food

Closing time

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The sign on the door speaks the truth to the 200 people who pass through it everyday: "Buster’s Place/13th Street Drop-In will be permanently closing Monday March 31 at 5 p.m."

Will, a trim, soft-spoken man seated inside Buster’s on a Monday afternoon, reading a paper and waiting for his laundry to finish spinning, says that starting April 1, "The street is going to be where I go. The Safeway sink is going to be my shower."

Buster’s Place, a homeless services facility run by Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, is on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s midyear budget chopping block. But recently passed legislation says the city must provide a 24-hour drop-in center accessible to anyone. On March 18, the Board of Supervisors, by a vote of 9-2, passed "standards of care" mandating that all city-funded homeless shelters meet a basic level of sanitation and service, stocking facilities with toilet paper, soap, and nutritious food, as well as keeping at least one open 24 hours a day for anyone to walk in the door. (See "Setting Standards," 1/30/08 and "Shelter Shuffle," 2/13/08.)

Newsom tacitly supported the new law, but took issue with the $160,000 price tag — which does not include the $1 million it takes to run Buster’s for a year.

The Human Services Agency plans to temporarily fill Buster’s void with 150 Otis, a city-owned building across the street where storage and shelter reservations are provided for homeless people. In the past, it’s been an emergency shelter for men, but it is only permitted to operate nine months out of the year. On April 1 it will reopen with about 30 beds and 30 to 40 chairs — all for men — and will only be open until June 30, the end of the fiscal year. HSA did not respond before press time to multiple requests for more details on the plan.

Beyond trying to fix a permanent problem with a temporary solution, 150 Otis will be a shadow of Buster’s.

"Buster’s definitely handles more than 30 to 40 people a night," said the Department of Public Health’s David Nakanishi. On March 20, for example, Buster’s staff reported to Nakanishi that 98 people were on-site at 3 a.m. — 90 males and eight females. They also reported 30 people at 3 p.m. and 80 at 8 p.m.; 90 was the average between midnight and 7 a.m. Overall, the staff sees 150-200 people a day.

The drop-in center is often the first place a newly homeless person goes for help. But now those people — especially women — will have one less option.

Buster’s manager, Carolyn Akbar, has been telling clients to go to the Free Clinics’ Oshun Center, which has 24-hour drop-in services for women. But, she said, "A lot of women don’t like to go there because it’s right in the heart of the Tenderloin."

Funding for 150 Otis is coming from an HSA budget surplus. "They’re not saving any money. They said as much at the budget hearing," said Sup. Chris Daly.

Already, other city-funded facilities are feeling the strain of one less helping hand. The Mission Neighborhood Resource Center has many of the same services as Buster’s, but is only open weekdays and already operating at capacity. Still, "I’m seeing my numbers spike up," said director Laura Guzman. Contracted to serve 100 people a day, her staff tries to keep the number under 200, but lately it’s been closer to 250. "We had an incidence of violence last week as a result of more people in the facility," Guzman said. Guzman called drop-in facilities "critical players in our system of care. "When everything else fails, the drop-in is there."

Necessities like showers, laundry, restrooms, telephones, and access to medical and dental services can be found at Buster’s. Also, unlike any of the 15 other city-funded places for homeless people, it’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is "low threshold," meaning there are no basic requirements to come in.

Nakanishi listed several reasons why a drop-in center aids in overall public health, from preventing deaths on the street to providing a place to take a shower and use the bathroom. A Request for Proposals put out by DPH to continue the 24-hour drop-in services next year is also on hold, shaving a slim million from the city’s budget.

Tenderloin Health, which operates a drop-in center on Golden Gate Avenue, was one of the respondents to DPH’s RFP for a 24-hour center and said it was more than willing to extend operating hours past the current 11:30 p.m. closing time.

"The funding was pulled the same day we submitted the proposal," said Colm Hegarty, director of development for the nonprofit. "We would do it. Our proposal was very specific."

Drop-in centers have been criticized as places where people hang out and avoid the shelter systems and services they provide, but that was never the intention for Buster’s, which has only been open for 13 months. "The program was designed to really have around the clock case management," said Nakanishi, who wrote the RFP.

Akbar said Homeless Outreach Team officers were supposed to be working with center staff to move people deeper into the care system, but she’s been told they’re too busy working with people on the streets.

Which is what Buster’s is all about. Most of the people still on the streets aren’t interested in doing something to change their situations, points out Keith Bussey, deputy director of integrated health services for the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics. "But people who come into a drop-in are in that pre-contemplative stage of change. They’re venturing inside for maybe the first time."

Will is unequivocal about Buster’s proposed replacement: "Not 150 Otis. I don’t want anything to do with 150 Otis because of the people who work there." Claiming he’s received rude treatment there too many times, Will even stopped using the storage facility there. Middle-aged and homeless in San Francisco for the past couple of months, he sleeps outside and after two stays in the city’s shelters said, "Never again."

"Ultimately it’s going to hurt the city," said Hegarty of the closing. "You’ll see more of a presence on the streets. People will want to see something done about it, so there will be more police responding. The criminal justice system is going to become burdened. The emergency room at San Francisco General is going to become burdened. People will go anywhere they can just to get off the streets."

White people like blogging

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By Ailene Sankur

A friend sent me the blog “Stuff White People Like,” and it’s probably the funniest thing on the Internet right now. White people are ridiculous! (Myself included, even though, technically, I’m Middle Eastern…Anyhow…)

A few eerily right on, brilliantly funny ones:

dinnerparty.jpg

Dinner Parties:

Hosts are expected to deliver a magical evening. The food must be homemade with fresh, organic ingredients, the music must be just right (ambient, new, but not too loud), and the decorations inside the house should be subtle but elegant.

Everything must be perfect. One copy of US Weekly, a McDonalds wrapper, a book by John Grisham, a Third Eye Blind CD, or an Old School DVD can undo months and maybe even years of work.

I read this after a dinner party with at good friends’ house. I call them D squared (Dee and Drew) and they always make amazing meals. Last week it was blood orange and onion pork shoulder roast, breaded cauliflower ( I will include the recipe at the bottom because you really should make it at home), sautéed broccoli rabe, and a salad with a simple Dijon vinaigrette. Vampire Weekend, Regina Spektor, and Cat Power played—at a pleasantly low volume.

Improv Everywhere: The Musical

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Now this is a mission after my own heart…

Members of the New York-based performance group Improv Everywhere planned a “spontaneous” musical-style song-and-dance number to be held in a food court in a Los Angeles mall. (These are the same folks responsible for Frozen Grand Central and the annual No Pants event.)

Jewish Music Festival

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PREVIEW Few genre-themed music festivals enjoy as much freedom in programming as Berkeley’s Jewish Music Festival, now in its 23rd year. For who’s to say what the criteria are? Jewish music expresses joy and pathos, success and failure, the thrill of adventure and the solace of tradition, assimilation, ostracism, whimsy, and gravity, as much as music — and only music — can. And so goes the festival, staking out its territory with challenging and alluring forays all over the Jewish cultural map.

Klezmatics frontman Frank London opens the proceedings with "A Night in the Old Marketplace," a newly commissioned song cycle based on a Yiddish play penned in 1907 by I.L. Peretz. Of course, if Berkeley is the birthplace of slow food, you might call "The Ark: Cyclical Rituals," the most ambitious program of the festival, "fast music." In the space of a week, nine notable performers, including London and influential Bay Area composers John Schott and Jewlia Eisenberg, will board a creative Noah’s Ark, devising a collaborative debut on themes of ritual and tradition.

Two more sure bets: violinist Kaila Flexer and oud player Gari Hegedus of the acoustic ensemble Teslim play Middle Eastern and Sephardic traditional music with understated mastery of melody and ornamentation. And, straight out of the promised land of New York City, the punk-rock klezmer band Golem expands the limits of the shtetl songbook with show-stopping stage presence and a remarkable grasp of Yiddishkeit.

