verse-chorus-verse-chorus brains around just such concertos, and worse, like where to eat in Nebraska.

His friend had gleaming eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a long beard. Not quite white, his hair was nevertheless Einsteinian in length and spirit. And, turns out, his brother-in-law is a physicist. Thus was he able to explain to me, in lay-chicken-farmer terms, the law of conservation of energy: there’s only so much stuff, it says, he said, and stuff can turn into other stuff, but nothing new gets created.

"Are you trying to give me writer’s block?" I said.

He said he was not. He said something turns into something, but nothing does not. He might as well have been dancing.

Behind me, in the coop, my chickens were unwinding toward sleep, which is an audible process, like a car engine ticking as it cools. They kind of buzz, and whir. Then nothing. After a day of scratching, pecking, and bathing in dirt, eating bugs, stones, grass, and oyster shell, they deserve the few feet of elevation the roost provides for the night.

In the morning they will lay their eggs. Which kind of answers my question right there. For chickens. For humans, we will need to add poetry. My mom and dad, to the best of my knowledge, did not eat bugs or grit or take dust baths. In fact they were pretty annoyingly hygienic. At least at the time. Always changing my diapers and sloshing me in the tub, baptizing me, making me go to church and shit. As if to say: You are not dirt! You are not dirt! And other such poems and prayers. Maybe what’s needed is not the addition of poetry, so much as the subtraction of it.

Yes! You know how I know? Because after the chickens were eaten — the ones on the grill, not the roost — we wiped our mouths and went inside, drank more wine, and Einstein said, "OK, I have heard both of you perform before. How about if I read you my poetry?"

This, for someone who’s been through Catholic school and, worse, graduate school, for someone steeped in prayer then poetry, poetry workshops, and poetry readings … this should have been a horror-movie moment, the Jungle and I looking at each other with wide, terrified eyes, the music chopping, screeching, swelling. May I read you my poems? Life had honed me to cut my wrists, or his, at the thought of it.

Instead I was thrilled, delighted, honestly honored that my slanty, woodsy, slightly witchy shack should hostess an impromptu after-dinner poetry reading. And that was when I knew that the transformation, this me-in-the-making, was finally, impossibly, complete: I really am a fucking chicken farmer, ain’t I?

——————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Green Chile Kitchen, and my new favorite thing is pozole, or posole. No matter how you spell it, it’s hominy, it’s chicken, it’s onions and cilantro, it’s soup, and it’s spicy. And that all adds up to I’m drooling all over the keyboard, just to type it. This is New Mexican style stuff, with an emphasis on red or green chiles, or "Christmas," which is both. Check it out: cheap, and damn good!


GREEN CHILE KITCHEN

601 Baker, SF

(415) 614-9411

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–9 p.m.

Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

Beer and wine

MC/V

The republic of fennel

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Fennel, like certain politicians one could name, has its pestilential, never-say-die quality: you see it growing all over the city, its feathery green plumage waving from street-tree wells or creeping up faded walls. It’s the kind of plant that could survive a nuclear holocaust, the kind of survivor the writer Jonathan Schell must have had in mind when he described a nuked United States as "a republic of insects and grass" at the outset of The Fate of the Earth (Knopf, 1982). He might have been optimistic about the republic part.

When we think of fennel, to be fair, we’re probably not thinking of nuclear war, indestructible weeds, rotted republics, or even Hillary Clinton. We’re most likely thinking about the plant’s seeds, which, when dried, are a staple of the Italian kitchen and of some of the wondrous spice blends of the Indian subcontinent. But the fennel plant has roots too, pale bulbs you find in abundance at farmers markets around this time of year. The bulbs have the feel and texture of celery root and offer a licorice flavor much milder than that of the seeds, so for these reasons fennel root, sliced or shaved, is often proposed as an alternative in recipes that call for celery.

Since celery root is the last word in necessary-but-not-sufficient foodstuffs, it’s easy not to bother substituting something else for it, and I never did — and so I never had much use for fennel root. I always had celery root on hand, and that was enough. Then, in January, a friend served slices of roasted fennel root as a before-dinner nibble. The earth shifted slightly under my feet.

Roasting, it must be said, brings out the best in many uncooperative vegetables. It deepens and softens and adds a smoky sweetness. Beets, cauliflower, asparagus — all benefit from this treatment; fennel root too.

Most of the prep work involves trimming the root end and the feathery rigging. Slice the trimmed bulbs lengthwise, about a quarter-inch thick. Rinse away any dirt, and don’t worry if the slices fall apart some. Have an oven preheated to 450 degrees. Put the fennel in a single layer on a roasting pan or cookie sheet, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and some dried thyme, and roast about 12 minutes, turning the pieces halfway through. Drizzle with a little more oil and serve.

Fune Ya

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HUNGER SET SAIL I must confess: I wasn’t planning to go to Fune Ya. I wanted to go to Namu, but couldn’t get a table (thanks, Paul Reidinger). Then I wanted to go to Burma Superstar, but after driving around the Inner Richmond for 45 minutes trying to find parking I wasn’t in the mood to wait twice that amount of time for food. So after buying a bunch of Peek-a-Poohs and Pocky from Genki’s Crepes, I walked a few doors down and saw a big banner in Fune Ya’s window: "Sushi Boat! $1.95 Rolls Special Promotion."

