Beer Archives — Page 55 of 61 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Mission: fresh-air beer

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March 19, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Listen up, troops: Spring is here and decent weather may be on the radar. It’s time to escape from the barracks and attack life with a blitzkrieg of beer and BBQ. Below is a list of checkpoints that are reported to condone and encourage the outdoor consumption of alcohol.

Good luck, soldier. Now get out there and knock ’em back!

Big guns

ZEITGEIST

The HQ of patio bars — the grand pooh-bah, the big cheese. Hands down the biggest, baddest patio west of the bay. Although owing to the line of porta-potties, it’s probably one of the stinkiest. This is your safe station, no matter what company you’re signed up with. Zeitgeist’s commissary will stock you up on burgers and fries, and its Bloody Marys will keep you flying.

199 Valencia, SF. (415) 255-7505, myspace.com/zeitgeistsf

EL RIO

Outer Mission hideaway El Rio is big enough for large outfits but romantic enough for a date while on leave. A portion of the yard is sheltered by a tent for rainy-day ops — and there’s nothing to stop you from lighting up. Mmmm — gotta love the smell of cigarettes in the midafternoon.

3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325 www.elriosf.com

PILSNER INN

Few cantinas can muster as many features as the Pilsner Inn. Twenty-four beers on tap, two pool leagues, and a lush, landscaped garden patio with two koi ponds should be enough to make anyone stand at attention. A strong contingent here flies the rainbow flag, but the Pilsner welcomes troops from all outfits to its relaxed environs.

225 Church, SF. (415) 621-7058, www.pilsnerinn.com

Smaller outposts

PAPA TOBY’S REVOLUTION CAF&EACUTE;

This little Mission spot will flash you back to life as a guerrilla fighter in Cuba or Guatemala. A beer and wine café with a secluded backwoods feel and a heated streetside patio, Papa Toby’s Revolution Café offers a variety of troop entertainment, from free trade to tango lessons. With enough alcohol here, you may be able to brainwash your copilot into believing he or she is the reincarnation of Che Guevara.

3248 22nd St., SF. (415) 642-0474

FINNEGAN’S WAKE

An enclave of Cole Valley regulars is keeping Finnegan’s Wake top secret. The back patio is a mini-Zeitgeist, equipped with a grill and picnic tables. Surrounded by apartments, this little retreat goes on lockdown after 21:00 hours, making this site good for daytime expeditions only.

937 Cole, SF. (415) 731-6119

GOLD CANE COCKTAIL LOUNGE

The patio of this Haight Street joint has a nicely elevated rear portion — high ground, easy to defend from marauding tourists and the like. And if you can’t successfully pilot your hand-rolled smokable through the crowd, you’ve no business flying so high, soldier.

1569 Haight, SF. (415) 626-1112

MAD DOG IN THE FOG

Bright red and green paint often makes the Mad Dog in the Fog’s vibrant little patio hard to handle without a pint or two. Local hostiles have managed to shut down maneuvers here after 22:00, so your best bet is to set up a happy-hour camp during the soccer off-season — around World Cup time, soccer insurgents outfitted in reversible jerseys and knee-high socks seize the position.

530 Haight, SF. (415) 626-7279

THE AXIS OF BURGERS

Taken together, Flippers restaurant and Marlena’s bar in Hayes Valley can provide a prime afternoon drinking and lounging target. Flippers serves burgers, beer, and wine. Its patio is outfitted with a variety of flora: lilies, trees, and lawn. Right next door, with a full bar, Marlena’s has a minimal cagelike smoking facility with just three benches gated off from the street.

Flippers Gourmet Burgers, 482 Hayes, SF. (415) 552-8880

Marlena’s, 488 Hayes, SF. (415) 864-6672

MARS BAR AND RESTAURANT

A secluded SoMa bar and restaurant often overrun by hordes of concertgoers and workers from the neighboring Concourse Exhibition Center in the evening, Mars Bar and Restaurant makes for an excellent outdoor lunch break. Late at night you’ll often locate barkeeps from other watering holes gathered here to blow their tips.

798 Brannan, SF. (415) 621-6277, www.marsbarsf.com

Coast Guard

PIER 23 CAFE

This waterfront bar and restaurant features live music most nights of the week. Its outdoor area is an expansive field of patio furniture flanked by the bay. A popular evening destination for locals, Pier 23 Cafe just underwent a complete remodel, now ready for inspection.

Pier 23, SF. (415) 362-5125 www.pier23cafe.com

RED’S JAVA HOUSE

Little more than a kitchen shed up front and a tent with bar in back, Red’s Java House is nestled beneath the Bay Bridge on Pier 30. The only thing that might obstruct your skyward reconnaissance is the occasional SUV parked next to the fenced-off, bare-bones patio. There’s a widescreen TV for sports fans in the tent and a menu of burgers, dogs, and fish and chips.

Pier 30, SF. (415) 777-5626

MOMO’S

Right next to PhoneCompany Park, Momo’s has a limited view — the baseball stadium and a massive apartment complex obstruct most of the horizon. The bar is incredibly well equipped, but Momo’s is a restaurant, which may impair smoking operations. While there, enrich yourself with the art installation in the front garden box: a giant heart-shaped olive. Enriching!

760 Second St., SF. (415) 227-8660, www.sfmomos.com

Eastern Theater

JUPITER

Just a short flight east of San Francisco, Jupiter is the majordomo outdoor operation of the East Bay. This two-story brewpub and pizza restaurant in downtown Berkeley is attached to a giant compound replete with heating lamps and ivy. You’ll have to stow those stogies, though: this place is a restaurant and doesn’t take kindly to smoking.

2181 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 843-8277, www.jupiterbeer.com

BECKETT’S

The two-story Irish pub is equipped with two fireplaces and two functional bars. Its patio is a small balcony above a cobblestone alleyway — the perfect size for an elite task force to secure a position and commence a-blazing.

2271 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 647-1790, www.beckettsirishpub.com

OASIS RESTAURANT AND BAR

Deep into East Bay territory is the Oasis Restaurant and Bar. By day this Oakland position operates as a Nigerian restaurant; at night it becomes a grooving outdoor lounge with DJs and two dance floors. A staggering canyon of cement surrounds the small rear patio. The heated paradise has multiple tables and chairs, a stage, a massive sound system, and a wraparound grass-covered overhang.

135 12th St., Oakland.

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MORE OUTDOOR DESTINATIONS

Carmen’s, Pier 40, SF. (415) 495-5140

Cinch, 1723 Polk, SF. (415) 776-4162, www.thecinch.com

Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut, SF. (415) 552-4440, www.theyankee.com

Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880, www.sfeagle.com

Jay ‘n Bee Club, 2736 20th St., SF. (415) 824-4190

Kennedy’s Irish Pub and Curry House, 1040 Columbus, SF. (415) 441-8855, www.kennedyscurry.com

Lone Star Saloon, 1354 Harrison, SF. (415) 863-9999, www.lonestarsaloon.com

Lucky 13, 2140 Market, SF. (415) 487-1313

Medjool, 2522 Mission, SF. (415) 550-9055, www.medjoolsf.com

Mix, 4086 18th St., SF. (415) 431-8616

Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. (415) 503-0393, www.theeparkside.com

Il Pirata, 2007 16th St., SF. (415) 626-2626

Ramp, 885 Terry Francois, SF. (415) 621-2378

Red Jack Saloon, 131 Bay, SF. (415) 989-0700

Rosewood, 732 Broadway, SF. (415) 951-4886, www.rosewoodbar.com

Wild Side West, 424 Cortland, SF. (415) 647-3099

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Building the bomb

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March 19, 2007

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It seems to be a matter of when, not if, another terrorist bomb will go off in the United States. One day we’ll come across the headline and let out an anguished "Oh, fuck" — a little later we’ll watch a stately funeral in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC. After such tragedy, will I ever be able to walk into a bar and order a nifty Irish Car Bomb again? What’s the buffer zone of alcoholic irony? With limited time before the next blast, I’d like to devote some space to bomb cocktails — in which a shot of something is dropped into a glass of something else — before it’s too late. Something about the plop of the shot and the glup of the drink always leaves a grin. And since I go drinking to get giddy, I’m all for drinks that make me giddy by their mere inception.

Because bombs fall below the purview of many published cocktail guides, there’s actually some debate about what to call them. Johnny Raglin, the bar manager at swanky Absinthe, insists they’re called boilermakers. But that seems to be too general a term: most mixologists say a boilermaker refers only to a shot with a beer. Many bombs don’t involve beer. Gary Regan, author of The Joy of Mixology, told me that he thought "depth charge" sounded good. But ordering a depth charge makes me feel like I’m at a WWII-era flea market. Mark Petrus of the Haight’s Gold Cane Cocktail Lounge may agree; he said he’d probably just call them bombs as well. Below are some of my local favorites — raise a glass and set it off.

BROSEPH

(Mandarin vodka in Sparks)

The arrival of Red Bull led to a proliferation of bombs in America. It was long accepted that the receiving ingredient (what’s in the glass) ought to be carbonated. So before there was Red Bull, beer, champagne, soda, and sparkling water were the only available mediums, and the latter three were rarely used. When Red Bull blew up, it became the bomb tinkerer’s experimental plaything. The Tic-Tac (mandarin vodka dropped in Red Bull) is one of the better leftovers from this heyday of discovery. But now its 2007, and Sparks energy drink has proven its mettle by tasting better. Commendations, then, to the Knockout for upgrading the Tic-Tac to this new formula.

Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994, www.theknockoutsf.com

ORANGE-CICLE

(Baileys and mandarin vodka in Red Bull)

Like the Broseph, the Orange-cicle is just one permutation away from the Tic-Tac. Yet the two couldn’t taste further apart. When tossed back with the proper intensity, the Orange-cicle is creamy and full-bodied and definitely deserving of its name. Aub Zam Zam is also one of those perfect bars for enjoying bombs. With simple decor and a convex bar taking up much of the front room, the cocktail lounge makes it easy to remain focused on drinking.

Persian Aub Zam Zam, 1633 Haight, SF. (415) 861-2545

LA CUCARACHA

(Amaretto and Kahlua, with a flaming floater of 151 rum dropped in cerveza)

The Flaming Dr. Pepper (amaretto and rum dropped in beer and set on fire) is one of the oldest bombs outside a shot of whiskey dropped into some cheap beer. It is also the most notorious: numerous novice drinkers (most of them rowdy teens) have found themselves in the emergency room with second-degree burns after gulping down too many rounds of FDPs. It seems best to avoid the drink, out of fear not for one’s delicate lips but for one’s reputation — who wants to look like an amateur? Fortunately, La Cucaracha at Bahia, which just adds a little Kahlua to the mix, is even better than the original. First of all, it disposes of the pretension that the drink tastes like Dr. Pepper. More important, though, the Kahlua gives it added bite — round after round, this bomb never fizzles out.

Bahia Restaurant, 3239 22nd St., SF. (415) 642-7224, www.forored.com/bahiarestaurant

WISCONSIN LUNCHBOX

(Amaretto dropped into Pabst with a splash of orange juice)

I slowed down halfway through gulping back the Wisconsin Lunchbox at Mauna Loa Club because it tasted so good. The nutty tones of amaretto mix great with the citrus kick of the OJ, but the tastes blend even better with the sweet starchiness of Pabst. Two sips later, though, and I knew my lax pacing was a mistake. When the cocktail’s drunk slowly, all the flavors that once sailed off hand in hand became boorish. It tasted like a way-too-fruity beer. Throw this one down quickly.

Mauna Loa Club, 3009 Fillmore, SF. (415) 563-5137

ABC

(Soju in champagne)

In Korea business deals are consummated over a drink called Poktanju ("alcohol bomb," or "bomb shot"), which is whiskey or the less expensive Soju dropped into beer. Seeing as we don’t have the same thirst for beer as Koreans, I wouldn’t feel comfortable completely copying them. It’s better we go our own way with this sprightly and slightly tangy bomb. Hitherto, I’ve only been able to chug champagne in those moments when I recognize how boring my friends are and start daring myself to see how many gulps of bubbly I can take in a row. On this occasion, at Bar 821, after the clank of the shot glass and the fizz of the drink, I just got caught up in the bliss of it.

Bar 821, 821 Divisadero, SF. www.bar821.com

SUICIDE BOMB

(Red Bull in Jägermeister)

What tonnage! The Suicide Bomb will definitely lead you into some mischief. Pops Bar doesn’t regularly serve this cocktail — I found it while screwing around on Wikipedia, and Pops was willing to serve it to me at a reasonable price. You could probably ask for a shot of Red Bull to drop into a half glass of Jäger almost anywhere. Just as a grain of vermouth does wonders to bury the edges of gin in a martini, the Red Bull brings precisely enough luster to this drink. That’s not to say it tastes good. But with a little Red Bull, you at least have something else to focus on while you pour flat, heavy, extremely alcoholic goop down the hatch.