JEWISH MUSIC FESTIVAL Fri/22–Sun/30. (510) 848-0237, visit www.jewishmusicfestival.org for specific times and locations.

Velvet Cantina

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GOOD SEATS, LAME EATS Our reservation was late, the table was still dirty when we sat down, utensils never showed until after our food, the margarita was more Rita than tequila, and the chile rellenos were not. But the electric sex glow of crimson velvet and soft candle lighting, our cozy round booth, and the vivacious Mission crowd begging for more sour-mix-satiated margaritas all made the Velvet Cantina enduring, if not enjoyable. Besides, any bad mixed drink can be fixed with a double shot splashed with the aforementioned overly-sweet concoctions.

So I was forced to eat my friend’s carne asada — which was divine — because my chicken mole was so sweet it tasted more like chicken morsel, and we mixed our own libations tableside. I guess participating in the process is part of the fun — isn’t that why fondue is the phenomenon it is? — but this was something else. I most definitely won’t go back for the grub, but I won’t hold the bartender’s heavy pour against the indiscriminate agaves nectar. The red walls were more scrumptious than the food, and while many palates might want to boycott most of the cuisine, the asada and nachos are enough to keep you sane.

Plus, booze is still booze, from whatever bar you choose. The vibrations from the excessively loud music had me strapping on my party shoes before our second round, and from our window side booth, I eventually found myself loving this place. Then again, tequila has that effect on me.

VELVET CANTINA Mon.–Thurs., 5–10:30p.m., bar open until midnight; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m., bar until 2 a.m.; Sun. 5–10:30pm., bar until midnight. 3349 23rd St., SF. (415) 648-4142, www.velvetcantina.com

A small beef

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WITHOUT RESERVATIONS In my years of traversing the Divisadero Summit, that land of cloud-minders at the very crest of Pacific Heights, I have sometimes wondered who actually lives in all the pretty houses. Well, Danielle Steele, of course, and her bevy of automobiles, which she seems to collect the way Imelda Marcos once collected shoes. But I don’t quite know which palace is hers, nor am I sure which belongs to the writer Robert Mailer Anderson and his Oracle heiress wife. Maybe I’m on the wrong street altogether. But I can tell you that the Japanese Consulate is up there, at the corner of Divis and Vallejo, in a beautiful Italianate mansion, and I know this because I was there a few days ago for a high-end cookout that filled the terrace with charcoal perfume and the large foyer with the faintly briny scent of a whole sea bream on display.

The point of the cookout was to remind the local food cognoscenti that Japan, like Europe, has its venerated, slow food-style traditions, and while sea bream makes lovely sushi, no Japanese foodstuff is more venerated than wagyu, the famous, and famously expensive, beef. Slabs of raw wagyu — the real stuff, not the US-produced knockoff kind — were on display beside the reddish sea bream, but they gave off no odor; the beefy smells were coming from the charcoal grills outside, where slivers of the meat were being barbecued while the hungry mob waited.

But you could have your wagyu raw, too, if you preferred: arranged atop a little rice ball as a form of beef sushi. Either way, you tasted the intense fattiness of the meat. "Marbling" — strata of fat within the muscle itself — is the term often used to describe this effect, but wagyu seems to be beyond marbled. The muscle and fat aren’t easily distinguishable. Naturally, small portions are in order, since wagyu is to ordinary beef what cognac is to wine. It’s concentrated and potent, and a tiny amount is plenty. You don’t eat wagyu, you savor it.

In America, where beef is king and is generally scarfed in large quantities, selling this proposition could be tricky, but the subtle culinary wisdoms of Japan do advise us that slow versus fast food is just one axis of a multipolar conflict. Instead of big food, how about … small food?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

South by Cynic

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By Kimberly Chun


› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Date night, March 15, the closing Saturday eve of the South by Southwest music conference, and I swear, the biggest thrill around is my offroadin’ pedicab ride on my way to the Diesel:U:Music bash atop Mount San Jacinto, through the remains of the Mess with Texas 2 music-comedy day-party in Waterloo Park. How sad is that?

"I do yoga, so that helps," explains my "driver" Liam (his name changed to protect the innocent). The spines of his spindly, highly waxed mohawk shiver like excited mushrooms beneath a forager’s greedy digits and his wire-rimmed spectacles gently mist as he steps up and pedals hard, climbing the park’s slopes as the Texas Capitol shines reprovingly above. "Hopefully it’s not all blocked off — this is my favorite shortcut."

Some shortcut: we career down too-tight paved paths, nearly get decked by a hat vendor stand, then head off onto the grass and through the woods, plunk down a curb — with minimal lady-passenger spillage — and then get back on a path and through a parking structure and finally, somehow, we’re on San Jac. Saint Jack ‘n’ Coke be praised. Liam glances back, mildly beatific: "Wanna smoke a bowl?"

Hey, I’ve only downed a few gratis cans of Lone Stars and a tall sweet tea ‘n’ vodka so far tonight — and with only a giveaway energy bar to absorb it all. Welcome to Austin, Texas, and SXSW, the now unfailingly polite, organizationally fine-tuned, and increasingly disappointing group-grope-n-grip for the increasingly somber, not-so-extravagantly partying music biz. Sure, the numbers are there — the fest appears to be doing well, with more than 123,000 attendees and 1,500 showcased acts, while pouring more than $77 million in expenditures into Austin coffers, according to 2007 stats — and the nontoiling gawkers and stalkers still filled the streets for what has become the nation’s fave musical spring break. But how to quantify the new wave of malaise? Roughly parse the leavings in the tea cup: where were the conference heavies when Dolly Parton bowed out due to health issues, as did, ahem, the Lemonheads? Was 60-ish ex-Oakland R&B elder Darondo’s much-talked-of Ubiquity appearance the best of the fest — or was it Yeasayer or Vampire Weekend? Does Ice Cube really wanna forsake Friday for the rap game? Can all the Euro and overseas showcases sub for the dampened-down US major label presence due to layoffs and cutbacks? At the troubled heart of 2008’s decentralized music biz, few could be heard whooping it up or mourning over at the fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who as the state’s attorney general oversaw the uncovering of $50 million in unpaid royalties to musicians and served subpoenas against labels while investigating payola. Is it true, as so many I spoke to at SXSW have said, that "everything I’ve seen that I’ve liked, I’ve already seen before"? My, South By, how lame you were this year. (Can this trend bottom out? See Sonic Reducer’s 2007’s judgment: "But for a three-time SXSWhiner like myself … the fest generally underwhelmed this year," and 2006’s description of "the ground-level, vaguely dissatisfied vibe at this year’s fest — one studded with sentiments ranging from "there’s too many people here" to "everyone I’ve talked to is complaining about working too hard and not having any fun.")

Sure, there were plenty of free shows and oodles of guest-list jockeying, but when the most talked-about soirees were Perez Hilton’s hush-hush hoedown, Rachael Ray’s bid for day-party indie cred ("There better be good food!" one warily groaned), and natch, the Playboy after-hours warehouse rave — complete with more empties and Porta-Johns than you can shake a Hefty bag at — you can just toss the teacup and throw up your multi-wristbanded hands. The truth: do these brands, celebs, or marketing pipe dreams have anything to do with music? The sonic sustenance of SXSW has become secondary to product placement, relegated to background noise amid a recession-jittered hard sell. No surprise that my extremely random sampling of music lovers were uniformly disgruntled. They weren’t hearing the sounds that made it worth braving the yeehawing and puking hordes, risking podiatric agony for five whole nights.

