Coffee

Appetite: 3 gourmet cheap eats on Sonoma

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 gourmet cheap eats on Sonoma

Not far off Sonoma’s idyllic town square lie these three unique gems – you can eat high quality Eastern European, BBQ or Mexican food at a reasonable price.

EL MOLINO CENTRAL: In a sea of taquerias lining Sonoma’s Highway 12, there’s a new addition I’ve been excited to tell you about that opened early this Summer: El Molino Central. I pulled over after doing a double take — it looks like a charming taqueria, but reading hand-painted “tortillas… tamales… blue bottle coffee” on the side of the building made me say, “Wait… what?”

With no dining space inside, there’s a leisurely patio out back. Inside, it’s an open kitchen where you survey Mexican street food prepared with a high level of care and quality ingredients. The staff hand-grinds corn masa and press tortillas in wood presses. There are even fresh tortillas and pre-prepared dishes to heat up at home. The menu offers merely a handful of items: chilaquiles, tostadas, enchiladas and delightful tamales (I like the white corn and cheese version).

What surprises is the Blue Bottle Coffee menu straight down to New Orleans’ Iced Coffee (perfect on a hot Wine Country summer day). You can get your individual drip or a cappuccino, happily savored with a tamale made from local ingredients.

The place looks plucked out of LA with palm trees and all, but exemplifying Slow Food sensibilities. The shock is the quality level (which costs a little more than an average taqueria, though still under $10)… and the Blue Bottle. You, too, can have your Blue Bottle and homemade tamales in a Mexican food joint. Sonoma is lucky to get this lovably quirky new addition.

Pork Schnitzel sandwich and white corn soup at Lokal

LOKAL: Just off the Sonoma square, Lokal has been getting some love lately from SF folk like Michael Bauer. I’m in when you say Eastern European and Hungarian food — difficult to find done well anywhere, much less in Wine Country.

Lokal won me over with shelves full of records and LPs in the dining room, then with sunny, back patio picnic tables. There’s a fine selection of beers making the patio beer garden-reminiscent. Service has it’s kinks, including a pricing discrepancy on their menu it took awhile to work out on my bill, but the food is a pleasure and is now a favored stop in downtown Sonoma.

Lokal makes a mean German Potato Salad ($5), sweetened by grilled red onions, punchy with mustard, maintaining a fresh profile despite starchiness. A Summer special of White Corn Puree Soup ($3.50 a cup) is sweet and bright. Count me in on the Eva Gabor’s Pork Schnitzel Sandwich/”Rueben” ($12). You almost forget there’s no pastrami in there with a breaded pork cutlet layered with mustard and sauerkraut. There’s a satisfying savoriness here reminiscent of a great Rueben. Lightly crunchy brown bread and house pickles seal the deal.

Jalapeno poppers stuffed with carnitas and cheese at Mondo

MONDO: Mondo, a short drive from downtown Sonoma, has the largest beer selection in the area: 23 on tap and more by the bottle, with a little beer garden courtyard through the restaurant. A couple years ago, this was a sausage and burger joint.

The burgers remain but there’s also the kind of bar food that puts a grin on my face: plump Jalapeno Poppers ($7.50) oozing with cheese and shreds of carnitas (pork). There’s fatty Braised Beef Brisket Sandwich ($9.50) piled with crumbly blue cheese and shaved red onion. For a little healthy balance, try specials like Sweet White Corn Salad ($5) tossed in lime, cilantro, red peppers and red onion.

This is a welcome Wine Country respite where you can break from excess wine for beer and cheap, gourmet bar fare. 

Burmese Kitchen

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Burmese Kitchen

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Burma isn’t quite as isolated as North Korea, but it did take a new name about 20 years ago and isn’t exactly on the beaten path these days. Since I am an admirer of David Lean’s 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, starring Alec Guinness, I still think of that faraway land as Burma, not Mynanmar.

Even under authoritarian military rule, Burma/Myanmar has no real hope of matching North Korea in dreadfulness since, if nothing else, it has better food. You can find nice examples of Burmese cooking at a pair of longtime restaurants just a few blocks from each other in the Inner Richmond — Burma Superstar and Mandalay — but last year saw the arrival of a new entrant, Burmese Kitchen, a reinvented deli along a run of Larkin Street from the Civic Center to Geary densely populated with Asian restaurants.

Burmese cooking is distinctive, at least to this occidental person, in its blending of the effects of the southeast Asian peninsula and Indian subcontinent. So you will find ong no kau swer ($5.50), a marvelous soup based on coconut milk with diced chicken and fat wheat noodles. It’s as if a bowl of udon and tom kha gai had an impetuous liaison and produced, as a love child, an east Asian version of chicken-noodle soup.

On the other hand, you have a dish like chicken chana dal ($6.50), a piece of boneless chicken set on a coarse berm of yellow split peas, with a gentle hint of what we might call curry flavor. The use of legumes here seemed to be a nod to the west, toward India, land of legumes. If I’ve ever come across a lentil or other legume in Thai or Vietnamese cooking, I don’t remember it.

Burmese Kitchen also offers a version of the baked-rice dish known in India as biryani. Here it’s called dan pauk ($8.95) and is heavily laced with flaps of beef — not, maybe, the protein you’d be most likely to find in an Indian biryani.

Several of the dishes feature ingredients I hadn’t come across before. A tea-leaf salad ($5.95) included cabbage, tomato, fried garlic, and a heavy shower of sesame seeds and peanuts — the salad’s chief effects were crunch and tartness. But while the tea leaves themselves laid there docilely while we ate them, we felt their avenging presence later, in the middle of the night. Tea leaves might not have the caffeine charge of coffee beans, but they have enough to make themselves known.

Then there’s the prawn and sour leaf salad ($6.50). The owner, Dennis Lin, personally recommended this, and one taste revealed why. The salad (which includes bamboo shoots and sliced onions, along with tamarind leaves for sour power) was powerfully tart in a way unlike that of either vinegar or lemons and limes, our most common sources of tongue-curling acidity. If the sourness reminded me of anything, it was of verjus, the unfermented wine-grape juice the French sometimes use in vinaigrettes.

Lin, incidentally, roams the dining room like an Italian patrone, checking, recommending, chatting, confirming. When the owner of a restaurant actually does this, you are made aware of how few actually do it. It’s the restaurant-owners equivalent of boots on the ground, and there’s no substitute for it if the owner wants to know how a place is running and how people feel about the food and, indeed, the whole experience. And most diners tend to feel better about a place if the owner is at hand.

We did find a few dishes that flew slightly wide of the mark. The pork with pickled mango ($6.50), touted by Lin, had a muddy look that affected the way we perceived its taste. A sprig of something green would have been a simple corrective. And the fish with tamarind sauce ($6.50) seemed underpowered, the sauce tasting more of soy sauce than anything else, with just a suggestion of fruitiness.

Yet one is hard-pressed to think of a dish anywhere that overachieves as spectacularly as Burmese Kitchen’s fried golden tofu ($4.95). It sounds like something someone would bring to a hippie Thanksgiving potluck. But tofu need not be gelatinous and white; here it was made with yellow split peas, and when cut into wafers and fried, the result was something like polenta sticks. The spicy dipping sauce was so good that I finished it off like a shot of espresso after the tofu was gone. Did the owner catch this small affront to good manners? If so, he was too polite to say anything.

BURMESE KITCHEN

Mon., 10:30 a.m.–3 p.m.;

Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m.

452 Larkin, SF

(415) 474-65569

www.burmesekitchen.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Average noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

Gods of Distortion: The Interviews (Part Two)

Sue Vaughan
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Gods of Distortion: The Interviews (Part Two)

Check out Ben Richardson’s story on the Southern Lord Mini-Tour in this week’s Guardian. Here, he talks with Mike Dean, bassist and singer of Corrosion of Conformity.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: You guys are practicing in North Carolina now, in preparation for the tour?

Mike Dean: That’s right, yeah. It might be useful.

SFBG: How long has it been since you’ve played all these Animosity songs?

MD: Quite a while. Easily 23, 24 years, something like that. 23 years!

SFBG: How does that feel? Is it like putting on an old garment?

MD: Either I remember the stuff precisely, and it is like putting on an old garment – it feels just like yesterday, and I can play it – or there are parts of songs that I have no recollection of. It’s either completely natural or kind of strange.

SFBG: Can you point to any particular parts that seem unfamiliar?

MD: There’s a bridge-like part in the middle of the song “Holier,” that I completely forgot about!

SFBG: This must be due in part to the fact that your technique has changed a lot over the years. At this point you’re a veteran, a very well-schooled musician – not to say that you weren’t good to begin with…

MD: It’s funny that you should mention that. It’s an astute observation, because sometime around the time we did [1987’s] Technocracy, I started to play with my fingers more and more, and sort of leave the picking thing behind. Basically, it was like starting all over again, to some extent. Now, I can do all the things on Animosity and Technocracy with my fingers, as opposed to a pick, which I would just be dropping anyway.

SFBG: So you recorded Animosity playing with a pick, but now you can play all those parts with your fingers.

MD: Yeah, I guess I’m losing points for authenticity that way.

SFBG: Well, I’m a fan of the pick-less bass playing, in general, so I gotta support that approach.

MD: I am too, but I try to have a real open mind about it now. You’ll see videos, certain songs in which John Entwistle [of the Who] or John Paul Jones [of Led Zeppelin] use a pick to mix it up.

SFBG: Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with this Southern Lord Mini-Tour. How did it all come together?

MD: That’s an interesting story. I’ve done a little recording for a band that was on Southern Lord called Earthride. Maybe about five years ago. I kinda knew Greg [Anderson, owner of Southern Lord Records] from that business. Greg was kind of a hardcore fan when he was really young. I believe that Corrosion of Conformity stayed at his house in Seattle back in the day. I have a foggy recollection of that happening. It took me a while to sort of put that person together with the guy in SunnO)))) and Goatsnake, but eventually I made that connection. Dealing with him is pretty cool, and there are a lot of artists on his label that I admire, like Wino and Goatsnake, whom I thought were really good the first time I heard them – it’s hard to go wrong with basically the rhythm section from the California version of The Obsessed and the singer for Scream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk3rlgFrL3w&feature=related

SFBG: Did he reach out to you, or you to him?

MD: He reached out to us. He was looking to re-issue some old stuff, and that still hasn’t happened too much. We mentioned that we were gonna record a new release, and that may happen. So we just started talking to him about doing that, and he said “hey you wanna play some shows out here?” and we were like “oh yeah!” It kinda lit a fire under our ass to get some new songs down and go out and play ’em.

SFBG: This is the new release as a trio that I’m hearing rumors about, with the Animosity line-up?

MD: Yeah. The only tangible thing that’s done is a seven-inch vinyl, two versions of one song called “Your Tomorrow.” That should be available by the time we’re out playing on the West Coast. It was kind of a hurry-up production, though it sounds really good, and looks really good too.

SFBG: Are there any plans to do any new C.O.C. material with [singer-guitarist] Pepper [Keenan]?

MD: There are plans to do that. We have a multi-pronged general plan, to perhaps take this and do a full-length three-piece release, and get out there and play it some. That’ll be quite a story – it’s been a long time, and I think we have some new material that we’re excited about. I think at the point after we’ve done that, it’ll be a story to get the Deliverance line-up together. Before we got the three-piece together, we were supposed to go to Europe and play some festivals, we had some offers, but Pepper’s busy with his other group, Down, so his schedule’s a little jacked up. So almost as a joke, I said, “Well we should do a three-piece tour!” Everybody stopped and went “Uhhhh….maybe we should!”

SFBG: What had you been up to since C.O.C. went on hiatus, in 2006? You mentioned recording Earthride…

MD: Well, C.O.C. had been going without [drummer] Reed [Mullin], and in some point around 2004, we decided to make a record with Stanton Moore, from Galactic – In the Arms of God. That’s something I’m pretty proud of, something we did ourselves in Galactic’s now-demolished rehearsal space, which was flooded out of the warehouse district of New Orleans. We had a nice little tour with Clutch, in the UK. At that point, [C.O.C. guitarist] Woody [Weatherman] and I started a band that we tentatively called Righteous Fool, and he moved up to the mountains, to basically go into agriculture and have a kid — that kind of put a damper on our plans. Then I started getting in contact with Reed for the first time in quite a few years, and we started jamming together, and that became Righteous Fool, and through that combination of circumstances we have Righteous Fool opening up for the three-piece-C.O.C gigs we have lined up in a couple weeks. It’s a slightly greasier kind of feel.

SFBG: I was gonna ask, since there’s only one song up on the Righteous Fool MySpace, and it seems more in the uptempo vein, like the older C.O.C. stuff: what are your plans for the Righteous Fool sound? What side of your musical personality do you get to express in that project?

MD: Well…it’s kind of in its infancy. We’re a couple years into it, and some good songs have emerged, but it’s difficult to call where that’s gonna go. We have a pretty solid musical presence in the form of Jason Browning. I don’t really know what to say about that. There’re a lot of directions we could go. I think there’s going to be more of an emphasis on vocal harmonies, things like that. We have a couple fun things we do, with a Fleetwood Mac song, and a Skip James song.

SFBG: Well I think people are curious to see what’s going to happen with that, and excited to see the band live. You’ll be playing two sets in a pretty short duration on this tour. What do you think the audience reaction is going to be, going from a super-slow, enveloping Goatsnake set right into this pissed-off hardcore Animosity stuff.

MD: It’ll be interesting to see. There are a lot of people who perform that kind of music [doom metal, a la Goatsnake] at some point in their life, in their younger life, in their previous life, who might have been into the hardcore kind of thing, so there’s a lot of overlap there, in terms of the cast of characters who perform that kinda stuff well. At the time – it’s kind of humorous to think, now – some of the parts on Animosity that were slower, briefly dirge-like, somewhat Black Sabbath inspired – that was considered slow, and within a certain kind of close-minded scene, was actually controversial. It was a controversy that you would play a few measures of something slow or heavy rock-inspired.

I think we were credited with being on the forefront of that, but in a way, we were just imitating Black Flag, but taking our Black Sabbath influence a little more literally, and indulging some more regressive influences. We did something original with borrowed ideas. There are people that would say we were involved in the beginnings of that type of thing, y’know. I don’t think that would be too pompous to say. [Laughs] If it is, I just said it, so…

SFBG: You mentioned having respect for Wino earlier. Being in Saint Vitus in that SST scene, he encountered people who would really be pissed off that he would play slow, super-Sabbathy songs.

MD: That was a pretty crazy thing. I’d already been initiated to the music of the Obsessed by that time, and picked up an appreciation for it. And so to see that dude in Saint Vitus not playing a guitar! It was just absurd, but it kind of wound him up, and made him a more intense vocalist. He’s been playing some shows with Saint Vitus recently, and I’ve heard that that’s still the case. I haven’t witnessed any Saint Vitus in quite a few years.

SFBG: You should take the opportunity, if it arises. I’ve seen two shows in this resurrected Saint Vitus era and…

MD: There’s no Armando on drums…they have some other dude on drums…

SFBG: Yeah, they have a different drummer, but Wino and Dave [Chandler, guitarist] are still really potent.

MD: So Saint Vitus comes to Raleigh, NC in like 1986, and Wino stays at my house (it’s a house a lot of people live at) and here he is on this tour not playing guitar. He picks up an acoustic guitar and plays tunes in a couple funny different ways, and plays Robert Johnson songs verbatim, as they are on the one LP – Robert Johnson Complete Recordings – we were just like, “Oh, my God!”

SFBG: I’m curious as to how you got from playing hardcore with Sabbath interludes to playing that reinvented C.O.C. sound from the early nineties, which is much more directly Sabbath-influenced. But that transition corresponds with the time when you were out of the band…

MD: I think we were already looking in that direction. You go out there and you play hardcore music, and you’re on tour, and the quality of it – of some of the bands you see – isn’t that great, and you’re listening to music partially devoid of melody. You want to unwind, and listen to some older stuff, and you realize that the craftsmanship of the older stuff is a little more advanced, even though its time has come and gone. Whats the next logical thing if you’re listening to Sabbath, or the next logical regression, to try to take something new? Deep Purple! We were listening to a lot of that. It’s funny, because after I quit the band they ended up with a singer [Pepper Keenan] who’s obviously really Ian Gillian-inspired, and they hooked up with a producer who had really sound music theory ideas. That resulted in Blind.

I had kinda moved on. I met a nice girl and moved to San Francisco for half a year. I lived in Philadelphia and I was delivering things on my bike. I heard the Blind record, and I was like “Oh mah god, its really good!” That minute came and went, and around the end of 1993, they had a dispute coming up with new material, and they were looking for a bass player and a singer. They asked me, did I want to come and make a record, and I was like “Yeah, all right!”

SFBG: That’s been the thing doing research for this interview…I think the archetypal narrative for rock bands is that they have members in and out and it gets complicated, and there are a lot of hard feelings, whereas it seems like with C.O.C. there’ve been all these people in and out of the band, but it’s been very amicable. You left and came back; you’re playing in Righteous Fool with guys who had been in the band before…

MD: Well, you know, that’s not to say that there weren’t heated incidents involved in some of this revolving door activity. There might be some negativity that occasionally rears its head. But I think everybody tries to be an adult, and a compassionate person. I think Kyuss would be the band that had that more amicable situation. Drummers in and out, a couple bass players…

SFBG: I thought some guys from that band don’t even speak anymore…

MD: Well now, yeah, you’re right. The funny thing is that they were all supposed to be on Roadburn in Holland like the same day. Nick Oliveri playing his acoustic stuff. Mr. Garcia doing some Kyuss stuff…

SFBG: It seems like a lot of these differences are being put aside in the interest of these tours that are resurrecting bands – bands that have been broken up for awhile and are coming back to tour.

MD: There’s a big rash of that right now, and it’s one of things that actually kinda gives me pause about doing this, to some extent. The only thing I can do to allay my feelings of not wanting to be part of that is to attempt to offer something new. At this point, we have four or five new songs that we can perform. We’re doing this as part of readying ourselves to do something new. And I know people are excited about the old stuff, and its fun to play, fun to reinterpret, and we enjoy it, but it’s also about having something new. Because there are a lot of 40-, 45-year-old people who were in some moderately famous musical endeavor when they were 20, and they’re all coming out of the woodwork. There’s just a new market for it.

SFBG: Is it possible for you to expand on the drawbacks of these nostalgia tours? Not asking you to slag anyone off, obviously. Are there things that you could point to that give you the bad vibe with that trend?

MD: No, not really. I’m not going to point to anyone who’s substandard or insincere. At some point it just becomes a little redundant. I’m kind of an unlikely subject [for a retro-focused tour] because I’ve never been real big on the nostalgia factor. But here we are.

SFBG: It just seems like if it’s overdone, it can take away the spotlight from some of the cool new bands. But it cuts both ways, right, because if you have these nostalgia tours, you can have new bands as openers, and take advantage of the known quantity, the big name. If there’s a similarity in the music, then the fans of Saint Vitus, say, get exposed to up-and-coming bands in the same genre that the older cats who listen to Saint Vitus might not have heard of.

MD: Well Saint Vitus this doesn’t really even apply to…

SFBG: Well, yeah. You’re right…

MD: …regular time, the laws of time, don’t really apply to them. They started off working this old crazy freedom-rock ethos anyway. They started off being out of style, and they’re a special case.

SFBG: A bad example for me to cite. In general, do you think it’s a good time in musical history to be a metal band?

MD: It might be! One of these trips has a corporate sponsorship, so apparently someone believes that this can help with product placement and identity. That’s…pretty crazy.

SFBG: Do you follow any newer, up-and-coming music? I’ve been impressed in recent years by the resurgence of a lot of North Carolina-based bands that have been making names for themselves…

MD: You know, the funny thing is, Between the Buried and Me…we had no earthly idea that they were from Raleigh, North Carolina. I was just like “that band with the really badass drummer, and sort of exaggerated dynamics – they’re from Raleigh?! Really?!” I’m not actively following stuff like that, but I’ve heard of them, and I’ve heard them.

SFBG: How about Valient Thorr?

MD: Valient Thorr I’ve actually seen, and the funny thing is I do a lot of…I work a lot of events, I do rigging, and I used to do straight-up stagehand stuff, so I’ve moved Valient Thorr’s gear, at the Warped Tour. They were like, “No, no, you can’t move our gear, you’re Mike Dean!” And I was like, “Dude, the rent is due, every month, I will move it.” I like them, I like their crazy anti-war video from several years ago, with Mr. Brian Walsby. Have you seen that? Being on the Volcom label, no one ever sees their shit.

SFBG: It seems to me like Southern metal has experienced a crazy boom in the last five, 10 years or so. All these bands out of Georgia – Baroness, Mastodon, Kylesa, Black Tusk. You’re sort of in a unique position to speak to how well Southern rock can combine with heavy music.

MD: A lot of the bands that you just mentioned there are good, non-stereotypical versions of what you would call “Southern metal.” There are other acts that kind of exploit that in an uninteresting way. There’s a lot interesting musicianship in that stuff, which is pretty cool. I’m not a big flag-waver, but all those bands are pretty good. It’s kind of astounding how popular and successful Mastodon are.

SFBG: It’s crazy. I’ve seen them go from the club shows to the college amphitheaters. It’s crazy to see the change in the kind of people who you see at the show.

MD: I’ve never been to a Mastodon show. I’ve may have seen them open for somebody a long time ago, but I’ve never been to one of these big shows. I’d be curious to see.