Pops Bar, 2800 24th St., SF. (415) 401-7677

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NOISE: South, West, and all sorts of points at SXSW

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March 16, 2007

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Oh me, oh my, what to do every day at SXSW – the competing pull of day parties and unofficial showcases and the panels and speakers during the day – and then the night parties and official showcases at night – has me torn like a paper bag full of giveaway matches, condoms, beer bottle openers, and random acts of swag. And outfits and tats and hair. “There’s a lot of hair going on,” said one girly wag in the elevator at my downtown digs. “And lots of interesting facial hair. We’re going shopping.” Inspirational! Oh, yes, and music, music, music.

Oxford Collapse work those stripes. All photos by Kimberly Chun.

Here’s a rundown of a few recent soirees: Brooklyn’s Oxford Collapse busted it up at the Sub Pop showcase early on on Wednesday night. Furious mod aerobics by the bassist. Earlier Seattle’s Tiny Vipers kept it sweet and low. BTW it was impossible to badge your way into the Beggars Banquet and 4AD showcases in the neighborin Emo’s properties – where Calla, Voxtrot, Beirut, Mountain Goats, and Blonde Redhead were rocking. Queue you…

About time.

So with that in mind, I lollygagged over to Beauty Bar where Best Fwends, Holy Fuck, and Crystal Castles were setting it off in the sparkly interior, and the Comas, Langhorne Slim, Jack, Illinois, and Annuals were busting moves in the patio. Amsterdam’s About were pretty durn electro-popping – throwing some bodily force into their boy-girl performance.

Oh. Oh. It’s Oh No! Oh My!

Down the street on Sixth the Dim Mak party was swinging, sweatily, in the confines of Flamingo Cantina. Oh No! Oh My! impressed with proggish indie stylings before Pony Up, Scanners, Willowz, and Har Mar Superstar stepped up.

Pandas on parade.

Australia seemed to be throwing mucho dinero at their homegrown music scene so showcases straight from Oz seemed to be everywhere – or maybe they just had mondo-efficient flierers. One of their number, Panda Band from Perth – what no Koala Band? – started promisingly enough with energetic rock that took intriguing melodic turns.

Slaraffenand – say it 20 times fast.

Jet lag was starting to overtake one’s curiosity around the time Copenhagen, Denmark’s Slaraffenland came on at Mohawk at the Hometapes show. Interesting group – we all edged closer when the sax and trombone and effects pedals came out. I hereby dub the trombone the most ubiquitous unexpected instrument at this year’s SXSW.

Outside on the Mohawk patio, a Steve Earle-like Rob Crow was ripping – sounding like he was channeling Geddy Lee of Rush and playing some delicate, at times moving music. Think he dedicated a song to Corey of the Bay Area label, Absolutely Kosher. Has everyone acknowleged that Mr. Goblin Cock is something of a genius yet?

Crow don’t blow.

More blogging to come – last night I kicked myself down Sixth for missing the afterhours Playboy party out in the boondocks, which word has it was surreal and chock-full of bunnies – hey, cabs were impossible to nab at 3 a.m. Is music sexy again? There did seem a preponderance of bottle blondes at this year’s SXSW.

Tonight, Friday, March 16, I’m looking forward to hyphy at the Beauty Bar with Federation, the Pack, and Saafir – if I can get in – and the Holy Mountain and Ecstatic Peace showcases as well as a Vice afterhours party. Scrape me off the floor when you’re ready to go-go.

NOISE: SXSW beckons, grins widely, then swallows…

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March 15, 2007

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I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, poor you – poor you, having to hear so much music, drink so much beer, inhale so much barbecue, and party so hard with all those rock stars, random actors, and piles o’ Texans.” You can wipe that little sneer off your mug – it’s unbecoming, and I see marionette lines in your faded future. Anyhoo, South By Southwest it was. Expect fresh dispatches daily, when I can slog back to a computer, from yours truly and contributor Kate Izquierdo. Pray for us.

Who were the strange, frisky, equine-masked dudes making loud, frisky punk with a theremin, fer chrissakes? Rubber Robot, I’m told. All photos by Kimberly Chun.

Wednesday, March 14, I finally landed after missing my plane – again! – and hopping on a jet packed with bizzy types hailing each other in the aisles with, “John Schmoe! John Schmoe! Now I know it’s going to be a good South By, seeing you.” It’s a big ole honking reunion partah down south for the music industry. But it’s a working – and listening – excursion for me. So don’t get me too Texas-toasted.

A small sampling of the fliers, mags, and literature around the Austin Convention Center during SXSW. I wouldn’t want to be handed a duster.

Early on I was looking forward to listening to talks by keynote speaker Pete Townshend, tropicalia pioneer and politico Gilberto Gil, and renewed Stooge Iggy Pop at the actual conference (Remember that? Sometimes it’s tough with all the parties, brisket tacos, and 40s in the haus). I wanted to check out panels on the relevancy of music labels, selling music online, and the greening of the industry. I had goals, yes, goals however humble to see and hear, to name just a few, the Fratellis, the Good, the Bad and the Queen, Charlie Louvin, Ghostface Killah, Jay Reatard at the Goner showcase, Thurston Moore’s new project at the Ecstatic Peace hoedown, Cyann and Ben, Peter Bjorn and John, Fujiya and Miyagi, and all those other bands of two names that actually include more than two members. Clever! Misleading! Pass the corned bread and shrimp tacos.

Honestly, despite that a cursory look at the overall fest bill left me slightly underwhelmed – no Whitehouse reunion this year – and other vets concurred. “Everytime you see a ‘special guest’ slot,” said one, pointing to the SXSW showcase sched, “just think, ‘Peter Townshend.'”

Maybe we’re just jaded. Maybe we suck. Yet, ever the optimist, I say our cynical, overcooked state makes us ripe for having our minds blown. Blow me down, babies.

So to get things started, check out the typically Mardi Gras-with-live-music scene down Sixth Street, the entertainment hub, on Wednesday night.

Pizza scarfing, street walking, and loud, loud music thundering down Sixth Street on a subdued SXSW Wednesday night in Austin, Texas.

Golden nugget

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March 13, 2007

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› paulr@sfbg.com

New restaurants, like trees and kings, have a way of rising from the remains of fallen ones: the restaurant is dead, long live the restaurant. This only makes sense. In the typical hermit-crab situation, a kitchen of some kind is already in place, there might also be some serviceable tables and chairs, and the permit jabberwocky will be slightly less daunting. Easier all the way around.

But this is not the only means of passing fortune’s baton. Some neighborhoods — SoMa springs immediately to mind — are full of restaurants ensconced in spaces once given over to printing plants, warehouses, and other industrial concerns. I had never considered the possibility that someone might one day open a restaurant in an old hubcap emporium — I did not know there were such emporiums — and then, about a year ago, someone did. The restaurant is called Ziryab (named after a ninth-century Baghdadi who moved to Spain and won renown for his discernment in gastronomic matters), and it is to be found along Divisadero in the lower Haight, in a neighborhood still dotted with auto-body and radiator shops.

Given the building’s proletarian past, we might well expect more of a makeover than a fresh coat of paint and new tabletops. We might expect a little pizzazz, a little imagination. And our first glimpse of Ziryab is promising if not quite stunning: a smart golden facade, shining on the gray street front like a nugget in a turbid stream, with the restaurant’s name spelled out in striking, Arabic-styled letters. Just under and behind the facade lies a heated forecourt set with tables and forested with gas heaters. Divisadero is a little rough for the alfresco set, even in mild weather, so the semiwalledness of this garden is relieving.

We step inside and find … well, it’s not quite Vegas, but the interior designer clearly has visited that desert Shangri-la. The restaurant’s basic layout, narrow and deep, is like that of countless other places; there are a couple of tables set in the windows on either side of the door, while the swelling of the kitchen on the right creates a kind of narrows, as at Zinzino. But the Vegas effect has nothing to do with the floor plan and everything to do with the columns and arches of fake marble blocks, which give a faint sense of grotto and a much stronger sense of being in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. All that’s missing is the fake sky of perpetual evening overhead, filled with fake twinkling stars. Also the fancy shops. For some reason I find this kind of plastic fakery charming, perhaps because, like all kitsch, it’s knowing, and because it’s truly not bad-looking. You would never go so far as to suppose that you’d actually wandered into the sultan’s kitchens in the Topkapi Palace, but the thought might cross your mind.

Ziryab’s food comports with the faintly whimsical mood. The basic tenor of things is Middle Eastern (or Mediterranean if you prefer, or eastern Mediterranean), and this means such dishes as shawarma, kabob, dolma, hummus, and so forth: onetime exotica now well integrated into local practice. But there are also more involved and unusual dishes of a related provenance, as well as a few that have nothing to do with the Middle East at all.

In this last category I would put the house burger ($9), adding only that it was among the worst hamburgers I’ve ever eaten, notwithstanding the lovely fries (with their natural curl) and a thimble of Dijon aioli on the side. The patty of meat, though good-size, was cooked beyond well-done to a cinderblock condition, and even this merciless charring couldn’t conceal a certain gamy offness. I felt as if I’d wandered into the pages of Kitchen Confidential. "House"? I would lose that.

Apart from this blemish, we found everything else to be good or better. Lentil soup ($4) had a nice acid charge (from some red wine vinegar?), while paprika oil brought a bit of smoky counterpoint to a sensuously creamy Jerusalem artichoke soup ($5). Kefta kabob ($14) — ground veal and lamb, spiced and grilled — is a common entry on Middle Eastern menus around town, and it usually shows up in the form of meatballs or links. Ziryab’s presentation is quite a bit more stylish: the pieces of meat are given a cutlet shape, then nicely plated on a bed of couscous (or rice, your choice).

Another preparation almost universal in the eastern Mediterranean is the spinach phyllo pie the Greeks call spanikopita. Ziryab’s term is sambosik ($15), and while it includes spinach in a pastry crust, it adds mushrooms, almonds, and feta cheese for a subtle whirligig of flavors and textures.

Araies ($6), on the other hand, I’d never heard of. What turned up was a quartet of half moon–shaped breads heavily topped with spicy ground lamb and flecks of scallion and green bell pepper. It was as if we were eating some superconcentrate of a pizza so meaty even Round Table hasn’t come up with it yet.

My vote for best dish would go to the homemade roast beef sausage with braised white beans ($9). The sausage was perhaps less novel than advertised, the links notable mainly for their garter snake–like slenderness. But the beans, in a thick, rich sauce of tomato confit (dotted with quarters of well-stewed tomato), were really a solid winter stew and would have remained so even if there’d been no sausage.

Dessert? Why, warbat ($5), of course, cheese wrapped in sweet phyllo. Picture a fragment being thrown clear of a collision between a cheesecake and a calzone, and you’ll have some idea. The warbat isn’t huge, but it is shareable (with a spouse or whomever) and makes a nice cap to dinner. *

ZIRYAB

Continuous service: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., noon–midnight; Fri.–Sat., noon–1 a.m.

528 Divisadero, SF

(415) 269-5430

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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Of blood and blintzes

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March 13, 2007

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The hawks are looking hungry. My chickens are scared. Me too. We spend a lot of time in the bushes, plucking and preening and trying to act casual. And while they’re scratching for bugs, I’m collecting dandelion greens for my salad. The price of lettuce has literally brought me to my knees.

You’re thinking: Lettuce? The price of lettuce?

Yeah, well, maybe you don’t know how much salad I eat. (A: a lot.) My favorite statistic says that when they have unlimited access to grass, chickens will eat it more than anything. Up to two-thirds of their diet will be green. That’s why true free-range eggs glow the way they do, the yolks. And true free-range chicken farmers glow too, in case you haven’t noticed.

Because probably two-thirds of what I eat are greens. And the other third, instead of bugs and spiders and stuff that chickens eat, is chickens; and chicken-fried steak; and big, bloody, rare burgers; and, of course, eggs.

All of which has nothing to do with what I’m doing in the bushes, let alone my new favorite restaurants. I’m on a secret surveillance mission. The mission: to find out how my escape-artist chicken, Houdini II, is finding her way out of the chicken yard and into the neighbor’s flower bed.

The method: to learn to think like a chicken, eat like a chicken, fear like a chicken, crave neighbors’ flower beds like a chicken, escape like a chicken, and, failing all that, to cut a chicken’s head off and make gumbo out of her.

My chicken-farmerly reputation hangs in the balance, like, like, like … like a foot-tied headless chicken draining into a bucket. Also at stake: the copaceticness of my relationship with certain flower bed–having neighbors.

