Food & Drink

Antidepressants

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS In the morning I dropped him off at the bus stop and he jumped out of the car, a big meeting at nine. Work. I smiled and waved through the window, blew him a kiss that I don’t think he saw, and pulled away.

Went to Crawdad de la Cooter’s to see her baby and her, but they were on their way out the door. Inside, her man was in bed sick. I should have stayed and made him soup, or something. We talked a little through the door, and I got back in my car and went.

Stopped at my favorite dumpster for firewood, and the gate was closed. I lingered, looking through the chain-linkage at an inviting overflow of sawed-off two-by-fours and scrapped corner cuts, all with everyone-else-in-the-world’s name on them, not mine.

It was a long drive home. And cold. Oh, the sky was sunny and brilliant, but all that was, like everything else in life, on the other side of my windshield. I turned the heater on and my chest tightened. My breathing became irregular. Goddamn, I hate these little heart attacks. I turned the heater off and rolled down my window.

At the Ping-Pong table in my mind, nothing and Nothing were duking it out, and no one was winning. I was dripping sweat, gritting my teeth, stomping and grunting, darting and lunging. Takes me an hour and a half to get home to the woods. That’s a lot of Ping-Pong. Final score: 0-0. I made a mental note to call my therapist.

Inside my shack it was in the mid-40s. I resisted the temptation to go to bed. Let me rephrase that: I went to bed, but first I got a fire going and only slept for a couple hours. Then, instead of my therapist, I called the feed store. It’s not the next best thing; it’s better. I may be hopelessly hopeless, useless, clueless, and gutless, but I’d be damned if I was going to stay chickenless.

"Got pullets?" I said. And for the first time in six weeks they said yep. So I called Mountain Sam’l. "Mister," I said, "your chickenless chicken farmer is about to be chickenful."

We met down at Western Farm, and after, while the new girls peeped and pooped on my passenger seat, we stopped for my favorite antidepressant, duck soup.

What friends are for: Sam’l talked to me, long after our noodles were all slurped up, and, with poetic patience and kind, country eyes, he reminded me How To Be Crazy. That’s golden. It’s practical, realistic information, especially compared with How Not To Be Crazy. And after way more than an hour, he not only didn’t charge me $60 or even $25 but even insisted on picking up the check.

Next day we went for a hike. He showed me some things you can eat, like cattail root, acorns for mush, and madrone bark for tea. Mountain Veronica made a pot roast and we watched A Beautiful Mind.

The chickens were not still in my car. They were digging their new digs in the redwoods — redecorating, unpacking: you know, settling in. On Sunday I drove down to the city, played three consecutive soccer games for three different teams, then, lunch-breaking only for a slice of pizza and a glass of water, I went and played baseball. Caught four innings, pitched three, and never knew the score, but it was a nine-to-five sports day. Imagine my soreness.

I could barely shift gears on my way back to the Mountains’ for salmon, mashed potatoes, and green beans. When I hit their hot tub at 11 that night, the cure was complete. But Mountain Veronica, ever the big sister, wouldn’t let me drive home.

In the morning, Monday morning, I would go to work: I would sing to and sit with my chickens. Help them paint. I would cook them a coop-warming corn bread with the buggy cornmeal and stinky flour I’d been saving. Welcome home!

And this, from Mr. and Mrs. Mountains: me! — your new, improved chicken farmer, and a can of worms.

My new favorite restaurant is Pizza Orgasmica, not because their thin slices are as good as you can get here in Not–New York. No. Because I play on their soccer team, and that must mean they bought our uniforms. The butts of our shorts say: "We Never Fake It." And we don’t, but we tend to lose anyway. The pizza’s good, though.

PIZZA ORGASMICA

Mon.–Wed. and Sun., 11 a.m.–midnight; Thurs., 11 a.m.–2 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–2:30 a.m.

3157 Fillmore (at Greenwich), SF

(415) 931-5300

Takeout available

Beer

AE/MC/V

Live Sushi Bar

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REVIEW When you’re looking for a restaurant in Potrero Hill, Live Sushi Bar is the proverbial needle in the haystack. But with a good location, great service, and fresh food at reasonable prices, it’s worth finding.

First of all, our server figured out I was a vegetarian when I ordered the Green Combo, and he replaced the beef-based miso soup that accompanies the combo with edamame before I had to ask. He also helped my sushi-novice companion choose a combination of rolls she’d be comfortable with.

As for the food, the vegetable tempura was nothing to sneeze at, but the sushi is really where this place shines. The highlights of my meal were the veggie swamp rolls, cucumber and avocado topped with a delicious seaweed salad that made them look like edible Fraggles curled up on my plate. My friend ordered the Roll Combo and was pleasantly surprised by the all-veggie cucumber rolls, a nice balance to the fishy tuna and crab rolls that constituted the rest of her order. The combos are certainly the best way to go: for the price of one order of rolls, you can get three different rolls, as well as miso (or edamame) and salad. Plus, everything arrives so beautifully arranged, you’ll almost feel guilty ruining the edible works of art with your chopsticks.

And an extra bonus? The women’s bathroom, which not only smells like a tropical paradise but also has a miniature village inside: ducks rowing a boat, a bridge, and little buildings all arranged in an alcove. Stuffing yourself and a friend on great sushi for $30 and then visiting a tiny fantasyland — who wouldn’t love that?

LIVE SUSHI BAR Daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.–late. 2001 17th St., SF. (415) 861-8610

Frisee

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REVIEW When I visited Frisée — the Castro eatery that markets itself as a bastion of fast, healthy gourmet food — I expected lots of steamed vegetables, light fish entrees, and creatively flavored oil-free salad dressings. In short, I imagined "healthy" to mean "diet friendly," and I therefore imagined Frisée’s offerings to be something like an upscale version of the Applebee’s Weight Watchers menu. Luckily for my taste buds — though not necessarily my waistline — this was an erroneous assumption. What’s healthy about Frisée’s food is that it’s fresh and well made, which sets it apart from other fast food places (you can get Frisée’s entrees to go at lunchtime) but not so much from other gourmet eateries.

Which is not to say it doesn’t hold its own against its gastronomic peers. Certain items on the menu are truly remarkable — notably anything with cream sauce, such as pasta dishes and special soups. And less exceptional items, like the tuna tartare, are still quite good. The space is surprisingly charming, managing to balance large street-facing windows and a to-go counter — both of which could seem cold or too casual — with intimate, sumptuous seating beneath a red leather canopy that’s something like the interior of a luxury jet.

But the very best thing Frisée has going for it is its service, which is friendly, professional, and helpful. In fact, my waiter for my recent visit, Chad, was undoubtedly the best who’s ever served me — helpful, cheerful, charming, and attentive without being overbearing. He seemed to know what I needed before I did and went out of his way to accommodate my special needs (e.g., a vegetarian companion, a midmeal cigarette break). I’d return to Frisée just for Chad. After all, isn’t good service also part of a healthy diet?

FRISÉE Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5:30–10 p.m.; Sat. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5:30–9 p.m. 2367 Market, SF. (415) 558-1616, www.friseerestaurant.com

We heart the cranberry tart

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People might grumble about holiday turkey, but even the most disenchanted grumbler will usually choke down a bite or two, just for appearances. Seldom is the same courtesy extended to the cranberry, which often reaches the table as a pretty red relish no one really wants. The cranberry is the orphan of holiday cooking and — a true measure of its lowly state — a punch line for sitcom jokes, from The Simpsons to Frasier.

To say all the neglect, abuse, and humor amount to an injustice is a considerable understatement. The cranberry is one of nature’s superfoods, for one thing, richer in antioxidants than just about everything else and, as the Indians understood, endowed with medicinal properties. (Cranberries were used to treat urinary-tract infections.)

But as food marketers have long known, "good for you" isn’t the sexiest pitch. Better to flash a little thigh — but does the cranberry have any thigh to flash? The answer is yes! Forget about the wretched relish and turn your holiday cranberries into a lovely dessert tart. (By doing this you will also rid the holiday world of at least one pumpkin pie, another deathless perennial no one seems to like.)

If you are truly ambitious, you can make a cranberry version of linzer torte using the recipe in Emily Luchetti’s Classic Stars Desserts (Chronicle, 2007). I made a rustic galette but did start with a version of her filling: basically a 12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries, rinsed, then simmered in a heavy saucepan with a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of water, and the zest of one orange until jamminess was achieved.

Pastry: a cup of all-purpose flour into the food processor, followed by six tablespoons of sweet butter (in chunks) and a pinch of salt. When it looks like cornmeal, dribble in ice water (machine still running) until a ball forms. Chill briefly, then shape into a 10-inch disk. Lay the disk on parchment paper on a baking tray. In the middle of the disk, spread three tablespoons each of sugar and flour. Spread about half of your jam over this, add five more tablespoons of sugar, and fold up the edges into a rough circle. Brush the pastry with water, sprinkle with a tablespoon of sugar, and bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes. Cool, and give thanks.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

House of Prime Rib

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Beef: it’s what’s for dinner at House of Prime Rib, and it’s pretty much all that’s for dinner. There is a lonely listing for a fish of the day in a far corner of the menu; you must ask about the details. But really, we have no cause to complain, since if ever a restaurant honored the WYSIWYG principle, that restaurant would be House of Prime Rib. If you expect braised halibut cheeks or a timale of roasted winter vegetables to be served to you at a restaurant whose very name proclaims meat, you are inattentive to some of life’s most basic clues, and we must fear for you.