SFBG: They’re total pros in one sense – the performance is really top notch. But the guitarist, Brent, is kind of a wild man, and I think they’re almost better when he’s three sheets to the wind, because it ups the intensity. If he’s getting angrier and angrier as the show goes on, his solos get more expressive…

MD: A whole album based on Moby Dick.

SFBG: Can’t argue with that, right?

MD: Those kids’ English teachers gotta be proud!

SFBG: One of the things I was struck by, listening to Animosity to prepare for this interview, was the strident political nature of a lot of the lyrics. Even though we live in very politically contentious times, there really hasn’t been the kind of musical reaction that existed under Reagan, when people were using music as a channel for their dissent. Do you have any insight, having written a seminal political hardcore album, about why that isn’t going on today?

MD: That’s an interesting observation. I don’t really know the answer to that. I don’t think there’s as much consensus, because of the disparate nature of media now, or the wider number of outlets. At that time, we had cable TV in its infancy, we had print media, we had three networks – I think that people would be more tuned in to the same media outlets at that point, and they would either accept it or reject it. I think there was more potential for mass consensus even in terms of dissent. Now it’s just so diffuse; people just look at things that reinforce their worldview. A lot of those worldviews don’t have anything to do with reacting to political situations, or reacting to wars that are going on. Also, I think expressing oneself through music didn’t result in any massive type of change. I don’t think its really an effective means of effecting any kind of change. It’s just blowing of steam…

SFBG: Well, Bono cured hunger in Africa. So, there’s that.

MD: I crewed for U2 on their 360 show as a local, working the spotlight, and the guy on the spotlight above me pissed himself in the spot chair – I got to watch the piss drip down.

SFBG: He couldn’t leave?

MD: Yeah, he couldn’t leave. I watched him drink some coffee beforehand, and I was wondering…

SFBG: You said it was the spotlight above you? That sounds like a bad situation…

MD: Fortunately, they were offset.

SFBG: Did you see a trickle of urine going by, a couple feet from you?

MD: I did. Yeah, I did.

SFBG: That’s brutal.

MD: They landed the truss, and the guy just left – he resigned on the spot.

THE SOUTHERN LORD WEST COAST MINI TOUR

Corrosion of Conformity, Goatsnake, Black Breath, Eagle Twin, Righteous Fool

Tue/10, 7 p.m., $25

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

www.dnalounge.com

Appetite: 2 sodas for the epicure

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 2 sodas for the epicure

I’ll get this out of the way: I am not a soda drinker. I stopped drinking Coke in high school when I was getting a lot of headaches, in an attempt to eliminate excess sugar from my diet, and not only did it help, but I never cared to revisit the habit. Of course, there are always exceptions and certainly I have tasted a number of worthy sodas over the years. Here are two of the best producers out there.

TAYLOR’S TONICS
Almost savory, spicy, herbal, Taylor’s Tonics are newer, local sodas, and ones that truly stand out. I love the traveling sideshow, Vaudeville-like spirit to the website and packaging, which reflects the passion for performance art and flair of founder, Taylor Peck, who once even worked as ringmaster for small circuses in San Francisco and New York City. His tonics evoke an old fashioned, American medicine show vibe. Healing powers seem possible in the spicing. They also thankfully uphold a trend away from too-sweet or cloying.

Chai Cola has elements of a traditional chai but a soda effervescence and strong, pleasant bitterness. Mate Mojito is a brilliant refresher that takes the tart of lime and balances it with hints of vanilla, spearmint and Yerba Mate tea. Cola Azteca is a bold, spicy mix of coffee, cocoa and cinnamon bark. I recommend the entire line. Check out Imbibe magazine’s story of these unique sodas and their creator.

Taylor’s Tonics are available in the Rancho Parnassus cafe and at Whole Foods.

FENTIMANS
Another yesteryear presentation comes with Fentimans botanically brewed beverages, around since 1905. Fentimans covers a range of sodas from a Victorian Lemonade or Mandarin & Seville Orange Jigger (jigger being an old English word for “good measure”), the latter balancing various orange juices with fermented ginger and juniper. There’s a shandy, ginger beer, and popular Curiosity Cola, a more herbal, apothecary-style soda. I find Dandelion & Burdock flavor an intriguing, traditionally English soda, infused with dandelion leaves, burdock root, pear juice and a hint of ginger and anise.

Fentiman’s gains rogue status when you find out it were banned in the state of Maine to minors (read more on the company’s blog). Why? Because the sodas are just under 0.5% alcohol by volume, which even the FDA considers “non-alcoholic,” but apparently not Maine, which won’t allow minors to purchase a Curiosity Cola.

Email info@drinkfentimans.com for where to buy it in your area.

Check out Virginia’s culinary itinerary site, www.theperfectspotsf.com

Best of the Bay 2010 Editors Picks: Shopping

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Best of the Bay 2010 Editors Picks: Shopping

 

Best of the Bay 2010 Editors Picks: Shopping

BEST SUBJUGATION TO A QUEEN

Well before colony collapse disorder became a phrase of terror, Bay Area bee geeks were eyeing their neglected backyard anise and eucalyptus plants as potential ambrosial fill-up stations for honeybees. In 2008, Her Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper entered the scene, giving the city’s swelling ranks of colonial wannabees the ultimate sweet spot: a one-stop source for everything Apoidea. The clean, light-filled store — which has the distinction of being the only urban beekeeping store in the country — stocks backyard starter kits and supplies, those fabulous white hazmat-style suits (and really, haven’t you always wanted one for demonstrations or Halloween?) beeswax candles, books, bee DIY products (i.e., honey and honeycombs), and, yes, bees. Let’s face it, you haven’t really tasted SF or embraced its hive mentality until you’ve drizzled some Gold Fine Crystal over your locally baked artisanal bread.

3520 20th St., SF. (415) 744-1465. www.hmsbeekeeper.com

 

BEST STEAMY SHOPPING

Shopping at P-Kok can be exhausting. You have to the cross the street, sometimes several times, just to take in all the cute clothes, bags, jewelry, scarves, etc. (and all at affordable prices) at P-Kok’s two Haight Street locations. It’s enough to make you want to find a tranquil garden, flop down on a chaise lounge with a beverage, and soothe your weary self with a sauna. At the P-Kok on the even side of the street (the one at 776 Haight), you can. Formerly the site of a day spa, P-Kok has preserved and replanted the inherited backyard garden sauna — renamed Eden — and rents it for $15 an hour. The best part: it accommodates up to 10. Packed like sardines or solo, it’s the perfect antidote to bustling Haight Street— and the perfect refreshment before going back out into P-Kok(s) and loading up on more cute stuff.

776 Haight, SF. (415) 503-1280, www.pkoksf.com

 

BEST PLACE TO PLAY FOOTSIE

Distraction is the enemy of sock shopping — you came for ultrathin running socks, but omigod, the store has lilac suede Fluevogs with four-inch heels! Before you know it, you’re out $250 and you still have no socks. That cannot happen at SockShop Haight Street. The small, newish, locally-owned store has nothing but socks and sock-related habiliment, including high socks, low socks, toe socks, boot socks, jock socks, kids socks, dad socks, tights, slipper-socks, and sock monkeys. And within those categories, SockShop goes way deep with wool socks, striped socks, plain socks, dot socks, cotton socks, argyle socks, cashmere socks, skull socks, floral socks, flag socks, food socks, animal socks, music socks, holiday socks, fox socks, blocks socks, and rocks socks … Really, need we say more?

1780 Haight, SF. (415) 396-5400, www.sockshoponhaight.com

 

BEST MAJOLICA RUSH

OK, not all of us can afford to buy some ancient heap of stones fixer-upper villa in Siena where, caressed by sun and Italian hunks, we blossom into writers (bite us, Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany). No, we must make do in our fog-shrouded garrets, scrounging for dropped change for a $2 cappuccino. But at some point, we can all afford to splurge on at least one small piece of authentic Italian splendor to add luster to our hardscrabble lives. That’s when we head to Biordi Art Imports in North Beach, a floor-to-ceiling treasure trove of hand-painted Majolica ceramics. And once you start sipping your coffee from a gorgeous De Simone mug or spooning your gruel from a colorful Eurgenio Ricciarelli bowl, the virtual sunlight comes rushing in. You won’t miss that stinkin’ villa at all. Maybe the hunks.

412 Columbus, SF. (415) 392-8096, www.biordi.com

 

BEST CACHE OF GRACE NOTES

Be it ever so humble or token, city dwellers always seem to crave some connection to the natural world: the single bathroom orchid, the three desktop seashells, the rock and glass arrangement lining the windowsill. When it comes to finding these small grace notes (outside of illicitly pocketing them from Glass Beach or Muir Woods), our vote goes to Xapno. The small one-woman shop in the Lower Haight offers a beautiful and fragrant cornucopia of the best that nature and humanity create: fresh and dried flowers, plants, vases, candles, jewelry, cards, shells, branches, cacti, books, paper, paintings, and sometimes clothes and shoes. Furthermore, about half the artists are local, including a ceramics student at City College who has been baking baskets-full of delicate ceramic roses in varying shades of ivory, peach, and pink.

678 Haight, SF. (415) 863-8199, www.xapno.com

 

BEST GIRLY GIFTERIA

Ombre feather earrings, Hollywood Regency lamps, and two-headed chicks by way of the taxidermist — that’s what BellJar is made of. Less evocative of Sylvia Plath’s total collapse than a delicate glass chamber filled with oodles of fascinating objects, the Mission boutique has made a name for itself as the discriminating gothette or vintage girl’s go-to for unique tchotchkes and gifts for loved ones — or, better yet, one’s own bad, sweet self. Here, and on the store’s recently revamped website, you’ll find delightfully retro-esque and oh-so-womanly clothing, witty trinkets that draw inspiration from nature’s bounty, exquisite earrings and necklaces, and founder Sasha Darling’s dark-femme ‘n’ fabulous eye for the Francophile, the girly, and the gorgeously Grimm.

3187 16th St., SF. (415) 626-1749, www.shopbelljarsf.com

 

BEST HANDCRAFTED NIP-HUGGERS

Seductively snug latex over a perfectly pert nipple — yes, please! Skip the tassels, beads and sequins, and go for a super-sexy set of pasties that show off your breasts and hint at the budding shape beneath. The Heartbreaker pasties by Madame S are individually fashioned by hand in the SoMa fetish wear and sex shop’s very own latex production lab by Madame’s devilishly talented crafters. Hidden in the back behind kinky-costumed mannequins and closed doors, your breast’s friend is taking on a cute, heart-shaped form right now and you should be anticipating ways to fit them into your daily wardrobe. Traditional black- and red-rimmed, these pasties are coquettish, classy, and come-hither all at once. Guaranteed to make jaws drop and temperatures rise with appreciation.

385 Eighth St., SF. (415) 863-9447, www.madame-s.com

 

BEST GOLD-GILDED GUIGNOL

Nothing celebrates life more than death — or at least, nothing is more invigoratingly creepy than opening a beautifully wrapped gift to find a life-size crown of thorns made with an assortment of deceased birds’ legs. Haight boutique Loved to Death is stocked with goose-bump inflicting fancies, many of which are gold-encrusted and way more thought-provoking than a living bouquet. Say “I love you” with a 24-karat badger-claw brooch, surprise him with a scorpion in a vial, or show her you care by putting an antique baby doll head under her pillow. Taxidermy (no animals were killed in the making — they were dead already), resurrected art, antiques, and goth-hip jewelry are way more fun when they test your lover’s limits. And if your delicate beloved can’t handle your purchase, you’ll get to keep the muskrat mandible gold-gilded earrings yourself.

1681 Haight, SF. (415) 551-0136, www.lovedtodeath.net

 

BEST HOMEGROWN DISNEY ALTERNATIVE

“We want to make things that have joy and humor, but that people aren’t embarrassed to have lying around their house,” says Gama-Go cofounder Greg Long. When Long and Chris Edmundson quit their day jobs at an East Bay toy company 10 years ago, they were following a dream to make well-designed, cartoon-inspired clothing and products that played off the enormously popular, collectible-crazy pop surrealism movement happening in L.A. at the time. It was a vision that launched a thousand T-shirts. Today, some of Gama’s cute-with-bite stock characters like Tigerlily, DeathBot, and that cuddly ice-bluish fave, Yeti, are common sights on city streets, clubbers’ chests, and shopaholics’ totes. And now there’s Go for your pad too. Guitar-shaped spatulas and “pot” holders that resemble big old Mary Jane leaves make perfect gifts for that urban class clown.

335 Eighth St., SF. (415) 626-1213, www.gama-go.com

 

BEST SMELL OF AEROSOL IN THE MORNING

Photo by Ben Hopfer

Screw a monument and urban planning: we live in City Beautiful. Walk down nearly any street in SF and there on the pavement and buildings you will find the stencils, murals, super burners, tags, and — how do you say? — art that makes this town rich in color, rich in mind. So where does the discerning street artist go for the tools and gear she needs to make these blocks pop? It’s gotta be 1:AM gallery, where prices on paint pens and aerosol spray trump the art supply and hardware stores every time. (1:AM as in “First Amendment” — and a tagger’s preferred rise and shine.) Not to mention the whole gallery side of the space, which hosts some of the most original sometimes-street artists around — who often tag the outside of the store’s Sixth Street walls in kaleidoscopic temporary letterings and designs.

1000 Howard, SF. (415) 861-5089, www.1amsf.com

 

BEST MAKEUP AS DRAMATIC AS YOU ARE

Word to the aspiring pageant queens: (apparently) it’s not all about the Vaseline on the teeth and duct-taped boobs. You want that crown, you need a face full of grade-A goos and glosses — and we know just the place to get them, girl. Kryolan Professional Makeup has been in the primp game since 1942, plumping and perking a passel of pretties, including the 2010 Miss USA contestants. But maybe you’re a DIY kind of queen? All good — Kryolan’s got a kaleidoscopic showroom full of the glitz and glamour for them bright lights, including glitter in animal, vegetable, and mineral form (the company produces more than 16,000 products in 750 colors — over the top, just like you!). If you need help slopping it on in style, or just some tips on how to blend with a little subtlety, then strut, mamma, strut to application classes in the same building.

132 Ninth St., SF. (415) 863-9684, www.kryolan.com

 

BEST RUN TO FREEDOM

Better circulation, cardiovascular health, time to reflect: running makes you free. (Especially if it’s away from an out-of-shape cop.) But pounding these city streets can be tough on the joints and bones. You’d like a little freedom from aching discomfort as well. So jog over to On the Run, an Inner Sunset shoe store that specializes in helping peeps in pain — seriously, half the store’s first-time customers arrive with a doctor’s referral. Its trained staff will send you for a walk on an electronic pad that measures foot pressure, plus pronation and supination (both refer to the angle at which your foot hits the block). They use a fancy device to measure your feet accurately, then hook you up with some sweet kicks that have you feeling fit, fast, and fab. You pay a bit more for all this podiatric prognostication, but hey, all runners know there’s gotta be some pain in the gain.

1310 Ninth Ave., SF. (415) 665-5311, www.ontherunshoes.com

 

BEST SUCCOR FOR SUCCULENTS

The fog makes a great excuse for those with black thumbs. Usually we can blame our houseplants’ premature striptease of this mortal coil on the clouded vagaries of our mini-ecosystem. However, even fact-based finger-pointing fails when it comes to the death of a beloved succulent. One simply should not be able to kill a cactus. And yet one does. Sigh. Should your astrophytum be stymied or your once-verdant aloe shade into an unbecoming red, Succulence is there. This secret garden store is hidden away on a Bernal Heights video store’s back patio, packed with many a bulbous, spiny, or just plain prickly new friend for you to take home in an inventive recycled planter. But don’t ditch that sickly chum languishing in your window box! Succulence also mixes a special soil blend that can resuscitate even the saddest looking ball o’ spikes.

402 Cortland, SF. (415) 282-2212

 

BEST TEMPLE OF LIFE

In some lovely, distant universe, all we buy are magnificent orchids, and all the money goes to AIDS prevention and relief organizations. This impractically gorgeous fantasy becomes reality at nonprofit Orchid Mania’s beautifully named Orchid Temple, based in an unassuming house in the Excelsior District that contains a three-climate greenhouse. OM has packed its temple with orchids that resemble dancing ladies, some smelling of blood (all the better to woo their insect pollinators), that will stop your housemates in their tracks with their glory on your kitchen table. Call ahead to alert the temple guards — or show up during the all-volunteer operation’s open orchard hours, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays — and take your time browsing for a worthy cause. The temple also functions as a bulb foster home to keep rare species from extinction. Let’s just say they’re into the preservation of beautiful lives all around.

717 Geneva, SF. (415) 841-1678, www.orchids.org

 

BEST ONE-STOP SKULL SHOP

You can’t walk by Martin’s 16th Street Emporium without ogling the ghoulish delights displayed in the windows. Casual strollers might be forgiven for thinking the place is called “The Skull Store” — an apt description, anyway, considering that the store is stuffed floor-to-ceiling with skulls galore. Though it’s not open very often (try Thurs.-Sat. afternoons — look for the pirate flag out front), it’s well worth a special visit to pick up a gift for your favorite skull collector. Sterling silver jewelry is the main attraction, with everything from dangerous-looking knuckle-duster rings (scary skull!) to delicate pendants and earrings (fashion skull!). It also carries skull figurines and other knickknacks, not all of them skull-related, but many of them vintage. Imagine stumbling upon an uber-cool, slightly spooky estate sale. If the estate was owned by Cap’n Blood, that is.

3248 16th St., SF. (415) 552-4631, www.skullsinsf.com

 

BEST STASH OF CULTURED BOOTIE

Do you need a dashiki-looking starter jacket, a grafted Italian fresco, an antique colored glass chandelier — like, yesterday? Friend, welcome to the power of collection. And welcome to Cottage Industry, the domain of a one Claudio Barone. The Italian-born Barone has spent the last 22 years traipsing about the globe, purchasing goods from indigenous craftspeople (at prices reasonable to all parties involved), and then retreating to Fillmore, treasure secured and ready to be squeezed into his darling shop — waiting for the day when you must, absolutely, positively, have that carved ebony figurine from the Congo, right away! Even if your mission lacks a hysterical level of urgency, do drop by. The piled shelves of goods ranging in price from 10 cents to $30,000 will either heighten or assuage the most pressing case of wanderlust.

2326 Fillmore, SF. (415) 885-0326

 

BEST FOLDING FANATICS

A gorilla sits in Japantown’s classic origami store. She’s squat and a little wrinkly, but say what you want about her lumps and rolls, she’s fantastically multidimensional — and even carries a little baby on her back. You can expect that kind of artistic wonder from Paper Tree, opened by the Mihara family in 1978 and run to this day by sisters Vicky and Linda, who constructed the primate in question. Not only can their shop meet your most fantastical origami needs (and those for quirky Japanese “office supplies” like sushi-shaped erasers and beribboned money envelopes), but the Miharas are serious about taking a role in their neighborhood community. Their lively origami classes and art, a staple for the last 43 years at the Cherry Blossom Festival, are testament to their desire to share the love of a good fold.

1743 Buchanan, SF. (415) 921-7100, www.paper-tree.com

 

BEST BEACHY DREAMS

There are those who blow and bluster about the lack of true beach weather in our city of rolling fog. And then there are those that smile and manifest sunbeams. Of the latter faction is Meggie White, whose Marina boutique, .meggie., imparts the same hope for rays as its fetching blonde owner. A breezy interior of hardwood and weathered white fixtures plays snazzy backdrop to .meggie.’s wonderland: fly floral sundresses share racks with the thinnest of sherbet-colored tees and cardigans. So stock up — what if that freak summer sunburst pokes through, and you without your pastels! .meggie. stocks several local designers, and White herself makes a supremely sand-worthy line of hand-forged silver, stone, and shell jewelry. So much more fun than that panicked schlep to J.Crew.

2277 Union, SF. (415) 525-3586, www.meggiejewelry.com

 

BEST SOLUTION TO THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA

Stymied on the menu for tonight’s dinner? Try this: start with a solid base of local, independent business, add two cups of foodie focus, stir in equal parts retro chic and current craze, bake with a product no one can get enough of, and never allow to cool (serve each slice with a celebrity sighting.) Problem solved! Such is the taste of your new culinary North Star, Omnivore Books, which happens to be the hawtest cookbook-only lit shop in Noe Valley. Owner Celia Sack has stocked her shelves with yummy tomes both new and old, and the small space packs in hungry audiences for its stellar author events. Recent speakers have included New York Times food writer Frank Bruni and local cheesemonger Gordon Edgar. It’s enough food inspiration to sate the least decisive dining divas among us.

3885 Cesar Chavez, SF. (415) 282-4712, www.omnivorebooks.com

 

BEST TL ROUGHNECKS

So you’re headed to psych class at City College one day when, on a dime, you say forget it — I’m going to follow my love and start a mini-skateboard empire in the Tenderloin instead. Welcome to the life of Johnny Roughneck. The boarder opened tee shirt treasure trove Dwntwn Skate Supply to hawk his Roughneck line of skate hardware and give a hand to new designers, like those of TL-repping clothing line The Loin, all while establishing a let’s-have-fun attitude in a neighborhood that often has its odds stacked against it. Occasional barbeques out on the Hyde Street pavement have given the shop some presence on the block, and Dwntwn has even played jump-off to some wildly legit skating events. Check out the video of the Roughneck crew’s 2010 Caltrain tour for Bay skating inspiration.