But all this talk of blood and gore and ruffled feathers is reminding me of my weekend last weekend, when I got to go to my ex-wife Crawdad’s baby shower and hug my ex-mother-in-law, Crawma, for the first time in my new format.

She didn’t recognize me, I don’t think.

"Crawdad," I said, "introduce me to your mom."

Then she recognized me but did seem a little weirded out, and who could blame her? It was a baby shower! What could be weirder? Everything was nice and pretty and cute, and afterward I needed to go to the roller derby.

I have a new favorite sport!

The Richmond Wrecking Belles beat the crap out of the SF Shevil Dead, and I ate a hot dog. But you’re probably more interested in Saul’s Delicatessen, huh?

Saul’s is Berkeley’s way of saying "hey" to New York. And just like Zachary’s does Chicago pizza better than Chicago (you ask me), I believe Saul’s would out-apple the Apple in belly-to-belly competition. But what do I know? I’m just a chicken farmer.

Well, sure, because of local-grown organic produce and Neiman Marcus designer meats, Saul’s might boast. But I like it better than New York for my usual reason: it’s closer. By a lot. And they have everything Jewish and wonderful, like potato latkes, blintzes, matzo ball soup, and so on. And bagels.

I got salami and eggs, and it was great. I mean, the eggs were just eggs, because we didn’t make them, me and my girls, but the salami was good and plentiful, and the latke, which you can get instead of hash browns for a buck-fifty extra … it’s worth it.

I love latkes. They’re those potato and onion pancakes, you know, served with applesauce and sour cream. I love that they were used, according to Jewish legend, to put some Assyrian meanie to sleep and then chop off his head.

And I love Saul’s. It’s a cheerful, comfortable place to hang out. I sat there with my new friend Thingpart, the famous five-minute cartoonist, and we blah blah blah blah blah’d like two old hens for way more than five minutes. We must have sat there for over two hours, I’m thinking, because what we ate was breakfast, and it was lunchtime by the time I left. And between this, the beautiful day that day, a great soccer match, a baby shower, and the Bay Area Derby Girls, I was one happy happy farmer.

Last weekend. But now it’s the work week, and, if you’ll excuse me, I have to whip up a potato latke, so to speak, for one of my girls. Here, Houdini! *

SAUL’S

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 8 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1475 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 848-3354

Takeout available

Beer, wine, and cocktails

MC/V

Bustling

Wheelchair accessible

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God chillin’

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March 7, 2007

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER O brother, where art thou, blog-worthy, buzz-besieged bands? Whither the classes of 2004 and ’05? As memory fades and fads pass, the Klaxons and Beirut had best look to the respective fates of Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, both of which have spawned second albums at a time when Britney Spears’s postpartum-postbreakup cue-ball cutes (uh, was she actually a musician, mommy?) score almost twice as many hits as Beyoncé or any ole artist who has actually issued fresh tracks in the last four years. How has blogosphere-borne hypey held up? Can the viral gospel survive, with or without fast-buck comps with the word "Hitz" in their titles? (Was I dozing through Now That’s What I Call Indie! Vol. 23?) Was there any substance to the sound of the mid-’00s when it comes to Arcade Fire and CYHSY — two indie taste sensations that musically mimed Talking Heads and, in their number, resembled villages more than singular villains? Can they bring sexy back sonically, even though they never bumped billiard balls with the naked-noggined queen of pop?

From the sound of the last CYHSY show I caught at the Warfield, the Philly–New York sprawl seemed well on its way to sell-out-by staleness. Out were the frothy, Afropop-derived David Byrne–ing campfire rhythms. Enter monotonous, monochromatic indie rock.

Yet although CYHSY’s new (and still bravely self-released) ‘un, Some Loud Thunder, peters to a dull roar by the time "Five Easy Pieces" rolls around, the full-length still impresses with its sense of aural experimentation. Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann throws fuzz, shmutz, and the noise equivalent of cat fur and tumbleweed over the proceedings, futzing the opening, title track into a cunning combo of foregrounded murk and tambourine-shimmy clarity. CYHSY cut through the fog of pop with the dissonance-laced sweetness of a cockeyed, choral "Emily Jean Stock" and the Dylanishly titilutf8g manifesto tease of "Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?" Some Loud Thunder is a freakin’ busy record — with the emphasis happily on the freak — and it’s almost as if CYHSY were trying to reach beyond the easy, cumbersome cool of their name (always suspected to be a major part of their appeal) and toward, hoo-boy, depth. Too bad the lyrics aren’t often up to the musical intrigue on such songs as "Satan Said Dance" and "Goodbye to Mother and the Cove," making CYHSY sound like the E.E. Cummingses of indie, for whatever that’s worth. "Gravity’s one thing and / Gravity’s something but / How about coming down …," Alec Ounsworth whinnies. "Weird but you’re back talking." Wonderfully weird, yes, though is it unfair to ask if you have anything to say?

Back also, in priestly black, are Arcade Fire, who have plenty to tell in the three years since Funeral was unveiled. Amid the majestic choral sheen, synth pop flock, and Tijuana brass of their new album, Neon Bible (Merge), Win Butler and party have unearthed and dusted off the lost threads of connection between the teary tough-guy sentimentality of Gene Pitney and Roy Orbison, the jittery junked-up teardrops of "Little Johnny Jewel" and Suicide, and the quavering, coaguutf8g pop syrup of the Cure and OMD. Arcade Fire have crawled through a creaky, darkened looking glass and found a lost, perhaps losing world populated with forlorn soldiers, urban paranoiacs, rough water, guiding lights, lions and lambs, and idling vehicles.

Cloaked in increasingly trad folk and ’80s pop-song structures, engineering by Markus Dravs (Björk) and Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls), and contributions by members of Calexico, Wolf Parade, and Final Fantasy, Arcade Fire thankfully put lyrical clichés to work during Neon Bible‘s clamorous service, to the end of genuine storytelling. They’re preaching the gospel of transcendence through music and art — something that now seems unique to rock, in contrast to rap — questioning a holy war in "Intervention" ("Working for the church while my family died / Your little sister is going to lose her mind / Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home / Hear the soldier groan / He’ll go it alone") and the god-fearing hysteria of "(Antichrist Television Blues)" ("Don’t want to work in a building downtown / I don’t know what I’m going to do / Because the planes keep crashing, two by two"). Arcade Fire are far from the first to fire artful shots in response to wartime, but Neon Bible — as bold and beautiful, as hysterical and hopeful, as corny and acute as a rockin’ soap opera or Jesus Christ Superstar — feels like the best album of 2007 so far. *

ARCADE FIRE

June 1–2, 8 p.m., $31.50

Greek Theatre

UC Berkeley, Gayley Road, Berk.

www.ticketmaster.com

GET OUT

NICE BOYS

The Portland, Ore., upstarts with mighty fine shaggy rooster cuts step up with ’70s-style glitter pop. With Time Flys and Apache. Wed/7, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

OLD TIME RELIJUN

K Records’ wrecking crew just might find a deity at the bottom of a beer stein. With Tussle and the Weasel Walter Quartet. Wed/7, 10 p.m., $5. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994

BUNNY RABBIT

CocoRosie’s girly rapper protégé freestyles with a thumb-sucking bounce. Is her Lovers and Crypts (Voodoo-Eros) for reals? With Tha Pumpsta and Bruno and the Dreamies. Thurs/8, 8 p.m., $6. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. (510) 444-7263. Tues/13, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

EMPTY ROOMS

A new self-titled EP finds the Bay Area moodniks waxing gothily. With Worship of Silence and This Isn’t It. Sun/11, 9 p.m., $6. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300

Upside Woodside

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March 7, 2007

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› paulr@sfbg.com

"Are we on the San Andreas Fault?" my companion asked uneasily as we stepped from the car and stood looking at the Bella Vista Continental Restaurant, lit up like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen tale in the soft winter gloaming. "No," I said. "The fault" — really a rift zone, so I’d learned in my college geology class — "is down there." I gestured vaguely past the rambling structure, perched at the edge of a woody abyss, toward the twinkles and shadows below, perhaps at Larry Ellison’s $27 million Woodside backyard. The fault, or rift zone, as I understand it, creates the long, narrow valley that separates Skyline Boulevard and I-280 for much of the northern length of the Peninsula. The valley’s chain of lakes look like Scottish lochs but are in fact reservoirs run by the San Francisco Water Department. Larry Ellison runs Oracle; would we find him at the bar at Bella Vista? Is he a regular?

When we stepped inside, we found no sign of him, but the bar was lightly populated by a quartet of young men in sweatpants and sneakers staring at a flat-screen broadcast of some Stanford game.

"We’re overdressed," my companion hissed, and my heart sank. I remembered the restaurant as being agreeably classy in an Aspen-ish, horse-country way, with a wealth of rustic, roadside-inn touches — exposed wood beams, picture lamps with their cords trailing down the walls, an unpaved parking lot among the cedars — but my last visit had been some years earlier, in the summer of 1980, when Jimmy Carter’s solar panels were still in place on the White House roof and the phrase "President Reagan" was still tinged with irreality. Had the past quarter century brought a down-market slalom to this handsome and atmospheric stalwart, which opened in 1927? Had it become a kind of Dutch Goose with a view, or a rival to Zott’s, the fabled hamburger stand and beer garden (once a stagecoach stop, now called something else) on nearby Alpine Road? We were led to our table, which was set with a red rose and a frosted hurricane lamp with a real candle, and our server shortly appeared in a black dinner jacket and black tie, speaking with an Old World accent we guessed might be Belgian. No, no down-market drift.

Cuisine described as "continental" might have had an alluring patina a generation or two ago, but nowadays it suggests museum cooking. Bella Vista is one of the Bay Area’s premier view restaurants anyway, and views tend to be conversation pieces. The view is why people are there, and the food only has to be good enough to keep them from getting up and leaving in disappointment.

As it turns out, Bella Vista’s food is quite a bit better than that, and while it is old-fashioned — I found myself wondering if the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton might offer a similar menu if it were moved to a lonely mountain road — it’s far from arthritic. Good food always does honor to a restaurant, of course, and is a sound fallback plan for any view restaurant in the event (at some point inevitable) that the view is temporarily obscured by weather or … other forces. We found the air hazy and smoke scented when we arrived; was Larry Ellison hosting a huge barbecue somewhere on the glittering carpet of lights below?

No grilling at Bella Vista. The kitchen’s main instruments are the sauté pan and the oven. New Zealand mussels ($14), for instance — gigantic ones — were arrayed on the half shell, slathered with garlic, parsley, and butter, and briefly roasted. This was fine by us, especially since the puddles of leftover melted butter were perfect for sopping up with the formidably sour sourdough bread.

For the relief of unbearable garlic breath, we were presented with an intermezzo of peach sorbet, spooned into sturdy sherry glasses that resembled dwarf champagne trumpets. Across the way: a birthday gathering of eight or so, with some off-key singing, which grew lustier as the wine disappeared. If we were at all tempted to join in, we were soon distracted by the arrival of our big plates, one of which was a simply gorgeous lobster tail ($55), shelled and sautéed in butter. The less done to lobster, the better; no fancy sauces, please, or incorporations into pasta or risotto. Just butter, and maybe some boiled new potatoes, a ration of seared green beans (squared off and stacked like firewood), and a smear of splendidly orange puree of roasted carrot.

Veal au poivre ($24) was similarly accompanied, except the potatoes gave way to a wild-rice pilaf. The slender, tender sheets of meat were bathed in a Dijon cream sauce dotted with green peppercorns, and while I have become uneasy about meat and almost always shun veal, whose production doesn’t bear much looking into, I was not at all sorry I failed to shun here.

Dessert production tilts toward soufflés for two ($18), and trayfuls emerge regularly from the kitchen. Raspberry was recommended to us (over chocolate and Grand Marnier); I found the soufflé itself to be eggy (with no burst of raspberry inside) but the swirl of sauce on the plate to be a winsome combination of butter, caramelized sugar, and whole raspberries. It could easily have been spooned over vanilla ice cream or pound cake or just eaten like zabaglione from a tall glass. Even if someone (not me!) were seen licking it right off the plate, it would be hard to find fault. *

BELLA VISTA CONTINENTAL RESTAURANT

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5–9 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.

13451 Skyline Blvd., Woodside

(650) 851-1229

www.bvrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

>

NOISE: Noise pop-a-go-go-going! Roky, Macro, Pop, pop, pop…

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March 2, 2007

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Wow, can’t stop the Noise Pop show-going. Though when one finds the time to report on it or discuss the hairdo’s seen or the amount of cheap beer quaffed – who knows?

