Pot

Monk’s Kettle

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› paulr@sfbg.com

First, although it’s early, let’s hand out our first annual Best Restaurant Name Award. This year’s winner is the Monk’s Kettle, which is a witty, memorable, and — since the place in question is a craft-beer bar with food to match; ergo, a kind of hipster tavern — evocative phrase. Everyone loves a monk, and kettle is just fun to say, especially after a fancy beer or two.

The Monk’s Kettle is not a brewpub. No beer brewing is done on the premises, which are probably too snug anyway. The deal instead is a wide offering of beers from around the world, in the manner of Toronado or Moe Ginsburg’s; some are draught, many others are in bottles, but all are served in one of the stunning array of specialty glasses stacked behind the bar like crystals in some extraordinary ice formation.

Pardon is hereby issued to those who don’t recognize the space as the recent home of a Thai restaurant, Rasha, and before that, of Kelly’s Burgers. The footprint is the same — deep and narrow, with the sizable, mirror-backed bar and a semiopen kitchen along the right side and, on the left, booths snuggled against the windows — but the smell of old grease is gone, the color scheme is now one of muted earth tones, and the harsh lighting has given way to halogen pinpoints and, above the booths, glowing disks that look like the shells of some huge mollusk.

But the aesthetic makeover, though thorough and stylish, is dwarfed as a marker of change by the crush of people trying to get into the restaurant. A year ago Rasha seemed to be largely empty, despite good food at moderate cost, a bright red neon sign, and a prime location; the Monk’s Kettle, at age two months, is already wall-to-wall crowds on weekend evenings, with even more people spilling out onto the sidewalk. And they’re young, hipstery people.

If the wealth of craft beers is part of the Monk’s Kettle’s appeal to this social cohort, so too must be the food, which is a surprisingly vegetarian-friendly version of pub grub. Many of the most memorable dishes are meatless and would do credit to the kitchen at Greens. But hipsters like their burgers too, apparently; on a recent evening while eating at the bar, we were flanked by young burger eaters dressed à la mode, two and three to a side.

The burger ($10.50) is good. The meat is grass-fed Niman Ranch and is served on a dense, chewy bun from La Brea Bakery. A slice of cheese (various choices) adds $1.50, and the American-style fries are fine. But there’s nothing exceptional here. As for the house-made veggie burger ($9.50): half a gold star for innovation, since the patty is falafel, laid out on the same La Brea bun instead of stuffed into a pita pocket with tahini sauce.

On the other hand, the Monk’s Kettle does offer quite a few treats you won’t regularly find on menus in the Mission or around town. There’s a fresh pretzel ($6.50), for instance, twisty soft and served with whole-grain mustard and a cheddar-ale sauce for dipping and dunking. We also liked the lightly crisped black-bean cakes ($8.75), a pair of slim disks scattered with roasted-corn salsa and artily piped with chipotle crème fraîche. Bruschetta ($8.50) — toasted bread spears smeared with cannellini puree — were plated in an overgrown garden of mixed greens and resembled statuary half hidden amid unkempt tendrils, but the greens were enriched by sautéed mushrooms and chunks of white cheddar cheese, bringers of flavor, texture, and heft.

Butternut squash soup ($6.50) needs special handling to rise above its usual station as a cold-weather commonplace. Do pepitas, the little pumpkinseeds of Mexican cooking, answer the call? The Monk’s Kettle kitchen installed them as a scattering across the surface of the soup, and they did their best, but the soup, while creamy, was a little too sweet and unfocused to satisfy, even with pepitas. It was also, however, nicely steamy, which brought some relief to my sniffly friend across the table.

Also nicely steamy was a bowl of Jude’s vegan chili ($6.50), a black-bean preparation laced with tomatoes, mushrooms, and olives. We did catch a whiff of some faint, faintly exotic, eastern Mediterranean spice in there and found ourselves thinking more of Turkey than Texas: mushrooms and olives in chili? The Turks, it must be said, prefer chickpeas to black beans. (The chickpea is thought to be native to southeastern Turkey.)

The kitchen seemed to be in possession of a mushroom mother lode, because tasty fungus recurred as a ragout in the day’s surprisingly elegant potpie ($14). I say elegant because the ragout had been baked in a handsome white crock with fluted sides, under a tarpaulin of butter-flaky pastry worthy of a beef Wellington. The potpie had the look of a huge, family-style dessert — a giant pot de crème, possibly, lurking under the pastry.

We never quite got around to actual dessert, but we did dabble in the beers (whose listings go on for several pages), in part to see which glasses would be used to serve them. St. Bernardus, a dark, caramelly Belgian brew ($7.75 for an eight-ounce pour), arrived in a vessel that looked like a giant cognac snifter, while Bitburger pilsner ($6.25 for 14 ounces) was presented in an attractive if slightly disappointing pilsner glass, a close relation of the ones I have at home. Mr. Cider, meanwhile, partook of the Fox Barrel black currant cider ($4.50 for eight ounces); this was served in a wineglass look-alike and was refreshingly unsweet in the European manner but did not really taste of black currant — a presence in name only, but we liked it anyway.

MONK’S KETTLE

Mon.–Fri., noon–2 a.m.; Sat.–Sun., 11:30–2 a.m.

3141 16th St., SF

(415) 865-9523

www.monkskettle.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Skunked

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS One week you smell like bacon, and the next week it’s skunk. Life is like this.

And do you know what a skunk sounds like? They make one of the most sinister noises in the animal kingdom, I think. They speak in a kind of wheezy, whiny murmur that forebodes death and disaster like a bunch of gangsters with head colds complaining about the service at a Chinese dive.

First I thought they were trying to make a hit on my chickens. It was three in the morning and I was in the throes of my depression. So the last thing I needed to wake up to was a pile of smelly, bloody feathers. Wait. I think skunks are like weasels. They pull the chickens’ heads off and suck out their brains, then leave the rest.

Either way, not a cheerful scenario.

So I dragged myself out of bed and went to my closet for something farmerly to wear. I couldn’t decide between overalls over a union suit and a Western shirt with a denim skirt. Overalls look great with a shotgun, and Western wear goes better with handguns. Of course, I don’t have either kind of gun. I just wanted to look convincing because the last time I raced outside in the middle of the night to defend the honor of my chickens, I was essentially laughed back to high school by a gang of possums, I assume because of the pajamas I was wearing.

In any case, my self-esteem suffered. They can be a cruel lot, these woodsy types that I hang with. Possums, foxes, bobcats, skunks … Eventually, after trying on several outfits, I settled on a "safe" floral-print flannel shirt and tight blue jeans under a long oversize coat that isn’t a trench coat but looked pretty good in the half dark in the mirror, especially from the side, I thought. And I went outside with a flashlight and walked around the chicken coop, trying to act casually curious, if not cool.

At the exact same time I realized that, gasp, I was wearing socks with Birkenstocks, I also saw, spotlighted in my flashlight light, the skunk. Also looking at my feet, shaking its head, like, "Loser!"

He wasn’t interested in my chickens after all. He’d been messing around behind the woodpile. I think he had a girl with him, or vice versa. In any case, this skunk was now smack between me and the door to my shack, and it turned its back to me, still shaking its head and muttering something about "pathetic hippie chicks."

I’m going to smell really bad for a really long time, I thought. But miraculously, it didn’t spray.

I was almost offended. What do I have to do to look threatening around here? I wondered, tiptoeing back around to the porch. Inside my shack I stood in the dark with my back to the door and breathed again. Then I threw my coat on the floor, kicked the old Birks way under the bed, and got back under the covers. Way under.

The fucking skunks fucked all the rest of the night that night, and when they weren’t making love they were complaining in those whiny, whiny undertones, right outside my window. I think someone wasn’t seeing to the other one’s needs or something.

It smelled a bit bad, but not as bad as it did a couple of nights later when the same skunk or skunks — or a different one — mixed it up with a feral cat in the crawl space beneath my shack. That was on Friday, and five days later I still smelled it on every single aspect of my life. Everything I own, and everything I have on loan from the library.

My dreams. My thoughts. My food. My songs, my singing. My writing. It all stinks right now. My cat, Weirdo the Cat … She doesn’t seem to mind. I smoke a lot of pot. And I keep a pan of bacon grease just sort of simmering on the wood stove.

Trying to get it back.

My new favorite restaurant is Fruitful Grounds. It’s just a little coffeehouse on Fulton near Masonic, but it has a good choice of good foodstuffs. Like French toast with bacon for $7.50. Huge portion. Delicious. And you can also get omelets, burgers burritos, smoothies … and, of course, bagels or pastries.

FRUITFUL GROUNDS

1813 Fulton, SF

(415) 221-1876

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–7 p.m.

Beer and wine

Cash only

Namu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Of the city’s many village centers, I have always had a special fondness for the Inner Richmond enclave along Balboa, from Arguello to Eighth Avenue or so. Here you find Russian bakeries nestled across the street from sushi bars, with a Korean barbecue at one corner, a Chinese joint at the next, and a chic Cal-Med spot a few steps beyond the traffic light. Add a butcher shop, a nursery school, and a cleaners, and you have a self-sustaining little world. It’s like a less-trafficked Clement Street.

The backwater charm has persisted for years, despite the occasional incursions of upscaleness: Katia’s Russian Tea room, with its immaculately starched tablecloths, and, of more recent vintage, the Richmond, which opened a few years ago in the old Jakarta space. The latest spit-and-polish entrant, Namu, isn’t as conspicuous as either of those two restaurants; it opened about a year ago in a midblock storefront, and you could easily walk right by it if you weren’t paying attention.

At least you could in the middle of the day. By night, Namu attracts the young the way a lantern attracts moths on a summer evening; they gather in clusters on either side of the door and along the curb, dressed in night shades of blue, gray, and black, talking on cell phones while waiting for a table to open up or the rest of their party to appear. If you were rushing along the sidewalk, you could probably pick your way past without too much fancy footwork, but you’d notice the crowd, certainly, and wonder what was up.

Part of what is up is certainly chef Dennis Lee’s cooking. (Lee owns the place with his brothers, David and Daniel.) Although Namu’s menu includes elements of both Japanese and fusion cooking, its most striking quality is its elegant recasting of Korean themes. It’s not quite a Korean bistro, but it’s more than a step in that direction and away from the traditional Korean barbecue, an honorable example of which stands at the corner.

Namu does offer that well-known Korean staple, kimchee (cabbage pickled with garlic and red chiles), and it’s just about indistinguishable from the corner barbecue’s: both offer excellent, sour fire. But at Namu the kimchee is served as part of a banchan plate (the first is complimentary, after that $4), in the company of, say, surprisingly rich sautéed chives and coils of pickled carrot, all presented on a museum-of-modern-art dish that looks like a flattened candelabra. There is a sense of stylish balance in both presentation and flavor that announces the kitchen’s sophistication.

You could satisfy yourself entirely with Japanese items, if you were so inclined, and you might even be able to convince yourself that you were at a sushi bar. Although there’s no sushi on the menu, the restaurant’s look is agleam with dark minimalism, including the unframed urban-industrial photographs hung on the walls as if at a hip gallery. Anyway, tataki — lightly seared tabs of fish — is almost like sushi, and Namu’s version ($10), with albacore tuna, is cleverly enhanced by a drizzle of Thai chili ponzu. Seaweed salad is also a sushi bar standard; here it’s called ocean salad ($8) and is made from a jumble of red, green, and wakame seaweed and looks like leftover Christmas wrapping. Nice touches: halved cherry tomatoes beneath the seaweed, and ume vinaigrette (ume is a pickled Asian plum) to give the salad fruitiness that isn’t quite sweet.

Pan-seared dumplings (a.k.a. pot stickers) are a commonplace throughout east Asia. Here ($9) they’re filled with slivered shiitake mushrooms and served in a shallow bowl with yet more shiitake slivers and a dashi broth reduced to dark intensity. (Dashi is one of the basics of Japanese cooking and is a stock made from kelp and dried skipjack.) Fresh rolls are also an east Asian commonplace, but Namu’s version ($6) feature a cross-cultural twist: chunks of grilled skirt steak, for a hint of the American southwest and, simultaneously, Korea. Just as unexpected is the mung bean cake ($6), and if you shy away from mung beans as the principal ingredient of indifferent desserts, you’ll be surprised here by the resemblance to crispy polenta triangles, suitable for dipping in ponzu sauce. And there is an explicitly Italian touch to the buckwheat noodles ($9.50); they’re tossed with shiitake mushrooms but also pesto (from Thai basil!), pine nuts, and garlic before getting a good sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese.

We didn’t particularly respond to the broccolini ($7), which wasn’t bad but wasn’t special despite embellishments of yuzu ponzu and fried garlic. It seemed too much like ordinary steamed broccoli. But we did respond to the prawns ($9), which had been glazed with den jang (a Korean fermented bean paste similar to miso) and grilled in pairs on skewers.

Too much culinary globe-trotting? The hamburger ($9), then, is restful in a juicy, tasty, villagy way, with a first-rate bun and good fries that would be just a bit better if more svelte, more in the frites line. Of course, even B+ fries tend to get gobbled up, even by those who mean to save some room for dessert. Namu’s desserts are well above the ordinary: a chocolate brioche bread pudding ($7) for instance, napped with raspberry sauce (is any dish with brioche disappointing? I say no), and a puddinglike crème brûlée ($7) lifted from the mundane by little butter cookies flavored with our friend ume, the distinctive Japanese preserved plum last observed in the seaweed salad vinaigrette. Some plums certainly get around.

NAMU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

489 Balboa, SF

(415) 386-8332

www.namubar.com

Beer, wine, sake

AE/MC/V

Noisy if crowded

Wheelchair accessible

Nursing the ratchet effect

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If good cooking is about improvisation and flexibility, it’s also about certain rigid rules. One of these is the culinary version of the ratchet effect: once you add certain ingredients, you can’t unadd them. The only path open to you is forward. There can be no retreat. Cayenne pepper is the classic example. Once it goes in, it’s in, and if you put in too much, you’re stuck. Either you issue the necessary warning to the people who will be served your 10-alarm chili, or you empty the pot into the compost bin and start anew, taking special care with any high-heat elements.

Salt is similarly impossible to extract once it’s gone in, and oversalted food is commonplace in the wondrous realm of prepared and packaged items. Saltiness, in fact, is often the preeminent characteristic of ready-to-eat foods plucked from the grocery shelves, just as overweening sugariness is so often the only flavor you can detect in commercially prepared desserts. Recently I gave a friend recovering from minor surgery an attractive jar of tomato-basil soup from Lucini, a purveyor of various Italian delicacies. One of the soup’s virtues was that all you had to do was heat it up in a pot and eat it — a simple enough procedure even for someone not feeling well. A few days later the call came: the soup was good, but too salty. I apologized on behalf of Lucini, noted what a common shortcoming this is, and then proposed an easy remedy. For saltiness, unlike chili heat, can be masked. You can’t get rid of it, but you can cover it up, the same way you might paint over hideous wallpaper.

