Restaurants

Guide to greener living

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ECOLOGY CENTER


This is your one-stop ecoshop for green resources in the Bay Area. Want to know how to convert your home to solar power or learn how to compost, garden, or use nontoxic pest control? The Ecology Center has answers and classes. Want to go biodiesel? Visit the Berkeley Biodiesel Collective, one of the center’s sponsored projects. The center also runs Berkeley’s curbside recycling program, prints Terrain magazine, and publishes an eco-calendar of green events and classes in the Bay Area.

2530 San Pablo, Berk. (510) 548-2220, www.ecologycenter.org

GREEN ZEBRA


"We started the Green Zebra as a way for consumers to start enjoying nearby environmentally conscious businesses," founder Anne Vollen says of Green Zebra’s coupon book, which offers 300-plus pages of discounts on green restaurants, spas, travel, cultural activities, and much more. "But we’ve had such an enormous response from businesses and buyers alike that it’s become a virtual directory of all the green-minded things the Bay Area has to offer."

www.thegreenzebra.org

GREEN CITIZEN


Don’t let your used electronics go to e-waste. Green Citizen recycles obsolete and unwanted computers, CDs, cell phones, batteries, printers, and TVs (among other media-related things) and helps you hook up with institutions and programs in need of them. Can’t lift that antique monitor? Green Citizen also offers pickup service.

591 Howard, SF (and various locations). (415) 287-0000, www.greencitizen.com

PLAN-IT HARDWARE


Buildings consume a third of the country’s energy; substantially reducing that usage amount is possible through mindful construction and design. Plan-It Hardware is a green-focused, San Francisco–based hardware and home improvement distributor with hundreds of products and ideas for making your home greener, including environmentally conscious paint, weather stripping, flooring, gardening tools, and plumbing fixtures.

www.planithardware.com<

BAUER’S WORLDWIDE TRANSPORTATION


Eco-friendly limo. Sounds like another term for “VW Vanagon full of hippies going to the prom,” doesn’t it? But in the case of SF-based Bauer’s, it isn’t anything close. Bauers’ 120 electric, biodiesel, and compressed-propane-powered shuttles and cars may be the largest fleet of eco-friendly vehicles in the U.S., but they aren’t lacking for luxury. Stretch and hybrid limo-style vehicles, including the 2007 Lexus RX 400H SUV hybrid, come equipped with leather seats, Wifi, high end CD and DVD systems, LCD monitors for presentations, and even ports to plug in your iPod or phone. That’s a long way from van benches soaked with bong water.

Pier 27, SF; (800) LIMO-OUT, www.icars.cc

TREE FROG TREKS


Pry your rug rats away from those glowing screens and aim them at something natural. With Tree Frog’s programs, kids can go tide-pooling at Duxbury Reef, take a nature hike on Twin Peaks, and get creepy-crawly at Frog Hall with "Ross’s Ravenous Reptiles!" program. There they’ll meet Bully the bullfrog, Sid the snake, and Cletus the three-toed box turtle.

2112 Hayes, SF. (415) 876-3764, www.treefrogtreks.com

THIMMAKKA


Wanna eat green? Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education, a registered nonprofit, helps restaurants and bars get green certification — and also helps consumers find them through its comprehensive Web site.

www.thimmakka.org

WORLD CHANGING


World Changing’s Web site presents itself as a forum for figuring out how technology can be used to preserve and improve our world rather than destroy it. Read about and comment on digital houses; the 200 shared bikes of Barcelona, Spain; and state-of-the-art hydroturbines.

www.worldchanging.com

SCRAP


Pablo Picasso once declared himself "king of the ragpickers." Some of his most amazing art was made from found objects — other people’s trash. Since 1976, SCRAP (the Scroungers’ Center for Reusable Art Parts) has been helping ragpickers get art materials. The center operates a store and offers workshops on basket weaving, lamp rewiring, and other useful recyclables skills.

834 Toland, SF. (415) 647-1746, scrap-sf.org

BEDBUSTERS


Don’t just throw your old mattress on the street, leaving it to collect rainwater, dirt, fleas, and other unsavory grime. Bedbusters guarantees that your mattress will avoid the landfill, its steel springs and other materials will be recycled, and your conscience will be clear, for a reasonable fee.

(415) 516-5865, www.bedbusters.com

NATURE IN THE CITY


Think you have to go to Yosemite or Point Reyes to commune with nature? Think again. This organization is all about teaching San Franciscans how to recognize and care for the indigenous plants and animals living in our urban landscape — or as some call it, the Franciscan bioregion (from San Bruno Mountain to the Golden Gate Bridge). Check out the Web site to learn more, join a stewardship effort, and find green events.

(415) 564-4107, www.natureinthecity.org

GARDEN FOR THE ENVIRONMENT


Realize whirled peas (and carrots and broccoli) with help from Garden for the Environment, a nationally acclaimed program that teaches organic gardening, urban composting, and sustainable food systems at community workshops, the Gardening and Composting Educator Training program, outreach programs for local schools, and a one-acre urban demonstration garden. Plus, most classes and workshops are free.

780 Frederick, SF. (415) 731-5627, www.gardenfortheenvironment.org

LIVABLE CITY


Everything you ever wanted to know about living car-free in the city. Part resource, part activist organization, Livable City hosts workshops on walking, biking, and using public transit, as well as advocates for parking reform, better street planning, and the creation of a landscaped greenway to connect parts of the city.

995 Market, SF. (415) 344-0489, www.livablecity.org

SF ENVIRONMENT


An extensive and well-designed green resource guide for the city, this government Web site has information on everything from where to recycle toner cartridges and mercury thermometers to how to dispose of asbestos and biohazardous waste. (Choose the item in the easy "ecofindeRRR" box or search through resources one by one.) This is also the place to join Green Connect volunteer events, learn about green-leaning celebrations and meetings, and find links to news stories about the environment.

www.sfenvironment.com

PLANTSF


PlantSF is a grassroots program that provides information on permeable landscaping and urban farming and works with the city on land-use conversions. If you’ve ever wished the expanse of concrete outside your house were a little less paved and a bit prettier, these are the people to talk to about making that happen.

11 Grove, SF. (415) 355-3700, www.plantsf.org

TRANSPORTEDSF


All aboard the ecobus! This organization takes Das Frachtgut, the veggie oil–fueled bus Jens-Peter Jungclaussen uses as a mobile classroom, on an ecofriendly party tour. Movie nights are all about watching modern classics and then doing some kind of relevant outdoor activity (e.g., see The Big Lebowski, then bowl outside). Dance nights turn the bus into a mobile DJ booth and an instant, impromptu club. It’s fun, safe (no drunk driving, kids!), and above all, Earth friendly. *

www.transportedsf.com

GREEN KEY REAL ESTATE


There was a time when real estate was all about making money – and realtors were like the characters in American Beauty. Thankfully, times they are a changin’. Now you can buy or sell your house through Green Key Real Estate, the first (and only) green real estate brokerage in San Francisco. Green Key runs a sustainable business (minimizing office waste, donating a portion of profits to green building organizations, running the office on wind power) while encouraging sustainable building and remodeling. Most importantly, though, it’s experienced real estate agents linking like-minded people to each other and to the services they need.

