Food & Drink

Seafood soup for the soul

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IT TAKES A VILLAGE Chuck chicken noodle soup. Forget pho. When I’m sick, I need the warmth and sinus-clearing spice of hot and sour soup, or in a pinch, Top Ramen with lots of Tapatio. But the last time I was sick, in an effort to explore my new Outer Sunset hood, I decided to take my chances on the offerings at the almost-year-old Tofu Village.

Now, I’m all about immediate gratification. So I was happy when, 30 seconds after I sat down, steaming tea arrived. Then, 30 seconds after I ordered, came little plates of banchan: seaweed salad, vinegar-soaked bean sprouts, stewed potatoes, kimchi, and fish cakes. And 30 seconds after that? A whole fried fish. (I know it’s a delicacy, but I usually hate when my meat looks like what it used to be — except for cow-shaped steaks, which are fun. In this case, though, the crispy skin and tender flaky fish made my hesitant bite worthwhile.)

Then came the seafood tofu soup, in a basketball-size, steaming ceramic bowl. I ordered mine spicy (out of four options, this was the third hottest), and it was almost too much even for my heat-inured taste buds. The concoction was full of silky tofu, clams, and oysters — leading to my next triumph over a squeamish moment with unshelled prawns (carapaces, antennae, and pleopods — oh my!). The rice was kept warm in a similar ceramic bowl — a traditional touch — although the server didn’t offer to mix it with green tea, as is custom. The bulgogi, served on a sizzling ceramic plate, was flavorfully marinated and tender against the fresh pop of green onion.

Like a mother — a brisk, efficient, multitasking, slightly hovering mother — Tofu Village left me happy, stuffed, and still sniffling but feeling better. The best part? Getting all that food for just under $20.

TOFU VILLAGE Mon.–Thu., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m. 1920 Irving, SF. (415) 661-8322

Conduit

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› paulr@sfbg.com

First impressions are often false impressions, but some first impressions are so overwhelming as to transcend such mundane terms as false and favorable. When I first crossed the threshold of Conduit, I had the impression of having stepped inside a pipe organ. The restaurant (which opened late last year on a once-desolate stretch of Valencia near 14th Street) is a labyrinth of copper and steel tubing, so dense in its gleaming geometry as to become a kind of metallic fabric. The tightly arranged pipes make up part of the ceiling and help divide the dining room into sections, and if you think all that metal must feel cold, you’re not factoring in the burnished glow of the copper — so reminiscent, for foodheads, of the copper pans that once hung in Julia Child’s Cambridge, Mass., kitchen — or the gas fireplace that sits just inside the front door, as if in a warming hut at a high-end skating rink.

Also, you haven’t seen the bathrooms: a set of private cells behind a wall of translucent blue doors, as if in a giant honeycomb. A guided tour of this part of the restaurant would not be completely absurd but probably won’t be necessary, since paying crowds have already descended on Conduit for other, and excellent, reasons. The restaurant, even in its fledgling days, already must be considered one of the premier spots on Valencia’s still-burgeoning restaurant row; its peer group consists of Range, Limón, and perhaps Bar Tartine, and if only because of the extraordinary atmospherics of the interior design (the architect was Stanley Saitowitz), its sheen is brighter than theirs.

But let’s not forget the appeal of chef Justin Deering’s food either. The man and his staff work in an exhibition kitchen that stretches like a stage across the back of the restaurant, and the menu they’re turning out is a seasonal California one, yes, like so many others, but with an emphasis on butter and cream that reminded me of Traci Des Jardins’s early menus at Jardinière and of Nancy Oakes’s at Boulevard. Butter and cream discreetly bespeak luxury, not only because they’re expensive but also because they bring a velvety weight to foods that probably don’t, in most cases, need it. But part of the appeal of luxury is its very superfluousness. In other words: Conduit is a downtown restaurant that happens not to be downtown and charges (down!) accordingly. It isn’t cheap, but it costs about a third less than its city-center siblings and occupies a neighborhood setting that presents fewer logistical challenges.

Deering’s gnocchi ($12) are finished in bubbling butter — also topped with crab meat and chopped arugula — and as we might expect, they’re très rich, but the butter finish is standard procedure for gnocchi. A more improbable jolt of creaminess can be found in, or on, a salad of little gems ($9), the heads of baby romaine lettuce that so often get used in some variation on Caesar salad. The creamy dressing here is buttermilk based (like ranch) and is slathered on the halved heads with abandon. Even so, it doesn’t entirely mask the pleasant bite of spicy macadamia nuts and radish shavings, fine and delicate as tiny facial tissues, which are scattered over the lettuces and across the oblong plate.

Duck confit ($11) gets the deconstruction treatment instead of the usual meat-on-bone presentation. The deconstruction is visually striking, with a salad of frisée and pear slices at one end, and at the other a smear of duck-liver mousse (creamy!) and the actual confit, a pat of shredded confit meat that might more accurately be described as rillettes. Still, there’s nothing wrong with rillettes, and what’s been deconstructed can be reconstructed, often entertainingly.

Deering isn’t a complete butterfat crackhead. His bigger plates, in particular, rely less on dairy richness than their small-fry relations; a steak of grilled walu ($19), for example, was plated atop a mound of cannellini beans enhanced by crisped flaps of guanciale (a baconlike form of cured pork) and halved green olives fried tempura-style. (Walu is one of those wonderful fish with meaty white flesh taken from the waters of the Hawaiian Islands.)

Kitchen voyeurs (of whom I am one) will appreciate the dinner bar — a half dozen or so seats at the very cusp of the kitchen, with an unobstructed and intimate view of chefly goings-on. (This bar is not to be confused with the bar bar, an impressive affair nearer the front of the dining room, stacked with a full complement of booze.) The dinner bar, interestingly, is another echo of Boulevard, which offers similar seating. A further advantage of the dinner bar at Conduit: it’s near the restrooms, so you can make a brief visit and perusal while the pastry chefs (who are working right in front of you) put together your dessert.

A sundae ($8) sounds like an 80 mph fastball right down the middle of the plate — in other words, banal and sluggable — but a major wrinkle at Conduit is that the pastry chefs make their own ice creams, such as one with cherries and chocolate chunks, a kind of boutique Cherry Garcia, creamy and rich as gelato or frozen custard. Hot chocolate sauce spooned over? A nice touch, as is the pair of triangular chocolate wafers stuck into the ice cream. The clear plastic cup in which the sundae is served, meanwhile, seems like a good joke whose punch line is "Downmarket." But really, you could serve ice cream this good practically any way and send people into transports. Bi-Rite Creamery? What’s that?

A final huzzah for noise management. It is expert. Conduit isn’t quiet — and how could it be, with throngs of 1999-vintage tech androids swarming the place? — but the floors are laid with some sort of charcoal rugs of hemp or sisal, and they soak up sound like sponges. Impressive!

CONDUIT

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

280 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-5200

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Flowers

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I see flowers very differently. Not because I’m a woman now, or a softy, or insane, or even a chicken farmer. It’s a kid thing. I learned it from little Clara de la Cooter, who bonked into the world a year ago and very quickly became my new favorite person in it.

Probably not a lot of people get to babysit their ex’s kids. So I’m lucky in that sense, and so is Clara. She’s a passionate eater — I daresay a budding foodie. Her favorite food so far is eggs. I’m just saying …

It’s not hard to imagine who her favorite auntie will be, I’m saying.

Today I saw an ad on the side of a truck that said, "Just the freshest eggs you will ever eat." I forget the brand, but if its slogan is true, then I highly recommend it. Its eggs will be sold not by the carton but by the chicken. Yo, I’ve held warm ones in my hands on cold days between the nest and the skillet. I’ve had to postpone lunch until almost dinnertime because somebody was all stopped up.

And the boys who I’ve dated have not tended to bring flowers. But that’s OK, because most of them never knew they were dating me. I like to think of Clara de la Cooter’s first date. Some awkward, googly kid hands her a flower and she laughs.

"What?" they say, offended.

But if they knew her now, they would know better. The girl just cracks up at the sight of flowers. That’s all. For some reason they are the funniest thing in the world to her. They’re hilarious. She points and giggles, and she laughs her head off. And I think that’s beautiful. More beautiful than I used to think flowers were.

I’m inspired. I want to laugh at flowers too, and I think there’s a chance I might learn to. Yesterday we took two walks together. It’s spring. It’s Berkeley. I held her in bushes and she kicked her legs and squealed with pleasure, rattling the leaves and branches. I pushed her stroller right up into pink ones, purple ones, white ones, yellow ones, and she pointed and laughed and touched and tugged. That she also tried to eat them goes without saying, don’t you think?

Under a lemon tree I wheelied the stroller back so she could look straight up into it. The tree was loaded, and she lost it. She busted a gut. All that yellow, it was early Woody Allen to her. If she hadn’t been so strapped in, she’d have been rolling on the sidewalk.

I want this. I want one. And that alternative-weekly groan you’re hearing is all my old friends, because they know how I used to be. And people tend to expect you to stay the same. Especially those who love you most.

Which reminds me that one day Clara will not be so tickled by flowers, or not in the same way. Maybe she’ll have allergies. I had a fantasy, under the lemon tree with her, that I would live to be 84, and that she would ask me, hopefully over dinner, what she was like when she was one.

Like I started asking my own parents, and at least one of my aunts, a couple years ago. They didn’t seem to know much, maybe because I was 1 of 11. Or they forgot. Which … I don’t have the world’s best memory myself. Already. What I will have is an excessively creased and yellow newspaper clipping in my apron pocket, where I’ve been keeping it for 40 years, just in case. "You found flowers very funny," it will say. And: "We laughed till we cried."

