Food & Drink

The art of the cart

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The romance of street-cart food might not be high romance, but it is romance and does cast its spell, particularly in big, rich cities — like ours — with elaborate infrastructures of fancy restaurants and a concomitant epidemic of some as-yet unnamed cultural autoimmune disorder that attaches inordinate worth to the prosaic.
Street-cart chic reflects, I would say, a recognition among the high rollers that immaculate table linens and Limoges china aren’t all there is to the gastronomic life, that occasionally a little mayonnaise running down the sleeve is in order, though maybe not mayonnaise from an actual street cart, because the cart-keeper probably hasn’t washed his hands and you might get salmonella. I tilt toward this view largely because several recent street-cart-food undertakings of note have connections to glossy, big-name places, and these connections do carry a certain brand-name reassurance. Two examples: the Ferry Building’s Mijita, which serves Mexican street food with regional accents, is related to swank Jardinière by way of a shared owner-chef, Traci des Jardins, while Charles Pham’s hugely upscale the Slanted Door has given birth to a pair of Out the Doors (the latest in the Westfield San Francisco Centre, the great mall of tomorrow), which bundle up take-out packages of Vietnamese street-cart food for those on the run or on deadline.
Yet not all street-food emporiums are modest little places with richer, grander siblings that can sluice their rich patrons downstream every now and then for some edible absolution of wealth-guilt. Bodega Bistro, for instance, has a kind of dual identity; it’s a quite elegant Tenderloin restaurant that gives a section of its menu over to the street-cart food of Hanoi. And now we have the seductive Regalito Rosticeria, which combines a gleaming Pizzeria Delfina look, of warm wood, glass, and stainless steel, with a menu (by chef and owner Thomas Peña) largely given over to versions of Mexico City’s street-cart food.
The extreme makeover of what was once a pupusería is stunning in practically every respect, but its most striking feature is the long bar, or counter, which runs most of the length of the restaurant, can seat at least a dozen, and is backed by the busy kitchen, with its gas-fired ovens, mortars and pestles, and busy chefs filling stainless-steel bowls with fresh salsas and guacamoles. It’s like the Mexican version of a sushi bar. The dark side of the moon, of course, is that table seating is a little sparse.
As the glistening treasures in the chefs’ stainless-steel bowls suggest, las salsas are not only excellent but makers of dishes. Guacamole ($6) can and does stand alone, of course; it’s creamy-chunky, made with perfectly ripe avocados sliced up by hand rather than processed or pounded, and it’s served with whole tortillas (of wheat) fried to a bronze crispness. You break off a piece, as if it’s pappadam, and dip. If you want the same thing with tomatoes instead of avocados, you will opt for the tostadas with salsa fresca ($3), the crispy disks presented this time with a classic salsa made with voluptuously ripe tomatoes, finely diced, whose sweetness balances the sourness of the lime and the bite of the garlic and chiles.
But to say that other sauces play supporting roles is not to diminish them. The torta ($7.50) — a Mexican sandwich featuring roasted pork or chicken on wondrously puffy bread swabbed with refrijoles and Mexican crema (a close relation of crème fraîche) — benefits from the presence of a sharp pico de gallo, while the quesadillas ($7.50), deep-fried half moons, like empanadas depend on a red salsa, waterier and hotter than its fresca cousin. Even the sauces you can’t see, such as the vinaigrette that dresses the chopped lettuce accompanying the taquitos ($7.50), add a charge. There is nothing quite like undressed lettuce, sitting there like a pile of hay in a barnyard, to let the air out of the balloon of anticipation, and yet this seemingly minor oversight is common practice in many Mexican restaurants. If nothing else, the kitchen crew at Regalito sweats the details.
The only sauce I didn’t respond to was the roping of red-pepper coulis across the enchiladas rojas ($7.50), flaps of corn tortillas also topped with white pipings of crema, like decorations on a birthday cake. The sauce’s rich rust red color belied its undersalting. On the other hand, the tortillas weren’t deep-fried — a small mercy.
Many of the small dishes, of bar and side food, are remarkably tasty: brilliant little pirouettes of flavor and texture you could easily choreograph into a light, leisurely meal or an extended cocktail hour. If you’ve ever saved the seeds from your Halloween pumpkin and later tried to roast them, only to meet with disappointment, you will find the pepitas ($2) — pumpkin seeds toasted with chili, salt, and lime — to be revelatory. Mostly they are tender and melt in the mouth without leaving behind that terrible cud of fiber.
Beans, of course, are available in a variety of guises. Among the possibilities are stewed pinto beans ($2.50), mild and meaty, and ejotes ($3.50) — green beans — sautéed with delicate ribbons of white onion and finished with a squeeze of lime. And while we are on the subject of limes: the house-made limeade ($1.95) is a phenomenon of dense sweet-sourness. If you’re tired of lemonade and you want a bit more excitement than the usual aguas frescas can provide — or you seek the grease-cutting power of citric acid — you will be happy with it. Think of it as a little gift to yourself — a regalito, as Spanish speakers say.<\!s>SFBG

REGALITO ROSTICERIA
Tues.–<\d>Fri., 11 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.; Sat., 9 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–<\d>8 p.m.
3481 18th St., SF
(415) 503-0650
www.regalitosf.com
Beer and wine
AE/DISC/MC/V
Pleasantly noisy
Wheelchair accessible

Breakthroughs

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS My new favorite superheroes are my old pal Mod the Pod and her social-working podner, the Kat Attack. Together they comb the streets and psyches of the Bay Area, looking for people to help, and in many cases that turns out to be me!
If I had a nickel for every time one or the other or both of them together have untied me from figurative railroad tracks or snatched me up in midair as I was falling into snaky pits or the abyss or … well, in this case, I was bummed about having been Just-Friended, yet again, the night before. Not a lot of sleep, and morning found the chicken farmer kind of crying into her coat collar down at Java Supreme.
My coffee was this close to being cold, literally, when out of nowhere our superheroes swooped down in their superminivan, and Earl Butter helped load me into the back. Wasting no time, Mod the Pod gave me a squirt of our favorite perfume, and the Kat Attack told a great joke in which a bear walks into a bar and says, “Gimme a shot and a … beer,” and the bartender goes, “Why the big pause?”
After about a beat, I laughed real hard and rolled on the floor, mostly because there aren’t any seats in the back of this van.
Earl Butter, still choking over my squirt of perfume, was groping around like a mime in a box, trying to open real windows that didn’t really open. (Note: this seemingly innocuous detail is what we writers call “foreshadowing,” so don’t forget to remember it later, OK?)
Well, Jelly’s was “closed for the season,” whatever that means. As if San Francisco has seasons. So we had to go to the Ramp. And we had to sit outside, even though it was practically raining and cold. All the inside tables were taken.
I was thinking: coffee. Hot coffee. But before I could say so, Mod the Pod ordered us four Bloody Marys, and I went with it, reasoning: she’s the social worker.
Sure enough, the sun came out! And food! Huevos rancheros ($10.95), a bacon avocado omelet ($9.75), bacon and eggs ($8.75 times two), and more Bloody Marys (way, way too much money to even think about) … and I told my sad story, and the Attack was her supersweet self, and Earl Butter made jokes and poked me, and the Pod, you know what Mod the Pod did, being a superhero?
She gave me some of her bacon.
To think, to think that earlier in the week I’d almost killed her! But that’s another story.
Did you hear? I shattered glass during my very first session of speech therapy! We were sitting at a long wooden table, Coach Freidenberg and me, and I was saying things into a microphone and she was monitoring my pitch on a computer screen, like the opposite of the limbo: how high can you go? My eyes were mostly closed, not in concentration, but because it was of course excruciating to hear my own voice being played back to me.
“Many men making much money in the month of May,” my voice said. “The murmuring of doves in the memorial elms.”
It was worse than excruciating. It was traumatic. It was psychologically damaging. Stanley Kubrick could prop toothpicks in my ears and make a movie out of it. I was this close to losing my will to live, and then I opened my eyes to see what time it was — because it seemed like an important moment to mark, the losing of one’s will to live.
But instead of seeing clocks I saw, down below on the sidewalk outside, loitering, looking for someone to save, guess who? Mod the Pod! Me, I thought. Save me.
To get her attention, I tried to open the window, which was one of those old out-opening ones with a crank. I wanted to say, “Lunch?” That’s all. And I turned the crank ever so slightly, but it broke. At 11:41 in the morning. The window, glass, shattering, crash, bang, boom, and time stood still for idiot chicken farmers and for pedestrians pushing perambulators filled with gurgling children, and for loitering superheroes.
Would she save the day? Could she? How? With bacon? This being the story of my life and my life being basically a comic book, time stands still for you too, dear reader, until next time, while foot-long shards of glass hang in thick air like enemy arrows.<\!s>SFBG

RAMP
Mon.–<\d>Fri., 11 a.m.–<\d>3 p.m.
Sat.–<\d>Sun., 8:30 a.m.–<\d>4 p.m.
855 China Basin, SF
(415) 621-2378
Full bar
AE/DISC/MC/V
Wheelchair accessible

The kitchen sink

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS There’s this thing in sports and therefore maybe life where you’re supposed to “act like you’ve been there before.” But how are you supposed to act like you’ve been there before if you’ve never been there? What if every single thing is news to you?
You strike out the big hitter, score a touchdown. Or let’s say you’re not into sports, so you, I don’t know, close the deal, or achieve the … thing. What do people do in life? Or what do you do if you’re me and the whole world is suddenly one big end zone? How am I supposed to not jump around and make a fool of myself, for example, while buying my first bra? At the tender age of 43.
Act like you’ve been here before, said the voice in my head. I’d never been to San Mateo, let alone Lula Lu Petite Lingerie shop.
“Do you know what size you are?” asked a voice outside my head. The only other customer had left and my tiny friend Sockywonk, the famous Godzilla artist, was already in the other fitting room, trying stuff on, so finally our friendly salesgirlperson could turn her attention to me.
I peed my pants.
Unfazed, Ms. Lula Lu whipped out her cloth tape measure. “Hold your arms out like this,” she said, making like an airplane.
I asked if I could do Superman instead because airplanes wig me out.
“Like this,” she said. The airplane. I closed my eyes and tried to think of it as doing Jesus, and that was a little better. Jesus being fitted for a bra … eerie look on His face, like He knows what’s being foreshadowed, oh shit.
Forty inches, that’s the circumference of My chest. The cup size, well, I don’t think there are enough As in the alphabet to describe my cup size. But I do have boobs, I swear.
And so does Sockywonk, and they’re beautiful, I’ve seen them. She can’t keep her hands off them, not even in restaurants. I don’t blame her.
Chemo starts tomorrow, and then, down the road, she loses one. She told me over noodles at Pho Little Saigon 3, across the street, that she’s not going to go for no chest reconstruction surgery. So this bra she’s deciding on in the next fitting room might be the last nonmastectomy one she ever buys.
The food was great! For some crazy reason it was Sockywonk’s first time eating Vietnamese. Barbecued chicken over rice vermicelli ($5.95) and a seafood combo soup with egg noodles ($5.95). We shared and slurped and swirled and it was my way of returning the favor, firstswise. Lula Lu being her idea.
Pho Little Saigon 3. You can’t miss it. It’s the only place in San Mateo that isn’t a sushi place.
When Sockywonk first found out about the cancer was around when I found out I was a witch, so naturally I promised to use all my spells and powers on her behalf, which means basically that I will write like I write and try to make her laugh and want to eat food. Those are my powers, and I think she might need them because chemo ain’t funny, or appetizing.
I love all my friends, and they’re just going to have to get used to that. But I feel like I have extra chambers in my heart right now for Sockywonk, and not just because she wanted to take me bra shopping after coming down with breast cancer. And not just because she’s a freaky and freakin’ amazing painter of monsterish beauty. And not just because she showed me her boobs, either, although of course that helped. It’s all of the above, plus she invited me last summer to that rooftop paella party I wrote about, which kind of kick-started me socially at a time when I needed a kick.
I met some of my other new friends, like Orange Pop 2, on that same roof, and these are Sockywonk’s people and they’re lively, weird, rockingly good-cooking folks. And she knows but I want her cancer to know too that it ain’t just chemo: we’re all coming after it with everything we’ve got. And I don’t mean good vibes and health food, either.
I mean, yeah, good vibes and health food — but I also mean beers and guitar solos and horn sections. Fresh eggs. Funky restaurant reviews. Funny dances, dessert, impossible hats, pretty bras, everything. Good books. Scary dogs. Strong coffee. Combat boots. Bicycle kicks. Everything, and the kitchen sink. The dirty dishes. Big slow curve balls and fast, freaky serves. SFBG
PHO LITTLE SAIGON 3
Daily, 10 a.m.– SFBG9 p.m.
147 E. Third Ave., San Mateo
(650) 685-6151
Takeout available
Beer
MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible

One word: plastics

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› paulr@sfbg.com
These days it is hard to be sure if the American way is war or plastic. Probably both, and since plastic is a petroleum product, and petroleum is a perennial occasion for war, we are probably not talking about a meaningful difference. Kevin Phillips describes the United States as the petroleum hegemon in his recent book American Theocracy (Viking, 2006), and the proof that he’s right is all around us. To the extent that we make anything at all anymore, we make it out of plastic: dashboards, lawn furniture, coffee mugs, picnic knives, even clothes. Why bother draping yourself in velvet or cotton when you can swaddle yourself in Lycra spandex or Gore-tex or some other synthetic fiber spun from oil and bearing a name that ends in x?
Although I make every effort to avoid wearing petroleum-based products, I concede that plastic has its uses. In particular, I favor the plastic wine cork, which (unlike the natural kind) poses no risk of tainting the wine with fungus, or even of just crumbling to dust, while preserving (as screw tops do not) the forms and rituals of uncorking. And I am pleased to report that plastic-cork technology seems to have improved sharply in just the past year or two.
Recently I popped open a couple of bottles — of Husch chenin blanc and Gundlach Bundschu merlot — and found I could not easily tell whether the corks were natural or plastic, at least not in the midst of holiday hubbub and bad lighting. I set the corks aside for further scrutiny in the morning sunshine. I actually ended up having to cut them open with my trusty Wüsthof trimming knife to make a final determination: a kind of wine-cork autopsy.
Both corks had the springiness of natural cork. Both had natural cork’s coloration, beige with darker specklings. The principal hint that the Husch cork was manufactured had to do with its near-perfection of shape. I was almost certain the Gundlach cork, too, was plastic, until I slashed it open and found the unmistakable flakiness of real bark inside. Another clue, unnoticed until some time later, was that the bottom of the Gundlach cork was stained red from the wine; the Husch cork, by contrast, was immaculate on both ends, though it did come from a bottle of white wine — so, not quite a fair fight, maybe.

East meets West Hollywood

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› paulr@sfbg.com
As you step into Roy’s Restaurant, you will notice the names of many cities stenciled in gold on the glass door — places where other Roy’s Restaurants can be found. You might feel as if you are sidling into one of the branches of a Parisian house of couture or the district office of some international brokerage firm. My eyes darted briefly to the end of the two-columned list, half expecting to see the reassuring words “FDIC insured.” I didn’t see them. But then, insurance, whether from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or some other gracious entity, isn’t really necessary at Roy’s. The place has found its feet here, and they are feet that move with a definite San Francisco style.
When our Roy’s opened six years ago, I walked through the doors into a fabulous inaugural dinner party and was disappointed. It was a lovely restaurant, yes, with innovative and well-prepared food conceived by Roy Yamaguchi, the founding chef and eponym — but it wasn’t in Hawaii, and the island magic seemed lost on the streets of San Francisco. The handful of Roy’s Restaurants in Hawaii are among the original ones, and they reflect the islands’ paradisial temper; life moves a little more slowly there, and people are less tense with the metropolitan urgencies. The Roy’s on the Big Island even has, for alfresco types, a kind of docklike deck extending over the water, and if you take a table there, you can practically hear the just-caught fish flopping around on the weathered timbers. The cooking reflects the immediacy and locality of the ingredients — seafood just minutes from the sea, beef from cattle raised on the Big Island — as well as the distinctive blend of influences, from Japan, Polynesia, and Europe, that give the Hawaiian Islands much of their gastronomic and cultural flavor.
Transport all this to a gritty and often chilly stretch of Mission Street and you have the restaurant equivalent of a heart transplant. There is no dock whose pilings are lapped by soft, warm waves, no purple sunset or palm fronds waving in a gentle breeze; there is just damp concrete and Muni buses. Even the interior decor is mostly in the urban vein: a huge exhibition kitchen and a honeycomb of wine bottles similar to the one at Bacar. If, like me, you remember Roy’s as part of the Hawaiian enchantment, you might well find the difference shocking and even disappointing. But this is unfair to our Roy’s, which in truth has become an excellent restaurant very much in the metro-California manner. If the long list of cities on Roy’s front door reveals that Yamaguchi has built an empire, it also tells us that, like the Roman Empire and its ecclesiastical successor, he has done so by adapting a core formula to local conditions, tastes, and expectations.
Roy’s core mostly has to do with the food, and its center of gravity (the menu’s term of art is “classic”) lies within the confines of the prix fixe, a $35, three-course dinner. The street signage describes the restaurant’s cooking as “Hawaiian fusion,” and for me the fusion isn’t so much East-meets-West as East–meets–West Hollywood. Yamaguchi cooked in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and he has a Wolfgang Puckish flair for boldness — grilled shrimp (part of the prix fixe first course) served with wasabi cocktail sauce, for instance, or a large, spherical crab cake ($15) mounted like a trophy on a pedestal of tinglingly spicy kimchi — sweet, hot, sour, and rich, all in the same bite.
The fixed-price dinners all open with the same appetizer trio, of which the shrimp is a constituent. Its companions include a single, but heavily meaty, baby back rib — tender as the night, Szechuan spiced and wood grilled — and a chef’s-choice item that might be a nicely crisped pot sticker. On the question of main dishes, choices open out. Here we find four possibilities, reflecting a world of influences. Large prawns in a tangle of pad thai — threads of carrot and daikon radish tossed with rice noodles — seem quite comfortably Southeast Asian, while charbroiled short ribs (of beef) are as tender and engagingly stringy as Grandma’s pot roast on a chilly Iowa night.
I was pleased that the hibachi-grilled salmon was wild king salmon presented on a molded pad of jasmine rice, though it seemed a bit late in the season for the fish to be local. The dish I found most representative of Roy’s local sensibility was a mahimahi filet, crusted with macadamia nut crumbs (a very Hawaiian touch), then sautéed and served with lobster-butter sauce (a rather French touch, I thought) and thick slices of new potatoes. The overall effect was less one of fusion than of California cooking. One minor note of discontent: the potatoes were undercooked.
Our friends, who are Roy’s devotees, urged upon us the melting hot chocolate soufflé, an innocuously cakey-looking object that was indeed filled with melted chocolate. At the touch of a fork, it oozed out like lava onto the plate. Less dramatic, but also texturally memorable, was a macadamia nut almond tart — a disk of one’s own, tasting a lot like pecan pie and topped with crumbles of macadamia nuts and a shift knob of vanilla bean ice cream. The tart was almost too sweet for me.
The devotees made a point of saying they prefer Roy’s to Boulevard. I am not sure I agree with them, but I understood their point, and perhaps the real news is that Roy’s and Boulevard can be mentioned in the same sentence these days — can be compared. The two, while neighbors, are very different sorts of restaurants, but each is a San Francisco restaurant, sprinkled with a bit of the local pixie dust. For Roy’s, member of a chain whose roots are halfway across the Pacific, that’s certainly some dust it’s glad to have. SFBG
ROY’S RESTAURANT
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.
Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–11 p.m.
575 Mission, SF
(415) 777-0277
www.roysrestaurant.com
Full bar
AE/DC/DISC/MC/V
Moderately noisy
Wheelchair accessible

Guardian Guide: Comfort food and joy

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>www.tablehopper.com

Wintertime has descended, which means it’s high time for wonderfully unhealthy, heavy eating (a food coma is as close to hibernation as you can get). The chilly nights practically demand that you keep yourself in extra cuddly form, but at least you can hide your pale, flabby body under coats and sweaters. As we know, San Francisco’s Victorian and Edwardian apartments can be hella drafty, so when your fingers feel like frozen Vienna sausages and you need a break from wrapping presents, here are some hot spots around town guaranteed to warm you — and fill you — right up.

TURTLE TOWER
Nothing gets you toasty like a big bowl of soup, so count your lucky stars there are Vietnamese pho joints all over this foggy, damp city. The finest of them all is Turtle Tower, where you get some of the best pho in the city, and it’s ridiculously cheap. At the first sign of a cold, get yourself a bowl of their pho ga (chicken noodle) soup — you’ll score a pore-cleaning blast of steam as you slurp the delicate hand-cut noodles. You can really sweat a cold out with a bowl of the beef soup, like the pho soc vang — and feel free to go nuts adding some spicy, sinus-clearing sriracha to it.
631 Larkin, SF. (415) 409-3333

SUZU NOODLE HOUSE
The Japanese have turned noodles into an art form (it’s right up there with bonsai), but it’s a shame so few eateries in our Japanophilic town give them much respect. One place that knows how to rock the ramen right is Suzu, nestled in the bottom of the Japantown Kinokuniya complex. It’s a small space, but the options for bowls of tender udon and silky ramen are varied and numerous. Some swear by the chicken kara-age (fried chicken), but the mabo ramen is the truly irresistible choice: tofu and ground pork in a somewhat spiced broth. Slurp.
1581 Webster, suite 105, SF. (415) 346-5083

MATTERHORN SWISS RESTAURANT
The only snow we tend to get is in the bathrooms at the clubs, but you can still make like Hans and Heidi and head over to this quirky chalet for a winter wonderland night of fondue. Take your pick from a variety of cheese and beef fondues and start dunking chunks of baguette (carbs and calories be damned). You can even choose extra sides for dipping, such as apple, sausage, and mushrooms. But a ticket to ride to this alpine fantasy comes at a price — not quite a Swiss bank withdrawal, but still: cheese fondue is $34 for two, beef is $44 for two, and sides are $4 each — and if you have your heart set on some chocolate fondue for dessert, you’ll pay $16 for two. (“Edelweiss” not included.)
2323 Van Ness, SF. (415) 885-6116