Sure, there were revelatory moments: the grinning electro-diva Santogold, the crowd-entrancing the Whip, and teased blonde soulstress Duffy (dimpled Kate Bosworth-like everygirl to Amy Winehouse’s trouble-lady) were fab, as were Sightings and Evangelista. Lou Reed cracked mordantly wise even while hawking his new concert doc recreating Berlin (RCA, 1973), shades of Neil Young and Heart of Gold two years ago. SXSW organizers oughta take a cue from the packed "Vinyl Revival" panel, the teeming unofficial shows off the beaten Sixth Street path, where Monotonix raised the roof — and drum kit — at the Typewriter Museum, and where experi-punks screeched under sunny skies at Ms. Bea’s at shindigs hosted by Brooklyn party-starter Todd P, who was given his own official showcases this year. You can already make out signs of the next-gen underground filtering into Moby’s Girl Talk–like Playboy finale and folkie Liam Finn’s noise climax on DirectTV. Is the life-support-via-corporate-sponsorship worth the tourist buck, South By? Next time bring the focus back to the truly smokin’ sounds.

Also glad I saw: Black Moth Super Rainbow (spewing glitter and piñata), Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong (let the nouveau-mod boy-band revolution begin), Ra Ra Riot (kids love Arcade Fire!), High on Fire and Motorhead, Blitzen Trapper with Adam Stephens on harmonica, Justice and Moby’s DJ sets, Torche, High Places, Half Japanese (with a wiggly David Fair and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan on sax), Deer Tick, Scary Mansions, Inca Ore and Grouper, a musically unimaginative but enthusiastic Carbon/Silicon, Goat the Head, Lightspeed Champion, Sons and Daughters, the Kills, "Body of War," Yacht, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Smalltown Supersounders Lindstrom and Kim Hiorthoy, Naked Raygun, the Dicks, the Ting Tings, Paper Rad, Samara Lubelski, and Black Helicopter.

Regret I missed: the Rascals, the Wombats, Barbara Mason, Jaymay, Bun B, the Bo-Keys, Game Rebellion, These New Puritans, Robyn, Pete Rock, Ruby Suns, Napalm Death, the Touch Alliance, Snowglobe, Kayo Dot, Ola Podrida, Bowerbirds, Dark Meat, White Rabbits, White Rainbow, El-P, Herman Dune, Holy Ghost!, Digitalism, Arp, Juiceboxxx, Supagroup, Daryl Hall, Meneguar, Black Ghosts, the Mirrors, Van Morrison, 17 Hippies, Afrobots, Working for a Nuclear Free City, Boyz Noize, Peggy Sue and the Pirates, Death Sentence: Panda!, Christian Kiefer, Megafaun, Salvador Santana Band, Psychic Ills, Devin the Dude, Passenger, the Morning Benders, the Tennessee Three, the Switches, Sera Cahoone, Little Freddie King, A-Trak, Kid Sister, the Clipse, Headlights, Los Llamarada, Pissed Jeans, Rob G, Wale, Dax Riggs, Neon Neon, These Are Powers, WILDILDLIFE, Clockcleaner, Look See Proof, the Cynics, Dusty Rhodes and the River Band, Rahdunes, Stars Like Fleas, and Cheveu.

Pigeon vs. Fuck: Pidgeon, the Pigeon Detectives, Pigeon John, and Woodpigeon go up against Fuck Buttons, Holy Fuck, and Fucked Up, umpired by CunninLynguists.

BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW

Wed/19, 9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

Piqueo’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When Carlos Altamirano opened his first restaurant, Mochica, on a drab block of Harrison Street in SoMa more than four years ago, I thought: well, Peruvian, that’s interesting, but how good could it be if he had to put it there? Then I went and found out how good it could be: way good, extraordinary, probably the best Peruvian food in the city. Few pleasures are as exquisite as that of finding one’s expectations exceeded.

And yet, in unlooked-for success, danger can lurk, too. If your first restaurant turns out to be marvelous, people will expect your other restaurants to be marvelous, maybe even more marvelous. The word, from two summers ago, that Altamirano would be taking over the original Moki’s space in Bernal Heights to open a Mochica sibling wasn’t surprising, but it did lead me to suppose that the new place would be at least as good as the older one and, at the same time, wonder if and how it could be. Would it be disappointing if Piqueo’s, the new restaurant, were only as good as Mochica, not better?

One way out of this gilded conundrum might be to serve a slightly different sort of food at each locale. Altamirano describes the menu at Piqueo’s as "contemporary" Peruvian cuisine — "traditional" Peruvian, "with a California twist." (Mochica, incidentally, serves "fusion Peruvian cuisine," according to the Web site.) The description is fair enough in that vague, diplomats-having-frank-discussions way, but it does not begin to capture the wonder of the sauces, which, in their variety, sophistication, and vividness, are so good we actually requested glasses to drink them from, once we’d run out of sopping and soaking material. If you associate sauces with a certain sort of snooty French cooking, you will find revelation at Piqueo’s.

The menu card itself is an unwieldy artifact. It’s oversized — it could pass as a modestly shrunken reproduction of the Declaration of Independence — and like that worthy document it’s filled with text, in small, difficult-to-read lettering. One evening we had to whip out our Peepers (those wallet-size magnifying glasses, so no, it’s not what you think) to be able to read the menu. Rarely do you see so many choices except at Chinese restaurants, and when a kitchen must turn out such a broad range of dishes, you wonder if it isn’t trying to spread too little butter over too much bread.

But you don’t get bread at Piqueo’s: You get little dishes of crispy, spicy chickpeas, tossed with scallion mince and some mild white vinegar. They’re no good for sauce reclamation, but they are addictive. You empty the dish and another soon appears, and by the time you’ve emptied that, you are presented with a platter of seviche, maybe the mixto version ($17), an embarrassment of peeled shrimp, sea scallops, mussels, yam chunks, kernels of Peruvian corn, and a few slivers of fresh ginger bathing in a glow-in-the-dark sauce of lime juice and two kinds of chili pepper, rocoto and aji limo. The sauce was almost like a distillate of V-8 juice, and when the seafood was gone, we poured the remnant into a cordial glass and made a small toast to the next course.

After such puckering heat, a bit of aromatic sweetness is indicated. How about a salad of quinoa ($9) — the grain of the Inca — perfumed with mint? I was expecting something like couscous, but the salad was a real salad: a bowlful of mixed greens, with the cooked quinoa scattered like cheese crumblings over the lettuces and a lively but well-mannered supporting cast of halved black olives, red bell pepper julienne, and more Peruvian corn kernels tossed into the mix. Vinaigrette: lush and balsamicky, a hint of caramel sweetness.

As familiar as Peruvian corn (a.k.a. cancha) may have become in recent years, at least to those who haunt Peruvian restaurants, its appearances have remained confined (in my experience) to off-the-cob bit parts. But Piqueo’s offers cancha steamed on skewered cobs ($9) in a fabulous, turmeric-yellow aji sauce. The corn itself was a little bland (though it doesn’t stick in your teeth the way the ordinary kind can), but the sauce was so good that we pleaded for, and were brought, a plate of toasted baguette rounds to clean it up with.

Bread recurred (in a kind of late-inning rally) as part of a fried-smelt sandwich ($9) enlivened by sprigs of fresh cilantro. Smelt is a fresh-water fish not often seen in restaurants around here — I associate it with the Great Lakes and early-spring fishing expeditions by night along Chicago’s lakefront — but there is a variety native to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, so it’s not necessarily an exotic delicacy.

Also not exotic delicacies, but delicious all the same, are calamari tubes ($19), closed off at one end like pastry piping bags, filled with chorizo, and grilled. The tubes (which look like elongated dreidels) are plated with broad, flat white beans, a jumble of watercress, and yet another wondrous sauce, this one called chupe.

If there is a slight letdown, it has to do with the dessert menu. Many of the usual suspects can be found here, from alfajores (the little cookies) to suspiro to passion-fruit mousse. After some squabbling ("Gentlemen, draw your Peepers"), we settled on the chocolate cake ($10) with ice cream. The ice cream, made with lucuña, a tropical fruit native to Peru, was a pretty orange-pink color but disappointingly granular, which suggested it had melted and been refrozen. The cake, on the other hand, a disk held within a rim of crushed nuts, was outstanding: a mousse cake, smooth and dense as night. No sauce needed.