Making limeade out of lemons is my motto in life. This was someone else’s tree, of course, but I picked a small, hard one and put it in Clara’s little hand, unwashed, let her gum and suck it. And a couple of sidewalk squares later I saw, and picked, one tiny wild strawberry, the size of a pea. This I put in her other hand, knowing she’d eat it. And that it might have been sprayed, or peed on by a dog.
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My new favorite restaurant is one of my old favorite restaurants, but I never told you. It’s the 55-year-old Cinderella Russian Bakery in the Richmond, where I refueled with my soccer buds recently and dripped sweat and blood (from my nose) onto stuffed cabbages, garlicky potatoes, homemade bread, and dill in general. Wow! I think my mates were looking for more like, you know, breakfast, but for my money this is just the thing.

CINDERELLA RUSSIAN BAKERY

435 Balboa, SF

(415) 751-9690

Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

Beer and wine

AE/DC/V

From Umbria, with brio

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As a member of the lentil-involved community, I was honored and elated to be presented with a small sack of organic Umbrian lentils at a recent Slow Food shindig for organic Umbrian farmers. (Organic Umbrian Agriculture: World Tour ’08.) The lentils, from a producer called Terra Colombaia ("pigeon coop"), were uncooked, of course; cooking not included. I would have to handle that part myself, and I welcomed the chance, which would come later, once I’d gotten home. Meantime, I practiced saying lenticchie — the Italian word for lentils, and a jollier word than ours it is — with the jolly Umbrian farmers seated all around me at Acme Chophouse. I asked them if they liked America, and they smiled and nodded knowingly without quite saying yes. I know this drill; it’s the universal language for "We hate Bush!" But hope, somehow, abides. In that spirit, the subject of Hillary was steered clear of.

The lentils, liberated from their plastic sack, proved to be a motley if lovable crew, smaller than the Umbrian lentils I’ve long been accustomed to seeing at the market, and far more varied in color. The dominant shade in both iterations is a mocha brown, but in the commercial version I usually buy (from Emilio Bartolini, an Umbrian concern known mainly for olive oils), that shade is deep and consistent. The organic lentils, by contrast, have reds, browns, grays, and greens lurking in the mix; it’s like a legume version of M&Ms. Also, the organic lentils are smaller, about the size of their hard green Puy cousins from France to the north. Size matters in American cosmology, and small is a sin in more ways than I can decently mention, but in lentilology, small is an advantage, since small Umbrian lentils cook more quickly than the bigger ones — a boon for the harried cook. Slow food … fast! And even quick-cooking Umbrian lentils are resistant to turning mushy; this is a boon for everyone, except people trying to make dal, and they should be using those reddish orange Indian lentils anyway.

Several of the Umbrian farmers spoke surprisingly good English, and when that didn’t suffice, there were enough Spanish, German, and French words at the table to fill the gaps. Still, we all thrilled to lenticchie — not quite a rousing chorus, but close.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Dining in the off-hours

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LATE LUNCHES One of the things that makes Don’t-call-it-Frisco such a fine place is the disproportionate ratio of successful slackers to office drones who live here. You know the type: they sleep in until 10, read the whole newspaper over a bagel and coffee, get some sort of exercise, and then spend the rest of the day creatively earning money. I’m one of them — hell, you’re probably one of them. Waiters, bartenders, freelance mortgage brokers, writers, graphic designers … there are all sorts of creative types doodling around the city during off hours, working after the sun goes down and eating their meals whenever they please. The only problem? When you finish breakfast at 11 a.m., you want lunch around 3 or 4 p.m. — and many power-lunch spots serving the corporate world close between 2 and 5 p.m., when the earliest cocktailer trickles in. So where do late lunchers eat? For those of you who think outside the cubicle, here are a few restaurants that’ll serve you no matter what time the lunch urge strikes.

Everything about Bar Bambino (2931 16th St.; 701-8466, www.barbambino.com) is carefully rustic. In the restaurant’s front window, a rough-hewn community table seats 10 and a soft white Italian marble bar reaches all the way back to an open section of the kitchen, displaying cheeses and charcuterie. A few scattered indoor tables give way to a quiet, heated outdoor patio. The menu shows owner Christopher Losa’s love for northern Italy, where he lived for several years: the food is simple, traditional Italian, like the polpetti, pork-and-veal meatballs in a rich tomato sauce with dark chard. There’s nothing superfluous on the plates (order some sides for that), and the dishes are affordable. "I’m all about gastronomic progression, but how many times a week can you eat peppered sardines in cilantro foam?" laughs Losa. "Sometimes you just want a plate of really good pasta." The highly polished Italian wine list offsets Bar Bambino’s simple food.

If you want to know where the really good meals are, follow the chefs. When San Francisco’s culinary heroes have slept off last night’s shift (and postshift drinks) and finished their coffee, they head to Sunflower (506 Valencia and 3111 16th St.; 626-5022) for cheap and authentic Vietnamese eats. Sunflower has two locations: a tiny (like, four tables tiny) space on Valencia and a larger dining room around the corner on 16th Street. Both locations share the same kitchen, which speedily produces hangover-curing dishes like sticky wontons (stuffed with pork, rolled in rice, and deep-fried) and all kinds of pho, with the requisite Mission vegan options available. The industrial-strength Thai iced tea or coffee is sweetened by plenty of condensed milk and will keep you buzzing long into the evening. The produce is fresh and the meat is nondubious, something of a rarity for a pho restaurant.

Absinthe (398 Hayes; 551-1590, www.absinthe.com) hasn’t gotten a lot of press in the past couple of years, but that’s not because the restaurant has slipped any. The Yelpers and the new-restaurant junkies may have gone to feed on fresh prey, but good ol’ Absinthe remains a staple of opera diners and cocktail connoisseurs. The bar’s lounge area stays open through Absinthe’s lunch rush, dinner rush, and the post-opera blitz. Sure, you’ll drop some coin on a meal at Absinthe (a decadent lunch for two plus cocktails runs about $100), but you’ll eat, and be treated, like royalty. Forget about the tired waitstaff dying to drop the checks so they can go home — the service here is as good as the Chartreuse cocktails and the fresh crab.

Restaurant Lulu (816 Folsom; 495-5775, www.restaurantlulu.com) is a total find in the restaurant wasteland that makes up this part of the SoMa corridor. It has the best salty, lemony mussels around, hands down. The industrial-chic decor is at odds with the impeccable and friendly service (read: no pretense, no attitude). Lulu’s is perfect for a hefty lunch circa 3 p.m., after a midday spin at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The kitchen at Perbacco (230 California; 955-0663, www.perbaccosf.com) will only do a bar menu between lunch and dinner, but it’s worth a trip to the heart of the Financial District for some ultra-authentic Italian snacks and drinks. The house specialty is the charcuterie plate (the sassy little meat-chef slices everything on a vintage machine right behind the bar), but everything’s good. Try their signature cocktail as a brightly acidic complement to the heavy, comforting meatiness offered on the rest of the menu.

OK, so you never want to hear the words "Asian fusion" again. I know: I don’t either. But buck up and check out Ozumo (161 Steuart; 882-1333, www.ozumo.com) on the backside of Steuart. If you just can’t bear to order anything with the word "fusion" in its name (your loss), you can still try the sushi. Ozumo is where the other servers in the area head for their post-lunch-shift drink — in case you wonder who the raucous group in the front lounge are. If you sit up there too, you can even pick up a wireless signal from next door. Hey, it’s like you really are in an office … but with cocktails. Viva la SF-slacker lifestyle! (Ella Lawrence)

Breezy’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Since the symphony strike of the mid-1990s, the west side of the Civic Center has seen more than its share of high-profile destination restaurants open their doors. From Jardinière (born 1997) to Essencia (2007), the tone of the restaurants in the neighborhood (whose epicenter is the corner of Gough and Hayes) has become considerably … tonier.

Much of the upscale-ishness doubtless has to do with the demolition of the Central Freeway viaduct and the reemergence of Hayes Valley as a nice place to live. A fresh bloom of boutique shops tends to confirm this. But east of Gough, the song remains largely the same: opera, symphony, ballet, with the occasional "in conversation with" at Herbst Auditorium thrown in. Yes, we are talking performances of one kind or another, and performance audiences often want something to eat in a civilized setting beforehand and aren’t always eager to cash out their 401(k)s or Google stock options to pay for it. Does the west Civic Center, with its new wealth of destination spots, have anything to offer these people? Ivy’s was the archetype of this sort of value restaurant, but it closed more than a decade ago.

On a recent weekend evening, mild and clear after weeks of stultifying rain, we slipped into Breezy’s at about 7:30 and found both large dining rooms full. A half hour later, as the clock struck eight, the restaurant was nearly empty; we were like the two forlorn members of a school of tasty fish who didn’t get the memo about the approaching great white shark. As curtains grandly rose in grand buildings on the other side of Gough, we made do with a chocolate tart.

Bawer Tekin and Dawn Wiggins opened Breezy’s last fall in a space long occupied by the Blue Muse, whose fanatical devotees will be relieved to know their restaurant has reappeared a block away, in a space that adjoins the performing-arts parking garage. The old space, meanwhile, looks little-changed and is still rather cavernous, with the front room still dominated by the big bar and the rear dining room faintly secret, like a cell in a medieval cloister. A creamy color scheme brings some warmth to this brutal roominess, and the iridescent tiles on the support pillars exert a certain hypnotic appeal, as Rubik’s Cube did a generation ago.