The tools are simple: sugar and acid, whether from lemon or lime juice or, in a pinch, white vinegar. Sugar and acid are most effective as a duo, since each helps balance oversaltiness from a distinct angle. But you can use just one and still succeed. Sugar is a little gentler, while acid adds a zing that distracts from saltiness at least as much as balancing it. I just add little pinches of sugar to a too-salty dish, stirring them in, until harmony is restored. Then, maybe, for good measure, a discreet dribble of lemon juice. Follow-up question: could judicious salting rescue a too-sweet dessert?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Platforms

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My little brother needs a big sister, and my big sister needs a little one. Chickens need a farmer. Bread needs butter. Earl Butter needs bread. Crawdad de la Cooter needs me to paint a bookshelf. She’s pregnant and can’t breathe the fumes. I’m not, and can. But don’t want to, so she bribes me with K.C. Barbecue or Zachary’s Pizza, then both.

"What time should I be there?"

"How soon can you be here?"

I don’t know. Weirdo the Cat needs warmth and affection. Dishes … My lover needs loving. Need is a strong word, according to Phenomenon. According to Buddhists we’re not supposed to need. But what the fuck? Everybody does, and I do. I need money, grace, hope, and lettuce.

A new stove … I need a new stove with 10 back burners and no front ones because I can’t seem to finish anything anymore. I can clean my plate, and I can clean my ass. Other than that, I’m a mess.

I’m an underachiever. My goal in life is to get my hair cut. I mean, I’ll miss it when I’m doing the dishes, not needing no scrubbies or nothing. But other times, like cooking and eating, it just gets in the way.

Earl Butter calls this the Year of Becoming Better Cooks. And I’m down with that too. Every year is that year for me. So he cleaned his kitchen. I came over after a soccer game, let myself in, and wondered whether I even needed a shower, it smelled so good in there. He had a pot of greens simmering on the stove, a pan of spicy wedged potatoes roasting in it, and a loaf of corn bread cooling on the counter.

Mod the Pod and the Kat Attack were on their way over for dinner, Earl Butter said. Could I do the pork chops?

I could.

"However you want to cook them," he said. Then he proceeded to tell me how to cook them. He said to sprinkle some salt and pepper into a dry, hot frying pan, then put the pork chops in there too.

I ran my fingers through my hair. I stood in front of the stove and held my arms out, basking in the warm, wet aroma of comfort food. Then, considering myself bathed, I put clean clothes on, draped my sweaty soccer stuff over the radiator, washed my hands, cracked my knuckles, and Became Better Cooks with Earl Butter.

And with you, Dear Reader. I’m not that smart, I know, but I think I think about things as much as the next chicken farmer. I have conviction. Something to stand on, a platform. If I were running for president, my platform would be: Hey, America, use your fucking broilers! What the fuck do you think they’re there for?

Sure, I’ve cooked steaks and chops in hot, salted frying pans, and it does work. But so does the broiler. Better. You know that. Everyone knows. The thing is that no one wants to have to wash it afterwards, and that, in a nutshell, is why I can never run for public office. Or private office either. I am unelectable because no one wants to have to clean the broiler pan.

Most of them haven’t been washed in decades. This is a problem, if you know me. If you don’t know me — personally, I mean — then most likely your broiler hasn’t been used in decades. So why clean it? If you do know me, then you know that I love to cook in other people’s kitchens and won’t hesitate to use your broiler. I will promise to wash it. I will eschew your salted frying pans and make a big mess.

I thought about this in Earl Butter’s kitchen while broiling our pork chops, having promised to clean up after. I thought: I can be a forgetful, sleepy chicken farmer, especially after a big, good meal. Hmm …

Sockywonk, Mountain Sam’l, Bikkets, Phenomenon, Choo-Choo, Crawdad, Johnny "Jack" Poetry … um, Earl Butter, and anyone else whose kitchen I have commandeered in the past 10 years … check your broiler. If it looks like a landscape from Star Trek, call me. I’ll bring the Brillo.

My new favorite restaurant is the Citrus Club, just for being there on a cold, rainy night in the Haight. I was this close to freezing to death, then: hot and sour shrimp noodle soup! Huge bowl, and spicy! It’s pan-Asian, noodle-centric fare, mostly rice noodles, but some egg, and buckwheat. Warm, dry atmosphere.

CITRUS CLUB

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

1790 Haight, SF

(415) 387-6366

Takeout available

Beer, wine, sake, and specialties

MC/V

Sahn Maru Korean BBQ

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REVIEW Sahn Maru may be the most cheerful restaurant in the East Bay. Its bright, sunny lighting falls on interesting pieces of art, arrangements of flowers, and happy patrons. Likewise, the beaming smiles of the staff fall on everyone who walks through the door, even the first-timers. When I visited, there were three people in our party, so we decided to try dinner combo A ($39.95; recommended for two), supplemented with our usual dol sot bi bim bab ($10.95 for beef, veggies, and egg over rice in a sizzling pot; $8.95 without the sizzle). We needn’t have worried about having enough food: the combo’s bul ko ki (barbecued beef), dark gui (barbecued chicken), jap chae (panfried noodles), na mul (Korean seasoned vegetables), and soft tofu chi gae (bean-cake casserole soup with zucchini) would have been enough for three (although we polished off everything anyway). One member of our party, a Korean Australian, declared the soup the best thing he’d ever had at a Korean restaurant. I was particularly pleased to see so many vegetables included in the dinner combos, not just in the chi gae and na mul but also in the jap chae, which was heavier on the greens than are many such dishes. And our waiter was charming — identifying all of the barbecued meat supplements with panache, always appearing exactly when we needed him, and making us feel welcome and glad to be there. When we left, he and another staffer invited us to come back soon. It will be our pleasure.

SAHN MARU KOREAN BBQ Daily, 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m. 4315 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 653-3366

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part II

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E.M. Health Services, a home health care company founded by a high-ranking member of Your Black Muslim Bakery, opened for business in July 1996, flush with a $1.1 million loan from the city of Oakland.

But shortly over a year later, signs of trouble already plagued the business — and a review of documents shows that the founders of the struggling company paid themselves lavish salaries, and lucrative consulting contracts went to bakery associates and family members.

More than a decade later, the city hasn’t received one penny in repayment for the loan, and questions remain over why city officials granted the loan in the first place.

Under the terms of E.M.’s loan, the company wasn’t scheduled to make principal payments for two years — until 1998 — but just 15 months after getting the money, CEO Nedir Bey asked to defer repayments until 2000.

The city, which had already questioned several invoices submitted by the company, did not approve the extension. Instead, officials responded by requesting an audit of E.M.’s books.

In his request for an extension, Bey did not mention that in May 1997, E.M. Health had applied to the California Department of Insurance for a $2 million loan to purchase a 4,000-square-foot office building on 17th Street in downtown Oakland.

In his application to the state, Bey cited Oakland’s loan approval as proof of his good reputation, even though by then the city was already questioning tens of thousands of dollars in operating expenses claimed by his company.

The $1.1 million loan agreement called for E.M. Health to begin repaying monthly interest and principal payments of $19,692 on May 1, 1998, the date the company was projected to have enough billable clients to break even.

But May came and went with no payments.

And, documents show, E.M. Health would ask for more.

But the story of how the business, a subsidiary of the now-bankrupt Your Black Muslim Bakery, received the money despite a flawed business plan and a disturbing criminal incident in Nedir Bey’s past illustrates the extent politics and pressure played in officials’ decision to approve the loan.

Bakery members also have been linked to several violent incidents, including the Aug. 2 shooting death of journalist Chauncey Bailey, as well as alleged real estate and welfare fraud and child rape.

Details of the company’s financial growth were outlined in correspondence between Nedir Bey and various city staff who reviewed documentation to support the original $1.1 million loan application, as well as documents surrounding Nedir Bey’s later attempts to obtain a $2.5 million loan that was never granted.

In a January 1997 letter to the city, E.M. Health said it had contracts with 13 patients between October and December 1996, which should have generated more than $23,000 in revenues for the three-month period.

The same letter said seven would-be home health aides had graduated from a training program run by a different company. Those aides could not be sent out to care for Medicare/MediCal patients until they passed their certification exams that month, the letter said.

The letter also reveals that E.M. Health had a goal of generating $1.2 million in income in 1997 by providing services to 50 clients. The company instead reported large losses in 1996 and 1997.

It started to pull in more revenue early the following year, according to a letter from former Economic Development Chief Bill Claggett addressed to then-City Manager Robert Bobb.

Clagget’s letter stated that the company had a net profit of $30,068 for the first two months of 1998, but was still experiencing delays in receiving reimbursements for its Medicare/MediCal clients.

By June 17, 1998, Nedir Bey stated in a letter to city loan department manager Teri Robinson-Green that E.M. was “doing about $80,000 a month.” In another letter listing E.M.’s achievements, Bey claimed the company had hired 55 people, trained 30 people and served more than 200 patients.

But still no loan payments.

E.M. Health’s agreement with the city stated that the company and its employees, many of whom were also trusted bakery associates and family members, would not profit from the business. Any extra income after expenses would be funneled back into Qiyamah, a nonprofit organization founded by the bakery to further Yusuf Bey’s community work. Qiyamah was E.M. Health’s parent company.

But the salaries, car lease and billing rates charged by bakery members who moonlighted as consultants to E.M. Health coupled with too few billable clients and delays in reimbursements by Medicare and MediCal all but ensured there wouldn’t be enough money left over to pay back the city’s loans.

“It’s interesting how that millionaire from the skating rink got $12 million and declared bankruptcy and never paid the city back,” Nedir Bey said, referring to the builders of Oakland’s downtown ice rink, who defaulted on an $11 million loan before E.M. Health Services was funded. The city took possession of the rink. “Is the city calling him and trying to ask him those kind of questions?

“The bottom line for me, I’m trying to move forward with my life. Everything that you’re discussing is in my past,” Bey said.

A popular message

E.M. Health’s business model resonated with Oakland’s black politicians who were eager to even the playing field for black businesses that had not gotten an equitable share of city contracts and loans. They lauded the accomplishments of Yusuf Bey — the controversial but charismatic founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery — and viewed the health care proposal as a continuation of his good works.

The plan also resonated with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and appeared to meet its criteria for loan funding. E.M. Health’s $1.1 million loan came from a $44 million pot of money the federal agency offered Oakland to fund start-up organizations that sought to provide jobs in low-income communities.

Still, in a June 4, 1996, letter to Kofi Bonner, Oakland’s then-director of community development, local HUD director Steven Sachs wrote that “E.M. Health Services business plan is still being developed …” with many “issues still to be worked out.”

Sachs urged the city to consider “providing a much smaller amount of financial assistance to this start-up business.”

That same night, despite Bonner’s warning that Nedir Bey had not yet provided several documents the city required for the loan, nor procured a provisional license from state health officials, the council voted to give the company a $275,000 advance on the $1.1 million HUD loan.

In fact, even though E.M. Health was $63,000 in arrears in its business taxes, the company ended up getting $538,000 in interim loans from the city of Oakland over the next six months, before HUD officials reimbursed Oakland for the money in April 1997.

Nedir Bey relied on that type of sentiment when he approached the city in February 1998 and asked for an additional $2.5 million — half loan, half grant — to buy a shopping center in West Oakland to house a new urgent care clinic, in addition to funds he sought unsuccessfully from the state department of insurance.

The shopping center plan lacked numerous financial details and included no downpayment or personal investment by Nedir Bey.

Nonetheless, he lined up his supporters and produced letters of recommendation from well-respected medical experts, including David Kears, director of the Health Care Services Agency for Alameda County; Michael Lenoir, president of the Ethnic Health Institute at Alta Bates/Summit Hospitals; and H. Geoffrey Watson, president of the Golden State Medical Association, which represents 2,000 African-American physicians in California.

Claggett said he would have loved to have someone revitalize that blighted shopping center, but nothing about E.M.’s finances by then suggested it could support a new business venture. City records show that E.M. Health incurred losses of $425,000 during 1996 and $343,000 in 1997.

E.M. Health was already three months behind on the payments for the $1.1 million loan, and a mere six months later, E.M. Health’s parent, the Qiyamah Corporation, would default on a

$100,000 bank loan originally signed by Saleem Ali Bey, also known as Darren Wright.

‘I don’t think they ever gave up’

Nedir Bey nonetheless again pressured the city into rushing the review of his new loan request. By July 1998, he sought direct backing from then-Mayor Elihu Harris, whose father was an E.M. Health patient for a short time, according to company records on file with the city.

“Staff should be more inform (sic) on the procedures and policies of the city of Oakland as opposed to me having to check with the mayor and then letting you know what you can and cannot do,” Bey said in a July 1998 letter to Gregory Hunter, now Oakland’s redevelopment agency director, apparently unhappy that the request had not yet been forwarded to the loan review committee.

Kears recalls Nedir Bey first approached him for a letter of recommendation, but that evolved into a request for money to finance outreach efforts for new patients. The county wound up giving Bey a $25,000 contract, the most it could provide without approval from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Kears said he doesn’t know whether E.M. Health ever submitted invoices to use any of the money.

The $2.5 million loan application eventually stalled as Nedir Bey failed to produce documentation requested by the city related to the first infusion of cash, the repayment of which was falling further and further behind.

By the time the city sent its first default letter to E.M. Health in December 1998, the payments were eight months past due and the company had crumbled.

City employees would later discover that the company’s offices had been cleaned out, office furnishings and computer equipment pledged as collateral gone.

Claggett said that not long afterward, he was questioned by the FBI about E.M. Health and Nedir Bey. The FBI’s San Francisco office did not return a call seeking comment about the probe.

No way to collect

The Oakland city attorney sued E.M. Health

in December 2000 in an attempt to recover $1.45million in loan funds and $98,600 in unpaid interest. The city won a default judgment, but no one could collect on it, in part because there was no personal guarantee made when the loan was awarded.

City Attorney John Russo said recently that it is up to the city’s Finance Department to collect on the $1.5 million judgment, which remains unpaid today.

The city wasn’t the only one left holding worthless paper when E.M. Health deteriorated. Orthopedic and Neurological Rehabilitation, Speech Pathology Inc. of Los Gatos sued Nedir Bey and Cecil R. Moody, an E.M. Health agent listed among business registration records, in 2000 to recover $8,700 worth of services it provided to the company’s patients over a two-month period. According to the lawsuit, E.M. Health billed MediCal and Medicare but never reimbursed the company.

In May, Daulet Bey, a Muslim wife of Yusuf Bey and mother of current bakery CEO Yusuf Bey IV, 21, and her daughter Jannah Bey filed papers to revive Qiyamah’s state business license. It’s not clear whether bakery associates plan to use Qiyamah to attempt a new business venture.

The license was promptly suspended again by the state Franchise Tax Board for failing to file an information report in 2005, according to spokeswoman Denise Azimi.