28 Clayton, SF; (415) 750-1120, www.greenkeyrealestate.com

GREEN HOME


This online superstore is like Target (or Fred Meyer, for you Pac Northwest transplants) for environmentally sound products. We’re talking organic soy wax candles (since paraffin pollutes the air), recycled glass tumblers, picture frames made of reclaimed wood, super efficient refrigerators, all-natural hardwood furniture (since pressed wood products use formaldehyde and synthetic adhesives), household cleaners, baby clothes, and so much more. Plus, the Richmond-based (but exclusively online) store maintains a list of useful articles, news, and tips about living green, as well as a directory of green service providers, from dry cleaners to long distance phone companies.

877-282-6400 www.greenhome.com

A LIVING LIBRARY


Based on the principle that if we learn about our local surroundings, we learn about our world, this non-profit strives to turn barren, ugly, or otherwise underutilized public spaces into beautiful, relevant, useful parks and gardens, called living libraries and thinkparks, using local resources – human, ecological, economic, historic, technological, and aesthetic. The public can visit one of the SF sites in Excelsior or Bernal Heights, take kids to a Living Library in- or after-school program, or get involved in a free adult green skills job training class specially designed for low income adults (and especially immigrants).

(415) 215-5992, www.alivinglibrary.org

Sustainable Business Alliance


Green business is good business – at least, that’s the philosophy behind this membership organization linking companies committed to sustainability. This networking and resource group hopes to educate members about sustainability and then strengthen their businesses through involvement with each other through meetings, workshops, seminars, a green business directory, and events such as East Bay Drinks, a monthly meetup on third Wednesdays at Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley.

PO Box 11944, Berk. (510) 931-6560, www.sustainablebiz.org

Esperpento

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Spanish food may have struggled for recognition in this country and will almost certainly never be as well loved as its near relation, Italian cooking, but in the last decade or so the Iberian peninsula has given us at least one big present: the tapa. Tapas, the little plates that could, are so big now that they’re often not even remotely Spanish: we find Cuban and nuevo Latino and even American versions, while small plates from other cultures end up being called "tapas" for convenience’s sake. People might not know about, and might be chary of ordering, a meze platter, but if you call it Turkish or Greek tapas, they’re in.

At Esperpento, which turns 15 this year (the name means "absurdity"), the tapas are still tapas, still Spanish — the kinds of things you’d have with a beer or a glass of verdujo or rioja in the middle evening at some restaurant near the Plaza Mayor in Madrid. The venue itself, with its forest of support columns and cheerful, well-scuffed yellowness, looks like such a place and offers us a reminder that restaurant interiors evolve or accrete meaning through use and are not necessarily complete when created, no matter how elaborately and expensively they are designed. But what most amazes about Esperpento is the paella, which is actually better than good — quite near excellent, in fact. While I cling to my view that the best paella is likely to be made by a home cook, I can no longer say that restaurants can’t pull it off. Esperpento can and does, though, as with soufflés, you are given notice that there will be a 30-minute wait.

If you have to wait a spell for your main dish, what better way to pass the time than by noshing on tapas in a house of tapas? Esperpento’s selection is huge, turn-around time is short, and a surprising number of the small plates are vegetarian friendly. You could easily order up a meatless feast here without disappointing meat eaters in the slightest. Especially fabulous are the alcachofas a la plancha ($5.50), disks of thinly sliced artichokes grilled with a simple combination of garlic and parsley. And not far behind are the patatas ali-oli ($4.50), crispy-tender new-potato quarters generously spattered with garlic mayonnaise. If you like your potatoes a little less free-form, you might prefer the tortilla de patata ($6), which the menu describes as an "omelet" of potatoes and onion but is really more like a cross between a quiche and a tart and is far tastier (and substantial: the pie yields six decent-size slices) than its modest list of ingredients might imply.

As in Italian cooking, simple preparations yield potent results. Mushrooms sautéed with garlic ($5.25) were as meaty and fragrant as chunks of kebab. A salad of roasted julienne red pepper ($5.50) dressed with a house vinaigrette was gorgeous, even though the peppers were just the ordinary kind rather than the fancier (and slightly hotter) sort from Navarre. Boquerones ($5), Spain’s famous white anchovies, were dipped in batter and flash-fried, so they resembled french fries, while calamares a la plancha ($6.50) took a turn on the grill quick enough to keep them tender. One plancha-style dish did disappoint: clams ($6.25), which were not bad, just pallid despite garlic, parsley, and olive oil. And a salad of white beans ($4.75) could have used a boost of something.

A common booster in Spanish cooking is pimentón ahumado, or smoked paprika. This is the spice that gives Spanish chorizo its distinctive flavor, and it turned up big in the sauce of the rabbit stew ($6.75), a quasi-signature dish. The meat itself, still on the bone, was fine if not remarkable, but we carefully sopped up all of the sauce with rounds of white bread from the continually replenished basket.

The paella — de carnes y mariscos ($26 for two, but plenty for four if sufficiently preceded by tapas) — arrived in due course and was inspected. We noted the traditional two-handled pan, the wealth of meat, mussels, prawns, and green peas, and the bright yellowness of the rice — an indication that there has been no stinting on the saffron. The grains of rice were plump and glistening, a sign that they had just been cooked straight through rather than parboiled, left to wait, then finished in haste.

Best of all was the caramelized crust that had developed at the bottom of the rice layer. One of the big differences between risotto and paella is that the former is stirred more or less constantly, with a creamy result, while the latter is stirred hardly at all. The result of this stasis is the crust, which is something of a delicacy, though scraping it off and folding it into the rest of the dish can be an indelicate operation.

Paella is one of life’s more festive dishes, and Esperpento, despite its advanced age, has to be one of the more festive restaurants in the not-exactly-somnolent Mission: large parties wait at the door, tables are pushed together, cheerful voices are raised, plates laden with tapas fly from the kitchen (to return a few minutes later, stripped clean), service staff move nimbly among the tables like performers in some high-wire circus act. It is chaos, yes, but functional chaos, absurd as that might sound. *

ESPERPENTO

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Fri., 5–10 p.m. Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., noon–10 p.m.

3295 22nd St., SF

(415) 282-8867

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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Sites We Love: No sleep ’til Mendocino

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Wanna travel? Wanna get away? Why drive when you can fly, right? Wrong. There’s tons of great travel opportunities right here in the Bay — not all of them boutique-y in that precious Wine Country way or “Look at all these distressed and antiqued finds up here in Half Moon Bay” way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

But lately — and post-Spring breakly — we’re lovin’ 71 Miles, a local travel site put together by former television travel commentator and late-night heartthrob John Vlahides — who certainly seems to know a lot about the Bay’s “hidden spots” …

71miles.gif

And why not? Who doesn’t want to fondle the soft, white, nearby underbelly of the Bay in terms of restaurants, B&Bs, shops and other such getaway stuff? So forget about Puerto Vallarta — we’ve got Truckee! Yes, Truckee. The “next Aspen.” Really!

The big town

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From the air, Chicago in late winter looks like a giant crepe sprinkled with crushed peppercorns and minced scallions: a brown flatness textured with bits of black and white and wan hints of green. It’s a cold crepe, of course; you land and you can see your breath, though within a day or so the temperature will have risen into the malarial mid-70s, and the sky will be filled with purplish green, swelling clouds right out of The Wizard of Oz. Summerish heat in March suggests (apart from global warming) the imminence of tornadoes, to be followed by a blizzard, though not mosquitoes.