But forget about Breezy’s pleasantly unobtrusive décor and its friendly, efficient service, which holds up well even at the heart of the pre-performance rush. You’re there to eat, and the food is good. Quite good! Interesting without calling undue attention to itself, and reasonably priced in a fat-cat city where the word affordable often seems as if it’s been read right out of the language.

Chef Rodney Baca’s menu offers, according to the restaurant’s Web site, "the fresh tastes of the Mediterranean, with a swirl of Asian flair." Nicely put. The food, in other words, is that by-now familiar amalgam of California–New American cuisine, with touches of local and sustainable, along with a few blatant violations of these tenets. I love stuffed tomatoes, and Baca’s version ($9) is excellent — a baseball-size, reasonably ripe (for February) fruit, opened at the top like a Halloween pumpkin for a lively filling of prosciutto, cheese, and basil — but … a tomato in February? With basil? Everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire wrote in Candide, except (and I choose to believe this is implicit in the Voltairean text) winter tomatoes.

An arugula and watercress salad ($6) is a little more like it. The greens reached the table still practically glistening with rain, and instead of walnuts (those usual suspects), Baca used spicy peanuts to add crunch while making, possibly, a sly Super Bowl reference. Aged bleu cheese is a standard player in these salads and did appear in this one, but the vinaigrette acquired a refreshing sheen from pomegranate juice.

The kitchen also handles pasta beautifully, and this is an important consideration for performance-bound people, who will be more comfortable sitting there for an hour or three if they’ve eaten something a little lighter than a 20-ounce steak. You can get some steak with your pasta if you like; linguine alla carbonara ($14), with a classic sauce of pancetta cream and green peas, also includes meatballs of rib eye and Asiago cheese — just enough meat to register. And macaroni and cheese ($6, for a serving big enough to be a small main dish), is infused with truffle oil, scattered with crisped bits of chorizo, and plated with mixed micro greens, for a full-spectrum effect.

The chocolate tart ($7) we were so contentedly eating when the room cleared, as if in response to an air-raid siren, did suffer from a tough crust. Our server had mentioned this to us beforehand. But it was flavorful tough crust, we had good knives, and the ganache inside was intense and at the very precipice of not being sweet. Embedded on the surface of the ganache like bits of buckshot were blueberries, while napped around the edge was a wild berry marmalade and a dusting of pulverized pistachio.

At weekday lunchtime (the other busy period for restaurants in this area) Breezy’s is nicely accessible. Its large carrying capacity must help. Choices tend toward the conventional — Cobb salad ($9), say, or seared ahi tuna ($11) on a focaccia bun — and as at dinner, toward lightness too. Lightness, freshness, the pleasant startlement of a fresh breeze in the face: the name Breezy’s made not much sense to me before I went there and ate the food, but then I did and now it does. *

BREEZY’S

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

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

409 Gough, SF

(415) 552-3400

www.breezysf.com

Full bar

Moderately noisy

AE/DC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Change of heart

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS You don’t know me. You think you do, but not even my closest friends in the world know what a foolish, silly, misguided, and clumsy chicken farmer I can be. Key word: can be. Key words.

Luckily, we do have a choice, or at least a say. I have decided to be flattered by what happened on the night when I made a beautiful chicken pie out of one of my own, then accidentally dumped it in the sink. This point of view was not easy to come by.

At first I felt about as awful as it is possible to feel without dying. People who were in the kitchen had to leave the kitchen because they couldn’t bear to see me like that. I said what any English-speaking chicken farmer would have said right then. I said, putting it mildly, "Fuck!" My posture, I am sure, said the rest. I was bent or buckled over the counter next to the sink, my head in my hands, feeling entirely broken.

There was a time, earlier that day, when I had looked in the mirror and thought, I look pretty. Yeah, and there was a time, however brief, when my pie had looked delicious. Now it was a pile of steaming ruins in the bottom of the sink. Is this life? I keep trying to find out what life is, and the results keep coming back from the lab: an image of something ugly over porcelain.

Fortunately, I laugh easily and play hard, so I don’t stay down for long. During my already overdocumented recent depression (thanks for the concerned e-mails, BTW) I spent a long, blubbery time on the phone with my beloved Sockywonk, and she kept saying, "Your chickens! Your chickens!" And this is why I feel so sorry for people who struggle with longer-term depression. Because when you’re like that, not even the things you love can quite cut it. Not even chickens. Not to mention that, truth be told, I don’t even love my chickens. Not these ones. Not yet.

There’s no delicate way to say this. My chickens are pussies. Remember? I had to coax them out of their house and into the world with ham sandwiches. They had been outdoorsy, technically free-range chickens for months without ever really ranging freely. With half an acre of brush and stumps and logs and trees to explore, they mostly stay in the bushes right outside their door and just quiver.

Houdini they are not — Houdini being my famous and beloved escape-artist chicken whom I loved and then killed, when, even in death, she leaped out of the pot and bit me. In fact, hey, wait a minute! Come to think of it, ohmigod, this was Houdini, the end of her, the last little bit of freezer-burned meat, the last couple cups of broth, that went into this pie! I swear.

Holy shit! So she had one last escape attempt in her!

Not that it succeeded. The sink being pretty clean, Choo-choo and me spatula’d it all back into the pan, a broken mess, a chicken-pie casserole — but those who were brave enough to try it liked it.

Wow. Which would also explain why, while I was walking to my car after a sleepless night in Earl Butter’s closet, even the leftovers tried to get away. The pan, I swear, flew out of my hands and, without spilling, clattered across the sidewalk. I attributed this, at the time, to precaffeination, but now I’m thinking: Houdini!

That right there, that is spirit, soul, zest, zing, and that’s what my current chickens lacked. I had yet to look out my kitchen window and see my favorite sight in the world: chickens running around being chickens. So when Sockywonk said, Your chickens, your chickens, I was, like, whatever. Like I didn’t even hear her.

But they did, I guess, because four hours after we got off the phone, when I finally had the strength to get up from the table and turned to the sink to fill the teakettle, there they were. In the waning daylight. In the big yard. First time ever. Loving life and running around like chickens with their heads still on. Their world had just gotten bigger.

Mine too. I smiled for probably the first time in weeks.

My new favorite restaurant is Calafia Taqueria ’cause it’s where Mookie gets his burritos. This is the nice thing about dating an Alamedite. One of the nice things. Now I get to know where to go in Alameda, and then you get to know too! Anyway, the carne asada is great, they grill the tortillas, and there’s a big bar of fresh salsas. Didn’t get to try them all, but I’ll be back. *

CALAFIA TAQUERIA

1445 Webster, Alameda

(510) 522-2996

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

Beer

MC/V

Requiem for a lemon

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The city slicker’s agricultural portfolio tends to run toward seasonings and emendations — rosemary, for instance, which has plenty of street smarts and is drought resistant too. Yours truly has for years managed a tiny estate of such bit players, including the aforementioned rosemary (a weedlike presence at the rear of the garden), along with bay and Kaffir lime bushes. The one crop that might qualify as cash is the Meyer lemon.

The infrequency of the (dwarf) Meyer lemon tree’s deigning to fruit has long added piquancy to those moments when it does, usually every other year. This year was to be one such moment; the flowers were heavy last summer, the immature fruit abundant all through the autumn, and by Christmastime a wealth of golden globes hung like ornaments from the tree’s branches. Tree is an absurd word to describe a shapeless shrub about three feet tall that drags its knuckles on the ground, but when such a plant produces three or four dozen fruit in one of its fecund moods, one is inclined to be forgiving.

Such plans I had for those lemons! Crème caramels were envisioned, also tarts, estate-bottled limoncello, and wonderful salad dressings. All in good time. Let the lemons remain safe on the tree; I would simply gather them as needed so they would not languish on the counter or in the refrigerator like supermarket produce. The city-slicker farmer, you see, has no conception of pests, and tales of whole harvests lost to plagues of locusts belong to the pages of the Bible or John Steinbeck novels.

So it was with a sense of horror and disbelief that I gazed out the window at my lemony riches a few days ago, at the end of weeks of obscuring rain, and saw that those riches were gone. Had they been stolen? Organic Meyer lemons would fetch a pretty penny at markets. But no: a close examination revealed the lemons had been eaten on the spot; the ground was scattered with shavings of rind. Templeton, the gregarious rat from Charlotte’s Web, bragged that he would eat anything — but lemons? Do skunks eat lemons? Raccoons? All the neighbors’ lemons similarly vanished.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may was the advice of the English poet Robert Herrick, and even if your rosebuds are lemons, this remains a wise strategy.

› paulr@sfbg.com

A la Turca

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TURKISH TREAT Lebanese, Syrian, Greek — a craving for Mediterranean or Middle Eastern can be satisfied at a number of Bay Area restaurants, yet what if you want the one cuisine bridging the two? Inexplicably, Turkish restaurants are sorely missing from an otherwise all-inclusive food scene.

But deep in the cracked-out heart of the Tenderloin resides the consistently delicious and ridiculously affordable A la Turca. It’s a virtual Xanadu for any aficionado of the Byzantine: flat-screens showing Turkish channels, an all-Turkish waitstaff, hard-to-find Turkish dishes like fried carrots in yogurt sauce, a swarthy Turkish chef in the window shaving glistening slices of doner off a spit, the potent Turkish tea served in the traditional diminutive tulip-shaped glasses, and Turkish wine selections. Add the smell of diesel, cigarettes, and that ubiquitous lemon cologne, and I would swear I was in the back streets of Istanbul.