Nedir Bey’s costly experiment was finished and thousands in unaccounted for public funds were left in his wake.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell, and radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part 1

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Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series examining a $1million city loan to a Your Black Muslim Bakery affiliate that was never repaid.

It was a noble cause: Train welfare recipients as home health aides and put them to work caring for homebound sick and elderly clients.

A decade ago, while Your Black Muslim Bakery founder Yusuf Bey enjoyed unwavering support and adulation from black businesses and politicians, his spiritually adopted son, Nedir Bey, pressured and shamed city leaders into giving him a $1.1 million loan to help finance the promise of black entrepreneurial independence.

But the venture, E.M. Health Services, swiftly collapsed. The failure of CEO Nedir Bey to repay a dime of the loan made headlines at the time and prompted most to assume the company’s demise was caused by a combination of poor business decisions, bureaucratic hurdles and simple bad luck.

But was it?

City officials overlooked flaws in the company’s business plans and relented to black community leaders who insisted they award the loan, according to interviews, documents and other correspondence reviewed by the Chauncey Bailey Project.

The loan was granted to Nedir Bey despite his well-publicized arrest for the torture and kidnapping of a man two years earlier. Bey pleaded no contest to one felony count of false imprisonment and was sentenced to three years’ probation.

In awarding the loan to Nedir Bey, nearly every elected official lauded the accomplishments of Yusuf Bey in turning around the lives of troubled young men. Yet dozens of those men had armed themselves during a standoff with police two years earlier. And a few years later, Yusuf Bey himself would be accused of raping and fathering children with young girls who were placed in his care.

And the Chauncey Bailey Project has learned that in late 1999 and early 2000, the FBI investigated E.M. Health Services’ loan and Nedir Bey, although it’s not clear how the probe was resolved.

In the wake of reported real estate and welfare fraud allegedly committed by the wives and children of Yusuf Bey _ as well as the August arrest of a bakery member accused of the Aug. 2 shooting death of Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post _ a deeper review of the E.M. Health Services loan reveals several questionable expenses that suggest an internal pattern of cronyism that enriched nearly every facet of the bakery empire’s inner circle including:

-Tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees paid to companies controlled by Nedir Bey and his wife, Rosemarie Boothe-Bey, as well as other bakery insiders.

-Thousands of dollars in security fees paid to yet another company controlled by Your Black Muslim Bakery and thousands more in advertising fees paid to Universal Distributors, a company operated by associates of the bakery.

-$20,000 paid to the administrator of an Oakland home health company who had urged the city to award the loan to E.M. Health Services.

-Top-end salaries paid to Nedir Bey and his wife, Rosemarie Boothe, as well as to two of the Muslim wives of bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey who are accused of receiving fraudulent welfare payments at the time, and a second woman with whom Nedir Bey fathered children. Other bakery insiders filled the company’s payroll.

-15-day loans made to E.M. Health by Nedir Bey and other bakery associates that were repaid with hefty loan fees.

The beginnings

On April 30, 1996, the Oakland City Council awarded E.M. Health conditional approval for a $1.1million federal loan to establish a training program for home health aides.

According to loan documents and internal memos, the city approved that loan despite flaws in the company’s business plan and no discernible collateral or equity to back up the debt.

The money was part of a $44 million pot — half loan, half grant — awarded to the city by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to fund start-up ventures or help expand existing businesses in three distressed areas of Oakland with high unemployment rates. The federal money was supposed to create jobs, and it was intended for borrowers who could not qualify for conventional loans.

E.M. Health’s share of that pot — through the leadership of then-bakery lieutenant Nedir Bey — would further Yusuf Bey’s efforts to empower poor black residents and ex-cons by giving them training and job opportunities at various bakery outlets and private security companies affiliated with the patriarch’s expanding empire.

The loan proceeds were supposed to be used for start-up costs to recruit workers and patients, establish the home health training program and provide ongoing operating expenses.

The company never lived up to its promise. Ten years have passed and still not a cent has been repaid. The equipment pledged to secure the proceeds never surfaced. The promised jobs for low-income residents, as well as the promised services for sick and elderly clients, evaporated. The Oakland city attorney sued to recoup the debt, plus interest, but the city’s finance department has not been able to collect.

Nedir Bey, whose last listed occupation is business development consultant, would not answer questions about the business operations or why the company failed to take hold, saying that was “in the past.” In a brief telephone conversation, Bey said there were other Oakland businesses that defaulted on city loans and he asked if they were receiving the same level of scrutiny. Bey remains in Oakland but says he is no longer affiliated with the bakery.

Former bakery associate and businessman Ali Saleem Bey has spent the last several months trying to save the heavily indebted bakery enterprise from liquidation. Saleem Bey said he hasn’t spoken to Nedir Bey in years, but he defended E.M. Health’s efforts to provide job training and services to poor Oakland residents.

Saleem Bey, reached by phone, said the city subjected the business to undue scrutiny compared with others seeking public money. That scrutiny also led to the company being underfunded, Saleem Bey said, and contributed to its demise.

“We really felt we were sabotaged by the city, …” said Saleem Bey, who worked alongside other bakery associates to help launch the business.

“Politically, they never wanted to give us the money … and when it came time to work with us and make it go, they made it as hard as possible,” Saleem Bey said. “They wanted to wag their fingers at us.”

But the only thing that remains today from the ashes of E.M. Health is a considerable outstanding debt to taxpayers — a debt that could have been much larger.

Big plans, big loan requests

The Qiyamah Corp., E.M. Health’s nonprofit parent company, first filed state business registration papers in October 1993. The nonprofit organization was formed to expand the bakery’s community work and job training programs, and it wasn’t long before bakery members sought the city’s help in financing a new home health care venture.

Nedir Bey originally approached the city in approximately 1994 for a $3.4million loan to buy an apartment building on 24th Street in North Oakland. That would be used, he said at the time, as a base for his home health care program.

The building purchase didn’t qualify for HUD funds, and over time it was dropped from the plan. The loan request was whittled down to the $1.1 million, which was conditionally awarded to Qiyamah’s for-profit subsidiary, E.M. Health.

The company promised to create 32 full-time jobs, more than half of which would be filled by residents of West Oakland, East Oakland or San Antonio/Fruitvale — the three economically depressed areas targeted by HUD.

The company also promised to train 120 low-income residents and welfare recipients as home health workers, who would in turn provide services to Medicare and MediCal patients and other clients who were privately insured. According to E.M. Health’s business plan accepted by the city, insurance reimbursements would be more than sufficient to repay the loan. It might have worked if Nedir Bey had started small.

Instead, he purchased expensive office furniture and loaded the payroll with bakery insiders, most of whom had no health care experience, while spending little initially on actual medical supplies, according to loan documents.

Bill Claggett, the former director of Oakland’s Community and Economic Development Agency who inherited the E.M. loan in late 1997, said he couldn’t believe the city gave the company “a dime,” let alone $1.1 million.

“They didn’t know what they were doing,” Claggett said. “The cost per person served was much higher than any other similar business. It was clear (Bey) didn’t have the kind of staffing he needed for that operation.”

E.M. Health opened its doors on July 10, 1996, in an office storefront on Grand Avenue. That first year’s tax return posted income of $6,007 and a loss of $437,802. It spent $85,886 on consultants, $10,600 on security and only $5,708 for medical supplies. It survived almost exclusively on the city loan.

The list of employees included Nedir Bey’s wife, Rosemarie Boothe; and another woman, Kathy Leviege, with whom he has two children; family associate Janet Bey; and Madeeah Bey and Farieda Bey, two wives of bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey who are alleged to have received illegal welfare payments at the time, according to civil depositions taken recently in an unrelated case.

Within three months of receiving start-up funds from the city, Nedir Bey was on track to earn $108,000 a year, a figure that was out of line with what similar agencies in the Bay Area paid their CEOs, according to a spring 1997 memo in the city’s loan files.

Quarterly wage reports filed with the state show that Nedir Bey’s wife earned $47,000 as the assistant administrator, and Yusuf Bey’s wives — whose occupations were listed as marketing director and LVN/outreach coordinator — earned nearly $60,000 each, the same as Janet Bey, a registered public health nurse. Other than Janet Bey, none of the women had nursing degrees or related licenses, according to a review of state documents. Saleem Bey said it should not seem suspicious that members of the bakery’s extended family ended up on E.M. Health’s payroll. He said they worked many different jobs to help support the bakery empire and to further Yusuf Bey’s edict to be self-reliant.

He said they also worked alongside Nedir Bey to try and make the enterprise a success. To infer otherwise would be a mistake.

“It behooved the organization to be successful, so it wasn’t as if everybody was just eyeing this money and they wanted to steal a million,” Saleem Bey said. “If the business plan was successful, by this time it would have created 10 times that amount of money and created many jobs.”

Even so, the city’s loan staff requested that the compensation for E.M.’s three top executives be reduced by 20 percent, a move Nedir Bey protested in a memo to city officials.

Other questionable expenses

There were other missteps and invoices that city officials questioned before the city received the HUD proceeds, including a lease on a Cadillac and reimbursements to a security company controlled by the bakery.

One city staffer flagged the vehicle lease, $64,000 in consulting contracts, and thousands budgeted for security as ineligible uses of the federal funds. “Staff is exploring options for recovering these costs,” reads one memo from April 1, 1997.

That same year, in addition to their salaries, E.M. Health paid approximately $40,000 in consulting fees and service payments to Nedir Bey and relatives either directly or through companies that he and other associates of the bakery controlled, according to records on file with the city of Oakland.

Bakery associates also made 15-day loans to E.M. Health to cover operating expenses and charged substantial interest fees in return. Nedir Bey earned a $750 fee for a $9,000 loan he made to the company, and Ali Saleem Bey charged $1,000 interest for a $13,750 loan. Time after time, city staff questioned the invoices E.M. Health submitted for reimbursement, asking for more details or supporting documentation. But the money was never withheld for long.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell and freelance radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Remember the main

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Our end-of-’07 road tour, with a Where have you gone Nancy Pelosi? theme (to be sung to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s "Mrs. Robinson") took me to two states I’d never been to before, Idaho and Montana. In the former, no Larry Craig sightings, but we did keep out of REIs. In the latter, mammoth main courses in restaurants, about which more presently. As for the states-visited list, it is sizable if not mammoth, with Texas and Florida still in the penalty box. There I expect they shall remain. Daniel Walker Howe’s excellent (if mammoth) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford, 904 pages, $35) contains a fine account of the exertions required on our part to wrest Texas from Mexico, and as a reader luxuriating in hindsight, I found myself thinking: this was not wise.

The main course has been taking a hosing lately, and it isn’t hard to see why. If you think these dishes are too big here — and they are — you’re likely to split a seam at what’s being served beyond the Bay Area bubble, out there in our beloved red states. The situation is like a culinary version of grade inflation; side dishes are sizable enough to be appetizers, while appetizers are big enough to be main courses, and main courses are basically indescribable. Immense. At the Lodge at Whitefish Lake one evening we naively opened with a Mediterranean flat bread, a kind of pizza with olives, feta, and tomatoes and a ramekin of hummus on the side, before moving on to soup and salad, and then the main event.

Why, I thought too late, did I order pot roast after all that? The pot roast was excellent, but was it necessary to include two six-ounce slabs of beef, along with mashed potatoes?

Across the table a cooler head prevailed, and a more modest main course was ordered: shrimp diablo on a bed of multicolored orzo. And the cooler head wisely didn’t even eat all of it. For various bad reasons ("Live, live all you can!" Henry James wrote. "It’s a mistake not to!" Plus, you’re on vacation!), I ate all of mine, in addition to nibbling at the orzo, and wondered if I would live.

We can’t blame restaurants for serving (and charging for) 4,000-calorie plates when there are people dopey enough to eat them. Memo to dopey self: Think small. Remember your stomach. Choose life.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Tiger tales

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More on the SF Zoo:
>>20 Questions the zoo won’t answer
>>Editorial: Take back the zoo
>>Opinion: Shut down the zoo
>>From 1999: The Zoo Blues

› news@sfbg.com

When I first heard about the attack at the San Francisco Zoo, I felt strangely vindicated to learn that a Siberian tiger had been involved. I am irrationally prejudiced when it comes to big cats: I don’t like Siberians. Of all the tigers, lions, jaguars, and other exotic animals I have known in my day — and I grew up on a wild animal farm, so I have known quite a few — the only ones that truly frightened me were a chimpanzee named Lolita and a pair of Siberians (they’re known as Amurs now) that lived in an old shed about 100 feet from my front door.

When I read in March that two chimps from a California primate sanctuary had attacked a 62-year-old man, biting off much of his face, tearing off his foot, and mutiutf8g his genitals, I thought of Mike’s thumb. And when I heard that Tatiana had attacked three young men, killing one of them, I immediately thought of his ear.

Mike Bleyman was a biologist who built a research and breeding compound outside Pittsboro, NC, and like many exotic-animal fanatics he had a tendency to lose body parts. Fortunately, the surgeons in Chapel Hill were skilled at sewing them back on.

Mike was also my stepfather. My parents divorced when I was in junior high, and when my mother moved in with Mike on "the farm," I went with her.

I was present when Lolita bit Mike’s thumb right through the bone, almost severing it completely. I was away at college when the tiger got him.

Mike had arranged a trade with the Albuquerque Zoo in New Mexico — two Siberians and a Himalayan black bear for a young Sumatran tiger. Mike hit both tigers with tranquilizer darts. But ketamine, the drug of choice for sedating big cats, takes several minutes to work, and being an impatient man who didn’t play by the rules, Mike entered the cage before the recommended time had passed. When he approached the male, the female roused herself. She slashed Mike across the back, dislocated his elbow, and removed his ear.

The fact that Mike was able to extract himself from the cage alive is testament to the fact that the ketamine had at least begun to have an impact. Siberian tigers are not creatures you want to mess with.

Our other tigers, all Bengals, were sociable and playful. As I walked by they would chuffle their hellos. I would chuffle back and reach through the fence to scratch their necks or rub their noses. The Siberians, however, had a flat affect, rarely vocalized, and menacingly tracked passing humans.

I know it’s not fair to judge an entire subspecies by two individuals, and these cats had every reason to be sullen. They had evolved to preside as alpha predators over rugged territories of hundreds of square miles, and they were being forced to live sedentary lives in a gloomy shed probably no bigger than 200 square feet. But fair or not, they freaked me out.

I have been thinking a lot about those cats in the past couple of weeks as I have read the news stories coming from San Francisco. As someone who has bottle-fed several cubs, built my share of tiger cages, and shoveled more than my share of tiger shit, I know more than a little about Felis tigris.