One evening we wandered west through River North to Scoozi, the Rich Melman–Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurant that turned 20 last year. The place was something of a pioneer when it opened; the neighborhood was still slightly sketchy, and the setting — a remade temple of heavy industry, with an enormous barrel ceiling supported by wooden cantilevers so as to leave the dining room clear of pillars — gave some sense of what imagination could do with grand old spaces that hadn’t been built with food and restaurants in mind. I thought Scoozi was spectacular when I first visited it, soon after it opened, and it seems to me none the worse for more than two decades of wear; in San Francisco, only LuLu begins to compare in the category of warm spaciousness. Even Scoozi’s big, red, and curiously flattened tomato still hovers, cigar volante–style, above the front door.

The metro-rustic food too was — or is — as good as I remembered it. We particularly liked the grilled artichoke hearts, which seemed not merely to have been marinated in lemon juice and garlic but to have been braised or parboiled in that combination before hitting the barbie. Clue: the potent pair was present throughout the vegetables, making the flesh tender, moist, and fragrant, rather than being just a surface phenomenon. And I am not particularly an apostle of artichokes.

Chicago is underrated as a food city, as in so many other ways. Its reputation is one of rust, Al Capone, Vienna beef sausages, and the clattering El — but that is the old city. The new one is, like our own, a forest of cranes and high-rise apartment buildings whose residents want something interesting for dinner. Excuse me, did someone say crepe?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Open city

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› paulr@sfbg.com

There could hardly be a more welcoming name for a restaurant than aperto — "open" in Italian, and Aperto is an Italian restaurant — except, possibly, Welcome. The north face of Potrero Hill is home to lots of restaurants, but Welcome isn’t one of them, at least not yet. While we wait, we can wait at Aperto, which offers a handsome wooden bench outside the front door for the convenience of those whose tables aren’t yet available and are too weary to stand. Aperto is small, and it is busy, and everyone seems to know about it. This is fitting, because it’s been there since 1992 and over its 15 years of life has become the jewellike Italian restaurant every urban neighborhood should have at least one of.

For some or no reason, Aperto is a place I’d never been to until recently. Regular reports, most of them favorable, did reach me from friends who seemed to go all the time, and these debriefings perhaps soothed my curiosity. I had noticed that the restaurant, after reaching a crest of sorts in the mid-1990s as one of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s top 100 restaurants, seemed to have receded in later years from public awareness. This could be due to fatigue, but it is certainly not due to the focaccia, which flows from the open kitchen to the dining room in a steady stream and is just exemplary: soft (though with a hint of crust), warm, and gently scented with olive oil. It’s the bread equivalent of the perfect hotel pillow and is at least as good as the focaccia at Blue Plate. And that means it’s awesome.

When you are dishing out complementary focaccia of this quality and keeping water glasses full and prices modest for well-executed, lovable Italian dishes, you are likely to be a successful restaurant. Aperto isn’t up to anything radical; its look and food are classical and timeless, and the restaurant, as an experience, presents itself unobtrusively. It’s like a favorite coat, well made and warming, you might wrap around yourself on a chilly night.

Few cuisines can match the Italian for inventive frugality. Despite a public image of flamboyance, Italians tend not to waste food. Stale bread finds a home in panzanella or ribollita, while grape pomace (the mush left over from the wine crush) is fermented and distilled into grappa. (Then exported and resold to us at a tidy profit.) Because Aperto’s menu is pasta-rich and pasta is among the most flexible of starches, the restaurant’s recycling program uses it to impressive effect. One (chilly!) evening I found myself staring into a broad white bowl of papardelle ($13.50) sauced with a sugo of osso buco. Osso buco, also known as braised veal shank, is a tine-intensive production, not ordinarily to be undertaken just to come up with a pasta sauce. But, should there be surplus from the night before, the leftover meat makes a lovely pairing with pasta, rich and just hinting of the beefiness that makes veal so attractive. Throw in some spinach for color, add some grana shavings on top, and you have a dish of elegant simplicity.

Glancing slightly upmarket, we find striped sea bass ($17.75), coated with arugula pesto, roasted, then plopped into a beanbag chair of lemon mashed potatoes, with an encirclement of ratatouille and a hairpiece of microgreens. This was a handsomely composed, colorful plate of food whose lemon mashed potatoes actually carried a distinct whiff of the advertised ingredient and whose seafood star (as I learned ex post facto from Seafood Watch) is in the "best" category. I give Aperto a big gold star for this alone. If a smallish neighborhood restaurant can keep itself within the boundaries of sustainability without making a huge fuss or overcharging, then everybody can.

The restaurant doesn’t give short shrift to seasonality either. On one late-winter menu we found crab cakes ($9.75 for a crottin-shaped pair), presented on a bed of shaved fennel and radicchio, with pomegranate seeds scattered around the plate like rubies and squirts of spicy aioli atop the cakes themselves. The same menu yielded strands of fat spaghetti ($11.50) tossed with shelled fava beans, leeks, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese — a distinctively NorCal when-seasons-collide moment.

Given the limitless focaccia, which produces a filling effect similar to that of chips and salsa in Mexican restaurants, the first courses are in some danger of superfluousness. Among the best of the lot is the platter of oven-roasted mussels ($9.50), swimming in a buttery shellfish broth perfumed with fennel and garlic. The broth is nicely soppable with the accompanying spears of well-grilled levain (topped with the customary rouille), and when that was gone, we picked up the slack with focaccia.

Only the soups seemed flat: good, but a little slow out of bed in the morning. Lentil ($4.50) did feature shreds of crispy pancetta, but the floating chunks of celery seemed slightly clumsy, like flotsam after some sort of accident. And cream of roasted tomato ($5) was creamy — and cheesy! — but might have been made more interesting, visually, at least, by an addition as simple as minced parsley.

If the overhead chalkboard listing the day’s specials includes the mascarpone brownie ($6), you won’t be sorry if you ignore your diet and have it. Brownies sound juvenile, but this one isn’t; it’s marbled, moist, and just sweet enough, like homemade cake. Whipped cream? Yes, but not too much; same with the hot fudge sauce piped around the edges of the plate. The brownie might not be authentically Italian, but I suspect even a lot of authentic Italians would be open to its charms. *

APERTO

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

1434 18th St., SF

(415) 252-1625

www.apertosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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FEAST: the Guardian Guide to spring food and drink

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Click here to check out out FEAST picks!