I love sushi boats for their interactive quality. We’re taught as kids to wait patiently; as adults, we’re taught that serious dining is a process of patience, of conversation in between plates. The whole point of a restaurant is to be served. But sometimes, as I walk starving through the restaurant to my table, I just want to grab food off the server window. I not only want what I order, but to pick off what everyone else ordered. Hence the sushi boat: you see, you want, you grab that shit. Ah, instant gratification.

Sushi boat sushi is never that good. It’s only decent when the restaurant is busy and the sushi is constantly replenished. On this visit, it was a Friday night, so everything was fresh. The shrimp tempura roll was delicately crunchy — not oily and soggy — and the shrimp was juicy and sweet inside. The spicy tuna with creamy sauce on top was delectable, as were the California rolls and other sushi standards. It was when we got into the nigiri that the quality severely dropped. The octopus was way too chewy; the salmon was fresh, but sorely lacking the high-grade buttery flavor.

A nice touch at Fune Ya normally missing from sushi boat establishments, though, was having the makings of a full meal via nonsushi items: appetizers (such as edamame) and dessert. The dessert was deep-fried tempura banana drizzled with sweet strawberry sauce. It was incredible. I am ashamed to say that my friend and I grabbed four plates, all of which were newly fried — warm, mushy banana in a crunchy, still-sizzling cocoon.

If you find yourself in the Inner Richmond (hopefully, you’ve taken the bus or ridden your bike), stop by Fune Ya. The cheapie promotion will last a few more months.

FUNE YA Mon.–Thurs., 11:30a.m.–3 p.m., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m., 5:30–11 p.m.; Sat., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sun., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m., 354 Clement, SF. (415) 386-2788, www.funeya.us

SPQR

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If all roads lead to Rome — or once did — what does this tell us about the Eternal City? That it has terrible traffic? Yes, eternally — since ancient times. That the city was and is an international city? Yes, again, though more so in yesteryear, when the imperial Romans called the Mediterranean Sea mare nostrum and grain grown in Egypt was shipped more than a thousand miles by boat to feed the capital’s million or so citizens. In our locavore times, it is startling to think that a metropolis two millennia ago depended on such a sprawling foodshed.

At SPQR, a restaurant that opened late last year in the old Chez Nous space on Fillmore, the Roman feeling is more intimate — and maybe that means more modern, since today’s Italy no longer has its fingers in a host of imperial pies and Rome itself owes its international stature largely to its position as seat of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, the city is an Italian city, and its food is Italian food, with bits and influences taken from here and there across the peninsula. (The letters of the restaurant’s name, incidentally, stand for "Senatus Populusque Romanus," meaning "the Senate and people of Rome.")

SPQR’s powers that be, including executive chef Nate Appleman, have applied to the new restaurant the ethic they successfully introduced at their first one, A16 in the Marina. The ethic involves, in true European fashion, elements of preservation and innovation; A16 brought the flavors of Naples and Campania, including first-rate pizza, into the space once occupied by Zinzino, a creditable ristorante-pizzeria in its own right, and now SPQR succeeds Chez Nous, a pioneer in global tapas (with a slant toward Provence and the Maghrib), with a Roman-inflected menu that’s very heavy on fabulous small plates. They’re not called tapas, and since tapas fatigue set in some time ago around here, this is probably a wise choice.

These small courses are the heart of the menu and are arrayed under three rubrics: cold, hot, and fried. If ordered separately, they’re $7 each, but you get three for $18 and five for $28, and because they’re uniformly excellent, these bulk deals are good ones. (By small, by the way, I mean to imply "shareable," not "tiny.") The only small dish I found even slightly submemorable was a plate of crostini served with ricotta cheese and a pooling of peppery olio nuovo; the overall effect was gentle, with some crunch from the bread rounds and a hint of bite from the olive oil, like a teething puppy working a pinkie finger, and those little stimuli probably would have been enough if the other dishes hadn’t been so impressive.

Fried means, in several cases, "deep-fried," and this can be among the guiltier of pleasures if it gets out of hand. Deep-frying didn’t hurt bocconcini, gumball-sized blobs of mozzarella cheese, but it didn’t add much, either, beyond producing a likeness to the risotto fritters known as arancini; the spicy tomato sauce for dipping was more tomato than spicy, but it carried a sufficient voltage of tartness to help cut the fat.

Chicken livers, on the other hand, benefited from the same treatment. Deep-frying helped moderate their blood-iron gaminess. (The Romans are said to be organ-meat aficionados, but I would say this is true throughout Italy and the rest of Europe, where for centuries meat has been expensive and hard to come by, and all parts of a food animal were and are appreciated, honored, and used.)

While beans are most closely associated with Tuscany, they turn up throughout Italian cooking, and if it turns up somewhere in Italian cooking, sooner or later it will turn up in Roman cooking. SPQR offers cellini beans — a broad, white variety, similar to cannellini — topped with a reddish soffrito of ground pork that resembles a cross between (Mexican) chorizo and Bolognese sauce. The kitchen also handles a pair of problem children with considerable skill: black kale is sautéed to tenderness — but not mushiness — with broccolini, golden garlic slivers, and enough red chili flakes to make a real entrance, while Brussels sprouts are split like baby artichoke hearts and flash-fried with garlic, capers, parsley, and plenty of lemon to tame the cabbage beast.