ABSINTHE BRASSERIE AND BAR
The French have it down with soupe a l’oignon gratinée. Really, what’s not to love about crusty bread, sweet golden-brown onions, chicken and beef broth, a whisper of brandy, fresh thyme, and melted Gruyère cheese? It’s the original meal in a cup, or bowl for that matter. And one of the better bowls of this wonder stuff can be had at Absinthe, working a très charmant brasserie environment to accompany a menu of Frenchie classics. Finish or, heck, bookend dinner with some primo cocktails from the bar, and you’ll leave toasty and a little toasted.
398 Hayes, SF. (415) 551-1590, www.absinthe.com

WALZWERK
The Germans practically invented hefty food, and if there is ever a time to scarf down some schnitzel or sauerbraten, these cold-ass months are it. Two East Berlin lasses run this homey neighborhood joint and will ensure you are well fed without totally lightening your wallet (entrées clock in at less than $15). And vegetarians, achtung! Now is the time in Sprockets when you eat, since there are a rather tasty vegetarian schnitzel and a meatless cabbage roulade on the menu, both served in generous portions with mashed potatoes. Bonus: this place is always warm and packed with friendly bodies, partially due to the seriously legit beers on tap. Prost!
381 S. Van Ness, SF. (415) 551-7181, www.walzwerk.com

BAR CRUDO
Ahhhhh, chowdah. There’s a reason anglers are able to keep fueled and warm on the stuff — it’s hot, filling, and hearty, and the boys at Bar Crudo are happy to make sure you leave feeling like a nautical warrior, even if you work for Google. This rich and savory chowder has fresh clams, cod, squid, and potato, plus some hunky hunks of smoky bacon, all in a cream-loaded broth that makes you grateful you’re not lactose intolerant. Order up an ale from the extensive beer list, and you’ll be calling yourself Long John Silver in no time. Oh, wait, he was a pirate.
603 Bush, SF. (415) 956-0396, www.barcrudo.com

POLENG LOUNGE
So your socks are soggy and your nose is runny? Let’s pretend you’re maxing and relaxing at a balmy locale instead. Poleng’s tropical feel, complete with batik, a water wall, and other island-evocative decor, should help. And for some weird reason, it can also feel quite stuffy, so the resort fantasy isn’t too far-fetched. Thanks to the talented Filipino chef, you can feast on an array of Asian small plates that are as delish as they are affordable, such as fried chicken adobo wings, lumpia Shanghai, and garlic crab noodles. Don’t miss the tea service, which is almost as effective as self-warming seats in a Saab.
1751 Fulton, SF. (415) 441-1751, www.polenglounge.com

TADICH GRILL
San Franciscans know wintertime is all about Dungeness crab. And when there’s crab, there’s a bowl of the quintessential San Francisco treat out there with your name on it. Not Rice-A-Roni, friend — cioppino. Belly up to the counter at Tadich, and you’ll get a big steaming bowl of clams, prawns, scallops, bay shrimp, crabmeat, and white fish, with garlic bread on the side. You can also warm up with a bowl of its various chowders or some Chesapeake Bay oyster stew. For those who have never had a Tadich experience, just know the long-standing waiters here are about as salty as your Saltine cracker, so don’t try any funny stuff, kid.
240 California, SF. (415) 391-1849

LUNA PARK
Luna Park is already a favorite of comfort food junkies for its warm goat cheese fondue, oven-baked mac ’n’ cheese with broccoli and applewood-smoked ham, and other stick-to-your ribs savories for less than $20. But this holiday it’s time to release your inner kid, the nice one who wants to decorate cookies (not the bad one who throws rocks)! From Dec. 10 to 25, you can come in and decorate your own gingerbread man and Christmas tree cookie with all kinds of candies and toppings. You can also warm up like an adult with a mug of Santa’s Little Helper, Luna Park’s brandy- or whiskey-spiked eggnog. It comes with a bar of dark chocolate, perfect for stirring and eating naturally.
694 Valencia, SF. (415) 553-8584, www.lunaparksf.com

ELLA’S RESTAURANT
This friendly little eatery is well-known around town for its killer brunch, but a lot of people are just learning about its ridiculously affordable dinners too, thanks to the new owners. Chow down on homey neoclassical American faves such as slow-roasted lamb shank, roasted free-range chicken, and Shiraz-braised short ribs, with not a single dish more than $16 in that little roundup (and you get some fab veggie sides). Any place that serves chicken potpie is a champ, but how about chicken hash, for dinner? Uh, yeah, bring it on. Fill up on the homemade bread too.
500 Presidio, SF. (415) 441-2238, www.ellassanfrancisco.com

KOKKARI AND TERZO
Most San Francisco fireplaces have been converted into receptacles to store crappy gas heaters, but there are a couple spiffy restaurants around town that understand the importance of a good, crackling fire. Nothing quite tops the fireplace at Kokkari, which does double duty as a rotisserie for various meat treats such as spring lamb, whole Red Wattle pig, duck, goose, and goat. (No Duraflame here.) Meanwhile, newcomer Terzo has a cozy hearth that complements its slick and attractive space; its extensive menu of Mediterranean and seasonal small plates supplies some old-world hominess.
Kokkari, 200 Jackson, SF. (415) 981-0983, www.kokkari.com; Terzo, 3011 Steiner, SF. (415) 441-3200, www.terzosf.com

WOODWARD’S GARDEN
A steamy room isn’t normally considered an asset, but when it’s nippy out, nothing quite beats the front room of Woodward’s Garden for snuggly respite. The open kitchen cranks up the ambient temperature and sends out seasonal and substantial dishes such as pork chops, lamb shanks, and homemade ravioli. Depending on what’s cookin’, you also might walk out smelling a little smoky, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.
1700 Mission, SF. (415) 621-7122, www.woodwardsgarden.com

Starch Control

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› paulr@sfbg.com
While we wait to be instructed on the lessons of Iraq by James A. Baker III — the Bush family consigliere assigned the Mosaic task of leading us forth from the Mesopotamian desert — let us consider the lessons of the Thanksgiving meal just past.
The bane of all holiday cooking is starch, and the Thanksgiving meal is the apotheosis of holiday cooking. Therefore: Thanksgiving = starch. You have your mashed potatoes, your bread stuffing, your bread, your pie crusts. By some point late in the afternoon or early in the evening, you can’t believe you ate the whole thing.
How, then, to curb starch without being a killjoy? Other holiday meals will require other answers, but at Thanksgiving this year at our table, the answer was to serve succotash — the ancient Indian dish of corn and beans — instead of potatoes and stuffing. There were a few bleats about tradition, but the general feeling seemed to be that the succotash was wonderfully tasty and much less … stuffing. It was also a tip of the cap to the Indians and the immeasurable sorrows that overtook them. Thanksgiving really ought to be consecrated in their memory and honor; we need not be self-flagelutf8g or ostentatiously guilty to recognize that but for their horrendous loss, most of us would not be here. And we do right by them and ourselves, it seems to me, when we incorporate bits and pieces of Indian life into our own evolving traditions while remembering where they came from and what they meant. If we don’t do it, no one will.
As for the current fashion of brining the turkey: bah and humbug, I would say. My far simpler and less messy alternative is to rub the bird the day before with a couple tablespoons of kosher salt and a couple more of herbes de Provence. Before roasting, work some softened sweet butter and a few smashed garlic cloves under the skin at the breast, back, and legs. Roast breast side up in a hot (450 degrees) preheated oven for about 25 minutes, until the skin is golden. Flip the turkey over and reduce the heat to 350 degrees. Keep turning the bird every 30 minutes or so and allow about nine minutes per pound. No stuffing, of course, and let the turkey rest under aluminum foil before serving.

Unmoored

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CHEAP EATS I should say a few words about Weird Fish. Not that I didn’t thoroughly exhaust the topic in last week’s restaurant review, but because it’s just so fun to say the name of the place. Weird Fish.
Weird Fish is a new nice little Mission-y restaurant at Mission and 18th Street. On the basis of its great name alone, it’s my new favorite restaurant. The food was good too, but if I tell you how small the plates were, my faithful fans will all write to me and say, like they did when I wrote about Café Gratitude, “Come on! Be true to your roots, man.”
I think roots are great, for trees and, you know, Christians and such. But what can I say? In addition to not having a spiritual bone in my body or bark or branches, I don’t eat like I used to. I just don’t. I don’t anything like I used to.
Now, I know not everyone reads these things as meticulously as I right them (yes, that’s a joke), but I would think by now it would be clear that I’ve come entirely unhinged. I don’t have no roots, man. I live and lie down entirely on top of my planet. And I just love Weird Fish. To eat at and to say.
I met a guy at a party who had just eaten dinner at Weird Fish, and our mutual friend, who was introducing us, said, “Dani just wrote a review of Weird Fish.”
And I said, being a brilliant conversationalist, “Mm-hmm, yes, that’s right, I did.” Or something to that effect. Then I suavely spilled a small sip of wine down my chest and asked, to secure the continuation of our acquaintance, “Wha’d-ya-get?”
“Fish and chips.”
I nodded thoughtfully, as if to say, “Ah, fish and chips,” but for some reason I didn’t say anything. I was trying to remember what I’d had at Weird Fish. Blackened trout? Mango salsa?
Oh, it was yummy, whatever it was, but a lot of good that did me now.
After an awkward silence, my new friend handed me a napkin and while I dabbed at my chest, he became involved in a passionate discussion with our introducer about teaching and I think maybe pedagogy (depending what that word means).
I turned to the woman on the other side of me and engaged her on the topic of poop.
Yes, the dates are rolling in! I have to have a calendar now to keep it all straight — which days I’m doing what with whom and eating where with what. Soon I might have to get a watch or a cell phone. Anything is possible, life remains interesting, love flows. And while you’re shuddering at the thought, let me remind you that I use the word date loosely and love even looselier and that in any case my new pattern is to fall for wonderful, fascinating folks who are ultimately unavailable to me, at least in any kind of horizontal fashion. Luckily, I love to kiss people standing up, preferable with my back pressed against a wall.
So, OK, so: what does this tell me about me, my initial relationship to my overwhelmed, unavailable mom, who passed me off to an aunt and uncle while she cranked out her fifth, sixth, seventh kids? Being now a self-aware, psychologically-minded, in-therapy type of person, I have to think about these things. But because I am also still very much a fool, I get to “persist in my folly” — hooray! — and continue to chase after rainbows and windmills in the meantime. I have permission. From Blake and Cervantes!
I’m not giving up just yet on the queer wimmins, cause I just love the bejesus out of them, whether they want to ever git me nekkid or not. My luck, on that front, may well change. To ensure it doesn’t, I think I’ll switch my focus back to straight men. Speaking of windmills. Yes, question?
Yes. Thank you. So why, when presented with the opportunity the other night to put your weird fishy body into a hot tub with a sweet straight stoned dude who people said was flirting with you … why did you wash dishes instead and then drive the dark, winding drive home? Hmm?
That’s a very good question, and in fact, I’m still bashing my head into the wall over it. If a fool persists in her folly, as the saying says, she shall become wise. Like all good philosophies, this raises more questions than it answers. Mainly: when?<\!s>SFBG
WEIRD FISH
Sun.–<\d>Thurs., 9 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.; Fri.–<\d>Sat., 9 a.m.–<\d>midnight
2193 Mission, SF
(415) 863-4744
Takeout available
No alcohol
D/MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible

The salt point

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As a partisan of salt, I could hardly help but love a restaurant called Salt House, and I did — and do — but … how funny that there apparently are no saltshakers at the bar. I was casting about for one, wanting to salt something up a little while waiting for someone to arrive, but I had to settle instead for pouring myself more water from the glass jugs the staff set out for your very own. Water is nice, of course, but sometimes only salt will do.
Salt House is the latest project from the brothers Rosenthal, Mitchell and Steven, who for the last decade or so have run the kitchen show (and I mean this quite literally) at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio, where the exhibition kitchen is of the capital-E sort. The first stage of the Rosenthals’ exit strategy involved opening their own restaurant, Town Hall, in an old SoMa building a few years ago. Salt House is their Chapter Two and coincides, more or less, with the end of their reign at Postrio.
Like Town Hall (which is just around the corner), Salt House has been installed on the ground floor of a venerable structure, a century-old building that used to be a printing plant. The restaurant’s street-front space is boxy, fairly narrow, and deep — like a garage bay for an 18-wheeler, if there are such bays. In keeping with SoMa’s postindustrial fashionability, there are exposed wood beams (including a kind of indoor arbor, sans greenery, near the host’s station) and exposed brick, along with a line of light fixtures that look like barrels beginning to explode above the dining room and neoquaint incandescent bulbs dangling over the zinc bar.
Mostly, though, I noticed the windows, huge multiglazed modern marvels that admit oceans of light while giving the entire redo a distinctly sleek, Mies van der Rohe cast. If you want to know if an old building has been rehabbed, look at the windows; if you see a certain waviness, like heat rising from pavement on a hot day, you are probably looking at original window glass and an unrehabbed building. If you see gleaming perfection, a sheen like the undisturbed surface of a pond, you are looking at renovation money, and perhaps at Salt House.
The food might be called California pub food, but it is pub food of a high order. As at Postrio, the Rosenthals have orchestrated a brass band of big flavors. Even the little bar snacks are vivid: the house-made “pot o’ pickles” ($5) — an array of vegetables including cauliflower, baby carrots, pearl onions, and wax beans — jumps with a vinegar charge in its fist-sized crock; and the mixed nuts ($5) — almonds, pistachios, a cast of thousands — are roasted with one of life’s great improbables, truffle honey, along with sea salt. (This was the dish I was trying to salt up at the bar, incidentally. The sea salt had settled at the bottom of the crock, a fact we discovered only when the crock was nearly empty.)
Nearly every dish has some flavor kazoo. In the poutine ($7 at dinner, $10 at lunch), basically a plate of potato chips dribbled with short-rib gravy, it’s the layer of gorgonzola, which not only gives a textural effect like that of nachos but adds a tremendous charge of pungency up the nose. In the shellfish stew ($19), mainly mussels and shrimp, it’s a broth infused with saffron aioli. In the pizzalike preserved tomato tart ($11), it’s the intensity of the preserved tomatoes — along with the squares of luxuriously buttery pastry crust they sit on. In the chili-roasted oysters ($13), it’s the fiery chili sauce, which, it must be said, makes the dish a little top-heavy.
The watchword for fish is crispy. This cannot be a bad thing. A mackerel filet ($9) wears a waistcoat of golden panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs), while pan-roasted skate wing ($24) gets a nice searing on both sides before being plated with roasted, quartered brussels sprouts, chunks of salsify, and dabs of a tarragon salsa. Skate wing, with its corrugated texture, is one of the most interesting fish to eat — getting the last of the flesh away from the bone is like cleaning stray hairs from a comb — and yet we should not be eating it. Too late I learned from Seafood Watch that skate are seriously endangered and should be avoided. Like sharks, they reproduce slowly, and they are taken through the highly destructive method of trawling. (Mackerel are in the “best” category, but that was just a lucky stab for us.)
I would be glad to learn that skate had been replaced on the menu by petrale sole or some other type of local, floundery fish that might not be as fascinatingly ribbed but isn’t teetering on the brink, either. The Rosenthals are eminences here; if they set a good and conspicuous example, others will follow. It would be a great help to ordinary diners if restaurants simply refused to buy and serve any seafood whose populations aren’t in sustainable shape (per Seafood Watch or some similar authority) and indicated as much on their menus — maybe with a smiling or dancing fish icon?
Sundries: desserts ($7) are mostly in the American grain, including a lewdly moist warm chocolate Bundt cake and some nostalgia-laced butter pecan ice cream, presented in two scoops. The house-blend wines, including a fruity-floral white, are available on tap (from steel barrels) and are presented in several sizes of nifty apothecary bottles, near relations of the water jugs and perhaps of the saltshakers, if they ever come to pass.<\!s>SFBG
SALT HOUSE
Mon.–<\d>Fri., 11:30–<\d>1 a.m.; Sat., 5 p.m.–<\d>1:30 a.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.–<\d>midnight
545 Mission, SF
(415) 543-8900
Full bar
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible

Full noodle frontity

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS THE CHICKEN FARMER IS HOT. It took several tries to get the big block letters to stick, but finally I had stated my case — in homemade egg noodles inside the lid of an egg carton, where normally you might expect to read nutritional facts about eggs.
Where normally the eggs would go, I put 12 pretty stones.
The Chicken Farmer is not normal. One of her favorite things to do is to lie face down in the fog for hours at Sonoma beaches, the ones with tiny stones instead of sand, and sift through the pretty colors, taking home a handful of favorites. I’ve been doing this for years and years. Now I have someone sort of odd to give some to.
I was coming to the city to play soccer, and then I had a date with this new Nancy Drew I’ve been trying to tell you about. Instead of an apple or flower or poem or butt of a burrito, I was going to present her with this … piece? Well, Saturday morning arts and crafts project. Well … egg carton.
She would think they were eggs, because that’s what I usually give people instead of flowers, and then she would notice it was too light and kind of rattly, like beans or something, and with a quizzically delicious smile forming on her lips — it was all mapped out in my mind — she would slowly open the carton, know that I was hot, and have to take my clothes off.
I sure do love dating! You can go into a thing with no real expectations, in fact knowing — knowing — with like 99.9 percent accuracy, that that’s not going to happen, not tonight, no way. And yet still you will bathe more carefully, shave more closely, fantasize more prayerfully, and put on your prettiest panties, which you washed in the sink and dried over the wood stove just for the …
Uh-oh … or is this just me?
Anyway, for now I carefully load in to the passenger seat of my pick-up truck this precious cargo, this key to my new improved love life and future nudity, making a mental note not to drive as hard as usual. I consider buckling the carton in and even go so far as to wish I had a child’s safety seat for it.
Already running late for soccer, I linger, close the lid and open it. No damage — the homemade letters will hang on for the ride, I think. THE CHICKEN FARMER IS HOT.
Then, wait …
The chicken farmer is hot? The chicken farmer?
In the movie version of my life (starring Penelope Cruz or OK, Holly Hunter or OK, OK, Crispen Glover in drag), the soundtrack screeches to a stop and all of a sudden everything is wrong. It’s basics! It’s Dating 101! You can’t give someone something saying, explicitly, that you’re hot. It has to say that they’re hot.
She knows I’m hot. She already said so weeks ago when she first found out I made my own pasta. “That’s so hot,” she said. It’s like I was answering, albeit in fettucini, with, “You’re so right. I’m hot.” Instead of “Baby, you. You’re hot! I’m just Crispen Glover. In drag.”
In real life I ran back into my shack and fumbled for the phone. There was no time for a revision, and the actual eggs in the actual carton tangled with my cleats in the back of the truck were already earmarked for another friend whose birthday was on Sunday. “Pick up pick up be home be home,” I chanted into the receiver.
“Hello?” said Moonpie, my oldest girlfriend in the world and most trusted romantic adviser.
In 10 seconds and 1,250 words I stated (or spat) the dilemma of my nature (or vice versa) and asked more slowly, in conclusion, “Can I give this egg carton to her? What do you think?”
“I think it’s funny,” she said.
“Yes.” Right: funny. I knew that and took a breath. “But,” I asked, “at my expense?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Excellent,” I said, and I gave it to her. I did.
Well … back to the drawing board, or rolling pin, for the chicken farmer. Nobody took any clothes off, let alone mine, but it was a wonderful date! Sean Dorsey’s Outsider Chronicles was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. (He dances for the most part to words!) And, oh yeah, Ms. Drew and I have a new favorite restaurant. SFBG
WEIRD FISH
Sun.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–midnight
2193 Mission, SF
(415) 863-4744
Takeout available
No alcohol
D/MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible

Over easy

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Changing public consciousness is an inglorious task that seems to involve a great deal of repetition. There is an art to repetition, to saying the same thing over and over without boring or infuriating people or losing one’s patience at their benightedness and resorting to jeremiads. But observation suggests that this branch of the suasive arts is, in our drink-Bud-or-we’ll-kill-you culture, at least slightly in eclipse.
Still, despite the rather dismal state of the art and the basic human resistance to change — our preferred mode of advance is evolutionary not revolutionary, as science instructs us — change does appear, sometimes with notable swiftness. The imperilment of the world’s fish, for instance, is a matter lately ascendant in the global consciousness. (Yes, I know I have mentioned this glum subject before — artfully, I hope.) In Honolulu on Nov. 10, I picked up a copy of the local paper, the Advertiser, to find that the op-ed page carried both an editorial calling for “aggressive management” by Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources of the state’s marine life — in particular, for enhanced protection of the bottom-dwelling and vulnerable species opakapaka and onaga — and an opinion piece (by Bruce Anderson, president of the Oceanic Institute) arguing that aquaculture, if responsibly practiced, can ease human pressure on the seas as a source of food. Research and innovation are critical here.
I was pleased, though not surprised, to find major Hawaiian media paying serious attention to the plight of fisheries locally and around the world. I was also pleased — and surprised — to find that awareness of the issue has seeped to deeper levels. While on a brief visit to a friend recovering from surgery at the Towers (the continuum-of-care facility on Cathedral Hill), I glanced at a menu in one of the dining rooms and saw on offer mahimahi, ling cod, and swordfish — all line-caught, the first and last in Hawaiian waters. There are some questions with all of these fish, and I would not give the menu a perfect ecoscore, since apart from everything else, “line-caught” is ambiguous. Some lines are better than others. Still, it was evident that even in some institutional kitchens, care is now being taken that might not have been taken five years ago. There must be more than a few people in the Towers asking an artful question or two about the food they’re being served.