First off, Roky Erickson totally freakin‘ kicked ass last night, March 1. Solid band, great sound, punchy drumming, great gods of distortion smiling down. You know, the works. Though the set was relatively short at about 40 or so minutes and Erickson and the Explosives sprinkled the proceedings with several blues jams, all the faves were in order – 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and his own “Two Headed Dog,” “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer,” and “I Walked with a Zombie.” All mind-alteringly loud with plenty of intriguing facial expressions (puzzled, thinking, munching, etc.) on Erickson’s face. Black motorcycle jacketed rocker crowd was out in force, along with passionate oldsters – haven’t seen that mix since Radio Birdman’s first SF stand.

And Wooden Shjips sounded absolutely awesome at 8:30 p.m. opening for Erickson (incidentally Howlin’ Rain rocked the keys and Oranger sounded more raucous than ever). Hard to believe it’s your second show, I told guitarist Ripley Johnson. It’s actually his third – the second was in Cotati, he replied. Same diff, no?

Meanwhile Macromantics, otherwise known as Romy Hoffman, killed at Bottom of the Hill Wednesday, Feb. 28. She mimed sticking a knife in her chest, strafed the air with her arms, and flipped her long hair all over the place – and ruled the mic with tongue-twisters that would have driven me mad. (And lord knows I’ve tried, tackling “Crazy in Love”‘s raps at karaoke.) Later Pop Levi brought the blues-rock overdrive – loud and proud, get used to it.

Later I waddled over to Great American Music Hall to check Sebadoh. Yep, they’re still there. My pals were divided as to whether they prefered Eric Sebadoh tunes or Lou Sebadoh numbers. Regardless, ya got it all.

An evening of esoteric indie rock

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March 2, 2007

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So there’s this guy named Tommy Lee. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Played drums in a little-known rock band? Married some blonde in a red bathing suit? Starred in a salacious home video? Well, apparently this obscure musician is still making his art in the small, private, cult-following-type venues he’s become accustomed to (like Oakland’s Oracle Arena, on two different reality shows, and in a book he’s co-writing, among about a dozen other gigs).

And because I’m on the inside of the indie scene, with my ear to the ground and finger on the pulse and my nose buried deep in music mags you’ve never heard of, I caught wind of Mr. Lee’s recent appearance in the Bay Area. Not only caught wind, mind you, but rode that wind all the way to the stage and then behind it, where I watched this lean, muscled, tattooed, talented, teenager-in-a-man’s-body (If only he could be saved from his obscurity so the rest of the world could appreciate his crush-worthiness…) wail away on the drums while his friends from other little known bands (Guns N Roses, anyone? Black Crowes? Nah, I haven’t heard of ’em either…) and a guy they found on a TV show played along in their tiny garage band named Rockstar Supernova .

Now’s probably the part where I should review the show, but thanks to appropriately rockstar amounts of beer and Jagermeister that took me a week to recover from (and therefore that long to write about it), you’ve probably already read about the show somewhere else. And considering that I met (and liked) the fantastic Mr. Lee before he went on stage, I’m not exactly an unbiased observer anyway.

Instead? Look at some pictures from the Rockstar Supernova show on Thursday, February 22 (with Juke Cartel, fronted by Rockstar Supernova reality show runner-up Toby Rand, and Panic Channel, featuring Dave Navarro):

Lukas Rossi, the former Hooter’s cook from Canada who won the reality show contest and now fronts Rockstar Supernova

Tommy Lee on keyboards during a cover of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony

The encore, a cover of Prince’s Purple Rain, climaxes with – what else? – a rain storm of purple confetti

(Molly Freedenberg)

Noisepop cracks up: trading jibes with Patton Oswalt

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February 28, 2007

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Our little bundle of noise is almost all grown up. Damning the brooding tradition of adolescence, Noise Pop has learned to laugh at itself — and anything that involves swigging beer and heckling Patton Oswalt without a two-drink minimum sounds like pure fucking genius to me. I recently spoke to Oswalt on the phone from Burbank. After soaking in enough indie to keep you cloaked in scene points until next year, you may want to check out his act alongside fellow comedians Brian Posehn and Marian Bamford. (K. Tighe)

SFBG You’ve been gigging at indie rock venues for a while — and now you are getting booked at festivals such as Noise Pop and Coachella. A lot of bands must be pissed off at you.

PATTON OSWALT Getting invited to these things is really flattering, but my rider’s still simple. As long as there is old scotch, I’m fine.

SFBG Have you ever been to the Noise Pop festival?

PO No, but I’m really excited. I’ve only ever listened to Genesis, so I’m hoping to discover new stuff.

SFBG You used to live in San Francisco. Are there any old haunts you still frequent when you play here?

PO I have about 10 old haunts. They are all Starbucks now.

SFBG El Farolito or Cancun?

PO La Cumbre all the way. They are mighty, mighty, mighty, and they’ve never fallen.

SFBG Your San Francisco act is always incredibly liberal — how much do you need to alter your political material from city to city?

PO I don’t have a tailored act. I trust the audiences to rise to the occasion. There are more and more pockets of resistance everywhere. Besides, the things I say aren’t all that outrageous compared to what is actually going on.

SFBG Any early thoughts on the 2008 presidential race?

PO I’m saying it now: the Democratic ticket will be Mickey Rourke and the original lineup of Journey.

COMEDIANS OF COMEDY

Sun/4, 5:30 and 8:30 p.m., $24

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

MORE NOISE POP PICKS

FEB. 28

DAMIEN JURADO

At a recent gig in Seattle, Damien Jurado recounted an interview with a French journalist who had asked him if folk music was the new grunge. The singer-songwriter dismissed the question, but it was clear he was as comfortable cracking wise as he is creating the bleak portraits and doleful characters that inhabit his songs. Jurado’s latest release is not new but a reissue of Gathered in Song (Made in Mexico), which was originally put to tape in 1999 by friend and fellow plaintive songwriter David Bazan. Three months older though still freshly minted is And Now That I’m in Your Shadow (Secretly Canadian), a milestone recording with Jurado’s first permanent band, including cellist Jenna Conrad and percussionist-guitarist Eric Fisher. Here the trio essays the same lyrical and windswept landscapes that dominate Jurado’s discography, though gone are the upbeat pop numbers that have peppered past albums. The result is at once tender and forlorn. John Vanderslice headlines; the Submarines and Black Fiction also perform. (Nathan Baker)

8 p.m. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $14. (415) 771-1421

MARCH 1

TRAINWRECK RIDERS

Despite critical acclaim for their latest album, Lonely Road Revival (Alive), Trainwreck Riders remain as down-home as their sound. Proof the San Francisco boys haven’t gone Hollywood yet: vocalist Andrew Kerwin still works at Amoeba in the city, and the band recently got arrested and Tasered by Houston police at a show with former labelmates Two Gallants. Songs such as "In and Out of Love" combine roots rock, punk, and country that sound familiar, retro, and refreshing all at once. The harmonica in "Christmas Time Blues" makes me want to flee to my favorite dive bar to sulk, even on a good day. (Elaine Santore)

9 p.m. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. $12. (415) 861-2011

MARCH 2

DAVID DONDERO

If ever there were a diamond in the indie rock rough, it is David Dondero. National Public Radio named him one of the 10 best living songwriters, but he still tours in his truck and has probably served you pints at Casanova. Nick Drake may have lamented that "fame is but a fruit tree," but he checked out long before his notoriety took root and grew. Dondero, on the other hand, has worked for years in relative obscurity. His latest effort, South of the South (Team Love), was bankrolled by Conor Oberst, an overdue invitation to the feast from a man who freely admits to copping Dondero’s style. Jolie Holland headlines; St. Vincent opens. (Baker)

9 p.m. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $20. (415) 346-6000

TED LEO AND THE PHARMACISTS

Naming your band is one of the early hurdles for any would-be rock star. Ted Leo and his mates had a stroke of genius the day they alighted on the Pharmacists, arguably trumping even the Beatles for best tongue-in-cheek rock ‘n’ roll pun. Not that ingenuity is lacking in this outfit, which packs as much fevered punk energy into a four-minute tune as a mitochondrion does into a cell. For those who slept through freshman biology, that’s the part of a cell that, among other things, processes adrenaline. And anyone who has ever attended a Leo show is all too familiar with this chemical. (Baker)

8 p.m. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. $18. (415) 885-0750

MARCH 4

CAKE

The genre-bending Sacramento band known for funky arrangements, monotone vocals, droll lyrics, and a whole set of cabaret, country, and soul cover songs (including Gloria Gaynor’s "I Will Survive" and Black Sabbath’s "War Pigs") finishes Noise Pop with characteristic verve and vibraslap. This indie-turned-mainstream-turned-indie quartet has gotten increasingly political in recent years — check out the band’s Web site (www.cakemusic.com) if you want to see what I mean — so expect some social commentary with your catchy ditties. It’s also worth showing up for the textured pop sound and cheeky lyrics of opening band the Boticcellis; Money Mark and Scrabbel also perform. (Molly Freedenberg)

7:30 p.m. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. $25. (415) 474-0365

>

The power of meat

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February 27, 2007

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By L.E. Leone

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I’m not really going to no wimmin’s music festival in Michigan this summer, don’t worry. It costs money — are you kidding me? And I’m not camping out at no Camp Trans, either, to protest. I already gave up on political actions, restroom-related or otherwise.

Y’all can have your fucked-up ismicistic world.

I have chickens. I have fire and wheels and weird words that nobody knows but me. Ismicistic means everyone’s got to be a somethingist and embrace somethingism. Not the chicken farmer, not no more. I embrace nothing. I lay down my arms, my sword, my pen, my heart. So that means I give up on romantic embracement too.

Hey, maybe the only time anything really really buttery ever happens is after you’ve already surrendered to the bread: the plain old dry, crusty facts of your actual life, exactly what you actually have (e.g. chickens, chicken shit).

I really am going to Michigan, though. In August. I’m going to karate chop my chickens, pack up my pickup, and pitch my little one-farmer tent right smack in the war zone between the wimmin-born-wimmins and the boy-born-girlies, and I’m gonna eat nothing but raw red meat for a week, and lie around in the dirt, naked. Then when all the mosquitoes that bite me start biting everyone else on their vegetarian asses, they’ll all be infected by a meaty, greasy, good-natured carnivorousness, and the world will have been saved without anyone even realizing it.

My Michigan-born-wimminfriend Kizzer deserves a Nobel Warmth prize for teaching me to go to bed with hot water bottles, in lieu of lovers. I giggle and smile and think of her warmly every night as I crawl in under the covers and play footsy with Mr. Hotbelly. Talk about personal growth … I used to sleep with my socks on!

So Kizzer calls me at my brother’s house on a recent Sunday, says she’s been walking around Berkeley all day, smelling meat.

"Let’s be more specific," I said, searching for my pen, which I’d just laid down. Somewhere. "Barbecued? Braised? Broiled? Barbecued? What? Talk to me."

"Grilled," she says, after honestly thinking about it.

"OK, that’s kind of like barbecue. Let me make a few calls, borrow someone’s laptop, see what I can come up with."

K.C., Everett and Jones … been there, done them. There’s another one now called T-Rex, but it looks like high-brow barbecue, which is an oxymoron. And as much as I love oxen and morons, Kizzer and me had just accidentally dropped 40 bucks apiece at some Italian restaurant in the Mission the night before. We were both still reeling and a little nauseous over that.

So I called up Wayway, my go-to Berkeley eats consultant, and said, "Cheap. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap."

"Chicken farmer?" he said. "Is this you?"

It was!

Taiwan Restaurant, he said. Next door to McDonald’s on University. He said it was his favorite place for cheap Chinese food. Ever. Anywhere. And Chinese food ain’t barbecue, I’ll be the first to admit, but when Wayway described the pork noodle soup with mustard greens, it sounded like soul food to my ears. I told you I have this thing for soup right now. In fact, I’d almost rather eat soup than meat — so long as the soup has meat in it, you understand.

I had to talk Kizzer into this. "It’s Chinese New Year!" I said. "It’s the Year of the Pork!"

She bit, and I slurped and slobbered and spilt my tea, I was so excited over the heap of noodles and greens and pork swirling majestically out of the broth like Alcatraz or other islandy, mountainous tourist attractions. With noodles and greens and pork all over them.

Get this: $4.50! For a meal-size bowl of soup. Six-fifty for a huge plate of beef and snow peas, and the meat was tender and the peas were snappy. And the pot stickers took 20 minutes to make and were so juicy and meaty and flavorous that you could almost believe in Santa Claus all over again.

Fifteen dollars stuffed us solid, and me again for lunch the next day. So … do I have a new favorite restaurant?

I do! *

TAIWAN RESTAURANT

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–12:30 a.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.–12:30 a.m.; Sun., 10:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m.