The signature Roman pasta sauce is amatriciana, which is typically a combination of onions, tomatoes, smoked pancetta, and a suggestion of chile heat, and it is usually tossed with fat, hollow string pasta, either bucatini or perciatelli. SPQR’s version ($12) uses red instead of yellow or white onion, substitutes guanciale (cured pork cheek) for the pancetta, and leaves you to choose either spaghetti or rigatoni (both housemade) as your pasta. Choose either: you will be happy. The sauce is intense but civilized. If you like your pasta sauces creamy, you’re also likely to be happy with the carbonara sauce ($12), made with guanciale, crushed black peppercorns, and pecorino cheese. Like gelato, it draws its richness from egg yolks.

Since Italian food isn’t known for its spiciness, I was struck by the heat of the kale and amatriciana dishes. But, duly struck, I was less surprised by the "spicy chocolate" dessert ($7.50), chocolate mousse studded with Calabrian chiles and presented in a hot-chocolate cup under a dapper cap of whipped cream. The chile effect was mild, not much more than a tingle, but it did enhance the chocolate — maybe just through simple stimulation.

A similar enhancement: the spooning of sugared bitter-orange zest over a thick slice of ricotta torte ($7.50) with crema fresca. The torte and its cream shawl were rich but a little shy, while the zest on its own would have been too sharp. But together, they are a simple symphony.

The restaurant doesn’t take reservations. So: expect big crowds, of friends and countrymen, if not Romans.

SPQR

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

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

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

1911 Fillmore, SF

(415) 771-7779

www.spqrsf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Ping pong

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It’s a swirly, soupy thing, life, and I would like to be less dizzy in it but there’s this furiously pointless Ping-Pong game, nonstop, between my head and my gut. Fortunately, I’m a fan of the sport. And of spin, and slams.

Cousin Choo-Choo Train says I am never quite satisfied unless my dinner guests go home a little nervous, on top of everything else. And it’s true that I like to err on the side of salmonella, that I have no respect whatsoever for trichinosis, and that E. coli could be the latest Internet gadgetry for all I care. Still, no one has ever puked because of my cooking.

And if that ain’t a claim to fame … if I’m misclaiming it — if I just don’t know — then please tell me so’s I can change my ways. I don’t mean to make anyone sick, just nervous. Just a little bit nervous, like, hmm, I wonder if I might wind up in the emergency room. But then you don’t. Like that.

A lot of people don’t like to eat with me. In many cases their reasons are valid, like they’re vegetarian, or don’t know me. Other people keep coming back, keep going home nervous, and keep coming back.

This is called a sense of adventure. I know you have one, dear reader, or you wouldn’t be reading Cheap Eats. You’d be hoping your parachute opens, or surfing where sharks are — something really really boring.

Speaking of boring, one of my oldest, meat-eatingest friends wrote to remind me, after I got soft a couple columns ago and accidentally wrote about a one-year-old client of mine who I love, and who loves flowers, that "there’s only one thing more boring than listening to cat-loving freaks talk about their freakin’ cats … "

The ellipses are his. I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean chickens, though, because I’ve been writing about chickens ever since I was a teenager, no lie, and we’ve been in writing workshops and bands together. Surely he’d have said something before now, like, "Whoa! Chickens are boring."

Besides which it just ain’t true. So he must have meant either babies or flowers. Probably both. Together. Cute little flower-loving babies. Boring — unless they’re yours (or your client) — according to people.

So, OK, so how am I going to make it up to my Cheap readership, this un-farmerly lapse of coolness? Why, it’s almost too easy! By treating you all to something so freakin’ fascinating, so exciting, so universally bacon that even the most jaded cynic will have to turn his NASCAR cap around afterward, read it again, shake his head, and go, "Whoa! Chickens are boring, compared to this."

The subject of which I speak, of course, is My First Mammogram. I thought I was going to say Food Poisoning. But everything changed when I went to the mailbox just now and there was a letter from the medics re: my March 3 breast imaging examination:

Blah blah blah, there’s something in there, yadee-yada, they believe it’s benign, but…. And these ellipses are mine because my brain by now was awhirl with horror and general aghastness at the thought that two weeks had passed since My First Mammogram without me writing about it!

Well: Everyone said it hurts like hell, especially for small-breasted women. They described mean-fingered, banjo-faced technicians leveraging practical white nursing shoes into your sternum, grabbing one nipple in both hands and yanking and flattening you out like pie crust, in some cases using marble rolling pins to coerce you into the picture.

"Are you currently pregnant?" my mammogrammer asked.

It was the kindest thing anyone ever said to me and I told her so, then realized that she probably had to ask, by law, even if you had a mustache. In any case, she was a dear, and it didn’t hurt one bit. I like pie.

And, no, I ain’t afraid of no probably benign notes in the mail. I know just what it was they saw in there: a ping-pong ball. I’m game. Next time they look, I know, it will be exactly the same size, only in a whole different place.

My new favorite restaurant is Roadside BBQ on Geary in the Richmond. Sockywonk’s been barking it up for a long time so I finally grabbed her and shook her and made her take me there. And pay. What I like, besides sweet tea, tangy no-mayo slaw, and great fries, is that it uses apple wood for smoke, in addition to the more common hickory and mesquite. Apple smoke is my favorite kind of smoke. Smoked chicken sandwich with avocado and cilantro, and you can get your ‘cue in a salad, which is something else I love.