644 Hyde, SF. (415) 913-7422, www.dwntwnsf.com

 

BEST PRINTER WITH A PURPOSE

Raising your fist is all well and good, but if your arm gets tired, you’ll want that rebel yell printed on your T-shirt for good measure. After helping to found the Mission’s community screen-printing shop, Mission Gráfica, radical artist Jos Sanches opened Alliance Graphics in 1988. He needed a place where he could continue to churn out his poster print protests against the world’s various sources of evil (capitalism, neoimperialism, commercialism, and a busted justice system, to name some of his faves) — and still be a resource for the progressive causes that to this day need a voice on the street. Does your war cry scream out to be monogrammed on a bumper sticker, backpack, or umbrella? Alliance can get the job done right, with union labor and made in the USA products to boot.

1101 Eighth St., Berk. (510) 845-8835, www.unionbug.com

 

BEST FAST TRACK TO THRIFT BLISS

Lord, these used clothing stores. The racks of oversized leggings, the bins of kitty-appliquéd sweatshirts, the puff paint visors. (Wait, are those hip now?) Who has the time for such excavations? There are times when you just want to throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care and head to the local Anthropologie. But back down off that ledge! Delisa Sage’s Collage on Potrero Hill can be your one-stop cool kid shop when you haven’t the time to rifle through Grandma’s old church dresses. Skone-Rees has stocked her boutique with well-edited used clothing at prices not too far above Goodwill price gouges. (Her nifty store of scavenged home décor is next door.) And you’ll never find her array of locally-made jewelry and well-preserved boots and slippers at any Salvation Army. But be forewarned: Collage’s collection of late 1990s failed tech startup mascot hats is a bit lacking.

1345 18th St., SF. (415) 282-4401, www.collage-gallery.com

 

BEST BOUTIQUE STARR

Is there anything that Bianca Starr owner Bianca Kaplan can’t do? After moving on from her and hubby’s bangin’ DJ spot, 222 Hyde, Kaplan turned her eyes from beats to threads — secondhand designer label threads, which her Mission boutique sells to all the fly ladies looking for a clubby, classy, strappy looks (with just a hint of “Dynasty” decadence and chola sass) in which to creature up the night. Dresses, separates, handbags, belts, jewelry, and footwear: no detail is overlooked. Always collaborative, Kaplan picks chic up-and-coming designers to feature at her packed monthly stylist boutique events, and hands them the reigns to her racks for the night. And if you happen to stroll past Bianca Starr (so-called for her childhood friend’s coolest name ever) on a sunny day, you might just catch Kaplan and her girlfriends lounging streetside with a bottle of champagne. Wearing the cutest frocks you’ve ever seen, natch.

3552 20th St., SF. (415) 341-1020, www.biancastarr.com

 

BEST FANTASY FABRICATORS

Photo by Ben Hopfer

The mother-in-law’s birthday approaches, and all we know is that she likes to knit socks. Maybe we can help out with her frosty feet at the ImagiKnit store we always pass in the Castro? Probably great for some yarn — maybe a little bit fusty, too, though, and maybe somewhat intimidating to those who’ve never pearled. Imagine our surprise as we enter a rainbow wonderland busting with spectacular spun materials — spiky mohair, luminous silk, titillating cashmere, speckled cotton — and staffed by immediately accommodating people who don’t want to stick needles in our naïve newbie eyes. More shock: we run into several of our hippest friends leafing through vintage pattern books and holding court at the DIY wool winders. ImagiKnit’s community vibe and vibrant stock draw us in for hours. In the end we make the momentous decision to knit those socks ourselves. Sorry about the six toes, Mom.

3897 18th Street, SF. (415) 621-6642, www.imagiknit.com

 

BEST NIBSTER

Fountain pen lovers are a strange bunch. We spend hundreds of dollars on something that’s part status symbol, part jewelry, part objet d’art and, oh, yes, part writing instrument. Sometimes these works of exquisite craftsmanship write beautifully; sometimes they leak, skip, spurt ink all over the paper (and our hands), and don’t write at all. That’s why Stephanie Boyette, the fountain pen expert at Flax, is our favorite nibster. She can help you pick the right pen and ink, tell you how to use acrylic flow enhancers, give you tips on maintenance, and often tell you with a quick glance why your precious pen is malfunctioning. In fact, she’s so devoted that she’s been chosen to work as an apprentice to John Mottishaw, the Los Angeles nib-repair expert who is widely regarded as the best fountain pen surgeon in America.

1699 Market, SF. (415) 552-2355, www.flaxart.com

 

BEST PLACE TO FLIP YOUR WIG

What’s that on your head? If it ain’t a wig, get thee to the Wig Factory, pronto, because every man, woman, boy, girl, dog, cat, bird, and goldfish needs at least one follicular embellishment to send their look into another, more fabulous dimension. The Wig Factory’s capital selection includes everything from utter realness to costume frivolity — it’s got you covered like Andre Agassi’s cranium after half a can of Ron Popeil’s spray-on hair. Devotees know that Wig Factory is subject to some controversy because of its rules limiting the number of hairpieces you can try on in a single visit, which some people complain about. Such folks conflate whining with Yelping — ignore them. Do you want to try on a wig that’s already been tested by a hundred finicky entitled shoppers who think their scalps don’t stink? We don’t think so. Queens and princesses, beauty is here, on a mannequin head. Kings and princes, you can look like Adam Lambert or a Brylcreemed silver fox in a single fitting.

3020 Mission, SF. (415) 282-4939

 

BEST MINTY FRESH FASHIONS

It’s easy to show your California love when it’s directed at Mint Mall, a SF-based online clothing shop that mixes fine originals with vintage finds. An appreciation for natural fabrics, an eye for vibrant eras of well-known and obscure labels, and the type of tough dedication required to make the best thrifting finds are three of the special ingredients that make up Mint Mall. But the two main factors are co-owners Corina Biliandzija and Genevieve Dodge, who teamed up over half-a-decade ago and have refined their own designs and vintage visions with each passing day. Mint Mall items are fun to wear and born from the pair’s love and enthusiasm for fashion and everyday style. Native fringe, Aztec or cartoon prints, bell-sleeved tunic tops, Grecian gold thread minis, Bergdorf Goodman floral maxis, Diane von Furstenberg silk wraps, Givenchy platforms, original hoodies — the dynamic duo behind Mint Mall work hard for your closet, so you better treat them right.

www.stores.ebay.com/the-mint-mall

 

BEST SWEET SHOP TO MAKE A SUPERSTAR PROUD

Even before it opened, Candy Darling had a reputation, thanks to its fabulous name and kicky red plastic sign. Passersby were left to wonder — would it be a candy shop, or a drag queen fashion emporium? Those with a sweet tooth were the ones who received the happy answer, though, to be honest, there’s something wonderfully Grey Gardens about the store’s vintage 1960s or ’70s feel. Candy Darling the Warhol superstar was utterly unique, the essence of feminine glamour, and as soft and lovely as a lilac-scented breeze. Candy Darling the corner shop is a little paradise of sea-salt caramels, milk chocolate turtles, rocky road clusters, English toffee bars, and dark chocolate-dipped candied ginger. It does its namesake proud, which is no small feat. Visit Candy Darling just once and you might never see Mrs. See again.

798 Sutter, SF. (415) 346-1500

 

BEST BOOK HAVEN FOR ART LOVERS

A great bookstore is almost like an inspiring place of worship, except more fun and more grounded in palpable truth. Some of San Francisco’s best bookstores are nestled into nooks, like the esoteric Bolerium, or ready to move, like 871 Fine Arts. The numbers in this tome emporium and gallery’s name are enigmatic: for years, it brought some historical heart and heft to the art biz maze that is 49 Geary, and now it’s at 20 Hawthorne, another half-hidden location. (So the name’s obviously not address-oriented; perhaps it refers to the year Viking king Bagsecg died?) Owner Adrienne Fish has developed a selection of art books that is simply second to none in SF — 871 mixes old and new titles, is well-organized, and brings a sense of depth and breadth to any movement or era. The layout and lighting are attractive and efficient, and browsers and buyers can also enjoy an art show during a visit, since Fish’s curatorial acumen regarding California art is extra-sharp.

20 Hawthorne, SF. (415) 543-5155

 

BEST KANDI WHEN YOU’RE RANDY

Great reasons to use a glass dildo: they last longer, they’re less likely to harbor harmful bacteria, they retain temperature well — and on first glance, they more resemble works of fine art than hump handles. It was this urge toward aesthetic excellence that compelled Samantha Liu to open Glass Kandi, the display shop for her online catalog Glass Dildo Me. Liu provides expert guidance to the adventurous singles and curious couples who grace her door, smoothly introducing them to the exact masterpiece of whorled glass and embedded metals that will rev their engines. And don’t worry if you have a lady who likes to accessorize — Glass Kandi’s arsenal of whips, wigs, jewelry, and more is tinglingly top notch.

569 Geary, SF. (415) 931-2256, www.glasskandi.com

 

BEST SQUEAKY-SHARP WHEELS

It’s a bad cliché. The snooty bike repair dude, sniffing down his (lensless) thick-frame glasses at your beloved, if somewhat mind-boggling, bicycle. Will he overquote you? Will he really fix the problem with due diligence? Will you regret asking him the question in the first place? Blow by those stereotypical scaries and enter the world of Roaring Mouse Cycles. Racks and racks of high-quality road, track, and mountain bikes await to be sized expertly to your frame. (Should your size not be in stock, they’ll order it for you with a perfect-fit guarantee). Plus, the racing enthusiast staff is pro enough to know exactly what your two-wheeled buddy needs to get rolling again. They pride themselves on a steel frame code of service, and definitely won’t hurt your bike — or your ego. You’ll never feel velo-vapid again!

1352 Irving, SF. (415) 753-6272, www.roaringmousecycles.com

 

BEST REFINED RUGGEDNESS

Photo by Ben Hopfer

Way out west, where Midwestern dreams take form, there’s a Victorian that predates the great 1906 quake. There, you’ll find men’s workwear goods refined to something like an art form. They’re well-arranged in a shop known to sport an American flag or two, not in any jingoistic way, but as a reflection of its “finest quality dry goods”: jeans, shirts, bags, boots, and other masculine items, all selected by Todd Barket, whose design eye has influenced some of the more popular mass-market clothing brands on Market Street. The attire in Unionmade is considerably pricier for the most part, but with a sharpness, durability, and practical ingenuity (they’ve carried Chester Wallace canvas bags built to fit two six-packs) you won’t find for a lower tag. While a different nearby store has Japanese denim for those whose wallets can indulge in jean dreams, Barket stocks Levi’s from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, a tack that taps into the brand’s SF past and relates to it newer brands such as Woolrich and Gitman Tanner. Look for the Unionmade label, or rather, for the stamp on your bag when you’ve made a purchase.

493 Sanchez, SF. (415) 861-3373, www.unionmadegoods.com

 

BEST FRILLS OF A LIFETIME

If you can’t find something to geek out on in Japantown’s five-story New People Tokyo fashion mall, you’re not doing it right. But not many of the pop culture palace’s multitudinous corners have spawned their very own local subcultures — which brings us to Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, a Harajuku ministore mecca, and one of the original brands responsible for the “Sweet Lolita” dress up movement in Japan. Lady-like Lolita adherents flounce around in intensely festooned outfits otherwise seen only on the most precious of collectible baby dolls. And since this is the BSSB brand’s only U.S. retail source, pretty-pretty princesses come from far and wide to partake in the store’s frillfest of matching dresses, bonnets, Mary Janes, and parasols. For extra credit, the Lolitas can play at BSSB-organized tea parties, held at pinkies-up swank spots all over the city.

1746 Post, SF. (415) 525-8630, www.newpeopleworld.com

 

Best of the Bay 2010 Editors Picks: Food and Drink

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Best of the Bay 2010 Editors Picks: Food and Drink

 

Best of the Bay 2010 Editors Picks: Food and Drink

BEST PERKS FOR PROUD PERVERTS

A Web search for every cafe, a cafe for every Web search? All well and good, but what if your search is for the best goldarn double-sided dildo there is — and you’re sick of that uptight suit over there eyeing your Googles? Proudly pervy surf-and-sippers, you officially have a kick-it spot. Kink café and boutique Wicked Grounds not only brews steamy cups of Ritual coffee, but hosts regular meet-and-munches where you can warm up to your next dom, sub, or whatever you’re into these days. The welcoming staff can be easily convinced to serve coffee from a dog bowl for the right slave. (Caution: contents may be hot!) They might also be able to help out with that just-right vibe hunt: shelves by the front counter stock all the finest gear in Super Sexy Toyland.

289 Eighth St., SF. (415) 503-0405, www.wickedgrounds.com

 

BEST EFA DOSE ON TOAST

When it comes to sardines, you have to think outside the earthquake shelter. On the flavor-ometer, the tinned food of last resort (served on tarps in the shelter with Saltines and stale water) bears no resemblance to its freshly grilled or roasted self. Not only are the little silver herrings tasty, they pack a megadose of essential fatty acids, the stuff nutritionists keep nagging us to eat more of. But no one needs to tell this to the Italian-inspired chefs who created the sardine sandwich at Barbacco Eno Trattoria, the more casual relation of Perbacco in the Financial District. Unlike restaurants that play it safe with sardines by smothering them in mayonnaise and lemon juice, Barbacco tops its sardines with seared calamari. Not most people’s first choice, perhaps, but the two get along swimmingly, especially when served on an Acme torpedo roll and slathered with arugula and “roasted tomatoe condimento.”

220 California, SF. (415) 955-1919, www.barbaccosf.com

 

BEST HOLE IN ONE

When people start trash-talking donuts, it’s hard not to imagine a life in which the person was weaned on Hostess or Entenmann’s and maybe stepped up to Dunkin’ or Krispy Kreme on special occasions. In other words, we’re talking a lifetime of mass production, where the only donuts these people have encountered spent their nasty, brutish, and short lives being callously blended in giant vats and stuffed into huge ovens, untouched — nay, unkneaded! — by human hands. Not so at Dynamo Donuts & Coffee, the small, open-air stand in the Mission that is diligently working to give donuts a good name. Each day the artisanal bakery makes seven to 10 types of donuts, all by hand. Standouts include the maple-glazed bacon apple, spiced chocolate, and lemon Sichuan filled with lemon curd and Dynamo’s incomparable “dredge.”

2670 24th St., SF. (415) 920-1978, www.dynamodonut.com

 

BEST FOWL TO TABLE

Which came first: the chickens or the eggs? At Stable Cafe, what probably came first was a commitment to fresh, local, sustainable food, which led to its farm in Santa Rosa, which led to its chickens, which led to its eggs, which led to its egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, which is a savory, molten marvel of scrambled egg and cheddar on thick, toasted Acme bread. But this light, airy Mission District cafe, beautifully renovated by architect Malcolm Davis in one of SF’s original carriage houses, brings that kind of integrity to everything it does. Its credo seems to be, do a small number of things well (know thy chickens; bake thy own muffins) — and adhere it does. And if you want to pay homage to the laying lovelies who created your eggs, Stable has their photos on the wall.

2128 Folsom, SF. (415) 552-1199, www.stablecafe.com

 

BEST CZECHVARS WITH A TWIST OF BOHEMIA

For a city with such a strong bohemian reputation, San Francisco has surprisingly few spaces that capture some of the flavor of the actual place. Yes, Virginia, there really is a Bohemia — and its capital is Prague. (One prefers the emphatic German spelling: PRAG. No lazy French vowels trailing behind, doing nothing!) And, speaking of nothing, nothing says Prague quite like a mug of the beer known to the Czechs as Budvar but to us, we of the North American market — perhaps because of a potential conflict with Budweiser — as Czechvar. A splendid place to enjoy said beer, whatever its name, is at the aptly named Café Prague. The feel inside is wonderfully Mitteleuropean, while the calorie-rich food emphasizes such basics as starch, meat, and fat. You probably won’t leave hungry, or sober.

2140 Mission, SF. (415) 986-0269

 

BEST CULINARY MULTIPLE PERSONALITY

Photo by Ben Hopfer

Don’t be deceived; Red Crawfish isn’t some kind of Red Lobster knockoff. The name is (we guess) a sly joke, and the restaurant does offer crawfish. But neither the jokey name nor the serving of crawfish is what makes the restaurant special. No, the reason you’ll remember Red Crawfish is because of its split personality. And although in human beings, split personalities are generally problem personalities, it’s different — and better — with restaurants (in this case, all Jeckyll and no Hyde). By day, Red Crawfish is an ordinary-looking Tenderloin restaurant that lays out an agreeable east Asian menu. But when the sun goes down, the place morphs smoothly into a Cajun spot whose gumbo is superb. Good gumbo doesn’t exactly grow on trees in these parts, so for this dish alone, let us all give thanks to Red Crawfish, whichever one it may be.

611 Larkin, SF. (415) 771-1388

 

BEST MEXICAN LESSON

If Mexican cooking is underrated in this country, part of the reason must be that we’ve been exposed to fast-food chain tacos and, even in our very own Mission District, overexposed to the burrito — which isn’t even authentically Mexican. God save the burrito anyway; it gives a lot of bang for the buck, and that’s important in these shriveled times for starving students and plenty of others. But there’s a real education to be had as well in the foods of Mexico, and a good place to audit the class is Nopalito, an offshoot of the highly regarded Nopa. The care taken about ingredients matches that of the nearby mothership, and the menu ranges nimbly across regional specialties, many of which are unfamiliar. The carnitas are recognizable, but they are also spectacular. It will be as if you’ve never had them before.

306 Broderick, SF. (415) 437-0303, www.nopalitosf.com

 

BEST PUPUSAS AND GOOOAAAALLL!!!S

Football and food take on more global connotations at Balompié, and that’s just bueno. The restaurant is well-hung with huge flat-screen televisions showing soccer matches from around the world, and the food is splendidly Salvadorian at a modest cost. This means lots of pupusas and pasteles, along with exotica like pacaya (pickled date palm blossoms), and — to rinse down all this bounty — the Salvadorian beer Regia, which comes in bottles that resemble howitzer munitions. But the best thing about Balompié is that at its heart it’s a sports bar. Men like to watch sports on big TVs while drinking beer, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re speaking Spanish, drinking Regia, or pulling for Costa Rica, pupusas in hand.

3349 18th St. (also at 525 Seventh St. and 3801 Mission), SF. (415) 648-9199 (558-9668, 647-4000)

 

BEST CREPE ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO

What do we miss most about Paris in the spring? The hip-hop boys with their gold chains and exposed biceps, the gamine girls in strappy heels, the constant elusive threat of rain, the crowds at Paris-Plages, laden with beer bottles, acoustic guitars, and joie de vivre. But above all, we can’t help reminiscing about those street crepes, fresh off the griddle, just the ticket for staving off those inopportune late-night hunger pangs, and great for soaking up any excess vin ordinaire in the bargain. Hooray! The 11th Street corridor’s Crepes A Go Go serves up the best street crepes this far side of the Maginot line. Starting at just $2.50, each crepe is made to order, and filled to oozing point with a decidedly Californian array of savory or sweet options. Open until 4 a.m. on weekends, with complimentary French hip-hop and comfy street-side sofa seating in the bargain. Take that, bacon-wrapped hotdog cart.

350 11th St. and other locations, SF. (415) 503-1294

 

BEST SCONES WITH A SIDE OF ASIMOV

Do you remember when the venerable coffee shop was a place people gathered to hang out instead of network? Where gamers would shuffle their Magic decks, writers would swap paragraphs, readers would sit quietly for hours with a good book and a pot of tea, and caffeine-fueled college kids would cram like the dickens? Welcome to Borderlands Café, the newest darling of the Valencia Street corridor. An offshoot of the classic Borderlands Books sci-fi bookstore, it’s already attracted quite a cross-section of trend-spotting caffiends and café nostalgists who just want to converse without being shushed by perfectly-coiffed app-oholics. And with a huge selection of magazines, comfy chairs, and scrumptious cheddar cheese and onion scones, Borderlands has a lot to offer even the solo café dweller. Except for Wi-Fi, which is actually our favorite perk of the place.

Borderlands Café, 870 Valencia, SF. (415) 970-6998, www.borderlands-cafe.com

 

BEST MOUTHWATERING MAYAN

It’s not situated in a chic location, unless you’re looking for snazzy new rims or a car wash. But Poc Chuc is well worth a trip down a less-bustling stretch of 16th Street for its unique Spanish-Mayan fusion cuisine. Open for lunch and dinner five days a week, the small, unadorned restaurant offers an array of dishes that inject an ancient, mouthwatering twist into standard Latin American fare. (Think plenty of smoked turkey, grilled tomatoes, pickled onions, and, of course, maize in several iterations.) A platillo Maya appetizer platter combines some of its tastiest, bite-sized creations, with plenty to share among a group — but no fighting over the pork empanadas or turkey salbutes! Main dishes include the signature Poc Chuc — grilled citrus-marinated pork topped with grilled tomatoes — and a reliable daily specials menu. Go for the mole!