PIQUEO’S

Daily, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

830 Cortland, SF

(415) 282-8812

www.piqueos.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Shitloads of Money

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Stirring constantly … I’m a troublemaker. For complicated reasons, my old pals, um, Ronnie "Zack" Pottery and his wife, Mrs. "Zack" Pottery, were running from the law. Understand that these are two of the sweetest, law-abidingest people you will ever meet. They live very cleanly, simply, and musically in subrural, um, Idaho, pay taxes, stay sober, write, work, and record at home, go to the doctor, and consume more tea than anyone I know. Their idea of a wild time is to stay up late (as in, like, 11 p.m.) and render jazz standards on melodica and banjo. Sometimes they throw in a little slide whistle, or toy piano … the sick, twisted deviants! Their closest friends, I swear, are nuns.

Everybody sing: The hills are alive with the sound of music. No. It’s Idaho, but it ain’t like that. And I’m not sure I quite know what I mean, but I have a gut feeling it might be funny, in an over-my-own-head kind of way, so let’s stay with it. Just in case.

Everybody sing again: The hills are alive with the sound of music.

Sorry. The reason I’m stalling is because I want so very badly to explain why my two most clean-living friends ever, anywhere, were fugitives from (in)justice for a week. It’s so exciting and ridiculous. Surely it will make great copy. And yet, I have to be careful, don’t I?

Suffice it to say, as vaguely as possible, that people with shitloads of money can do basically whatever they want to people without squat, or very little, at any rate — like maybe some musical instruments and herbal tea. Everybody knows this, right?

But it’s even more twisted than that. Woohoo!

To make a long story short, as Ronnie "Zack" himself is fond of saying, someone with shitloads of money takes someone else with shitloads of money to court over, say, shitloads of money, or custody of kids, or it could be anything, really. The point is that clever, ruthless lawyers with shitloads of money start playing shitloads-of-money hardball with each other over shitloads of money, and the next thing you know, nun-hugging, starving-artistical innocents with a fear of flying are about to be subpoenaed to appear in a courtroom many states away to testify against a third person with shitloads of money who is not even materially involved in the case of Shitloads of Money vs. Shitloads of Money.

So let’s say that this third person with shitloads of money would prefer not to see Shitloads of Money winning shitloads of money off of Shitloads of Money, if only because in the process his own good name, Shitloads of Money, stands to be destroyed and he may, for example, lose the respect of loved ones who may or may not already have lost respect for him years ago. In any case, it’s too much to risk for someone with shitloads of money, so he generously suggests to said nun huggers that they must certainly be under stress and could use a vacation.

Oh, it’s so convoluted and other-worldly. It’s enough to boggle a little chicken farmer’s tiny brain. Which is partly my fault, because as soon as I saw Mr. and Mrs. "Zack" Pottery in their his-and-hers false mustaches at a discreet little hotel in My Hometown, California, I asked them please not to tell me too much about what was going on, so that I might write about it more accurately.

As a result, you probably know more about this case right now than I do. All I know is that Shitloads of Money vs. Shitloads of Money + Shitloads of Money – False Mustache–Sporting Nun Huggers = Fun for Chicken Farmers.

Breakfast was on them. Lunch was on them. Dinner was on them. Gas was on them. And as it gradually dawned on me that "on them" likely didn’t really mean on them so much as on them, I started suggesting fancier and fancier places. Places that chicken farmers and musicians don’t generally get to eat at.

And in this way, in my own imagination at least — which counts! — I had the small satisfaction of sticking it to Shitloads of Money.

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My new favorite restaurant is the Willow Wood Market up here in Graton. It’s the kind of place where I would never be able to afford to go, myself. It ain’t cheap eats: in other words, you’ll spend $15-$25 on a dinner entrée. But on special occasions, like your birthday or surprise out-of-town visitors wearing false mustaches and picking up checks…. It serves pretty basic, unpretentious, comfortable, and great food like risotto with scallops, rock shrimp with polenta, and grilled flat iron steak.

WILLOW WOOD MARKET & CAFE

9020 Graton Road, Graton

(707) 823-0233

Mon.–Sat., 8 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

Beer and wine

MC/V

Hooker science

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TECHSPLOITATION The outrage over former New York governor Eliot Spitzer hiring an A-list hooker makes me feel like throwing a gigantic, crippling pile of superheavy biology and economics books at everyone in the United States and possibly the world. Are we still so Victorian in our thinking that we think it’s bad for somebody to pay large amounts of money for a few hours of skin-time with a professional? Have we not learned enough at this point about psychology and neuroscience to understand that a roll in the sheets is just a fun, chemical fizz for our brains and that it means nothing about ethics and morality?

The sad fact is that we have learned all that stuff, and yet most people still believe paying money for sex is the equivalent of killing babies on the moral report card. And yet nobody bothers to ask why, or to investigate past the sensational headlines. As far as I’m concerned, the one unethical thing Spitzer did was to hire a sex worker after prosecuting several prostitution rings. That’s hypocritical of him, and undermines my faith in him as a politician.

But let’s say Spitzer hadn’t prosecuted so-called sex crimes before, and all he was doing was hiring a lady for some sex. Here is what I don’t get: why is this bad? On the scale of things politicians can do – from sending huge numbers of young people to be killed in other countries to cutting programs aimed at helping foster kids get lunch money – hiring a sex worker is peanuts. It’s a personal choice! It’s not like Spitzer was issuing a statewide policy of mandatory hookers for everybody.

What really boggles the mind is the way so-called liberal media like National Public Radio and the New York Times have been attacking Spitzer’s morals as much as the conservative Fox News types have. In some cases, they’ve attacked him more. The reasons given are always the same: sex work is abusive to women (male prostitutes don’t exist?), and being paid for sex is inherently degrading.

Let’s look inside one of those heavy economics books that I just beat you with and examine these assumptions for a minute, OK? Every possible kind of human act has been commodified and turned into a job under capitalism. That means people are legally paid to clean up one another’s poop, paid to wash one another’s naked bodies, paid to fry food all day, paid to work in toxic mines, paid to clean toilets, paid to wash and dress dead naked bodies, and paid to clean the brains off walls in crime scenes. My point is, you can earn money doing every possible degrading or disgusting thing on earth.

And yet, most people don’t think it’s immoral to wipe somebody else’s bum or to fry food all day, even though both jobs could truthfully be described as inherently degrading. They say, "Gee that’s a tough job." And then they pay the people who do those jobs minimum wage.

The sex worker Spitzer visited, on the other hand, was paid handsomely for her tough job. The New York Times, in its mission to invade this woman’s privacy (though in what one must suppose is a nonexploitative way), reported that she was a midrange worker at her agency who pulled in between $1000–$2000 per job. She wasn’t working for minimum wage; she wasn’t forced to inhale toxic fumes that would destroy her chances of having a nonmutant baby. She was being paid a middle-class salary to have sex. Sure, it might be an icky job, in the same way cleaning up barf in a hospital can be icky. But was she being economically exploited? Probably a hell of a lot less than the janitor in the hospital mopping up vomit cleaning up after you.

Sure, there are hookers who are exploited and who have miserable lives. There are people who are exploited and miserable in a lot of jobs. But the misery is circumstantial: not all hookers are exploited, just as not all hospital workers are exploited. It’s basic labor economics, people.

Audacia Ray, former sex worker and editor of the sex worker magazine $pread, has pointed out that the public doesn’t even seem to understand what exploitation really means. The woman who did sex work for Spitzer has had her picture and personal history splattered all over the media in an incredibly insulting way. Nobody seems to realize she’s being degraded far more now than she ever was when Spitzer was her client. And she’s not getting any retirement savings out of it, either.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who
once hired a prostitute for a few hundred bucks and had a pretty good time.