And thankfully, the food is incredible. The lahmacun (Turkish pizza) is perfectly crunchy on the edges and covered with a thin mixture of flawlessly seasoned tomato and ground lamb. The doner is divine. But I would go to A la Turca for the manti alone. Manti is Turkish comfort food — meat and onion ravioli in a spicy tomato and garlic yogurt sauce (bring Altoids). I’ve never found it outside Turkey, but A la Turca has a delectable version available only on Sundays (I’ve always thought the mark of a great restaurant is that it can make demands on you).

The desserts were surprisingly bland, but the rest? Çok güzel.

A LA TURCA Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m. 869 Geary, SF. (415) 345-1011, www.alaturcasf.com

Monk’s Kettle

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› paulr@sfbg.com

First, although it’s early, let’s hand out our first annual Best Restaurant Name Award. This year’s winner is the Monk’s Kettle, which is a witty, memorable, and — since the place in question is a craft-beer bar with food to match; ergo, a kind of hipster tavern — evocative phrase. Everyone loves a monk, and kettle is just fun to say, especially after a fancy beer or two.

The Monk’s Kettle is not a brewpub. No beer brewing is done on the premises, which are probably too snug anyway. The deal instead is a wide offering of beers from around the world, in the manner of Toronado or Moe Ginsburg’s; some are draught, many others are in bottles, but all are served in one of the stunning array of specialty glasses stacked behind the bar like crystals in some extraordinary ice formation.

Pardon is hereby issued to those who don’t recognize the space as the recent home of a Thai restaurant, Rasha, and before that, of Kelly’s Burgers. The footprint is the same — deep and narrow, with the sizable, mirror-backed bar and a semiopen kitchen along the right side and, on the left, booths snuggled against the windows — but the smell of old grease is gone, the color scheme is now one of muted earth tones, and the harsh lighting has given way to halogen pinpoints and, above the booths, glowing disks that look like the shells of some huge mollusk.

But the aesthetic makeover, though thorough and stylish, is dwarfed as a marker of change by the crush of people trying to get into the restaurant. A year ago Rasha seemed to be largely empty, despite good food at moderate cost, a bright red neon sign, and a prime location; the Monk’s Kettle, at age two months, is already wall-to-wall crowds on weekend evenings, with even more people spilling out onto the sidewalk. And they’re young, hipstery people.

If the wealth of craft beers is part of the Monk’s Kettle’s appeal to this social cohort, so too must be the food, which is a surprisingly vegetarian-friendly version of pub grub. Many of the most memorable dishes are meatless and would do credit to the kitchen at Greens. But hipsters like their burgers too, apparently; on a recent evening while eating at the bar, we were flanked by young burger eaters dressed à la mode, two and three to a side.

The burger ($10.50) is good. The meat is grass-fed Niman Ranch and is served on a dense, chewy bun from La Brea Bakery. A slice of cheese (various choices) adds $1.50, and the American-style fries are fine. But there’s nothing exceptional here. As for the house-made veggie burger ($9.50): half a gold star for innovation, since the patty is falafel, laid out on the same La Brea bun instead of stuffed into a pita pocket with tahini sauce.

On the other hand, the Monk’s Kettle does offer quite a few treats you won’t regularly find on menus in the Mission or around town. There’s a fresh pretzel ($6.50), for instance, twisty soft and served with whole-grain mustard and a cheddar-ale sauce for dipping and dunking. We also liked the lightly crisped black-bean cakes ($8.75), a pair of slim disks scattered with roasted-corn salsa and artily piped with chipotle crème fraîche. Bruschetta ($8.50) — toasted bread spears smeared with cannellini puree — were plated in an overgrown garden of mixed greens and resembled statuary half hidden amid unkempt tendrils, but the greens were enriched by sautéed mushrooms and chunks of white cheddar cheese, bringers of flavor, texture, and heft.

Butternut squash soup ($6.50) needs special handling to rise above its usual station as a cold-weather commonplace. Do pepitas, the little pumpkinseeds of Mexican cooking, answer the call? The Monk’s Kettle kitchen installed them as a scattering across the surface of the soup, and they did their best, but the soup, while creamy, was a little too sweet and unfocused to satisfy, even with pepitas. It was also, however, nicely steamy, which brought some relief to my sniffly friend across the table.

Also nicely steamy was a bowl of Jude’s vegan chili ($6.50), a black-bean preparation laced with tomatoes, mushrooms, and olives. We did catch a whiff of some faint, faintly exotic, eastern Mediterranean spice in there and found ourselves thinking more of Turkey than Texas: mushrooms and olives in chili? The Turks, it must be said, prefer chickpeas to black beans. (The chickpea is thought to be native to southeastern Turkey.)

The kitchen seemed to be in possession of a mushroom mother lode, because tasty fungus recurred as a ragout in the day’s surprisingly elegant potpie ($14). I say elegant because the ragout had been baked in a handsome white crock with fluted sides, under a tarpaulin of butter-flaky pastry worthy of a beef Wellington. The potpie had the look of a huge, family-style dessert — a giant pot de crème, possibly, lurking under the pastry.

We never quite got around to actual dessert, but we did dabble in the beers (whose listings go on for several pages), in part to see which glasses would be used to serve them. St. Bernardus, a dark, caramelly Belgian brew ($7.75 for an eight-ounce pour), arrived in a vessel that looked like a giant cognac snifter, while Bitburger pilsner ($6.25 for 14 ounces) was presented in an attractive if slightly disappointing pilsner glass, a close relation of the ones I have at home. Mr. Cider, meanwhile, partook of the Fox Barrel black currant cider ($4.50 for eight ounces); this was served in a wineglass look-alike and was refreshingly unsweet in the European manner but did not really taste of black currant — a presence in name only, but we liked it anyway.

MONK’S KETTLE

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

3141 16th St., SF

(415) 865-9523

www.monkskettle.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Skunked

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS One week you smell like bacon, and the next week it’s skunk. Life is like this.

And do you know what a skunk sounds like? They make one of the most sinister noises in the animal kingdom, I think. They speak in a kind of wheezy, whiny murmur that forebodes death and disaster like a bunch of gangsters with head colds complaining about the service at a Chinese dive.

First I thought they were trying to make a hit on my chickens. It was three in the morning and I was in the throes of my depression. So the last thing I needed to wake up to was a pile of smelly, bloody feathers. Wait. I think skunks are like weasels. They pull the chickens’ heads off and suck out their brains, then leave the rest.

Either way, not a cheerful scenario.

So I dragged myself out of bed and went to my closet for something farmerly to wear. I couldn’t decide between overalls over a union suit and a Western shirt with a denim skirt. Overalls look great with a shotgun, and Western wear goes better with handguns. Of course, I don’t have either kind of gun. I just wanted to look convincing because the last time I raced outside in the middle of the night to defend the honor of my chickens, I was essentially laughed back to high school by a gang of possums, I assume because of the pajamas I was wearing.

In any case, my self-esteem suffered. They can be a cruel lot, these woodsy types that I hang with. Possums, foxes, bobcats, skunks … Eventually, after trying on several outfits, I settled on a "safe" floral-print flannel shirt and tight blue jeans under a long oversize coat that isn’t a trench coat but looked pretty good in the half dark in the mirror, especially from the side, I thought. And I went outside with a flashlight and walked around the chicken coop, trying to act casually curious, if not cool.

At the exact same time I realized that, gasp, I was wearing socks with Birkenstocks, I also saw, spotlighted in my flashlight light, the skunk. Also looking at my feet, shaking its head, like, "Loser!"

He wasn’t interested in my chickens after all. He’d been messing around behind the woodpile. I think he had a girl with him, or vice versa. In any case, this skunk was now smack between me and the door to my shack, and it turned its back to me, still shaking its head and muttering something about "pathetic hippie chicks."

I’m going to smell really bad for a really long time, I thought. But miraculously, it didn’t spray.

I was almost offended. What do I have to do to look threatening around here? I wondered, tiptoeing back around to the porch. Inside my shack I stood in the dark with my back to the door and breathed again. Then I threw my coat on the floor, kicked the old Birks way under the bed, and got back under the covers. Way under.

The fucking skunks fucked all the rest of the night that night, and when they weren’t making love they were complaining in those whiny, whiny undertones, right outside my window. I think someone wasn’t seeing to the other one’s needs or something.

It smelled a bit bad, but not as bad as it did a couple of nights later when the same skunk or skunks — or a different one — mixed it up with a feral cat in the crawl space beneath my shack. That was on Friday, and five days later I still smelled it on every single aspect of my life. Everything I own, and everything I have on loan from the library.

My dreams. My thoughts. My food. My songs, my singing. My writing. It all stinks right now. My cat, Weirdo the Cat … She doesn’t seem to mind. I smoke a lot of pot. And I keep a pan of bacon grease just sort of simmering on the wood stove.

Trying to get it back.

My new favorite restaurant is Fruitful Grounds. It’s just a little coffeehouse on Fulton near Masonic, but it has a good choice of good foodstuffs. Like French toast with bacon for $7.50. Huge portion. Delicious. And you can also get omelets, burgers burritos, smoothies … and, of course, bagels or pastries.

FRUITFUL GROUNDS

1813 Fulton, SF

(415) 221-1876

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–7 p.m.

Beer and wine

Cash only

On the waterfront: an epic

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The city of night on a night of rain still offers its spectacles, and one of them must be the Bay Bridge as viewed from Epic Roasthouse, the brand-new restaurant (starring Pat Kuleto and Jan Birnbaum) that, with its sibling, Waterbar, sits on the narrow strip of land between the Embarcadero and the water. The bridge soars through the mists overhead, like the arc of a rainbow, and one has the sense of inspecting it — peeking at its underbelly, as if at a used car that might or might not be leaking coolant.