ROADSIDE BBQ

Sun.–Thu., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

3751 Geary, SF

(415) 221-7427

Beer and wine

AE/D/MC/V

Velvet Cantina

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GOOD SEATS, LAME EATS Our reservation was late, the table was still dirty when we sat down, utensils never showed until after our food, the margarita was more Rita than tequila, and the chile rellenos were not. But the electric sex glow of crimson velvet and soft candle lighting, our cozy round booth, and the vivacious Mission crowd begging for more sour-mix-satiated margaritas all made the Velvet Cantina enduring, if not enjoyable. Besides, any bad mixed drink can be fixed with a double shot splashed with the aforementioned overly-sweet concoctions.

So I was forced to eat my friend’s carne asada — which was divine — because my chicken mole was so sweet it tasted more like chicken morsel, and we mixed our own libations tableside. I guess participating in the process is part of the fun — isn’t that why fondue is the phenomenon it is? — but this was something else. I most definitely won’t go back for the grub, but I won’t hold the bartender’s heavy pour against the indiscriminate agaves nectar. The red walls were more scrumptious than the food, and while many palates might want to boycott most of the cuisine, the asada and nachos are enough to keep you sane.

Plus, booze is still booze, from whatever bar you choose. The vibrations from the excessively loud music had me strapping on my party shoes before our second round, and from our window side booth, I eventually found myself loving this place. Then again, tequila has that effect on me.

VELVET CANTINA Mon.–Thurs., 5–10:30p.m., bar open until midnight; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m., bar until 2 a.m.; Sun. 5–10:30pm., bar until midnight. 3349 23rd St., SF. (415) 648-4142, www.velvetcantina.com

A small beef

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WITHOUT RESERVATIONS In my years of traversing the Divisadero Summit, that land of cloud-minders at the very crest of Pacific Heights, I have sometimes wondered who actually lives in all the pretty houses. Well, Danielle Steele, of course, and her bevy of automobiles, which she seems to collect the way Imelda Marcos once collected shoes. But I don’t quite know which palace is hers, nor am I sure which belongs to the writer Robert Mailer Anderson and his Oracle heiress wife. Maybe I’m on the wrong street altogether. But I can tell you that the Japanese Consulate is up there, at the corner of Divis and Vallejo, in a beautiful Italianate mansion, and I know this because I was there a few days ago for a high-end cookout that filled the terrace with charcoal perfume and the large foyer with the faintly briny scent of a whole sea bream on display.

The point of the cookout was to remind the local food cognoscenti that Japan, like Europe, has its venerated, slow food-style traditions, and while sea bream makes lovely sushi, no Japanese foodstuff is more venerated than wagyu, the famous, and famously expensive, beef. Slabs of raw wagyu — the real stuff, not the US-produced knockoff kind — were on display beside the reddish sea bream, but they gave off no odor; the beefy smells were coming from the charcoal grills outside, where slivers of the meat were being barbecued while the hungry mob waited.

But you could have your wagyu raw, too, if you preferred: arranged atop a little rice ball as a form of beef sushi. Either way, you tasted the intense fattiness of the meat. "Marbling" — strata of fat within the muscle itself — is the term often used to describe this effect, but wagyu seems to be beyond marbled. The muscle and fat aren’t easily distinguishable. Naturally, small portions are in order, since wagyu is to ordinary beef what cognac is to wine. It’s concentrated and potent, and a tiny amount is plenty. You don’t eat wagyu, you savor it.

In America, where beef is king and is generally scarfed in large quantities, selling this proposition could be tricky, but the subtle culinary wisdoms of Japan do advise us that slow versus fast food is just one axis of a multipolar conflict. Instead of big food, how about … small food?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Piqueo’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When Carlos Altamirano opened his first restaurant, Mochica, on a drab block of Harrison Street in SoMa more than four years ago, I thought: well, Peruvian, that’s interesting, but how good could it be if he had to put it there? Then I went and found out how good it could be: way good, extraordinary, probably the best Peruvian food in the city. Few pleasures are as exquisite as that of finding one’s expectations exceeded.

And yet, in unlooked-for success, danger can lurk, too. If your first restaurant turns out to be marvelous, people will expect your other restaurants to be marvelous, maybe even more marvelous. The word, from two summers ago, that Altamirano would be taking over the original Moki’s space in Bernal Heights to open a Mochica sibling wasn’t surprising, but it did lead me to suppose that the new place would be at least as good as the older one and, at the same time, wonder if and how it could be. Would it be disappointing if Piqueo’s, the new restaurant, were only as good as Mochica, not better?

One way out of this gilded conundrum might be to serve a slightly different sort of food at each locale. Altamirano describes the menu at Piqueo’s as "contemporary" Peruvian cuisine — "traditional" Peruvian, "with a California twist." (Mochica, incidentally, serves "fusion Peruvian cuisine," according to the Web site.) The description is fair enough in that vague, diplomats-having-frank-discussions way, but it does not begin to capture the wonder of the sauces, which, in their variety, sophistication, and vividness, are so good we actually requested glasses to drink them from, once we’d run out of sopping and soaking material. If you associate sauces with a certain sort of snooty French cooking, you will find revelation at Piqueo’s.