2071 University, Berk.

(510) 845-1456

Takeout available

Beer

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

>

The rise and fall of the Donnas

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February 20, 2007

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

The Donnas have every right to be bitter — and the general nonexistence of delectable male groupies is just one item on a laundry list of spoilers. "Seriously, if there were hot guys throwing themselves at me, I would take advantage of them!" complains vocalist Brett Anderson, lounging on the patio outside engineer Jay Rustin’s Sherman Oaks recording studio, where the Donnas are recording their next album.

What’s the issue on this mild winter day in an intensely girly garden paradise cluttered with poodle-haired pups, dive-bombing hummingbirds, and wildly whistling songbirds? The unequal treatment undergone by one of the most celebrated and derided groups of female rock musicians to hit the country’s pop radar since the Go-Go’s. Essentially, "it’s not the same!" Anderson and guitarist Allison Robertson yelp simultaneously.

"It’s much harder for a girl to get a blow job," adds Robertson, ever the analytical Donna, even in matters of quickies. "A lot of guys on the road in rock bands don’t always bang every girl — they just get blow jobs really fast. Guys can do that. It takes 10 minutes or five minutes. But with girls, it’s just not the same. We all know — it’s a little more involved. You need a little more privacy usually, I dunno."

Their tour bus just has tiny bunks shielded by curtains. "Literally, a Porta Potty is more private than a bunk," says Anderson, still the wisecracking, immaculately turned-out amazon in a sweater, skinny jeans, flats, and Springsteen T.

Once Palo Alto’s misfit all-girl rockers from Jordan Middle School, San Francisco’s punk-metal-pop sweethearts on Lookout!, then Atlantic’s up-and-comers splashed all over MTV, the Donnas are now, 13 years along, veterans at the ripe ages of 27 and 28 who can say they’ve been and done that and seduced, if not 40 boys in 40 nights, then thousands of listeners. Today labelless, off their well-worked and beloved touring circuit, and working through a Saturday on a disc with nary a flunky pushing a pop agenda, the Donnas are free, though their trajectory has been tough — littered with put-downs (some said they were the products of a Svengali in the form of Radio Trash–Super*Teem label owner Darrin Raffaelli, who initially collaborated with the teen band once called Ragady Anne then the Electrocutes), innuendo (who could ignore the unsettling amounts of older stalker dudes at their shows?), and rumor. "A lot of people think we’ve gotten dropped and we owe [Atlantic] thousands of dollars and we can’t pay them back!" Robertson explains. "Also that we’re broke and we’ve broken up."

"Also that we’re lazy," Anderson jumps in, imitating an imaginary slurring, boozy Donna. " ‘Oh yeah, we’re working on our record. Gimme another beer!’ "

Contrary to conjecture, it turns out that the Donnas weren’t dropped from Atlantic but left amicably, deciding not to renew in the face of pressure to go more pop after 2002’s Spend the Night failed to take off on rock radio despite much MTV play for their video "Take It Off" and 2004’s Gold Medal failed to remedy matters. "Our big joke was that we were making Gold Medal so Spend the Night would go gold," Anderson quips. Fortunately, the women who once aced their high school courses and recorded their first 7-inches after hours at a local Mailboxes Etc. are used to driving themselves — even when they couldn’t operate a motor vehicle.

"They started when they were in seventh grade," Anderson’s mother, Bonnie, says over the phone from Palo Alto. She’s one of a contingent of Donnas parents including Robertson’s musician dad, Baxter, and bassist Maya Ford’s English instructor father, John, who founded Poetry Flash. "We had to drive. We were the roadies. Mostly we drove them to different shows, unloaded them, watched them, and went, ‘Omigod,’ and loaded ’em up again. We lived vicariously through them."

But then, the Donnas’ career has been marked by such disjunctions: they were the good students who got into UC Santa Cruz (Robertson and Ford), UC Berkeley (Anderson), and NYU (drummer Torry Castellano) as well as sexy, nice girls-gone-bad who foregrounded female desire, fast tempos, and crunchy metal-fleck glam rock licks, fashioning a sound that might have emerged from Rikki Rockett and Vince Neil if they took the rock train to the next gender. All appetite and attitude, riding the tension between the needs to please and be pleased, the Donnas projected the carefree party-hard image that presaged Andrew W.K. while undergoing their share of trauma and drama, starting with a car accident on the cusp of 2001’s Turn 21 (Lookout!) and continuing through the trouble-plagued Gold Medal sessions, which saw Castellano’s painful case of tendonitis, Anderson’s ravaged vocal chords, Robertson’s divorce, and ordinarily prolific lyric writer Ford’s dry spell. "I kind of ran out of ideas and just got depressed," Ford says on the phone in Los Angeles. "I think I felt, like, a lot of pressure, and it’s never a good situation to be under the gun."

But the Bay Area–bred band stuck together, even when they always felt like outsiders amid Lookout!’s East Bay punk scene. "The thing that’s the most impressive about the Donnas is that through all of this, being teenagers, being best friends, having dreams of school and different careers, parental pressure to pursue those, highs and lows in terms of record sales and attention, they’ve stuck together," says manager Molly Neuman, once the drummer of riot grrrl groundbreakers Bratmobile and a force behind the now-catalog-driven Lookout! alongside her ex-husband, Christopher Appelgren.

The frustrating thing — even on this Grammy weekend, as the Dixie Chicks were getting ready to receive their dust collectors across town — was hitting the wall on rock radio as so many other female bands have. All the while they were dancing backward, away from the on-air jokes about synchronized periods and D-cups and being told repeatedly, " ‘We don’t play female rock on our rock station,’ " unless it’s Evanescence or No Doubt, Robertson says.

After trying Atlantic’s pop strategy and working with songwriters such as Dave Stewart ("You write songs with a guy who’s had these number one hits, and you see he still has to sit and go, ‘Dog, no. Frog, no’ — that’s nice," Anderson says. "You feel like, ‘Oh shit, he has to do that too’ "), they’re hoping to strike a balance with the new record, cooking up hard rock ear candy that satisfies a craving for sweet riffs and hard-to-shake hooks without falling prey to the monochromatic hardness of, say, Spend the Night. The songs they’ve tracked so far focus on Donna favorites — partying and dancing — with glances at the equalizing effects of nightfall and the loneliness of the road. And perhaps the gumption that gave these women the courage to face prove-it punks and surly sods every night on tour, the same sassiness that some mistake for brattiness, has been tempered with time.

"We were listening to old records and thinking, ‘Shit! Like, we’re scary!’ " Anderson says, laughing.

"This album," Robertson says softly, "is more like ‘Come party with us.’ " *

DONNAS

With Boyskout, Bellavista, and Push to Talk

March 2, 9 p.m., $20

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

Sonic Reducer will return next week.

Me and my bitches

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February 20, 2007

0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I have long, pretty, curly hair, and there’s always food in it — and often branches and leaves and stuff — because I’m a chicken farmer. I spend my days crawling around in the bushes, looking for eggs.

At the famous Womyn’s Music Festival in Michigan, trans women (MTFs, women who were It’s-a-Boyed at birth) are not welcome. I knew that. What I didn’t know, until Bitch magazine told me, is that trans men (FTMs, men who were It’s-a-Girled at birth) are welcome. To explain their quirky exclusionism, the festival heads have invented a new category of people called womyn-born-womyn.

Well, dang, that ain’t me either….

It’s almost enough sometimes to make a chicken farmer feel a little lonely. In the world. In the woods, I am on top of the world, and I’m working on a new song that says so. It’s called "A Thousand Feet above You." Which is what I am, in a purely topographical sense, assuming you live at sea level.

I’m going to put on my own music festival for chicken farmers–born–chicken farmers. I’m going to play my great new song to an audience of none. And it’s going to be sad and weird and safe and healing and … safe … and …

I’m so confused!

But then the food comes, and everything makes sense again. The cheese on Lisa’s enchiladas is moving! It’s so hot it bubbles up. And my own plate of beef and beans and rice is so big and so heavy-looking that I could cry. It’s hot too. Sizzling. You can hear it. In the kitchen, instead of an oven, they have secret access to the center of the earth, and the food is not cooked so much as volcanoed.

Our meals seem to be trying to say something to us. I bend my ear to my plate and do, indeed, learn something that goes universes beyond anything else I’ve ever learned. It’s like a dream, untranslatably wise. Ever the poet, I lift my head, look Lisa in the eye, and begin to search for words. Exact words with precise meanings … even as the understanding itself is retreating irretrievably into a steamy, dreamy sort of nebulousness.

"You have beans in your hair," Lisa says.

It’s gone. Gone. But I have to grab onto something, or I might disappear too. "That’s it! Never try and listen to your food," I say, or pronounce. In italics. Out in the air like that it seems somehow small, incomplete. "If you have long hair," I add, wiping mine off with humility and grace and a napkin.

Don’t worry, dear reader, this isn’t a date. (Or, if it were, it ain’t no more, Ms. Beanhead.) It’s more like a journalistic summit: Bitch magazine vs. Cheap Eats. Except right off the bat you can tell that, refried ends notwithstanding, we’re on the same exact side!

How can this be? Bitch is a smart, cool, feministic take on pop culture. Beyond my decided preference for root beer, I don’t even know what pop culture means. No TV. I don’t listen to the radio. Most of the records I like are at least 60 years old. And I don’t subscribe to any newspapers or magazines or spend a lot of time online. I can’t remember the last movie I went to or rented. And I can’t afford the opera or ballet or real restaurants. (And by real, of course, I mean unreal.)

In short: I’m a chicken farmer. When I’m not having lunch with my new friend Lisa at my new favorite restaurant, Mexicali Rose, in Oakland, I’m crawling around on my hands and knees in mud and chicken shit, looking for eggs. I have branches and leaves — and now refried beans — in my hair.

What’s more, I’m trans, and that translates to misogyny, according to some feminists. Believe it or not, I’ve heard this. And like everything else I’ve heard, there’s a part of me that is willing to believe it.

Fortunately, there are 40 trillion other parts of me. And 40 trillion other voices. And when Bitch and Cheap Eats put our little blabbers together last week and clicked forks — and mind you, I was born with "male privilege" and a little tiny wee-wee, and Lisa is practically a vegetarian, for crying out loud — I swear it was like we were long-lost sisters.

Is there a word for this? Inclusion? Openness? Warmth?

So, OK … August. Who wants to go to Michigan with me? *

MEXICALI ROSE

Daily, 10 a.m.–1 a.m.

701 Clay, Oakl.

(510) 451-2450

Takeout available

Full bar

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

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Practical aggression

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February 13, 2007

0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The reason I keep a dream journal is not because I think my dreams mean anything. It’s because where else do you get to write a sentence like He’s always so brittle when he comes back to life and not even blink?

Cheap Eats!!!

This week’s dreamy food-for-all begins on the baseball field. Big Rec, Golden Gate Park. A beautiful summery day for July or August. For early February, it was surreal. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

On TV, Super Sunday countdown; and by way of a more appropriate pregame show, six dudes were playing touch football in deep left field, creating for us a sort of nebulous, moving home run fence. The center-field fence was a soccer match, and in right field it was ultimate Frisbee.

Some of the guys I play ball with don’t even know I’m a girl. They think I’m just cool or weird. Which I am and am, of course, so I let it ride. Bob ribbed me because my earrings didn’t match my socks, or they did — I forget which. Letting it ride, I lined a double over third. I like being on base mainly because I get to chat with the other team’s players. Weather, restaurants … you know, music.

"Yeah, I have to leave early today," I said to their shortstop, Dave, taking my lead. Then I got all embarrassed because I thought he’d think I was leaving early to watch the Super Bowl. So I clarified: "Book club."

I felt certain he’d have wanted to know what book we were reading, but the batter got a hit, and I had to run. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, Dave. That’s what I was discussing with my girlfriends over tea and cake while elsewhere in the world Tony was drinking beer and Carlos was winning $500.

The water was the exact same shade of blue as the sky, creating the effect of horizonlessness, according to Robinson. The metaphorical significance of which, according to Kirsten, was a blurring of the line between life and death. It made so much sense. I almost jumped up, pumped my fist, and spilled my tea, but I didn’t. They’re alive, and they’re not alive!

Almost exactly in sync with the winding down of tea and cake and literature, a loud cheer wafted through the open window from an apartment building across the street, signifying, I guessed, the end of the game.

Remember when I was practically a sportswriter? At dinner at Chilli Cha Cha on Haight and Fillmore (Thai Noodle and Food Café is the subtitle), I sat with my back to the TV so that Kirsten’s boyfriend, Peter, who had also missed the game, could watch highlights.

We split a spicy grilled beef salad (Peter and me), and Kirsten poured a whole order of rice into her coconut milk soup, creating a pasty, tasty mess. My favorite thing in the world right now is duck noodle soup, and I turn to it often. My new favorite "food café" floats some spinach in it, and I love them for that. The deep, dark broth, the comfort of noodles, and the ridiculous juiciness of duck, that lovely layer of fat between the skin and the meat … that’s where I want to live.