Taking it in

It’s no secret that we are what we eat. But it’s as true on a collective level as it is on a personal one. I’ve been struck by this fact as I’ve toured my new hometown with an eye for Bloody Marys and bloody steaks, learning about the life, vibrancy, art, and activism of San Francisco through its tamales and tajines. Having come most recently from Los Angeles, with the strip-mall predictability of its restaurants, I find myself falling more in love with this bayside city with every PBR I polish off. Not that there aren’t good places to eat in LA — there are. But a city’s culinary landscape is indicative of its culture, values, and politics — and while LA’s sweet spots are few and far between, hidden, often elitist, usually too expensive, and always hard to get to (hello, traffic), San Francisco’s are plentiful, varied, egalitarian, ecofriendly, and accessible. They have personality and heart. They provide nourishment and pleasure. Most of all, they serve damned good food. This is a guide to this city’s characteristic places for dining and drinking, the places that express our great diversity and our activist nature, the places that cater to our exciting nightlife and to the many ways we recover from it. From green restaurants to places to get cocktails, from high-end to lowbrow, from ethnic treasures to all-American classics, these are some of our favorites. This list is by no means comprehensive, as we are blessed to live in a city with so much to offer that a full list of places worth visiting would read like a phone book. For even more, check out our weekly restaurant reviews, in the paper and online at www.sfbg.com, and keep an eye out for our Best of the Bay issue in July. And in the meantime, raise your glass — or your fork — to the fact that we live in one of the most exciting, eclectic, good-eatin’ cities in the world. I for one am happy to drink to that.

Molly Freedenberg

Feast 2007 editor

molly@sfbg.com

FEAST: The art of the splurge

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Splurging — not to be confused with surging — is one of those activities whose scale and pleasures tend to vary according to where the fluttering bill comes to rest. Who, in other words, is paying? Because San Francisco is to tourism something like what Rome is to Catholicism, with all roads leading here, we the citizenry of this city are certain to find wanderers from afar turning up on the doorstep sooner or later. They are glad to see you and perhaps accept your hospitality, and in return they offer to take you and yours out to dinner at the best restaurant in town.

It helps if these willing souls are rich, or parents, or both. (European friends aren’t bad either, since they probably wield the mighty euro, and America for euro wielders is one huge fire sale.) They will be grateful for your expertise in choosing the restaurant, and you will need take no notice of the bill, when at last it arrives, nor of its proportions, which, if there is significant wine involved, could vaguely resemble a month’s rent. Glance at the harmless-looking little chit if you must or if you are curious; otherwise, pay a visit to the restroom while the putf8um AmEx card does its work.

These kinds of blowouts are fun, like showing up empty-handed at somebody’s party and gorging on the food and drink everybody else brought, but the more meaningful splurges are those we pay for ourselves. Yes, there can be a certain pang when ordering, since we know the damage is coming right out of our pocket; there can be an even greater pang when the server presents what the French discreetly call l’addition. But there is also a sense of having earned the moment and its satisfactions and of having spent money not on a yacht or a marbled bathroom with gold-leaf fixtures worthy of Nero but on an experience that will last a few hours at most and will be just a memory even before we get into bed for the night. That is priceless. (For everything else, there’s MasterCard.)

What follows is a brief survey of places I consider splurgeworthy (not to be confused with spongeworthy). The first group consists of restaurants most suitable for the spending of other people’s money — i.e., they are expensive, quite a few of them hideously so. The second group is the spots that you should treat yourself to even if you can’t arrange for somebody else to pick up the tab. You live here, and experiencing these restaurants is part of your education: you are obliged. The last set is the best bang-for-the-buck ones; you’ll pay, but not quite so woundingly, and you’ll come away feeling that the money was well spent. (Paul Reidinger)

Somebody else pays

GARY DANKO


The experience of gastronomic luxury is nowhere more holistic than here. Everything is just right and in balance; the restaurant is handsome but not showy, lively but not overwhelming. Members of the service staff seem genuinely pleased to see you, and the food is sublime. I did notice on my last visit that the tables seemed closer together than a few years ago — the more the merrier, apparently, especially in the accounting department. Noise levels have risen a bit, and the staff seems slightly more in a hurry. Nonetheless, a visit is certain to be ethereal and unforgettable, and you will be lauded for your acumen and good taste if you agree to be taken here. NB: the food is quite rich, so adjust your cholesterol meds accordingly if applicable.

800 N. Point, SF. (415) 749-2060, www.garydanko.com

AQUA


Even people who are wary of seafood will find much to like at Aqua, which really can’t be improved on. The look has softened and warmed subtly over the years, while the food is as good as it’s ever been, maybe better. Chef Laurent Manrique (who follows in the illustrious footsteps of George Morrone and Michael Mina) brings a muscular elegance to his maritime-leaning menu, and there is even foie gras, if you are so inclined. The wine list is huge and interesting, the ceilings high (noise vanishes up there like unwanted smoke or heat), the bread warm and fresh, the staff well schooled. There is a certain formality of tone that might have to do with the restaurant’s Financial District location; at weekday lunches, hordes of money changers descend. Evening’s the time, then.

252 California, SF. (415) 956-5662, www.aqua-sf.com

FLEUR DE LYS


Being inside Hubert Keller’s restaurant is like being inside A Thousand and One Nights; the walls ripple with loose, tentlike fabric. And you can’t possibly miss the huge pot of flowers that dominates the middle of the main dining room. The cooking combines elements of nouvelle with a certain whimsy. The prix fixe menus offer lots of wiggle room, bigger and smaller portions as you choose and so forth. There is also a vegetarian menu. The cuisine is among the most visually interesting in the city; individual courses tend to be highly architectural and to arrive in, or be sauced from, a wealth of dollhouse-size pots, pans, and pitchers. For those who like to play with their food before eating it, this adds to the fun.

777 Sutter, SF. (415) 673-7779, www.fleurdelyssf.com

CAMPTON PLACE


Parents are a special case, and Campton Place is the special spot to bring them. Although the dining room is quite small, the tables are decently far apart, and a civilized hush obtains. The kitchen has launched its share of stars over the years; the alumni association includes Jan Birnbaum, Bradley Ogden, Laurent Manrique, and Daniel Humm. No matter who’s cooking, the food is superior — there is none better. What is most distinctive about Campton Place is its layered European feel; there is a sense of tradition and grandeur that does not call attention to itself because it doesn’t need to. It’s a given. Of all the city’s top-tier restaurants, Campton Place is perhaps the one that’s been most resolute in the face of fads and trends; it’s not stuffy, but it isn’t afraid of being what it is either.

340 Stockton, SF. (415) 781-5555, www.camptonplace.com/dining

You grit your teeth and pay

CHEZ PANISSE


If there’s one restaurant all Bay Area folk should have their passport stamped at (I am speaking metaphorically, of course), it’s Chez Panisse. All the mother-ship clichés are true; many if not most of our best restaurants and chefs can trace their lineage here, and they must be proud to do so. The restaurant’s understanding of California cooking remains distinctive in its unclutteredness; the big wood-fired hearth in the open kitchen means many dishes are grilled, and for rustic elegance, the kiss of wood smoke is unsurpassed. The wider experience is modulated with similar grace. Chez Panisse isn’t quite casual, but it isn’t overformal either. It’s in harmony with its arts and crafts setting, as are most of its patrons.

1517 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 548-5525, www.chezpanisse.com

BOULEVARD


Notwithstanding a bit of the Parisian brasserie look, including a fair amount of dark wood and brass, chef-owner Nancy Oakes’s longtime jewel on the Embarcadero is really quite all-American in its own high-stepping way. The restaurant is a microcosm of the city, a place of power lunches and multigenerational family get-togethers. The food is as stylish as it gets, but if you want some glorious version of meat and potatoes, you will likely find it here — and if you want a main course that knows it’s a main course and not just a puffed-up small plate, you’ll find that too. Of all the city’s top-tier restaurants, Boulevard might be the least terrifying to heartland sensibilities.