HPR is probably the least grand of the city’s high-profile beef emporiums. Nearby Harris’ has a spare, high-ceilings-in-1948 elegance, while nearby (the other way) Ruth’s Chris is a haven of plush intimacy, as if it were part of a Neiman-Marcus store. Morton’s I haven’t been to, but the steak aficionado assured me that it costs about twice as much as HPR for an experience that isn’t drastically different.

The experience I was hoping to avoid was one of those immiserating episodes familiar to any holiday diner: cholesterol overload and soaring glycemic indexes. Beef is rich, and prime rib (marbled from feeding corn to the cattle) is the richest kind of beef you can have — and huge slabs of it, etcetera. Add to this the usual buttery accompaniments, and you soon picture your heavily intubated self departing on a gurney, pausing for a moment at the entryway while the valet pulls your ambulance around.

A departure by gurney might not attract all that much attention at HPR, since plying the dining room are carts that look like the sarcophagi of ancient Egyptian child-kings. Within these huge steel footballs are sides of roasted beef, and when the bell tolls for thee and thine, the cart rolls to your table and a crew starts slicing, putf8g, and distributing. The prudent will have settled on the city cut ($32.95, including all the fixin’s), a single slice of boneless meat, nicely pink and juicy, big but not massive. The more ambitious might go for the weightier House of Prime Rib cut ($34.95, and you can get it on the bone if you prefer) or the English cut ($34.95), a fan of scaloppinelike thin slices. Let us not speak of the Henry VIII cut ($37.65), other than to note that it bears the name of that fellow who had the heads chopped off of some of his more unsatisfactory wives.

By the time the meat juggernaut reaches you, you will have seen the better part of the dinner’s nonmeat componentry. There will have been a round loaf or two of warm, fragrant sourdough bread, presented with a serrated knife, like an ax in a tree stump, and a tub of good butter; there will have been the "salad bowl," a surprisingly tasty concert of iceberg lettuce, watercress, and slivers of roasted beet soaking luxuriously in French dressing.

The beef’s sidekicks include choice of potato (mashed or baked), choice of creamed vegetable (spinach or corn), a chunk of Yorkshire pudding (basically a popover or savory pastry), and an array of horseradishes in ramekins. These range from the straight stuff, which soon finds its fiery way up your nose, to leash-broken versions cut with mayonnaise or sour cream. The horseradishes are flavorful enough — and even, in one case, thrilling — but the beef does not need them. If ever you need reminding, in fact, why good beef is the chef’s best friend, an elegant food that barely needs salt and pepper and scarcely any cooking, then a visit to HPR is in order.

And if you happen to be in the company of small children who don’t like vegetables, then HPR’s vegetables will appeal. The mashed potatoes are buttery, while the baked potato is topped by a flourish of sour cream. The spinach and corn are as creamy as their names suggest. We did indeed see a number of tables featuring small children, none of whom seemed to be squalling or otherwise rejecting the food being set before them. They were under the spell of fat.

Is HPR a kiddie restaurant, then? No, though kiddies are welcome; so too are tourists from foreign lands (or people we took to be tourists, on data that included their slow, accented English and strange shoes), family groups of various ethnicities, and — that increasingly rare bird here — plain, middle-aged, middle-American folk, people for whom a nice dinner must include meat and potatoes in some recognizable form, in a handsome but not overwrought setting with the warmth of Grandmama’s dining room.

House of Prime Rib is, in this sense, one of the dwindling number of outposts of this city’s dwindling middle class. Youth and wealth — and our peculiar, much-celebrated amalgam of the two — congregate elsewhere. Beef, meanwhile, doesn’t command the audience of yesteryear; the food cognoscenti tend toward fish (for reasons of health and vanity) and often away from flesh altogether. Dinner, under the new regime, no longer must include a big slab of red meat and a blob of potatoes. In fact, it probably shouldn’t.

Still, we all have our cravings for those very foods from time to time, and for an old-time atmosphere to enjoy them in. House of Prime Rib’s pleasures might be atavistic, but they are real enough, even a form of time travel, back to an era when the youthful rich weren’t quite so much with us. 2

HOUSE OF PRIME RIB

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri., 5–10 p.m.; Sat., 4:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 4–10 p.m.

1906 Van Ness, SF

(415) 885-4605

houseofprimerib.ypguides.net

AE/MC/V

Full bar

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Dirty girl

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I washed the dishes. Put my clothes away. Emptied the compost. I let the fire go out and sat on top of the wood stove in my underwear. The phone rang: how was my weekend?

Let me think about it, I said. I said there was blood on my bed, every single thing smelled like smoke, my eyes burned, I hadn’t shat since Thursday, and my cat was lucky to be alive. Me too, but for a whole different reason. In short, it was my new favorite weekend ever, I said. Yours?

What reason?

Because I care. You said, "How was your weekend?" I say, "Fine, thank you, yours?"

No. I mean why are you lucky to be alive — compared to why the cat is.

Life is good, I said. We have fun, we make a mess, we clean it up, we listen to music. And the mess keeps creeping back in and we keep cleaning it up. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Yes I would, because eventually, I’m told, it wins. It dirties us.

Are you in love, or just weird?

Lost signal. What I was was dirty, so I took a bath. I thought about scrubbing the smoke damage off of my walls with a sponge. I thought about the look that cats get in their litter boxes, the glazed place that they go, at once so far away and yet never more at home.

We can get there too! Weed’s too easy. Try hot sauce. Try three years of almost nothing followed by three days of almost-nothing-but.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. The Mountains hosted and I, the Woods, cooked. Our guests were Cities. Smoked turkey, sausage-and-cornbread-and-biscuit stuffing–stuffed red peppers, mustard greens, apple sauce, cranberry relish, cranberry sauce, and an apple pie.

Everything had meat in it. I had asked 10 times if any of the Cities were vegetarian, and the Mountains had said no (no no no no no no).

There was a vegetarian. For me, the novice cooker and enthusiast-at-large, all will and no clue, this was a dream come true. A last-minute vegetarian at my meatfest, like a drowning kid to a teenage lifeguard, and the boy she’s liked all summer is watching…. Splash!

I looked at Mookie, the Brick, my Chief Number One (and only) Assistant, who I was going to go home with but nobody knew that yet, and I smiled.

He looked neutral. Maybe he was tired of taking orders, chopping this, grating that … everything else was in the oven. And on the grill, chilling in the fridge, or simmering on back burners, waiting for the bell. This was supposed to be Miller Time, not a cross between Baywatch and Iron Chef.

Now the Mountains, as you know, are two of my favorite people ever, even though — or maybe partly because — neither one of them likes to cook. But they both love to eat, so I get to express my devotion, my gratitude, my love, my little sisterhood, my best-friendship, and my unwavering appetite with trays of homemade-noodled lasagna and huge pots of gumbo. If I wasn’t there, they would have had Stove-Top stuffing with their store-cooked turkey.

One of the guests brought Rice-A-Roni. I’m not a snob. While Mookie cored two more peppers, I got that going and scoured their refrigerator for doctorings (carrots, asparagus, a tomato, fake sausage links, and leftover chickpeas). We stuffed the peppers with the San Francisco treat, mixed with all of the above, and put them on the grill with the others. Main course: mushroom burgers. And I had not figured out a way to get bacon into the cranberry things, so he could have that too.

Well, the vegetarian looked about as happy as anyone else at the table. "Hey Mookie! He likes it!" But this was supposed to be a poem, and it had turned into bad television.

For almost all of November I’d been trying to write a song about being a dirty girl on the low road. Which wasn’t working, probably because I’m too fucking angelic. In the bathtub on Monday morning or whatever the hell it was, I gave up on writing the song and just started singing it.

The phone rang. From the tub I could hear the same cellular voice screaming into my answering machine: Who was he?

My new favorite restaurant is El Delfin, mostly for the guacamole. It has some interesting main dishes too, with a recurring natural disaster theme, like "Salmon Tornado" and "Volcan en Molcajete" — which is beef, sausage, cactus, onion, cheese, and red sauce, all a-sizzle. And not as good as it sounds.

Also not particularly cheap, most dishes at or over $10.

But the guac! … *

EL DELFIN

Wed.–Mon., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

3066 24th St., SF

(415) 643-7955

Take-out available

The smell test

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Old joke: If you want to hear God laugh, make plans. (A tip of the trilby here to the Chronicle’s Jon Carroll, whose recent and perfect phrasing I borrow.) In the alternative, open a nice restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf. Fisherman’s Wharf: our very own cross between Vatican City and the Potsdamer Platz of Cold War Berlin, except with seagulls instead of barbed wire and searchlights. It is so different from the rest of the city that it feels as if it should have its own time zone and area code. It is a place where city dwellers do not tread, unless they aren’t paying attention and find they’ve ridden the cable car all the way to the end of the line.

And yet, there is a lovely, improbable restaurant in this precinct of gift shops, rental car lots, and tourist hotels. Its name is Bistro Boudin, and it can be found on the second floor of the Boudin Bakery, a handsome and fresh-from-the-ground-up building that opened about two years ago and is, against all odds, a fairly large-scale working bakery in the midst of the city.