Not even a generation ago this neighborhood was entombed by an overhead freeway, and when Boulevard opened in the Audiffred Building just a few blocks away in 1993, the Embarcadero consisted mostly of granulated, ghost-town asphalt. But the visionaries could see what was bound to happen — what indeed was already happening, slowly but inexorably, because of the 1989 earthquake — and in that crumbled pavement a farmers market took root. Eventually it found a home in the resurrected Ferry Building, while on other plots of land liberated from elevated-freeway strangulation, hotels and parks and housing developments sprouted; restaurants too. What was an urban wilderland is now a glossy district both commercial and residential, a crown for the city, with a couple of gaudy new jewels.

Like all view restaurants, Epic Roasthouse is bound to attract tourists, both out-of-towners and suburbanites, but it also stands to develop a city constituency. Although parking in the area is hellish, Muni’s T line stops just steps away, and meanwhile, the blocks immediately behind the waterfront are filling up with residential towers, which will soon fill up with people of means who will be able to walk over to the Embarcadero for dinner.

With all due respect to the bicycle lobbies, the great city pleasure is walking — and the great luxury of our time is also walking, since it frees us from the tyranny of machines, at least if we’re not listening to an iPod or yakking into a cell phone as we stroll. Walking to or from work? Priceless! Walking to or from Epic Roasthouse? Also priceless, with appetite kindled on the inbound leg and calories usefully spent on the other.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Cocoa-a-go-go

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HOT CHOCOLATES In honor of Valentine’s Day, the official holiday of chocolatiers (and florists, and jewelers, and marriage counselors) nationwide, I’m giving you a list of some of my favorite places to get your chocolate on — for Feb. 14 and beyond.

Democratic candidates: eat me So food has always been political — is it genetically-modified-organism free? Farmed fairly? Packaged responsibly? — but this is something else altogether. Designer Chocolate (www.designerchocolate.org) wraps its 100 percent natural chocolate in either Hillary Clinton– or Barack Obama–themed paper, complete with photos and quotes. I don’t feel qualified to say which candidate tastes better.

Fair trade truffles Love humankind as much as you love chocolate? You’re in luck. Global Exchange (4018 24th St., SF; 415-648-8068; 2840 College, Berk.; 510-548-0370; store.gxonlinestore.org) has a full selection of certified fair trade and organic chocolate, from special holiday versions (like the Fair Trade Valentine’s Day Action Kit for $15) to year-round delights (like the Chocoholics Gift Basket for $75), including offerings from Divine, the world’s first farmer-owned fair trade chocolate brand.

Design within reach (of your mouth) When it’s just as important for the chocolate you buy to be pretty as it is for it to be delicious, Richart Chocolate (393 Sutter, SF; 415-291-9600, www.richart-chocolates.com) is the only place worth looking. These tiny rectangular delights come marked with classic, understated designs like swirls, polka dots, flowers, and geometric shapes and in creative flavors like licorice ganache, thyme praline, and ginger. They’re almost too pretty to eat … almost.

A pint of pleasure It might possibly be the second most brilliant idea anyone ever had: pairing beer with chocolate. The most brilliant? A whole festival dedicated to the two. And the Beer and Chocolate festival (Feb. 15, 8 p.m., $90; Cathedral Hill Hotel, 1101 Van Ness, SF; www.beer-chef.com) is no PBR–and–Hershey’s kisses kind of affair. Oh no. We’re talking a four-course dinner with items like roasted quail with chocolate port sauce served with Koningshoeven Bock. Do I hear last-minute Valentine’s Day plans being made?

Cuckoo for Coco500

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› paulr@sfbg.com

An adage favored by the paterfamilias: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He has generally deployed this wisdom in the matter of automobiles, while for me it has tended to apply to … well, practically everything. Bizou, for instance. This was the restaurant Loretta Keller opened at the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan in 1993, a time when the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan was a pretty lonely place at night. There was as yet no baseball park or light-rail line nearby, just the dowdy Caltrain station and lots of empty-looking warehouses slouching in the gloom.

Keller had worked at Stars in its glamorous heyday, but her restaurant, which served rustic French and Italian foods in a setting of rustic elegance, most closely resembled Zuni Cafe. The place was always, in my experience, discreetly stunning, and when I learned a few springtimes ago that she was recasting it for contemporary tastes, I thought, Oy. The subtext of the change seemed to be that the city’s most recent bevy of young, rich plutocrats was uninterested in a restaurant with a hint of Provençal languor; to lure them in, you needed halogen spot lamps, unadorned surfaces, certainly more noise, and a menu promising excitement.

Coco500, Bizou’s successor, does answer to this description, but it is nonetheless just as stunning in its own way and is a worthy bearer of the torch. I went in warily, full of skepticism, and was almost instantly won over, and that is about the loudest hallelujah I can sing for any restaurant, reinvented or otherwise.

Most of Coco500’s magic has to do with the food and the service, it must be said. The redesign of the interior emphasizes blond wood and is reminiscent of a Scandinavian Designs store or a sauna, and while there’s nothing wrong with the Danish modern look, it doesn’t exactly send the most accurate subliminal signals about what sort of food to expect. If the cooking is no longer about Provence and Italy, it’s still Cal-Med in some fundamental way. You’re not likely to find lutefisk on the menu, though there is plenty of seafood, and even in California an ethos of seasonality has to account for winter’s being one of the seasons. Bizou was good at this; so is Coco500.

Let’s start with a marvelous flat bread ($10), like the thinnest of thin-crust pizzas, topped with a fine mince of mushrooms and, for some extra chthonic intensity, truffle oil. The sense is of eating slices of especially flavorful winter-dampened earth, and the crust could not be better.

Seafood is more seasonal than we’re sometimes aware, though most Bay Areans probably associate king salmon with summer, and this Bay Arean associates halibut with winter. Ono, on the other hand, I associate with Hawaii; it’s one of those marvelous fish taken from the deep, clean waters around the islands, and while it makes a doubtful entrant on a restaurant menu in San Francisco, thousands of miles distant, Coco500’s kitchen does manage to turn it into a delicious crudo. The chunks of opalescent white flesh are sprinkled with fennel shavings, drizzled with a blood orange gastrique, and wrapped in wildly unseasonal, but tasty, basil leaves. It’s like eating prescooped Chinese lettuce cups.

More winter: celery root ($6), roasted with thyme and neatly cubed, could almost have passed for some sort of potato dish. A cream of cauliflower soup ($6) did not lack for cream — an ingredient of underappreciated potency that can overwhelm through sheer richness but didn’t quite here. Bits of chervil and squirts of paprika oil over the soup’s surface helped maintain balance.

Duck is also wintry for me, maybe because it’s a close relation to goose and roast goose is a classic holiday dish, dramatic if, in the end, more trouble than it’s quite worth. Boneless duck breast, on the other hand, is a type of flesh for all seasons: red and meatlike for bad weather but also highly grillable and always easy to deal with. At Coco500 the duck breast ($23) was grilled (medium), sliced, and presented with two extraordinary companions. One was a whole braised endive, almost like a torpedo onion, the other a duck baklava, rillettes under a pastry roof — completely unexpected and natural at the same time. Also delicious.

Alaskan black cod ($23), also known as sablefish, was another faraway fish, and I should have resisted it on carbon footprint grounds if nothing else, but I was lured in by the bit players: smashed (skin-on) fingerling potatoes and creamed rapini, like creamed spinach but with a sharper edge. The gently sautéed fillet itself, delicate and immaculately white, was good though not exceptional. I did find some ex post facto consolation at Seafood Watch, which reports that black cod is a best choice; the fish are line-caught from well-managed and sustainable fisheries. Please, restaurants, trumpet this kind of information! Don’t assume we have it or always have the presence of mind to ask for it.

We might not have had the presence of mind because we were probably thinking ahead to dessert and other postprandial wonders, such as Armagnac ($10), my latest passion in the liquid fires. Less fiery but not less worthy was a warm apple-huckleberry tart ($8) — basically a single-serve apple pie stained blue by the berries, with an immensely flaky (in the good sense) crust. As for the fruit: I love apples and apple pie, but the huckleberry (a close relation of the blueberry) is an American original, so how about a starring role someday?

COCO500

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

500 Brannan, SF

(415) 543-2222

www.coco500.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately loud

Wheelchair accessible

The drop

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS On his 40th birthday Jolly Boy talked about beautiful. Beauty this and beautiful that. We were in a bar in the Mission, saying good night. He was impressed and grateful, I think he said, to have seen so much beauty in 40 years in the world.

"Good night, Jolly Boy," I said.

I hugged some other people too, and one of them said I smelled like bacon.

This floated me home to Earl Butter’s closet. I walked across the Mission at 12:30 a.m. with my hands in my pockets, alone and cold, knowing that this world, Jolly Boy’s world, was pretty lastingly beautiful and that I, in any case, smelled like bacon.

On the darkest part of my walk, near the little park on 19th Street, a guy wanted to talk to me.

"Hello," he said as we passed each other on the sidewalk. He was wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt, but I thought I could see his nose twitch somewhere in there in it.

I was wearing a white, warm, short coat with a rabbit fur collar and a skirt with flowers on it.

"Hi," I said, smiling. He waited a little too long to ask if I happened to know what time it was.

I don’t wear a watch, or own a cell phone, but I turned around on the sidewalk and said, "No. I don’t know. But I think it’s around 12:30."

This was all that he needed to hear, apparently, to follow me. Tuesday morning, 12:30 a.m. I knew he was following me, and then I turned to see and saw that he was, beautiful world. He’d reversed direction and was walking 30 or 40 feet behind me, in his hood.