I have been equally fascinated, if not more so, by the behavior of the other species that populates this tragic tale, the one known as Homo sapiens. In addition to being a former tiger farmer, I am also a journalist who once covered San Francisco politics. I still work occasionally as a communications consultant to nonprofits, and in my day job I am a manager of a small state agency and work regularly with elected officials. So when I look at this story through the lens of a behaviorist, I think about the traits of various human subspecies — politicians, bureaucrats, managers, spin doctors, journalists, self-proclaimed experts, and supposed guardians of health and safety. Frankly, I am not impressed.

Tatiana was killed for being a tiger. Tigers have only one self. They are what they are; end of story. Humans are a different order of being: we are capable of self-deception. We can lie to ourselves, we can deny what is right in front of us, we can try to shift blame, and we can avoid the things we know we should face.

And thereon hangs this tiger tale.

TARZAN AND TIGER ISLAND


People have often asked me over the years why my stepfather had all of his animals. I like to tell them it was because he thought he was Tarzan. It’s not the absolute truth, but it is as valid as any other answer.

It started in the 1970s, when he just drove down to Florida one day and came back with a tiger cub.

For her first several months there, Gretchen had the run of the farm. I remember one weekend when Mike was teaching us to shoot: my sister Gwenn was lying in the bed of a battered red Toyota pickup, one eye closed and the other sighting down a rifle barrel at a paper bull’s-eye. She never saw the tiger stalking her from behind. As soon as Gretchen was near enough, she closed in a sudden burst, easily cleared the side of the bed, and landed squarely on Gwenn’s back. Gwenn just huffed, "Gretchen, get off," and calmly squeezed the trigger.

Gretchen, however, was soon too large to be treated like a funny-looking dog. Mike hired a backhoe operator to dig a moat around a knoll where an abandoned farmhouse perched. The man arrived on a day when Mike’s very wild foster daughter, Dianne, had cooked brownies. The backhoe operator didn’t realized they were laced with pot and ate a few. It took a long time to finish the job, in part because the guy kept nodding off, and in the end the moat had a peculiar shape.

Mike didn’t mind. He just put up an acircular fence around the acircular moat and called it Tiger Island.

The fence was 12 feet tall and built of heavy-gauge chain link. A barbed-wire overhang jutted inward from the top at a 45-degree angle. A tiger might be able to leap to the top of a 12-foot fence, but the moat meant there was no solid place from which Gretchen could launch herself.

If she tried to hurdle the fence, she’d have to start at least 10 feet back. And if she crossed the moat and pulled herself onto the narrow bank, she would have to jump straight up. That would mean an encounter with the overhang. She wouldn’t climb the fence because chain link is too wobbly. It was the way the moat and the fence and the overhang worked together that made the compound secure. Even when the moat ran dry in later years, a tiger would still have had to jump from the bottom of the dry moat, making the total leap on the order of 16 or 17 feet.

In other words, a stoned heavy-equipment operator and a somewhat oddball zoologist, with a few thousand dollars’ worth of chain link and barbed wire, managed to make a very secure tiger pen. I have to wonder why the privatized San Francisco Zoo, with millions of dollars in bond money and a director who earns $339,000 a year, couldn’t.

THE MISSING WALL


Early reports from San Francisco described the tiger grotto as having a wall and a moat as if they were separate things and gave dimensions for both — initially 15 feet for the moat and 20 feet for the wall. When I read that, I began examining aerial photos to look for other points of egress. I studied the height and the angle of the side walls.

All tigers can climb trees. Amur habitat includes mountain ranges. They don’t like steep slopes, but they’re capable of scrambling over rocky faces. Perhaps Tatiana got out that way, I thought, but I soon rejected the idea.

The aerials showed me the initial reports were inaccurate. There never was a wall and a moat. Tatiana’s compound was nothing like Gretchen’s. There was only a moat, and the so-called wall was simply the far bank. The moat isn’t, in zoological terms, either a physical or a psychological fail-safe. It’s simply a way of recessing a wall into the earth so it doesn’t block human sight lines.

A dry moat can actually be worse than a wall because the far bank gives a tiger launching points. When the jump-off point is around the same elevation as the top of the far bank, as it is at the San Francisco Zoo, the moat’s depth may not matter. The question becomes not how high the tiger can jump but how far it can leap. History and a close look at pictures of the grotto suggest that is exactly the question San Francisco and zoos everywhere should be asking.

One rule of thumb is that a moat needs to be four times the average body length of the species it is suppose to contain, which for an Amur is just an inch shy of six feet. That means a moat should be at least 24 feet across. I’m skeptical of this calculation. Mean body length for a mountain lion, for example, puts the recommended moat distance at just over 13 feet, yet there are credible reports of mountain lions leaping 35 feet.

An alternative is the cat’s known leaping distance plus 20 percent. The oft-reported leaping distance is 20 feet, so the minimum width would again be 24 feet. There are accounts of tigers leaping 30 to 33 feet, but I have not been able to determine whether these were documented. In China, the Yangtze River runs through Leaping Tiger Gorge, so named because a tiger leaped the river to escape a hunter, according to local lore. The river at its narrowest is about 82 feet wide. The story is a fable, but it gives you a sense of the tiger’s reputation as a prodigious leaper. Based on my years of observing tigers at play, 30 feet does not seem at all out of the question.

Such calculations likely contributed to the standards of two Association of Zoos and Aquarium committees. Both the AZA Felid Technical Advisory Group and the AZA Nutrition Advisory Group recommend a minimum width of 25 feet for a tiger moat.

So imagine my reaction when Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo stated his belief that the tiger could not have escaped from the moat, while also saying that according Zoo records, the moat was 20 feet across. I have never met Mollinedo, and he didn’t return my calls, but in my opinion the man has no idea what he is talking about.

Then came reports that the moat is 33 feet across. Well … sort of, maybe, kind of. It may be 33 feet from wall to wall, but the bank on the grotto side slopes to a flat floor 20 feet across. Some clever bloke decided to make the transition look more natural by placing fake boulders atop the slope. These project out into the moat and in some cases rise above the grotto floor. A tiger that launched from the lip of one of these would have to cross far less than 30 feet.

I asked the Zoo for the narrowest leap between the outside wall and these "rocks." Zoo officials didn’t respond. So I went out there with my tape measure.

The tiger grotto is closed off, and Zoo officials also declined to answer my request for access to the area. But through a side window I was able to study a neighboring lion grotto with a similar design. A rock ledge stuck out into the moat more than seven feet, leaving a gap I measured along the outer wall at about 25 feet. Using aerial photographs and online measuring tools to look at Tatiana’s grotto, I repeatedly got widths of less than 24 feet.

In other words, the width of the moat most likely does not meet AZA standards, which could hardly be described as overly cautious.

NO MARGIN FOR ERROR


The world soon found out the bank of Tatiana’s grotto was less than 12.5 feet high, and experts quickly agreed that a motivated tiger could have surmounted the wall. Yet Mollinedo was still expressing disbelief.

We know tigers pluck monkeys from tree branches, bound over steep rock faces, and jump on the backs of large prey. But how tall do they stand, and how much can they elevate? The best evidence I can find of an Amur’s reach comes from the field studies of Anatolii Grigor’evich Yudakov. One way Amurs mark their territory is by making scratches high in the bark of trees. Yudakov measured these marks at 210 to 290 centimeters, or roughly 7 to 9.5 feet.

For an Amur standing on its hind legs to reach the top of a 12.5 foot wall, it would have to elevate another 3 to 5.5 feet. Remember Gretchen jumping effortlessly over the side rail of a small pickup? Four feet.

A major prey species for Amurs is the Manchurian red deer, which stands up to five feet at the shoulder. Though not sourced, many references report a vertical leap for tigers of six feet. Take a tiger with a reach of almost 10 feet and a vertical leap of six feet, and suddenly the industry standard of a 16-foot wall has no appreciable margin for error.

Then there are the events of May 14, 1994, when a Bengal tiger in India’s Kaziranga National Park attacked a man on the back of an elephant. According to a press release from Wildlife Trust International, executive director Vivek Menon reviewed footage of the attack and exclaimed, "I could never imagine that a tiger could so effortlessly leap from the ground onto an adult elephant’s head, which is at least 12 feet above the ground."

There has been much speculation about whether a captive tiger is capable of matching the jumping ability of a wild cat. Presumably a confined tiger would be sluggish, out of shape, her muscles atrophied. No one to my knowledge, though, has studied the sports physiology of tigers.

I can say from personal experience that even captive tigers are incredibly agile and powerful. We had a Bengal named Engels (the litter was born on May Day) who lived on Tiger Island. One day a female Bengal tried to snatch some food from him. He swiped at her almost casually, hitting her in the side. The force of the blow immediately stopped the young tiger’s heart, and she fell over dead.

THE LONG JUMP


So what happened that day at the Zoo? So far, none of the witnesses are talking. Media accounts suggest one scenario: Tatiana may have stood on her hind legs against the wall, pushed off from the bottom of the moat, grabbed the top of the wall with her front paws, and leveraged herself up and over by digging her hind claws into the wall. That’s conceivable, I guess. Tatiana may even have escaped before the attack and waited for her prey in the tall grass beside the moat.

I have a very hard time imagining that, though. For one thing, the wall curves outward at the top. For another, such methodical, incremental movement is not typical of a tiger. They stalk their prey slowly, but in a brutal burst, they close with amazing speed. I am convinced Tatiana exploded from the grotto, landed on the lip, and then powered her way up. Whether she sprang from one of the protruding rocks, the sloped bank, or the moat floor is almost immaterial, but I am inclined to believe she jumped over the moat.

Strangely, Mollinedo may have been on the right track at a Dec. 28 press conference when he said, "How she jumped that high is beyond me." She may not have jumped high at all; I suspect she just jumped long.

I base this on my observations of tigers and my study of grotto photographs, but it is supported by history. There are three known escapes from Tatiana’s grotto and one near escape. In one case the escape went unwitnessed.

Keepers Jack Castor and John Alcaraz walked by the grotto one day a few years back and saw a Bengal named Jack wandering outside, Alcaraz told me by phone. They yelled at him, and he jumped back in.

David Rentz witnessed another escape in 1959, when he was a young Zoo volunteer. He’s an entomologist in Australia now, and he recently wrote in his blog that the tiger "flew across the moat from his position on the other side … and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement." There had been previous reports this same tiger could jump the moat.

Then there’s the near escape witnessed by Marian Roth-Cramer in 1997. In an interview in the Dec. 27 San Francisco Chronicle, she said, "I saw the tiger leap over the moat." This makes me wonder why so much coverage has focused on the height of the wall and not the width of the moat.

Media coverage has also focused on whether the men taunted or teased Tatiana. I find this discussion ludicrous. Zoos know animal abuse comes with the territory. They must anticipate it, prevent it, and prepare for its consequences. It’s part of the job. And besides, how does one taunt a tiger?

When I think of taunting, I think of the French kibitzers and King Arthur’s men in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a scene reprised in Spamalot. I imagine some kids shouting into the grotto, "Your mother was a wild boar, and you father smelt of porcelainberries. I scent-mark in your general direction."

Teasing a confined animal means tempting it with something it can’t have — a ball, say, or your throat.

Tatiana wasn’t teased. She got what she wanted.

Tigers attack for limited reasons — they see you as prey, they see you as a threat to them, their cubs, or their food, or they dislike you because of something you did to them. Perhaps Tatiana saw the young men as a threat. Perhaps they pissed her off. But a simpler explanation is that their behavior got the cat’s attention, and perhaps they crossed the fence and got too close to the edge, until at some point Tatiana identified Kulbir Dhaliwal as prey that had come within range. It seems significant that the attack occurred at twilight, since tigers are crepuscular, meaning they are most active then. It’s their favorite time to hunt.

Naturalist and western novelist Dane Coolidge wrote in 1901 that Indians classify tigers as game killers, cattle lifters, or man killers. People have suggested tigers become human killers because they develop a taste for human flesh. I believe tigers will eat almost anything — but they’re wary of taking on prey that might fight back effectively. They lose any hesitancy when they discover just how vulnerable we humans are. Tatiana proved she had no inhibitions about dining on human flesh when she attacked keeper Lori Kamejan in 2006.

Carlos Sousa Jr. apparently tried to distract Tatiana from her attempted "kill," and I use that term loosely since tigers naturally feed on prey that is still alive, and captive tigers are in-between creatures, psychologically speaking. Wild cubs learn from their mothers to dispatch prey effectively, but captive-bred tigers are never taught that skill. In terms of hardware, they may be the world’s finest killers, but their software is buggier than Windows Vista.

Tigers often have to protect their prey after an attack. They are followed by wild dogs and bears that try to scavenge their kills, and herd animals will sometimes try to rescue a herdmate. Tatiana most likely fought off the threat from Sousa, slashing his throat in the process, then tracked her wounded prey to finish what she started. It wasn’t a rampage, a vicious and angry outburst, as media reports have described it, just the methodical, instinctive actions of a top-of-the-line predator.

THE BIPED PROBLEM


If you look at what led up to Tatiana’s escape, you follow a trail of denial and avoidance.

Consider the players, starting with Zoo management and keepers.

Zoo staffers have known for almost a half century that a tiger could jump out of that grotto. Carey Baldwin, then the Zoo director, witnessed the escape with Rentz in 1959. His solution, according to Rentz’s blog, was to post instructions to keep the offending tiger indoors. Castor’s solution to Jack’s escape was to fill the moat with water, according to Alcaraz, but that practice ended after Jack died. Neither solution was permanent or designed to deal with the next strong-legged, strong-willed tiger to come along.

When Roth-Cramer witnessed the near escape, a passing keeper apparently laughed it off. She reportedly wrote a letter to then–Zoo director David Anderson, but there is no evidence her letter produced any response.

As far as we can tell, no one ever tried to convince the AZA or federal regulators that they needed tougher standards or tougher enforcement. No one took the story to the press or published a journal article to warn other Zoo professionals. No one posted public warnings, ordered changes to the grotto, banned tigers from the exhibit, or shut the lion house.

Mollinedo should have known about the problem if his keepers knew. But there seems to be a lot he doesn’t know, and previous Guardian reports and a recent Chronicle article suggest communication has broken down between employees, particularly keepers, and Zoo management. Lower-level staff complain of not being heard, not being consulted. Morale is low. Institutional knowledge is being lost as keepers quit in frustration.

And what about the regulators? Ron Tilson, the conservation director of the Minnesota Zoo, said in a Dec. 27 Chronicle story that the AZA standard, which he said was seven meters (closer to 23 feet), is "very conservative." Yet this has less than a 20 percent safety margin when you consider the conventional wisdom about how far a tiger can jump, and it is far less than reported leaps of 30 feet or more.

The day after the attack, the AZA issued a statement that "AZA accreditation standards contain no specific dimensions for big cat enclosures." The AZA did not return calls seeking comment, but what it provides is really a set of guidelines produced by advisory committees for a voluntary association composed of the very institutions being regulated. The guidelines aren’t consistently known and have never been fully implemented.

We know the AZA accredited the San Francisco Zoo despite a wall almost four feet shorter than the recommended height.