The final frontier

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Regrets? I’ve had a few. At the top of the list is that, due to circumstances beyond our control, I will never get to see Beethoven play the piano — unless we have misunderstood the time-space continuum. This seems more likely than not, given the reliable arrogance of human science, and I do retain a shred of hope.
The also-rans run well behind. I do not expect my idea for a sport-tuned, high-performance Prius — the Priapus, a Prius for men! — to make it onto a Toyota production line any time soon, alas and alack. And I am sorry I can’t remember what many areas of the city looked like a decade ago, before the Great Bulldozing. What was it like to sail down the Third Street corridor? I remember doing it at least once, in the middle 1990s, on a mission to take some moribund computer equipment to a recycling facility near the foot of 23rd Street. There was a certain ominous, video-game facelessness to the buildings, and I was glad when the errand was over.
As for restaurants: once you’d passed south of 16th Street, where 42° sat at the back of the rather dingy Esprit Center (since demolished), you were in a different world. You had passed through border control, a kind of Checkpoint Charlie of culture, and you were on your own. But … change was not far off. Soon the development tide would flow south: there would be a new baseball park, a new UCSF campus, a new Muni light-rail line. And the neighborhood’s obvious virtues — nearness to the city center and the bay, flat streets, warm weather, gorgeous old industrial buildings (many of brick), sweeping views — would begin to be noticed.
Today, Third Street is lined with new live-work and other lofty-looking buildings, and people must be living and working in them (or working nearby), because if you step into the New Spot, a new spot serving Mexican and Salvadoran food, you are likely to run into a wall of these people, at least if it’s around lunchtime on a weekday. They all look to be about 30 years old, give or take, and are dressed with that studied scruffiness I associate with the late, great dot-com boom. Are we now surfing some wave in the space-time continuum back to 1999? Certainly, the traffic and parking situations are horrendous in the area, as they were elsewhere in the city at the close of the last millennium — and the crush is all the more shocking in what I had long thought to be a kind of ghost town, a deserted neighborhood that was fun to bike through on a hot autumn Saturday.
The New Spot is to Salvadoran and Mexican cooking what Chutney (on lower Nob Hill) is to Indian and Pakistani cooking. The look is minimalist clean, prices are low, and the food is fresh and meticulously prepared. My only cavil on freshness concerns the chips, which twice seemed stale to me, though the spicy-smooth red salsa ($1.40 for a half pint, if you want or need that much) covered up much of the weariness. The guacamole ($2.25) is good too, though I would have liked bigger avocado chunks and maybe a bit less lime juice.
The Salvadoran-style dishes dominate the menu and include those old standbys, pupusas (just $1.60 each, but you have to order at least two). These are disks like small pita breads, and they can be stuffed in a variety of meaty and meatless ways. We found the queso con frijoles version — with a good packing of refried beans and oozy queso blanco — to do very nicely, especially with some pico de gallo and shredded, pickled cabbage (curtido) on the side.
Pasteles ($5.50 for a plate of three) turned out to be lightly deep-fried corn pies filled with more queso. (I’d ordered chicken but was pleased with the cheese.) Generally, I stay out of the deep-fried end of the pool, but these pasteles were of a delicate crispness that made me think of golden clouds. The menu lists chile relleno ($7.50) — a fire-roasted poblano stuffed with cheese (or choice of meat) and served with salsa, beans, and rice — as a Salvadoran specialty, and perhaps that’s because it isn’t dipped in batter and fried, as in the more typical preparation you find in Mexican restaurants around town.
The fish tacos ($3.15) are exemplary. I always try a place’s fish tacos, since the range of possible outcomes is so great. Good ones are unforgettable; bad ones are … forgettable. Bland, usually. The New Spot’s menu doesn’t say what kind of fish is used — some kind of cod or pollack, I would guess, or possibly tilapia, judging from the bits of soft, white flesh — but the grill imparts some appealing smoke, and the crispy tacos are filled out with shredded lettuce (instead of the more usual shredded cabbage), diced tomato, refrijoles, salsa, and guacamole. Like a regular taco, really, and the better for it.
The food, it must be said, doesn’t exactly fly out of the kitchen, in part because the dishes are made to order and also because the crunch-time crowds are thick. At the moment, alternatives in the neighborhood are few. But the New Spot is flanked by signs of yesterday and tomorrow; on one side is a faded old-school Chinese restaurant on its way out, while on the other is a café, Sundance Coffee, that could easily be associated with a museum of modern art. The times, they are a-changin’. SFBG
NEW SPOT
Mon.–Fri., 6 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sat., 7 a.m.–5 p.m.
632 20th St., SF
(415) 558-0556
No alcohol
AE/MC/V
Noisy if busy
Wheelchair accessible

Time changes

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS In honor of my French sister’s birthday I ordered a chicken pesto crepe with fromage and how-you-say, toasted almonds, hold the mushrooms ($8.50). It was eight in the morning.
The waitressperson looked at her watch.
“Is it too early for crepes?” I asked. “Do I need to get an omelet?”
She looked at her watch again, shrugged, looked toward the kitchen. It was five in the afternoon in France, but luckily I didn’t need to argue this point, because she let me have my crepe, pesto and all.
Earl Butter wasn’t eating. I’d offered to buy him something, but he just wanted coffee. I don’t know why he wasn’t hungry, but I do know (because sometimes I sleep in his closet) that he wakes up at four in the morning, has breakfast, and then goes back to sleep. Anyway, he did have a cup of coffee and a lot to say while I was chewing things over.
“Colma has more dead people in it than live people,” he said.
“Is that why you always want to go there for breakfast?” I said.
“Not necessarily,” he said. “I just like being in cars.”
I offered him a taste of my crepe, which was fantastic, because you can’t go wrong with chicken and pesto and feta, I think it was.
“Good,” he said, and he said it again after I offered him a taste of the potatoes, which were fantastic. They were cooked in some kind of a ramekin and then plopped onto the plate, crispy outside and creamy underneath. Fantastic.
So good that 10 days later when I woke up in Earl Butter’s closet again, needing something to eat, I said, “What about that place?”
“In Colma?”
“No,” I said. “On Divis. With the upside-down potatoes. My new favorite restaurant.”
“With the crepes?”
Yes. It came to me: the Bean Bag Café. I remembered because when I sleep in Earl Butter’s closet, I’m sleeping on beanbags, and my body I think retains the information. This doesn’t sound comfortable, I know, but these are my favorite nights’ sleep. Closets are dark, and my chickens have me trained to spring out of bed at the first creak of daylight, no matter where in the world I am.
Except in Earl Butter’s closet, where daylight dares not tread, I get to sleep in, and as a result it was closer to lunchtime than breakfast by the time we were in the Bean Bag, placing our order. Baja omelet for him ($7.50), La Mancha omelet for me ($8.50).
Again: fantastic! Well, mine was, because it had grilled chicken, sun-dried tomatoes, green onions, and provolone, hold the mushrooms. Earl’s Baja, which I didn’t taste and didn’t want to, featured soy chorizo with avocado, black beans, salsa, and sour cream. I don’t think he saw the word soy before he ordered and was expecting the real thing.
So he was disappointed about that and disappointed because this time there were people there. It was late morning on a Sunday. We got the last open table, in the middle of the café. There’s also a kind of a closed-in patio and a couple tables out on the sidewalk.
“Turn around,” Earl Butter said, with a scowl, halfway through our meal.
I turned around, and there was a line winding out the door.
“You didn’t tell me you were bringing me where people were,” he said.
To make it up to him, I washed about a month’s worth of Earl’s dishes, swept his kitchen floor, took the garbage out, then drove him to West Oakland, and put him in a car with my brother, so now, while I’m writing this, he’s somewhere in Nevada or Utah or Wyoming, where people aren’t. He gets to spend Thanksgiving with my family, in Ohio. And I get to cook in his clean kitchen, sleep in his big bed if I want, and go to Guerneville and play cards with Choo-Choo and Ding-a-Ling-a-Ling and all their fabulous friends.
I’ll probably also go back to the Bean Bag at least once, because I do love their potatoes and people and because besides eggs and crepes they also have burgers, bagels, smoothies, salads, and sandwiches with names that make me feel at home: Sonoma, Petaluma, Bodega Bay …
What are you doing for Thanksgiving? SFBG
BEAN BAG CAFÉ
Mon.–Fri., 7 a.m.–9 p.m.;
Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–9 p.m.
601 Divisadero, SF
(415) 563-3634
Takeout available
Beer
No credit cards
Quiet/bustling
Wheelchair accessible

Turkey in the sky

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Airline food was a rich lode of material for jokery — until there was no more airline food. In the wake of Sept. 11 and apparently as part of the airline industry’s determination to make air travel as uncivilized and distressing an experience as possible, meal services were replaced by the peddling — cash only, please, and exact change preferred — of boxed junk: cookies, crackers, Velveeta spread, and all of the other industrial, hyperprocessed, sclerosis-inducing unfood that has made America the land of the fat.
I was stunned, then, on a recent Hawaiian Airlines flight to Honolulu, to be presented with not only an actual meal — free! — but a choice of meals. A turkey croissant sandwich, a bag of chips, an oatmeal cookie: it wasn’t much, but it wasn’t bad, either, and I was beyond thankful to have it. Although flying is an ordeal at best, it is slightly less so when one’s stomach isn’t growling for hours on end and one isn’t constantly rummaging through one’s carry-on bag for a blackened banana or a fistful of Trader Joe’s dried cherries or salty pistachio nuts while wondering if one has enough cash to buy one of those $9 airport wraps when one lands, and how many unbearable moments hence will that be?
If food is civilization, in some basic way, what does that make the deliberate withholding of food from or the hawking of barely edible dreck to a captive and immiserated population? Insulting is one word that springs to mind; abusive is another. In recent years all of corporate America, not to mention the Bush government, seems to have been on a savage quest to find out just how much mistreatment the subject population would accept and how much said population would pay to be mistreated. And the answer seemed to be, on both counts, a lot, at least until the Nov. 7 elections, when the word Enough! at last rang across the land. Even I heard it, and I was in Hawaii, not at all hypoglycemic despite the five-hour flight and the usual where-is-the-luggage circus. A big aloha (sayonara version) to George and the gang back in DC, and an even bigger mahalo to the voters of America, who finally resisted the temptation to hit the snooze bar yet one more time.