Discounts that do good

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Coupon books don’t tend to be of much use to green-minded consumers or businesses. They’re usually just chock full of special offers from fast food restaurants and wasteful chain stores. That’s why former credit auditors Anne Fisher Vollen and Sheryl Cohen started the Green Zebra Savings Guide. They wanted to use the good old-fashioned clip-outs to draw customers to, and educate them about, environmentally conscious companies.

"It is our hope that discounts will give Green Zebra users incentive to try out a new green alternative to a traditional product or service," Vollen told the Guardian. "Then if it lives up to their expectations, [we hope] they will continue to patronize that business even without the discount."

First published in San Francisco in 2007, Green Zebra promotes bargains for enterprises such as green retailers, bike shops, and independent bookstores. It also offers useful educational tips on topics such as greening your home, purchasing eco-friendly beauty products, and creating a zero-waste lunch. To make it into the book, companies have to meet two of the following criteria: they must offer a discount on a green product or service, run their business in a sustainable manner, be locally owned, and/or contribute significantly to the community.

This past year, Vollen and Cohen expanded the guide to include separate editions for Marin County and the peninsula. Helping people buy from Bay Area businesses rather than larger chains is a critical aspect of Green Zebra’s mission. By promoting independent, locally owned firms, Vollen said, "We are not only strengthening the local economy but also helping preserve the uniqueness of San Francisco, rather then contributing to the strip-mallization that has become so rampant in the US."

Vollen understands that living in modern day America makes it hard, if not impossible, to reform everything about our lives. But she hopes Green Zebra will encourage people to start with small steps, inspired by issues they’re passionate about. The mother of two and MBA graduate told us her own personal passion of late has been finding ways to eliminate water bottle waste. "Less than 10 percent of bottles get recycled, and it’s a petroleum product," she said.

The guide’s mode of production also embodies the spirit of doing what we can to minimize our impact on the planet. Each edition, Vollen said, is printed on "100 percent recycled fiber, 98 percent postconsumer waste paper, processed chlorine-free." In addition, Green Zebra offsets its carbon emissions by helping to fund a methane digester at a family farm. The digester not only takes climate-warming methane out of the atmosphere, it turns the gases into renewable electricity. Another way Vollen and Cohen hope to lead by example is by donating roughly 50 percent of the guide’s proceeds to charity. A portion of this year’s profits went to the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, an organization that teaches children eco-friendly gardening, architecture, and design skills.

Most Green Zebra sales are through public and private school fundraisers, but copies of the guide are available for purchase online at www.thegreenzebra.org.

South By Culture: Kimya who?

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Culture editor Molly Freedenberg hits SXSW for the first time to explore the festival’s extracurricular aspects. For Music Editor Kimberly Chun’s take on SXSW’s tunes, click here.

Yes, I’m a music fanatic, but I’m no music geek – and certainly no expert. I love the music I love in the simplest, purest way, as a child who grew up on the Stones and the Beatles and associates rock’n’roll with love and breakfast and spontaneous living room dance parties. I’m not the girl who’s up on the all the coolest new bands, nor the one who scours record stores for rare 7 inch bootlegs from all the coolest old ones. My haircut is symmetrical, my T-shirts aren’t ironic, and the closest thing I have to “skinny jeans” are pants I’ve outgrown. In short? I’m no spokesperson for indie rock.

So while it’s true that I’m here at South by Southwest (locals call it South By, by the way) to hear music until my ears bleed and my feet blister, I’m not going to pretend to assess the bands down here. I’ll leave that to Kim, who’s far more qualified on that subject.

No, just as I am at home, I’m going to be the eyes of the Guardian’s culture section while I’m here. Food, fashion, nightlife, drinking, lifestyle – and everything else that makes Austin the San Francisco of Texas. I can’t promise my posts will all be cohesive – or even coherent (there sure are a lot of bars in Austin, and a lot of parties being thrown at them during SXSW), but what else would anyone expect?

Ammiano gets no respect

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Supervisor Tom Ammiano has been all over the news recently and has a couple of major accomplishments, including a restaurant-nutrition requirement and legislation that sets standards for care in homeless shelters.

And yet he’s still getting a beating from the Chronicle, which seems to think that something as basic as asking chain restaurants like McDonalds to tell you how unhealthy their food is could somehow harm the city’s business climate.

The restaurant disclosure bill got a lot of press, but the homeless shelter standards was more of a political challenge – Ammiano had to get the mayor, who has been reluctant to admit that any part of his homeless program is a failure, to sign on to the program.

The conditions in the shelters are, and for a long time have been, deplorable. So this may actually make the lives of a lot of human beings a lot better.

And of course, Newsom made a bit point the other day of talking about how he was going to use the city’s rainy day fund to bail out the city’s schools – without ever mentioning the Ammiano was the one who wrote that bill (without any help from then-Sup. Gavin Newsom.)

Ammiano’s going to leave the Board of Supes next year with one of the longest and most distinguished legislative records in memory. He deserves a little more respect.

Falling flat

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It was clear early on that the Slow Beer Festival, presented March 1 by Slow Food San Francisco and the San Francisco Brewers Guild, was more of an excuse to get drunk in a convention hall on a Saturday afternoon than to explore how beer could be sustainable. Twelve NorCal microbreweries lined the green-hued cement walls of the County Fair Building — Marin Brewing, Speakeasy, Anderson Valley, Red Seal, and so on. An administrator at the front desk, though, couldn’t tell me what the difference was between a Slow Beer and your everyday microbrew (though she did say it was "a good question"). The man at the nationally distributed Gordon Biersch stand said bluntly, "Yeah, we’re a corporation."

Normally I’d say, "Fill up my glass and pass me another Gambone-mushroom-and-cheese skewer [drizzled in salsa verde]!" Here, though, I began to actually wonder how beer could be incorporated in the Slow Food ideology. As the manifesto says, "May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency."

The Slow Foodists seek not just to change the food we consume but to change how we consume it as well. So isn’t a sterile room for beer tasting just stripping beer down to its flavor, and not about the way we experience it? At the festival, on one side of the gate there was a crowded room with a slender outdoor food garden and (by my estimate) 200 gallons of beer; on the other side, a park blanketed in sunshine. The latter setting might be better for bringing out the true sensual pleasures of beer. Next year, why not save money on the room deposit and hold the event in Michael Pollan’s backyard?

Pacific Catch

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When a service station is torn down to make way for an art gallery, we cheer. When the art gallery folds and is succeeded by a restaurant, we shuffle our feet uneasily. At least they won’t be tearing the building down to bring back the service station — but art galleries are harder to find than restaurants.

Pacific Catch is a pretty good seafood restaurant in a neighborhood already chockablock with restaurants. The prices are moderate, the service is friendly and efficient, the food is good, and the look is handsome in a not-overbearing way. But those who remember that the space was home for several years to the Canvas Gallery — a blend of art forum, café, restaurant, and meetinghouse, with a general university-town flavor — won’t recognize much when they step inside. The interior floor plan has been heavily reworked: the central coffee and pastry bar, once surrounded by naves hung with paintings and photographs, has been replaced by tables, chairs, and booths. There is also now (at the far side of the restaurant as you enter) a shiny and bustling exhibition kitchen, along with a bold color scheme of red and blue, and light fixtures that look like clusters of bottomless Bombay Sapphire gin bottles. All that remains of the original layout is a smaller dining room along the building’s north face, looking across the busy street at Golden Gate Park.

Still, there is a nice irony in the transformation of a filling station — or indeed any other urban eyesore — into a haven of civilization, whether it’s a locus for art or food, and to have a seafood restaurant on a site that once reeked of gasoline fumes must be accounted an improvement by any standard. I only wish Pacific Catch weren’t a nascent chain; there’s a tiny sibling outlet on Chestnut in the Marina, another (of unknown scale) in Corte Madera, and a general sense, as a friend of mine put it, that still more Pacific Catches can’t be far off.