The night before, in a bar, I’d almost got in a fight, I was saying. A drunk guy kept pinging my steel pan with his fingers. I had to grab his wrist and hold it and I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I felt ready and willing. I would have punched and kicked and clawed in defense of my baby.

Which was weird, I was saying, because before I switched fuels, I was a mess in this situation. On T, I would shake, shut down, and lose the ability to speak or swallow, let alone fight. It didn’t make sense.

"Testosterone affects aggression," Peter said, looking down from football highlights. "Defense is something else entirely." He looked back up.

Wow. He was right. Outside of television sets, football stadiums, and certain select craniums, Peter was absolutely right, and I was going to have to vote for Hillary.

But why do I keep dreaming about Dom, my best friend, teammate, bandmate, and comrade, who died almost 20 years ago? Our dreams are peopled by pieces of ourselves supposedly. And he’s always so brittle when he comes back to life. *

CHILLI CHA CHA

Daily, 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

495 Haight, SF

(415) 552-2960

Takeout and delivery available

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

>

Fresh hedonism and sound artifacts

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February 13, 2007

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

America’s holy trinity — beer, barbecue, and the Bible — forms a belief system of carnivorous consumption and garish glitz in recent photographs by Bill Owens and Christian Patterson, well paired in concurrent exhibitions at Robert Koch Gallery.

Owens’s "Flesh," with its uncomfortable close-ups of pork parts and gnashing teeth, picks through gristly ribs, charred bacon strips, and headless mannequins, revealing an eat-or-be-eaten society starved for gustatory and spiritual succor. Patterson’s "Sound Affects" searches for musical solace in Memphis, Tenn., finding fundamentalist sass and the sick glow of neon lights where Elvis Presley used to reign. Both photographers — old-guard Owens, whose seminal Suburbia study put him and his Livermore neighbors on the map 35 years ago, and up-and-comer Patterson, seen here in his first West Coast show — saturate their semisurreal documentary images with alarmingly bright hues, recalling William Eggleston’s aesthetic approach. Their generous use of color gives these images of flesh and blood, bars and jukeboxes, an added kick, and the shows are energizing even when their subject matter is ugly or forlorn. "Revelations 21:8," scrawled on a dirty kitchen wall in one of Patterson’s photos as if prophesying doom resulting from the kitchen stove’s four burners left unattended, sets a foreboding tone. "But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone," this cheery verse promises. That’s bad news for the ravenous consumers in Owens’s images, whose sins of the flesh range from ogling Victoria’s Secret models and worshipping Prada mannequins to sprinkling mystery meat with synthetic seasoning and tearing into jumbo ribs with unsated appetites verging on vengeance.

Heedless hedonism is slathered all over Owens’s pictures like rancid barbecue sauce: his subjects pig out in skimpy underwear and strike a pose or decompose depending on their place in the food chain. Only in Freud at the Met, in which three museumgoers study master painter Lucian Freud’s portrait of legendary performance artist Leigh Bowery in all his corporeal glory, does the contemplation of flesh finally satisfy our appetite for skin, sin, and salvation. Otherwise, "Flesh" inspires a desire for vigorous flossing.

Patterson leads us away from Owens’s designer bulimia and deep into Memphis, where so many have wandered before. Like the Japanese teens in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, Patterson is lured by the promise of musical transcendence and authentic American cool. Void of people but crammed with their stuff — twinkling Christmas lights, a Diary of a Mad Housewife paperback, a jukebox playing Floyd Cramer’s "Last Date," a poster of the classic Jam record that gives Patterson’s show its mod title — these photos testify to Paul Weller’s, Patterson’s, and Presley’s belief in music’s ability to alter its most receptive listeners and their environs, from Tennessee to Woking, forever and for the better.

Imbued with tunes blaring at bars, skating rinks, and house parties, Patterson’s photos are melodious, bluesy, and edged with guitar feedback. The brightly colored fluorescent tubes that illuminate the Cozy Corner Restaurant are like a Dan Flavin installation put to good use, while the neon Alex’s Tavern sign, shot from within the late-night lush lounge, vibrates through creased Venetian blinds. Patterson fills out his compositions with musical filigree: white graffiti clouds on a light blue brick wall, the curves of a vampiric temptress wielding her pet bat in a salacious painting decorating a well-worn watering hole, the striated lines and lies of a tattered American flag. The whoremongers, sorcerers, and idolaters of Revelation 21:8 might be damned, but eternal suffering for doing bad, bad things in run-down Southern towns doesn’t seem so awful when the fire-and-brimstone soundtrack features "That’s Entertainment."

Skateland emerges as the key work in Patterson’s show and also offers an elegiac alternative to the meat eating and meat beating so rampant in Owens’s series. In this nostalgic image, a giant roller skate adorned with wings soars above an abandoned rink, no doubt once the site of Xanadu-like bliss, into a perfect blue sky. All flesh is pure here, all sins are forgiven. Elvis has not left the building. *

"BILL OWENS: FLESH" AND "CHRISTIAN PATTERSON: SOUND AFFECTS"

Through Feb. 24, free

Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Robert Koch Gallery

49 Geary, fifth floor, SF

(415) 421-0122

www.kochgallery.com

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Sex on wheels

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February 7, 2007

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FIXED-GEAR FIX Mr. July, bare chested, coyly toys with a Rubik’s Cube, the waistband of his Champion boxer-briefs just visible above his brown leather belt with a "Philadelphia Freedom" buckle. Mr. November, sandwiched between two Muni cars, has his T-shirt pulled up to just above his nipples, revealing washboard abs and a plethora of tattoos. Mr. February gazes longingly over the Mission rooftops, one slippered foot swinging like a come-on over the edge.

What do they have in common besides month-based nomenclature? They’re all local bike messengers who were lustily photographed by Svet, Laura Downey, Peter Taylor, and Kevin White for the 2007 "At Your Service" bike messenger calendar.

If you’re a big gay like me, you spent most of the post–Chili Peppers, pre–Warped Tour ’90s playing not fantasy football but fantasy bike squad, dreaming of scruffy, rough-and-tumble boys like the ones pictured in the calendar streaking over hill and dale on their FrankenTreks to deliver their special package to you (insert back-door delivery joke here). A few years and several actual messenger scores later (yep, that was me on Craigslist) brought the reality that fantasy is best savored virtually — but that doesn’t mean I had to quit looking.

The calendar, shot by Bay Area photogs and laid out by local gear-queen designer Downey, brings a breath of sweaty, last night’s beer–scented air to any cubicle or bathroom. Indulge yearlong in the grungy goodness! (Marke B.)

Calendar available ($10) at Box Dog Bikes, 494 14th St., SF. (415) 431-9627, www.boxdogbikes.com; and Refried Cycles, 440 Haight, SF. (415) 621-2911, www.refriedcycles.com; or by e-mailing Laura Downey at blueakira@gmail.com

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Valentine’s Day events

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February 7, 2007

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PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

"Amor del Mar" Aquarium of the Bay at Pier 39, Embarcadero at Bay; 623-5323, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Wed/14, 7pm, $125 single, $200 couple. Support the nonprofit Aquarium of the Bay Foundation during this romantic evening featuring cocktails, culinary delights, and a live salsa band.

"Cupid Stunt — Club Neon’s Third Annual Valentine’s Day Underwear Party" Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell; 861-2011, www.neonsf.com. Wed/14, 9pm, $10. A chance to dance with no pants, featuring DJs, a lingerie fashion show and trunk sale by designer Danielle Rodriguez, and Valentine’s visuals by Chris Golden.

"Isn’t It Romantic: New Connections Valentine’s Day Benefit Concert" Castro Theatre, 429 Castro; www.newconnections.org. Wed/14, 7:30pm, $20. Local chanteuse Nancy Gilliland sings love songs from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s to benefit New Connections’ HIV/AIDS healthcare services. Tickets available via www.ticketweb.com.

"Love Your Way to Abolition: Party with Saint Valentine" El Rio, 3158 Mission; www.elriosf.com. Thurs/15, 6pm, $5-50. This benefit for Justice Now, an organization that works with incarcerated women and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons, will feature speakers and live music.

"Pink’s Valentine’s Party: Cupid’s Back" 296 Liberty; www.pinkmag.com. Sat/10, 8pm, $25. This party will raise funds to support the GLBT Historical Society’s world-class archives of queer history. Romance tips given by Clint Griess, life coach on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and an open bar provided by Bulldog Gin and Peroni Beer. Space is limited.

"Randall Museum Presents a Valentine’s Day Sex Tour" Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way; 554-9600, www.randallmuseum.org. Thurs/15, 7:30pm, free, donations encouraged. Guest speaker Jane Tollini of the San Francisco Zoo leads an entertaining and educational romp through the wild kingdom, featuring fairly explicit photos and her own blend of knowledge and humor.

"Sea of Love Scavenger Hunt" California Academy of Sciences, 875 Howard; 321-8000, www.calacademy.org. Sat/10-Thurs/15, 10am-5pm, free with museum admission. Embark on a self-guided scavenger hunt to find the museum’s most amorous creatures and earn fun prizes. G-rated tours available for children.

"The Sweet Cheat Gone — a Free Public Street Game" Meet at corner of Steuart and Market; www.sfzero.org. Sat/10, 7pm, free. Participants take sides in the prosecution of a defendant accused of committing a crime. Teams will travel by foot, bike, or Muni (no cars or taxis) to various San Francisco locations, competing with each other to collect or destroy evidence and prove their case.

"Valentines, Fashion, and You" Nordstrom San Francisco Center, 865 Market; 243-8500, ext 1240. Sat/10, 12pm, free. Event features live models, the hottest fashions in lingerie, refreshments, and prize drawings. Space is limited to the first 100 who RSVP to the number listed above.

"The Vampire Tour of San Francisco" Meet at corner of California and Taylor; (650) 279-1840 (reservations), www.sfvampiretour.com. Wed/14, 8pm, $15-20. Spend Valentine’s Day in the company of a vampire, and take an amorous walk through beautiful Nob Hill. A few special guests are dying to meet you.

"Woo at the Zoo" San Francisco Zoo; Sloat Blvd at 47th St; 753-7263, www.sfzoo.org. Sun/11, 12pm, Tues/13-Wed/14, 6pm, $70. This new and dynamic multimedia event provides an entertaining approach to the erotic life of animals, including how they choose their mates and raise their families. The 90-minute tour features up-close animal encounters and romantic refreshments. Admission includes presentation, refreshments, parking, and zoo admission.

BAY AREA

"Have a Heart" MOCHA — Museum of Children’s Art, 528 Ninth St, Oakl; 510-465-8770, www.mocha.org. Sat/10-Sun/11, 1pm-4pm, $5 per child. Make a papier-mâché heart sculpture or a lacy wire heart mobile and design unique cards for your loved ones.

"Nils Peterson’s Valentine’s Day Poetry Reading" Le Petit Trianon Theatre, 72 N Fifth St, San Jose; www.pcsj.org. Wed/14, 5:30pm, $10 includes glass of wine. The Poetry Center San Jose presents Nils Peterson, whose long literary career includes a 30-year tenure teaching creative writing at San Jose State University. Also featuring Sally Ashton.

"Saint Valentine’s Day Poetry Reading" Frank Bette Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru, Alameda; (510) 523-6957, www.frankbettecenter.org. Wed/14, 7pm, free. Alameda’s poet laureate Mary Ridge and others will read about people they have loved and welcomed.

"Week of Valentines at Habitot Children’s Museum" Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk; (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org. Wed/7-Wed/14, $6 per child and $5 for accompanying adult. Add your unique artistic touch to a large heart sculpture and create handmade Valentine cards for your family and loved ones using recycled materials at this award-winning discovery museum for young adults.

FILM, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

"BATS Improv Special Valentine’s Day Performance" Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, bldg B, Marina at Laguna; 474-8935, www.improv.com. Wed/14, 8pm, $10 advance, $15 at the door. In the first half of the show, audience suggestions will spark scenes and improv games that illustrate the humor in romance. In the second half, the audience will supply a title and a theme for an improvised story that will be created on the spot by BATS’s improv troupe.

"Club Chuckles Presents: Soft Rock vs. Smooth Jazz Valentine’s Day Bash" Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk; 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com. Wed/14, 9pm, $5. A battle of the bands that pits the forces of soft rock against smooth jazz, as played by bands Cool Nites and the Sound Painters, respectively. Moderated by comedy duo Carole Murphy and Mitzi Fitzsimmons, who will also dispense advice to the lovelorn and romantically challenged.