Where the buffalo roam

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Many hamburger places are at some pains to keep you from seeing, or wondering, exactly what’s going into — as opposed to on top of — your burger. So I was rather surprised to find, at Bullshead Restaurant (a West Portal spot that recently opened a branch in the Castro), a glass display case near the entryway, laid out with various high-end-looking cuts of meat along with a selection of preshaped burger patties, as at a butcher’s shop.
“Is this stuff for sale?” I asked.
A staffer behind the counter nodded.
“Even the buffalo burgers?”
“Yes. They’re $10.95 a pound,” she said. She pointed out the buffalo burgers in the case, where they lurked in the back, behind their beef counterparts, and were distinguishable from same by a darker color, almost the purplish shade of a bruise, as were the strip and loin steaks. My first thought was that $10.95 per pound is a little steep for hamburger, even if beautifully formed into grill-ready patties, but on the other hand it’s roughly comparable to the tariff for Boca Burgers, the excellent poseurs made of soy.
Buffalo meat is also supposed to be better for you than beef: lower in calories and cholesterol, higher in protein. The restaurant’s documentation contends that eating it contributed to the well-being and longevity of the various tribes of Plains Indians, for whom the animal was an important source of food. Even if the health factor is a wash, we should still cast a kindly eye on buffalo meat: the buffalo is an American original, its return from near-extinction is a modest but real ecological triumph, and the burgers made from its flesh are, quite frankly, superior to beef burgers, at least at Bullshead.
They are also a little more expensive, on the order of a buck to a buck and a quarter per order, depending on the dosage of meat you want. (You choose between third- and half-pound allotments, and your options include, in addition to buffalo and beef, organic beef and turkey.) But they are dressed just like their more plebeian siblings, in garb that ranges from a simple slice of cheese (American, Swiss, cheddar, jack, or mozzarella) to more elaborate combinations involving mushrooms, bacon, blue cheese, and avocado. There is even a Hawaiian burger, topped with pineapple rings — shades, for some of us, of the dread Hawaiian pizza from undergraduate days.
But let us first consider the terrain as it might appear to a vegetarian or someone who just isn’t that hungry. Our party one evening included such a person, and her eye was first drawn to the ocean burger, where said eye remained until we were told the fish was deep-fried. So long, see you tomorrow. That left the garden burger ($8.95), which the menu card laconically described as a “grilled vegetarian patty” with slices of avocado and a sauté of mushrooms and onions. I was not feeling too optimistic in this matter, fearing that we would be served one of those disks of mashed legumes with bits of carrot and peas and a few sprouts shooting forth like strands of uncombable hair. But the vegetarian patty turned out to be quite nearly fantastic, of plausibly burgerish texture and well seasoned with cumin and just enough cayenne pepper to be interesting. The avocado and sauté were fine, and the side of coleslaw needed only some salt to pass muster.
The pepper jack buffalo burger ($9.75 for a one-third-pound edition) didn’t carry much of a pepper charge — a pity, since pepper jack cheese is a lively variant of a stolid old standby. But the meat was so luxurious it did not matter: it was intensely flavored without being greasy and had been cooked medium rare, as ordered, with a center rosy as a child’s cheeks on a bright winter morn. The organic-beef version (also $9.75 for one third of a pound) was creditable, but it did not have quite the intensity of flavor or the moistness.
We tried the latter — along with an excellent pastrami sandwich ($7.95) served with commendable fries — at the Castro location, which opened recently in one of those upstairs-downstairs buildings across the street from the Cala Market. Previously there had been several generations of Italian restaurants in the split-level space, and a canopy of inverted wine goblets still hangs like a flock of glass bats on a rack above the bar on the main floor. The aura is sunny and pleasant, with an unobstructed view of street traffic (which is ceaseless and stares right back at you), but it doesn’t feel like a place that serves buffalo wings and buffalo burgers, and it doesn’t look anything like its West Portal sibling.
“Don’t you feel like we’re at a restaurant someplace in the Midwest?” one of my companions said apropos the latter location. Yes: apart from the display cases up front, the senior Bullshead is a warren of old wood, yellowish floors, and yellowish light and could easily be named the Pine Cone and be seated beside one of those old two-lane US highways that crisscrossed the country in the long-ago days before the interstates. The setting is a little creaky, yes, a little dowdy, but it is also friendly, and familiar in a profound way. It’s a little bit like the diner in Diner, a spot for impromptu gatherings by the cheerful young, or that nameless café in the cartoon strip Blondie where Dagwood Bumstead is always stuffing his face at lunch. I don’t think that place serves buffalo burgers, at least not yet.SFBG
BULLSHEAD RESTAURANT
West Portal: Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Mon., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.
840 Ulloa, SF
(415) 665-4350
Castro: Sun.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.
4230 18th St., SF
(415) 431-4201
Beer and wine
MC/V
Pleasant noise level
Castro location not wheelchair accessible

Chaste and chaser

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS A picture begins to develop: dating, for the chicken farmer, is turning out to be a sort of exercise in quantum romantics. Things are happening and not happening at the same time.
I’ll start out being totally, over-boilingly in love with a complete stranger, and this gets gradually perfected to a sweet, simmering, and in a couple cases, cuddly friendship — miraculously without me ever getting my tits licked, which is all I really want, really. That and maybe a little something to eat.
Over pomegranate chicken and eggs at Aram’s in Petaluma my date says, “You know, I’m not a nonviolent person.”
It takes everything I have, but I manage not to climb across the table and bite her, toppling everything. Deep breaths help, plus I derive farmerly strength from the suspicion that suddenly cullinizing one’s date, no matter how heartfelt or sexy, would be disrespectful to the chicken, which was amazing.
Over spicy Thai cold-medicine soup at that place on Haight, she wonders with the humble self-awareness of a death-bedded grandmother (and a stuffy nose) whether she might not yet know her own heart.
This week she turns 29.
Coffee and French toast at the Squat and Gobble, and I can still be a witch if I want, no matter that I don’t believe in magic or spells or sorcery or goddesses or witchcraft or even eating children — although I’m not entirely a noncannibalistic person, consent withstanding.
If I understand her correctly, even in prepagan times, even before there was the word witch, there were strong, wise, weird women who lived in shacks in the woods with black cats and wrote restaurant reviews for their local weeklies.
In my shack in my woods we are eating her-made beet gnocchi with me-made fresh bread and salad, drinking wine and talking about lasagna, when she sets down her fork and says, “I’m so happy I could cry.” And she does, and I get to hug and hold her and totally empathize because lasagna makes me emotional too.
But it turns out that wasn’t it for her. It was the first few bars of the Paolo Conti album I’d just put on.
Oh oh oh oh oh, there are so many wonderful new favorite restaurants in the Bay Area, many of which I would love to tell you about, but this is for those who have written or asked or simply wondered what ever happened to that Queer Girl Nancy Drew, my Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart and Inspirer of Piles and Piles of Poetry who Tartined me over a month or so ago.
Well, the reason I haven’t written about her is because I can’t decide what her name is, not because we haven’t been hanging out. We eat a lot and talk a lot and even smooch and snuggle some, but no, no sex. Not that I would tell you if there was. (But you know I would, because I tell you everything, right?)
Anyway, this isn’t like that, as the saying goes. It’s not about sex, and you’re not going to believe this, but it’s not about food either with her. With her, between me and you, all I really want is to get her on the other side of a Ping-Pong table — since another thing I learned when she first opened her heart to me (curry goat, Penny’s, Berkeley) is that her grandfather is Ping-Pong champion of the Baltic states and that she trained as a kid.
She knows how I feel. I know how she feels. We talk about everything in the world but this. Is her reticence regarding playing Ping-Pong with me based on fear of winning or losing or something else?
In bed she says she’s starstruck and falls asleep with a smile on her lips and my hand in her hair. The moon between the redwood branches outside my window is what I’m looking at, until eventually I get out of bed, tiptoe to my file cabinet, and so so so so slowly open the third drawer, the one labeled THE MEANING OF LIFE. I’m starstruck. I take out my two nice Butterfly Ping-Pong paddles, hold one in each hand, and just hold them, so happy I could cry.
Of their own accord (or maybe it’s a trick of the tears), the two paddles almost seem to be fluttering toward each other, their motion barely perceptible. If I stay to see it happen, I might be up all night, and in any case their eventual connection would be at this rate noiseless, not likely to wake anyone or put anyone to sleep.
Lost in thought and moonlight, thinking witchy not-witchy things like waves and particles, I stare between the butterflies at my file cabinet, one in the morning.
PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY, AND ETHICS, says the first drawer. Inside: empty egg cartons.
CEREAL, says the second. Inside: cereal. SFBG

The clarifications

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Doctrines of infallibility are for popes and neocons, and need I say more? The rest of us lowly humans must make do with the doctrine of fallibility, a splendid coat of many colors. If you screw up in the kitchen, you add some mustard or vinegar — pancake makeup for defaced or deformed dishes — and hope for the best. Or phone out for emergency pizza. If you screw up in print … well, there it is, as the tin-eared Emperor Joseph was wont to say in Amadeus. Errata have a way of accumuutf8g, like spatters on a chef’s apron, until finally a laundering is in order. Herewith a selection of my own recent spatters. [Editor’s note: Also missed by Paul’s hysterical-anorexic editor, Marke B.]
In my recent piece about Alamo Square Seafood Grill (“Sea Rations,” 11/1/06), I wrongly dismissed trout as a responsible choice of fish. True, it is a farmed carnivore, but according to the endlessly useful Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium (www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp), trout is rated in the “best” category. It efficiently converts feed into protein and is farmed in an enviro-friendly way.
In my piece about the Michelin guide’s recent Northern California edition (Without Reservations, 10/11/06), I implied that the Michelin guide uses half stars. I do not know where I got this idea; perhaps there was confusion with other star-giving entities that do deal in half rations. Michelin gives full stars only — or not, as the case may be. Also, while there was considerable distress here as to the NorCal guide’s emphases and omissions, it is worth reminding ourselves that we are probably not Michelin’s principal audience; the green guides are largely for visiting French and other Europeans, so a skewing toward French restaurants with a certain formality of service shouldn’t surprise us.
Most puzzling is my persistent delusion that Belden Place is either “Lane” or “Alley.” In my recent piece on Café Claude (“Charm Latitudes,” 10/11/06 — again!), I stumbled into “Lane.” I also said that it is paved with bricks, because my memory insists that it is, but on a recent flyby I noticed only asphalt, though it is possible there are brick facades or perhaps bricks hugging the earth as foundations. I am relieved not to have described it as “cobblestoned,” which I might have done in the past, though I hope not. Cobblestones would be nice.

Life after Julie, continued

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Reincarnation is a sketchy proposition, even if you’re a restaurant. True, you won’t come back as a rabbit or a mosquito — a couple of the less juicy possibilities human beings have to worry about in anticipating their next go-round in life — but you will certainly be stuck with a past that, even if punctuated with interludes of glory, has to have culminated in some sort of gloomy closure for you to be available for reincarnation at all. The truth is that the names of successful restaurants don’t recycle easily. Two vividly local examples: Stars and Trader Vic’s.
For years I would pass by Julie’s Supper Club, on Folsom, and I would mean to go there even as I was on my way to someplace else, to many someplace elses. The supper club (opened by Julie Ring in 1987) was a SoMa stalwart in the early 1990s, when the neighbors included Appam, the Acorn, and, just a few blocks west, Hamburger Mary’s. All those places had closed by the turn of the millennium, but Julie’s soldiered on, though without Julie herself: she’d sold her interest in 1998 and moved along to other ventures. When the end finally came for Julie’s Supper Club, about a year and a half ago, it was as if the last veteran of the Civil War had died.
So much for Julie’s Supper Club, I thought, RIP. Rumor told of some new loungey deal, with a new name, to open in the space, and rumor, as we all well know, is always true, except when it isn’t. The recently opened successor to Julie’s Supper Club is … Julie’s Supper Club and Lounge II. I am not sure about the Roman numeral, which makes me think of Super Bowls or people who wear monocles. It seems weighty in a way the new proprietors might not necessarily intend. But it also suggests continuity, a fusing of western SoMa’s seedy-glamorous yesterdays with a lively tomorrow.
Since I never saw the inside of the original Julie’s, I cannot say whether much has been changed, though I suspect not. The look is very hip-loungey, with a series of warped-L ceiling supports (whose holes of various sizes give one the sense that they’re made of colored Swiss cheese) and a long bar backed by a mirror and a battery of pink neon lights that look like they’ve been salvaged from the starship Enterprise (so often wrecked and reincarnated, like a stock-car racer). The oak floors are simply magnificent; they are a rich coffee color and are immaculately glossy, as if they belong in the ballroom of some posh town house on the Upper East Side.
The biggest change is probably chef Shane Suemori’s food. Under the old regime the vittles used to be a mélange of Californian and American influences; now, according to the menu card’s terrifying proclamation, it is “fusion cuisine, where east truly meets west.” There is also a quesadilla ($9), but pass on that: it consists of a pair of semi-stale tortillas enclosing an undistinguished filling of melted white cheese, diced yellow bell peppers, and chopped chicken. This is the kind of food famished travelers have to eat, at the kind of price they have to pay, while held captive at those prisons called airports. Marginally better (but still airportworthy) is a Japanese chicken curry ($7), which consists of chicken chunks, bits of carrot, and potato quarters in a golden sauce that reminded me of similar sauces I used to make from those soaplike bars of curry paste.
At its best, the cooking is quite innovative. I’d never had anything remotely like the lemon ponzu somen salad ($6), which was like a pasta sushi, with four little nests of cooked somen noodles arranged around a dipping dish of ponzu. And the asparagus cheese tease ($7) turned out to be a kind of vegetarian version of pigs in a blanket, with the asparagus stalks swaddled in phyllo leaves and baked with mozzarella and parmesan cheeses. The ends of the stalks could have used trimming; they were inedibly tough, but then it is not really asparagus season.
The crab cakes ($16 for two) were slightly larger than golf balls and were simply terrific, particularly with the spicy creole sauce, but the presentation was otherwise about as minimalist as it gets, with the pair of spheres sitting naked on the plate like … like … I can’t say it, but you see what I mean. A little more generous was the oven-roasted chicken breast ($14) stuffed with cheese, cut into quarters, and set atop a mound of cheese mashed potatoes and a mix of sautéed eggplant, zucchini, and tabs of carrot. The sole dessert, meanwhile, bananas flambé ($6) presented in a martini glass, was positively luxurious. The lengths of fruit were swimming in a warm custard beneath whose bubbly surface lurked large chunks of chocolate. There was even an ornamental sprig of mint on the plate beneath the glass!
The reincarnated Julie’s prices don’t look too high as printed, but when you see what you actually get, you start to wonder. Of course, we live in the age of the $40 main dish, as the New York Times reported recently. Still, should a glass of no-name cabernet sauvignon cost $10? (We were given no wine list, just offered a few banal choices.) Should a doll-size snifter of Rémy Martin cognac — good though hardly regal — cost $8? I might have minded less if plate after plate hadn’t seemed quite so abstemiously composed and if I’d never laid eyes on the airport quesadilla. SFBG
JULIE’S SUPPER CLUB AND LOUNGE II
Lunch: Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Supper: nightly, 5–10 p.m.
1123 Folsom, SF
(415) 864-1222
AE/MC/V
Full bar
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible

In the genes

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS Hold on a second. Let me call and ask her …
OK, it’s OK to tell you now: Crawdad de la Cooter is pregnant! I had to keep it a secret for a long time because that’s what pregnant people do to you — they tell everyone, and they tell everyone not to tell anyone. So we all go around bursting at the seams and looking at each other, wondering who knows what. But now I can write restaurant reviews and songs about it and everything. Crawdad’s going to be a mama! Her new guy, Crawguy de la Peter, is going to be a daddy! And I get to be the well-paid live-in nanny!
Well, right now they kind of have it in their head to raise their own child, and I can’t say that I blame them exactly, but I’d really rather do it myself. So my strategy is to make all the people around here go very quietly crazy, so that they lose their concentration and mess up their computers, and then they’ll all be calling on Crawguy all the time to fix them and Crawdad to fix their heads, because that’s what he does and she does respectfully. Business will boom, lots of money, no time. Enter the chicken farmer.
It’s a fact that kids love chickens and farmers, and although it’s also a fact that I’m a witch now too (because I say so), and everyone knows that witches eat children, it is not a fact that I do. I have never, for example, eaten a child.
On the other hand, I do remember how to change diapers, because don’t forget that I come from a big family, and I was one of the older ones. Wait — maybe I made this up. Let me call my mom.
Ah, she claims I didn’t change a lot of little siblings’ diapers — just my own, apparently, when I was a baby. Still, I do love poop, as my readers well know. Several of my brothers and sisters are or have been nannies and/or baby-sitters — possibly, in many cases, parents — so you gotta figure it’s in my blood.
Anyway, I thought I would talk this all over with the happy Craw Couple over Vietnamese food, and they wisely invited Ms. Trotwood, their fixer-upper and my new best friend. We talked it all over and decided to get imperial rolls, hot and sour shrimp soup, and some kind of chicken in a coconut curry thingy, except it was all white meat, and then that led to a long, intense philosophical discussion over whether we liked the white meat or the dark meat better.
Me and Trotwood: dark. Crawdad and Crawguy: white. Which made me marvel (unfortunately out loud) at how challenging their life together is going to be, the poor crustaceans, because even if you’re perfectly matched in every other way, as Crawdad and Crawguy are, the foremost factor for determining long-term compatibility, in my book, is one of you’s gotta prefer the dark meat, and the other light. Doesn’t matter which is which, but you have to have that as a foundation.
Unless … hmm, if you both go for the breast, yet you have a kid together, and that kid turns out against all genetic odds to be a leg-and-a-thigh kind of kid, then there may still be hope for your whole chickens and therefore your marriage. Since DNA is going to work against you, however, it will have to be a matter of nurturance.
Enter chicken farmer.
You know me, I would still be going on about my indispensability to their family’s happiness, even after our food came and was excellent, if it weren’t for the Interventional Wisdom and Distractive Powers of dear Ms. Trotwood. Brilliantly, she dug from her purse a little gift card for Victoria’s Secret and gave it to me.
This was the perfect thing. Not only did it distract me from making an even bigger fool of myself, but it happens that I am just about to almost actually need a bra.
I forgot to say two of the things we got: spicy grilled beef salad, which was probably everyone’s favorite dish, cause it had mint and cilantro and jalapeños and “smoke flavored dressing.” The other one, grilled pork over smashed together vermicelli, was probably the least popular, but I liked it.
By the way, have I mentioned the name of my new favorite Vietnamese restaurant? SFBG
PHO 84
Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5–9 p.m.; Sat., noon–9 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.
354 17th St., Oakl.
(510) 832-1338
Takeout available
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Busy
Wheelchair accessible

Fish in the balance

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› paulr@sfbg.com
When I write about seafood these days, I cringe a little, wondering whether, by describing the eating of fish, I am in effect abetting the collapse of the world’s maritime ecosystem. That I would be doing so in a rather tiny way makes no moral difference; nor does the fact that I personally will not buy or eat any seafood other than what I know to have been taken from sustainably managed (and usually local) populations — and this is a very brief list.
Historians of the future may well regard the 21st century as the interval in which the fate of this planet was decided. If we as a species pursue our present course, our descendants a century hence could well find themselves living on a hellishly steamy globe stripped of much of its wildlife. Elephants have been recklessly endangered — and are angry about it, as a spectacular story in the Oct. 8 New York Times Magazine recently demonstrated — while the heavy majority of the world’s fisheries have been overworked to the verge of irretrievable harm. This is the depressing news brought by the British journalist Charles Clover in The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (New Press, $26.95).
Clover finds his evidence all around us, in the form of drastically reduced catches from once-bountiful seas (a particularly vivid North American example: the Grand Banks) and in once-thriving coastal towns, such as Gloucester, Mass., and Hull, England, that have become ghostly now that there are no more fish to catch and process. The culprit is an all-too-familiar mechanism of industrial technique deployed to satisfy heedless demand in wealthy countries. The French, rather shockingly, have a taste for orange roughy, one of the many deep-sea species whose slow rate of reproduction leaves them especially vulnerable to human rapacity.
Clover’s description of the North Sea gives us a brief glimpse of a glum tomorrow. Today’s sea is muddy, he says, because its once-enormous beds of oysters and mussels — nature’s water filters — have been decimated by overfishing. The cloudiness inhibits plant growth on the bottom, a place he regards as “a devastated ecosystem” that can no longer heal itself. That leaves just a couple of questions for us, the devastators: Can we heal it if we try, and will we try? And when? It’s later than we think.

Nights of the round table

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› paulr@sfbg.com
If, like me, you associate the letters K and L with wine — as in K and L Wines — you might have to do some expectation adjustment when you step through the doors of KL Restaurant, a Hong Kong–style seafood house in the westernmost Richmond. Despite the heavily maritime menu, the only alcoholic drink on offer is beer, and the only beer is Heineken. No Tsingtao? Not even Sapporo or Tiger? Unheard of. Not that there’s anything wrong with Heineken.
The restaurant’s winelessness did not come as a complete surprise. We’d been advised beforehand by an in-the-know member of our party that if we were going to want wine, we would have to pack it in ourselves. Who would not want wine with seafood? I thought while vaguely intending to take a well-chilled bottle of Navarro gewürztraminer, gewürz being one of those fragrant German grapes that stand up nicely to Chinese food. And: who would want beer with seafood? All of us, as it turned out. The gewürz did not get chilled or packed in, the beer turned out to be a good match with dish after dish (the wine would have too, it must be said), and the result was a tableful of slightly woozy satiation — the way one might feel at the end of, say, a wedding banquet.
KL’s banquetish aura isn’t of the lordly sort. The main dining room is huge, unfancy, and airy; its principal wall hangings are announcements of the day’s specials, hand lettered in Chinese on plain white paper. There is also a battery of aquariums in which various creatures of the deep await their rendezvous with the big mesh scooper. If it weren’t a restaurant, with a telltale sizzle coming from the kitchen, it could be a pet shop. But the tables give us our chief clue. A number of them are round and large, suitable for the seating of up to a dozen — and large parties do show up with some frequency to fill them. There is also an adjoining room that serves as a kind of overflow dining room but would also do (despite its coat-closet starkness) as the setting for a private party — a more intimate banquet, perhaps.
KL convincingly stands for the proposition that the best interior design element in any restaurant is the presence of human beings. If you attract scads of interesting people — families in generational layers, from grandparents to tykes; a crew of early-20s types and their rainbow of RAZRs clustered at a banquet table; the odd outworlder; groups meeting on the sidewalk outside or laughing at the host’s station — you do not need anything else to achieve the buzz, the low but steady roar of enjoyment, all restaurateurs are looking for.
Good food helps too, of course, and KL’s food, considered as a ratio of price to value and as an exercise in variety, is good. The kitchen is particularly skilled at sampan preparations, which involve a peppery batter-fry. I am not sure this is the best way to have Dungeness crab ($14), since most of what ends up covered in delicious, spicy-crisp batter is shell. Still, you do get some batter-on-flesh effect, mostly with the body chunks, and as for the legs — you can scrape the tasty crust off with your teeth before cracking them open. And if that is too much work, you can luxuriate in the surrounding fermented-black-bean sauce, which has the texture of a pilaf and a strong salty bite.
While deep-frying often brings an extra dash of delight to otherwise bland foods, such as the potato, I am obliged to report that the deep-frying of oysters ($8.95) has the opposite effect. The unmistakable flavor of brine disappears, as does the slippery-soft, slightly naughty texture; in its place we find an ordinary meatiness like that of chicken liver. A bright red, slightly sweet sauce served in a dipping plate on the side provided color more than anything else.
Salt-and-pepper squid ($6.95), on the other hand, turned out to be a success: tender with just a bit of chewiness and the pepper in the batter helping cut the grease. Even better was a platter of sea scallops ($8.95) stir-fried kung pao–style, with chunks of red and green bell pepper, chopped scallion, and a heavy showering of peanuts in a dark, thick, smoky-sweet sauce.
The sizzling-rice seafood soup ($5.95) didn’t amount to much beyond its rafts of sizzling rice: just some sliced shiitake caps, bits of chopped scallion, and a few lonely dried shrimp bobbing in an OK broth. And the steamed prawns ($21.90), a platter-filling spectacle of finger-size crustaceans split in half and sprinkled with a garlic-shallot sauce that looked like couscous cooked in bleach, were distinctly disappointing, rubbery in the mouth and tasting of feebleness.
One of the best dishes — oh irony! — has nothing to do with the sea. This would be the minced squab lettuce cup ($11.95), a mu shu pork–like construct (complete with a side of hoisin sauce) in which pristine iceberg lettuce leaves are substituted for the pancakes and the meat mixture is scooped into them. If you’ve ever struggled with squab in a restaurant that served the little fowl on the bone — for flavor or authenticity’s sake or due to the chef’s busy schedule — you will sniffle in appreciation at the ease and pleasure of munching through this dish.
For a restaurant whose clientele appears to be overwhelmingly Chinese, service is Anglophone-friendly and quite gregarious, though I felt the Heinekens were pushed a little too keenly. Service with brio, meanwhile, does not necessarily mean efficiency: we went out of our way to order an item and it never appeared, except on the bill. So: celebrate, but verify. SFBG
KL RESTAURANT
Daily, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.
4401 Balboa, SF
(415) 666-9928
Beer
MC/V
Very noisy
Wheelchair accessible