The food is accordingly mainstream, with tweaks and tunings that reflect sensibilities on either side of the Pacific, trending sometimes in an Asian direction and at others in a Latin American one. Among the great Mexican seafood dishes must be the fish taco, and Pacific Catch offers several versions ($4.25), all creditable on their beds of shredded cabbage: Baja, with chunks of batter-fried halibut or cod; grilled mahimahi, slathered in the restaurant’s ubiquitous avocado-tomatillo salsa; and barbecue shrimp, enlivened by little flares of fresh ginger (a nod across the Pacific there). Side dishes enhance the south-of-the-border aura; black beans ($2.95 for a sizable crock) are well seasoned and sprinkled with crumblings of queso fresco, while grilled corn ($2.95) — still on disks of cob — is suitable for dipping into accompanying pats of chipotle butter.

If Pacific Catch can seem like a cantina in Cabo San Lucas, it can also present itself as a sushi bar on Maui. A variety of sashimi is offered (as is its New World cousin, seviche), along with a selection of sushi rolls and — for that Hawaiian touch — poke ($8.50), cubes of lightly seared ahi drizzled with soy sauce and served atop a Fritos-like mélange of rice chips. The poke is temperamentally well suited to share table space with wakame (seaweed) salad ($3.95), a staple of sushi bars and notable here for its considerable size. The salad is plenty for two and could even satisfy four if other treats were on the way.

The grilled salmon ($19.95) — a deftly grilled filet — had been organically farmed in British Columbia, which relieved some of my unease at having it, since farmed salmon is usually a big no-no. The so-called California presentation itself was pleasant if unremarkable and consisted of a huge scoop of brown rice, several stalks of steamed asparagus (with basil aioli for dipping), and under the fish, a confit of tomatoes and lemon.

Even if Pacific Catch is mostly a seafood restaurant, you don’t have to have seafood. You could have grilled skirt steak ($18.95), glazed with miso, cut into tender slices, and plated with a huge scoop of white rice, a salad of picked cucumber threads, and a pile of deceptively pale kimchi that packed a real and thrilling wallop of garlic and chili pepper. My only complaint about these large plates is that they did look like subcompacts coming off an assembly line: this one got an extra cup holder from the parts bin, that one a CD deck in the dashboard — but otherwise they heavily resembled one another in a bolted-together way.

Dessert tends to soothe complainants of most stripes, luckily, and Pacific Catch has at least one quite good dessert: a sundae ($6.50) built on a macadamia-nut brownie. The brownie isn’t a doodle or add-on here, an extra calorie payment stuffed into a sundae glass with gobs of ice cream, as is so often the case with brownie sundaes; instead, it’s like Huck’s raft, sprawling and commodious, and the blob of macadamia-nut ice cream on top is almost a condiment. Other condiments include twin oozings of hot-fudge and caramel sauces.

There’s one element of the mix that hasn’t changed much in the metamorphosis, and that’s the crowd. It remains young and collegiate- or postcollegiate-looking, although the noise level has risen noticeably. In the old art-café days, people tended to keep even their more intense conversations at murmur level; now, without the elevating presence of art beyond some paintings of fish on the walls, there is a tendency to hoot and bray, if you catch my drift.

PACIFIC CATCH

Sun.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;
Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

1200 Ninth Ave., SF

(415) 504-6905

www.pacificcatch.com

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Craft fare

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS There was this crafts fair at one of our bars, and Sockywonk said she knew a guy who was giving away waffles. "Crafts fair?" I said, picturing clothes, jewelry, and purses, but not waffles.

Yeah, she said. He’d figured out a way to get waffle batter into an aerosol can, like Reddy-Wip, and he was promoting his brilliant invention by feeding all the craft fairies for free.

I loved Sockywonk for knowing such a thing. But after a sporty morning, I had me a good sticky, stinky sweat on and was mostly interested in her bathtub. We were going to a potluck at another bar later in the afternoon. I still had my soccer socks on.

"Well … " I said.

"Waffles!" she said, and what could I say? I had to agree with her 100 percent, once she put it like that. Waffles! Free ones, at that, and I was hungry and only had exactly $1.15.

"Waffles!" I said. And I changed my socks, borrowed a shirt, and found all sorts of things in Sockywonk’s bathroom to rub and spray on myself in lieu of a waterier bath.

At the end of the block we joined forces with Natty King Coal, the oatmeal pusher, and his charming bag lady–enforcer (and my personal hero) Little Orphan-Maker Annie, who was on crutches due to a grisly roller derby smash-up. She hadn’t been out of the house in months. I’m not kidding.

Annie had a crazed and wonderful look in her eye, like Give Me Blood, or syrup, or bargains. She also had a handicapped-parking thingy, so we drove to the bar even though it was within walking distance — or would have been, without pins and rods and crushed bones and so forth.

"What’s that smell?" Natty King said once all the car doors were closed.

"Do you mean ‘What are those smells?’" I said. "They represent a delicate yet complicated blending of the usual — sweat, smoke, and chicken shit — with the unusual: whatever the hell Socky keeps on the shelf in her bathroom."

Sockywonk works at a girly, soapy bath, spray, and general smell shop called Common Scents, and that was pretty much what I smelled like, like the entire store, Common Scents, on 24th Street. Plus sweat and smoke and of course chicken shit.

"I like it," the Orphan-Maker said, turning in her seat and smiling. Christ, she’s so sweet. And that was the end of that discussion.

At the crapshoot, or crafts fair, Sockywonk left less $40, the Orphan-Maker dropped two great T-shirts’ worth, plus the $20 she spotted the Wonk for even more cool stuff. Natty King, who knows how to treat his girls, bless him, went down whatever-the-worth of three bags of hot-sauced mango from a sidewalk vendor. Yum! And I, your chicken farmer truly, walked away with exactly $1.15, plus Aunt Jemima stains all over my borrowed shirt. Syrup. Sorry, Socky.

The verdict on aerosol-can waffle and pancake batter?

Yeah. Whatever. No, I mean, it was free, and it was delicious. But being a person who loves to cook, and who loves to spend as much time as possible doing the things that I love to do, like cooking, why in the world would I ever in the world squeeze waffle batter out of a can? And then blow time looking out the window that I could have more wisely spent separating egg whites and hand-whisking until they hold soft peaks?

No kidding, I make three meals a day. I want to have my hands in the food, and my arms, teeth, and tongue when appropriate. Like sex, I actually want it to take as long as possible. And dirty all the dishes. (I’ll do ’em in the morning.) You’re in a hurry, I know. You have a job. Check it out: batterblaster.com. Me, I’ll keep doing what I do … stirring constantly.

——————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Pretty Lady, a divine dive in West Oakland. Me and Deevee both ordered fried egg sandwiches, because we only had $10 between us, and all of it was hers. She laughed at me for ordering my sandwich eggs over easy, and I laughed last when my first bite squirted egg yolk all over my shirt and pants and the place. Which I really and truly love, did I mention? Nothing but counter, U-shaped for easier people-watching/eavesdropping. Saw a good-looking salad and stir-fry down the counter, so … stay for lunch.

PRETTY LADY

1733 Peralta, Oakl.

(510) 832-1213

Mon.–Sat., 7 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Moth Flap Heightens

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More big news on the Light Brown Apple Moth front:

California Certified Organic Farmers, one of the nation’’s oldest and largest third-party organic certifying agencies, has revoked its support of aerial spraying of organically approved pheromones.

CCOF took this decision due to what its Board of Directors describe as “potential human health and environmental concerns.”

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Instead, CCOF will support diversified ground integrated pest management approaches toward LBAM and is urging the California Department of Food and Agriculture to “pursue a diverse and precautionary approach”.