2886 16th St, SF. (415) 558-1853, www.pocchuc.com

 

BEST GOOEY MAGIC (NO ELVES REQUIRED)

If you don’t like cookies, feel free to skip ahead. But if you were born with taste buds and an appreciation for delicious gooeyness, you’d do well to hit up Anthony’s Cookies. There is indeed an Anthony — likely you’ll see the man himself when you stumble into his Valencia Street shop, lured by the prospect of fresh, hot, calories-be-damned treats. And if Anthony looks like the happiest guy on planet Earth, he probably is — he bakes cookies for a living, after all — using only natural ingredients. Who’s magical now, Keebler Elves? Flavors include the usual suspects, plus variations on chocolate chip (semisweet, with walnut, using white chocolate … ) done to soft-meets-crisp perfection, plus inspired creations like cookies and cream and whole wheat oatmeal.

1417 Valencia, SF. (415) 655-9834, www.anthonyscookies.com

 

BEST XXX

Sink happily into the dark brown booths at Baker and Banker for a memorable Cal cuisine dinner — sweet corn bisque with a plump lobster hush puppy, maybe, or sausage-stuffed quail in a coffee-molasses glaze. Husband and wife chef duo Jeff Banker and Lori Baker get it right with each dish. But you could visit for dessert alone with Lori’s ever-changing wonderland of a dessert menu. In fall, dessert might be pumpkin cobbler, steaming hot with a crunchy top and cooled with candied pumpkin seed ice cream. In summer, a cherry tarte tatin accented by salted caramel and amaretti rules. Awesomely, the Baker and Banker’s XXX triple-dark chocolate layer cake is a constant. This orgiastic slice stands tall with a bottom layer of dark, dense flourless chocolate. Not to be outdone, the middle is a tangy chocolate cheesecake, while the top finally gives you a density break with traditional chocolate cake. One of the more satisfying threesomes in town.

1701 Octavia, SF. (415) 351-2500, www.bakerandbanker.com

 

BEST FRESH KASHI PAN

Sandbox Bakery is a pocket-sized cafe in Bernal Heights serving Ritual Roasters and De La Paz coffee with classic pastries like Valhrona chocolate croissants or orange currant scones. But it doesn’t end there. Owner and pastry chef Mutsumi Takehara’s background ranges from Slanted Door to La Farine, and her creations span a world of taste. Sandbox’s Japanese sweet bread, or kashi pan, is a lightly sweet brioche filled with the likes of melon or yuzu marmalade with sage. Or, in its savory form, it comes challah-like with negi-miso, curry or red bean paste filling. Daily special sandwiches often express a fusion of cuisines: Thai chicken croque-monsieur; an apple, smoked gouda, and rosemary spread over fresh baguette, or a teriyaki chicken rice burger with sticky rice as bun. A Zen-like experience with Parisian spirit.

833 Cortland, SF. (415) 642-8580 , www.sandboxbakerysf.com

 

BEST HOT HAKKA

Not familiar with Hakka cuisine, the regional cooking style of Southeast China that’s got food bloggers in a hot lather? It’s time you became acquainted. Head to the Outer Richmond and get schooled at Hakka Restaurant. Hakka looks like any other nearby Chinese joint, but there’s a legitimate pride in the service and an uncommon freshness to the food. Dishes include salt-baked chicken, fried strips of pumpkin coated in salted egg, crisp Chinese broccoli sautéed in rice wine, and ngiong tew foo, or stuffed tofu cubes. Kiu nyuk, a beloved Hakka dish, has two known versions, the more common served here: fatty pork belly layered over preserved mustard greens and mushrooms in a dark and complexly herbal sugar-soy sauce. Slice through layers of skin and fat to the tender anise-scented meat and you’ll be hooked on Hakka.

4401-A Cabrillo, SF. (415) 876-6898 BEST FRIENDLY YEMENI

This spring, on the western edge of the Tenderloin, a humble little restaurant opened quietly: Yemeni’s. Owner Ali Abu Baker and his staff convey a warmth almost equal to that of the piping Yemeni bread coming from the oven (useful for sopping up hummus with strip steak). Shawerma, baba ganoush, tabbouleh, and other Middle Eastern favorites are available. But the real draws are traditional Yemeni dishes like salteh, the country’s national dish: a meat stew topped with hilbeh — a tomato-based, chutney-like dip spiced with fenugreek, garlic, and cardamom — and zhug/sahaweq, a hot pepper sauce. Sip Yemeni coffee accented with a spice mix called hawayij. Baker shares his passion for his native country’s food at prices that encourage feasting for mere dollars. Stop into neighboring Queen of Sheba market for Middle Eastern groceries to complete your culinary journey.

1098 Sutter, SF. (415) 441-8832, www.yemenirestaurant.com

 

BEST SLAMMIN’ KOREAN STEAK SANDWICH

Rhea’s Deli is an unassuming, even demure, counter hidden inside a Mission District convenience store. But then the bad-ass $8 Korean steak sandwiches come out and the gloves come off. You’ll be fighting for — or at least gladly waiting up to 30 minutes in line for — a chance to sink your teeth into one of these babies. (Smart steakers call ahead and preorder). Once you’ve scored, it’s tempting to wolf down this mountain of tender, spicy Korean beef, shredded cabbage, red onions, and cheddar cheese on a crunchy baguette. Avoid this animal urge and take it slow, allowing the pleasure to last. Rhea’s offers an array of other savory lunchables as well, from a katsu sandwich with pork loin fried in Japanese breadcrumbs to a 19 Street sandwich with roast beef, Vermont cheddar, pepper jack, avocado, and pickled jalapenos. But, you know, steak.

800 Valencia, SF. (415) 282-5255

 

BEST BEELZEBUB BREW

The appropriately named Coffee Bar offers a double whammy of appeal: it occupies an impeccably cool industrial-looking space for laptop workaholics and serves some truly eye-opening coffee. Mr. Espresso coffee beans provide the kick in bracing espressos and cappuccinos; an ultra-expensive, ultra-shiny Clover machine dispenses perfect single cups. Unlike chain-like offerings of watered-down, cloyingly sweet mochas and “specialty” coffees, the additional drink menu items here are crafted with punch. Vietnamese or Havana coffees (conveniently hot or iced for those variable summer days) are sure things. But our taste buds go up in flames for Coffee Bar’s El Diablo. A devilishly smooth mix of espresso, chipotle-infused milk, and Guittard chocolate, the robust brew marries a hint of cocoa sweetness to subtle heat. Yes, we’re probably going to hell for worshipping El Diablo. But at least we’ll be awake for it.

1890 Bryant, SF. (415) 551-8100, www.coffeebar-usa.com

 

BEST OCCASIONAL KANGABURGER

Trek to a mellow stretch of Clement Street and enter the “five-star dive” environs of Tee Off Bar & Grill. You might assume it’s all right for a beer and little else — but you’d be wrong. The place is comfortably worn, sure. But regulars and staff soon feel like old friends, often sharing one of their spare Bronx Bombers (fiery BBQ chicken wings) or beer-battered mushrooms. The next surprise comes when you exit the dim interior to a sunny back patio with picnic tables and random paraphernalia from popular pirate parties (ask your bartender). A chalkboard reveals weekend specials. Wait! Is that a $20 kangaroo burger? After you’ve balked at the price, you can’t pass up this adventurous challenge, especially when the burger is plumped up with fried onions and kiwi relish. Make sure you call ahead, since Tee Off only serves it on occasional weekends and until supplies run out. If the roo’s already hopped, other worthy eats like ostrich burgers or Paul’s Crafty mac ‘n’ cheese, a four-cheese blend with pancetta blessed by Guy Fieri himself, will satisfy.

3129 Clement, SF. (415) 752-5439, www.teeoffbarandgrill.com

 

BEST DEVILED DELIGHT

When the rustic-chic Marlowe first opened, it offered a seemingly straightforward menu of bistro staples like steak frites and cheesy cauliflower gratin that seemed anticlimactic. But chef Jennifer Puccio’s faith in the classics and elegant marshaling of simple ingredients soon paid off: raves began to roll in — especially for the jaw-widening burger loaded with caramelized onions, horseradish aioli, and bacon. But the burger isn’t the only star on the lunch menu. Diving into Marlowe’s deviled egg sandwich is not settling for second best. Simple in presentation, it’s one of the finest egg sandwiches out there, an open-faced beauty with a layer of crisp, meaty bacon, aged provolone, pickled chilis, and horseradish aioli on the side (perfect for accompanying fries). Order addictive brussels sprout chips and let the office know you won’t be back for a while. The only proper way to wrap up such a heartwarming lunch is to take a nap.

330 Townsend, SF. (415) 974-5599, www.marlowesf.com

 

BEST SOUS-VIDE SOUS-BUDGET

One expects to shell out a pretty penny to partake of gourmet cooking techniques like sous-vide, or vacuum-packed slow cooking. But Berkeley’s eVe defies such expectations with a palate-tickling, surprisingly filling two-course prix fixe menu for $25 that includes several sous-vide items. The set menu offerings change often (additional items are steadfastly priced at $11 each), but husband-and-wife chef team Christopher and Veronica Laramie always keep it lively, highlighting the tastes of Veronica’s native Peru. Grilled squid ink risotto gets a tart kick from candied kumquats and yuzu. Diver scallops are brightened by lime leaf, edamame, mint, and delicate salmon roe. A sizable piece of fatty-licious pork belly pairs with a warm watermelon radish, chive flower, and a paper-thin slice of candied Buddha’s hand. Dessert might be goat brie sweetened with apricot, red wine, and a welcome contrast of shallots and flax seeds. In other words, world-class gastronomie d’avant-garde priced to appeal to ramen-weary students.

1960 University, Berk. (510) 868-0735, www.eve-berkeley.com

 

BEST BAR BRUNCH WITH BUNNY CHAO

It is with humor and reverence that one dines at Three Papayas, a pop-up Sunday brunch from 12 p.m.-4 p.m. at Doc’s Clock bar. Mismatched Michael Jackson placemats abound, and Bibles and porn-laced comic books act as menu-holders. Creative chef Ta-Wei Lin emphasizes fresh and funky Vietnamese and Thai flavors. His menu of four or five changing items per week (everything is $8) might include pan-fried rabbit, Filipino sisig, chicken or vegan Vietnamese crepes, or viet banh canh with clams and coconut sauce. If it’s available, hop on the unusual Bunny Chao, a hollowed-out loaf of bread — filling piled neatly on the side — overflowing with green lentils, veggies, and cardamom pods. Chef Lin garnishes with seasonal fruits like figs, passion fruit, and, of course, papayas, making his plates fun to behold, but even better to eat. In the lovably grungy Doc’s setting, pair your food with a peppery bloody mary, and join your fellow dive-tastic brunchers in a round of hallelujahs.

2575 Mission, SF. (415) 824-3627, www.docsclock.com

 

BEST BIG EASY OVER EASY

Morning at Brenda’s French Soul Food: where to start? Grillades and grits or crawfish beignets? Fried shrimp po’boy or sloppy Josephine? Eggs and andouille? Oui, Oui! This wee spot on Polk Street — open for breakfast, brunch, and lunch — is a showcase of the strikingly huge flavors of New Orleans-style French and Creole cuisines. The portions are big, the atmosphere strikes a note between quaint and cosmopolitan, and wonderfully named Filipino-Creole chef (and New Orleans native) Brenda Buenviaje keeps the flavor flowing. The only drawback, besides having to brave the tiny curbside riots to get in, is having to choose among the many dreamy menu items on offer. Make sure, however, to wash down Brenda’s must-try gumbo with a glass of sweet watermelon iced tea before proceeding to the next steaming dish.

652 Polk, SF. (415) 345-8100, www.frenchsoulfood.com

 

BEST SLICE OF SPICE

From slammin’ New Mexican resto Green Chile Kitchen comes Chile Pies, a low-key dessert café offering a spicy paradise of crave-inducing organic sweets. Seriously, if you thought Southwestern desserts were frozen in a sticky Bimbo-landia of saturated fats, this joint will blow your buds. Blue corn waffle cones, Straus Family soft-serve, Café Gratitude raw vegan ice cream, and fantastic floats (ginger ale with cardamom ice cream, anyone?) are just a few of the tasty treats at the Panhandle hot spot. The main draw is the rotating cast of daily pie specials, from the simple, like banana cream, to the sophisticated, like a tangy green chile apple with walnuts and red chile honey drizzle. Can’t decide between a scoop of Three Twins Ice Cream or a slice of chocolate peanut butter pie? No problem, have both in the form of a frosty pie shake. And then there’s Chile’s piece de resistance: a classic Frito Pie, with organic Niman Ranch beef and Mexican red chile. You can have pie for dinner and dessert.

601 Baker, SF. (415) 614-9411, www.greenchilekitchen.com/chilepies

 

BEST GIANT FEAST FOR GIANTS FANS

Do thoughts of those wallet-demolishing $9 beers at AT&T Park leave you with a sinking feeling in your stomach? There’s no need to get shut out of lunch or dinner plans around game time — hightail it to nearby Hard Knox Café for a true meal steal. Heaping soul food plates of smothered pork chops, Cajun meatloaf, barbecued spare ribs, and chicken and waffles, available at super-affordable prices, will last you all 54 outs and then some. Hard Knox’s no-nonsense shrimp po’boys and hot link sandwiches to go will keep you doing the wave through extra innings at a fraction of ballpark prices. Better yet, order a perfectly battered pile of fried chicken, settle into one of the comfy booths, and watch the entire game on the flat screen. You can order round after round from Hard Knox’s stellar selection of microbrews without missing a minute of the action.

2526 Third St., SF. (415) 648-3770, www.hardknoxcafe.com

 

BEST VIRGIN KICK

Don’t know about you, but we periodically have these Jack Nicholson Five Easy Pieces chicken salad sandwich moments at oyster bars, where we want to say, “We’ll have an order of oysters with lemon, cocktail sauce, and horseradish. Now hold the oysters — and bring me the lemon, cocktail sauce, and horseradish.” That’s why whenever we order a virgin Mary at Rose Pistola in North Beach, we get the spooky feeling that the bartenders have read our mind. The secret of their piquant housemade mix is, according to several staff members, secret (although one staffer did divulge that the bartenders add horseradish to the traditional tomato juice-Tabasco-Worcestershire combo). On top of this, Rose Pistola adds a green olive, pickled onion, and slice of lemon. You won’t even miss the vodka — or the oysters.

532 Columbus, SF. (415) 399-0499, www.rosepistolasf.com

 

BEST MIX MASTER, WITH MARMALADE

Photo by Ben Hopfer

A tucked away, speakeasy-like space on the second floor of the Crescent Hotel, minus the masses and snobbery: that’s where you’ll find the Burritt Room and its founder, master mixologist Kevin Diedrich. In the brick-walled space accented with sparkly chandeliers, black and red couches, and white piano, Diedrich shakes and stirs from a reasonably-sized menu of 18 rotating cocktails. He doesn’t just craft the classics, though there are plenty of those. Diedrich also creates inventive new drinks — often featuring marmalade — like the sparkling Hitachino Sour with bourbon, orange marmalade, lemon, sugar, and orange bitters, topped with Hitachino White beer. His experience lies in some of the country’s greatest bars from East to West. Diedrich sets a welcoming, unpretentious tone, has assembled a tight team of bartenders, and will take you on tasteful journeys nostalgic and new.

417 Stockton, SF. (415) 400-0500, www.crescentsf.com

 

BEST VEGAN CHARCUTERIE

Oh, if all our utopias were this dreamily delish. Ideally situated on green perch of reclaimed woodland on the edge of the UC Berkeley campus, halcyon eatery Gather offers seasonally minded, meticulously sourced food (complete with a sizable, possibly TMI volume, available to diners, detailing all providers and particulars). Vegetarians and vegans will be pleased to know that former Millennium sous chef Sean Baker has given much thought to its selections: the menu is 50 percent vegetarian, the star of which is undoubtedly the artisanal vegan “charcuterie” platter, which might include the most delicate tofu-skin tower or an Tuscan Rose eggplant with cashew “ricotta” and fennel-top pesto. Expect biodynamic and organic California wines, as well as piquant cocktails like the Secret Breakfast, composed of smoked peach scotch, bacon cello, spicy honey, and egg whites.

2200 Oxford, Berk. (510) 809-0400, www.gatherrestaurant.com

 

BEST BOW TO THE ANCIENT BACON GODS OF CATALUNYA

With or without you, we’re set to indulge our love of refined yet pleasure-minded Catalan cooking — and the pitch-perfect Contigo, which translates as “with you,” has us murmuring “Bon profit!” like a native of the land of Gaudi and Dali. The crowds have made this industrial-moderne Noe Valley restaurant the most popular spot in the hood for its wonderfully authentic Catalan tapas, artisanal Spanish and stateside hams, and fresh Catalan flatbreads — studded with wild nettles and porcinis (add a farm egg, anchovies, or Fatted Calf bacon). Aficionados of whole-critter eating won’t shy away from the tripe and chorizo and chickpeas or the oxtail-stuffed piquillo peppers, all sourced from local organic providers. And everyone, including the finicky ankle-biters, will want the albondigas, or pork and ham meatballs. For here the pig reigns supreme, even on the cookie plate, which includes a piglet-shaped peanut butter and bacon number.

1320 Castro, SF. (415) 285-0250, www.contigosf.com

 

BEST ITTY BITTY TREATS FOR TWI-HARDS

Moist and addictive, this blood-red baby is so tiny it’s totally OK to sink your fangs into a foursome and not break the Eternal Oath of Your Diet. Sure, his type wasn’t born yesterday, but damn, the way he stares at you, his skinny jeans, that whipped topping that glistens in the sun … the Rich Red Velvet cupcake at Cups and Cakes Bakery, named for its deep, vampire-luring color and smooth, timeless flavor is enough to blow our Team Edward minds. (Jacobites can tear into other flavors on offer, like Pretty Pretty Princess and Rainbow Bright. Just sayin’.) Did we mention the rich swirl of cream cheese and the crimson sprinkles? Que bella! Step into Jennifer Emerson’s beckoning SoMa bakery and drool over the perfectly constructed cuppies therein. And don’t worry, these beauties won’t make you wait three sequels for your first bite.

451 Ninth St., SF. (415) 437-2877, www.cupsandcakesbakery.com

 

BEST AL FRESCO FEEL-GOOD

Nestled amid boxy-lofty tech startups and the frenetic energy of AT&T Park lies the small green courtyard wonderland of Crossroads Cafe. The sprightly enterprise is a component of the Delancey Street Foundation, one of the country’s most innovative self-help organizations for the homeless, which has filled up this quiet little SoMa block with 370,000 square feet of housing, vocational schools, and the well-regarded Delancey Street Restaurant. But at Crossroads, all that is readily apparent of this commendable social enterprise is the distinct impression that the staff — composed mostly of Delancey residents learning workforce skills — wants to create the best darn cafe ever. Proceeds from the large menu go toward resident education and support. Pass through the small bookstore and grab Michael Chabon’s new bestseller, order a housemade waffle or scoop of coconut ice cream, and settle into a seat on the garden patio for a little soul sunshine.

699 Delancey, SF. (415) 512-5111, www.delanceystreetfoundation.org

 

BEST MICROBREW MUTINEERS

You’re always down for a 40 on the corner, a Bud on the stoop, or a PBR from your purse on Corona Heights. But sometimes you want an actual beer. You know, the kind that doesn’t taste like you wrung out a hipster’s legwarmers in your mouth. You’ve considered venturing into the labyrinth of microbrews, but microbrew culture turns you off — kind of snobby, kind of midlife-crisis-y, definitely confusing. Relax and revolt: Beer Revolution, downtown Oakland’s new grade-A beer store, will guide you into superlative suds with deep knowledge and just the right amount of edge. Staff connoisseurs offer tastes of recommended nectars, and a generous deck studded with picnic tables encourages kicking up your Doc Martens and glugging with abandon. Besides bottled bounty, there’s a spirited band of ever-rotating, ever-satisfying selections on tap, like Meantime Scotch Ale, Caracole Nostradamus, and Alagash Black. Slip on a balaclava and pop a few caps at bland brewskis.

464 3rd St., Oakl. (510) 452-2337, www.beer-revolution.com

 

BEST SWEET BEWILDERMENT

You know those foodies (maybe you’re one) — so up on the blogs and culinary porn rags they think they’ve tasted everything under the sun. Well, unless these epicurean explorers have logged some serious hours at 100% Sweet Dessert Café in the Outer Richmond, they’ve surely left some sugary stones unturned. You simply will not find a menu that covers more enticing and bewildering acreage — at least 10 massive pages illustrated with a complex grid system that showcases a dazzling plethora of Asian desserts. Two you might want to sample: crystal rolls (clear rice paper sachets of sweet sugary goo and fresh mangos and strawberries) or a selection from the extensive jelly drink section of the menu. Sure, the many of the sample photos look like fairy tale versions of your saltwater aquarium’s decorative fauna, but your fish seem to lead delicious lives, right?

2512 Clement, SF. (415) 221-1628

 

BEST TOTALLY WORTH-IT TOOTHACHE

Photo by Ben Hopfer

When Jamie Kasselman hands you a box on your birthday, you better be stoked. Presentation is key. Before opening her candy store in the Marina, she was famous for her impeccable flair for arranging sweets on designer dishes — a clear inspiration for the achingly sweet décor at Sweetdish. Kasselman has it well stocked with classic candies, designer chocolates hailing from mouth-wateringly diverse locales ranging from Colombia to Ghana, and even some treats made closer to home. (Kasselman makes her own line of fantastic homemade flavored marshmallows. Want-want-want!) It can be difficult to decide between all the fanciful bulk candy options — we’re naturally drawn to all the strawberry and lemon goodies — but the pretty salesgirls will feed you samples of from bags of irregulars behind the counter if you ask … sweetly.