Explosives

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
What am I grateful for?
Bacon. Fried chicken. Butter. Barbecued chicken. Butter. Bacon fat. Eggs … None of which you will find by the way at my new favorite restaurant, Café Gratitude. I went to the one in Berkeley with my old blackberry pickin’ pal and new favorite massage therapist NFC, and even though I couldn’t find no chicken-fried steak on the menu, I have to admit to having had one of the Times of my Life.
Has the chicken farmer lost her mind?
No! My old pal NFC has, because I would have taken her to Chez Panisse or even House of Chicken and Waffles … and she picked this.
“No, no, I’m serious, anywhere you want,” I said. “My treat.” I owed her big-time, see, for fixing me up backwise in an emergency the week before. “Chez Panisse,” I said. “Chicken and Waffles.”
“Café Gratitude,” she said again.
So, OK, I didn’t even know what it was, but namewise it seemed appropriate for the occasion. Conceptwise, you know: “live” organic foods, no meat, no pain and suffering, locally farmed, environmentally friendly, vegan, “prepared with love,” and all that hippie dippy dong dong dicky doo I’m so, so into these days, so long as I get to go home afterward and lop the head off of one of my chickens.
I like dead food too.
Everything on the menu is named an affirmative first-person statement, and the idea I think is to make you say it when you order. Like “I am wonderful,” “I am lovely,” “I am dazzling,” “I am magical,” and all kinds of other flat-out lies. Personally, I am honest, so I scoured the menu for something true to say to our waitressperson, such as “I am all of the above and none of the above and clumsy and stupid and pissed off and oh yeah, my feet stink.”
“I am explosive,” NFC said, but that wasn’t on the menu either. Although … never mind. Well, no, never mind.
Well, I think she was maybe making a prediction, based on all the ingredients in all the stuff we were looking at, like grains and greens and nuts and flax chips. Give you an example: the salad called “I am fulfilled” contains mixed greens, carrots, beets, cucumber, tomato, avocado, sprouts, microgreens (whatever that means), Brazil nut parmesan, and flax crackers ($10).
Actually, that sounds delicious, but I settled on being “elated,” which meant I was eating an enchilada with corn, cilantro, and something else inside and a spicy green salsa on top ($10). This came with a side salad and Bhutanese red rice. All good, right on.
NFC decided to be accepting, which meant she was eating red rice too, only all tossed together with raw free-range organic vegetables, pine nuts, some other kinds of nuts, and some shit-talking mushrooms. All good, right on.
To drink: free-range organic wind-dried water (with a wink to Posh Nosh fans — hi, Chrissy), and we also ordered a couple things from the smoothies and nut milks, but I don’t remember what. But it was all good, right on.
You think I’m kidding but I’m not. I love this stuff! Anyway, I could have been eating sand and sea shells, and so long as I get to eat it sitting cross-legged on a couch with my old friend NFC, talking about her girls and my chickens and, you know, life and shit, with our knees sometimes touching … I’m going to be happy.
I was satisfied. Technically, this was breakfast, since we started eating around 10, but I didn’t have any lunch and wasn’t hungry for dinner until later than usual. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t run right home anyway and knock over one of my chickens. It was a beautiful day that day.
It’s a beautiful day today. I am sad and scared and loving life because I can’t stop making poetry out of it. This one I call “Hopeful Chicken Farmer Poem”:
Suddenly bugs make sense to me and lavender smells like lavender — finally! Who knew that a dried-up leaf would sound that way under a feral cat’s paw? So I planted a blueberry bush next to the blackberry bushes. Next year, if the chickens don’t scratch it all out … SFBG
CAFÉ GRATITUDE
Daily, 10 a.m.–10 p.m.
1730 Shattuck, Berk.
(415) 824-4652
Takeout available
No alcohol
MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible

Don’t block the box

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› paulr@sfbg.com
In the Thousand Years’ War between beer and wine, beer has long enjoyed an advantage on the party battlefield, mostly because of the keg, the bunker buster of party drink delivery. Oh yes, kegs do run dry, they must, but has anyone actually seen it happen?
Wine, on the other hand, comes in bottles, and while some of these bottles are, in theory, party sized — the jeroboams and nebuchadnezzars that hold massive amounts of champagne spring to mind — they are unwieldy, lacking the keg’s convenient tap. Could wine’s secret weapon in the struggle for party preeminence be the box? “I drink boxed wine!” is not necessarily an announcement to be shouted from the rooftops in San Francisco, but lately I have had occasion to sample some boxed wines (from Black Box), a cab and a pinot grigio, and I am here to say they are not bad — are, in fact, quite quaffable, though not better than the better Two-Buck Chucks, while costing about twice as much. (A three-liter box of Black Box is the equivalent of four standard-size bottles of wine and retails for about $18, or about $4.50 per bottle.)
It is the box format, of all things, that aggravates. Making the boxes operational is slightly arduous, involving the punching out of stubbornly uncooperative paperboard tabs and the pulling forth of the fugitive spigot, but once all that is accomplished, you have a smart little keg — full of wine. The issue is that the spigot is almost at the bottom of the box, which is fine for flow but does make getting a glass under there a challenge. The solution with a keg is often to set it on some kind of a stool or low table, with plenty of open space under the tap, but the wine boxes aren’t as big and stable as kegs. Little fold-down legs might be helpful, as on Kramer’s coffee-table book about coffee tables.
Also, I did not like the spectacle of white wine gushing downward from the spigot. A little too reminiscent of wee-hours micturition for more delicate sensibilities. And I’m not sure about the recycling; wine bottles are easy, but the wine box would first need some postmortem surgery to get rid of the plastic bladder inside the paperboard shell, and who is going to do that when besotted with party wine and maybe even a blast or two from a competing keg?

Sea rations

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› paulr@sfbg.com
One of the stronger arguments for vegetarianism is variety: there are far more kinds of vegetables and ways of preparing vegetables than there are meats and ways of preparing meat, even if you eat mutton. (And know where to get it.) Fish and seafood too are more various than meats — or at least they have been. There is growing evidence that most of the world’s major fisheries are drifting toward collapse; the British author Charles Clover gives a chillingly thorough review of the evidence in his new book, The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (New Press, $26.95).
Eating fish, then, is no longer presumptively virtuous. It matters what fish we eat: farmed or wild, how and where taken if wild, health of the overall population, and so forth. Earlier this year, while reacquainting myself with Hayes Street Grill after some years’ absence, I noticed that the menu card now gives a good deal of information about the sources of the restaurant’s maritime dishes. The plain assumption is that diners want and need this information, that they are beginning to understand that choices about food involve a moral dimension and that considering the moral dimension of one’s choices need not ruin the meal nor the evening.
Given HSG’s position as an exemplar, I was curious as to whether its attention to sourcing might have begun to influence other seafood houses around town. One of the most obvious places to start looking would have to be Alamo Square Seafood Grill, which since the middle 1990s has sat atop a romantic stretch of Fillmore a block from the hilltop park that provides its name. From the beginning, Alamo Square borrowed a page from the HSG playbook by letting diners choose from among several varieties of fish, cooking method, and sauce. One difference: you did not get fries, as at HSG. On the other hand, there was — and remains — an early bird prix fixe option, three courses for $14.50 and a reminder that Alamo Square began as an offshoot of that long-running prix fixery, Baker Street Bistro, at the edge of the Presidio.
The restaurant looks none the worse for a decade of wear, except that the northern face of the street sign (wreathed in Christmassy little white lights) has lost its initial A: if, trekking uphill, you come across a place called lamo Square, you are there. Inside the storefront space, the mood is one of candlelit intimacy, and the crowd is varied, consisting largely of people in their 20s and early 30s (neighborhood folk?), along with the occasional interloper. A youngish couple who had Marina written all over them arrived in a silvery Aston Martin coupe, which they parked in the bus zone right outside the restaurant’s door. Oh Department of Parking and Traffic, where are you at those rare moments when you could actually be useful? Not that some DPT timeliness would have mattered in this case, since the canny pair took a window seat with a view of bus stop and car.
Our first order of business was establishing which of the proffered fish we might conscionably eat. Trout: no, a farmed carnivore, with aquafarming the cause of environmental pollution and carnivorous fish requiring on the order of four pounds of wild fish to return a pound of salable flesh. Mahimahi: attractively firm and abundant, though flown in from Hawaii. Red snapper: a local fish with decently managed populations, just a wee bit boring. And … an ahi tuna loin, prepared according to a set recipe. Tuna is dicey: bluefin is a no-no, other varieties somewhat less so.
Red snapper ($13.95), luckily, takes well to blackening even if it’s just the Pacific kind, not the true variety from the Gulf of Mexico. We found the mâitre d’hôtel sauce — basically a garlic and parsley butter — to be just assertive enough to make its voice heard without challenging the fish. The more party-hearty Provençale sauce — of tomatoes, black olives, capers, and garlic, a combination reminiscent of Neapolitan puttanesca — made a nice match with grilled mahimahi ($13.95), a fish that, like chicken, welcomes a little help and usually benefits from it. Platters of fish (not too little, not too much) were served with brown rice pilaf and a mélange of sautéed vegetables, among pattypan squash, zucchini, carrots, and button mushrooms; none of this quite matched good French fries for excitement, but it was all pretty tasty and much lower in fat.
The kitchen handles nonfish dishes with equal aplomb, from an amuse of wild-mushroom pottage spiked with a little balsamic vinegar and presented in demitasses to a fabulous salad of shredded romaine hearts ($6.75) tossed with crisp lardons, slivers of carrot and French radish, garlic croutons, blue cheese, and lemon oil. A soup ($6.25) of artichoke and fennel topped with pipings of curry oil was desperately underseasoned — all we could taste was the sweetness of the fennel — but a few good pinches from the tabletop salt dish coaxed the artichoke flavor forth.
There was even an occasional flash of wit, as in a tarte tatin ($5) made with pears instead of apples and presented in the au courant, deconstructed style: the pear slices were fanned over a floor of pastry. It looked a little like a pear pastry lasagna the chef hadn’t quite finished putting together. On the side, a pat of vanilla ice cream nodded to tradition.
As we left, we noted the Marina couple chattering away in their little surveillance box and the Aston Martin still sitting in the bus stop, ticketless. We gave the restaurant pretty good grades, in the A to A- range, for both overall experience and sustainability. Maybe the place can use one of those As to get the sign fixed. SFBG
ALAMO SQUARE SEAFOOD GRILL
Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9:30 p.m.
803 Fillmore, SF
(415) 440-2828
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible

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