Another tip of the trilby, then, this time to Boudin for investing in the city, and for making pretty good bread while they’re at it. Boudin, like Parisian, is one of the city’s old-guard bakeries, and building your new bakery in the heart of Touristan could certainly be seen as making a statement, or maybe just a pitch. If there are outposts of Tartine and Bay Bread in the area, they keep a low profile. But Boudin knows what it’s doing in the bread-baking department; its sourdoughs are soft, tangy-fragrant, and the loaves out for butter like the Sirens of the Rhine.

Bistro Boudin is on the second floor of the spiffy bakery. The large windows command a view of the bay and Alcatraz. The dining room seems to consist largely of glass, leather, and honey-colored wood: a traditional San Francisco look, subtly freshened. The executive chef, James Chan, was sacked from Harrow for undisclosed offenses, only to turn up in our little corner of the New World with a sophisticated menu that blends elements of New World and Old.

But can he blend locals and tourists? To find out, he will need locals, and what better way to draw them but with the smell of baking bread?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Happy Garden Restaurant

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REVIEW Wow, this place is excellent, and even better if you can swing an off-the-menu order or two. When I visited this affordable, familial gem on Clement, there was extra tomato soup in the back, a nice little on-the-house warm-up dish that was a bit on the sweet side but afforded a friendly lesson in etymology (ketchup is taken from the Cantonese for "tomato sauce").

Lover’s Shrimp seemed a suspiciously named special, against which we decided only after much debate. Instead, we opted to order some ee mein noodles and the catfish we smelled as it steamed by our table — it helps to have a friend with you who can ask, "What was that?" in Cantonese, even if the waiter answers in English.

I recommend the catfish (whole), so long as you’re willing to negotiate the bones. It’s steamed, then recooked in a pour of hot gravy, which also drenches the tofu bed underneath. And lo and behold, ee mein is unlike other Chinese noodles I’ve had. It has a deep-fried, maybe even refried, thing going on, and it tastes great with clumps of crab and mushrooms.

The staff liked my friend’s Cantonese bullshit and my cheesy smile well enough to throw some pastries our way too. Mmm … handheld, doughy, served-hot numbers filled with sesame goo … tsk tsk, now, not for tourists. Best of all? The bill was a laugh, especially considering the tasty extras and healthy portions. Next time it’s Lover’s Shrimp, come what may. (Chris DeMento)

HAPPY GARDEN RESTAURANT Daily, 9 a.m.–11 p.m. 815 Clement, SF. (415) 831-3322

Osteria and Bacco Ristorante

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When all else fails, we go to our neighborhood Italian restaurant. And since we’re staying in the neighborhood for dinner — whatever neighborhood that might be — we can walk. This means we can drink as much as we want without tempting the after-dinner fates by getting behind the wheel, not that we would dream of doing such a thing. Also, we can pretend we’re in Italy. The Italians spend a lot of time walking through their beautiful cities, at least when not scooting about on their Vespas. They tend not to drink too much, either. Wine in Italy is food, and is to be enjoyed like other food: heartily, but not to excess.

While in recent weeks the vanguard of the food involved have settled on just-opened Spruce near Laurel Village, like pigeons descending on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, we fluttered to a threshold nearby on a mild autumn evening. It was that of Osteria, a graciously homey restaurant of a certain age where the locals go when they’re not in the mood for trends like squab. (Squab is the food-involved word for pigeon.) The interior, a drawing-room assembly of hand-painted ceramic tiles, wallpapers, striped upholstery, and carved wood columns, has a terra-cotta luminousness, while chef-owner Vahid Ghorbani’s menu consists of well-constructed old friends, including a number of veal dishes.

Since veal has been banished from our home kitchen, mostly on grounds of animal cruelty, I find myself powerfully drawn to it in restaurants. Perhaps this is hypocrisy or some other moral failing. Perhaps I should not order veal and enjoy it — but I do and I do, and then that’s enough, at least until the next time. Osteria’s veal parmesan ($18) consists of several flaps of meat slathered in a garlicky tomato sauce, with slices of cheese melted on top. The meat was tender and tasty enough, if rather beefy, and it occurred to me that if I were making this dish at home, I would use turkey scallops, and they would be just as good. Elsewhere on the plate: neat piles of quartered carrot sticks and trimmed green beans, along with a lone boiled new potato. All handsome in a faintly apologetic way. One of the Dutch masters could have done something attractive with this colorful group.

The eggplant parmesan ($13) was essentially the same dish, with virtue substituted for the veal. I will never cheer for eggplant, but if the bitter juices are salted out and the slices are bathed in a tasty sauce, I can look the other way — backward, perhaps, at the fine first courses. One, an artichoke heart ($9) filled with bay shrimp and dressed like a sundae with a basil vinaigrette, was substantial enough to serve as a light main course, even without the heart of palm flute to one side. The other, a spinach salad ($8) with roasted almonds and gorgonzola, was given a note of insinuation by a dark and handsome balsamic vinaigrette.

For dessert: mocha torte ($6), basically a slice of coffee ice cream cake. Or just watch the people come and go, young and old, in groups big and small, even a table of bears with what could be a cub. Almost like Noe Valley!

Funny you should ask. For years the best Italian restaurant in Noe Valley was Bacco Ristorante (which opened in 1993). Of course, for years the competition was thin. Lately it’s intensified, with the arrivals of Incanto, La Ciccia, Pescheria (all on outer Church), and Lupa (just around the corner.) But Bacco’s owners, Paolo Dominici and Vincenzo Cucco, haven’t been lazing on their laurels. They’ve picked up a Zagat rating, for one thing, and, for another, they’ve replaced the terra-cotta paint scheme with one of sage and butter. There’s also now a beautiful interior Old World arch.

It would be difficult to improve on the food. We inhaled the crostino ($9.95), a pair of sizable toast rounds spread with a butterlike cannellini puree, then layered with garlic-sautéed broccoli rabe and shavings of pecorino cheese. A salad of wine red roasted beets ($11.95) — interpolated with sections of pink grapefruit and daubs of goat cheese — vanished with only slightly more ceremony.

Garganelli ($17.95) — pennelike pasta, tossed with smoked sausage and porcini in a spicy tomato sauce — was a gratifying country dish. Just a bit more exotic was a plate of fregola ($19.95), a pebbly pasta (like a Sardinian version of Israeli couscous), sauced with a mix of mussels and scallops in a saffron tomato sauce. If you squinted, you could convince yourself this was a seafood risotto made with especially fat grains of rice.

Dessert: a flourless chocolate torte ($8) with crème anglaise, raspberries, and mint, the colors of the Italian flag and the pizza margherita. Crowd: mixed and younger than Osteria’s, with more overt peculiarities. Middle-aged man with much younger man in beret: Son? Boyfriend? Other thoughts?

Our server asked me if I wanted a second glass of pinot grigio, which was peculiar, since on the first round I’d ordered vermentino ($8.50). The vermentino hadn’t tasted like vermentino; it was too plump, like an oaked California chardonnay or maybe a domestic pinot grigio. I demurred on a second glass, wondering if it would be rude to ask if it was poured right from the bottle. At Bacco’s prices, which are far from low, this wouldn’t seem unreasonable. Although we weren’t at all tipsy, we walked home — one of life’s loveliest luxuries.

OSTERIA

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

3277 Sacramento, SF

(415) 771-5030

www.osteriasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Slightly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

BACCO RISTORANTE

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

737 Diamond, SF

(415) 282-4969

www.baccosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The importance of inches

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I’m gettin’ some. Don’t worry. But a couple of months ago I was singing the blues to a trans woman friend who is a lesbian. I sang a verse about how no boys would go out with me, and she said, in effect, that she wouldn’t go out with me either.

This was discouraging. Not that I had any idea in the world of dating this woman, or vice versa. And not that she meant to be mean. On the contrary, she was sincerely, simply trying to help me understand a thing.

"Look, I’m into women," she said, "and I don’t know if I would date a trans woman." Why? "Because," she said, and she started to choose her words very carefully. I don’t think she liked saying what she was saying any more than I liked hearing it. "What I love about women is … they’re soft. Delicate. Fragile …"

Soft. Delicate. Fragile.

I’m those things! I swear! I’m soft. I’m delicate. I’m fragile. And I encourage you, dear reader, while those three words echo and retreat in the background — soft (soft soft), delicate (delicate delicate), fragile (fragile fragile) — to envision a montage of Your Chicken Farmer Truly holding a bird down on a stump and swinging the hatchet (soft), shoveling shit (delicate), flying through the air drenched in soccer sweat (fragile), skinning knees, muddying socks, playing tackle football, swinging from trees, chopping wood, climbing in and out of Dumpsters, slam-dancing to punk rock, hammering oil drums into musical instruments, and just generally kicking this world’s ass.

Now … there are two things I crave and have always craved even more than sucked-clean chicken bones or sex. In no particular order: athletic glory and to be female.

I never once wanted to be taller. I was the third-smallest boy in my class, and I envied the first-smallest. I was cut from my high school baseball team; reason given: "too short." But I never in my life, wanted to be taller than I was, ever. When I got my first female driver’s license, I lied about my height, not weight. I said five-six instead of five-seven.

So I play on this Brazilian soccer team. I can’t speak Portuguese, but I pass for Brazilian. I love playing with this team because they’re good. The guys, the girls, they know how to pass the ball and where to be when. I am the weak link. Only three women showed up on Sunday, so I got to play the whole game. I got to play forward, which I never do.

We were playing the best team in the league, and I was open the whole first half, but they would not pass me the ball. We were winning 3–1 at halftime. In the second half we were losing 4-3, then tied, then down 5–4 with time running out.