In 1974 the Philadelphia Zoo surveyed 10 other zoos about their tiger moats. It published the findings in the 1976 International Zoo Yearbook. San Francisco reported its moat was 13.5 feet deep. Detroit said its moat was 15.5 feet deep. Chicago’s moat was only 21 feet wide, and Tulsa reported between 15 and 20 feet. Oklahoma’s moat was only 17 feet wide. Half of the surveyed zoos couldn’t meet AZA recommendations.

There are signs the San Francisco Zoo did not meet other AZA standards. For example, the AZA’s 2008 Accreditation Standards and Related Policies states, "A written protocol should be developed involving local police or other emergency agencies." On Jan. 3, I e-mailed 20 questions to the Zoo’s public relations firm, many of which related to AZA standards. For example, I asked about the last emergency drill and about gun training. I also asked for copies of related Zoo policies. The Zoo never responded. But the next day Mollinedo announced that the Zoo is working with police at Taraval Station on a coordinated emergency response and that police and Zoo shooters will be training together.

The United States Department of Agriculture regulates zoos as exhibitors under the Animal Welfare Act. That act and the rules written to implement it are primarily meant to ensure healthy conditions for the animals. They contain specifications for the size of the fences around the outside of a zoo facility to keep unauthorized people out, not for the fences separating the animals from visitors.

And local oversight? The city owns the grounds and the animals. Zoo employees are part of the city employees union. But since 1993 the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society has owned the institution and operated it under a contract with the city. There were problems at the Zoo when the city ran it, but, as Sup. Tom Ammiano told me, "Nobody died."

The contract retains a role for the city through a Joint Zoo Committee of society board members and Recreation and Park Department commissioners. I have gone though the minutes of that committee going back several years, and I have to say the committee provides as much oversight as the stuffed animals in the Zoo’s gift ship. As Ammiano put it, "It’s all lip service."

The employee relations problems, the animal injuries and deaths (see Opinion, page 7), and other management issues at the Zoo are nothing new. Savannah Blackwell reported on these same sets of issues for the Guardian twice — see "The Zoo Blues" (5/19/99) and "The Zoo’s Losers" (5/7/03) — and there is no indication anything has been done.

The city’s contract with the Zoological Society and the Joint Zoo Committee should mean Zoo documents are public under the city’s sunshine laws. But the Zoo has not been forthcoming with key documents requested by the media. Sup. Sean Elsbernd has called for hearings, and Ammiano said there will be multiple hearings. "I think the key issues are accountability and transparency," he said.

The Zoo’s high-priced director has demonstrated that his knowledge of the animals under his care, the condition of his facilities, and the concerns of his staff are embarrassingly limited. In press conferences he looked befuddled, evaded questions, broke every rule of crisis communication, and speculated about the victims without clear information.

The Zoo hired Sam Singer, supposedly a crisis communication specialist, but I have attended multiple trainings in crisis communication, and I have to say he seems more like a fixer to me. And despite this, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the society’s board publicly support Mollinedo.

Mollinedo and his PR people have tried to direct blame toward the victims. Perhaps they were drunk, stoned, rowdy, throwing things — but if Tatiana was killed for being a tiger, it could also be argued that Sousa was killed for being a young man.

There’s a whole process of brain development that scientists are now beginning to understand. The maturation of brain cells through something called myelination starts from the back of the brain. The front of the brain, the seat of executive functions like judgment, matures last. Young people often don’t make good decisions. Boys, in particular, take unnecessary risks.

In the public health world, we understand this and concentrate on policies that control risk and reduce harm. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold the survivors accountable for anything they might have done, but it does mean the Zoo has no business shifting the blame.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with more avoidance than a tiger has stripes.

In the end, this was a human problem. People weren’t doing their jobs. They had not taken action when it was clearly needed. And in the end, the only innocent creature in this drama was the one that had no choice other than to be what she was. Her name was Tatiana.

And now she is dead, along with a young man whose parents loved and miss him very much.

Craig McLaughlin is a former Guardian managing editor. He is coauthor of Health Policy Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Jones and Bartlett, 2008).

1300 on Fillmore

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Ordinarily one would be distressed, though these days hardly surprised, by the news that a farmers market in the midst of the city was being displaced by a brand-new building full of luxury condos, with a fancy restaurant on the ground floor. Although farmers markets, like coyotes, have been modestly flourishing in the city of late, they are still a delicate species whose natural habitat — often parking lots — invites predation by developers. Then there is the horror of contemporary architecture, which reflects, simultaneously, our fetish for the industrial and our indifference to the touch of the human hand, the small but artful detail that gives warmth and life to big buildings with expansive spaces. Without that touch, too many of our just-raised edifices are nothing more than triumphal and simplistic tombs made of concrete, steel, and glass.

The Fillmore farmers market began in the spring of 2003, in a parking lot at the corner of Fillmore and Eddy, and was of particular value not least because it brought high-quality fresh produce at reasonable prices to one of the city’s less golden neighborhoods. One chilly evening a few weeks ago, I found myself at that corner and was completely disoriented; a huge building had sprung up in the parking lot, like a giant mushroom after an autumn rain, and the few blocks of Fillmore below Geary seemed more than ever like one of Manhattan’s canyons, with the valets at Yoshi’s smiling and motioning to passersby like those guys who try to lure people into girlie shows in North Beach.

We weren’t on our way to Yoshi’s, as it happened, but to 1300 on Fillmore, a quietly glamorous new restaurant that brings a touch of Mecca SF–like magic to a historic, jazz-inflected neighborhood. (Meantime, to end the suspense, if any: the farmers market, though displaced, survives nearby, at Steiner and O’Farrell.) Although the restaurant keeps a poker face to the street — just a succession of smoked-glass panels, like a display of the world’s biggest sunglasses — its L-shaped interior is both spacious and clubby. A wealth of wood glows with warmth under the halogen spot lamps, while all of those windows are hung with tall, gauzy draperies, ready to billow in a breeze that will never blow through.

If we were somewhere in the South, the absence of a breeze would grow oppressive at a point well before high summer, and we would stomp our feet and demand mint juleps or iced tea. But we’re here, in our blue state and ice blue city, so we must make do with the Southern touches chef and owner David Lawrence brings to his sophisticated menu, beginning with the triangles of corn bread that quickly appear at the table, ready to be spread with butter or, for those with a bit of derring-do, pepper jelly, or best of all, with both.

The smaller courses range from homey to urbane. An example of the first is a plate of hush puppies ($13), half a dozen peeled shrimp dipped in a peppery batter, deep-fried, and presented in a crock with a side pot of ancho chile rémoulade. The cosmopolite, tempted by but wary of deep-frying, might let his companion order this dish, and maybe the fat fries too ($6), with homemade ketchup, for overkill, while choosing for himself the oyster bisque ($9) — classy, but tasting at least as much of cream as of oysters — or the sautéed wild mushrooms ($9) seated on a bed of white polenta. These last two dishes were brought to us slightly underseasoned, but a handsome little tray of salt and ground pepper was already on the table, which made it easy for us to take corrective action and implied we were meant to.

Undersalting was a more serious issue with the maple-glazed beef short rib ($28), a thick disk of meat with a bit of bone sticking out of the middle. It looked like a wheel that had flown off a Weber kettle. We could taste the maple on the surface of the meat, which was fork tender and moist, but once we penetrated to the interior of the great disk, we found ourselves in dim lighting indeed. The beef’s enveloping sidekicks — fried onion rings on top, mashed potatoes underneath — were good but peripheral in every sense.

Better was arctic char ($25), a salmonlike fish presented as a breaded and crisped fillet, almost perfectly square, nested atop a tasty hash of roasted brussels sprouts, fingerling potatoes, bits of lobster, and balsamic gastrique. I didn’t detect much Southern influence, but the flavors and textures were beautifully integrated and the portion size was ideal, especially with the wheel of beef looming across the table.

If the savory courses seem as much Pacific as Gulf Coast, the dessert menu speaks with an unmistakable drawl. There are first-rate beignets ($8), three doughnut torpedoes lightly dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar and ready for dunking into either warm chocolate sauce or coffee foam, which had a root-beerish fizz along with a hint of chicory: New Orleans coffee, we guessed. A gingerbread napoleon ($8), meanwhile, looked "like the de Young Museum," according to a tablemate with whom I’d been pleasurably commiserating about the de Young Museum. At least the napoleon — an elaborate modernist construct of wafers, gingerbread pudding, whipped cream, and a square of apple-caramel jelly — was edible, as opposed to bulletproof.

Service: attentive if slightly erratic (some dishes to the wrong people). These are usually teething troubles, and the best thing about teething troubles is that you outgrow them to have a long run, which you’re pretty sure you will. You’re jazzed. *

1300 ON FILLMORE

Daily, 5–11 p.m.

1300 Fillmore, SF

(415) 771-7100

www.1300fillmore.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Well-modulated noise

Wheelchair accessible

Feeding the food brainiac

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› paulr@sfbg.com


Amid the agonies and anxieties of last-minute holiday shopping can be found at least one sure stocking stuffer, provided your list includes a food brainiac (with a Christmas stocking). You’ll know one when you meet one; a large clue will be a passionate interest in not merely recipes and restaurants but also the cultural story they help tell.

And what is that sure thing, in a world where many a gift goes astray like a bad JDAM? A book, of course, since the reports of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated and the food brainiac loves books. One of the better food brainiac–friendly books available is Lilia Zaouali’s Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World (University of California Press, $24.95), whose subtitle, A Concise History with 174 Recipes, suggests that we aren’t talking about a volume with a companion Saturday-morning, how-to-cook-it series on public television.

No, Zaouali’s book dwells more on the history than the recipes, which are interesting though possibly too vague to be of much use in the contemporary, anal-retentive kitchen. Even a reasonably competent home cook is likely to be uneasy about such instructions as "put some red meat cut into small pieces in a pot with some water. When it is cooked, strain it and brown it in fat" (from a recipe for rutabiyya, or meat with dates).

But even if your brainiac never boils a dollop of honey in a splash of vinegar (medieval Islamic cooking being rich in sweet-sour effects), pleasurable sustenance can be had from the book’s many fascinating historical nuggets: the migratory route of couscous from North Africa through Sicily into Tuscany, for instance, or the Moorish roots (culinary and linguistic) of the dish the Spanish call escabeche, or the religious importance to Muslims of eating meat (other than pork) with most meals. As Zaouali puts it, "One may wonder whether a vegetarian could be admitted to the community of believers."

Of transcendent interest is not the bequest of medieval Islamic cooks to their modern heirs in both the Middle East and Europe but their own debt to the Romans, many of whose ingredients and flavor patterns they adopted and continued. The Roman gastronome Apicius, who lived at the time of Christ, is especially relevant here. For details, consult your stocking.

Chopped liver

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS What I like about technology is iTunes, because you can do a search for songs about rivers. It’s coming up on Christmas. People are cutting down trees, putting up reindeer, singing songs of joy and peace. I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

This week’s column will attempt to answer the oft-asked and seldom fully explored question, "What am I? Chopped liver?"

There’s an easy answer. That’s why the question’s seldom fully explored. But you know and I know that easy answers don’t tend to be any righter than convoluted ones. Plus, they’re not nearly as fun. So let’s put on a pot of coffee and our thinking caps and work this one out. Shall we?

Speaking of breaking it down, thank you for riding in the nervous breakdown lane with me last week. Like a lot of other people and Joni Mitchell, I don’t do too well during the holidays. Not anymore. I think it’s because I have friends and parties and now even dates and shit, so I get desperately nostalgic for the happy days when I would spend Christmas camping out by myself in the desert, or holing up in Idaho with Mr. and Mrs. Johnny "Jack" Poetry and some llamas.

Now, alas, I am popular and neurotic. I was at an art opening at this sex club, on my hands and knees on the floor … cleaning up the wine I’d just spilled all over my pretty dress and everything, when I overheard the following from somewhere up and over me, where heads were:

"Are you ready for your Hanukkah party?"

"I can’t find anyone to make the chopped liver. Nobody knows how to make chopped liver. Do you know how to make chopped liver?"

"No."

I jumped to my feet and located the owners of the voices. "I don’t know how to make chopped liver either!" I said. "But I love liver and would like to learn!"

Luckily I knew the conversationalists. They were friends of a friend and had no choice now but to invite me to their Hanukkah party. Didn’t I tell you I was popular?

The art show was on a Saturday, and the Hanukkah party was on Wednesday, so I had four days to learn how to make a dish that I had not only never made but also never eaten. I’d never even seen it. I’m not Jewish. I started calling all of my Jewish friends and exes and asking them who makes the best chopped liver. And, being good Jews, they all said the same exact thing: their mother.

The Liver Lady, the only one I know who loves liver more than I do, gave me the general idea: chopped-up chicken livers, some chicken fat, chopped-up onions, and hard-boiled eggs, also chopped. She would have been more exact, she said, but her mom was out of town.

I e-mailed Crawdad de la Cooter’s mom, my favorite ever ex-mother-in-law and kitchen comrade and, according to Crawdad, the best chopped-liver maker in the world. She sent a recipe, but I didn’t exactly follow it, even though it called for enormous amounts of butter. I figured if I was going to impress the Jews — which is, after all, my ultimate goal in life — I was eventually going to have to learn to make schmaltz.

Now, schmaltz … schmaltz is a beautiful thing. Especially considering what a goofy word it is. What you do is, you cut all the fat and skin off a chicken, throw it in a frying pan with some onions, and render the bejesus out of it. What you wind up with is not bacon grease, but it’s up there. Bacon fat, butter, schmaltz. I fried the chopped onions in it, broiled the chicken livers, boiled the eggs, and then brought everything together and chopped it some more.

So that’s chopped liver. As for the rest of the question, the "What am I?" … Um, the punctuation? The mark at the end of the question, the dot dot dot. Period. Pause. Your huckleberry friend?

Oh, and the chopped liver, yes. The host said it was the best he’d ever had. Out of respect for his mother, I won’t print his name.

My new favorite restaurant is Pho 84. Its hot and sour soup not only is the hottest hot and sour soup going but also has — get this — okra in it. Swimming with the shrimps and celery and pineapple and tomato. Only thing: try getting out of there for $10 or under. Definitely a date place. *

PHO 84

Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5–9 p.m.; Sat., noon–9 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

354 17th St., Oakl.

(510) 832-1338

Takeout available

Beer/wine

AE/MC/V

Homes for whom?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

After years of letting the free market dictate San Francisco’s housing mix — as a result steadily losing ground on the city’s affordable housing goals — the Board of Supervisors appears primed to place an ambitious bond measure on the fall 2008 ballot to address the housing imbalance.

Winning the necessary support from two-thirds of voters won’t be easy, coming on a ballot with the majority of supervisorial seats up for grabs, the presidential election, and a likely bond measure for rebuilding General Hospital. But Sup. Chris Daly, author of the affordable-housing bond measure, believes it’s a good time to have progressives focus on this most important of problems facing the city.