CCOF’s decision comes hard on the heels of a report that claims the moth threat has been overstated

Maybe CCOF’s withdrawal of support and Dr. Harder’s report will open up the door on the wider policy discussion here: namely, what are truly sustainable policies and practices in a steadily shrinking global economy?

To find out more about the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s spraying plans and the opposition to them, head for Marin on Thursday March 13, where Sen. Carole Midgen joins forces with Senate Environmental Safety Committee chair Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Santa Cruz) for a hearing on the state’s LBAM plans.

The March 13 hearing takes place at the Marin County Civic Center, 3501 Civic Center Drive, Room 330, San Rafael from 1-3 PM. It will feature state officials who support the spraying alongside scientists who oppose it, and include an opportunity for the public to comment.

To see CCOF’s Board of Directors full statement, keep reading::

The case for Concord

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By Ailene Sankur

What would make me want to spend a year of my life living in Concord?

Love.

Cheap rent. ($350/month to live with said person I loved, and another roommate.)

Bomb-ass Mexican food.

I am about to say a very controversial thing: I have yet to eat a truly good burrito in the city. I have been up and down Mission, up and down Valencia, and to El Beach Burrito by my house in the Sunset, and found nothing but decent — bordering on good — burritos. I am not impressed. (But am open to, and would really welcome suggestions…)

I don’t miss Concord, besides its tons of parking and wonderfully hot, 90-plus summers, but I do miss that Mexican food. Concord’s Mexican joints make any place in the Mission taste about as authentic as Baja Fresh.

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Is the Moth Menace overstated?

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adultLBAMoth.jpg
Last week, during my research into this week’s Light Brown Apple Moth story, a couple of sources spoke off the record about research that they intimated will prove that the LBAM risk is overstated. Today that research was released and its authors claim that LBAM is controlled by naturalpredators, a claim based on what the authors describe as a fact-finding tour to New Zealand. (New Zealand is also where the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the US Department of Ag are currently conducting trials on a new, longer lasting, pheromone spray.)
adultLBAMoth.jpg

In a press release sent to the Guardian, Dr. Daniel Harder, botanist and Executive Director of the University of California at Santa Cruz Arboretum, and Jeff Rosendale, a Watsonville grower and horticulturalist, said that during a three-week, 3,000-kilometer fact-finding study in New Zealand, they earned that “80 to 90 percent of LBAM larvae are destroyed by natural predators and never mature.”
adultLBAMoth.jpg

The report’s authors also said they also spoke with current research experts on LBAM in New Zealand’s government agricultural agency, HortResearch.

“The success of New Zealand agriculture and horticulture professionals in controlling LBAM and other leaf-roller pests using Integrated pest management techniques and few or no chemical applications is a model of best IPM practices that can be readily adopted in California to control LBAM,” the report’s authors stated .
adultLBAMoth.jpg

Seafood soup for the soul

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

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

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

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

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

Conduit

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONDUIT

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

280 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-5200

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Flowers

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" they say, offended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making limeade out of lemons is my motto in life. This was someone else’s tree, of course, but I picked a small, hard one and put it in Clara’s little hand, unwashed, let her gum and suck it. And a couple of sidewalk squares later I saw, and picked, one tiny wild strawberry, the size of a pea. This I put in her other hand, knowing she’d eat it. And that it might have been sprayed, or peed on by a dog.
——————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is one of my old favorite restaurants, but I never told you. It’s the 55-year-old Cinderella Russian Bakery in the Richmond, where I refueled with my soccer buds recently and dripped sweat and blood (from my nose) onto stuffed cabbages, garlicky potatoes, homemade bread, and dill in general. Wow! I think my mates were looking for more like, you know, breakfast, but for my money this is just the thing.

CINDERELLA RUSSIAN BAKERY

435 Balboa, SF

(415) 751-9690

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

Beer and wine

AE/DC/V

Chemicals and quarantines

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› sarah@sfbg.com

As the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) pushes ahead with plans to aerially spray the Bay Area with pheromones to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM), the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has signed onto state senator Carole Migden’s efforts to ask CDFA to put a moratorium on the spraying.

"We haven’t seen this level of concern and debate since the medfly days of then governor Jerry Brown," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "At this point, spraying sounds premature and reckless, even though I understand this is a nasty invasive pest."

Meanwhile, four members of the California State Assembly, including San Francisco’s Mark Leno, are working collaboratively on a group of LBAM-related measures to address health, scientific, and efficacy issues that remain unresolved since the agency’s multimillion-dollar eradication campaign began last year.

Leno’s part in this collaboration with fellow assembly members John Laird, Loni Hancock, and Jared Huffman involves demanding that CDFA complete an environmental impact report (EIR) before being able to apply pesticide in an urban area for LBAM eradication, which can be a lengthy process.

"By making this an urgency measure, it would take immediate effect," Leno told the Guardian. "We recognize that urban areas are concerned about health and safety, that LBAM is a real threat to the agricultural industry, and that the other side must be considered."

Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and CDFA both gave LBAM emergency status after the tiny, leaf-rolling Australian native was found in a Berkeley backyard, the first time it was confirmed in the continental United States.

As the USDA’s Larry Hawkins told the Guardian, the federal declaration of emergency allowed his department to access the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federally owned and operated entity within the USDA that supports and protects farm income and prices.

So far, the USDA has allocated $90 million to cover the costs of what Hawkins called "an expensive regulatory program," along with those of developing suitable pesticides and a nationwide survey to see if the moth has spread beyond California.

Hawkins claims the state separately declared an LBAM emergency — a move that allowed CDFA to go ahead and abate the pest — and that impacted the state’s normal EIR process.

"Emergency status doesn’t relieve [CDFA] of EIR requirements, but it allows them to do it simultaneously," Hawkins explained.

Since then some citizen activists have challenged the moth’s emergency status, claiming that there is no evidence that LBAM has severely damaged or infested local crops. But Hawkins says this purported lack of evidence proves that the government’s eradication program is working.

"We know the insect exists, that it destroys crops in other countries, and now you find the same insect here," said Hawkins, whose department has predicted that LBAM could inhabit 80 percent of the United States and nibble on 2,000 plant species.

"So, we can logically conclude it will cause damage here. The reason you haven’t seen major damage here is because we’ve found it early enough to deal with it before it becomes substantial. And the reason you won’t find reports of major LBAM damage in New Zealand or Australia is because they are constantly using pesticides," Hawkins said.

Asked if the USDA will fully disclose the ingredients of any product the state plans to use aerially, Hawkins said, "We cannot force a private company to reveal all their ingredients. But we have told all those companies that hope to provide products that they should expect to reveal them all."

Critics of the state’s pheromone spraying program observe that Suterra LLC, which manufactured the spray used over Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, refused to release the full ingredients until it was sued — and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demanded immediate full disclosure.

These same critics also note that Schwarzenegger, who continues to support CDFA’s LBAM-eradication program, received $144,600 in campaign contributions from Los Angeles–based Roll International owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who control Suterra, Fiji Water, Paramount Agribusiness, and the Franklin Mint.

Records show the Resnicks donate broadly, mostly to Democrats — including the gubernatorial campaigns of Steve Westly and Phil Angelides, and US Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama — with a lesser-size donation to Republican presidential front-runner John McCain, proving they play both sides of the fence.

With researchers testing a variety of LBAM-related products in New Zealand, Hawkins hopes to have a product formulated for California by June 1, which is when spraying is scheduled to resume in Santa Cruz and Monterey; spraying in the Bay Area is set for Aug. 1.

"We would like to give communities maximum notice, but we’re also working towards a beginning-of-June date, and as much as we’d like to insert artificial time frames, the insect couldn’t care less. It’s on a biological time table and is multiplying every day," Hawkins said.