I smiled to myself and slowed down. The stars were about as bright as I’d ever seen them in the city. Earlier that afternoon, in the sun, in the country, I had been walking down my street, which is a dead-end street on a thousand-foot-high ridge overlooking, at various points, rolling coastal redwoods, vineyards, cows, sheep, and the Pacific Ocean. It’s a brilliantly beautiful world up there, and tears were streaming down my face because I had lost my soul and could not see much of anything in it.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t play music or listen to music. And I couldn’t imagine what I might possibly have left to live for. So I thought I would go for a walk and find out. What I decided while walking, crying, looking at cows and sheep and Pacific Oceans and the thousands of acorns that acorn woodpeckers, in their kooky wisdom, have embedded in a telephone pole next to a barn … what I decided was that I was going to go out that evening to the closest bar to my house, pick up a faceless, nameless drunk guy, and go home with him. Take it from there.

It was like all the flavor had been squeezed out of life into one dense drop on a bent piece of sheet metal in a driveway, then evaporated, taken up to the clouds, and spit back down with this season’s above-average rainfall. One drop. Somewhere. I was as likely to find it on the tip of an anonymous Sonoma County penis as anywhere. Or in the featureless face of a dark hood on a dark street in the Mission District at 12:30 a.m.

I’m not saying I’m smart.

But I do think I might be pretty enough now to pull off something like this. Pick up a guy in a bar. So I turned away from the acorn woodpecker’s acorn art and started back for my shack, beautiful world.

I put a big piece of apple wood on the fire. Took a bath on the porch while the sun was going down, put up the chickens, put on some clean, pretty clothes and makeup, and checked my e-mail.

Jolly Boy’s birthday. Drinks. Earl Butter had beans. Bring tortillas, he said. Well, so maybe I would find that drop, that one thing to hold on to, in a hot sauce bottle, on a cupcake, or in the hugs of friends. It never occurred to me that they would find it on me. In my hair.

The smell of bacon! In retrospect, I’m surprised more people didn’t follow me across the Mission.

My new favorite restaurant is Dragon Rouge, where I ate when I was starting to get sick and could not find duck soup. So I got hot and sour instead. Or "sweet and sour," as they call it, only that was before I poured all the hot sauce in the world into it. Didn’t work (no duck), but the shrimps were particularly great, and it has some cool nonstandard Vietnamese treats for next time: mango steak blankets!

DRAGON ROUGE

Lunch: Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10 p.m.

2304 Encinal, Alameda

(510) 521-1800

Beer, wine, sake

MC/V

Sugar and spice

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In response to a recent column about quick reconstructive surgery for oversalted dishes (add some sugar!), a reader wrote with the news that it’s also possible to salvage dishes made inedible by too much chili heat. The procedure is simple: peel a raw potato, preferably a russet (starchy is better than waxy here), put it in the afflicted dish, and cook until it shows signs of disintegrating. Remove the still-whole spud, cross fingers, and serve.

Thanks to Gabriel Bereny for this intel, which apparently he got from his wife and her mother. My only question: where were you 23 years ago, when I was making so-called Chinese chili from a recipe in the Chicago Tribune, a reputable newspaper, and the directions called for a quarter cup of cayenne pepper, which did seem like quite a bit, but I put it in anyway because that’s what it said to do? The result was what I came to call, in later years — when time had softened the episode’s more severe edges — Chernobyl chili. I ate the Chernobyl chili, I suppose to prove that it could be eaten, but I glowed in the dark for days afterward. And that wasn’t the worst of it: for our guest, who scorched her lips with her first tentative taste, I whipped up some hasty pasta. I still have the Chinese chili recipe, but I have corrected what even my neophyte eye should have seen as an obvious typo; a quarter cup is now a quarter teaspoon. There is a meaningful difference.

Starch’s value as a culinary fire retardant extends beyond the potato. If you find you’ve taken a bit of something too incendiary for your comfort, you can find relief in plain starch: a mouthful of white rice, for instance, or unadorned bread. Boiled white rice is standard-issue with some of the world’s spicier cuisines, including those from India and Korea.

And a final word in defense of sugar as a savory player: add a pinch of it the next time you make a vinaigrette (I use the darkest brown sugar I can find) and note the pleasant balancing of salty, sour, and sweet. You can make a pretty good vinaigrette with some Dijon mustard, a quality vinegar (balsamic, red wine, rice), and some good extra-virgin olive oil, but good becomes great by adding just the tiniest hint of sweet.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Namu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Of the city’s many village centers, I have always had a special fondness for the Inner Richmond enclave along Balboa, from Arguello to Eighth Avenue or so. Here you find Russian bakeries nestled across the street from sushi bars, with a Korean barbecue at one corner, a Chinese joint at the next, and a chic Cal-Med spot a few steps beyond the traffic light. Add a butcher shop, a nursery school, and a cleaners, and you have a self-sustaining little world. It’s like a less-trafficked Clement Street.

The backwater charm has persisted for years, despite the occasional incursions of upscaleness: Katia’s Russian Tea room, with its immaculately starched tablecloths, and, of more recent vintage, the Richmond, which opened a few years ago in the old Jakarta space. The latest spit-and-polish entrant, Namu, isn’t as conspicuous as either of those two restaurants; it opened about a year ago in a midblock storefront, and you could easily walk right by it if you weren’t paying attention.

At least you could in the middle of the day. By night, Namu attracts the young the way a lantern attracts moths on a summer evening; they gather in clusters on either side of the door and along the curb, dressed in night shades of blue, gray, and black, talking on cell phones while waiting for a table to open up or the rest of their party to appear. If you were rushing along the sidewalk, you could probably pick your way past without too much fancy footwork, but you’d notice the crowd, certainly, and wonder what was up.

Part of what is up is certainly chef Dennis Lee’s cooking. (Lee owns the place with his brothers, David and Daniel.) Although Namu’s menu includes elements of both Japanese and fusion cooking, its most striking quality is its elegant recasting of Korean themes. It’s not quite a Korean bistro, but it’s more than a step in that direction and away from the traditional Korean barbecue, an honorable example of which stands at the corner.

Namu does offer that well-known Korean staple, kimchee (cabbage pickled with garlic and red chiles), and it’s just about indistinguishable from the corner barbecue’s: both offer excellent, sour fire. But at Namu the kimchee is served as part of a banchan plate (the first is complimentary, after that $4), in the company of, say, surprisingly rich sautéed chives and coils of pickled carrot, all presented on a museum-of-modern-art dish that looks like a flattened candelabra. There is a sense of stylish balance in both presentation and flavor that announces the kitchen’s sophistication.

You could satisfy yourself entirely with Japanese items, if you were so inclined, and you might even be able to convince yourself that you were at a sushi bar. Although there’s no sushi on the menu, the restaurant’s look is agleam with dark minimalism, including the unframed urban-industrial photographs hung on the walls as if at a hip gallery. Anyway, tataki — lightly seared tabs of fish — is almost like sushi, and Namu’s version ($10), with albacore tuna, is cleverly enhanced by a drizzle of Thai chili ponzu. Seaweed salad is also a sushi bar standard; here it’s called ocean salad ($8) and is made from a jumble of red, green, and wakame seaweed and looks like leftover Christmas wrapping. Nice touches: halved cherry tomatoes beneath the seaweed, and ume vinaigrette (ume is a pickled Asian plum) to give the salad fruitiness that isn’t quite sweet.

Pan-seared dumplings (a.k.a. pot stickers) are a commonplace throughout east Asia. Here ($9) they’re filled with slivered shiitake mushrooms and served in a shallow bowl with yet more shiitake slivers and a dashi broth reduced to dark intensity. (Dashi is one of the basics of Japanese cooking and is a stock made from kelp and dried skipjack.) Fresh rolls are also an east Asian commonplace, but Namu’s version ($6) feature a cross-cultural twist: chunks of grilled skirt steak, for a hint of the American southwest and, simultaneously, Korea. Just as unexpected is the mung bean cake ($6), and if you shy away from mung beans as the principal ingredient of indifferent desserts, you’ll be surprised here by the resemblance to crispy polenta triangles, suitable for dipping in ponzu sauce. And there is an explicitly Italian touch to the buckwheat noodles ($9.50); they’re tossed with shiitake mushrooms but also pesto (from Thai basil!), pine nuts, and garlic before getting a good sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese.

We didn’t particularly respond to the broccolini ($7), which wasn’t bad but wasn’t special despite embellishments of yuzu ponzu and fried garlic. It seemed too much like ordinary steamed broccoli. But we did respond to the prawns ($9), which had been glazed with den jang (a Korean fermented bean paste similar to miso) and grilled in pairs on skewers.

Too much culinary globe-trotting? The hamburger ($9), then, is restful in a juicy, tasty, villagy way, with a first-rate bun and good fries that would be just a bit better if more svelte, more in the frites line. Of course, even B+ fries tend to get gobbled up, even by those who mean to save some room for dessert. Namu’s desserts are well above the ordinary: a chocolate brioche bread pudding ($7) for instance, napped with raspberry sauce (is any dish with brioche disappointing? I say no), and a puddinglike crème brûlée ($7) lifted from the mundane by little butter cookies flavored with our friend ume, the distinctive Japanese preserved plum last observed in the seaweed salad vinaigrette. Some plums certainly get around.

NAMU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

489 Balboa, SF

(415) 386-8332

www.namubar.com

Beer, wine, sake

AE/MC/V

Noisy if crowded

Wheelchair accessible

Duck me, I’m sick

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It had been a few years since I’d been sick, and I’d forgotten how to do it. I walked around in the rain, looking for this party. And when I found it, I stayed until almost the end. Then I called up the Boy Who I’m Kissing and asked if I could come over and kiss him.