2144 Chestnut, SF. (415) 563-2144, www.thesweetdish.com

 

BEST VIRTUAL VEGGIE GURU

Vegetarian goddess Heidi Swanson started her essential 101 Cookbooks blog way back in the ancient year of 2003. It was a way to start putting her massive cookbook collection to use, combining her love of cooking with her interest in photography. The result is a comprehensive vegetarian go-to guide for making simple, delicious recipes infused with her own San Francisco flair. Swanson focuses on natural, whole foods and ingredients, frequenting SF’s many farmers markets and organic foods stores. Then she tells readers how to whip up gems like chile blackberry syrup, Tuscan ribollita, and Rajasthani buttermilk curry. Each post walks you through her experiences with colorful photos and descriptions, substitution suggestions, and cooking tips. She’s since published two meat-free meatspace cookbooks of her own — mere amuses bouches to her blog, which contains reams of virtual veggie lore. If you ever wondered what the name of that funny squash is or what to do with halloumi cheese, give her a click.

www.101cookbooks.com

 

BEST PICKLED PLEASURE REVIVAL

Oh, pickled egg! Like your glass-jarred, vinegar-soaked, bar-top cousins the pig’s foot and the giant gherkin, you have for years endured the tipsy sneers and simulated gagging of drinkers who never gave you a chance. Once the prince of any bar worth its salt, an easy snack for barflies and hofbrauistas alike, you slipped into ovoid obscurity. Now one bar has resurrected your sweet purple form by giving it a gourmet spin. Who’d pass up a go at pickled quail eggs at the Alembic in this age of adventurous eating? It just goes to show that if you repackage something, provide the proper ambience, and price something at $2, you can get someone to eat just about anything. Perfect with Alembic’s saucy cocktails, you’re a hit with highbrow tipplers. Now please put in a good word for your forgotten cousins.

1725 Haight, SF. (415) 666-0822, www.alembicbar.com

 

BEST CUTE CUBANO

Any eatery can slap some pulled pork and pickles on a panini and call it a Cuban sandwich. But true Cuban food connoisseurs venture to Market Street’s upper climes to dig in at the tiny Chan Chan Café Cubano, a cute café by day that at night becomes a paradise of traditional dishes prepared with a gourmet touch. Entrees like ropa vieja and pollo en hoya are spectacular, but you may just pack them up to go after feasting your way through the well-priced tapas menu, which includes scrumptious croquetas, hongos, and camarones criollos. Plus, hello, a couple pitchers of sangria. With true Cuban flair — when the electricity goes out, as it sometimes does, a rewarding fever of culinary improvisation descends — and a laidback, handsome staff (yes, you may have to wait a bit for your order to come out of the one-stove kitchen, but you’ll have plenty to look at), Chan Chan is indeed one of those “hidden gems.”

4690 18th St., SF. (415) 864-4199

 

BEST DAMN CIOPPINO

Photo by Ben Hopfer

Best cioppino? Them’s fightin’ words in San Francisco, where the thick, rich seafood stew originated. But we’re serious. As certified fish freaks always eager for a fix of this blues-obliviating local delicacy, we’ve tried our fair share. And we can safely say that the home-style cioppino at Sotto Mare is the best. The key — besides the incredible tang of the smoky tomato broth and flawlessly fresh crab and fish chunks, scallops, mussels, and shrimp loaded within — is the atmosphere. Run by beloved, no-nonsense North Beach legend Gigi Fiorucci (don’t squeeze that lemon wedge over your superbly grilled sand dabs or he’ll reprimand you), Sotto Mare has a true family feel, a bustling business of diverse diners, and a haphazard décor that recalls San Francisco’s ramshackle maritime past. When that steaming cioppino tureen, more than enough for two, is placed on the table by the gregarious waitstaff, you feel a delicious connection to SF history.

552 Green, SF. (415) 398-3181, www.sottomaresf.com

 

BEST WIENERAMA

Never mind the ubiquitous fancy food carts or “third wave” coffee shops springing up in back alley garages — wieners were everywhere this past year. The explosion of gourmet and not-so-gourmet hot dog stands, joints, and full-on restaurants worked to balance all the epicurean exotica with some down-home comfort for those who were raised in a broke-down Chevy on televised baseball and McDonald’s apple pies. All were worthy, but one in particular consistently heated our buns: Showdogs. This “emporium of sausages” keeps it classy with a spotless, tin-tiled interior and organic ingredients like wild boar and merguez, while still appealing to the everyday eater with a sporty sense of humor — we’re suckers for the 49er, an all-beef Schwartz dog with housemade mustard, arugula, and, gasp, real sauerkraut. Add some barbecue fries and a Trumer Pils, and this hearty barker wins best in show.

1020 Market, SF. (415) 558-9560, www.showdogssf.com

 

BEST PLACE TO HORK DOWN HALF A BIRD

“I just ate half a chicken.” That declaration is written on a Post-it stuck to a cubicle at the Guardian offices. The sticky piece of pastel paper has since been signed by other people besides the original chicken lover. What can you say? Unless you’re the staunchest vegetarian, sometimes you just get the urge to eat half a chicken. Thai BarBQ in Potrero Hill was ideal for such moments, but it’s flown the coop. Luckily, Baby Blues BBQ is here to satisfy those extra-intense and voracious aviary cravings. The restaurant’s Marion County slow-smoked yard bird is served with a tangy barbeque sauce, but be sure to ask for the special Sassy Molassy molasses sauce. Add in corn bread and a choice of two fixins (sautéed okra, mac ‘n’ cheese and corn on the cob are some of the best options) and at a grand total of $15, you’ve got a deal only a fool would cluck-cluck at.

3149 Mission, SF. (415) 896-4250, www.babybluessf.com

 

BEST RAMEN PHENOMENON

We all know about chicken soup for the soul, how about delicious soup for the skin? Because its pork bone broth contains collagen and calcium, tonkotsu ramen has a rep as the genuinely edible version of a spa facial. There are some delicious tonkotsu ramens in Vancouver and San Francisco, but they’re all matched and even superceded by the subtle one at Asuka Ramen, which manages to be rich and light within a single spoon-size sip. Ramen establishments have popped up all over the city in the last year or two, but Asuka steers clear of trendy trappings and delivers the low-priced goods. Tantanmen is Asuka’s go-to dish, but if you don’t confuse greasy strong flavor with deliciousness, its pork-and-egg laden tonkotsu is the type for you.

883 Bush, SF. (415) 567-3153

 

BEST BEEF LULU

If life was little more than vodka and pastries (with no hangovers), we’d be in heaven, and the best place to shop would be Royal Market & Bakery. Even here on this mortal playground, Royal Market and Bakery is in the running for greatest shop. Why? Tasty marinated quail, excellent caviar, homemade hummus, fresh fruit, savory eggplant rolls with cheese, dark Russian chocolates, Turkish coffee, a tremendous selection of chilled vodkas and other liquor, an overflowing nook of flaky pastries, and last but not least, Beef Lulu. A special seasoned dish of ground meat, Beef Lulu is as enjoyable as its name is funny. At a time when the city is being overrun by generic chain supermarkets, Royal makes the case for individuality devoted to regional cuisine. And the prices are better, too.

5335 Geary, SF. (415) 221-5550

 

BEST BASKET OF UBE

On a busy street south of San Francisco lies a little land of leavened love where all your Filipino baked goods needs are met with a sweet smile and an even sweeter pandecoco. We won’t require 20 questions to tell you where: the place is Bread Basket, a starkly outfitted bakery famed for its thrillas from Manila. The neighborhood favorite is BB’s pandesal, swiped fresh out of the ovens while the packs of the bun-like lovelies are still aromatically steamy. Need to bring home a little something for dessert? The joint has cornered the market on delights made from the meat of the ube, or purple yam, which Bread Basket magically transforms into the bun fillings and feathery, marzipan-like candies that sit alongside its more familiar cookies and breads.

7099 Mission, Daly City. (650) 994-7741, www.breadbasketca.com

 

BEST QUE SYRAH, HURRAH

Tucked in a sliver of a space in the West Portal commercial strip is the tantalizing Que Syrah wine bar, founded and presided over with skill and affection by the team of Stephanie and Keith McCardell. Que Syrah is the perfect place to savor a glass of wine in a friendly neighborhood setting: quiet, unpretentious, and specializing in unusual wines from small production wineries from all over the world. Stephanie and Keith serve by the glass or in intriguing flights and provide expert notes about the wine, the winemakers, and the regions involved. Every Thursday night, an array of delectable tapas enliven the tastings — chef Val Desuyo takes inspiration from his regular trips to the restaurants of Barcelona. Plus: quarterly paella parties! Seafood paella and a glass from Penedès? Sì, sì!

230 West Portal Ave., SF. (415) 731-7000, www.quesyrahsf.com

 

BEST LOBSTER ROLLIN’

Whatever queasy misgivings you may harbor about the phrase “mobile seafood shack” will instantly be dispelled once you’ve palmed (or tried to palm) a hefty Maine lobster roll from Sam’s Chowdermobile. We were turned on to this tender, brimming-over prize when one of our East Coast-native amigos texted “lobster roll = real deal” from Golden Gate Park, where you can find the edible aquarium on wheels most weekends. So we tried one for ourselves, and yep. Great lobster rolls at a reasonable price are surprisingly hard to come by ’round these Left Coast parts — we’re crabby that way. Luckily Sam’s, the mobile unit of Half Moon Bay resto Sam’s Chowder House delivers the goods. (The roll proper is enough to feed two — order a single-serving “shortie” if you want one all to yourself.) Prep yourself for crustacean heaven with a bowl of Sam’s New England chowder and a side of Old Bay fries for a true Eastern experience.

www.samschowdermobile.com

 

Appetite: Don’t forget to remember — Mission Beach Cafe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Don’t forget to remember — Mission Beach Cafe

In the wake of last year’s closings, at the beginning of the year I began reflecting on those neighborhood spots or classic restaurants we often forget are there but don’t want to lose. From time to time, I share reviews of places we’d do well to re-visit… or get to for the first time. They might be receiving a fresh infusion of flavor from recent chef or menu changes, or remain noteworthy, despite floods of new openings and (over)hyped hot spots.

Mission Beach Cafe, aka MBC, a welcoming corner restaurant many go to for brunch or incredible baked goods and Blue Bottle coffee in the morning, has maintained a rare level of quality through a handful of chef changes. I am amazed at how delicious dinners here remain: from chef Thomas Martinez (see my 2009 review at The Perfect Spot) to heartwarming Pot Pie Tuesdays. For about six months, they’ve had a new chef, Trevor Ogden, who most recently worked at Umami, at the now defunct Frisson and with Stephanie Izzard in Chicago. Though young, like former Chef Martinez, there’s inventive maturity in Ogden’s work.

A recent visit yielded literally one pleasurable dish after the other:

– MBC has thankfully kept their killer flatbread of the day ($14) on the menu. Ogden prepared ours with a goat gouda infused with hops (yes, you heard right), layered with crisp corn, caramelized ramps, chicken and two pepper purees (red pepper and padron).

– One of the stand-outs in a stand-out meal, is tea-smoked albacore tuna ($14) topped with quail eggs, caviar, chili creme fraiche and dotted with crispy lemon-saffron risotto. A visual work of art and a lightly seductive pleasure to the palate.

– Mixed baby lettuces ($10) are shaped into bowl cupping mounds of avocado, red spring onions, toybox tomatoes, herbed tofu and walnuts in a creamy cabernet vinaigrette.

Artful smokes and grilled Hodo tofu

– I’m so not a vegetarian, but one of two vegetarian entrees was a favorite of mine: smoked and grilled Hodo tofu ($17) is in good company with zucchini, toybox summer squash, eggplant, grilled corn and forbidden black rice. A little sweet comes in the form of strawberries and strawberry rhubarb glaze.

– Organic pork tenderloin ($23) is comforting with roasted German butterball potatoes, cipollini onions, baby carrots and sugar snap peas. But when it’s cooked in rosemary brown butter and drizzled with white peach pork jus, it’s downright luxurious.

– Pan-seared branzino ($25) arrives stacked over shaved fennel, summer squash and pea tendrils. The fish is delicate but the skin adds crisp and saltiness. Most addictive is the Vidalia onion/Yukon gold soubise and tomato-lemon verbena broth accenting the dish.

– Those truffle fries resting under shaved parmesan ($5) are as fabulous as they ever were.

– Alan Carter holds the crown of pastry chef extraordinaire and his pies ($6.50-7 a slice) are still mama’s home cooking and a long-awaited holiday rolled into one. It’s like coming home to his banana butterscotch cream or chocolate pecan pies, but I was especially entranced with my beloved rhubarb (thank you, summer!) in his strawberry rhubarb pie.

Alan Carter’s magnificent pies

I am happy to (continue) to say, do not forget to return to Mission Beach Cafe.

198 Guerrero Street (at 14th Street)
(415) 861-0198
www.missionbeachcafesf.com

Kelly Malone crafts up a new kind of SF playspace

Andrew Lam
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I’m going to venture a thought that may prove controversial, but it bears saying. San Francisco is not a crafter’s wonderland. Now, certainly it is fertile ground for artistic genius. But craft? Such a small, persnickety pastime thrives better in towns with worse weather, or less going on, or in ones with an idyllic beach or field where no one asks you if you’d like a weed infused peanut butter and jelly sandwich every god damn twenty minutes. Perhaps this explains the widespread popularity of Workshop, a crafting social space where you can zone out for an evening of PBRs and careful make-time.

Workshop co-founder Kelly Malone grew up with a functional notion of craft. Her dad’s a carpenter and her mom a part time seamstress. The couple would sit in the garage and sewing room, respectively, “and I was like, well that’s kind of lame,” Malone tells me one morning at Workshop, after we have gotten coffee across the street at Matching Half Cafe and I had managed to spill it on my dress, twice. Malone’s mom would try to teach her stitches back then, but “I’d get all goth on her, and tell her to piss off with the sewing.” It wasn’t until college that Malone got into crafting, after which she nabbed New York creative gigs for Victoria’s Secret and Betsy Johnson before moving to San Francisco.

Once here, she assembled her crafty friends in her backyard for Indie Mart, a hip DIY craft fair where Malone would cram in 25 vendors, stick a DJ in the bushes and was the funnest thing ever until the bathroom line got too long. So they moved it out to larger venues like the blocks outside Thee Parkside bar, and The Independent (it’s still going strong). Malone battled ovarian cancer (three rounds of chemo, but in remission as of last month), and decided that she wanted a permanent spot to capitalize on the SF craft mania that Indie Mart seemed to tap into.

So she sold nearly everything she owned, and got a Western Addition space that had lived previously as a T-shirt company, and as a dry cleaner for thirty years previous. Her vision paid off. Nowadays, she can’t post the one-off classes to the website quick enough – they sell out, nearly every one of the 13 the center usually offers a week. When Workshop opened, Malone had expected to teach no more than four a week.

“I didn’t realize that home ec doesn’t exist anymore – no one knows how to sew,” she tells me. “We all used to make things, but now we don’t create our own things anymore. I don’t nerd out on the politics of it too much, but I like seeing people make their own commerce.” 

Workshop classes do seem to attract their fair share of aspiring professionals eager to beat their cyclical unemployment. A recent screen-printing course I took played host to a girl in a homemade dress that seemed intent on learning the functionality of making prints, even though we shared the space that night with a sweethearted pack of leftover Pride tourists that came for the good times that Malone’s affable instructors provide. Some students have become Indie Mart vendors, even gone on to sell their wares to stores, and an Indie Business class at Workshop has found an eager audience.

But crafting is still clearly the source of much amusement here. My screen-printing instructor, Nicole Schwieterman, seemed equally concerned with the amount of fun students were having as their grasp of the technical skills involved. “It’s supposed to look like that, right?” she smiled when I sheepishly showed her the excessive mess my paint slops had made. Most people left with a finished product, of sorts, but I’m guessing only half will ever avail themselves to Workshop’s open studio hours.

 

The Workshop team’s votives of their space’s patron saints. Holla, Mr. Wizard, Martha Stewart, Bob Vila, and Shepard Fairey! Photo by Caitlin Donohue

Popular classes include glass terrarium making and rock ‘n roll sewing (for beginners), from which participants walk away with a homemade beer cozie. Examples of these lovely floral and/or screen-printing specimens lie piled in a basket in a corner of Workshop’s front room in accordance with a house rule that all drinks must be drunk thusly, well insulated. It’s good times — I liked the teacher ladies so much that when the three hour class had finished, I wanted to crack another beer, nest into the lounge area by the front door, and suck in more of the fun-productive ambience.

I can’t decide which of my three visits to Workshop I enjoyed most. The first was my initial stumble-upon when I caught their Divisadero Art Walk party. The same room I learned to screen-print in was packed with alterna-looking young people, and a girl headed up a punk band whose instruments were hooked up to more amps than seemed strictly necessary for a space so small. “We have our fair share of social events,” Kelly told me when I came back to chat with her on my second trip to figure out how this place came to be. And of course, there was the third time, making owl print T-shirts and killing beers with my roommate and a bunch of nice strangers. 

I take it back, I’m obviously going with the third time. You can hear a cute little indie band any day of the week, and hanging with successful creatives is cool, but a night on the town just making stuff? Totally San Francisco — or at least now we can pretend that it is.

 

Workshop

1798 McAllister, SF

(415) 874-9186

www.workshopsf.org

 

An online defense of print—and a plug for the Public Press’ first print edition

Mary Magee
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An online defense of print—and a plug for the Public Press’ first print edition

I spent my lunch hour yesterday indulging in what media critics say could soon be a lost experience: reading the first print issue of a newspaper.

As I turned the pages of a pilot print edition of the San Francisco Public Press, which has been in existence online since March 2009, I was surrounded by folks who were tapping out messages on plastic coated cell phones or sitting scrunched at table trying to read stuff on laptops.

And I began to wonder, will there be a print renaissance in my life time as upcoming generations begin to feel the impacts of too much screen and keyboard time? And begin to realize the benefits of having a print presence in this increasingly digital world? Or is print really going to go the way of the dinosaurs?

Maybe it’s because I’m old school, but I actually believe there’s a future for print journalism, though it may be a limited one. To my mind you can’t beat the sensation that comes from leafing through a newspaper, while sipping morning coffee, or the welcome relief of reading the news in hard copy, after staring at computer screens all day. And then there’s the fact that I’m never going to get mugged, or have my car broken into, because someone wants to steal a newspaper–something that can’t be said if you leave your Kindle or Blackberry or fancy laptop around.

Yeah, I never have to worry about sand at the beach, or water in the bath, when I read a print newspaper. And I can rest assured that when I am done with my paper, and leave it in a coffee shop, someone else can read it, or recycle it in their blue bin or reuse it as the proverbial bird cage liner or fish wrap.

Now, what’s especially interesting about the San Francisco Public Press—and distinguishes it from most other print newspapers currently available—is that it’s free of advertisements. Or, as the folks at the Public Press like to say, it’s “ad-free news in the public interest.”

    “Why no ads?” the Public Press asks. “As the newspaper advertising market has drained to Internet competitors, we need to search for other sources of income to support quality journalism. Advertising has also warped the content of the newsroom, both explicitly and subtly, encouraging newspapers to shift their coverage to topics of interest to businesses and wealthy readers—the target of ads. Noncommercial news, while often less lucrative, has the luxury of independence.”

The Public Press also devotes some wordage to explaining why they have turned to ink:
    “Newspapers help bridge the digital divide,” they state, noting that San Francisco’s 2009 City Survey showed that more than 34 percent of households with income under $50,000 cannot access the Internet at home via personal computers.
    “Newspapers serve as communal touchstones,” they continue, observing how isolating digital widgets can be, compared to reading a print newspaper in public.
    “We want to pay our hardworking staff for the work they do,” they add, reminding us that folks buy 50 million newspapers everyday in the US, but are still averse to paying for news online.
    “People use paper and electronic devices differently,” they conclude. “There are times and places when even the most tech-savvy Bay Area digerati enjoy some screen relief.”

I got my hands on a copy of the San Francisco Public Press’ first print edition, because Lila Lahood, SFPP’s director of operations, and SFPP contributor Christopher D. Cook, who wrote a timely piece about Lennar using federal taxpayer funds to balance its books, stopped by the Guardian with a stack of papers.

And while they were in newspaper delivery mode, Lahood and Cook also shared their thoughts on “Lessons Learned” from their first foray into print.

“We missed our deadline,” Lahood admitted, observing how, in future, the Public Press plans to focus less on breaking news and more on timely features to avoid deadline stress. The plan going forward, Lahood said, is to publish a print edition on a quarterly basis, with the hope of becoming a monthly print publication at some point next year.

“Some of us we stayed up the whole night, filings our full package at 6 in the morning,” Lahood added, tipping her hat to the “strong and committed core” of Public Press workers that made this first print edition possible.

‘Though most of us are journalists, we worked for publications that were already in existence before we arrived,” Lahood continued, acknowledging that the team had much to learn about putting out a print edition from start to finish this first time around.

‘But we showed it could be done,” Cook added.  “There is a solid professional publication now in the public sphere, making a dent in the San Francisco community.”