We’re Brazilian, but old. I’m 44, and I was not so open in the second half as in the first. However, in the final minute of the game, down by one, we had the ball and we had a shot. Our guy crossed it in front of their goal, and it sailed over the head of one of our best players, who was making a brilliant run up the center. I didn’t realize until the last second that I was sneaking in, uncovered, behind the pass’s likely intended target, toward the far post. I tried to time it just so, and I leaped for all I was worth, wishing for the first time that I was just one inch taller, as the ball skimmed the very top of my head, parted my hair down the middle, and is still rolling, as far as I know.

The whistle blew, and I clunked off the field with my head in my hands, knowing that any other player on the team would have made that goal. Hell, if I’d put five-seven on my driver’s license, I’d have made it.

I once asked a straight male friend about a straight male friend of his. "Oh, he’s single," I was told, "but there’s no way he’d go out with a dude." I pointed out that I wasn’t, technically speaking, a dude. (Which of course my friend already knew.)

He said, and I quote, "Yeah, but, you know …"

Oh, that.

So, OK. Yes, so … whence will my moment come, this athletic glory, this (soft, delicate, fragile) femalehood? I am one inch short and, oddly enough, two and a half inches long.
———————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Lilly’s on Divis. Don’t let them talk you out of the hot sauce (it’s not that hot) or into the chicken (it’s not that great). The pork ribs, though! Great atmosphere: as in, no atmosphere. Just you and your meat and Wonderbread and the smell of smoke. Most people get it to go. Oh, and there’s a parking lot. You know the corner.

LILLY’S BARBECUE

Daily, 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

705 Divisadero, SF

(415) 440-7427

Takeout available

MC/V

A certain way

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Georgie Bundle came creaking into my shack in the middle of the night. Weirdo the Cat wigged a little and went under the bed. I rolled over. The refrigerator snored. Georgie Bundle stood his stand-up bass in the doorway and wound down on the floor without any lights on.

In the morning I stepped over him and put the coffee on. I started a fire. There was an apple pie, and there were leftover ribs I’d slow-smoked for dinner the night before. Oh, and there was applesauce, of course, with bacon in it. Starting to sound like breakfast?

Wake up, Georgie Bundle. Wake up and smell the barbecue.

I never lock my door. It’s the woods! I’m a chicken farmer! Visitors are rare, but always welcome. It was Bundle’s idea to put the ribs on the pie, like ice cream.

"Georgie Boy," I said half a bite later, my mouth full, my eyes bugging, "you are a genius."

He hemmed and chawed, blushed a little, and said, "No, no, no," but I tell you, world, this was a chicken-and-waffle moment. The smoky sauce (borrowed from Big Nate), the juicy meat, the flaky, buttery crust, the sweet, gooey apples … it was a taste sensation that will likely color — or flavor, I should say — the rest of my apple pie–eating life.

Yours too, if you let it. Don’t be afraid. Look, open your eyes. It’s walking distance to pork chops and apple sauce, with pastry crust for biscuits. It’s almost classic. I, for one, will not be able to eat apple pie now without smothering it in barbecue, or at least wanting to. Just like I crave fried chicken instead of blueberries on my waffle and buttered, syrupy waffles under my fried chicken.

End of story. Bing. I take back everything I ever said about anything. I love applesauce, I love apple pie, and Mitsuhiro is wild about burritos.

He’s the Japanese tourist whom I met on the train and then helped find his way around Chicago. I made a phone call, drew a map, walked him to the El, and pointed him north. It was nothing, really — I had a five-hour layover there. But to him this was tantamount to saving his life. Come to think of it, he might be right.

Anyway, we’d already agreed that when he came back West we’d go eat. I’m a slow thinker and a patient listener, and this makes me popular with non-English-speaking people in general. I’m also a one-track conversationalist. After hours and hours of broken sentences, backyard sign language, and bee dances, I had gleaned that Mitsuhiro, in one week in San Francisco, had only eaten Chinese food.

I gave him my phone number and e-mail address and tried to think how to say he was "in good hands" without potentially transutf8g that into Japanese as "I want to blow you." Even though, of course, I did.

"Mexican food," I said, starting safe. "Vietnamese food. Caribbean food. Indian food. I love to eat. I will show you."

His mind stopped working at Mexican, I guess, because a couple of weeks later he e-mailed on his way back across the country and said, "Next Sunday date 11 I am free. I would try Mexican food."

We ate burritos, then drank at the only Mission District bar that was open at 5:55 p.m. on Sunday, date 11: the Make-Out Room. I didn’t know there was going to be music. At first we were the only ones there. Three pints later I started to realize that I, your chicken farmer truly, to whom every single thing is "a date," was on a date … a date date. I know because he kept saying sweet things and, more to the point, wouldn’t let me pay for anything. And right around that time, all of my friends in the world started moseying into the bar. There was Kid Coyote with a guitar, the Old Sack on drums. Here come the Mountains, Gator-Gator, Jolly Boy, Earl Butter. And nobody’s seen me for weeks, so there’s considerable hugging and hooting, and I tried to introduce Mitsuhiro in a certain way. But.

I can only imagine his confusion. I think he thought I was one of those kinds of women, or else maybe he realized finally that I was exactly the kind that I am.

In any case, the mood changed. He started looking at his watch a lot, then had to go. Back to Okinawa, and there is a song in that, yes, but it’s already been written. *

Chez Maman

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Chez Maman might not be spreading her arms just for you, but it sure feels that way. You step inside, and you are snuggled. There is no one else in her world but you — except, of course, those other inconveniently needy people who are lined up at the long bar and packed into the windowside tables, hungry for a taste of Mom’s cooking and competing for her attention, damn them. Mom in this instance is French, a stoveside exponent of la France profonde, a disher-up of various Gallic comfort food, though plainly Mom has been hoofing it around the world lately too, since, to judge by the menu card, she seems to have discovered the quesadilla, among other New World wonders.

Mom’s place used to be Just for You, a celebrated daytime, mostly breakfast-and-lunch venue that also served dinner but decamped a few years ago to Dogpatch. Space was presumably an issue in that move; the vacated premises were tight even by the standards of tight premises, and the advent of Chez Maman (an offshoot of Plouf offshoot Chez Papa, at the corner; now there are several Chezs Mamans) did not cause those premises to expand. The restaurant’s minimal dimensions seem to be exactly those of yesteryear. We were shown to a window-display table one noontime, and I felt as if I were being stuffed into a coach seat on United Airlines. The chairs were handsome enough — some kind of brushed steel or aluminum, very au courant — but I would have been happier with less metallic chic and more space in which to draw breath.

Yet the closeness of the quarters is what it is: an inherited condition. And there is something to be said for knee-knocking proximity, at least if you’re with somebody you like. If you’re not, there’s always the long counter (which affords an excellent view of the conversation-piece kitchen) and, in clement weather, the sidewalk tables. It has long been my sense that the concept of clement weather is generously understood in France; the French will sit at outdoor tables in the Place de la Bastille, sipping espressos or Kronenbourgs from tall glasses, even as February snowflakes twirl gently down around them. If they need further warming, they light cigarettes and denounce the government.

No snowflakes on Potrero Hill, of course, at least not of the meteorological sort — and not many cigarettes now either — but at Chez Maman there are excellent panini, including those classic French versions, croques monsieur et madame. You can’t go wrong with these, but how about a panino of merguez ($9.50), the spicy North African lamb sausage, presented (with sautéed onions and Gruyère) on immaculately fresh bread in the form of a boomerang? I never tire of merguez, but I particularly liked Chez Maman’s version, which had the coarse, chewy texture of the house-made kind.

The merguez panino plate, like that of the tuna panino plate ($9.50), was prettied up with balsamic-dressed mesclun — beautiful and tasty if rather austere. To balance this small touch of abstemious greenery, we sprang for the herbed frites ($5), which arrived in a hefty stack with a ramekin of aioli on the side and lasted beyond the end of the panini despite our enthusiastic plunderings: forkfuls, fingerfuls. The tuna sandwich was good, just not quite as memorable as its merguez sibling: the fish was mashed with aioli into a kind of salad dotted by bits of roasted red pepper and given a gentle edge by some parmesan gratings, though no capers.

If you accept the quesadilla as legitimate in a French (or French-plus) bistro, then you will also welcome, beforehand, guacamole and chips ($7). The guac is nicely chunky and lightly kissed by lime juice, but the fresh-from-the-fryer chips are a revelation — almost like pastry. No one can eat just one, and I should know. I could easily have eaten the whole stack, like a bag of Ruffles, without any guacamole at all. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had to share.

The quesadillas are wittier than the run-of-the-mill sort. I was especially taken by a vegetarian version ($10.50) filled with a sauté of red and yellow bell peppers and zucchini, and smears of goat cheese. The quesadilla, duly grilled, was cut into quarters and stacked like a club sandwich, which made it easier to share, sharing being a recurrent motif at Chez Maman, perhaps because of the close quarters or the sense of maternal vigilance.

Across the way, my friend took a deep whiff of his niçoise salad ($13.50), as if he were warming his face over a steamy bowl of soup.

"It smells fishy," he said with satisfaction, "like the real thing." The salad included fresh grilled tuna, naturally, to contribute to this authenticating perfume, but also anchovy fillets, whose aroma is indispensable in certain preparations. I have had niçoise salads, even good niçoise salads, without anchovies, but anchovies are, without doubt, an improvement. (The rest of the salad was satisfyingly standard-issue: quarters of hard-boiled eggs and tomato, green beans, potatoes, and black olives.)