1 Mission (in the Audiffred Bldg.), SF. (415) 543-6084, www.boulevardrestaurant.com

RIP: HAWTHORNE LANE


And a quick digression to remember Hawthorne Lane, which closed at the end of the year (and an 11-year run) to be reborn a few weeks later as Two. I haven’t been to the new place, but I know that even if I like it, I will never stop missing the dearly departed. Hawthorne Lane was as comfortably gracious a restaurant as could be found in San Francisco: plush but not stuffy, vibrant but not loud, with a menu rich in style and short on intimidation. It was the sort of place 25-year-olds and their parents would be equally impressed by, and that’s saying something.

Two, 22 Hawthorne, SF. (415) 777-9779, www.two-sf.com

Good value

DELFINA


Chef-owner Craig Stoll’s Mission venue tilts toward youth — famous rock stars are said to like it, and the crowd (not to mention the service staff) has more than its share of tattoos and piercings — but beneath the hipster glamour is one of the best restaurants in the city. The kitchen turns out Tuscan-inflected dishes that reflect Stoll’s sojourn in that overfamous Italian region; Tuscan might be a cliché now, but it isn’t at Delfina. Noise has long been an issue, and while a large expansion a few years back (along with plenty of quilted sound-baffling material posted discreetly around the dining room) has helped dilute the clamor, Delfina is packed so reliably that it can never truly be calm. Older people can find it overwhelming. But … a glass of wine will help soothe any ruffled feathers.

3621 18th St., SF. (415) 552-4055, www.delfinasf.com

FEAST: 6 green bars and bistros

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The road to hell is paved with recycled soda cans. I know you mean well, turning off the water while you brush your teeth and sorting your trash, but don’t you know it takes more than that now? We’re saving the world, yo, and boy, does it need saving. So what else can you do besides buy your toilet paper at Trader Joe’s? How about support green businesses — and green restaurants in particular? Because with all the day-to-day hard work and heartache it takes to run such a place, it ain’t easy being … well, you know. Luckily, the world has people like Ritu Primlani, founder and executive director of Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education. Thimmakka’s mission is to help restaurants conserve water and energy, prevent pollution, and minimize solid waste — and then reward them for their efforts by publicizing them as certified green businesses. And though some of the classic do-gooders are on the list — Chez Panisse and Café Gratitude among them — Thimmakka also makes a special effort to work with lesser-known, ethnic, and lower-brow venues. The following is a small set of Bay Area bars and clubs that have undergone Thimmakka’s greening program and come out a healthier shade of jade. For more, in the Bay and elsewhere, visit www.thimmakka.org. (Molly Freedenberg)

ELIXIR


Far from being your typical dive, this Mission saloon is all about going above and beyond. It organizes charity bartender nights, hosts meetings of green-leaning politicos, and impressed Thimmakka with its myriad of earth-friendly measures: using rechargeable batteries, ultralow-flush toilets and double-sided printers, reusing recycled content in construction materials and tabletop covers, and letting dry waste sit for a day or so (to save trash bags). Plus, there’s nothing like a good pour of Stella to help you forget for a moment that global warming is going to kill us all.

3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com

TASTE OF THE HIMALAYAS


Wonder what Nepalese food is like? It’s a lot like Indian food but lighter, fluffier, and, in the case of this Marina eatery, greener. Though stark and a bit lonely during the day, this is the kind of place that could be cozy and festive when packed on a weekend night. And there’s every reason for it to be — the greens are surprisingly spicy, the garbanzo bean stew both sweet and savory, the naan so airy it’s positively gravity defying, and the service as friendly as friendly could be. Plus, it’s Thimmakka approved.

2420 Lombard, SF. (415) 674-9898, www.himalayanexp.com

RAMBLAS TAPAS BAR


Not just a home of tiny plates of food and large pitchers of sangria, Ramblas is also an exemplar of green goodness. It has discarded grease and oil picked up to be reused as biodiesel or soap. It donates electronic equipment. It uses a special vent that keeps grease away from the roof so it doesn’t wash into storm water. And all its chard and spinach are organic. Feel that high? It’s not just the fruity wine-and-spirits concoction you had with dinner. It’s the buzz of environmental righteousness.

557 Valencia, SF. (415) 565-0207, www.ramblastapas.com

BISTRO LIAISON


This Berkeley bistro stays true to the French tradition of well-portioned, perfectly seasoned, richly flavored delights. But it shucks the age-old restaurant convention of waste, waste, waste. Among its other envirofriendly accomplishments, Liaison manages to recycle and compost 80 percent of its solid waste. C’est responsable!

1849 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 849-2155, www.liaisonbistro.com

SAN MIGUEL


The shabby exterior and faded sign aren’t doing San Miguel any favors, but inside this Mission eatery is a kitschy, cozy, Disneyland-does-Guatemala affair with maps under glass on the tables, rows of Latin American tchotchkes hanging from the corrugated tin ceiling, and a soundtrack of music that can only be described as south of the border polka. And in addition to doing good for your taste buds (try the sour and savory salpicon), this place is doing good for the planet. It uses potpourri and a special degreaser instead of Pine-Sol and aerosols, it’s outfitted its bathrooms with special aerated taps, and it’s learned how to identify and repair leaks. So go ahead: have your camarones asados with a side of environmentalism.

3263 Mission, SF. (415) 641-5866, www.forored.com/sanmiguel

BLONDIE’S BAR AND NO GRILL


"Really? Blondie’s?" That’s the response I get when I tell people this Mission dance club is one of Thimmakka’s darlings — not because the walls are papered with Styrofoam and baby seal eyes or anything, but because the scene is so far from the hemp and hacky-sack culture usually associated with envirofriendliness. But it’s true. This bastion of Yelp.com ambivalence serves organic vodka, reduces paper waste by posting bulletins on a board rather than handing out individual letters or memos, conserves water with special dishwasher systems, and reduces chemical pollution by using a diluted pesticide that’s 200 times less toxic than Raid. Best of all, though, Blondie’s encourages people to get out of their cars by having parking for bikes — no big surprise if you know owner Nicole Dewald’s mother was a major player in getting bike lanes and one-lane streets in the city. "It’s their claim to fame," Primlani said.

540 Valencia, SF. (415) 864-2419, www.blondiesbar.com *

FEAST: 6 all-you-can-eat buffets

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If I have an Achilles heel when it comes to dining out, it is a persistent inability to make up my mind about the entrée. Who can ever pick just one? Wouldn’t that seafood linguine be pleasantly enhanced with just a morsel of roasted quail? Isn’t the fun of eating Chinese food in passing the plates around so everyone gets to try everything? Happily for my hardwired grazing gene, there is a contingent of restaurants in the Bay Area that cater to my need to nosh, with fixed-price all-you-can eat buffets. These aren’t Vegas-style troughs either — the quality of the food in no way suffers from the fact that there’s a lot of it. And the cuisine spans the globe, from South America to the Middle East. (Nicole Gluckstern)

ESPETUS


Rule number one for dining at Espetus: leave your vegetarian friends at home. It’s not that the restaurant doesn’t have any meatless options — there’s a whole steam table–salad bar area where you can load up on black beans and fresh fruit — but the sight of a king-size rack of ribs circling the room on a silver platter can put even the most tolerant veg-heads off their feed. However, for the eager omnivore, this Brazilian churrascaria offers more than a dozen meaty delights straight from the grill, served by wandering waiters who carve slices off skewers of salt-rubbed sirloin and Parmesan-dusted pork loin until you indicate your state of satiety by turning a tabletop dial from green to red. Even this ploy might not save you — the last time I was there and we went to red, the headwaiter marched over, turned the dial back to green, and forced us to try his filet mignon. Bless him, it was superb.