In my defense, I didn’t know at the time that I was sick sick, as in the flu. I thought it was just lung cancer or something, from breathing all the smoke that I breathe. One of the advantages of an active imagination is hypochondria, or what I call "my sick mind" — without which I would never have compiled this amazing record of miraculous recoveries.

I have bested brain tumors by closing one eye and opening the other real wide. I’ve conquered cardiac arrest with cups of hot tea and survived strokes by slapping the side of my head, then getting some rest.

So the combination of my sick mind and an actually pretty fucking healthy body means that when I do get sick sick, as in the flu, I tend to think I can lick it by licking the Boy Who I’m Licking, or drinking more wine than usual, or stepping away from my smoky shack in the woods for a weekend.

This is unfortunate, and not just for the Boy Who I’m Infecting. It’s unfortunate for me because I probably would have been better by now if I’d gone, "Oh, the flu," and stayed home in bed with Weirdo the Cat. And it’s unfortunate for Weirdo the Cat, who could have been warm and cozy and well fed while I stayed in bed with her all weekend, albeit moaning and groaning.

As it was, Mookie got to get me in his bed, moaning and groaning, which, on the surface, might have seemed like business as usual, woo-hoo, but trust me, this wasn’t like that. It was the first time ever that we didn’t have sex. I just laid there with my eyes kind of open, coughing inconsolably and gradually realizing that it wasn’t lung cancer, goddamn it, but the flu.

By morning I hurt so bad I couldn’t even speak straight. "You have a sick chicken farmer on your hands," I tried to say. But it came out "chick sicken farmer."

He brought me coffee in bed, as usual, and offered to go to the store for Robitussin.

I was pretty sure I had cough syrup at home with codeine in it. Probably four years old, and certainly someone else’s prescription. But without codeine, cough syrup has never done much for me. It’s like duck soup without duck in it. Or chicken soup. I love chicken soup. And tea, and rest. But only two things can cure the common cold, and they are, in order of efficacy, duck soup and codeine.

Thinking I was closer to duck soup than codeine, I spent an hour on Mookie’s couch with a laptop and a telephone. Oakland’s Chinatown was just on the other side of the tunnel, for crying out loud.

And failing that, Crawdad de la Cooter’s freezer was in Berkeley. I happened to know that there were wild ducks in it. However, restraining orders prevent me from raiding her refrigerator, or coming over without calling first, or, um … writing about her in Cheap Eats.

I’m delirious. How, in other words, did I wind up without my face in a bowl of dark, rich, greasy, spicy duck soup? It was through no fault of Mookie’s. Let me rephrase that: it was all his fault. Because when Thanh Ky had a line out the door into the rain, he remembered for sure seeing duck soup at a place in Alameda. Only they were closed. Sunday.

For future reference, I’m never going to start seeing someone ever again without first finding out where the closest duck soup is to their house and having little cards printed up with business hours and directions. Then, when I’m laid up with flulike symptoms or the flu and they offer to go get medicine, I can hand them the card like a prescription.

"Ask for extra hot sauce."

I’ll either say that or have it printed on the card.

My new favorite restaurant is Bai Som Thai Kitchen. It’s a comfortable, colorful, and fun little place. Its motto is "Cooking with care" … and my soup was almost cold by the time the others at the table were served. So that proves it! Tom yum with salmon and pineapples, superspicy. And mealworthy, with a plate of plain noodles on the side. Look up at the ceiling while you’re there.

BAI SOM

Lunch: Daily, 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Daily, 4:30–9:45 p.m.

2121 Clement, SF

(415) 751-5332

Beer, wine

MC/V

Wine + chocolate = love

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PERFECT MATCH Want to seduce someone this Valentine’s Day? Just share a glass of wine (or three) with your sweetheart. Wine is liquid sensuality: its heady bouquet stimulates the appetite and its velvet caress soothes that desire. What other drink is described as both voluptuous and muscular? And when you pair wine with the mouth-coating luxury of chocolate, the combination is impossible to resist.

We asked Natalie Maclean, author of Red, White and Drunk All Over (Bloomsbury, 2006) and the woman behind the food-wine matcher at www.nataliemaclean.com, to give us her romantic suggestions of chocolate pairings with California wines. Here’s her top 10 list:

•Dark chocolate and Cline Ancient Vines Zinfandel, Contra Costa County

•Chocolate-covered biscotti and Beaulieu Vineyard Coastal Cabernet Sauvignon

•Chocolate-orange cake and Andrew Quady Essencia Orange Muscat

•Chocolate with nuts and Santa Barbara Winery Syrah, Santa Ynez Valley

•Milk chocolate and Greg Norman Lake County Zinfandel

•Bittersweet chocolate and Round Hill Cabernet Sauvignon California

•Chocolate-dipped fruit and Gallo Frei Ranch Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma

•Chocolate ganache truffles and Toasted Head Shiraz California

•Chocolate raspberry cheesecake and Bonny Doon Framboise

•Chocolate hearts with cream filling and Francis Coppola Diamond Collection Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon

"The creamy flavors of chocolate go best with full-bodied wines like those that California produces," Maclean says. For more pairings — including a variety of wines from all regions paired with a wide range of foods — visit her Web site, check out her book, or join the 85,000 people who are subscribed to her free e-newsletter.

www.nataliemaclean.com

Green winter

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When I was in college, I was pleased to discover that spring in these parts began to make itself felt in February. The sun strengthened, the air grew mild — at least if it wasn’t raining — and people lay out to sunbathe. All this was very different from my native northern clime, in which winter nastiness often lasted well into April. April baseball games were sometimes snowed out, and May snow wasn’t unheard-of.

A warming world might soon be giving us reasons to rethink our understandings of the seasons, and perhaps Winnipeg will become a haven for snowbirds, but some of us have already made certain psychological adjustments. Spring for me — for instance — no longer means sunbathers in February but strawberries, asparagus, and artichokes, and while we await these delicacies, it’s the end of January, the Meyer lemon bush in the drippy garden is heavy with globes the color of summer sunshine, and markets are full of tubers and greens.

There are so many sorts of greens, arrayed in such abundance at farmers market stalls, that one feels a certain anxiety in choosing one kind but not another. Mixed baby salad greens are an almost automatic choice, since all they need is a splash of vinaigrette. Only slightly less demanding are baby spinach leaves, which can be wilted with some pine nuts, garlic, and currants to make a swift and classic Sicilian side dish. Romaine? You can make Caesar salads from it (and from its immature version, little gems), but I also found it turning up, braised, in a friend’s exquisite posole last week. I must make posole, I thought — a kind of chili made with hominy instead of beans — and I might or might not put romaine leaves in it, but I will try it with chickpeas.

Speaking, yet again, of legumes: lentil soup is a good place to stash all sorts of greens. I’ve put chard in there, and arugula, and even dandelion greens, though they have a bitterness that must be carefully handled. Dandelion greens work better in a pasta sauce, with garlic, chile flakes, sausage (poultry or soy if you like), some crushed black peppercorns, and a good grating of Parmesan or Romano cheese. The greens’ assertiveness matches up better with these comparably strong flavors. By the time you’ve cleaned your plate, it could be February, and strawberries for dessert.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Venus

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BREAKFAST OF BLANDNESS Brunch is a vulnerable meal: you’ve probably just woken up, and you might be unshowered or hungover. Regardless of your daring at dinner, brunch requires only consistency.

My friend gets that from Venus in Berkeley. I can see why: the coziness of the brick walls, lined with local artists’ work; the long wait and bustling interior that allude to the establishment’s popularity. She swears by the chicken sausage scramble with the morning glory muffin. The scramble is decent, a good balance of sweet and salty, while the morning glory is an ostentatiously named bran muffin that, while moist, lacks, well, flavor.

Which is fairly representative of the problem with Venus. I really want to like it, but I always leave vaguely dissatisfied — full, but not satiated. The Harajuku scramble, with tofu, shiitake mushrooms, and other veggies, is as uninspired in execution as it is imaginative in concept (Gwen Stefani would not hollaback). The Indian brunch — curried carrot-zucchini-parsnip pancakes with akoori scrambled eggs — is lackluster. How, I ask, can curry be bland?

The cocktails are overpriced. The coffee is good — smoky and rich — but refills are few and far between. And then there was the Sunday I went. I ordered a Diet Coke; the server brought me organic diet cane cola. Now, I understand her forgetting to ask "Is Pepsi OK?" — but to bring me that flat, syrupy concoction (with a faint tinge of rum) was the last in a series of letdowns.

A weekend morning demands a dependably satisfying meal; Venus is reliable only in that it will disappoint me. (Ailene Sankur)

VENUS Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–2:30 p.m. (also Tues.–Fri., 5–9:30 p.m.); Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–2:15 p.m. (also Sat., 5–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.). 2327 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 540-5950, www.venusrestaurant.net

Serpentine

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you didn’t know that Dogpatch’s newest glam restaurant, Serpentine, is the younger sibling of the Slow Club, would you guess? Signals are mixed, and your answer might depend on whether you concentrated your attention on the menus or the physical particulars of the related pair. On the latter point, we have a sort of local restaurant version of Wills and Harry, the British princelings beloved of paparazzi: a confounding blend of similarities and dissimilarities, evidence that could go either way. If you squint, you suspect a family likeness, but you know you’re not looking at twins.