The menu card itself is an unwieldy artifact. It’s oversized — it could pass as a modestly shrunken reproduction of the Declaration of Independence — and like that worthy document it’s filled with text, in small, difficult-to-read lettering. One evening we had to whip out our Peepers (those wallet-size magnifying glasses, so no, it’s not what you think) to be able to read the menu. Rarely do you see so many choices except at Chinese restaurants, and when a kitchen must turn out such a broad range of dishes, you wonder if it isn’t trying to spread too little butter over too much bread.

But you don’t get bread at Piqueo’s: You get little dishes of crispy, spicy chickpeas, tossed with scallion mince and some mild white vinegar. They’re no good for sauce reclamation, but they are addictive. You empty the dish and another soon appears, and by the time you’ve emptied that, you are presented with a platter of seviche, maybe the mixto version ($17), an embarrassment of peeled shrimp, sea scallops, mussels, yam chunks, kernels of Peruvian corn, and a few slivers of fresh ginger bathing in a glow-in-the-dark sauce of lime juice and two kinds of chili pepper, rocoto and aji limo. The sauce was almost like a distillate of V-8 juice, and when the seafood was gone, we poured the remnant into a cordial glass and made a small toast to the next course.

After such puckering heat, a bit of aromatic sweetness is indicated. How about a salad of quinoa ($9) — the grain of the Inca — perfumed with mint? I was expecting something like couscous, but the salad was a real salad: a bowlful of mixed greens, with the cooked quinoa scattered like cheese crumblings over the lettuces and a lively but well-mannered supporting cast of halved black olives, red bell pepper julienne, and more Peruvian corn kernels tossed into the mix. Vinaigrette: lush and balsamicky, a hint of caramel sweetness.

As familiar as Peruvian corn (a.k.a. cancha) may have become in recent years, at least to those who haunt Peruvian restaurants, its appearances have remained confined (in my experience) to off-the-cob bit parts. But Piqueo’s offers cancha steamed on skewered cobs ($9) in a fabulous, turmeric-yellow aji sauce. The corn itself was a little bland (though it doesn’t stick in your teeth the way the ordinary kind can), but the sauce was so good that we pleaded for, and were brought, a plate of toasted baguette rounds to clean it up with.

Bread recurred (in a kind of late-inning rally) as part of a fried-smelt sandwich ($9) enlivened by sprigs of fresh cilantro. Smelt is a fresh-water fish not often seen in restaurants around here — I associate it with the Great Lakes and early-spring fishing expeditions by night along Chicago’s lakefront — but there is a variety native to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, so it’s not necessarily an exotic delicacy.

Also not exotic delicacies, but delicious all the same, are calamari tubes ($19), closed off at one end like pastry piping bags, filled with chorizo, and grilled. The tubes (which look like elongated dreidels) are plated with broad, flat white beans, a jumble of watercress, and yet another wondrous sauce, this one called chupe.

If there is a slight letdown, it has to do with the dessert menu. Many of the usual suspects can be found here, from alfajores (the little cookies) to suspiro to passion-fruit mousse. After some squabbling ("Gentlemen, draw your Peepers"), we settled on the chocolate cake ($10) with ice cream. The ice cream, made with lucuña, a tropical fruit native to Peru, was a pretty orange-pink color but disappointingly granular, which suggested it had melted and been refrozen. The cake, on the other hand, a disk held within a rim of crushed nuts, was outstanding: a mousse cake, smooth and dense as night. No sauce needed.

PIQUEO’S

Daily, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

830 Cortland, SF

(415) 282-8812

www.piqueos.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Shitloads of Money

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Stirring constantly … I’m a troublemaker. For complicated reasons, my old pals, um, Ronnie "Zack" Pottery and his wife, Mrs. "Zack" Pottery, were running from the law. Understand that these are two of the sweetest, law-abidingest people you will ever meet. They live very cleanly, simply, and musically in subrural, um, Idaho, pay taxes, stay sober, write, work, and record at home, go to the doctor, and consume more tea than anyone I know. Their idea of a wild time is to stay up late (as in, like, 11 p.m.) and render jazz standards on melodica and banjo. Sometimes they throw in a little slide whistle, or toy piano … the sick, twisted deviants! Their closest friends, I swear, are nuns.

Everybody sing: The hills are alive with the sound of music. No. It’s Idaho, but it ain’t like that. And I’m not sure I quite know what I mean, but I have a gut feeling it might be funny, in an over-my-own-head kind of way, so let’s stay with it. Just in case.

Everybody sing again: The hills are alive with the sound of music.

Sorry. The reason I’m stalling is because I want so very badly to explain why my two most clean-living friends ever, anywhere, were fugitives from (in)justice for a week. It’s so exciting and ridiculous. Surely it will make great copy. And yet, I have to be careful, don’t I?

Suffice it to say, as vaguely as possible, that people with shitloads of money can do basically whatever they want to people without squat, or very little, at any rate — like maybe some musical instruments and herbal tea. Everybody knows this, right?

But it’s even more twisted than that. Woohoo!

To make a long story short, as Ronnie "Zack" himself is fond of saying, someone with shitloads of money takes someone else with shitloads of money to court over, say, shitloads of money, or custody of kids, or it could be anything, really. The point is that clever, ruthless lawyers with shitloads of money start playing shitloads-of-money hardball with each other over shitloads of money, and the next thing you know, nun-hugging, starving-artistical innocents with a fear of flying are about to be subpoenaed to appear in a courtroom many states away to testify against a third person with shitloads of money who is not even materially involved in the case of Shitloads of Money vs. Shitloads of Money.