Available in 35 bookstores and newsstands in the Bay Area, the Public Press’ print edition is also available on the street for $2 a pop—an exercise in sales that isn’t as easy as the guys who peddle the Street Sheet (a monthly tabloid written primarily by homeless and formerly homeless people) make it look.

“It’s hard to sell newspapers on the street,” Cook acknowledged. “We knew it was going to be challenging. When you are out there, standing on the corner in the urban crunch, no one has an interest, but the minute you connect to folks, on an individual level, it changes.”

On June 22, the Public Press’s first pilot newspaper hit the streets. At 28 pages long, it includes two sections, three investigative reports, a full-page graphic novel and 50 articles from staff members and a broad spectrum of public media and civic groups, including KALW, KQED, Commonwealth Club, World Affairs Council, California Watch and Consumers Union.

I found the Public Press’ special section on Treasure Island intriguing and informative—the kind of in-depth investigation that’s hard for one journalist to pull off, but is crucial if the city of San Francisco and all its many residents are going to make informed planning and development decisions.

I appreciated the wide-range of articles in the Public Press’ main section, including items on the ongoing battle over the future of the open-air sewage digesters that have been stinking up the Bayview for decades now.

I loved the “Sit, Lie, Get Deported” comic strip that merges photos with hand-drawn illustrations and uses the actual words of politicians, city officials, activists and gadflies to help illustrate its point.

And I’m still trying to finish the crossword. In fact,  I plan to read the SFPP’s first printedition from front to back over the July 4 holiday weekend, when I’ll have the time to really absorb and enjoy it.

“Ideally, news will appear in print first, then online, so there’s interest in seeking out the print edition,” Lahood told me, noting that the Public Press’ first edition amounts to about 70,000 words. “So, it a novel, in length,” Lahood laughed. “People are, if not starving, at least very hungry for news analysis and investigative reporting. There are a lot of online sites that aggregate other publications content, and then there’s the corporate model of the Chronicle, but while there is some good reporting in town, there are fewer reporters.”

No kidding. All the more reason for this reporter to write an online defense of print, in the hope that you rush out to secure your copy of the Public Press’s first print edition and evaluate this new model of journalism. I think you’ll be glad you did.

La Briciola

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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La Briciola

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Seven years ago — I long to say, “four score and seven years ago” but that would be stretching a point — I considered an Italian restaurant, Vino e Cucina, on a SoMa stretch of Third Street notable for its grit. After dark, in the shadows of the crumbling viaduct carrying traffic to and from the Bay Bridge, you could easily imagine yourself being inside one of Tim Burton’s Batman movies, and to step into Vino e Cucina was to find refuge.

These days the neighborhood’s aspect is quite different. The viaduct has been rebuilt, tony-looking housing has popped up all over, and Vino e Cucina is now La Briciola. The refuge angle is less sharp now, but La Briciola is still welcoming in that distinctive Italian way that manages to be informal and formal at the same time. The interior is done in shades of brown and cream; if it were a cup of coffee, it would be a macchiato, an espresso marked with some foamed milk. And the service staff practices a well-mannered demonstrativeness that will probably seem familiar to anyone who’s ever eaten at a trattoria in Rome.

The food, rooted mostly in the cuisines of Tuscany and Piemonte, tells us a nuanced tale about Italian cuisine’s complex relationship with innovation. If a dish has been made the same way for generations — has, in effect, been perfected — then why tamper or fiddle around with it? Yet this is America, where newness is celebrated with an almost religious fervor. So which will it be, perfection or newness?

Executive chef Gian Luca Toschi’s best dishes are the traditional ones, though these aren’t necessarily old warhorses. For instance, I’ve never seen fagottini ($14) or Italian crepes on a menu before; these turned out to resemble a pair of giant dim sum pouches, wrapped up like gunny sacks and filled with chopped mushrooms and carrots. The earthiness of the filling was enhanced (and that’s putting it mildly) by a cream sauce of mushroom and truffle oil.

Veal, on the other hand, tends to be ubiquitous in north Italian cooking, and La Briciola offers a lovely version “alla valdostana” ($22), the name referring to an alpine region known for its fontina cheese. The veal was cutlets, pounded thin and rolled around a core of fontina cheese and speck (smoked prosciutto) into stubby cigars. If you like chicken kiev, you’d like this.

At the side of the plate lay a berm of vegetables, lightly steamed but still bright with color — broccoli, carrots, quartered new potatoes. If food were a game of chess, they would be pawns, worthy but not of enormous interest. These pawns did attract my interest, though, because they were exactly the same as those on a plate of food across the table, seared tuna with sesame sauce ($22).

The fish was fine. The sauce, like liquid amber dotted with black sesame seeds, was beautiful rather than flavorful despite the presence of shallots and vin santo. Sesame belongs mainly to the cuisines along the rim of the Indian Ocean; it’s not a natural part of the Italian kitchen, so it wasn’t shocking that the kitchen didn’t do much with it. But it was the sameness of the vegetables that captured my attention. It was as if they’d been slung onto passing plates in some kind of hash line. Of course restaurant kitchens are assembly lines, and of course economies of scale are important — but so too is the illusion that each plate has been carefully and lovingly assembled by hand, like a Louis Vuitton bag. And the illusion is so easy to create; a single variation — green beans instead of broccoli — would do it.

And speaking of green: green is a color, and a little color would have been welcome in the octopus salad ($12), which consisted of pale white octopus flesh, (white) cannellini beans, and whitish barley kernels. Some color was provided by pickled carrot shavings, but these were ungainly and awkward to eat. Still, the salad, as amended with squeezes of fresh lemon, satisfied, and it did reflect the Italian ethic of simplicity.

Chocolate volcano cake ($8) has been widely done, but it seemed strangely appropriate to find it in an Italian restaurant since Italy is among the more volcanic of lands, and Italians do love their chocolate. An issue with these cakes is that the chocolate magma can sometimes be molten enough to burn your tongue, but here it was pleasantly very warm, not hot. This was a welcome variation.

LA BRICIOLA

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

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

489 Third St., SF

(415) 512-0300

www.labriciola-sf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Reasonable noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

Appetite: More intriguing June openings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: More intriguing June openings

It’s been an exhausting, thrilling whirl of new openings this month (check out last week’s Appetite). As usual, I hit most new SF openings right away, then continue to revisit as they settle in (if they are worth revisiting, which is often the case). Here’s an initial take on more recent openings. For further details, check out my upcoming July 1st issue of The Perfect Spot)

SKOOL – On a sunny, Potrero Hill afternoon during Skool’s (soft) opening week, June 21, I wandered over to this new fish haven run by husband and wife duos, Toshihoro and Hiroko Nagano (of my beloved Bushi Tei) and Andy and Olia Mirabell (of Blowfish Sushi to Die For). The Zen-peace of the patio, enclosed in gorgeous Japanese foliage, is brightened by orange Aperol umbrellas. Inside it’s sleek, Japanese minimalism in the form of warm, brown woods and gentle lighting. I’m already plotting another visit this week and anticipating their addition of dinner once they get their liquor license (lunch only at the moment). They make good sans alcohol with fine teas, Illy coffee and virgin drinks like Teacher’s Pet ($4): apple juice, honey water, topped with ginger foam and a basil leaf. I almost don’t miss a cocktail.There’s hefty “lunch box” sandwiches, like Dungeness crab ($13) tossed in a light mayo with yuzu whole grain mustard, topped with avocado, butter lettuce, tomato, and a poached free range egg; or a Washugyu Sandwich ($15) with coffee-marinated washu-beef, mozzarella and Parmesan cheese, caramelized onion, pepper cress and wasabi aioli. Dessert offers a seductively jiggly Lavender Panna Cotta ($6), surprisingly light, delicately drizzled with a honey vanilla bean sauce. I definitely see a Bushi Tei freshness and creativity at work here. And how can you not fall in love with that patio?

1725 Alameda, SF
(415) 255-8800
www.skoolsf.com

SPICE KIT — Just opened June 28, this airy, high-ceilinged take-out spot with a few tables inside and out on a patio in the shadow of SoMa high-rises, Spice Kit keeps its menu simple. Choose a ssam (stuffed Korean rice paper wrap), Vietnamese banh mi or salad with five-spice chicken, beef shortrib, roasted pork or seared/braised organic tofu. Sides are simple (crispy lotus chips, grilled pork belly buns), as are drinks (Calamansi Limeade, Vietnamese iced coffee), and prices happily under $8. Spice Kit may not exactly be Momofuku West, but it does have hints of that ethos, opened by two self-proclaimed French-trained Asian guys who cooked at restaurants you may have heard of: The French Laundry and Per Se? I wouldn’t say travel across town for it, but if you work nearby, it’ll most likely be added to your lunch rotation.

405 Howard, SF.
(415) 882-4581
www.spicekit.com

 

ROAM ARTISAN BURGERS — I’ve tasted through all four burgers at Cow Hollow’s new burger joint, which opened on June 21: grass-fed beef, bison (lean, meaty), turkey, and veggie. All come with various topping choices, whether fried egg or Southwestern veggies, but the veggie burger especially impressed. Veggie burgers never taste like (or replace) meat burgers for me, but this is a unique, veggie sandwich with patties made primarily of quinoa and beets, loaded with avocado. Straus Creamery (http://www.strausfamilycreamery.com) shakes are lush in flavors like Salted Caramel and Matcha Green Tea. Kombucha on tap is refreshingly smooth. But Sweet Potato Fries cooked in maple syrup may have been my favorite item at this casually chic burger lounge.
 

1785 Union Street
(415) 440-7626
www.roamburgers.com

Appetite: Intriguing June openings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Intriguing June openings

It’s been an exhausting, thrilling whirl of new openings in SF this month. And it’s not quite over yet… as usual, I hit most new SF openings right away, then continue to revisit as they settle in (if they are worth revisiting, which is often the case). Here’s a quick, initial take on openings of the past week or two, with more to come next week (for more details, check out my upcoming July 1st issue of The Perfect Spot):

SAISON — Walk through the side gate of Stable Cafe, with unique 1800’s carriage house setting, and enter Saison’s newly remodeled garden, evocative of an Italian or Mediterranean villa patio: white lights strung across the courtyard, lemon tree emitting a soft citrus scent, rocking chair and vintage ashtray stand inviting you to linger with a glass of wine, and wood-burning hearth (which will also be a bread baking oven with mention of whole animal cooking to come)? Entirely transporting.

Chef and owner Joshua Skenes has taken his acclaimed weekly “pop-up” and launched a full, Tuesday through Saturday restaurant, opened June 22.  Cooking on the only Molteni stove in the Bay Area, the 30-seat interior is minimalist, but warm and glowing, with open flow between dining room and kitchen. Prices are hefty for this unusual dining experience, from a one nightly seating, $98 per person/8-course tasting menu, to a four-seat chef’s counter at $200 per person, or a two-seat chef’s table with 20 customized courses at $200 to $500 per person (!) They were very smart to add the casual, enchanting patio to the mix with a la carte options for those not partaking in multi-courses. Something for everyone.

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Saison’s garden entrance

At a pre-opening dinner, I sampled possible menu offerings, while Sommelier Mark Bright kept us satiated with wine pairings like affordable 2005 Chateau de Montpezat Coteaux du Languedoc and 2004 Neal Ellis Shiraz. Dishes were delicate, tiny, artistic, and, of course, farm fresh, from hand-picked, local ingredients. Highlights include crispy sweetbreads roasted with caramelized honey and intriguing slant of berbere spicing, as well as a perfect rendition of one of my favorites: rhubarb as a sorbet on milk granite with tart strips of rhubarb decorating the sorbet.
2124 Folsom, SF.
(415)828-7990
www.saisonsf.com

 

PROSPECT — Nancy Oakes, Kathy King and Pamela Mazzola of Boulevard opened the long-anticipated Prospect restaurant with a stellar crew: Ravi Kapur as chef, Brooke Arthur (long a favorite for her cocktail menu at Range), and Amy Currens as Wine Director (formerly of Luce). You couldn’t ask for a better line-up, with all the elegance of Boulevard but more of an experimental, hip approach.

The space is huge, almost corporate-looking, but warmed by brown tones and centered bar. Granted, I haven’t dined fully here yet but at the pre-opening party, I sampled a wide range of the food (at least ten dishes), pretty much all of it stellar, as well as three fine cocktails. The kitchen is impressive, allowing a finely tuned team to crank out Dayboat scallops ($16) with summer truffles and shaved squash, better-than-Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches, and whole wheat crepes ($19) stuffed with ricotta, nettles and roasted mushrooms. I love black cod ($14) in red curry with snap peas, shiitakes, and lightly-fried shiso shrimp fritters. Desserts were equally intriguing from a blissfully dark, creamy chocolate mousse/cake topped with berries, to the truly unique presentation and taste of cherries atop a thyme pavlova ($8) with vanilla, black pepper and frozen yogurt.

Cocktails ($10-11) were all high quality from a tart, bracing Mr. White (Pueblo Viejo blanco tequila, St. Germain elderflower, strawberry mint shrub, lime) to a balanced Prospector (Wild Turkey Rye 101, Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur, Drambuie, pineapple gum, lemon). I suspect Prospect is going to become a key SF dining and drinking destination.
300 Spear, SF.
(415) 247-7770
www.prospectsf.com

HOOKER’S SWEET TREATS — The name continually prompts the obvious jokes, but all that aside, Hooker’s Sea Salt Dark Chocolate-covered Caramels are as addictive and bitchin’ as everyone says.

Hooker’s caramel and a capuccino

Visiting opening day, I found it’s not merely a storefront for the caramels (expensive at $2 each, $7 for 3, or $20 for 10), but also for wonderful coffee and capuccinos from Sightglass, serving the first of their own roasted beans here (returning the favor since Sightglass first sold Hooker’s caramels). They bake bread pudding daily (always wins points with me), a nod to the owner’s Louisiana roots (another point!) The space is cozy, with one communal table that gazes lazily out a window framed by a leafy tree, and turn-of-the-century country kitchen decor of dark blue and wood. Along with microscopic Farm:Table, there’s two linger-worthy, coffee mecca cafes in this neck of the ‘Loin.

442 Hyde, SF.
www.hookerssweettreats.com

Now voyager

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Now voyager

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC What might Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s status be? Casual but committed, relaxed yet extremely productive sounds about right for the Alps music-maker, Root Strata label head, On Land festival organizer, and now the third leg of the recently formed Moholy-Nagy.

Not another reunion band-cum-supergroup — Cantu-Ledesma, Danny Paul Grody (the Drift), and Trevor Montgomery (Lazarus) were founding members of Tarentel — the new SF project shares a moniker with the Bauhaus movement mover-and-shaker, although the trio is much more unassuming than all that.

“I think Danny and Trevor had been playing for a couple months, and they called and asked if they could borrow one of my synthesizers,” recalls Cantu-Ledesma on the phone, taking a break from his day job in operations at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “I said, ‘No, but I’ll come down and play it’ — an asshole move on my part, but that’s typical of me.” You can practically hear his tongue being firmly thrust in cheek.

Very casually, but consistently, in the spirit of a “nerding-out recording project” with the members switching instruments and utilizing a “junky analog” ’70s drum machine Montgomery found on eBay, the threesome hunkered down in its longtime Hunters Point practice space, making what Cantu-Ledesma describes as the “most synthesized thing any of us has ever done before. It’s largely improvised around bass lines or drum parts, so things weigh it down and other things can have freedom around it.”

“It’s more like hanging out with friends having some lunch and getting some coffee and making music,” he adds. “It’s not like, ‘Dude! We’re in a band!'<0x2009>”

Easy-going but quick to step back and see the folly or humor in whatever’s before him, often issuing a loud, bright laugh, Cantu-Ledesma seems less than impressed with self-important “band dudes,” even after years spent in an influential combo like Tarentel.

“Oh, gosh, are you picking up on that?” he replies, dryly ironic, when asked about it. “Well, even with the Alps, when you look at it on the surface, it looks like we’re writing songs, but we’re not writing songs. We just want to create stuff and not so much worry about the fidelity of recreating things.”

But what things Cantu-Ledesma makes, judging from the haunting watercolor tone poems of Moholy-Nagy — music that could easily slip into a cinematic mood piece like Zabriskie Point (1970) or Paris, Texas (1984) — and the alternately motorik-beatific and insinuatingly delicate experiments of the Alps’ new Le Voyage (Type). For Cantu-Ledesma’s forthcoming solo album, due this fall, he’ll dig into his more shoegaze-ish background, but for Moholy-Nagy, he gets to “exercise another side. I’m a total knob-tweaker kind of guy, but we get to move around a lot more than we get to on other projects. Things are tending to sound more quirky or funky than other things we’ve done.”

In a way this project is an extension of the San Francisco Art Institute painting and sculpture graduate’s interior, rather than audibly exterior, work. “I’m going to say this, and I’m not trying to be new age,” he confesses. “But honestly, I used to be really intense about stuff happening a certain way. But I worked on my own development and became more secure with my own personality. and that really helped in terms of — without sounding too Californian — just letting it flow.”

That goes for his collaborations with filmmaker and kindred SFMOMA staffer Paul Clipson: a DVD of their Super-8 films and sound pieces since 2007 comes out this summer and coincides with an August performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. “We love what we do, but there’s no plan behind any of it,” Cantu-Ledesma ponders. “I know this probably sounds facetious, but I’m not really motivated to make things happen — though obviously with things like On Land, you’re booking and buying plane tickets and stuff.”

On Land is firmly grounded in Cantu-Ledesma’s Root Strata imprint, which materialized in 2004, inspired by SF collectives like Jeweled Antler and then-Bay Area-based performers like Yellow Swans, Axolotl, and Skaters. It’s a way to present artists that Cantu-Ledesma and co-organizer and label cohort Maxwell Croy like and have worked with in the last year, in a “nice venue,” otherwise known as Cafe Du Nord. In early September, label musicians and friends like Charalambides, Grouper, Oneohtrix Point Never, Zelienople, Dan Higgs, White Rainbow, Barn Owl, and Bill Orcutt will appear, with video collaborations by Clipson and Nate Boyce, at the second annual gathering.

“Does the Bay Area need another music festival? Probably not,” Cantu-Ledesma quips wryly. “But you’re not going to see Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy or Vampire Weekend. We’re trying to show a different strata of stuff from California or Oregon, kind of a West Coast underground, or people who just fit into our tastes, which are idiosyncratic and weird.”

MOHOLY-NAGY

With Brother Raven and Golden Retriever

Wed/16, 9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

rootstrata.com

www.onlandfestival.com

Get your kicks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Get your kicks

culture@sfbg.com

SPORTS The Olympics may get the most props for bringing sports fans of all nationalities together in (mostly) friendly competition. But as futbol fans know, a simple “gooooaaaallll!” translates thrillingly into any language. Like millions of World Cup soccer enthusiasts around the globe, I’ll be parking my particulars in front of the biggest screens in town for this year’s spectacle (June 11-July 11). And fortunately, no matter where you are in the city, you should be able to do the same. Here’s a short list of some of the best places to go and check out a match or 10. Too numerous to list are the many sports bars and Irish/English pubs that will undoubtedly be open (Bus Stop, Kezar Pub, the Phoenix, Mad Dog in the Fog, Balompie Café — here’s looking at you!), but you’ll find them easily enough on your own. Just follow the sounds of “ole, ole, ole, ole” wafting in the breeze, grab a stripy scarf, and plunge into the fray.

Civic Center: If you can’t force your soccer-loving employees to come to work during the big matches, at least you can cut down on their commute by installing a giant 13-by-18-foot screen in front of City Hall and inviting the neighbors ’round. Jens-Peter Jungclaussen, the “teacher-with-the-bus” who almost single-handedly wrangled 10,000 people to a screening of the 2006 final at Dolores Park, is helping spearhead the city’s ambitious 2010 operation, with 10 days of screenings including all quarterfinal, semifinal, and final matches, and a corresponding youth soccer tournament organized by America SCORES.

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF. www.worldcupsf.com, www.teacherbus.com

AT&T Park: “Take me out to the ballgame” gets a brand new meaning at AT&T Park where they’ll be screening the big USA-England match on June 12 for free. Open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., the ballpark expects 5,000 fans to show up. If you ever wanted to give soccer hooliganism a try, this might well be the place. Just try not to get all Bill Buford about it.

24 Willie Mays Plaza, SF. (415) 972-2000

Goethe Institute: Even though the games aren’t being played in the vaterland this year, native German-speakers and we amis who love them will be gathering at the institute to watch the Germany-Australia game on June 13, and the Germany-Ghana match on June 23. Kickoff time for both games is 11:30 a.m., more screenings will be announced presuming Germany progresses to the next levels.

530 Bush, SF. (415) 263-8760, www.goethe.de/sanfrancisco

Mercury Lounge: Who would have thought that a relatively innocuous den of SoMa-style iniquity would decide to open its doors to the rough-and-tumble world of footie fandom? If you can get through the somewhat self-indulgent event webpage, you’ll come away pretty excited about the prospect of seeing matches every day from 6 a.m., with drink specials, breakfast menu, and (ick) bar-staff “eye candy”. Don’t get me started on that, but do expect to see me put in an appearance or two for half-volleys and hash browns.

1582 Folsom, SF. (415) 551-1582, www.sfworldcup2010.com

Horatius: The proprietor of this Potrero Hill café, Horacio Gomes, has thrown down the “best place to watch the World Cup” gauntlet by promising to be open for every single match — including those that start at 4:30 a.m. — and screening simultaneous games when they occur. Plus, the venue boasts a 15-by-15-foot projection screen that you won’t find at your run-of-the-mill sports bar and a capacity for up to 300 people. Free coffee will be served during the early morning matches, and light breakfast at 6 a.m.