The Slow Club has always struck me as a descendant — a noisy one — of speakeasies. (Is there such a thing as a speakloudly?) The look is low, velvety, and slightly secretive; there are few windows, and the spot lighting is spare. Serpentine, by contrast, soars like a cathedral in its old industrial site. Brick walls? Yes, it has them, punctuated with vast factory windows that face the west and the afternoon sun, but there is also an exposed ceiling of poured concrete laced with electrical conduits. This vault of open space, rising a full two stories above the dining-room floor, might be a considerable factor in swallowing up noise; Serpentine looks like it should be deafening, but it isn’t, even when full. It helps, in this respect, that the floors aren’t reflections of the ceiling but are of burnished wood, warming and elegant and not quite as cacophony producing as poured concrete. Also warming: the wealth of votive candles, several to a table, that lend the restaurant a sense of rustic intimacy. It’s as if a country inn had decided to squat in one of Charles Dickens’s abandoned blacking factories.

Not many country inns, on the other hand, whether in Dickens’s time or our own, have served food quite as good as Serpentine’s. California cuisine has gone from novelty to cliché to beyond cliché and back again, but at Serpentine it does what all good cooking should do: cause you to pause, to notice, to inquire. What is that, and how did they do that?

"Is this tomato soup?" my companion asked, jabbing a spoon into the creamy puree that had been set before me. And the correct answer was: no, not tomato but carrot ($7.50), and not even carrot with ginger or curry but just plain carrot, adorned only with a few fried sage leaves. The soup’s color was difficult to make out in the dim light, so on that basis alone I granted a pardon on the tomato-or-carrot question, but there was also an aromatic fruitiness I would never have associated with plain carrot soup.

Interesting and unexpected ingredients enhance the restaurant’s spell. I’d never heard of spigariello; I would have guessed it was some obscure pasta shape, but in fact (according to the well-schooled server) it’s a toothy green from the broccoli family, composed by chef Chris Kronner’s kitchen into a handsome salad — with crumblings of blue cheese, bread crumbs, and a pepper vinaigrette — that resembled a small holiday wreath.

The menu doesn’t force you toward big plates, and many of the smaller plates are sizable and rich enough to satisfy. A plate of lamb riblets ($11.50), for instance, featured about a half-dozen pieces of achingly tender meat still on the bone, and that was plenty, even allowing for some shameless raiding from across the table. The raider and I did agree that the seasoning palette — of pickled shallots, feta cheese, and mint salsa verde — was missing something. A hint of sweetness was needed, a splash of balsamic vinegar, maybe, or some interesting honey.

Meanwhile, we shared the savory bread pudding ($11.50 with an add-on heap of mesclun), a baked, caramelized delight of some scale that glowed gold in the candlelight and spoke of sustenance on a wintry night. The pudding was fortified with roasted butternut squash, buttermilk, and blue cheese — a sturdy and honest combination. And, for a bit of spice, peeled prawns on a bed of white grits ($10.50) were dressed with poblano pepper sauce, a demure-looking, muddy green puddle that really lit up the room on making contact with a human tongue. At least that was this human’s experience.

For those of us who use a caloric equivalent of zero-sum budgeting — i.e., each indulgence must be offset by a savings — Serpentine is a forgiving place to eat. On the one hand, there are subtle lightenings to be found in un-looked-for places; a nice example of this was a sandwich of roast turkey slices and sauerkraut on rye bread ($9.50) that amounted to a reduced-calorie Reuben and reminded us, yet again, of turkey’s many uses.

And, on the other, there are the desserts, which, like good poems, depend on concentrated effects rather than volume to establish their place in memory. A particularly noteworthy example might be the chocolate-hazelnut tart ($7.50), an almost fudgelike (and not too huge; about the circumference of a baseball) disk trimmed by a fluted pastry crust and dotted with hazelnuts. The tart (served with a scoop of chocolate ice cream from Bi-Rite Creamery) was like an upper-crust relative of a dark chocolate–with–nuts candy bar: a Snickers wrapped in buttery pastry.

The crowd is eclectic. We noticed plenty of young people, but more than a few older folks too, parenty types in the company of adult children. As an adult who once took his parents to the Slow Club only to watch them struggle with the noise, I looked on these entourages with an odd mix of remorse and approval, though more of the latter than the former. Serpentine: same great taste, less deafening.

SERPENTINE

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

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

2495 Third St., SF

(415) 252-2000

www.serpentinesf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Note: Serpentine observes a no-reservations policy

Snowed

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Bernie Jungle made me a frittata, then got the ladder out, and we went onto his roof to look at the chimney.

"It’s going to snow," I said.

He didn’t argue. Bernie did time in Cleveland, and he can feel when it’s going to snow as well as I can. He just moved to my neck of the woods from Oakland and now lives five minutes east of Occidental, in Sebastopol. I live five minutes west of Occidental, in Occidental. It’s complicated math, or cartography, but not as complicated as the meteorology of two aging Ohio punks on a Northern California rooftop knowing it’s going to snow. Even though, of course, it never snows here.

Except sometimes it does.

Anyway, we couldn’t figure out why his wood stove wouldn’t work, not even by standing on the roof with our hands in our pockets looking at the chimney and knowing it was going to snow. So we climbed back down the ladder. I thanked him for the frittata and headed home, stopping in town for a chicken so as not to have to kill one of my own. Because I’d be damned if I was going to let a rare Sonoma County snowstorm pass me by without lighting the grill.

I’m not sure how to explain why when it snows my thoughts turn to barbecue rather than snowballs, snowmen, or even hot chocolate. It’s complicated psychology. Another way of looking at it is that my thoughts are just stuck on barbecue, period, and always will be, no matter what the fuck — rain, snow, sleet, or hail, for example. I’m like a sexaholic, or the United States mail delivery system.

In which case I should have taken off Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but no. I stopped at the expensive little hippie grocery store in Occidental and bought me a chicken. When I went in it was raining, and when I came out it was snowing.

A young woman with a white face and the shakes was getting out of her car, saying to a young man with dreadlocks, "It’s a good thing I grew up in the Midwest."

"Why?" Dreadlocks asked.

The roads around here are steep and winding. And slick, even when they’re only wet. It couldn’t have been snowing for more than three minutes, but the streets were white. It was dumping. I clutched my chicken a little tighter to my chest and was glad I grew up in the Midwest too.

Five minutes later I arrived safe and sound at my little shack in the woods, and even though my elevation is 223 feet higher than town proper, there was no sign of snow. I hadn’t been home since the morning before. My chickens were glad to see their farmer and even gladder to see the little chicken-size bag in her hand.

"It’s going to snow," I said to them on my way into the shack, where it was in the low 40s. I could see my breath. "It’s going to snow," I said to Weirdo the Cat. "Maybe even in here."

It didn’t snow. I got a fire going inside, then I got a fire going outside, but it never did snow. Not even outside. I stood there in the woods, in the weather, with my arms outstretched, palms up, and my tongue out, like a little kid, pausing every 15 minutes or so to flip the chicken.

Which came out great, by the way, but no thanks to meteorological anomalies. The great blizzard of ’08 had lasted approximately five minutes, and the only casualties were a young Midwestern girl’s nerves and a middle-aged Midwestern girl’s $13.16. I would never have paid $2.99 per pound for a chicken if I didn’t think I was going to get to cook it in the snow!

On the other hand, now I can write it off on my taxes, like love and laser treatments and all the other expensive subjects Cheap Eats wrassles with. Rum, laptops, record albums. Soccer shoes, league dues. Boots. Bras. Train tickets … I reckon I might actually save money by spending it, and wish I could explain how.

It’s complicated economics.

My new favorite restaurant is Metro Kathmandu. A companion had just asked a provocative question: what was the strangest thing I’d ever buttered? I was carefully considering my answer while buttering my lamb curry burger and french fries ($10) when the waitressperson offered us a round of free mimosas. It was a January brunchtime-only promotion, so I guess it’s over. But still …

METRO KATHMANDU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m .–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–11 p.m.

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 552-0903

Beer, wine, cocktails

MC/V

Nursing the ratchet effect

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If good cooking is about improvisation and flexibility, it’s also about certain rigid rules. One of these is the culinary version of the ratchet effect: once you add certain ingredients, you can’t unadd them. The only path open to you is forward. There can be no retreat. Cayenne pepper is the classic example. Once it goes in, it’s in, and if you put in too much, you’re stuck. Either you issue the necessary warning to the people who will be served your 10-alarm chili, or you empty the pot into the compost bin and start anew, taking special care with any high-heat elements.

Salt is similarly impossible to extract once it’s gone in, and oversalted food is commonplace in the wondrous realm of prepared and packaged items. Saltiness, in fact, is often the preeminent characteristic of ready-to-eat foods plucked from the grocery shelves, just as overweening sugariness is so often the only flavor you can detect in commercially prepared desserts. Recently I gave a friend recovering from minor surgery an attractive jar of tomato-basil soup from Lucini, a purveyor of various Italian delicacies. One of the soup’s virtues was that all you had to do was heat it up in a pot and eat it — a simple enough procedure even for someone not feeling well. A few days later the call came: the soup was good, but too salty. I apologized on behalf of Lucini, noted what a common shortcoming this is, and then proposed an easy remedy. For saltiness, unlike chili heat, can be masked. You can’t get rid of it, but you can cover it up, the same way you might paint over hideous wallpaper.

The tools are simple: sugar and acid, whether from lemon or lime juice or, in a pinch, white vinegar. Sugar and acid are most effective as a duo, since each helps balance oversaltiness from a distinct angle. But you can use just one and still succeed. Sugar is a little gentler, while acid adds a zing that distracts from saltiness at least as much as balancing it. I just add little pinches of sugar to a too-salty dish, stirring them in, until harmony is restored. Then, maybe, for good measure, a discreet dribble of lemon juice. Follow-up question: could judicious salting rescue a too-sweet dessert?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

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