Perhaps the most genuinely French aspect of the Chez Maman experience is the service. As those who’ve visited France know, the French tend not to fawn over restaurant customers. Service is generally crisp and correct, and servers are pleasant while avoiding the noisome American tic of pretending to be your friend. Chez Maman’s service offers a version of this brisk continental experience, which is intensified by the crowding smallness of the place into a blend of efficiency and urgency. Plates clatter, people come and go, and Maman reminds us, gently but firmly, not to talk with our mouths full. *

CHEZ MAMAN POTRERO HILL

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

1453 18th St., SF

(415) 824-7166

www.chezmamansf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Sens Restaurant

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REVIEW My hot date and I spent about as enjoyable an hour and a half as can be spent in a brown bat cave (without doing it in a corner). I don’t know what restaurant occupied this slot on the promenade level of 4 Embarcadero before Sens took it over, but whatever beast it was left Sens with a nightmare dilemma on its hands: how to exorcise California gothic spirits of stone and brown and big buck hunting and death? Sens’s answer? You don’t. You just try to work around the problem, apparently, starting with strong gin and tonics and continuing with great food.

The Caprese here was a complete success, and when interrogated as to the type of cheese on which it hinged, our waiter Anthony was quick to get back to us with an answer: "Manouri — wonderful texture." The lamb meatballs were plated atop some kind of berry reduction, an attempt at underlying sweetness that did little to contrast an overgarlicky finish.

As for the entrées, there’s better halibut out there, but the lamb shank that Anthony brought us was gorgeous and easy off the bone — NC-17 all the way. And dessert? Caramel ice cream sitting on a little cake, all on some wafers. It was gone before we could identify its parts.

The service was politely concerned, not pushy. The Mediterranean spices were authentic, if slightly overpowering. But the hand lamps that adorn every stone pillar seemed straight-up evil. Picture this: put an electric torch in a lamp in the hand of a dead person. Multiply by 25. No joke.

When there’s little an owner can do to overcome such a gnarly aesthetic hex, I guess the only thing left to do is simply to embrace it. Or maybe the interior’s not such a lugubrious affair at lunchtime. Here’s hoping, for the food’s sake.

SENS RESTAURANT Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5:30–10 p.m.; Sat., 5–11 p.m. 4 Embarcadero, promenade level, SF. (415) 362-0646, www.sens-sf.com

Land of milk and money

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› paulr@sfbg.com


At Gourmet magazine’s recent Wine Cellar extravaganza in the Galleria, I chatted with a Kerrygold functionary about currency exchanges, having first fortified myself with a few glasses of wine and an empanada. One would not want to drift into discussions of the dollar and the euro on an empty stomach, nor in a condition of total and stony sobriety. How about renaming the dollar the bungee, incidentally? Maybe it would help bring the great plunge to a stop.

Kerrygold is an Irish dairy concern with a huge export business in butter and boutique cheeses, much of it on this side of the Atlantic, so the diverging fortunes of the dollar and the euro are of intense interest to its corporate strategists. But an even more pressing issue, I was told, is the rising global demand for milk, as people in China, a onetime land of tea now rapidly becoming citified, start developing the Western taste for coffee and piling into their local Starbucks for morning lattes. It is one of life’s larger ironies at the moment that even as our drive-through way of life shows signs of collapsing, much of the rest of the world seeks to adopt it. Happiness is getting into your car and driving somewhere for a $4 cup of milky coffee. O blessed marketers!

Irony did not seem to be the evening’s theme, but then, irony is seldom to the taste of swells. Groups of the well-dressed and well-off swirled about the huge hall as if at a waltz, nibbling and sipping and nibbling some more. Quite a few of the city’s grandest restaurants — including Aqua, La Folie, Scott Howard, and Limón — were represented among the food stations, while off in a corner a group from Louisiana was barbecuing large prawns in spicy sauce, and a crew on the stage was dishing out low-calorie Indian food. The queues for these treats were formidable. Even swells, apparently, can stand only so much monkfish liver, or spot-prawn sashimi in apple-fennel broth with coconut marshmallow.

Back in the land of Kerrygold, I grazed musingly across a small prairie of cheeses and used toothpicks. For a moment I was alone, the herd of swells having galloped across the floor in pursuit of some new delight. I felt the crinkly dollars in my pocket and murmured reassuringly to them.

Beer, sweet beer

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In beer’s ongoing search for a place at the table set with a white linen tablecloth, dessert presents itself as an unlikely but promising niche. Reputable brewers seem convinced that their offerings match up at least as well as wine with many savory dishes, in part because beer tastes less strongly of alcohol and is therefore the food’s servant rather than its competitor, but during a recent beer-and-high-cuisine dinner at Rubicon, I found myself yearning for some nicely acidic wine — red, white, champers, I would gladly have taken a glass of any of it, though the menu had been chosen to flatter and be flattered by the accompanying beers.

The dishes certainly sounded beerworthy: crispy buttermilk-marinated quail (a tony relative of fried chicken) on a bed of tart onions and preserved lemon, followed by a slab of beer-braised beef short ribs, with carrot puree and roasted wild mushrooms. The fact that all of this was basically glorified pub food didn’t diminish its tastiness, nor its compatibility with beer — but it was also cripplingly rich. Just one of these dishes would have filled my richness quota for a month. But there was dessert too.

The sweet course was remarkable not so much in itself — an oat crunch cake, spiced like a carrot cake and served with a pat of chocolate ice cream fortified with stout — as for what it managed to do for a pair of libations. Under its penumbra of sugariness, a dark cream stout tasted almost like black coffee, while a beer-derived postprandial liqueur — rather cloying on its own — acquired a steadying deepness on the tongue to accompany its deep, slightly cloudy caramel color.

The beer cordial (Utopias from Samuel Adams, if you’re curious) is being marketed as a cognac and port alternative and is priced accordingly. On its own it was shapelessly sweet; it lacked cognac’s clarifying fire and port’s engulfing grapy richness. But this is America, and in America, apparently, there is no such thing as too sweet. While cognac and port have their grown-up stringencies, Utopias is soft and lovable, even when served in a sophisticated-looking brandy snifter. It is, however, 27 percent alcohol, which means that, like a chocolate martini, it’s stronger than it looks. Be careful or you’ll get tipsy, knock over your snifter, and stain the white linen tablecloth.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Bistro 9

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› paulr@sfbg.com

It was déjà vu all over again when we stepped into Bistro 9 on a mild October evening.

"So when did you take over from Park Chow?" I asked our server. There was no doubt in my mind that Bistro 9 was the successor to that long-running Inner Sunset sanctum of casual comfort food. The heated sidewalk loge, the long bar, the warmth of brick and wood, the garden in the rear — it was all just as I remembered from my last visit to Park Chow. Bill Clinton was still president then, so this would have been sometime in the previous millennium, and memory does have its sell-by dates.

"Oh, Park Chow’s still there," she said brightly. "It’s just a few doors that way, toward Irving." She motioned, and I nodded, feeling the same confusion Captain Kirk must have felt in "The Mark of Gideon," when, unbeknownst to him, he was beamed onto a fake Enterprise. Later, after we’d paid and left, we strolled briefly along the block, just to make sure, and there indeed was Park Chow, with crowds milling outside and in. Heated loge set with tables at the sidewalk, warm yellow light pooling in the dim interior.

The sense of parallel universes is strong, then, if subtly skewed at points. The restaurants share a layout, look, and crowd — young, UCSF-ish, collegiate and postcollegiate — but they part company, congenially enough, in the matter of food. Park Chow tilts toward the Italian, whereas Bistro 9 (which opened late in the summer and is a sibling of the Citrus Club) finds its bliss farther east, in the methods and flavors of the Middle East. Here you will find kebab-style skewers to rival those at Asqew Grill — along with moussaka, couscous, and zataar flat bread. And if these fragrant whiffs of Turkey, Morocco, and Arabia don’t appeal, there are such standbys as pizza, burgers, rotisserie chicken or beef (from the splendid machine that stands at the heart of the exhibition kitchen), and even Provençal rack of lamb.

In this landscape of gastronomic peaks and valleys, there is a great deal of earthy satisfaction to be had in the folds of the second (although the rack of lamb is something of a deal at $19.50). Skewers are cookout food, party food — but Bistro 9 offers them in a wealth of possible combinations and sophisticated treatments. There are cubes of souvlaki-style lamb (wonderfully garlicky marinade, slightly tough meat), chicken breast perfumed with mint and cumin, shrimp and scallops with bell peppers, and spicy summer sausage. The last looked benign enough, with a pale color suggestive of veal and a smooth texture that reminded my companion of hot dogs. (I like hot dogs; he, being from Germany, regards them as overprocessed and aberrant.) But spicy meant spicy, as in "nearly incendiary." We both liked that.