1686 Market, SF. (415) 552-8792, www.espetus.com

HELMAND


Back when I worked in North Beach, I walked past Helmand every day and tried to imagine what Afghan cuisine might entail. Content with stuffing myself with 50-cent dim sum and Cafe Trieste instead, I never ventured inside until I discovered the well-stocked, all-you-can-eat lunch buffet for $9.95. I can now report back with certainty — Afghan cuisine means yogurt-based sauces, lots of lamb, and even a mouthwateringly delicious okra-and-tomato stew (bendi). The baked pumpkin in sugar (kaddo) is universally praised, and the leek-filled ravioli (aushak) are morsels of delectable pungency.

430 Broadway, SF. (415) 362-0641, www.helmandrestaurantsanfrancisco.com

TODAI


Todai might be the best reason to take BART to Daly City. Located a hop, skip, and jump away from the station, this Olympic-size smorgasbord of Japanese food makes Sushi Boat look like the kiddie pool. At Todai you’ll find sushi aplenty (including roll-your-own), plus an array of salads, shabu shabu, calamari, unagi skewers (yum!), grilled meats, gyoza, udon, teriyaki, tempura, crab legs, and even bite-size cream puffs and green tea–flavored cheesecake chunks. The high school cafeteria atmosphere is on the cheerless side, but the inexpensive carafes of hot sake do help to alleviate any lingering flashbacks of social unease.

1901 Junipero Serra Blvd., Daly City. (650) 997-0882, www.todai.com

GOAT HILL PIZZA


Like most people who have grown up accustomed to a regional variety of pizza, I admit to pizza crust favoritism — in my case, a preference for thick and bready, Rocky Mountain–style. Goat Hill somehow manages to trump my predilection with a specialty of its own, the sourdough crust. Not only does it adequately sop up all that extraneous cheese grease, but it also complements all kinds of toppings, from the familiar (pepperoni) to the esoteric (linguica). Best of all, every Monday night at the Potrero Hill location and daily at the Howard Street address, it’s all-you-can-eat, plus salad.

300 Connecticut, SF. (415) 641-1440; 525 Howard, SF. (415) 357-1440. www.goathill.com

STAR OF INDIA


Though my love of Indian food is generally all-encompassing enough to overlook some of the more common blunders cheap Indian restaurants are prone to (too much grease, not enough spice), it’s nice to be able to sidestep caution and go straight for the gustatory gusto. The daily buffet at Star of India is blessedly low on the grease index, and at $8.95 for unlimited trips to the steam table, I can overlook the spice issue. The vindaloo is fiery enough, the sag paneer delightfully smooth, and the assorted pickled veggies a great little garnish. Chai tea and a dessert option are included.

2127 Polk, SF. (415) 292-6699, www.starofindiaonpolk.com

CLUB WAZIEMA


Vegetarians, rejoice! Club Waziema’s got the $9 all-you-can-eat platter especially for you. Boasting the most incongruous decor of any Ethiopian restaurant in town, the restaurant has a bordello-chic look — complete with crushed velvet wallpaper — that only highlights the pleasure of plowing your fingers into spongy blankets of piping hot injera and stuffing them full of collard greens, spicy lentils, and vegetable stew. Sip a glass of delicate honey wine with dinner, or wait until afterward and start in on the G-and-T’s from the full-service bar.

543 Divisadero, SF. (415) 346-6641, www.clubwaziema.com *

Dine Listings

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Welcome to our dining listings, a detailed guide by neighborhood of some great places to grab a bite, hang out with friends, or impress the ones you love with thorough knowledge of this delectable city. Restaurants are reviewed by Paul Reidinger (PR) or staff. All area codes are 415, and all restaurants are wheelchair accessible, except where noted.

B Breakfast

BR Saturday and/or Sunday brunch

L Lunch

D Dinner

AE American Express

DC Diners Club

DISC Discover

MC MasterCard

V Visa

¢ less than $7 per entrée

$ $7–$12

$$ $13–$20

$$$ more than $20

DOWNTOWN/EMBARCADERO

Boulevard runs with ethereal smoothness — you are cosseted as if at a chic private party — but despite much fame the place retains its brasserie trappings and joyous energy. (Staff) 1 Mission, SF. 543-6084. American, L/D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Brindisi Cucina di Mare cooks seafood the south Italian way, and that means many, many ways, with many, many sorts of seafood. (PR, 4/04) 88 Belden Place, SF. 593-8000. Italian/seafood, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Bushi-tei melds East and West, old and new, with sublime elegance. Chef Seiji Wakabayashi is fluent in many of the culinary dialects of East Asia as well as the lofty idiom of France, and the result is cooking that develops its own integrity. The setting — of glass, candles, and ancient lumber — shimmers with enchantment. (PR, 3/06) 1638 Post, SF. 440-4959. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

Café Claude is a hidden treasure of the city center. There is an excellent menu of traditional, discreetly citified French dishes, a youthful energy, and a romantic setting on a narrow, car-free lane reminiscent of the Marais. (PR, 10/06) 7 Claude Lane, SF. 392-3515. French, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Chaya Brasserie brings a taste of LA’s preen-and-be-seen culture to the waterfront. The Japanese-influenced food is mostly French, and very expensive. (Staff) 132 Embarcadero, SF. 777-8688. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Cortez has a Scandinavian Designs-on-acid look — lots of heavy, weird multicolored mobiles — but Pascal Rigo’s Mediterranean-influenced small plates will quickly make you forget you’re eating in a hotel. (Staff) 550 Geary (in the Hotel Adagio), SF. 292-6360. Mediterranean, B/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cosmopolitan Cafe seems like a huge Pullman car. The New American menu emphasizes heartiness. (Staff) 121 Spear, SF. 543-4001. American, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

NORTH BEACH/CHINATOWN

Maykadeh Persian Cuisine is a great date restaurant, classy but not too pricey, and there are lots of veggie options both for appetizers and entrées. Khoresht bademjan was a delectable, deep red stew of tomato and eggplant with a rich, sweet, almost chocolatey undertone. (Staff) 470 Green, SF. 362-8286. Persian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Michelangelo Cafe There’s always a line outside this quintessential North Beach restaurant, but it’s well worth the sidewalk time for Michelangelo’s excellent Italian, served in a bustling, family-style atmosphere. The seafood dishes are recommended; approach the postprandial Gummi Bears at your own risk. (Staff) 597 Columbus, SF. 986-4058. Italian, D, $$.

Moose’s is famous for the Mooseburger, but the rest of the menu is comfortably sophisticated. The crowd is moneyed but not showy and definitely not nouveau. (Staff) 1652 Stockton, SF. 989-7800. American, BR/L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Pena Pacha Mama offers organic Bolivian cuisine as well as weekly performances of Andean song and dance. Dine on crusted lamb and yucca frita while watching a genuine flamenco performance in this intimate setting. (Staff) 1630 Powell, SF. 646-0018. Bolivian, BR/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Rico’s touts its salsas, and they are good, but so is almost everything else on the mainstream Mexican menu. (Staff) 943 Columbus, SF. 928-5404. Mexican, L/D, ¢, AE/MC/V.