350 Kansas, SF. (415) 252-3500, www.horatius.com

Steps of Rome Caffe: This North Beach stronghold is also planning to be open for every game — including those 4:30 matches that only the most diehard fans would consider attending (New Zealand vs. Slovakia anyone?). If you’re not yet a diehard fan, this might be the place that turns you into one, what with all that Italian coffee, pizza, and overseas-bred enthusiasm for the world’s greatest game flowing like a robust house red.

348 Columbus, SF. (415) 397-0435, www.stepsofromecaffe.com

Bongtastic!

Andrew Lam
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0
Bongtastic!

Science: it brought us non-stick saute pans, the Internet, timed traffic lights — and now, once again, it is making our lives better through the advancement of empirical knowledge. Of course, I’m referring to the findings enclosed in the new publication from Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press, Bongology.

Author Chris Stone is hardly one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, he has made significant contributions to the world of science, art, and culinary wisdom. The fruits of his endeavors can easily be referenced by his three publications; Spliffgami, Bongology, and the upcoming Baked: Marijuana Munchies to Make and Bake. A true renaissance man, a man for our time.

In honor of his achievements, I’ve assembled here a top ten list of his most illustrious designs for the scientifically correct consumption of herbals. You too, can be a scientist. By making bongs, people, lots of bongs. (*Insert golf claps)

  1. “Mini Liquor Bottle Vaporizer”: Airplane people, you tell me I can’t bring my pipe on the plane. So, whatever, that’s cool. I’m just gonna smoke out of your in flight service refreshments. Thanks, Dr. Stone! Ba-bam!

  2. “The Party Hookah”: What to do when the entire party wants to get high at once? Emily Post, to my knowledge, has never codified etiquette for the situation. The smart hostess will have at least one of these homemade beauties on hand, which can accommodate five super buddies at once.

  3. “Office Bong”: Again, big ups Doc Stone, this time for helping me understand the world around me. I finally grok the “caffeine addiction” of my Guardian editors. (No one in particular, mind you. Cough Marke B. cough.) This little gem of creativity needs only your standard to-go coffee cup, some everyday office supplies, and a healthy regard for creativity in the workplace.

  4. “Jam Jar Hookah”: God I love precious things. This has immense potential to be, scientifically speaking, the cutest fucking thing ever.

  5. “Earth Pipe”: Dude, I love the Earth. Wanna smoke out of it? No lie people, Dr. Stone (his real name, fancy!) has pioneered a way to use the very dirt beneath your feet to get lifted.

  6. “The Lung”: Actually, the illustration of the finished product of this particular model makes my stomach turn a little. But a large plastic bag inflating and collapsing into a liter bottle is just… so… sciencey — it makes the top ten!

  7. “Teapot Bong”: Granny will love it! I hear this is how they smoke in England.

  8. “Backyard Bong”: Finally, put those watering cans to use! I hear this is how they smoke in Berkeley.

  9. “Recorder Pipe”: Everyone was required to learn “Three Blind Mice” on their recorder in fifth grade. Didn’t they know that music is a gateway drug?    

  10. “The Bathroom Bong”: Don’t get squeamish on me now, people! We’re just delving deep into the realms of science. The first step to deployment of this specimen requires making your toilet cistern air tight. And that’s all I’m authorized to release.  

aaaand my least favorite: “The Mask”: No, no, no! I refuse to put a gas mask on my face and fill it with weed. I don’t care what cutting commentary it is on the futility of war, it’s just freaky and vaguely unsafe.

Firelit: Coffee with benefits

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Firelit: Coffee with benefits

Since its release a couple of months ago, I’ve been savoring Firelit Spirits‘ one-of-a-kind coffee liqueur, featuring none other than Blue Bottle Coffee. Starting off with 1,800 bottles (which are just about gone, by the way), founding partners, Jeff Kessinger and St. George Spirits distiller Dave Smith have created a coffee liqueur that retains all the nuance and glory of fine coffee. It is robust with unaged brandy, Madagascar vanilla beans and just enough cane sugar to provide balance, rather than cloying sweetness. With a strong caffeinated kick and at a bracing 60 proof, this is coffee with benefits.

I had the privilege of chatting with Jeff Kessinger and Dave Smith, both gracious guys with a deep knowledge and passion for spirits, to discuss the story behind Firelit’s creation. The recipe and concept are Kessinger’s, and his story has been covered in various publications.

In speaking with Smith about what prompted the great St. George to embrace this project, my suspicion that the distillery receives numerous pitches for products or use of the facilities was correct. What made them take a longer look at Kessinger’s recipe? As he was an old friend of St. George’s, they decided to experiment with a trial batch, believing so much in what they initially produced that Smith took on distilling responsibilities. Smith and Kessinger shared a vision for making a unique, natural tasting (read: not sticky-sweet) coffee liqueur. Smith explored recipes himself over the years, even a chicory coffee liqueur after a New Orleans’ trip. Along with James Freeman of Blue Bottle, Smith and Kessinger tested a slew of iterations of the liqueur with every shade of coffee bean, achieving a consensus on the final product for initial bottling. Dave acknowledges that many spirits come out of what is more or less a “dare”, the risk becoming greater the more unexplored the liqueur style. “It’s not difficult to make a good product”, Smith says, “but it’s very difficult to make a great product.”

Understandably, Smith calls Firelit a product he’s “incredibly proud of”, expressing the unique thumbprint of each person involved, which is, in fact, a common goal at St. George. One of the most exciting aspects of Firelit is that it will be produced with different coffee beans and brands. Just as coffee beans reflect the terroir and climate of a region in any given year, Firelit will evolve and reincarnate, allowing varying coffees to take center stage, even as the base profile remains the same. This is a welcome new liqueur for any spirits (and coffee) lover… and also another locally made treasure.

Available at:
K&L Wines
The Jug Shop
The Wine Club
Swirl on Castro

Visit Virginia Miller’s culinary itinerary site, www.theperfectspotsf.com

The coffee shop-dollar store king of Divco

Andrew Lam
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1

One questions the need for another coffeehouse on Divisadero – seems like every time I turn around there’s another corner store churning out lattes and biscotti. But clearly I lack the vision of Haile Taddesse, owner of the 99¢ Divis Variety Discount at Divisadero and McAllister. “I am a coffee addicted person,” the Eritrean business owner tells me. “I grew up in a coffee country.” And no offense to the other establishments on his street, but he thought their coffee was mediocre. So, sick of trekking “ten blocks, or a mile even,” to find Philz or Blue Bottle, he decided to expand his business empire with a cafe next door to his dollar store.

Which makes for an interesting blend of customers. The DivCo (Division Corridor) neighborhood demographics are changing rapidly these days. Older restaurants and barbershops are ceding their storefronts to trendy new restaurants and coffee shops. Hell, some people (we won’t go into who those people are, we don’t particularly jibe with them) have even made up a name, NoPa, for the stretch, eschewing the working class implications of Western Addition.

So it’s nice to see a long time business owner successfully adapting to the winds of change. This morning when I visited, business was rolling at the five year old 99¢ Divis. A group of immigrant men chatted with Taddesse about politics (“I like Reagan and Clinton. Reagan was respected abroad. Americans, they don’t care about that.”). On the other side of the door that leads to Oasis Cafe, a cheerful barista made sandwiches and coffee for young people, and a few individuals working on their laptops.

And true to his word, Tadesse’s got some damn good coffee. Ten different kinds of beans sit behind the counter, and drinks are made on a cup by cup basis. “Most coffees around here are deceptive,” he told me. “You don’t see them make it. I am trying to make everything fresh for the neighborhood.” I tried the Divisadero blend, which I was told was the darkest of the blends that day. It gave me a rich jolt that I must admit is hard to come by at other spots down DivCo.

Seating is ample and comfortable; banquettes and deep, overstuffed leather armchairs. There’s a large mural of an oasis on the back wall, painted free of charge by a fellow cafe owner who just wanted to contribute something to Tadesse, who turns in 16 plus hours a day at his mini commercial empire. Already, an extensive menu of milkshakes, fresh juices, omelettes, and sandwiches are available — but the owner sees all this as merely the beginning for the cafe. He has plans for an Ethiopian food menu, soups, outside seating for his customers.

Business at the cafe, located on less frequented stretch of Divisadero blocks from both the Mt. Zion Hospital lunch crowds and the hot Lower Haight blocks, has already exceeded Tadesse’s expectations. Which flies in the face of the advice from the friends who wieghed in when he first concieved of Oasis.

“They said not to waste my money, that it was a bad location,” he tells me as another customer unloads an armful of cheap toiletries at the dollar store counter. “But it’s not up to the competition. It’s up to you, and your product. I said ‘don’t worry, I’ll show you.’ ”

 

99¢ Divis Variety Discount & Oasis Cafe All in One

901 Divisadero, SF

(415) 474-4900

The Mitchell sister

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
The Mitchell sister

sarah@sfbg.com

Porn heiress Meta Jane Mitchell Johnson is running a little late when I arrive at the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theater, the adult entertainment establishment her father Jim Mitchell and uncle Artie Mitchell founded on the edge of the Tenderloin, just blocks from City Hall, July 4, 1969.

Johnson, 32, recently became co-owner of the theater and invited me over to discuss her vision for this notoriously hardcore strip club and the challenges she faces in an industry dominated by the Déjà Vu corporate strip club chain, in a town whose political leaders are still trying to figure out how best to regulate the clubs to ensure that their predominantly female workforce is properly compensated and protected from harassment in safe, sanitary conditions.

A young guy on the front register ushers me into a side room. The walls are decorated with photographs that recall the people and players who have made this club such a storied San Francisco institution and a landmark in the history of the sex industry.

There’s an image of a topless Marilyn Chambers, the star of Behind the Green Door, the porn film the Mitchell brothers shot and screened at the theater in 1972 and was a major hit after it became known that Chambers was also the wholesome face on Ivory Snow soap flakes box.

There is a photo of Artie with a young raven perched over his shoulder. It was taken in 1990 during a trip to Aspen, Colo., to support gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who worked at the club in the 1980s and was facing serious charges, including sexual assault and possession of drugs and explosives, that eventually got dropped.

Another shows both the Mitchell brothers, photographed when they were still young and rakish and battling the vice squad, even as they entertained the local political elite.

Today the brothers are dead, Artie from bullet wounds inflicted when Jim shot him with a rifle in February 1991; Jim from a heart attack in July 2007. And now Jim’s oldest son, James Mitchell, 28, is in jail awaiting trial for allegedly beating his ex-girlfriend Danielle Keller to death with a baseball bat in July 2009 and abducting their baby daughter, Samantha.

Unlike his father, who continued to run the Mitchell porn empire after serving less than three years for voluntary manslaughter, James is facing life behind bars.

“He is charged with six serious felonies and is facing life imprisonment with no possibility of parole,” Marin County Deputy Chief District Attorney Barry Borden said recently. Johnson told me that her brother no longer owns stock in Cinema 7, the corporation the Mitchell brothers founded to oversee their burgeoning sex business.

This latest family tragedy occurred in the wake of a $3.74 million class action suit that was settled in 2008. Brought by three MBOT dancers, the suit led to valid claims by 370 dancers who complained about Cinema 7’s “piece-rate” wage system. Under that system, the club compensated dancers solely for the number of private dances performed, waived meal and rest periods, and failed to reimburse dancers for costumes, props, and makeup.

Since then the club ended the piece-rate system, but introduced chips customers must buy to procure lap dances and encounters in small, curtained private rooms. On a recent night, the girls at the O’Farrell Theater remained smiling and bright-eyed as they succeeded in getting some customers to purchase chips for lap dances and private encounters. But the rest of the crowd remained largely silent and mostly tight-fisted as customers watched the club’s exotic dancers perform on its disco-balled stage.

All of which left me wondering if Johnson can succeed in overcoming her family history and reputation to make a difference for her workers and community while facing a nationwide recession in an industry dominated by an out-of-state chain.

 

THE UNLIKELY SAVIOR

Johnson greets me dressed in Ugg boots and jeans, apologizes for being tardy, and leads the way upstairs to the theater’s office so we can talk.

I first met Johnson in 2007 (“Behind the Mitchell’s Door,” 07/22/09) when she arrived at the theater in knee-high boots, clutching a massive lime handbag and a tiny dog named Baby. During that first encounter, three months after her father died, Johnson confided that when she took over the office, it was full of dildos dancers had given the Mitchell brothers. Placing her dog on the pool table that dominated the office, she said she planned to massage all this male energy toward femininity.

Today it looks as if she has started to deliver on that promise. The pool table is gone. The sofa where Hunter S. Thompson used to sit remains in the room. But now a clothesline runs between the office walls, draped with a stripper’s glove, stilettos, and a G-string emblazoned with the word “Gonzo,” presumably in honor of Thompson.

“It was a little thing we made to give away,” Johnson laughs.

She introduces her youngest brother and club co-owner, Justin. “Me and Justin are close. We are the owners and we are making some changes,” Johnson explains. “We are making the prices more reasonable so customers don’t have to spend an arm and a leg just to get a lap dance. And we’re going to hold events like poetry slams. We are trying to make the club fun again. We definitely see a hit due to the economy, but we’ve also been hit by the decision from the class action lawsuit.”

Johnson insists she and her brother aren’t “your typical strip club owners.”

“We‘re in a symbiotic relationship with our dancers,“ she says. “That sets us apart from other clubs. The dancers are our employees. We pay them minimum wage and workers comp. We cover their Healthy San Francisco costs. We incur a lot of expenses legally employing our dancers. But instead of crying about ‘our handicap,’ she said, referring to treating dancers as employees, “my goal is to show we can manage the club without a pimp mentality, without a ‘How much can you shake them down for?‘ approach.

“A lot of our employees have been here a long time and have had to deal with all the painful violent stuff too,” she continued. “And folks are still here, even though their hours got cut and they are not making as much money.“

In 2007, Johnson told me that she resented the family business when she was growing up. “The boys could go inside, and I couldn’t,” she recalled. It wasn’t until 2004, when she was working as a mortgage consultant in a cubical farm in San Ramon that Johnson began to take pride in the business “as something that had taken care of us through the years.”

Johnson, who became the club’s scheduling manager in 2005, recalls the shock of losing her dad in 2007. “It was like being dumped in icy water,” she says. “At first we didn’t know how to handle it. But we learned. Five years ago, I was much more liable to listen to advice. But I need to be able to fall asleep feeling good. That involves treating people a certain way. I don’t think any other strip club in the country is being run the way this one is.”

Johnson got married and went on maternity leave in 2008. ” When my son was six months old, I came back for the club’s 40th anniversary party and I realized, they need me — both of us [she and her brother]— as owners, steering the proverbial ship. No one else wants to be held accountable. We never discussed selling. Our father built this place. It’s completely shaped our lives. Good or bad, it’s ours.”

 

TOUGH INDUSTRY

As a nude strip club, Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre stands in direct competition with Crazy Horse on Market Street and the Déjà Vu-owned clubs including the Market Street Theaters, Gold Clubs and other spots in SoMa, and most of the clubs in North Beach. The exception is Lusty Lady, the only unionized, worker-owned peepshow in the country.

“If you walk into the Gold Club in San Francisco, well, there are 50 other Gold Clubs in the country, so, it‘s generic,“ Johnson says. “But they‘ve got their business model. We‘re not trying to copy Déjà Vu or Crazy Horse. We‘re the Mitchell Brothers. It‘s been part of us and our whole history.“

Dancers agree that the Lusty Lady isn’t in competition with Déjà Vu.

“They’re Walmart, and we’re the mom and pop store on the corner,” Lorelei*, a dancer at Lusty Lady, said. “At the Lusty, we pride ourselves on being alternative and having tattoos and piercings.”

Some dancers, who we’ve indicated with an asterisk after their altered names, voiced fear of being identified as critics of Déjà Vu’s business model.

“If Deja Vu found out I was shit-talking them I would probably get fired and be blacklisted from all their clubs,” Sugar* said. “If I were to get blacklisted, I’d be totally screwed because there are no other clubs in San Francisco,” where she doesn’t feel pressure to do more than dance, “which is not my thing.”

“Or the Lusty Lady, which doesn’t pay enough to cover my bills,” she continued. “But Deja Vu is notorious for being a terrible company to work for, mainly because of their outrageously high stage fees.”

Other dancers say they had to pay stage fees at the Déjà Vu-owned Hungry I, and sometimes went home empty-handed after eight-hour shifts when uninvited touching was common.

“The number one thing that would improve our work experience is if someone actually forced Deja Vu to stop charging us stage fees,” Amber* said. “Almost no one outside the industry knows that dancers pay money to go to work. A lot of customers think the clubs pay us, like, thousands of dollars. In San Francisco we pay between $100–$200 per shift, sometimes more.”

By law, dancers have the right to choose employee status, versus being considered independent contractors. “But that’s a joke,” Amber added. “If we choose employee status, we’re required to do a minimum of 10 lap dances per shift. The club keeps all that money, and we would get paid $12–$15 an hour.”

But Edi Thomas, counsel for Déjà Vu‘s Centerfolds club, flatly denies that the dancers who perform at Centerfolds (the only nightclub in San Francisco authorized to operate as a “Deja Vu Showgirls“ club) pay stage fees.

“Rather, entertainers who perform at Centerfolds (and/or at Hungry I, the Condor, and Market Street) are paid a substantial percentage of the patron revenues generated from individual dance sales,“ Thomas stated.

“The entertainers are issued Forms 1099 at year-end, reflecting the amounts they were paid by the nightclub,“ she said, which means the dancers are independent contractors, not employees. “These nightclubs operate within the law and make every effort to assure that entertainers are well compensated and perform in safe and lawful environments.

“There are, as in any industry, former and disgruntled workers carrying a desire to harm a nightclub or the industry for their own personal reasons,“ Thomas added. “But those workers do not represent the voice of the majority.“

 

CENTER OF THE STORM

When the Mitchell Brothers founded their empire, it was against a backdrop of organized crime trying to exercise a monopoly on the porn industry. According to a 1977 U.S. Department of Justice report, members of La Cosa Nostra tried to request exclusive distribution of Mitchell Brothers’ porn films.

The Mitchells resisted for years, but DOJ claims they eventually entered into a contract with LCN’s Michael Zaffarano to distribute “Autobiography of a Flea.” the Mitchells also fought City Hall.

During the 1980s, Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s vice squad tried to close the Mitchell Brothers’ operations. But under Mayor Willie Brown, the former attorney for late Déjà Vu strip club owner Sam Conti, SFPD enforcement reportedly eased.

Then in 1997, Déjà Vu started to take control of the city’s sex clubs, introducing stage fees and private rooms. In 2002, three former MBOT dancers filed their suit against Cinema 7. The next year, three other dancers brought suits against Market Street Cinema and Century Theater. And in 2005, Deja Vu settled a class action labor suit with its dancers. Attorney Greg Walston, representing the dancers, said at the time that minimum pay rate would protect dancers from being forced into prostitution to make money.

Deja Vu threatened a counter-suit based on the allegations of prostitution at their clubs, but Walston told reporters: “The record speaks for itself.” Walston used police reports with prostitution allegations to bolster his case and said he was doing the job the District Attorney’s Office should have done.

In July 2008, when MBOT reached its $3.74 million class action settlement, Cinema 7 president Jeffrey Armstrong said that the corporation was “not able to pay the entire amount up front.” Instead, Mitchell matriarch Georgia Mitchell and her business partner John P. Morgan, then cotrustees of the Jim Mitchell 1990 Family Trust, which holds two-thirds of Cinema 7’s shares, pledged stock certificates as security interest.

But the debate about how to treat sex work in San Francisco continues. In November 2008, District Attorney Kamala Harris and Mayor Gavin Newsom opposed Proposition K, a local measure that tried to decriminalize prostitution by forbidding local authorities from investigating, arresting or prosecuting sex workers. They argued that the measure would increase prostitution on the streets, give pimps cover, and hamper efforts to stop sex trafficking. The measure failed.

At the time, Prop. K advocate Carol Leigh and cofounder of the Bay Area Sex Workers Advocacy Network said, “We feel that repressive policies don’t help trafficking victims, and that human rights-based approaches, including decriminalization, are actually more effective.”

Today, erotic dancers must identify which of a tangle of regulatory entities is the appropriate venue to lodge complaints. District Attorney spokesperson Erica Derryck said Harris is dedicated to prosecuting violent crimes committed against all San Franciscans, regardless of whether they happen in a club or an alley.

“If there are two drug dealers and one attacks the other, we’d prosecute. But that’s not to say there won’t also be consequences for underlying criminal behavior too,” she said. “But anyone who has been victimized should be confident of going to the police and reporting any incident.”

Derryck said public health and safety complaints can be lodged at entities that provide permits and licenses, including the Planning Department and Entertainment Commission.

“There might not be any criminal activity involved, but this route hits clubs in the pocket and is worth considering if dancers want to represent their grievances,” she said.

Meanwhile dancers say there is still pressure to do more than just dance in some clubs. “For some dancers, the clubs feel fine,” Lorelei says. “It’s a safe space where no ads are needed. They see it as a fair exchange. But if you just want to dance — when one girl is doing this, and another that, how are you supposed to make money?”