Skewer plates ($7.50 for one skewer, $10.50 for two, and so on) include, besides a bed of wonderfully plumped rice grains, a choice of side dishes. These were superior, except for tabbouleh, a cracked wheat salad that was fine but not memorable. Greek salad, on the other hand — a jumble of tomato quarters, cucumber wedges, olives, onions, and feta cheese crumblings in a lemony vinaigrette — carried an enchantment of fresh mint, while grilled artichokes had a lovely lemon breath and were surprisingly tender, if not quite in season. Grilled corn, late in what has been a fine season, was still summertime sweet and dripping with melted butter. And the macaroni and cheese (you can get it separately, for $5.50) was just stupendously good, best in show in a field that’s grown quite impressive in the past few years. The kitchen uses cheddar, jack, and Gruyère, hardly an unknown combination in today’s world of mac-and-cheese connoisseurship, but the result is a creaminess and intense depth of flavor that leaves one longing for more, even though the serving crock is not small.

The Bistro 9 burger ($8, plus another buck for cheese) is made from Niman Ranch beef, which manages to remain tasty and juicy even when slightly overcooked. I’d ordered mine medium rare, which maybe is such a common expression that it no longer registers in the awareness of busy servers. Medium well isn’t ruinous for a burger, just faintly disappointing. A nice pillowy bun helped soften the letdown, as did a stack of fresh french fries, some with bits of skin still attached.

A word on the soups: try them. (All right, two words.) The signature soup is a hearty lentil ($4.50 for a cup), semipureed and sweetened by a raft of caramelized onions. A sometime offering is red bean with vegetable (also $4.50 for a cup), a full puree the color of tomato soup, decorated with pipings of crème fraîche and summoning the spirits of both minestrone and chili. It’s like a blind date for soup that works out.

For dessert, how about a shameless wallow in the brownie sundae ($6.50), several scoops of ice cream plopped over warm, chocolate chip–studded brownies, with a heavy lacquering of hot fudge sauce? It’s plenty for two and then some. The only issue is likely to be in agreeing on what kind of ice cream you want, since you get a choice. I demurred in the selection and heard, from across the table, chocolate being chosen. Chocolate ice cream with chocolate chocolate-chip brownies and chocolate sauce? And how about a tube of Clearasil on the side?

Still, we left happy. We even waved at the Park Chow people before slipping off into the night. *

BISTRO 9

Daily, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

1224 Ninth Ave., SF

(415) 753-3919

www.bistro9sf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Praise the lard

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By L.E. Leone


› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The problem is, I don’t like applesauce. The solution is to start liking applesauce. There is no other way, given the ridiculous bounty of Sonoma County’s apple harvest this year, plus the clanking, cavernous, empty chill I feel every time I open my checkbook.

I have two apple trees in my chicken yard. Since I wandered and roamed all summer and most of the fall, missing blackberries, missing peaches, missing the pears I poach from a tree down the street and the grapes I borrow from all of the vineyards around here, I am especially determined to use my millions and millions of apples — even the ones that have already fallen and have worms swizzle-sticking out of them since there ain’t no chickens yet to see to this.

I don’t like apple cider. I don’t like apple juice. Apple pie is not my favorite kind of pie. I mean, I eat applesauce, but it’s not a thing to get all excited about, like beet greens or getting to ride up front.

What I do like is apples — crunchy, juicy, crisp, ripe apples. In my hand, while I’m sitting in the tree, under it, or on a ladder. So I eat what I can, and I hand apples to people, like on the train. Or at Sockywonk’s art opening, when I went around the room and handed everyone an apple from my tree.

There’s something sexy about handing someone an apple.

I’m not religious, but sometimes a crazy-ass Bible story can point to something worth something in real life too, like how Jesus turned water into wine, and the next thing you know the French are making French toast out of stale bread. I myself have turned cream into butter, and my brother hammered spigots into trees and turned goo into maple syrup.

Voilà: breakfast!

To hand someone an apple is to say, Take a walk on the wild side!

Whereas there’s nothing at all sexy about applesauce. It’s baby food. It’s windfall, it’s "drop," it’s old. It’s easy to make. Just cut ’em up and cook ’em. Last year I made and canned a load of applesauce, and, so I wouldn’t have to eat it, I gave it all away. And no one made love to me. Well, that’s not true, but it was meat related. It had nothing to do with applesauce.

The year before that it was apple chutney, which didn’t go over so well with the Thanksgiving turkey. I’ve made and canned apple barbecue sauce too. It’s okay.

This year I am determined to learn to like applesauce.

Now, the number one tried-and-true all-time best way to start liking a thing that you didn’t like before, everybody knows, is to put bacon in it. I looked online, but none of the applesauce recipes had bacon in them. Cinnamon. Sugar. One said honey, but the closest any of them came to bacon was butter. I didn’t look real close. Anyway, the lesson of Jesus is to not use recipes. I shut down my computer and galloped into town to buy me some bacon.

My mother wonders if the serpent that spoke to Eve in the Bible story was perhaps actually honey, oozing out of a hive and slithering down the tree of life. Never mind that honey is even less likely to learn a language than snakes are — my mother has been wondering this now, she admitted to me recently, for at least 30 years.

I think she’s brilliant. And persistent. Yet flexible. Thirty years ago, for example, she was keeping bees and eating honey instead of sugar. Honey was good for you. Now it’s the root of all evil.

I never liked honey, and I found out recently that neither does Ruth Reichl, and neither did M.F.K. Fisher. So that’s my literary mom and grandma (they shudder and turn over, respectively, at the thought) and now my mom-mom too. My grandma-grandma couldn’t care less, being dead, but I come from a tradition of honey hating, apparently, and not even bacon is going to change that.

As for applesauce …

If there is in fact a root of all evil, I would like to find out what exactly it is and learn to cultivate and cook with it, like carrots, potatoes, beets.

If there is a root of all good, it’s bacon fat. I cooked the apples in it, slow and long, over the wood stove. Sprinkle of water. Speck of cinnamon. When finally I had what seemed like applesauce, I crumbled the bacon back into it, and now, praise the lard, guess who just loves applesauce?

Trattoria Pinocchio

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REVIEW My mission was to find a restaurant in North Beach that doesn’t serve Italian food. This was more out of curiosity than resolve; Italian food happens to be my favorite, but I wanted to find an oasis of originality amid the monotony of Columbus Street. After two hours of slowly eliminating the Afghan, Indian, Vietnamese, and Mexican restaurants I had found online because they had closed permanently, only opened for dinner, or had moved across town, I was coming to the conclusion that there is a very active Italian consortium in North Beach driving away all challengers. Plus, my curiosity was eroding under the steadily lapping waves of hunger. I finally cracked and decided to patronize the next cozy little restaurant I came to, provided it wouldn’t break my bank account.

This happened to be Trattoria Pinocchio, a nice-looking establishment with a hostess who spoke fluent Italian as she boasted that the restaurant’s pastas and breads were made fresh every day. With a claim like that and with prices comparable to those of all of the other places I had been passing ($12.95 for a salad and pasta), it deserved a shot at pleasing my exceedingly discriminatory pasta palate. I even made it easy by ordering one of my all-time favorites, linguini al pesto.

Unfortunately, my salad was so oily, it dripped onto my shirt and left stains on the way from the plate to my mouth. The dressing was not quite orthodox and mildly unpleasant, but tasty enough once I added black pepper, so I continued with the greens — with little help from my waiter, who was suspiciously absent most of the time. On my first bite of the linguini — when it finally came — I realized that I had been rudely cheated. While the pasta was cooked well enough, it certainly didn’t taste like it was made fresh that day, and the pesto sauce was more cream and (you guessed it) oil than basil. As I left, I half-expected the hostess’s nose to look longer, but no dice.

TRATTORIA PINOCCHIO Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–midnight. 401 Columbus, SF. (415) 392-1472, www.trattoriapinocchio.com

Bodhi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

It would be possible to enjoy a visit to Bodhi without eating anything at all, and this is not because the restaurant’s Vietnamese food is unworthy, but because the setting itself is so rich in allure that just sitting there (perhaps in the company of a good conversationalist, just to be on the safe side) is pleasure enough. Bodhi’s atmospheric magic is the magic of Europe’s public squares and has to do with architecture, artfulness, and the weaving of the private threads of human lives into a community fabric.

Food is central too, of course, in the casting of this enchantment. But let’s begin with the building, a gracious old brick structure that’s been subtly brought up to date with a good sandblasting and new windows, which are to a facade what new glasses are to a human face. Inside, the restaurant consists of two boxy, high-ceilinged dining rooms, connected by a grand passageway, like a squared-off proscenium arch, and the walls are hung with colorful abstract art. I have my doubts about abstract art, but I have even graver doubts about restaurants with no art at all on the walls. Art in public spaces, even public spaces devoted to activities other than art appreciation, isn’t a luxury and shouldn’t be considered discretionary. It’s an indispensable ingredient in the flavoring of mood, the temper in which people gather to eat.

Years ago, when a freeway viaduct still blighted the area, the space was occupied by a pan-Asian restaurant called the Window. That enterprise moved to Cathedral Hill and then became a Chinese restaurant. The viaduct, meanwhile, came a-tumblin’ down, and, in the vicinity of Valencia and Duboce, it was as if the sun were finally peeping out after years of sullen cloudiness. It didn’t hurt, either, that the public housing project across the street was demolished and rebuilt according to a more humane ethic. Inner Valencia still has something of the flavor of undiscovered country, but if Bodhi is a predictor, then the Valencia restaurant corridor could soon reach all the way to Market Street.