"Love Bites the Hand That Feeds It" Theatre Rhinoceros, 2940 16th St; 861-5079, www.therhino.org. Fri/9-Sat/10, 8pm, $15-$30. The Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco presents its annual anti-Valentine’s Day cabaret. Both evenings feature a variety of solo, duet, and group performances and will include a fifty-fifty raffle. The Feb. 10 event features a live auction.

"The Love Show by the Un-Scripted Theater Company" Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason; www.un-scripted.com. Wed/14, 8pm, $15-40. "The Love Show" will feature songs, scenes, and love-themed fun, all completely improvised. Couples and singles are encouraged to come. (There will even be a "quirky alone" seating section.)

"Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show" Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St; www.makeoutroom.com. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm, $12. Frequently featured on This American Life, Mortified is a comic excavation of teen angst artifacts (journals, poems, letters, lyrics, and home movies), as shared by their original authors. More information at www.getmortified.com.

"Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad" Red Devil Lounge, 1695 Polk; www.nicejewishgirlsgonebad.com. Wed/14, 9pm, $12. Featuring comedy, music, spoken word, and burlesque from performers seen on Comedy Central, HBO, and MTV. These girls thrill everyone but their mothers.

"Valentine’s Day Film Program: Labor of Love" Exploratorium, McBean Theater, 3601 Lyon; www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/10, 2pm, free with museum admission. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the Exploratorium presents a program of short, expressive films about people who love what they do.

BAY AREA

"Comedy Night in Novato" Pacheco Playhouse, 484 Ignacio Blvd, Novato; 883-4498, www.pachecoplayhouse.org. Wed/14, 6:30pm and 8:30pm, $15. Local comics bring levity to this most romantic of nights. A champagne celebration will close the evening.

"Valentine’s Day Comedy with Johnny Steele and Pals" Village Theater, 223 Front, Danville; (925) 314-3400; www.johnnysteele.com; Wed/14, 8pm, $18. Winner of the San Francisco International Comedy Competition, Johnny Steele has been plying his trade for nearly 20 years. A cavalcade of comics joins him for the third annual event.

ART SHOWS

BAY AREA

"All Heart" Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby, Berk; (510) 644-4930, www.expressionsgallery.org. Fri/10, 6pm, free. A collaborative art show with Children’s Hospital Oakland and Art for Life Foundation. The show runs through March 9. Presenting the work of patients participating in Art for Life programs as part of their care and rehabilitation. *

See you in Assisi

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February 6, 2007

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Umbria is the center of Italy, pretty much, and that isn’t an easy thing to be. The country has an unconcentric shape, for one thing: a long, booted shank poised to kick a lumpy ball called Sicily, with aloof Sardinia looking on and a curious glanslike flaring in the north, where the peninsula’s long-ago collision with the rest of Europe raised the Alps. Italy is, like California, hot, snowy, mountainous, and flat; it is a land of butter, rice, pancetta, tomatoes, basil, and olive oil. It is close to Switzerland and Africa. It has islands, including Elba, the knob of rock where Napoleon was sent so he couldn’t make any more trouble. (Would today’s Elbans accept another failed warmonger, do you think? Guess who!) It is a lot to be the center of.

There is, then, something elementally Italian about Umbria, a hilly province quite near a pair of famous neighbors, Tuscany and Rome, and like and unlike them. It differs from them in the sense that, apart from the hill towns of Assisi (home of St. Francis) and Deruta (famous for hand-painted ceramics), it is less well-known, especially to tourists. But it resembles its neighbors not least in cuisine, at least if we are judging by the menu at Ristorante Umbria, opened nearly 11 years ago by the fabulously named Giulio Tempesta. Umbria brought regional Italian cooking to San Francisco well ahead of the current vogue.

If you like Italian food, and everybody seems to, you’ll love Umbrian food, at least as the kitchen at Umbria turns it out. And you will like it in a setting that feels as Italian as many places in Italy, a pastiche of exposed wood, terra-cotta tiles, trompe l’oeil, an old armoire, and good-looking service staff speaking spitfire Italian as they do their skillful dance among the tables. Those tables are crowded, especially at lunchtime, when the hungry include a microcosmic mix of today’s SoMa populations: people who work in the area; others who are staying at one or the other of the neighborhood’s many hotels, conventioneering at Moscone, or visiting the nearby museums; and city folk who have ventured downtown because Umbria is, frankly, worth the venture.

Just as Zuni is renowned for its roast chicken with bread salad — a dish halfway competent home cooks can make a run at — so Umbria is notable for its exquisite pastas, which are another staple of most of the good home cooks I know. My interest is particularly piqued when I find a menu with pasta sauces I’ve been making for years, and Umbria has three of them, right in a row: puttanesca (spicy Neapolitan tomato sauce with anchovies, capers, and black olives), amatriciana (classic Roman sauce of pancetta, onion, and tomato), and arabbiata ("enraged" — tomato sauce with plenty of garlic and chili flakes). Of the three, the amatriciana sauce is the one I make least often, in large part because I don’t keep the requisite pasta — bucatini (fat, hollow strands) — in regular stock, and so I lean toward it in restaurants, when I lean toward pasta at all.

Umbria’s version ($11.75) steps around the bucatini issue by using rigatoni, the stubby, hollow cylinders that look like miniatures of underground pipes. Rigatoni are too short to be easily manipulable by a fork; they have to be speared instead. But the sauce, thickly adhesive and deeply flavored, more than made up for the slight loss of convenience, and I was particularly pleased to find the shreds of pancetta had been precrisped, so that they retained some crunch even when simmered with the tomato and onion.

Lasagne al forno ($16.25) was as satisfying as it gets and served at just the right temperature — somewhere between tepid and warm — which reminds us that, until fairly recently, home ovens were rare in Italy, and dishes destined to be baked had to be taken to the village fornaio, then hurried home while still warm. Mezze maniche ($15.75) — a tubular pasta similar to penne — also got the baking treatment; the tubes were jumbled with rounds of spicy sausage and slices of wild mushroom in a tomato-cream sauce before being sealed under a broad cap of melted mozzarella. And oreccheti ($15.75) dodged a cliché bullet by being given an ensemble of diced chicken, strips of red and yellow bell pepper, and a heavy shower of chopped arugula instead of the usual sausage and broccoli rabe.

You are not required to eat pasta at Umbria, of course. You can have pizza; the margherita ($11) is quite good, though it is more a cheese pizza, with basil and tomato (the former a sprig, the latter a lone cherry tomato, halved) serving in an advisory capacity. For meat people: beef carpaccio is an appealing port of entry, the shavings of flesh heavily festooned with grated Parmesan and basil chiffonade. Polpette ($6.50 for five) — meatballs slightly smaller than golf balls — were marvelously moist and mild (because of veal?) in their bright tomato-cheese sauce, and the lamb burger ($13.75) was sensational, a tasty juice bomb served on a focaccia bun and in the company of the crusty roasted potato rounds that have been one of the restaurant’s specialties from the beginning.

Last, there is the matter of tiramisù ($6.50). As a rule I can do without, but I found myself in the company of an expert, a man who has spent some time looking into the matter. He poked and prodded at Umbria’s offering like a scientist trying to pry a DNA sample from some ancient specimen; finally, he lifted a chunk, watched some goo drip lasciviously to the plate below, and pronounced himself pleased.

"It’s not dripping wet," he said. "A good sign."

Elementary, my good sir! *

RISTORANTE UMBRIA

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

198 Second St., SF

(415) 546-6985

www.ristoranteumbria.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Reorientation

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February 6, 2007

0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter said it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, and that was when I knew I was back. I wish I could remember what I’d said, to mark the spot, something about … something, I feel certain.

We were sitting around a couple of square tables in the back room at Mollie’s truck stop, former home of the 12-egg omelet and current home of the only chicken-fried steak omelet that I know of. It was me, Butter, Phenomenon, the House, and the Horn Section.

Late morning, Klamath Falls, Ore.

We were fueling up for an afternoon show at a nursing home where, weeks earlier, the director was shot and killed by an angry crazy person who probably had religious beliefs and almost certainly political ones. But we didn’t know this yet, over eggs.

Someone tried to tell me once that I was wise and witchy, and I made the mistake of actually believing them. For a while. This is one of the most idiotic mistakes you can make in life, right up there with holding your hand in the fire.

So I went around for maybe a month or two thinking I knew some things, and then the skin between my fingers started to blister and smoke, and I accidentally showed my true colors. I screamed.

My true color is red. My favorite colors are green and blue, and I wear a lot of brown, but my true color, apparently, is red. It expresses itself in millions of little tiny flags sticking out of my skin on millions of little tiny flagpoles, waving in the wind.

And I wonder why people don’t want to date me!

I’m like head cheese. You know that someone, somewhere, considers cute little fiery white chicken farmers of ambiguous gender and unambiguous stupidity a wonderful delicacy or a rare treat. Meanwhile, everyone else in the world, myself included, would rather be eating chicken-fried steak. Hash browns. Biscuits.

Or Thai food.

I decided to sit out our afternoon show in order to check my e-mail. And I borrowed my brother’s laptop and found a Thai restaurant with free wireless Internet. So while my comrades clippity-clopped a crew of traumatized Oregonian elders into working it out on the dance floor, I was eating plah goong with highly suspicious shrimp and wilted iceberg lettuce, checking my e-mail.

Nothing. I put the laptop away and wished with all my idiotic might that small-town Oregon would turn into San Francisco, at least long enough for me to finish lunch. Say at Little Thai on Polk and Broadway, where the prawn salad with mango is to die for, not to die of. And the yellow curry chicken, leftover, forgotten on the floor of your pickup truck and then eaten cold the next day ($7.95) will taste 10 times better than anything this kitchen can come up with.

My new favorite restaurant! Little Thai, I mean. Not this one. And so long as I’m sitting here dreaming and old people somewhere in the world are dancing, let me have a carpenter my age named Joe to talk to. Or let me be standing on Broadway in the dark in the cold, watching his lit, balding, bowed head in Little Thai’s warm, steamy window, reading a newspaper. I don’t care who that guy is, I think, waiting for the light to change. I’m going to cross this street and give him these eggs.

At a country dance that night one town down, at the community center, Earl Butter discovered brandy. I wasn’t drinking, but I couldn’t lay off of the chicken wings. By the middle of our third set, Earl was too brilliant to play the drums by himself, and I was too fried to play the pan.

So I sat splayed on the floor next to his neglected kick drum, and I took off one of my boots, held it by the toes, and tried to give the dancers a downbeat to land on in between his ups.

"Stop it!" he said. "Stop it! Stop it!" he kept saying, but I liked being on the floor and felt useful.

After, I went outside across the parking lot in front of our van and peed in the weeds. There was a field, and there were railroad tracks. It was a clear, icy country night, the stars almost tickling. A train came, shattering everything, and for the gazillionth time in my little life, I closed my eyes and wondered where in the world I was. *

LITTLE THAI

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 4–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 4–10:30 p.m.

2065 Polk, SF

(415) 771-5544

Takeout and delivery available

Beer

AE/MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

>

I Think You’re Crazy … Just Like Me

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February 5, 2007

1

Oh, Crazy Sushi. You’re so…well…crazy. Getting us all liquored up on beer and sake (Unfiltered! In stylish glass decanters! Who could resist?), letting our rowdy 30th-birthday-bash bunch take over your whole restaurant on no notice, and priming us for a night of debauched revelry with your naughtily named Lesbionic Roll (Didn’t I try that in college?) and your Black Magic Woman (Crab, BBQ eel, avocado, cucumber, black caviar and that special spicy sauce, all to make a devil out of us…).

I’d like to blame you for the way we bulldozed through The Transfer after we left you, for the horrific game of pool I somehow managed to win, for the “What? Are we 22?” after-party that went way too late.

But I can’t. Because it’s probably thanks to you and your insanely good food that we didn’t end up even worse off than we did.

So thank you, Crazy Sushi. You saved our (aging) asses.

(Molly Freedenberg)

En plein air

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January 31, 2007

0

› paulr@sfbg.com

If every neighborhood needs a neighborhood bistro, then every neighborhood bistro needs a neighborhood. And is there a neighborhood in the city more charmingly neighborhoody than Cole Valley, the little hamlet tucked in a cleft of the hills near UCSF and fitted out with every romantic accoutrement, from a railway station (Muni’s N-Judah line stops at Cole and Carl after emerging from a mysterious tunnel) to a sunlit boulangerie with well-worn floorboards? The neighborhood’s village center is, like that of neighboring Noe Valley, replete with amenities, including a hardware store and a plethora of interesting restaurants (from a hamburger stand to a sushi bar), but a certain serenity has survived; there are fewer baby strollers and fewer speeding SUVs careering around corners with frenzied drivers shrieking into cell phones than over the hill. While 24th Street, over the last decade, has acquired a Marina patina, or mania, Cole Valley remains one of the most Parisian of the city’s enclaves, a village and city at once.