So let’s say that this third person with shitloads of money would prefer not to see Shitloads of Money winning shitloads of money off of Shitloads of Money, if only because in the process his own good name, Shitloads of Money, stands to be destroyed and he may, for example, lose the respect of loved ones who may or may not already have lost respect for him years ago. In any case, it’s too much to risk for someone with shitloads of money, so he generously suggests to said nun huggers that they must certainly be under stress and could use a vacation.

Oh, it’s so convoluted and other-worldly. It’s enough to boggle a little chicken farmer’s tiny brain. Which is partly my fault, because as soon as I saw Mr. and Mrs. "Zack" Pottery in their his-and-hers false mustaches at a discreet little hotel in My Hometown, California, I asked them please not to tell me too much about what was going on, so that I might write about it more accurately.

As a result, you probably know more about this case right now than I do. All I know is that Shitloads of Money vs. Shitloads of Money + Shitloads of Money – False Mustache–Sporting Nun Huggers = Fun for Chicken Farmers.

Breakfast was on them. Lunch was on them. Dinner was on them. Gas was on them. And as it gradually dawned on me that "on them" likely didn’t really mean on them so much as on them, I started suggesting fancier and fancier places. Places that chicken farmers and musicians don’t generally get to eat at.

And in this way, in my own imagination at least — which counts! — I had the small satisfaction of sticking it to Shitloads of Money.

———————————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is the Willow Wood Market up here in Graton. It’s the kind of place where I would never be able to afford to go, myself. It ain’t cheap eats: in other words, you’ll spend $15-$25 on a dinner entrée. But on special occasions, like your birthday or surprise out-of-town visitors wearing false mustaches and picking up checks…. It serves pretty basic, unpretentious, comfortable, and great food like risotto with scallops, rock shrimp with polenta, and grilled flat iron steak.

WILLOW WOOD MARKET & CAFE

9020 Graton Road, Graton

(707) 823-0233

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

Beer and wine

MC/V

White made right

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Although "white" carries generally favorable connotations in our race-haunted society, the spell breaks at the gates of the wine kingdom. When Californians mention wines they like, the wines are almost always red ones — and more often than not, cabernets sauvignons. White wines? What are those?

To an extent, this bias can be explained by the great and unexpected success of (red) California wines at the famous Paris blind tasting of 1976, in which French judges ended up preferring the New World wines. But the vestigial glow of this triumph doesn’t explain why so many young people I know, many of them recently converted from beer to wine, already equate "wine" with red wine. Are red wines inherently superior?

Part of the issue could have to do with the fact that white wines are by nature more naked and skeletal than their red cousins. Their flaws tend to show, and they don’t have rich color or fruit-bomb radiance to distract us from noticing them. Another and more pertinent factor is the lackluster quality of so much California white wine. Many of the best whites still come from difficult little swatches of Europe (rainy Galicia, stony Sardinia, chilly Burgundy, the chalky Loire Valley), while our homegrown grapes, having lived the high life in rich soil and warm sunshine, too often produce wines that are flabby and flubbery (in the case of chardonnay) or aggressively grassy (in the case of sauvignon blanc).

Of course, I overgeneralize — but with intent. There are good white wines of California provenance to be found, and it’s fun to try to find them. You might have met despair while locked in the bathroom at a party, spitting up yet another overcooked chardonnay, but you will be all the more grateful when you take your first silvery sip of Navarro’s dry riesling, or Dry Creek’s utterly Loire-like chenin blanc — or if you are bound and determined to find a good California chardonnay, the unoaked chardonnay from Clos LaChance. The winery is slightly off the beaten path, in the foothills south of San Jose, and the wine is nearly Burgundian in its well-managed acidity (like a sharp knife with a sumptuous handle), crisp apple-y character, and wondrous lack of buttery bloat. If you’ve gagged on your last slug ever of party chardonnay, a gentle tipple of this stuff should settle you down nicely.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Falling flat

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It was clear early on that the Slow Beer Festival, presented March 1 by Slow Food San Francisco and the San Francisco Brewers Guild, was more of an excuse to get drunk in a convention hall on a Saturday afternoon than to explore how beer could be sustainable. Twelve NorCal microbreweries lined the green-hued cement walls of the County Fair Building — Marin Brewing, Speakeasy, Anderson Valley, Red Seal, and so on. An administrator at the front desk, though, couldn’t tell me what the difference was between a Slow Beer and your everyday microbrew (though she did say it was "a good question"). The man at the nationally distributed Gordon Biersch stand said bluntly, "Yeah, we’re a corporation."

Normally I’d say, "Fill up my glass and pass me another Gambone-mushroom-and-cheese skewer [drizzled in salsa verde]!" Here, though, I began to actually wonder how beer could be incorporated in the Slow Food ideology. As the manifesto says, "May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency."

The Slow Foodists seek not just to change the food we consume but to change how we consume it as well. So isn’t a sterile room for beer tasting just stripping beer down to its flavor, and not about the way we experience it? At the festival, on one side of the gate there was a crowded room with a slender outdoor food garden and (by my estimate) 200 gallons of beer; on the other side, a park blanketed in sunshine. The latter setting might be better for bringing out the true sensual pleasures of beer. Next year, why not save money on the room deposit and hold the event in Michael Pollan’s backyard?