Bodhi’s food, unlike the Window’s, is pretty much straight Vietnamese, as that cuisine has come to be understood in this country, although there are a few little cross-cultural twists and turns here and there: spring rolls filled with Peking duck, for instance, or grilled beef and pineapple, in a brief curtsey toward Hawaii. A representative introduction to the kitchen’s style is Bodhi’s sampler ($15), a likable hodgepodge of nibbleables and noshables whose members include crispy rolls (stuffed with pork, taro root, carrots, and onions), summer rolls (filled with shrimp, cucumbers, and lettuce and presented as stubby cylinders, like nigiri), sugarcane shrimp (which look like tiny corn dogs), noodle patties, and a long berm of lemongrass grilled beef, suitable for scooping up with lettuce leaves.

After all that, you wouldn’t necessarily be panting after soup, though we liked the sweet corn soup with Dungeness crab meat ($5), a kind of egg-drop number with cameos by a couple of big stars. (Seasonality buffs will notice that corn and crab are an awkward combination; the first is a summertime treat, the second a holiday season delicacy. If there is overlap, it would have to fall about now, in midautumn.)

Satay fish ($13) attracted my attention not least because I wondered if we were walking into a disaster. Delicate fish don’t always like being skewered and don’t always take kindly to the harsh, dry heat of the grill. One foresaw crumblings, disintegrations. But the whitefish filets (of tilapia?) turned out to have been marinated in coconut curry and threaded carefully onto the skewers, and the result was a surprising intactness, with sly but distinct flavors.

More in the extrovert line was citrus chicken ($10), a low mountain range of boneless cutlets that had been breaded and fried until tender gold, then drizzled with an orange reduction, like a spicy-sweet syrup. White rice or cold rice noodles made adequate accompaniments, but you’re not likely to miss them if they’re not there.

At lunch the servings are, if anything, even more generous than those in the evening. I struggled through a rather vast plate of garlic noodles ($7.50) tossed with shreds of sautéed beef, while a green papaya salad ($6.50) — a formidable mound in its own right — was augmented by steamed shrimp, halved lengthwise. The papaya in this salad was crisper than what I have found to be usual and also dressed with a bolder, more acidic lime vinaigrette than is typically the case. Only the seafood combo ($8), a jumble of shrimp and calamari in a lively amber sauce, with green beans and zigzaggy tabs of carrot thrown in for color, was reasonable enough in size to finish without being incapacitated for the rest of the afternoon.

Bodhi, as a culinary experience, isn’t the match of a place like Dragonfly, which lifts Vietnamese cooking to a sublime level without doing violence to its basic character. But even the grandest restaurant is never entirely about food; a meal in a restaurant is a holistic interval whose meaning and value turn not merely on what is eaten but on whom it’s eaten with and in what setting. In this enveloping sense, Bodhi is unlike any other place I can think of on Valencia Street’s ever-longer restaurant row; it’s the sort of place you go to when you want to keep talking to whomever you’re with long after the last platter has been cleared and the conversation has turned to the subject of art, abstract art, perhaps, pros and cons — cons first, please! *

BODHI

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

211 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-7750

www.bodhisf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Be my burger

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Last week’s rovings included a stop at Bistro Burger, in the basement of the Westfield San Francisco Centre — centre! Please. We’re not at Wimbledon. But the burger transcended its deracinated, strip-mall, airport-prison, why–am–I–in–Las Vegas setting. The meat (Niman Ranch, of course) was tender, juicy, intensely flavorful, and cooked medium rare, as agreed. A slice of pepper jack cheese was present but not overwhelming, and the bun was plump and soft, like a good pillow, but also not overwhelming.

You need not resign yourself to beef here. Any of the burgers are available with a turkey patty or some sort of vegetarian option, though since we showed up rather late in the evening (having completed our other urgent, mall-related business), they’d run out of turkey. Unburgers include a respectable sandwich of grilled mahimahi (a lovely fish but not too exciting: snag a mayo packet or two), while the seasoned curly fries are better than Jack in the Box’s, and that is saying something. Really. They are just decadent. You will have to block out the next day as a fat holiday.

Some days later: a late dinner at Masala (reviewed in these pages aeons ago), on Ninth near Lincoln, near the penny-factory de Young Museum and the recently unswaddled reincarnation of the Academy of Sciences — a splendor of glass. The two structures could hardly be more dissimilar: one incorporates the past and, in its lightness, seems to be at peace with its sylvan surroundings, while the other …

Masala is still pretty good. Less fiery than memory insists. Prices are moderate, and the setting is handsome and proper enough for parents. We found the service to be slightly sluggish, perhaps because it was a weekend night. The restaurant was busy though not full, but a fair number of the people who came to the door weren’t looking for tables but sackfuls of carryout.

D before H, except … It was with a certain tingle of what V.S. Naipaul calls "horror interest" that I recognized I’d misspelled "Stendhal" (10/24/07). It was also too late to fix it — "too late," as Othello says to Desdemona, then strangles her. May I be spared such a fate. As for the unexpected Stendahl: Could he or she be a Scandinavian playwright, of the obscure school?

Preservation

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS On my last night at my mom’s house, Jean Gene the Frenchman brought over a pile of greens from the garden where my sisters live. It was starting to get dark, so I had to wash and chop in a hurry. No electricity. What once was a hard-working, law-abiding kitchen sink is surrounded by white buckets and rust-tinted glass jars of water.

I didn’t ask where the water came from, just poured a couple of cups into a bowl and washed 10 pounds of greens in it, concocting a brackish sort of health food soup for chickens: all bugs and grit.

While I was working, Uncle Sonny and Cher, my mom’s brother, came over to talk about property. In question: 12 acres of swampy scrubland and prickly woods outside Youngstown, Ohio, the poorest place in America (small-city size and up). The property is worth about 85¢. My uncle uses it for hunting deer and harvesting mushrooms.

He bow-hunts — hasn’t killed anything there for years — but the land is important to him. It’s important to my mom because she lives on it. There’s another brother and another sister. Like me, they all grew up there and have strange, dreamy connections to the weeds and ditches, the crippled trees, the smell of mud puddles, and 85¢ worth of security. My guess is that they are going to need lawyers to sort it out.

"Papa said never sell the property," my mom assures or reassures her brother. "As long as you have the property," she says my grandpa said, "you will never starve."

The night before, for dinner, we ate dandelion greens and chicory. For dessert: purple-tipped clover — sweet but calorically wanting. After, I found some old popcorn in a closet, popped it in olive oil over a propane stove in the garage, and ate it at the wood stove, in the dark. My mom wouldn’t have any, on account of salt. Oh, and oil.

It’s very quiet at night. You don’t even hear frogs or crickets, let alone refrigerators, and I slept like a baby in the bed in the living room, which Grandma had just died in. After three nights on a train, sitting up, I was going to sleep no matter what, but my mom, on the couch, lullabied me with a soft, hypnotically cadenced lecture on the health risks of synthetic estrogen. In a nutshell, I was going to die. Blood clots, breast cancer, liver disease … somewhere between a stroke and a heart attack, I lost consciousness. My dreams were untroubled.

Woke up to my mom’s voice complaining to a local politician over the phone about I forget which chemical in the water. Then I knew that she was going to be OK.

Aunt Sonny and Cher, Uncle Sonny and Cher informed me later that day, is jealous of my hair. I took the greens out to the garage and sautéed them in olive oil with garlic, onions, and hot peppers. I found two dusty bottles of homemade wine, one half empty, the other half full, both long turned to something beyond vinegar. I figured this would either preserve my room-temperature greens for three more days on the train or kill me immediately.

If there is one thing that I would like this column to accomplish, it is to dispel the myth that there is anything to eat on trains. Where did this rumor get started? Johnny Cash? ("I bet there’s rich folks eating in them fancy dining cars / Prob’ly drinking coffee and smoking big cigars.")

Well sir, while Amtrak might be one notch above the airlines, eats-wise, it’s many, many notches below your neighborhood greasy spoon. The burger, whether you get it from the lounge car snack counter or sit-down style in the dining car, starts out frozen. Pizza’s limp and lame. Even the grilled-chicken Caesar salad is prepackaged. Why? They have refrigeration.

I did not have a cooler. Without beef jerky and a bag of apples I would have perished on the way out. For the way back I had this 32-ounce container of preserved greens to keep me alive and, ur, regular. They tasted great until day three, until now. Reno just came into view. It’s lunchtime, and I’m afraid of my greens.

Last night, for the sake of argument, I had a half-chicken dinner in the dining car ($12.50). It sucked. Still, I highly recommend train travel. West of Denver the scenery is spectacular. And you meet people.

Guys are hitting on me, for example. Two guys, currently. One drinks beer for breakfast, and the other is wanted in New Jersey. "Nothing serious," he assures me.

I believe him and am charmed.

Finfine Ethiopian Restaurant

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PREVIEW There’s only one thing better than a mimosa brunch: a mimosa brunch you get to in time to eat. Which is not what happened when my friend K. and I attended a morning birthday celebration in Berkeley on a recent Sunday morning. Yes, we got there in time to see our friends in their pajamas — and one particularly fabulous pair of car-shaped slippers — although, alas, no matching Underoos. And yes, we got there in time for both mimosas and fantastic Bloody Marys. But we completely missed the breakfast train, as everyone was already full and lazy by the time we got our asses across the bridge.