And it has one of the most Parisian of the city’s many neighborhood French bistros: Zazie, which opened in 1992 and changed hands two years ago, with no apparent drop in atmospherics or quality of food. My overwhelming impression of the restaurant a decade ago was one of narrowness, as if I might stretch out my arms and touch the walls on either side ("the restaurant equivalent of a galley kitchen" was my long-ago phrase). Of course it isn’t really that narrow; snug is more like it, but then, the tendency of memory is to exaggerate. The dining room, with its pair of window alcoves, accommodates about 20 tables of varying sizes, while in the back, past the bar, is a door that opens onto a secret garden, raised and enclosed. The enclosure is softened by bougainvillea and hundreds of little white lights, like stars, while a forest of gas heaters keeps the winter chill at bay even in the evening. If there is one respect in which it’s clearly better to be a French bistro here than in Paris, it has to do with the feasibility of dining under the heavens in January.

Our winters might be milder than those of northern France, but even mild winter weather has its chilly edge, and if you’re eating outdoors, you’re going to want some reinforcement beyond what the heaters can provide. As luck would have it, Zazie’s menu is full of discreetly muscular treats, including a first-rate French onion soup ($6), made with a deeply tasty beef stock sweetened by the slow cooking of the onions and capped by a pad of melted Gruyère cheese, and a chicken liver pâté spread on toasted levain and notable for its whipped-butter consistency.

The pâté appeared, for us, as the first act of a three-course, $19.50 prix fixe. You have your choice from among several — though not all — of the menu’s starters, main courses, and desserts; the permissible terrain is marked off with little asterisks. In a bow to the small-plate-tapas-sharing vogue, the restaurant also offers a $16 starter-sampler platter whose constituents you choose from an approved group. Since I was in the company of a beet lover, we went for the full-scale salade betterave ($8), a gorgeous still-life bundling of red and gold beet coins, avocado wedges, fennel shavings, and mixed greens, the whole thing lightly showered with a vinaigrette of white balsamic and flecks of gorgonzola. Although beets are beautiful to look at, like glistening jewels, I will never love their slightly geutf8ous texture, and the grace of this salad was the presence of everything besides the beets themselves.

Not all the food is French, though most of it is, and the non-Gallic stuff can show a French touch. There is a Zazie burger, as well as a not-tiny crock of macaroni and cheese ($4, and a deal) in which the presence of béchamel (un-American, in a good way) was revealed by a whiff of nutmeg. As for the Provençal fish soup (a prix fixe player), it could easily have been called a stew by virtue of its potato-thickened, slightly spicy red-pepper broth and would have sufficed as a light main course even without the chunks of snapper filet and handful of mussels. Additional spiciness appeared in the form of a trio of toasts smeared with rouille. We were warned against eating the toasts straight out — "Too spicy!" said the comely server — so I was naturally obliged to eat one straight out. I found some heat, nothing unmanageable. The other two toasts were dropped off at the pool as per instructions.

The joy of the prix fixe does ebb down the home stretch. For dessert we were asked to choose between some kind of fruit crumble and a chocolat pot de crème, and since we are confessed chocoholics, this was no choice at all, though we did manage to agonize about it for a few minutes. The pot de crème turned out to be fine in an unremarkable way: a rich, smooth chocolate pudding topped by a generous dollop of whipped cream and served in a handsome crock of white porcelain. As someone who has reached that point in life where the ideal dessert is a taste or two (often of someone else’s), not a massive portion to be consumed solo, I can’t say I was disappointed.

Zazie’s many other graces include knowledgeable, friendly, well-timed table service that seamlessly extends to the garden — always a serious test — and a brisk but sophisticated wine list that features some by-the-glass possibilities you seldom see, including a Quincy and a white Graves, the Bordeaux blend of sauvignon and semillon. The prices for these wines are more than reasonable, as are the restaurant’s prices generally — a welcome bit of proof that superior food and service at a fair price is not yet a paradox, at least not in some neighborhoods.

ZAZIE

Mon.–Thurs., 8 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Fri., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

941 Cole, SF

(415) 564-5332

www.zaziesf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

A Tale of two malls

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January 24, 2007

0

› paulr@sfbg.com

Whether euphemism is entirely a separate language or just a dialect, we need translational efforts to understand what is really being said in its slippery idiom. When foreign ministers tell the media they have enjoyed "frank and cordial discussions," we peek behind the fluttering veil of words to see that they bitterly argued and threatened each other. And when we read hosannas in the San Francisco Chronicle to the city’s burgeoning "service industry" — mentioned in that paper’s recent piece about our present and delightful "golden age" — we should understand that we are reading largely about the business of tourism. We might not yet be the Monaco of the Pacific Coast — a huge, gleaming apparatus whose principal function is to relieve visitors of their money; a bizarro ATM that sucks in cash rather than giving it out — but we are well on our way.

In this connection, we are blessed by the fact that tourists must eat and can be charged for the privilege. Restaurants are becoming our casinos. Not long ago, on a holiday weekend afternoon, I found myself swimming through seas of people in the basement of Westfield San Francisco Centre, the great new mall in the midst of the city. The basement is where many of the food establishments are, and I was en route to a rendezvous at the Out the Door, second offspring of the now world-famous Slanted Door. (The first OtD is in the Ferry Building, along with the mother ship.) If I had squinted slightly, I could easily have convinced myself that I was in the international terminal of some busy airport closed because of bad weather, leaving thousands of stranded travelers nothing better to do than shuffle through shops peddling chichi stuff and eat at fancified restaurants that seem more alike the more they struggle to seem different from one another. (Any casino in Las Vegas answers to this description, incidentally, and so do Honolulu’s Waikiki district and much of Palm Springs.)

As the name implies, Out the Door is set up to offer takeout, and the restaurant offers a small but appealing array of Southeast Asian grocery staples, such as cellophane packages of rice noodles and bottles of fish sauce, at reasonable prices. But there is also a huge dining room whose far wall — a checkerboard of flat glass rectangles in various shades of cream, beige, and brown — looks like a giant version of that sensor panel Mr. Spock was forever scanning on the old starship Enterprise. One difference: Spock’s panels blinked; Out the Door’s panels don’t. Maybe they will someday.

Befitting the restaurant’s pedigree, the food is prepared to a high standard, with immaculate ingredients, although the dishes themselves are modest in origin: a simple steamed bun ($3), say, the size of a baseball and stuffed with minced chicken, shiitake mushrooms, and surprisingly muted ginger. A bit more lively are the Vietnamese-style sandwiches on perfectly tender baguettes, among them a Saigon roast-pork number ($8) whose juicy, five spice–scented meat is enhanced with sprigs of cilantro, and a braised-meatball edition ($8), which includes coarse-ground pork of the sort you often see floating in bowls of pho.

Out the Door doesn’t call its beef noodle soup ($9.50) pho, incidentally, but that doesn’t dim its luster: it’s the one truly exceptional dish we came across, with a golden broth of almost espressolike density and smoothness. If, as a friend said, the measure of pho is the broth, then Out the Door’s pho measures up.

There are dressier, less street-carty choices available, among them grilled prawns over vermicelli ($10.50), elegant but a bit underpowered despite the strong presence of fresh mint, and barbecued pork spareribs ($10.50), beautifully tender under their honey-hoisin glaze. If these are higher-rent possibilities than sandwiches and steamed buns, they are nonetheless honest and sturdy. Still, the sense of being in ritz-land is pervasive. Bloomingdale’s bags everywhere. Diagnosis: affluenza.

Out the back door of Westfield and just a block or so along Mission Street is another mall, less heralded — the Mint Mall — and within its gritty confines a restaurant, New Filipinas, that is one of the very few Filipino restaurants in the city or indeed the metropolitan area. The setting has a run-down, 1970s look, poured concrete and ceramic tiles stained by time, and if you squint your eyes you might think you were at the foot of some faceless high-rise in Manila or Taipei. The restaurant itself is about as modest as it gets: a glass counter for ordering, a clutter of tables and chairs. The feeling is (as a mean birthday card once put it) "You’ve seen better days, but not many."

The food, prepared and served by chef-owner Tess Tuala-Diaz, has the unprepossessing look of an Army hash line: a steam-tray selection of chunked mystery meats stewing in various sauces of varying shades of brown. (A particularly chocolaty-looking tray held, we were told, pork in blood sauce.) There are adobos of pork and chicken, spare ribs, beef with broccoli, a beef and cabbage soup. For $4.90 you get your pick of one, plus a heap of white rice, while $6.50 buys you two picks, plus rice.

An advantage of bleak settings is that, if the food happens to be good, you will not be distracted from noticing it. And New Filipinas’ food is surprisingly good, its flavors deep and direct, its meats slow-cooked to a peak of moist tenderness. It is peasant food, adjusted to a greater fleshiness to reflect the biases and possibilities of this rich, flesh-addicted country. But vegetarians, I will speak frankly and cordially to you: Look elsewhere! Go east, to Westfield, even. *

OUT THE DOOR

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

845 Market, space 80, SF

(415) 541-9913

www.outthedoors.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

NEW FILIPINAS RESTAURANT

Mon.–Sat., 9 a.m.–7:30 p.m.

953 Mission, SF

(415) 571-5108

No alcohol

Cash only

Bearable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

>

Ways we were

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January 24, 2007

0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I was sitting at the bar drinking whiskey with Hobosack, talking about art and writing and waiting for the band to go on so that we could move our heads and close our eyes and rattle on the inside. It’s like being back in grad school, I thought, and this was a warm thing to think on a cold, cold night, until I realized that … why the hell would I want to be back in grad school?

Actually, I can think of some answers to that question: namely, Dash would still be alive, and the Bomb. I wouldn’t be scared. Angelina’s sausage calzone and pasta fagioli at Tony’s … It’s warmer on the East Coast than the West one right now — but then, of course, it wouldn’t be now if I were back in school; it would be then. And snow would be piling up on top of my trailer, the roof sagging and starting to drip.

Nostalgia is a funny thing, innit? Why would we want the way things were? Even if times were great, they are history, and history sucks. Because it’s gone.

Whereas the here and now is here, and now, and still has everything, including sensation, whiskey, a strong backbeat, new friends, old memories, Thai food, and — begrudgingly I admit it — candy.

They said on the radio recently that looking at photographs releases more happiness chemicals in the human brain than chocolate or a stiff drink or other stiff … stuff, or drugs or even hugs — although this starts to seem improbable, so maybe I’m malremembering.

Anyway, I was out in my storage shed looking for something else when I accidentally came across two pictures of Yatee-Yatee-Bing-Eh-Eh-Eh, and then some ones of Crawdad de la Cooter, Feather River. Happiness chemicals were nowhere to be found in my human brain. In fact, these images brought me to my knees, and my storage shed floor, so you know, is concrete and cold and covered in rat shit. My tears were not tears of joy.

There were in the same box so many pictures of the Bomb, from baby to buddy, that I could have put them in order, if I were an orderly person, and made a flip movie of his life and a big bowl of popcorn to go with it.

Not a happy ending.

Hobosack is a man who cries, and this is in fact how we became friends, even though he doesn’t eat meat and actually prefers dessert to main courses.

We were downtown, trying to find a Vietnamese restaurant I keep thinking about and can never quite locate, when suddenly there was Banana House, and then: parking.

"You like Thai?" I asked, blinkering the open spot.

"Bananas are two of my three favorite foods," Hobosack said.

I was charmed and alarmed by this information. Hobosack elaborated: banana Laffy Taffy is his first favorite food, actual bananas his third. That his top 10 list also included coffee, beer, and cake cracked me up and made my teeth start to hurt.

"Are you sure you want to have dinner?" I asked.

He did! I agreed to yum hed, which is a mixed mushroom salad, for the sake of the lettuce and the spicy lime dressing ($6.95). By accident, I even liked one of the three or four kinds of mushrooms, and it happened to be the one Hobosack didn’t like, lucky us. It was clear and looked like something you’d see while snorkeling. Anyone?

There was mango curry, a red coconut-milk concoction with basil and peppers ($7.95), and chicken satay ($7.95) so that I could cut some meat up into everything else. It was dry and bland, but it was meat.

And the bathroom was gravy — unisexual — but so cold that I couldn’t stop clacking until we went back to Sack’s for some hot tea. Then to El Rio, where the heat was on and overhead ceiling vents poured artificial warmth down the outsides of us while we poured whiskey into the insides.

And nobody got hurt or lost time or even cried. Although, as nice a night as it was, somehow we’d neglected to have any bananas. And of course they were on the menu — for dessert! Fried, with ice cream or honey, which sounds good even to me. *

BANANA HOUSE

Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon–9 p.m.

321 Kearny, SF

(415) 981-9399

Takeout available

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

>