Pacific Catch

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When a service station is torn down to make way for an art gallery, we cheer. When the art gallery folds and is succeeded by a restaurant, we shuffle our feet uneasily. At least they won’t be tearing the building down to bring back the service station — but art galleries are harder to find than restaurants.

Pacific Catch is a pretty good seafood restaurant in a neighborhood already chockablock with restaurants. The prices are moderate, the service is friendly and efficient, the food is good, and the look is handsome in a not-overbearing way. But those who remember that the space was home for several years to the Canvas Gallery — a blend of art forum, café, restaurant, and meetinghouse, with a general university-town flavor — won’t recognize much when they step inside. The interior floor plan has been heavily reworked: the central coffee and pastry bar, once surrounded by naves hung with paintings and photographs, has been replaced by tables, chairs, and booths. There is also now (at the far side of the restaurant as you enter) a shiny and bustling exhibition kitchen, along with a bold color scheme of red and blue, and light fixtures that look like clusters of bottomless Bombay Sapphire gin bottles. All that remains of the original layout is a smaller dining room along the building’s north face, looking across the busy street at Golden Gate Park.

Still, there is a nice irony in the transformation of a filling station — or indeed any other urban eyesore — into a haven of civilization, whether it’s a locus for art or food, and to have a seafood restaurant on a site that once reeked of gasoline fumes must be accounted an improvement by any standard. I only wish Pacific Catch weren’t a nascent chain; there’s a tiny sibling outlet on Chestnut in the Marina, another (of unknown scale) in Corte Madera, and a general sense, as a friend of mine put it, that still more Pacific Catches can’t be far off.

The food is accordingly mainstream, with tweaks and tunings that reflect sensibilities on either side of the Pacific, trending sometimes in an Asian direction and at others in a Latin American one. Among the great Mexican seafood dishes must be the fish taco, and Pacific Catch offers several versions ($4.25), all creditable on their beds of shredded cabbage: Baja, with chunks of batter-fried halibut or cod; grilled mahimahi, slathered in the restaurant’s ubiquitous avocado-tomatillo salsa; and barbecue shrimp, enlivened by little flares of fresh ginger (a nod across the Pacific there). Side dishes enhance the south-of-the-border aura; black beans ($2.95 for a sizable crock) are well seasoned and sprinkled with crumblings of queso fresco, while grilled corn ($2.95) — still on disks of cob — is suitable for dipping into accompanying pats of chipotle butter.

If Pacific Catch can seem like a cantina in Cabo San Lucas, it can also present itself as a sushi bar on Maui. A variety of sashimi is offered (as is its New World cousin, seviche), along with a selection of sushi rolls and — for that Hawaiian touch — poke ($8.50), cubes of lightly seared ahi drizzled with soy sauce and served atop a Fritos-like mélange of rice chips. The poke is temperamentally well suited to share table space with wakame (seaweed) salad ($3.95), a staple of sushi bars and notable here for its considerable size. The salad is plenty for two and could even satisfy four if other treats were on the way.

The grilled salmon ($19.95) — a deftly grilled filet — had been organically farmed in British Columbia, which relieved some of my unease at having it, since farmed salmon is usually a big no-no. The so-called California presentation itself was pleasant if unremarkable and consisted of a huge scoop of brown rice, several stalks of steamed asparagus (with basil aioli for dipping), and under the fish, a confit of tomatoes and lemon.

Even if Pacific Catch is mostly a seafood restaurant, you don’t have to have seafood. You could have grilled skirt steak ($18.95), glazed with miso, cut into tender slices, and plated with a huge scoop of white rice, a salad of picked cucumber threads, and a pile of deceptively pale kimchi that packed a real and thrilling wallop of garlic and chili pepper. My only complaint about these large plates is that they did look like subcompacts coming off an assembly line: this one got an extra cup holder from the parts bin, that one a CD deck in the dashboard — but otherwise they heavily resembled one another in a bolted-together way.

Dessert tends to soothe complainants of most stripes, luckily, and Pacific Catch has at least one quite good dessert: a sundae ($6.50) built on a macadamia-nut brownie. The brownie isn’t a doodle or add-on here, an extra calorie payment stuffed into a sundae glass with gobs of ice cream, as is so often the case with brownie sundaes; instead, it’s like Huck’s raft, sprawling and commodious, and the blob of macadamia-nut ice cream on top is almost a condiment. Other condiments include twin oozings of hot-fudge and caramel sauces.

There’s one element of the mix that hasn’t changed much in the metamorphosis, and that’s the crowd. It remains young and collegiate- or postcollegiate-looking, although the noise level has risen noticeably. In the old art-café days, people tended to keep even their more intense conversations at murmur level; now, without the elevating presence of art beyond some paintings of fish on the walls, there is a tendency to hoot and bray, if you catch my drift.

PACIFIC CATCH

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

1200 Ninth Ave., SF

(415) 504-6905

www.pacificcatch.com

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Craft fare

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS There was this crafts fair at one of our bars, and Sockywonk said she knew a guy who was giving away waffles. "Crafts fair?" I said, picturing clothes, jewelry, and purses, but not waffles.

Yeah, she said. He’d figured out a way to get waffle batter into an aerosol can, like Reddy-Wip, and he was promoting his brilliant invention by feeding all the craft fairies for free.

I loved Sockywonk for knowing such a thing. But after a sporty morning, I had me a good sticky, stinky sweat on and was mostly interested in her bathtub. We were going to a potluck at another bar later in the afternoon. I still had my soccer socks on.