So when K. and I left the daytime slumber party, we were famished. Enter Finfiné, an Ethiopian restaurant we happened to pass on our rambling path (read: we were lost) back to the freeway. To be fair, we were so hungry that an Egg McMuffin might’ve satisfied us. But Finfiné was so much better than melted cheese product on microwaved eggs. The Ye-Tsom Beyaynetu vegetarian sampler came with six different dishes, including savory collard greens, a spicy red lentil stew, a garlicky green lentil salad, and a chickpea concoction resembling hearty hummus. And the Ye-Doro Tibs proved to be perfectly cooked, high-quality cubed chicken in a spicy, but not overwhelming, sauce.

Plus, the combination platter featured enough food to provide K. and me with nearly two meals apiece. Show me a brunch that does that.

FINFINÉ ETHIOPIAN RESTAURANT Mon. and Wed.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.; Sun., noon–10 p.m. 2556 Telegraph, Berk. (510) 883-0167, www.finfine.com

Tinderbox

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› paulr@sfbg.com

For more than a decade, the king of the hill over in Bernal Heights, restaurant-wise, has been Liberty Café, one of those marvelous places that bloomed in the city’s neighborhoods after the 1989 earthquake. The quake, by damaging roads and bridges, made it more difficult for would-be suburban diners to get to the city center and its glittering array of possibilities; it also depressed the real estate market, so that a diaspora of young chefs could afford to open places of their own in the city’s many residential villages.

Given the flow of wealth into Bernal in recent years, it was probably inevitable that a pretender to Liberty Café’s crown would emerge — and now one has, without benefit of earthquake. The restaurant is called Tinderbox, a "freestyle bistro" (per the menu card) opened by Ryan Russell and chef Blair Warsham toward the end of the summer on an easterly, sloping stretch of Cortland Avenue. The snug space is about as un-Liberty as could be; it’s spare and modern rather than neo-quaint: the walls are covered with recycled cork, the ceilings hung with light boxes of frosted glass, and the tables topped with burnished copper. There’s even a private dining room of sorts, a cozy nook (up a half flight of stairs) that resembles the captain’s mess on some clipper ship of yesteryear.

Warsham’s food is also wildly un-Liberty-like. While both kitchens bow to the gods of the local and sustainable, Tinderbox’s ethos is one of bold innovation. Warsham stops short of festooning his dishes with foams and gelées but isn’t at all shy about unlikely combinations — most of which (to perfect our theme of unlikeliness) work.

From the get-go, you are given notice of the restaurant’s bent for artful eccentricity. A basket of bread? Forget it: Your server brings you instead some popcorn, basted with a Thai-ish blend of coconut red curry, lemongrass, and galangal. You are a little wary at first but are quickly won over; the basket is soon emptied, and the server brings you another. (Extreme traditionalists will note that there is bread on the premises, and the staff will probably bring you some if you ask for it or your children insist.)

The menu offers a la carte and prix fixe options, but the latter — $35 for any appetizer, any main course, and any dessert or a glass of house wine — is too good a deal to pass up. The only excluded items are the ribeye steak, T-box tasting (a kind of appetizer sampler), and the lasagnette, a loose sandwich of saffron-chervil pasta leaves plumped out with either sautéed calamari ($15) or zucchini ($13) and dressed with a habit-forming sauce of fresh paprika pepper.

Some of the dishes, it must be said, are exemplars of austere virtue: a trio of whole grilled sardines ($11), say, on a bed of white-bean purée. Preserved Meyer lemon and thyme were said to lurk elsewhere on the plate, but what we noticed was the glistening plumpness of the fish, and that was what mattered. A rabbit hot pocket ($10) wasn’t quite austere, maybe, in its envelope of gold-fried pastry but was otherwise familiar despite the substitution of slightly exotic rabbit meat for something more quotidian, such as chicken. The halved hot pocket was plated with a luxuriantly glossy salsa verde and pitted castelvetrano (i.e. green) olives whose saltiness helped balance the blandness of the underseasoned rabbit meat.

Beets and figs, together on the same plate? A nightmare scenario for the beet-and-fig-hater, but the combination ($9) — beet coins laid atop fig coins and drizzled with beet vinaigrette — turned out to be surprisingly tasty, with an unusual harmony between the sharp sweetness of the figs and the earthy richness of the beets. Was the walnut blue cheese popper, a knobbly golf ball like a leftover from a caterer’s tray at some holiday party, necessary, or just an attempt at comic relief?

The only high-invention dish I came away with doubts about was the grilled avocado cutlet ($17). This turned out to the pitted, peeled halves of a whole avocado, grilled to a light char and filled with lightly caramelized cucumber dice. On the other side of the plate sat a beautifully browned risotto cake whose inner layer consisted of cojita and avocado cream, which lent the cake some creamy weight but made only a tenuous connection to the cutlet itself. As for the cutlet: Why grill a ripe avocado? Perhaps the thinking was that, since the grill benefits many a vegetable — many a fruit too — it would benefit the avocado. But this calculation overlooked the law of unintended consequences. A ripe avocado is already soft and doesn’t need grilling to make it softer, and it has an appealing butteriness that isn’t enhanced by grill char, no matter how pretty such char might be to the eye. A main dish concocted from avocado is a wonderful idea, but this dish isn’t it; the chef is too much with us.

Desserts, on the other hand, tend toward the extraordinary. A trio of fresh-doughnut-like raspberry beignets ($7) was simplicity itself. But a cannolo ($7) dribbled forth almond cream inflected with black pepper, and was plated amid reflecting pools of strawberry and basil oils. And a Kaffir lime panna cotta ($7), presented in what might have been a dog’s water dish as conceived by some designer in Milan, was all the more amazing — an engulfing denseness of cream, a bright muted acidity like filtered sunshine — for being a last-minute replacement to the scheduled star, a basil version. The sole holdover detail was the little chunk of honeycomb on top — the golden king of that particular hill.

TINDERBOX

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

803 Cortland, SF

(415) 285-8269

www.tinderboxrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Surprisingly not too noisy

Wheelchair accessible *

Butterflies

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS In the picture she is wearing a loose white gown, and her hair is white, and so are her eyebrows. In one hand, in her lap, she is clutching a white handkerchief, and upon the middle finger of her other hand, a monarch butterfly has landed. My grandmother is holding this butterfly to her puckered lips, as if to kiss it.

We didn’t want her to have a heart attack, so I would wear jeans and a loose T-shirt and put my hair in a pony tail. What we talked about was chickens. On the phone, in person … chickens. I considered naming myself after her. I did name one of my chickens after her. But I never "came out" to my Grandma Rubino.

I was thinking about this the other day in a Dumpster.

You do know I’m a Dumpster diva, right? And I say diva not because I tend to be more elegantly dressed than most of my fellow divers — although I do, to the amusement of many a construction worker — but because I tend to sing while I work. If I’m not wrangling out the words to one of my own original, lighthearted compositions, such as "The Absolute Nothing Blues," "I’m Pretty Scared Right Now," or "Agent of Entropy," then I’m mimicking something I halfway remember and in no way understand from Madame Butterfly.

Io credo a lasagna / E la grande soil / Senza chili con carne piangere taaaaaannnnnnto!!! . . . for example. I belt it out.

My new car, by the way, is a pickup truck. I know this to be true, even though it’s shaped like a station wagon, because I have already hauled a load of scrap wood and a lot of garbage in it. I drove it to West Oakland and then took a train to Pittsburgh, Pa. Moonpie was getting married.

She’s my oldest friend in the whole wide world, and a lot of my other oldest friends in the whole wide world would be there, including Shortribs, Bikkets, and Nada. Haywire, who lives in Pittsburgh, was out of town.

It was probably the best-written wedding ever, full of poetry and poets, and held on the top floor of a downtown artist’s studio. Me and Bikkets made the music, on steel drum and violin. The cat who married them was the most qualified marrier I ever heard of: not a minister, nor a priest, nor a justice of the peace, nor a ship’s captain, but a poet. The families just had to deal. And did, quite nicely.

I wear hand-me-downs and shop, if I shop, at thrift stores. I don’t know about fashion, or etiquette, so I called Moonpie a week ago or so, while I was still in the woods, packing, for permission.

"Moonpie," I said, "can I wear all black to your wedding?"

This was before I knew I’d be attending a funeral as well. I didn’t find that out until I was already on the train.

"Whatever makes you feel beautiful," Moonpie said.

Nor did I know that Bikkets would wear all black, and the three writers who read things. Even the Poet of the Peace: all black, even his tie. The bride wore whatever. It didn’t matter. Against a night sky like us, the Moon was going to shine.

After the wedding, after the reception, me and cousin Choo-Choo went to Moonpie’s new house, where we were staying with Nada and Shortribs. Moonpie and her man were off somewhere, so I got to sleep in their bed.

More important, I got to raid their refrigerator. The night before there had been a calzone and pizza party, and all I could think about before, during, and after the wedding dinner, was midnight snacking on last night’s leftovers. There had been a particularly excellent hot sausage calzone, which was for some reason not popular.

I knew there was a lot left, and I scoured their refrigerator but couldn’t find it. Shortribs and Nada had slept there the night before too. I asked and Nada admitted, a little sheepishly (but not sheepishly enough), that she’d thrown it all away that morning. "It sat out overnight," she said.

There was a huge Hefty garbage bag right there, and, in my wedding best, a butterfly in black, I dove in. I am my grandmother’s granddaughter. I have survived the Great Depression — and a lot of littler, not-so-great ones too. Like a lot of my family, I eat compost. I eat garbage.

I hold my grandma’s pretty picture to my own puckered lips and whisper to it. "I lied," I say.

She whispers back, "How are the chickens?"

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