SOMA

AsiaSF Priscilla, Queen of the Desert meets Asian-influenced tapas at this amusingly surreal lounge. The drag queen burlesque spectacle draws a varied audience that’s a show in itself. (Staff) 201 Ninth St, SF. 255-2742. Fusion, D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Bacar means "wine goblet," and its wine menu is extensive — and affordable. Chef Arnold Wong’s eclectic American-global food plays along nicely. (Staff) 448 Brannan, SF. 904-4100. American, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Basil A serene, upscale oasis amid the industrial supply warehouses, Basil offers California-influenced Thai cuisine that’s lively and creative. (Staff) 1175 Folsom, SF. 552-8999. Thai, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Big Nate’s Barbecue is pretty stark inside — mostly linoleum arranged around a pair of massive brick ovens. But the hot sauce will make you sneeze. (Staff) 1665 Folsom, SF. 861-4242. Barbecue, L/D, $, MC/V.

Butler and the Chef brings a taste of Parisian café society — complete with pâtés, cornichons, and croques monsieurs — to sunny South Park. (PR, 5/04) 155A South Park, SF. French, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

NOB HILL/RUSSIAN HILL

Crustacean is famous for its roast Dungeness crab; the rest of the "Euro/Asian" menu is refreshingly Asian in emphasis. (Staff) 1475 Polk, SF. 776-2722. Fusion, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

East Coast West Delicatessen doesn’t look like a New York deli (too much space, air, light), but the huge, fattily satisfying Reubens, platters of meat loaf, black-and-white cookies, and all the other standards compare commendably to their East Coast cousins. (Staff) 1725 Polk, SF. 563-3542. Deli, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

La Folie could be a neighborhood spot or a destination or both, but either way or both ways it is sensational: an exercise in haute cuisine leavened with a West Coast sense of informality and playfulness. There is a full vegetarian menu and an ample selection of wines by the half bottle. (PR, 2/06) 2316 Polk, SF. 776-5577. French, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Grubstake might look like your typical Polk Gulch diner — sandwiches and burgers, open very late — but the kitchen also turns out some good mom-style Portuguese dishes, replete with olives, salt cod, and linguica. If you crave caldo verde at 3 a.m., this is the place. (Staff) 1525 Pine, SF. 673-8268. Portuguese/American, B/L/D, ¢, cash only.

*Matterhorn Restaurant offers dishes that aren’t fondue, but fondue (especially with beef) is the big deal and the answer to big appetites. For dessert: chocolate fondue! (Staff) 2323 Van Ness, SF. 885-6116. Swiss, $$, D, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

CIVIC CENTER/TENDERLOIN

Mekong Restaurant serves the foods of the Mekong River basin. There is a distinct Thai presence but also dishes with Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and even Chinese accents. (PR, 1/06) 791 O’Farrell, SF. 928-2772. Pan-Asian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Olive might look like a tapas bar, but what you want are the thin-crust pizzas, the simpler the toppings the better. The small plates offer eclectic pleasures, especially the Tuscan pâté and beef satay with peanut sauce. (Staff) 743 Larkin, SF. 776-9814. Pizza/eclectic, D, $, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Pagolac For $10.95 a person you and two or more of your favorite beef eaters can dive into Pagolac’s specialty: seven-flavor beef. Less carnivorous types can try the cold spring rolls, shrimp on sugarcane, or lemongrass tofu. (Staff) 655 Larkin, SF. 776-3234. Vietnamese, L/D, ¢.

*Saha serves "Arabic fusion cuisine" — a blend of the Middle East and California — in a cool, spare setting behind the concierge’s desk at the Hotel Carlton. One senses the imminence of young rock stars, drawn perhaps by the lovely chocolate fondue. (PR, 9/04) 1075 Sutter, SF. 345-9547. Arabic/fusion, B/BR/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

HAYES VALLEY

Frjtz serves first-rate Belgian fries, beer, crepes, and sandwiches in an art-house atmosphere. If the noise overwhelms, take refuge in the lovely rear garden. (Staff) 579 Hayes, SF. 864-7654; also at Ghirardelli Square, SF. 928-3886. Belgian, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Hayes Street Grill started more than a quarter century ago as an emulation of the city’s old seafood houses, and now it’s an institution itself. The original formula — immaculate seafood simply prepared, with choice of sauce and French fries — still beats vibrantly at the heart of the menu. Service is impeccable, the setting one of relaxed grace. (PR, 7/06) 816 Folsom, SF. 863-5545. Seafood, L/D, $$$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Sauce enjoys the services of chef Ben Paula, whose uninhibited California cooking is as easy to like as a good pop song. (PR, 5/05) 131 Gough, SF. 252-1369. California, D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Suppenküche has a Busvan for Bargains, butcher-block look that gives context to its German cuisine. If you like schnitzel, brats, roasted potatoes, eggs, cheese, cucumber salad, cold cuts, and cold beer, you’ll love it here. (Staff) 601 Hayes, SF. 252-9289. German, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

*Zuni Cafe is one of the most celebrated — and durable — restaurants in town, perhaps because its kitchen has honored the rustic country cooking of France and Italy for the better part of two decades. (PR, 2/05) 1658 Market, SF. 552-2522. California, B/L/D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

CASTRO/NOE VALLEY/GLEN PARK

La Ciccia offers the distinct cuisine of Sardinia — Italian yet not quite — in an appealingly subdued storefront setting in outer Noe Valley. Pizzas are excellent, and the food is notably meaty, though with some lovely maritime twists. A unique and riveting wine list. (PR, 6/06) 291 30th St., SF. 550-8114. Sardinian/Italian, D, $$, MC/V.

Côté Sud brings a stylish breath of Provence to the Castro. The cooking reflects an unfussy elegance; service is as crisp as a neatly folded linen napkin. Nota bene: you must climb a set of steps to reach the place. (Staff) 4238 18th St, SF. 255-6565. French, D, $$, MC/V.

Eric’s Dig into the likes of mango shrimp, hoisin green beans, and spicy eggplant with chicken in this bright, airy space. (Staff) 1500 Church, SF. 282-0919. Chinese, L/D, $, MC/V.

Eureka Restaurant and Lounge combines, in the old Neon Chicken space, a classic Castro sensibility (mirrors everywhere, fancy sparkling water) with a stylish all-American menu that reflects Boulevard and Chenery Park bloodlines. Prices are high. (PR, 12/06) 4063 18th St. SF. 431-6000. American, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

*Firefly remains an exemplar of the neighborhood restaurant in San Francisco: it is homey and classy, hip and friendly, serving an American menu — deftly inflected with ethnic and vegetarian touches — that’s the match of any in the city. (PR, 9/04) 4288 24th St, SF. 821-7652. American, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

HAIGHT/COLE VALLEY/WESTERN ADDITION

Metro Cafe brings the earthy chic of Paris’s 11th arrondissement to the Lower Haight, prix fixe and all. (Staff) 311 Divisadero, SF. 552-0903. French, B/BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

New Ganges Restaurant is short on style — it is as if the upmarket revolution in vegetarian restaurants never happened — but there is a homemade freshness to the food you won’t find at many other places. (Staff) 775 Frederick, SF. 681-4355. Vegetarian/Indian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Raja Cuisine of India serves up decent renditions of Indian standards in an unassuming, even spare, setting. Low prices. (Staff) 500 Haight, SF. 255-6000. Indian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Rotee isn’t the fanciest south Asian restaurant in the neighborhood, but it is certainly one of the most fragrant, and its bright oranges and yellows (food, walls) do bring good cheer. Excellent tandoori fish. (PR, 12/04) 400 Haight, SF. 552-8309. Indian/Pakistani, L/D, $, MC/V.