David Dilworth of the Monterey nonprofit group Helping Our Peninsula’s Environment, which advocates the use of targeted pheromone-baited sticky traps, conceded that even if CDFA was forced to stop the aerial spraying, the USDA could spray anyway.

"But it would take them several months to organize, and we don’t believe they have the constitutional power," claimed Dilworth, whose organization is preparing a 60-day notice of intent to sue the USDA and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, organic farmers find themselves in an uncomfortable limbo that continues to shift. Take the Santa Cruz–based California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). Last fall, CCOF supported the aerial pheromone spray after the National Organics Program approved it, meaning sprayed farmers didn’t lose organic certification

But March 4, CCOF spokesperson Viella Shipley told the Guardian that the group is about to release a revised position on the spraying, and could not comment further "because CCOF’s government affairs committee has not yet approved this revised position."

"We lobbied for an organically approved product and supported it last fall when lots of our members were suffering because they were in quarantine and couldn’t sell beyond county lines," was all Shipley would say.

Meanwhile, organic farmers who spoke on condition of anonymity largely supported aerial spraying for economic and environmental reasons.

"If the moth isn’t dealt with now, it’ll become a bigger problem, from both an environmental and toxic perspective," one farmer told us, citing the already high costs of controlling such bugs as coddling moths and medflies.

"This is somebody else’s pest at the moment, a nonnative pest," he said. "If farmers have to start dealing with LBAM as well, they’ll be ruined."

He also cited his belief that there aren’t 40 million pheromone-soaked twist ties on the market, which is what the CDFA claims is needed to blanket infested counties from the ground up with female pheromones to confuse the males.

Nigel Walker, an organic farmer in Dixon, recalled the devastating costs of quarantine thanks to a medfly-infested mango that someone brought back from Hawaii.

"Their vacation cost me $60,000 because of lost sales," Walker said. "So, for God’s sake, don’t bring, mail, or FedEx fruit and vegetables into California, because border inspectors are looking for bombs and terrorists, not produce and moths.

"We live in a global economy, and we have trade agreements that say if one person gets a pest, you have to do something about it," Walker added. "Nobody wants to be sprayed. Even when I spray organic seaweed on my fruit trees, I wear a mask. So I understand the gut reaction. But by refusing to be sprayed, you’re punishing the wrong person — the farmer — who already has to deal with the vagaries of the weather, the marketplace, and pests like the medfly."

Chris Mittelstaedt, who lives in San Francisco with his family and runs Fruitguys, a small business that delivers organic fruit to offices, said he’s personally against the spraying. "But as a company, we are going to wait a few weeks before letting people know what we officially think or endorse as a plan of action," Mittelstaedt told us.

Other city dwellers are less ambivalent. Frank Eggers, a former Fairfax mayor who is organizing a group called Stop the Spray, said, "[World Trade Organization] stuff is driving this so-called moth emergency.

"We’re allowing other countries to quarantine our produce. And with the global economy, climate change, and travel, we’re going be facing this issue continuously. But we can’t keep putting poison on our land, or say we’ll put you in quarantine if you don’t accept our aerial bombardment," he said.

Paul Schramski, state director of Pesticide Watch, worries that the state and federal agencies are still not listening to the people of California.

"If this is not being driven by trade agreements, then I’m not sure what is the driver. We don’t have all the facts. But it’s not being driven by actual crop damage," Schramski said. "We agree that this invasive moth should be controlled, but it’s a false premise to believe that the choice is between aerial spraying or nothing. The state has known since August that the public was opposed to spraying, so why aren’t we producing more twist ties?"

CDFA, which used $500,000 in USDA funds to hire PR agency Porter Novelli last November at the height of public outcry, is currently researching pheromone products that last up to 90 days and is also planning to use pheromone-loaded twist ties, sticky traps, and stingerless parasitic wasps in its LBAM program.

"We believe this to be a biological emergency," CDFA public affairs supervisor Steve Lyle told us. "If we waited a year or two, so we could first do an EIR, we would lose the battle and become generally infested."

Ironically, California’s best hope for not being sprayed ad infinitum may lie in the discovery that the moth has spread to other states.

"It would make a significant impact if we were to find the insect established in other places," the USDA’s Hawkins told us. "It doesn’t mean we would throw up our hands and walk away, but it would remove some of the argument that the rest of America is at risk from California if other states already have it."

But until that time, Hawkins warned that if state legislators demand a moratorium, forced spraying won’t be the federal government’s only option: "Maybe California would have to be quarantined. And now we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars."

No aerial spraying

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EDITORIAL The tiny light brown apple moth has become a huge environmental deal in Northern California. Ever since a retired entomologist found one in his Berkeley back yard a year ago, state and federal agencies have been in full attack mode. Now they’re preparing to send a fleet of airplanes to dump thousands of gallons of pest-control spray over San Francisco and the East Bay this summer. The aerial bombardment is likely to be ineffective — and it may have serious health impacts on humans. It’s a bad idea, and it needs to be stopped.

As Sarah Phelan, who first broke this story, reports on page 10, that won’t be easy: the California Department of Food and Agriculture is holding public hearings on the spraying but has insisted it will go forward no matter how much opposition emerges. State Sen. Carole Migden is trying to block the plan in the Legislature, but the governor will likely veto any bill she can get passed. So it may be that the only way to prevent San Franciscans from facing a pesticide carpet-bombing the first week in August is for somebody to file a lawsuit.

The moth frightens farmers because its larvae eat a wide variety of plants. The tiny caterpillars could do more than $600 million worth of damage to the state’s crops every year, the CDFA says.

The pest is native to Australia and had never before been reported on the United States mainland. So the authorities decided that the best solution was to eradicate it — and that the most effective way to do that was to drown the affected regions in a chemical called Checkmate.

Checkmate isn’t a poison, the way some of the nastier pesticides are. It contains an artificial version of a pheromone that female moths release to attract males during mating season. The idea is that if the pheromones are floating around in the air, the boy moths will get confused and never find the girls, and eventually the population will die out.

The mating scent is delivered in tiny bubbles of a plastic-type substance. Over time, the little capsules melt and the pheromone is released into the air. The way the state describes the spray, it can take up to 70 days for all of the active ingredients to become airborne. One application is supposed to last throughout the moth’s mating season.

But this theory has never been tested on a large scale, and some critics say it’s unlikely the pheromone assault will actually wipe out the brown apple moth population. If even just a few of the creatures manage to mate and produce offspring, the whole effort could be a failure.

The CDFA insists that Checkmate is totally safe for humans and pets, that it contains nothing toxic, and that the moth pheromone has no impact on anything other than this one type of insect. But the advisory label on Checkmate cans warns people who are applying the stuff to wear protective clothing and masks. The tiny capsules (which are not biodegradable) can’t be good for people with respiratory issues. Some residents of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, where a first batch was sprayed last summer, reported health effects.

And we’ve been around long enough to distrust officials who tell us that chemicals sprayed into the air are perfectly safe. As one Vietnam veteran testified at a public hearing last week, the government used to say that Agent Orange was harmless too.

San Francisco and the East Bay are dense urban areas with millions of people — hundreds of thousands of them children. If the health impacts of massive aerial spraying of moth pheromones are not definitively known, it’s a bad idea to go forward.

We recognize that the moth is a threat to agriculture; so are thousands of other pests. Organic farmers manage to produce crops every year without dumping chemicals on them.

There was a time when a governor named Jerry Brown stood his ground and refused to allow aerial spraying of a toxic chemical called malathion to kill Mediterranean fruit flies. Ultimately he backed down and allowed the spraying — and in retrospect he admits that was a mistake. Brown is now the state’s attorney general, and there’s talk that he’d like his old job back. If he wants to demonstrate that he’s a real environmentalist, he ought to file suit to block the spraying.

Since that’s unlikely, it’s going to require an environmental group with the resources and legal support to take this to court. San Francisco’s full of them; someone needs to step forward.

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