Last summer affordable-housing funds became a political football in a budget showdown between Daly and Mayor Gavin Newsom, a fight Newsom won, leading to a budget that prioritizes clean streets and a beefed-up Police Department over affordable housing. Newsom’s reelection campaign, which was just gearing up at the time, successfully cast Daly as the villain after the occasionally hotheaded supervisor threatened to bolster housing funds by cutting Newsom’s "pet projects," as Daly called them, which included a community justice center, a Police Academy class, street trees, and the Small Business Assistance Center.

Daly clearly lost that duel when he was savaged by the media and removed from his chair on the Budget Committee by board president Aaron Peskin. But now Daly has bounced back on the issue and secured solid support for his measure, which progressives and affordable-housing activists are already gearing up to fight for next year.

"Just because Newsom had a significant political operation this year does not mean that the affordable-housing issue went away," Daly told the Guardian after securing support for the amendment from six of his colleagues and a broad coalition of housing activists.

The measure would set aside $2.7 billion in city funds for affordable housing over 15 years. It is cosponsored by Sups. Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, Ross Mirkarimi, Gerardo Sandoval, Sophie Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, and Peskin and backed by Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth (which has made affordable family housing its top priority), the San Francisco Organizing Project, and the Housing Justice Coalition.

The measure would give affordable housing the same baseline of funding that the city already allocates to the Recreation and Park Department fund and the Library Preservation Fund — and less than what it sets aside for the Children, Youth and Families fund, the police fund, and the fire station maintenance fund.

"If we don’t have affordable housing, who is going to use the parks and the libraries?" housing activist Calvin Welch asked.

The amendment would also require the Mayor’s Office of Housing to prepare an affordable-housing plan every three years, present an annual affordable-housing budget, and complete these steps before the rest of the mayor’s budget proposals are finalized.

"I hope these provisions will bring some much-needed transparency and clarity to the affordable-housing process so we can avoid the train wreck of last year," Welch said.

In a June 8 editorial still posted at Newsom’s www.actlocally.org reelection Web site, the San Francisco Chronicle appears to have bought the mayor’s spin that Daly’s request to prioritize housing was all just political theater.

"There was nothing wise or efficient about Supervisor Chris Daly’s bald political ploy to strip $37 million from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget priorities and shift most of it into affordable housing," the Chronicle claimed. "Now let’s be clear. We know that San Francisco does need housing. Newsom’s budget also acknowledges the shortage, pumping $217 million into housing programs."

But, according to Welch, "the lie was that Newsom allocated $217 million when he really only allocated $78 million and the board added a further $10 million to the pot…. Newsom was taking credit for more than he was actually allocating and using those other funds to imply that he’d already used a massive amount of the General Fund when he was, in fact, allocating less than the year before. So he was actually talking about a cut."

Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard told the Guardian that the total affordable-housing budget for fiscal year 2007–08 was $226 million — and of that total budget, "just approximately $90 million is General Fund dollars.

"The balance of funding (the difference between $226 million and $90 million) is a whole variety of other funding sources," he added, listing inclusionary housing in-lieu fees, redevelopment funds, jobs housing linkage fees levied on private development, federal and state sources, and other funds, many of which accumulate over many years, further distorting the budget picture.

But Welch said the housing situation is grim. As he told us, "The truth is that 92 percent of the city’s population can’t afford housing."

Daly’s affordable-housing amendment awaits a Jan. 8 board vote, following a request by Maxwell to allow for affordable housing to be built on sites used under the San Francisco Housing Authority — the so-called Hope SF program — a request Daly supports.

"My issue with Hope SF is [with] any proposal to build a large number of market-rate units on public housing sites," Daly explained, referring to a central tenet of the Newsom-created program.

Meanwhile, a June 2008 ballot measure being pushed by Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and a host of other prominent local power brokers threatens to drain what little money the city does have for affordable housing in order to subsidize a massive push by Lennar Corp. to build 8,000 to 10,000 new houses in Candlestick Point, Hunters Point, and the Bayview.

Other than committing to replace low-income Alice Griffith public housing units at a one-to-one ratio, the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Measure does not specify what percentage of the Lennar-built homes will be considered affordable or sold below market rates. Publicly, backers of the measure are presenting the efforts as focused on building a new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers, even though the team has said it would rather move to Santa Clara. Yet the campaign is also keenly aware of the public support for more affordable housing, at least if its ground-level pitches are any indication.

A paid signature gatherer who was recently working the 24th Street BART station (and who also told a Guardian source he was getting the unusually high sum of $2.50 per signature) presented the proposal to passersby as "an affordable housing measure."

Antidepressants

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PIZZA ORGASMICA

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

3157 Fillmore (at Greenwich), SF

(415) 931-5300

Takeout available

Beer

AE/MC/V

Purple penetrator

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Being rich and famous dupes so many into thinking they have profound life wisdom that must be shared. Is it simple narcissism? Is it that when material desires are fulfilled too easily, spirituality becomes the top high-end item left to acquire?

Guy Ritchie may do stupid things, like remaking Lina Wertmüller’s reactionary-in-1974 Swept Away as a 2002 vehicle for his wife, Madonna, whose acting kills entire movies on contact. But he’s also clever, at least regarding surfaces. Yet there’s usually nothing beneath them, unless in-joke movie references count as deep. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) are deliriously, obnoxiously showy exercises in hyperworked camera, editing, and soundtrack. Their affectedly cool ‘tude is wrought of pissing-contest testosterone, compiled genre clichés, and Ritchie’s training in music videos and TV commercials. Love ’em or leave ’em, these movies are elaborate toys for boys, their pulp roots elevated to artier status by Brit exoticism and a big bag of stylistic tricks. Tricks, you’ll recall, are for kids.

After those samey successes and one stinging flop, Ritchie was ripe to expand his range. He and Madonna developed as sentient beings too, what with childbearing and third world adoption and all that kabbalah stuff.

Yet one wonders: has spiritual evolution given Ritchie more depth as an artist? Merely considering the question hurts.

Ritchie’s latest movie, Revolver, premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival to howls of derision. More than a year later, it’s here, and — like Richard Kelly’s similarly dissed, delayed, and recut Southland Tales — it’s still terrible. Not just because it’s an unsalvageable mess, but also because it’s an expression of ersatz profundity that confirms a shallow intellect. This being Ritchie, his big stab at insight regarding the human condition arrives as a hyperstylized gangster movie, albeit with less smug jokiness than before and a stinking new pantsload of pretension.

Ritchie’s usual muse Jason Statham plays Jake Green, just released from seven years in prison and eager to avenge himself on the casino kingpin (Ray Liotta) who put him there. He signs on with nasty loan sharks Vincent Pastore and André Benjamin, who promise to abet his vengeance — but at a high price. Soon everyone wants to kill Jake, but he kills them instead. It’s all just bullet-riddled bodies flying through space. Senseless as a thriller, Revolver could be enjoyed for its textural luxuriance — Ritchie does have a gift for constructing dynamic scene-by-scene aesthetics — if not for the paralyzing pomposity that hitches onto this empty cargo train.

Revolver is so transparently about nothing that its final revelations become inadvertent punch lines at the auteur’s expense. We’re told "the ultimate con" is the ego, Jake’s own "worst enemy" his bad-boy self. That’s before the epilogue. (Warning: it involves Deepak Chopra.) There isn’t enough pot in the world to make such quasi-philosophical wankery provoke the intended whoa.

The idea of Ritchie liberating himself from the trap of ego is contradicted by every frame of this self-consciously flashy and vain movie. Revolver inhabits a fantasy man’s-man world. It’s a painful example of wannabe mysticism — riddled with kabbalah and numerological references — and it’s exactly as enlightened about women as a mid-’60s James Bond flick. Female cast members are displayed mute, surgically enhanced, open mouthed, and variably unclad, like porn models. The sole older woman (Francesca Annis) is a retro lesbian-sadist caricature modeled on Lotte Lenya in 1963’s From Russia with Love. She paws cringing younger female slaves who recall the runway look-alikes in Robert Palmer’s "Addicted to Love" video.

Revolver also finds time to be racist, via Tom Wu’s stereotyped Asian crime boss, Lord John. Why bother distinguishing? This movie is a massive, great-looking embarrassment. But Ritchie is probably so insulated he can assure himself it’s merely misunderstood. That’s his loss. *

REVOLVER

Opens Fri/7 in Bay Area theaters

All I want for Christmas …

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We asked some notable San Francisco personalities to recall their most memorable holiday gifts. Read on for the superlatively good, bad, and fugly (plus our recommendations for where to get the good stuff).

BRIANNA TOTH, CURATOR, COORDINATOR FOR THE CONCERT SERIES "NOISE IN MY KITCHEN"


WORST A sweater with pink elephants on it from Argentina, from my ex-boyfriend. It’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen … it has nothing to do with him as a person.

BEST Once, my friends accidentally ran over my Jawbreaker cassette Dear You because it fell out of my pocket when I got out of their car. They felt bad and bought the record for me for Christmas, on vinyl.

Find punk rock on vinyl at Thrillhouse Records, 3422 Mission, SF. (415) 826-0223.

MERIC LONG, VOCALS AND GUITAR FOR THE DODOS


WORST A small ceramic version of ET when I was six. It was terrifying…. I got out of bed and smashed it in the middle of the night.

BEST A tiny keyboard called the Casio SK-1. It can record sounds and play them back in different frequencies. I got it when I was a kid, and it still sounds great.

Find pianos and electric keyboards at Piedmont Piano Company, 660 Third St., SF. (415) 543-9988, www.piedmontpiano.com.

BRENDA KNIGHT, AUTHOR OF WOMEN OF THE BEAT GENERATION, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER AT REDWHEEL WEISER/CONARI


WORST An unbelievably fugly wall planter called the Little Brown Jug, the most hideous gift imaginable. I got it at a party. When I opened it up, it stopped everything. You could hear a pin drop. I tried to sell it at a yard sale, but nobody would take it. It’s probably still there at the Goodwill on Haight.

BEST Jewelry from a store on Carl and Cole called the Sword and Rose. They sell exquisite, intricate, affordable, one-of-a-kind pieces.

Stop by the Sword and Rose, 85 Carl, SF. (415) 681-5434.

JONATHON KEATS, ARTIST, CURRENTLY SHOWING "MIRACLE WORKS" AT MODERNISM


WORST The worst hasn’t happened yet. My parents often threaten to give me a cat, apparently on the principle that an animal will make me responsible. The only thing worse than being given a pet is being the pet that gets given.

BEST I already have more books than I’ll ever read, which is why being given another one is such a luxury. I especially enjoy obscure old books, because they contain whole lost worlds. For instance, I was once given a well-worn hardcover called Around the World with Jigger, Beaker, and Glass. The title alone was as good as a month’s travels.

For rare and first-edition books, try Phoenix Books, 3850 24th St., SF. (415) 821-3477, www.dogearedbooks.com.

CHICKEN JOHN RINALDI, ARTIST, SHOWMAN, FORMER MAYORAL CANDIDATE


WORST My best and worst were at my annual Christmas Eve game show party. One year everyone left before the gifts were all used up. So I opened one. It was a Mexican magazine of horror and gore unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was chilling and haunting and real — a magazine of car-accident victims and people who had died from dog bites, bee stings, battery acid. It was totally out of control. With cute little captions in Spanish. I’m still haunted by that magazine.

BEST A random coupon for a kiss from a girl named Donna. I said into the mic that she could hang around until the show was over so I could collect my kiss. She was crazy gorgeous in a weird, giantess kinda way and was totally into biting. I like the biting.

Give the gift of looking at (if not actually kissing) gorgeous women: a tour of SF strip clubs through Slinky Productions. (510) 291-9779, www.slinkyproductions.com.

BERT BERGEN, ARTIST, CURATOR, DRUMMER FOR ASCENDED MASTER


WORST A series of Franklin Mint plates depicting football plays with nondescript football players. They had painterly guys in orange getting tackled by nondescript defenders. And what’s a 12-year-old supposed to do with decorative plates?

BEST That would have to be a hunting rifle, a .30-30, the same kind that the Rifleman uses. I killed my first deer with it.

We’re not going to support guns or killing living creatures, but if you want to find a dead animal gift of your own, visit Gypsy Honeymoon, 3599 24th St., SF. (415) 821-1713.

TED EDWARDS, VOCALS AND GUITAR FOR THE MUSIC LOVERS


WORST My first electric guitar, from my cousin Jane when I was 13 years old, because it set in motion a cycle of events that led to three divorces, despair, and debt.

BEST My first electric guitar, from my cousin Jane when I was 13 years old, as it led to an intimate love affair with the wonder of song, the glamour of the stage, and therein finding the one and only place I have ever belonged.

Find and fix electric guitars at San Francisco Guitarworks, 323 Potrero, SF. (415) 865-5424, www.sfguitarworks.com.

LIANNA HIBBARD, GENERAL MANAGER, UPPER PLAYGROUND


WORST Homemade leg warmers.

BEST Artist series Adidas Superstars — the San Diego edition — by Dave Kinsey.

MALIA, BARTENDER, THEE PARKSIDE


WORST A ceramic potpourri simmer pot with flowers painted on it.

BEST The iPhone I haven’t received yet (hint, hint).

Like you didn’t know: get an iPhone at the Apple Store, 2125 Chestnut, SF. (415) 392-0202, www.apple.com.

AMANDA CASKEY, GENERAL MANAGER, CAFÉ GRATITUDE RETAIL STORE


WORST A pink rhinestone charm bracelet with three-inch-long black rhinestone palm tree and taxicab charms.

BEST My grandmother promising to match the money my girlfriend and I save toward buying a house.

You may not be able to give the gift of half a house, but you can get hip, charming housewares from Egg and the Urban Mercantile, 85 Carl, SF. (415) 564-2248.

ABAI, DJ, BOUNCE REFLEX


WORST Fruitcake! I was a kid, and it was Christmas. I was so grossed out by it because it looked slimy and green. When the family wasn’t looking, my brother and I fed it to the family dog in the kitchen. He wolfed it down, then threw up all over the place a few minutes later. That was not fun.

BEST A sound system, gear to play on, an album, a trailer, and a van to pull it all in! Because that gave me the opportunity to travel around the country playing music I loved, which fueled my travels abroad to do the same thing.

DJs in the know shop at World of Stereo 2, 1080 Market, SF. (415) 626-1195. *

Nog on the noggin

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>culture@sfbg.com

For a drink that holds as much tradition as it does taste, one might think an integral part of the eggnog experience would be gathering around a pot and stirring up this year’s batch. For most, though, the experience comes from throwing a carton in your shopping cart and popping it open later that night. This year I figured, if I’m not making it myself, I should at least find out who was – and who was doing it best.