"Well … " I said.

"Waffles!" she said, and what could I say? I had to agree with her 100 percent, once she put it like that. Waffles! Free ones, at that, and I was hungry and only had exactly $1.15.

"Waffles!" I said. And I changed my socks, borrowed a shirt, and found all sorts of things in Sockywonk’s bathroom to rub and spray on myself in lieu of a waterier bath.

At the end of the block we joined forces with Natty King Coal, the oatmeal pusher, and his charming bag lady–enforcer (and my personal hero) Little Orphan-Maker Annie, who was on crutches due to a grisly roller derby smash-up. She hadn’t been out of the house in months. I’m not kidding.

Annie had a crazed and wonderful look in her eye, like Give Me Blood, or syrup, or bargains. She also had a handicapped-parking thingy, so we drove to the bar even though it was within walking distance — or would have been, without pins and rods and crushed bones and so forth.

"What’s that smell?" Natty King said once all the car doors were closed.

"Do you mean ‘What are those smells?’" I said. "They represent a delicate yet complicated blending of the usual — sweat, smoke, and chicken shit — with the unusual: whatever the hell Socky keeps on the shelf in her bathroom."

Sockywonk works at a girly, soapy bath, spray, and general smell shop called Common Scents, and that was pretty much what I smelled like, like the entire store, Common Scents, on 24th Street. Plus sweat and smoke and of course chicken shit.

"I like it," the Orphan-Maker said, turning in her seat and smiling. Christ, she’s so sweet. And that was the end of that discussion.

At the crapshoot, or crafts fair, Sockywonk left less $40, the Orphan-Maker dropped two great T-shirts’ worth, plus the $20 she spotted the Wonk for even more cool stuff. Natty King, who knows how to treat his girls, bless him, went down whatever-the-worth of three bags of hot-sauced mango from a sidewalk vendor. Yum! And I, your chicken farmer truly, walked away with exactly $1.15, plus Aunt Jemima stains all over my borrowed shirt. Syrup. Sorry, Socky.

The verdict on aerosol-can waffle and pancake batter?

Yeah. Whatever. No, I mean, it was free, and it was delicious. But being a person who loves to cook, and who loves to spend as much time as possible doing the things that I love to do, like cooking, why in the world would I ever in the world squeeze waffle batter out of a can? And then blow time looking out the window that I could have more wisely spent separating egg whites and hand-whisking until they hold soft peaks?

No kidding, I make three meals a day. I want to have my hands in the food, and my arms, teeth, and tongue when appropriate. Like sex, I actually want it to take as long as possible. And dirty all the dishes. (I’ll do ’em in the morning.) You’re in a hurry, I know. You have a job. Check it out: batterblaster.com. Me, I’ll keep doing what I do … stirring constantly.

——————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Pretty Lady, a divine dive in West Oakland. Me and Deevee both ordered fried egg sandwiches, because we only had $10 between us, and all of it was hers. She laughed at me for ordering my sandwich eggs over easy, and I laughed last when my first bite squirted egg yolk all over my shirt and pants and the place. Which I really and truly love, did I mention? Nothing but counter, U-shaped for easier people-watching/eavesdropping. Saw a good-looking salad and stir-fry down the counter, so … stay for lunch.

PRETTY LADY

1733 Peralta, Oakl.

(510) 832-1213

Mon.–Sat., 7 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

New soup for you!

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Day is done, gone the sun, and let’s have soup. The sun is lingering a little longer these days, but winter still abides in the garden, it remains damp and chilly inside, and if nothing else, we can warm our hands in the steam that rises from our bowls of soup.

Like all repertoires, the soup repertoire is in need of constant tending. You prune the ones that don’t quite work or show signs of reduced drawing power while being alert to new prospects. Much as I love butternut squash soup, for instance (and its near relation, kabocha squash soup), I’ve stricken it from the list, in part because of domestic unrest and in part because a great many restaurant kitchens turn out some version of it between November and March, and this creates an overkill issue.

Meanwhile, there is the matter of additions. The good soupist craves ideas, and when, for instance, a neighbor told of an excellent broccoli-leek soup she brought home one day from the Bi-Rite deli, the soupist’s ears pricked right up. Broccoli-leek? Could this be just a version of potato-leek with broccoli added? The soupist can’t speak for the Bi-Rite kitchen, but potato-leek with broccoli added does make a lovely, cream-of-broccoli-like soup, except with no cream.

Procedure: Clean a large leek by trimming the root end, removing the green leaves, thinly slicing the white bulb, and separating and cleaning the rings in a large bowl of water. Heat some sweet butter or vegetable oil in a soup pan, add the leek rings (with a pinch of salt), and soften, stirring occasionally. Don’t let the leek turn brown. Add a head of broccoli, rinsed and coarsely chopped, along with a large russet potato, peeled and cubed. Add about four or five cups water or stock — chicken stock is excellent but not vegan — bring to a boil, and simmer, covered, for about 20 minutes. Puree with an immersion wand or in a blender, add some ground or cracked black pepper, and salt to taste.

A nice springtime variation is to substitute green, or fresh, garlic (now showing up at farmers markets) for the leek. You will need three or four green garlic stalks, since they’re much slenderer than leeks. These soups cool very appealingly, even down to room temperature, but if your hands are blue, serve them hot.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

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