Other dancers wish managers wouldn’t abuse their power. “Sometimes they back you up,” Amber said. “Other nights, someone insults you and they won’t help.” And many wish management would try to make the clubs fun again.

“It used to be a party, but now it’s about the cheapest dirtiest fuck you can get,” Lorelei said. “Taking stage fees created a dark environment that carries over to the customers. It’s like we’re goats in a petting zoo begging, saying give me money, give me coke.”

 

FAMILY BUSINESS

Attorney Jim Quadra, who represented the dancers in the MBOT class action suit, said that for all the talk about treating dancers right, the Mitchells’ interest was money.

“At the time, a group of people thought the agenda was to get dancers to do more than dancing because that’s what brings in the revenue,” Quadra said. “But Meta comes off much better than the rest of her family.”

During the trial, Jim was asked if there were meetings where Cinema 7 personnel defined what they meant by a “lap dance” in the piece rate system.

“You need a lap for a lap dance,” Mitchell replied. “You are getting down to like, you know, lap dance, erotic theater, America. And your question is like just a waste of the public’s slender resources, like drop[ping] a basketball in the ghetto and asking, ‘Did you define what that is for them?'<0x2009>”

Johnson, who voluntarily took the witness stand, was asked if there was any reason dancers would be afraid of her father. “He can be a little gruff and he can be cranky, a grouchy old man,” she replied.

Today Johnson is moving ahead with a vision she began to outline in 2007, then put on hold until December 2009, when a law suit about the family trust fund was settled.

“We settled everything out of court in December with my grandmother, which was a nice Christmas present,” she says, confirming that she and her siblings succeeded in removing their 83-year grandmother, Georgia Mae Mitchell, as trustee of the Jim Mitchell family fund. They replaced her with their mother, Jim Mitchell’s ex-wife, Mary Jane Whitty-Grimm, who also has custody of James’s baby daughter, Samantha.

“Danielle’s mother has some personal problems … that made the court reluctant to give her custody of the baby. so they gave Samantha to Mary, who is a nice woman, who is married with a family,” former San Francisco D.A. Terence Hallinan told me, after James Mitchell replaced him with another private criminal defense attorney, Douglas Horngrad, in March.

In court filings related to the family trust fund, Mitchell matriarch Georgia Mae claimed her grandchildren’s lawsuit was intended to deny her jailed grandson James his share of the trust to defend against his serious felony charges.

“Justin asked me to take money out of the trust account of his brother James, and send it to his mother instead of paying his criminal defense attorney, Terence Hallinan,” the Mitchell matriarch claimed.

I asked Hallinan if the trust fund was the reason James Mitchell changed attorneys. “Yes and no,” Hallinan said. “It definitely had to do with money and who was going to run the club. The poor grandma, she is such a nice person. She was trying to play fair and be nice to all the kids. It’s not a really healthy family. ‘Rafe’ [James] is where he is. In my opinion, he is still not clear what happened or why.”

Johnson, for her part, says her brother James has mental health issues. “I don’t accept what he did,” she said. “I’m not making any excuses for it. He’s either insane or he’s a monster. But the family has an obligation to make sure he has legal defense. He was always a beneficiary of the trust. But he fired his lawyer, which is the worst thing he could have done.”

A restraining order Keller secured five days before she was murdered claims Mitchell abused her for years, had mood swings, used cocaine, and was addicted to methamphetamines.

“Danny should have left,” Johnson said.

“It’s been painful to read the comments people leave,” she continued, referring to online reaction to her brother’s arrest that suggest the Mitchells are bad seed and should be wiped out. “It’s not because James is a Mitchell, or because there’s some bad gene.”

Rather, she said he had serious unaddressed problems, “a time bomb that was going to explode and then it did in just about the most horrific way imaginable.”

“When I was 13, my father shot my uncle Artie. And when I was 31, James killed Danny,” she adds. “So I hope I don’t live to be 103.”

 

WOMEN’S WORK

In 1985, the O’Farrell Theater’s marquee famously read, “For show times call … ” followed by Mayor Feinstein’s phone number. But that was another era.

“I don’t know Dianne Feinstein,” Johnson says, as she shows me a cartoon R. Crumb drew in 1985 of then-Mayor Feinstein as Little Bo Peep, with a bunch of men, including political and law enforcement leaders, peeking out from under her skirts. “I know my father was never very fond of her. And I’m sure her reasons for wanting to shut the club down were based on the idea that women are being exploited and that we need to save them.”

Johnson says some of their dancers are single moms; some are young girls who can’t get enough work at retail jobs to pay their bills; and others are college students and graduates.

“There are as many stories as there are dancers. But the stereotype is that dancers are being exploited and have to be protected because they can’t protect themselves and no one really wants to dance. But when I came through the club door, I realized that many women want to do this and get upset if people try to save them. Some people feel that working in a strip club is bad, wrong, dirty. No. But it can be if you are pushed into it and don’t want to do it.”

Dancers the Guardian spoke to confirmed that they dislike being framed as victims. “When we are painted as victims, we look stupid,“ Lorelei said. “All we want is to make sure that folks are following the labor code and providing the same basic, decent working conditions you‘d get if you were working at a coffee shop.“

But dancers know that some people are titillated by the idea of women being taken advantage of. “They don’t want that fantasy to go away, that she’s really a good girl and doesn’t want to do it,” Lorelei said. “If it turns out we are not traumatized, horrified, or disenfranchised, it ruins the whole fantasy.”

She fears that political leaders know bad things are happening but don’t want to talk about them for fear it implies they are permitting them. “The attitude is these women aren’t real, they are sex workers, so if they get raped or go missing, who cares?” Lorelei claimed. “We can’t admit they are the babysitter, the girl who sits next to you at the office.”

When Johnson began working at MBOT, she was shocked that the dancers were naked. “But no one is forcing anyone to be here,” she says. “Sure, some women dance out of necessity. But there are women who are really into it … What’s bad is the exploitation.”

It’s hard to tell from the outside whether the MBOT dancers are feeling better about their working conditions these days or whether having a woman in charge makes a big difference.

On a recent Saturday night, we were charged $40 to enter the club. The ticket gave us access to the theater’s main stage, where a succession of ethnically diverse and athletically built girls pranced, pole danced, and eventually took it all off — in tasteful fashion — as the customers threw tips on stage.

A friendly girl asked if we’d like some company but backed off gracefully when we declined to do more than chat. No one else tried to hustle us for the next hour, and we didn’t get the sense that these women were desperate to make more money. The private rooms remained empty during our visit. But there are VIP rooms that we didn’t have access to, and it’s possible more hardcore stuff was going on elsewhere in the club.

As we left, a tour bus pulled up outside, full of tourists who pressed their noses against the bus windows to eyeball the famed Mitchell Brothers establishment, drawn just to gawk at this titillating and complicated San Francisco institution.

Johnson and Mitchell believe their club gives women a path to financial independence and that having a female in charge makes a difference. “They don’t need a man,” Johnson says. “In most strip clubs, the pay is all under the table, and the girls keep cash in shoe box under the bed.”

“Dodging the IRS,” Mitchell adds.

But they recognize that some dancers may be coming from abusive situations. Johnson said she realized one dancer was in trouble when she asked to be booked for every shift. “I looked at the situation and saw 16-hour days in stilettos and an exhausting schedule. It took a woman’s insight to work out what was going on.”

“It goes back to a woman’s touch, ” Mitchell says.

Johnson blames this nation’s puritanical roots for the abiding disapproval toward the sex industry and those who work in it.

“But it’s come a long way,” Mitchell interjects.” When this place first started, it got raided non-stop. Now it’s much more acceptable than 20 years ago. In the next 20 years, I’m optimistic that prostitution will be decriminalized, at least in our city, if not in our state.”

So is prostitution happening as much as some dancers say it is? “You can’t penalize people for surviving,” Johnson says. “What dancers do outside clubs is their business. We don’t have control over them. All we can do is worry about them. We don’t condone illegal activity inside the club. We don’t encourage or support it. That’s our official take.”

Johnson acknowledges the O’Farrell Theater may have the reputation for being perhaps the most hardcore club in the city. “But everything that happens here, happens elsewhere,” she says. “It’s the same exact deal except they don’t care at all, and we’re a family-run business.”

Mitchell observes that the O’Farrell Theater is huge part of the city’s tourism industry. “When conventions come through, we’re one of the prime tourist spots, along with Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge,” he said.

“San Francisco is known for its freewheeling sexuality, like the Folsom Street Fair,” Johnson adds. “People say San Francisco is Oakland’s slutty sister. And people come here because this club is an institution, a landmark in San Francisco.”

So can Johnson make a difference against this convoluted backdrop?

“It’s a benefit to have a female in management,” Johnson claims. “When we come up with an idea, I think: How will the dancers feel? We’re on the same team. I treat them like teammates. We’re not in a battle over who gets the most money. I can see through things. Women manipulate men, and dancers are in the business of manipulating men. It’s a sale. It’s a hustle. They have that mindset. But I say, no, you don’t need to make up situations. You just tell us what’s up. But that’s not the normal attitude. In most clubs, it’s ‘Shut up, do what we say, and pay your fees.'”

Johnson says she was recently at the AT&T store, and the girl asked where she worked. “I said, at a strip club. People find that incredibly interesting. This girl was 23 and she was not comfortable with the idea of dancing, but at the same time she was fascinated by it. And it’s not going away, women dancing and stripping, You can hate it; you can love it — it doesn’t matter.”

After so many years on the San Francisco scene, MBOT is striving to be a legitimate part of its neighborhood and the city’s business community. And to Johnson, some of that involves unfinished business.

“Lou Silva was the artist who did the original mural of whales on the club‘s wall. That‘s what I remember as a child. My dad and uncle were connected to that community and the underground comic movement in the late 1970s. They made money, they wanted to spread the love around, so they did a giant art project on the side wall. And a couple of years before my uncle died, they started to redo it. But the project stopped when my uncle was shot. We are going to bring the whales back. We‘re working on it with an Academy of Art class. It will be far more peaceful and calm than a crazy jungle scene on the wall. We want to redo whales to demonstrate that we are interested in more than just sex and exploitation. We want to be connected to our community again.“

Noting that the new mural is part of the beautification of Polk Street, Johnson concludes: “The mural on the wall is unfinished because of Artie‘s death. Now it‘s time to finish it, not to have unfinished art on the wall because of some horrible, violent incident. It‘s an investment to show we are not the Mitchells everyone thinks we are.“

A hologlyphic story

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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A hologlyphic story

arts@sfbg.com

FILM/VISUAL ART The first time I witnessed Walter Funk’s Hologlyphics, I’d spiraled up the whimsical stairs of Jaina Bee’s Granny’s Empire of Art, parted curtains and slipped inside the otherwise dark, slanted-roof attic. A circle floated in the center of the room that slowly morphed into a rhombus, then a rectangle. It was three-dimensional, but not real. Along with its movement, sound spread from keyboards and motion-sensor instruments and bounced off the walls.

Remember when R2-D2 projected Princess Leia’s message “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope”? What was once just an idea imagined by George Lucas is now Walter Funk’s Hologlyphics — although the images are abstract and more like Leia’s famous coiled buns. Unlike the 3-D technology Avatar is hyping, Hologlyphics requires no glasses and presents a 90-degree view of the object, allowing a viewer to walk around the image and see it from multiple perspectives.

Funk developed a system for live auto-stereoscopic movies along with music and created a family of real-time spatial image synthesis and processing algorithms that he has coined Hologlyphics. The system takes information from keyboards, controllers, motion sensors, and acoustic instruments and projects a 3-D image that interacts with the sound it is simultaneously producing. “So as something gets bigger and smaller, something might get louder or softer or lower or higher in pitch,” Funk explains as we talk over a café americano (him) and black coffee (me) at the Marsh Café. “The sound and the visual are considered one thing. For every visual, there’s an associated sound, just like in the real world.”

Funk has been pursuing holography ever since he went to the now defunct Museum of Holography in New York in the 1980s. In 1987, he ordered his first holography kit and played with graphics on the now-ancient Apple IIe. But he kept running into walls and was frustrated by monetary and technological constraints. He considered abandoning his work. Then, in the early 1990s while doing research in old technical journals, he discovered Homer Tilton’s display system and got in touch with Tilton.

“He [Tilton] was really open to the idea of doing art with his parallactiscope system, even though it wasn’t what he did,” Funk explains. “He actually put together some early hardware for me. Here I was, this freaky artist in California. And he didn’t necessarily share my same visual aesthetic, but just liked the idea that people wanted to do other stuff with his display.” By 1994, with the aide of Tilton, Funk had put together his first prototype.

Currently the display projects green, morphing, 3-D shapes. But Funk has big dreams for the future — although there are still the same two limitations: money and technology. In an ideal future, the system would be “larger, full color, and photo-realistic.” If the system was larger, multiple people could view it at a time — just like Avatar. But for now, Hologlyphics works best as a one-person-at-a-time experience. “Everything I’m doing is pretty much abstract, which is good, since I’m doing a lot of abstract music,” Funk says. “At the same time, I’d like people to incorporate real-world imagery with it.”

Funk has an optimistic view of the latest 3-D craze. “There are some negative aspects because some studios are just going make things 3-D to make money. But there’s a whole new world of storytelling going on. Done right, it can be amazing and even evolve into a different art form beyond film.”

With Funk’s system, viewers witness multiple perspectives while moving, just like the hologlyph, thus integrating it fluidly into the real world. “This is a cheesy example, but everyone knows it,” he says, with more energy than a mere cafe americano can provide. “Imagine Clint Eastwood when he says, ‘Go ahead, make my day.’ What if you were watching that movie for the first time, and right at that scene you’re looking at the back of his head because you can — that takes away a lot of effect and power from the filmmaker. It’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just a different art form.”

Hologlyphics illustrates the potential for enhanced viewing experiences and new ways to tell stories. “The thought of it is very common, but the existence of it is not,” he says. “I think once this stuff does exist, there’s no putting it back. It’s like Pandora’s box — people are gonna love it.”

WALTER FUNK’S HOLOGLYPHICS

Maker Faire

Sat/22, 10 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun/23, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; free–$25

San Mateo County Event Center

346 Saratoga Drive, San Mateo (650) 574-3247

www.hologlyphics.com

 

Streets of San Francisco: Benjamin Barnes

John Elberling
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Streets of San Francisco: Benjamin Barnes

Benjamin Barnes is one of the street musicians interviewed within our “Streets of San Francisco” issue. He’s played with Mr. Bungle, DJ Disk, and a host of other musicians and bands, and he teaches music. His current group Swindlefish is playing a show on Sunday, May 16 at 2 p.m. at Caffeinated Comics Company. It’s the store’s first live music show, though they also have karaoke. Treat your eyes to some comics and your ears to some music.

Name Benjamin Barnes

What styles of music do you play? I play guitar and viola, but violin projects better than those and I know a lot of repertory. I’ve got maybe three hours of Bach memorized. It’s a meditative thing.

There’s six sonatas and and six cello suites and I play the cello suites on viola and violin. They’re nice profound pieces and sometimes people will stop and listen.
I was playing the Bach Chaconne and this guy stopped and listened to the whole piece and tipped me afterward. Several times when I play someone will stop and listen for a while. That’s why I do it.

Where are your favorite sites to play? The first place I played was Powell Street station. It was 1989. I remember I put my can down and basically practiced and made 15 dollars. I packed it all up and went home and threw the money on my bed and laughed. I was working at a coffee shop and putting myself through school and I realized I didn’t have to work at the coffee shop.
In college I had a string quartet [Rilke String Quartet]. We used to play at Montgomery and Embarcadero and people enjoyed it and would hire us out to gigs like weddings and street fairs. We called it practicing guerrilla warfare — we were guerrilla musicians. We’d set up and play for a few hours and sell a lot of CDs at the street fair.
I like to play at 24th Street station. The acoustics aren’t bad — you get a little reverb like you would in a hall sometimes. Now I’m not out there just trying to make a buck, it’s a personal thing.

How long have you been playing in the streets or underground? For several years I didn’t — I just recently started playing again. I also sometimes play with my brother, he plays guitar. We play jazz songs and Beatles songs and David Bowie songs.

What do you like about it, and why do you do it? I used to get stressed out if I didn’t make any money, because I was using it to pay my rent. Now I have students — sometimes they’ll stop by. I do a lot of teaching and I’m not tied to needing to make the money at the BART station. When I do make money it’s always nice, but I can’t be in the mindset where I have to make money — your playing suffers because you’re not playing from the heart.
The Pacbell Canon will bring in tips. The [Rilke] String Quartet would play it for a few hours at Embarcadero and Montgomery and we’d make a fair amount of money. What I’m doing now is a little more artistic. I’ve been working on memorizing all these pieces and finding new ways to interpret them as I play them. If people stop and listen I might get nervous and get some adrenaline going. These pieces are masterpieces for the violin, I have five of the six cello suites memorized.
There’s a few fiddle players [playing outside in SF] and sometimes it’s hard to get a spot. It’s first come, first served. In order to get the spot you have to have the right attitude. It’s good to have extra spending money because times are rough. This buys me coffee and allows me to take my girlfriend someplace nice. I try to put away about half the money I make and save it for special occasions.
I was just in New York and I saw people busking in Central Park and Greenwich Village, but not on the subway because people were rushing by. There’s a famous violinist, Joshua Bell, who played in the New York subway for a couple of hours, and no one recognized him, or that he was playing on a Stradivarius. Most people walked by, or gave him a dollar, and one kid played air violin. He made 26 dollars.

Do you have recordings and/or a website? If anyone’s interested I have a lot of songs and string quartet and solo viola stuff that I’ve written and played on the website. You can download it for free. There’s a spot where you can make a donation. I’ve gotten 26 dollars (laughs).
I think some people have become students because they liked the music, or gone to shows by my band. I’m playing a free show at Caffeinated Comics on the 16th. It’s a great place. We’re going to play an acoustic show, with songs I wrote, Bowie covers, Beatles covers, Led Zep and “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” We have an upright bass, two guitars, and an excellent singer who does lead and backup.

What are your best and worst experiences playing? I’ve had a lot of great experiences and bad ones. Lately I’ve been playing really well and there’s one guy that tips me a 20 every couple months. One time a junkie tried to brush me away from my spot and started yelling at me with a story of how long I’d been there. I get a little worried sometimes. You get some pretty rough-looking characters, but most will like what you’re doing. Mostly I’m out here because I have fun and I like people and I’ve spent my life on music. It’s nice to be appreciated and have people enjoy what your’re doing.

SWINDLEFISH

Sun/16, 2 p.m.

Caffeinated Comics Company

3188 Mission, SF

(415) 829-7530

www.caffcom.com

Mission possibility

David Talbot
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Mission possibility

Meklit Hadero’s voice exudes music. A casual conversation over morning coffee can feel like an impromptu personal performance by the San Francisco jazz musician, because even her speaking voice has rhythm.

Assured with the spoken word, Hadero pauses at all the right times, naturally crafting an underlying melodic or poetic content to her dialogue. The intonation floats up and down like a line from one of her songs, as the buzz of the bean grinder, the clanking ceramic cups, and pings of a cash register replace traditional percussion. Opening and closing her eyes between thoughts, she carefully constructs each sentence.

“There is an art to not saying things too quickly,” she blushes when I call her out on this distinct way of speaking. “You have to be open to letting the words come. If there’s too much conversation in your head, the poetry runs away.”

Hadero is all about feeling out the right tempo. And whether it’s in regard to speech or daily duties, she’s established a beat. But as her musical career has grown in the past couple years due to residencies at both the Red Poppy Art House and the de Young Museum, her to-do list has simultaneously matured into a demanding beast, distracting her creative process and throwing off her internal metronome. When she does get a day off, it’s all about coffee and taking time to breathe.

 

“I’ll sleep in, enjoy the view from my apartment, and trick myself into not using my computer — I hide it in my car. Well, just kidding … but maybe I should do that.”

It’s on these days that Hadero is able to create music. Soul-filled vocals dance with jazzy, playful bass for a sound that references Nina Simone and suggests a more vibrant Norah Jones. This week she releases her debut album, On A Day Like This … (Porto Franco), a collection of plush, bright songs woven from the world of influences Hadero’s been collecting throughout her 30 years of life.

Hadero was born in Ethiopia, spent her childhood in Brooklyn, and has since lived in a dozen other places, including Germany; Washington, D.C.; Iowa City; Seattle; Miami; and New Haven, Conn., where she earned a degree from Yale. While she’s most comfortable in “nomad mode,” if there’s anywhere that’s home for her in this country, it’s here, Hadero says.

“The artistic community here is not something to take for granted. I’m coming on six years here in San Francisco — that’s the longest I’ve spent anywhere,” she pauses to reflect on this realization. “I will always be a person with multiple homes — because for me, home isn’t a physical place.”

For Hadero, home is made up of the people who inhabit a space and the rich exchanges that happen among them. It’s the diversity. The mountains. The water. The coffee shops and the music. On A Day Like This … is her ode to California.

“All the songs were written in San Francisco — they’re a culmination of my first period here. My Mission community of artists are all on this album, all the people I’ve been working and playing with for years. These are my moments in the Mission.”

MEKLIT HADERO CD RELEASE PARTY

With DJ Jeremiah Kpoh, and art by Great Tortilla Conspiracy

Thurs/13, 8 p.m., $15–$18

Bimbo’s 365 Club

365 Columbus, SF

1 (877) 4FL-YTIX

www.meklithadero.com

 

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