Straus Family Creamery Organic Eggnog www.strausfamilycreamery.com

If you woke up one morning and McDonald’s food was healthy and local, made only by well-paid workers, outside on warm days, would it still have that lingering gross taste? Or is that just a function of knowing about its production line? This is what I began to wonder when I learned about the Marin County creamery’s eggnog, which tastes like a rich, decadent McDonald’s treat but is also made with only four ingredients, all organic. (Unfortunately, the over-crisp nutmeg and yolk flavors also make it hard to drink more than a glass or two.)

The handsome, if not too wholesome, president of the company, Albert Straus, said coming up with his special recipe was simply a matter of trial and error. He tried a few variations of the basic ingredients – sugar, egg, milk, and nutmeg – in the company’s test kitchen. Once he found the right combination, he asked California Custom Fruit in Irwindale to make a concentrate, which Straus Family Creamery then adds to their milk.

Clover-Stornetta Organic Eggnog www.cloverstornetta.com

In the late seventies, says Herm Benedetti, Clover-Stornetta whipped up eggnog for friends and close customers, spiking it with bourbon. “People loved getting it”, says Benedetti, director of Product Research & Development and one of the sons of the company founder. But liability issues forced the Petaluma-based company to stop serving the alcoholic concoction.

Four years ago, though, Clover-Stornetta was finally able to source the ingredients to make an organic eggnog. The first test batch was too sweet and the second too flavorful, said Benedetti. But like the Goldilocks story, the third was just right. “We felt we had a winner,” he said. “So we stuck with it.”
Eggnogs are required by law to have six percent milkfat, and Benedetti’s version lets you taste it. The yolk and nutmeg are soft complements to a drink that makes you think you’re sucking down the middle of a huge Oreo. In fact, the greatest flaw of this eggnog, my favorite in the list, might be this eminent creamy drinkability. After all, if eggnog were supposed to be so drinkable, it wouldn’t be around just two months a year.

Organic Valley Eggnog www.organicvalley.coop

Maged Latif, Director of Research and Development for Organic Valley Coop, says the Flavor Order Profile for his eggnog starts with sugar and ends with nutmeg. It took Organic Valley 12 months to get the recipe right right, including time for market feedback research.

When I sipped it, I felt the egg flavor came first, followed quickly by a cream-brigade that put out the sweetened yolk taste before it got gross. The nutmeg came somewhere in between. But both Latif and Emily Strickler, Fluid Category Associate, are proudest of the nutmeg.

“What makes ours unique is that we don’t add [fake] nutmeg flavor,” Latif said. Strickler agreed, “We pride ourselves on our nutmeg flavor profile.” Because Organic Valley is a countrywide coop of farmers, including many in the Bay Area, eggnog provided the company with a great way to use more of the farms’ resources. “[It offered us] great synergy between poultry farmers where get our eggs with our dairy farmers,” said Latif.

In and out

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Playwright Rebecca Gilman’s work has often courted subjects with ripped-from-the-headlines appeal, such as Spinning into Butter‘s take on racism at a small New England college or Boy Gets Girl‘s stalker scenario. Her latest play, The Crowd You’re In With, is no less timely. But at first blush it seems quieter and more understated in its choice of setting and subject matter: a backyard barbeque and a clash between three couples over whether or not to have children. By the end of a taut if laugh-filled 80 minutes, however, this successful comedy, enjoying its world premiere at the Magic Theatre, has uncovered the acute social import and anxieties behind a set of everyday characters and choices.

The play opens on a contemporary American idyll: a sunny Fourth of July afternoon in Chicago, where two thirtysomething white guys, Jasper (T. Edward Webster) and Dan (Kevin Rolston), hover beside a backyard grill in the archetypal pose (and perplexity) of the modern suburban male. Such a scene, including their young wives Melinda (Makela Spielman) and Windsong (Allison Jean White) arranging a table nearby, would seem to contain no more angst than the residual variety implicit in grill time’s spur to primitive masculinity. But there’s already a subtle cornered and concentrated effect in Erik Flatmo’s naturalistic scenic design, with its tiny swath of yard bracketed by the enclosing sharp angles of a two-story duplex and an adjoining high wooden fence. Reproducing Norman Rockwell is not going to prove so easy (if it ever was) in the age of global warming and unending war.

One of the first things we learn is that couple number one — Jasper and Melinda, the renters of the apartment whose yard this is — are trying to get pregnant. Five months and counting. This has Melinda, especially, nervous. Their friends Dan and Windsong, meanwhile, are already very pregnant, as Windsong’s eight-month bulge makes clear. Dan (a happy and good-natured but also slightly abrasive and unselfconsciously vulgar rock critic) and Windsong (the chipper, emotionally fragile, and determinedly conventional child of hippies) are more or less equally incurious and young beyond their years. Jasper and Melinda, by contrast, seem more mature and clever than their friends and yet, we come to suspect, are very much under the sway of their baby-making example all the same. Jasper (played with nicely measured intelligence and sympathetic earnestness by Webster) seems particularly uneasy with this dynamic.

Enter couple number three: Jasper and Melinda’s landlords and upstairs neighbors, Karen (Lorri Holt) and Tom (Charles Shaw Robinson), a pair of politically active progressive boomers without a baby or any desire for one. The genial but opinionated older couple soon evince a thinly veiled disdain for the crass yuppie ideals of their tenants’ friends and for the very idea of knee-jerk breeding under present social conditions. A final arrival helps stir the pot even more: a slovenly, cheapskate friend and bandmate of Dan’s named Dwight (Chris Yule), with a jaundiced eye on the overbearing culture of middle-class child rearing.

The ensuing tension leads to some very funny dialogue, oozing sarcasm, and slow-dawning insults. Ably helmed by Amy Glazer (who has directed all of Gilman’s work at the Magic) and beautifully brought to life by her thoroughly fine, enjoyable cast, the scenes build with a kind of chemical inevitability to temperatures hotter than the day or the barbeque. The fireworks not only start early this July 4 but also — in slyly showing up the repressed violence and bellicosity behind the national picnic and its whole rockets’-red-glare conceit — point to a larger, precarious pattern of denial.

Taking place in a single act in real time, The Crowd You’re In With proves a compact, genuinely entertaining, and provoking play. Even as it skirts stereotype, the types themselves are adeptly fleshed out and will resonate for most people with plenty of lived experience. Moreover, Gilman skillfully grounds her characters’ stories and dilemmas in issues of immediate and universal significance. The questions the play raises about them — like who is the more selfish given their respective life choices — reach down to deeper ones about conformity, consciousness, the meaning of happiness, and the fate of the world we live in.

THE CROWD YOU’RE IN WITH

Through Dec. 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 and 7 p.m.; $20–$45

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

Feed our students well

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Not long ago a green vegetable was a rare and startling sight on a lunch tray at a San Francisco school. Carnival-style food was the standard, with corn dogs as a regular entrée, packaged apple turnovers as the "fruit" course, and fried potatoes as the staple vegetable.

School lunches have come a long way since 2003, when San Francisco Unified School District parent volunteers, staff, students, public health professionals, and other community supporters joined together to begin creating the school district’s Wellness Policy. Lunches are fresher, tastier, healthier, and leaner, and the SFUSD’s "no empty calories" policy has been a role model in the nationwide effort to improve school food.

But even after all of those changes, a high school group recently surveyed more than 2,000 of their peers and learned that students still complain that school food doesn’t taste fresh and costs too much, and some question how nutritious it is.

So a growing movement argues it’s time to take the next step: the greening of school meals. Surely a food-savvy, health-conscious, environmentally aware city like San Francisco, which is located in one of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions, should be feeding its kids fresh, local organic produce at every meal.

But there’s an obstacle, and it’s green too. Government reimbursement for a free school lunch is just $2.71, nearly half of which goes to pay for labor. Other fixed overhead eats up another large chunk, leaving just about $1 to pay for the meal itself, including 34¢ for the required milk.

No wonder it’s hard to respond to requests for fresher, healthier food and more of it. New salad bars placed in three schools as part of a pilot program address these concerns, offering students mixed greens and raw vegetables, several kinds of fresh fruit, and whole grain breads and muffins, in addition to the hot entrée. When the first salad bar was created last year at Balboa High School, the average number of students eating its cafeteria lunch every day increased 26 percent, with virtually all of the new diners low-income students.

But that $1 per meal won’t cover a salad bar at every school, which is the SFUSD’s goal. The cost of just the equipment for a salad bar — the bar itself, added refrigeration and sinks, a couple more tables — can run more than $10,000 per school, depending on how much work needs to be done to reconfigure the lunch line. Organic produce drives the meal cost higher too.

Unfortunately, the SFUSD doesn’t have that money. Because it’s currently left to the school district to provide meals, the SFUSD must require that the Student Nutrition Department budget break even or else cut into classroom funds to cover the deficit.

The good news is that thanks to grants from the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families and Mayor Gavin Newsom, salad bars are being started in 25 SFUSD schools this year, stocked with seasonal, local produce. Still, despite this additional funding, only about 25 percent of district students will have access to the salad bars. Social justice demands that every student have equal access to a healthier school meal.

Most city officials and the greater community probably aren’t even aware of the situation. It’s time to put the need to feed our children adequately on the radar of the whole community and ask officials to step in with funding to ensure that our children can eat well without sacrificing classroom resources to cover the cost of their food. The Public Education Enrichment Fund, better known as Proposition H, provides a growing pot of city money aimed at improving the schools, and part of it could be used to fund the opening of more salad bars, so more school kids can enjoy the benefits of fresh produce and whole grains.

Providing the money to put salad bars in every school would pay off in healthier kids and related positive effects. Better nutrition is linked with higher academic achievement, improved behavior, and other benefits.

Let’s become a city that commits to teaching our children well, feeding them well, and promoting a greener food system. *

Paula Jones and Caroline Grannan are members of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Shorts

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FORESKIN’S LAMENT

By Shalom Auslander

Riverhead Books

320 pages, $24.95

It’s possible that one of the 613 commandments in the Torah is "Thou shall not read Foreskin’s Lament." Which of course means read it. If you’ve got the time, read it twice, once from right to left. You’ll still laugh. It’s that funny.

Shalom Auslander’s memoir of life as a black sheep in a black hat picks up where his first book, the short-story collection Beware of God (Simon and Schuster, 2005), left off, taking a well-hewed ax to the image of the Almighty. But unlike God bashers du jour Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, Auslander believes in the pie maker in the sky. And as his worn punch line goes, it’s been a real problem for him.

It was a problem while he was growing up in the Orthodox community of Monsey, NY, where he developed a penchant for pornography and junk food. It was a problem throughout his teens, as he padded his résumé of sin with lots of pot smoking and shoplifting. And it was even more of a problem, years later, after his wife became pregnant with their first child, a son no less. Having a family aggravated Auslander’s deep-seated religious paranoia. God, the wrathful stalker who smites first and asks questions later, was surely going to murder his family. It would be payback for years of vioutf8g the laws of Judaism. As his second-most-tired punch line goes, that would be so God.

Auslander plays the alienation and theological abuse (his wife’s words, not mine) for laughs, defiling his religious upbringing in ways that will win him friends and enemies in equal measure. But his paranoia — the idea that God will get him and his family — casts some very dark shadows over the book, not so dismal as to ruin a good time, but grave enough to bring the story to its supplicant knees. Still, Foreskin’s Lament is a romp — relentlessly unrepentant and irreverent. Auslander may be a weak man and a bad Jew, tempted by tits and traif, but he’s a better writer for it. Here’s hoping he has enough raw material for future laments over other parts of the body. (Scott Steinberg)

CONVERSATION

With Steve Almond

SF Jewish BookFest

Sun/4, 12:45–2 p.m., free

Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Kanbar Hall

3200 California, SF

(415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org

SENTENCES: THE LIFE OF MF GRIMM

Written by Percy Carey; illustrated by Ronald Wimberly

Vertigo

128 pages, $19.99

While reading Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm, Percy Carey’s graphic-memoir debut, it comes in handy to know a bit of the backstory — such as the recent controversy surrounding Carey, a.k.a. MF Grimm, and his former artistic partner MF Doom, onetime tight collaborators who have fallen out publicly through dis tracks. Familiarity with the innovative rapper’s street life–meets–transcendence flows is also a plus. Readers who come to Sentences fresh may be taken aback by Carey’s grittiness and what seems to be an argument that people don’t really change — they either calm down or die.

And yet Sentences, more HBO drama than MTV interview, will get you in the end. As we follow Carey, a gifted rapper but a natural fighter, from a rebellious Upper West Side youth through drug dealing, a paralyzing gunshot attack, and harsh jail time, he never stops believing that hip-hop is the most positive outlet for his particular type of raucous energy. And when he finally makes it — albeit in a wheelchair — starting multimedia label Day by Day Entertainment, we are right there with him.

Ronald Wimberly’s black-and-white artwork calls to mind Paul Chadwick’s careful inkings in Concrete (Dark Horse), with its use of shadows and silhouettes to emphasize emotional relationships. Although Wimberly has worked on fanciful Vertigo titles such as Swamp Thing and Lucifer, Sentences proves he has a knack for human antiheroics. Carey’s wandering storytelling style fits perfectly with the fluid, figurative scenes, which depict an urban reality full of countless ups and downs: watching a friend get set up by the cops; losing at the MC Battle for World Supremacy; standing face-to-face with Dr. Dre and Suge Knight, laying dreams on the table. When Carey presents his journal-style thoughts, the result is weirdly intimate, as when he admits that "in the end, it was my own stupidity that sent me to prison." Carey is usually less gushy, but be prepared: even the shoot-outs are heartfelt. (Ari Messer)

HONORABLE BANDIT: A WALK ACROSS CORSICA

By Brian Bouldrey

Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press

296 pages, $26.95

If narratives are like hikes, best begun in lighthearted whimsy before the climb to bleak summits and bracing vistas both earned and unexpected, then Brian Bouldrey’s narrative of a hike, Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica, could well be a model of its kind. The book recounts a journey by foot that Bouldrey and a friend made a few years ago across the enchanted Mediterranean island (ethnically Italian but politically part of France) where Napoleon was born. And while the tale is full of vivid detail about the expedition’s joys and travails (soaked shoes, crowded tents, sharp rocks, bad weather, wild boar, comically strange fellow travelers, the occasional glass of local wine), it also becomes, through a series of interpolated "why I walk" personal essays, a meditation on its author’s life.

Bouldrey (a former Guardian contributor) spent his young adulthood in the plague-ridden San Francisco of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the loss of a beloved to AIDS plainly still aches. Serious walking, then, is an occasion for remembering and reflecting and also, in its very meanderingness, a form of redemption: we save ourselves simply by making the effort to do so. Although most pilgrimages end up at some holy site, the literary value and interest of any pilgrimage has less to do with the destination than with the getting there, and in this sense Honorable Bandit joins a long line that begins with The Canterbury Tales.

Bouldrey has for some time been among our cheeriest bards of sorrow. As in an earlier collection of essays, Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books, 2001), he is candid about his griefs and losses without descending into self-pity over them, and his sense of the ridiculous never fails him. He is especially sensitive about his Americanness, to his being "a representative of the prevailing power" in a restive Europe. He doesn’t want to be outed as a Yank, and at the same time he is impatient with his native land and its bizarre Francophobia: "And you Americans," he thinks, "you have only one kind of mustard — and you call it French’s!" Vive les moutards. (Paul Reidinger)

READING WITH SLIDE SHOW

Nov. 13, 7 p.m., free

Get Lost Travel Books

1825 Market, SF

(415) 437-0529, www.getlostbooks.com

SHORTCOMINGS

By Adrian Tomine

Drawn and Quarterly

112 pages, $19.95

Ben Tanaka, the protagonist of Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings, is an ambitionless Berkeley cinema manager who attributes his outsider status not to race but to his being "a nerd with a bad personality and no social skills"; his girlfriend, Miko, is a successful organizer of an Asian American film festival who resents Ben’s attraction to Caucasian women. Every conversation between the two becomes an argument, and Ben sees every argument as a personal attack on him. So it’s with some relief that the two "take a break" while Miko’s in New York, leaving Ben free to pursue a pair of blonds.

But the girls he idealizes turn out to be just as flawed as he is, as revealed by one’s earnest but ridiculous art projects and the other’s passive-aggressive cruelty. Even Miko proves to be a hypocrite, shacking up with a "rice king" designer in Manhattan.

Compiled from the past three issues of Tomine’s Optic Nerve comic, Shortcomings isn’t all heartache and betrayal. There’s subtle comedy in small details like Crepe Expectations, the name of the café where Ben holds venting sessions with his friend Alice, a wisecracking womanizer, as well as moments of outright hilarity, as when Miko’s new white boyfriend (sorry, I mean half Jewish, half Native American) busts out a defensive karate stance when confronted by Ben on the street. And Ben’s recurring tirades about how shitty a place New York is (Tomine recently moved from the Bay Area to Brooklyn) might even be a nod to Woody Allen, the ultimate geek-cum-lothario whose wit, charm, and, above all, ability to laugh at himself are passable currency for his own shortcomings.

The thing is, Ben doesn’t seem to possess these qualities, except perhaps when courting the ladies, and we don’t get to see what he was like before his relationship went sour. So is he a sarcastic but sweet loner in need of understanding, or is he a superficial, insensitive creep who deserves a life of rejection and loneliness? Ultimately, Shortcomings is an honestly told story about the ugly end to a relationship that isn’t that black and white. (Hane C. Lee)

EVENTS

Conversation with Glen David Gold

Nov. 14, 7 p.m., free

Booksmith

1644 Haight, SF

(415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com

Visual presentation and signing

Nov. 15, 7 p.m., free

Cody’s Books

1730 Fourth St., Berk.

(510) 559-9500, www.codysbooks.com

TWO HISTORIES OF ENGLAND

By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens

Ecco

192 pages, $16.95

Jane Austen wrote her History of England when she was 16, in 1791, and she intended it to be read aloud at home. Her sister, Cassandra, drew pictures for it. These have not been reproduced in Ecco’s new edition of the history, one of several odd choices here. Various collections of Austen juvenilia include this work, and Algonquin Books published a facsimile and transcription in 1993. Why wouldn’t her fans just buy one of those? And why is her history twinned with an excerpt from Charles Dickens’s 1851–53 A Child’s History of England?

Austen’s recent pop-cultural upsurge no doubt explains this volume’s publication. And David Starkey makes a plausible case for reading both histories in his introduction, an apologia that’s longer than Austen’s entry. But he’s less convincing regarding their appearance in one volume, and Dickens’s inclusion calls to mind the useless (but equally space-consuming) footnotes T.S. Eliot provided to make The Waste Land book length. His contribution here covers a shorter period than Austen’s (although they both end with Charles I’s reign), and it’s hard to imagine Dickens devotees not searching out the complete text.

This book, then, seems suited primarily for the dabbler in English literature or history. Austen ascribes her work to "a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian"; the first two adjectives certainly apply to Dickens. The description is tongue-in-cheek, but the approach it suggests does allow these authors to write with, as Starkey says, "freshness and wit," producing unforgettable scenes and characters. Although Austen’s work is a satire of boring contemporary histories, it is amusing enough to spark the interest of a modern reader in the period she covers; meanwhile, Dickens’s was written for his Household Words journal and was meant to appeal to a broad audience — and was used in British schools until the 1950s. These writings make history interesting and even entertaining, and whatever they lack in scholarship can be picked up elsewhere. Whatever its failings, Two Histories has the potential to be an excellent gateway drug. (Juliana Froggatt)

Palencia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Palencia so nicely fills such an obvious niche in the city’s restaurant universe that we are left only to wonder why it wasn’t filled sooner. The niche is white-linen or upmarket Filipino cuisine, and it’s an obvious one in the sense that the connection between the Philippines and the United States — the West Coast in particular — has been strong for more than a century. It’s at least as obvious in the sense that Filipino cooking, like Singaporean, is an interesting mishmash to begin with, an earthy yet worldly blend of Asian, tropical, and European influences that takes well to a bit of California-style styling.

The restaurant (a project of the Palencia family) opened over the summer on a — comparatively — quiet and leafy stretch of 17th Street in the Castro. The nearby buildings are mostly residential rather than commercial, and on an autumnal evening of early darkness you could easily walk right past Palencia. There is, as of yet, no street signage beyond a panel of frosted glass bearing the restaurant’s name, along with a sheaf of menus posted at the door. Restaurant rows do have their advantages, among them the slowing down of foot traffic as prospective patrons move from one threshold to the next, pondering menu cards and making sure not to miss any. But there is an exhilaration in finding a restaurant all on its own, as if it’s a secret.

Palencia’s interior design adds to the sense of elegant hush. A votive candle flickers on each table, and the restaurant’s butter-colored walls dance with suggestive shadows cast by these small brightnesses. Dark wood trim gives a hint of medieval flavor, while whimsical light fixtures that resemble woven baskets remind us that yes, we are still somewhere in the Castro early in the 21st century.

Chef Danelle Valenzuela’s food matches up quite gracefully with the atmospheric setting. If your experience of Filipino cooking has heretofore been limited to eating fancified lumpia at Pres a Vi or the various tasty but plain adobos ladled over white rice at New Filipinas, you’re likely to find that Palencia’s kitchen has caught just the right tone. The dishes appear to be, by and large, authentic, but they are carefully prepared and plated, with dashes of artful juxtaposition.

If you love lumpia (the plump little pot sticker–burrito hybrids) but suffer from fried-food anxiety, you might open with Palencia’s "fresh" version ($7.50 for two), which are almost like soft tacos: steamed crepes, about the size of hot dog buns, enveloping leaves of red leaf lettuce enveloping shrimp and shredded carrots and cabbage. The dipping sauce on the side looks like the spicy peanut kind but isn’t; it’s made of garlic and soy and has a viscosity like that of homemade mayo.

While I cherish soy sauce as a reliable fund of umami, I felt it played too prominent a role in the chicken adobo ($8), boneless thigh meat and potatoes stewed to aching tenderness in what was meant to be a lively bath of garlic, red pepper, vinegar, and bay leaf. The broth was tasty enough; it just tasted a bit too much of soy saltiness. But this small off note was struck on an early visit; when we returned some weeks later we found no such imbalance in any of the dishes.

The least fried seeming of the fried items is probably ukoy ($7.95), an array of shaggy-looking shrimp-and-vegetable fritters served with a mignonettelike dipping sauce whose vinegary sharpness helps cut the fat. Once you reach the main courses you’re largely past the perils of the deep fryer. Simmering is a large motif, even beyond the adobos; the tongue-twistingly named guinataang kalabasa at hipon ($11.25) is a Thai-like coconut-milk curry studded with prawns and chunks of kabocha squash, along with a shower of dark green Chinese long beans, like the remains of a splintered river raft. (Spanish speakers will notice that kalabasa is just a respelling of calabasa — "squash" — and of course the Philippines were a Spanish possession until the Spanish-American War of 1898.)

Also Thai-ish in tone is the BBQ chicken ($10.95) on a triad of skewers. The marinated flesh takes a nice blistering from the grill but remains juicy inside. For textural and flavor contrast the skewers are plated with a small heap of achara: threads of pickled carrot and papaya. We were offered white rice to go with this dish, asked for brown rice instead, and settled for garlic rice ($3.50). The garlic rice nonetheless turned out to be at least as brown as most brown rice, and quite a bit tastier. Scooped from its cantaloupe-size bowl, it made a nice bed for the chicken skewers and prawn curry alike and was quite good on its own.

Although in the matter of dessert I am now a subprime customer who as often as not is pleased to settle for some chamomile tea — or nothing at all — I still feel a slight thrill in proclaiming an excellent sweet. Palencia has one: it’s the sans rival ($8) and looks like a peanut butter sandwich sliced in half and sexily posed. In fact, the sandwich consists of two layers of cashew meringue, separated by a narrow stratum of vanilla buttercream. It’s unusual and irresistible; all it needs is a little color on the plate, a sprig of mint, a splash of berry coulis. A lump of vanilla ice cream, on the other hand — as accompanies the turón ($8), a pair of crisp-fried crepes stuffed with bananas and jackfruit — would be overkill, even rivalrous. *

PALENCIA

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 2–5 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10:30 p.m.

3870 17th St., SF

(415) 522-1888

www.palenciasf.com

Beer and wine

Moderately noisy

MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

The red and the white

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› paulr@sfbg.com


In the pot-hazed precincts of bohemia, anything seems possible — and is that furtive person in the corner actually pouring the remains of a bottle of red wine into a half-empty bottle of white? Could someone please phone the wine police? (Wine-1-1?)

Bohemian life has ebbed in this city, no question, but living splinters of it remain, mostly in rambling flats in the Mission. The furtive person wasn’t actually in the corner but at the refrigerator — bohemians have refrigerators now — and she wasn’t blending red and white wines like matter and antimatter in some apocalyptic Star Trek episode but reaching for a bottle of Peju Province’s Provence blend. It’s the red wine you chill, and that’s because it’s not red wine, properly understood, but a proprietary blend of merlot, cab, and zin, along with chardonnay and colombard. It also costs about $22 a bottle — or, in a barter economy, nearly a case of Two Buck Chuck — but one of the wisdoms of bohemia is that if you’re going to blow some cash, blow it on an experience rather than a possession. A bottle of wine is a possession, in a sense, but only briefly; it’s really more a bottled experience that, like a genie, we summon when we choose.

While the cork master worked her magic, Stendahl was discussed by we sofa surfers. The Red and the Black. I have long been struck by the stark Franco-Italian distinction between the colors of wine: noir–nero versus blanc–bianco, black and white, one or the other, never the twain shall meet. Rosé, a possible exception, is basically neutered, or interrupted, red wine. The European versions and their domestic imitators can be a little austere and can taste rather strongly of alcohol, whereas the "white" wines made from red grapes — zin, cab, merlot — are friendlier but often too sweet and even, sometimes, fizzy, like soft drinks.

Peju’s blend is better than any of them. The wine has enough richness of color to convince, and while it’s light enough in body to benefit from chilling, it tastes more of fruit than of alcohol. It tastes, in fact, like a still version of cold duck, the sparkling party wine of yesteryear — and, as we discovered, it mixes well with talk about Stendahl. Bohemia lives!

By any other name

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Fish chili is still chili. Everyone else was wondering or grumbling, but there was never any question in my mind. Fish chili is chili. It just is. If you call a thing a thing, then it is what it is. Ask Popeye.

It was chili because it had chiles in it, or chili powder, and because it was at a chili cook-off and, most important, because the guy who made it called it chili. We live in a free country, and even if we didn’t, fish chili would be chili.

You don’t like that, move to Texas. In Terlingua, at the famous annual "international" chili cook-off, you are not allowed to put beans in your chili. Or pasta. Or rice. Or "other similar items."

Fish? I wonder….

I love Texas-style chili. I prefer it by a mile to your average ground-beef-with-bean varieties. And I love that you can call a chili cook-off an "international" event and then disallow beans and things, pretty much eliminating all the other kinds of chili in the world except Texas-style.

Oh, but chili was invented in Texas.

Give me a break. If so, it has since migrated to New Mexico, where, in Old Mexican fashion, it’s more about the peppers than the meat or the beans or whatever they happen to flavor. Ever been to Cincinnati? Chili has. It’s cinnamony. Beans, onions, and cheese are optional; spaghetti is standard.

Not to blow its cover, but chili lives incognito in Providence, RI, home of the oddly named New York system, which basically means chili dogs slapped together in a line of buns on a guy’s arm. They don’t call it chili, but it’s ground beef with chili powder and cumin, somewhat distinctified by soy sauce, ginger, and — my personal favorite — celery seed.

Now, Oakland is not Terlingua or Cincinnati or Detroit or New York City or New York system or New Castle, Pa. — or a lot of other places, if you think about it. It’s where Joe Rut lives, in a warehouse, and I’m jealous because he gets to vote for Barbara Lee and host chili cook-offs.

I get to go. I get to vote for my favorite chili. In a field of more than 20 contestants, which included a couple of excellent pork chilies, a wild-turkey chili (dude shot the bird hisself!), and an elk and bacon one, among the many beef-and-bean, just-beef, and vegetarian entries, my hands-down, hats-off, and belly-up favorite was the fish chili I’ve been trying to tell you about. It was ridiculously delicious, well stocked with several kinds of fish and shellfish, colorful with peppers, and just all-around pretty. Plus I liked its politics, and philosophy.

My only dilemma was whether to vote for it for best meat chili or best vegetarian. Joe Rut’s chili cook-off ballot, like life, gave me only two choices, neither one quite right, and I had to find my way around that.

This time it was easy: I put number five on both lines. The fish chili was the best meat chili and the best vegetarian one. This from a pork-barbecuing chicken-farmer chick whose favorite two things to eat are raw beef and green salad.

For the record, if there had been a line on the ballot for gumbo, I’d have fived that line too. Hell, if we were voting on pancakes, I’d have voted for the fish chili. You know how sometimes a bowl or plate of food just speaks to you, and speaks your language?

Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one listening. I just got forwarded a mass-mailed e-mail from Joe Rut announcing the winners: fish chili won best meat chili. I love the world!

My guess is about a hundred people voted. Very few were wearing cowboy hats. There must have been at least probably about 150 folks there, you gotta figure, because it was a warehouse and it was crowded. There were bands. There were pies for dessert and a big fruit salad just so everyone could at least have a chance of pooping the next day.

The name of the guy who made this fish chili, also for the record, is — hold on a second — Russ Leslie … and I publish that journalistic fact right here (of all the crazy places) in the wild but sincere hope that he will read this and invite me over for leftovers. Or next time he makes a pot, I guess, because it’s been more than a week.

I miss it.

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