Tsunami Sushi and Sake Bar brings hip Japanese-style seafood to the already hip Café Abir complex. Skull-capped sushi chefs, hefty and innovative rolls. (Staff) 1306 Fulton, SF. 567-7664. Japanese/sushi, D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Zazie is one of the best, possibly the very best, of the city’s neighborhood French bistros. The excellent food is fairly priced and the service well-honed; even diners in the open-air garden at the rear of the restaurant will feel coddled. (PR, 1/07) 941 Cole, SF. 564-5332. French, B/BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

Ziryab brings a touch of eastern Med class to a slightly sketchy block of Divisadero in the Western Addition. The menu graciously innovates Middle Eastern standards while adding a California twist or two for fun. Faux stonework lends a Vegas air to the setting. (PR, 3/07) 528 Divisadero, SF. 269-5430. Middle Eastern, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Zoya takes some finding — it is in the little turret of the Days Inn Motor Lodge at Grove and Gough — but the view over the street’s treetops is bucolic, and the cooking is simple, seasonal, direct, and ingredient driven. (PR, 12/05) 465 Grove, SF. 626-9692. California, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

MISSION/BERNAL HEIGHTS/POTRERO HILL

Cafe Phoenix looks like a junior-high cafeteria, but the California-deli food is fresh, tasty, and honest, and the people making it are part of a program to help the emotionally troubled return to employability. (Staff) 1234 Indiana, SF. 282-9675, ext. 239. California, B/L, ¢, MC/V.

Caffe Cozzolino Get it to go: everything’s about two to four bucks more if you eat it there. (Staff) 300 Precita, SF. 285-6005. Italian, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Caffe d’Melanio is the place to go if you want your pound of coffee beans roasted while you enjoy an Argentine-Italian dinner of pasta, milanesa, and chimichurri sauce. During the day the café offers a more typically Cal-American menu of better-than-average quality. First-rate coffee beans. (PR, 10/04) 1314 Ocean, SF. 333-3665. Italian/Argentine, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Il Cantuccio strikingly evokes that little trattoria you found near the Ponte Vecchio on your last trip to Florence. (Staff) 3228 16th St, SF. 861-3899. Italian, D, $, MC/V.

Chez Papa Bistrot sits like a beret atop Potrero Hill. The food is good, the staff’s French accents authentic, the crowd a lively cross section, but the place needs a few more scuffs and quirks before it can start feeling real. (Staff) 1401 18th St, SF. 824-8210. French, BR/L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Circolo Restaurant and Lounge brings Peruvian- and Asian-influenced cooking into a stylishly barnlike urban space where dot-commers gathered of old. Some of the dishes are overwrought, but the food is splendid on the whole. (PR, 6/04) 500 Florida, SF. 553-8560. Nuevo Latino/Asian, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Couleur Café reminds us that French food need be neither fancy nor insular. The kitchen playfully deploys a world of influences — the duck-confit quesadilla is fabulous — and service is precise and attentive despite the modest setting at the foot of Potrero Hill. (PR, 2/06) 300 De Haro, SF. 255-1021. French, BR/L/D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

*Delfina has grown from a neighborhood restaurant to an event, but an expanded dining room has brought the noise under control, and as always, the food — intense variations on a theme of Tuscany — could not be better. (PR, 2/04) 3621 18th St, SF. 552-4055. California, D, $$, MC/V.

Dosa serves dosas, the south Indian crepes, along with a wealth of other, and generally quite spicy, dishes from the south of the subcontinent. The cooking tends toward a natural meatlessness; the crowds are intense, like hordes of passengers inquiring about a delayed international flight. (PR, 1/06) 995 Valencia, SF. 642-3672. South Indian, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Double Play sits across the street from what once was Seals Stadium, but while the field and team are gone, the restaurant persists as an authentic sports bar with a solidly masculine aura — mitts on the walls, lots of dark wood, et cetera. The all-American food (soups, sandwiches, pastas, meat dishes, lots of fries) is outstanding. (Staff) 2401 16th St, SF. 621-9859. American, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack offers a tasty, inexpensive, late-night alternative to Pasta Pomodoro. The touch of human hands is everywhere evident. (Staff) 18 Virginia, SF. 206-2086. Italian, D, $, cash only.

Foreign Cinema serves some fine New American food in a spare setting of concrete and glass that warms up romantically once the sun goes down. (Staff) 2534 Mission, SF. 648-7600. California, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Front Porch mixes a cheerfully homey setting (with a front porch of sorts), a hipster crowd, and a Caribbean-inflected comfort menu into a distinctive urban cocktail. The best dishes, such as a white polenta porridge with crab, are Range-worthy, and nothing on the menu is much more than $10. (PR, 10/06) 65A 29th St, SF. 695-7800. American/Caribbean, BR/D, $, MC/V.

Herbivore is adorned in the immaculate-architect style: angular blond-wood surfaces and precise cubbyholes abound. (Staff) 983 Valencia, SF. 826-5657; 531 Divisadero (at Fell), SF. 885-7133. Vegetarian, L/D, $, MC/V.

MARINA/PACIFIC HEIGHTS/LAUREL HEIGHTS

*Quince doesn’t much resemble its precursor, the Meetinghouse: the setting is more overtly luxurious, the food a pristine Franco-Cal-Ital variant rather than hearty New American. Still, it’s an appealing place to meet. (PR, 7/04) 1701 Octavia, SF. 775-8500. California, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

Rigolo combines the best of Pascal Rigo’s boulangeries — including the spectacular breads — with some of the simpler elements (such as roast chicken) of his higher-end places. The result is excellent value in a bustling setting. (PR, 1/05) 3465 California, SF. 876-7777. California/Mediterranean, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Rose’s Cafe has a flexible, all-day menu that starts with breakfast sandwiches; moves into bruschettas, salads, and pizzas; and finishes with grilled dinner specials such as salmon, chicken, and flat-iron steak. (Staff) 2298 Union, SF. 775-2200. California, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Rosti Getting half a chicken along with roasted potatoes and an assortment of vegetables for $7.95 in the Marina is cause for celebration in itself. (Staff) 2060 Chestnut, SF. 929-9300. Italian, L/D, $, AE/DISC/V.

Saji Japanese Cuisine Sit at the sushi bar and ask the resident sushi makers what’s particularly good that day. As for the hot dishes, seafood yosenabe, served in a clay pot, is a virtual Discovery Channel of finned and scaly beasts, all tasty and fresh. (Staff) 3232 Scott, SF. 931-0563. Japanese, D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

Sociale serves first-rate Cal-Ital food in bewitching surroundings — a heated courtyard, a beautifully upholstered interior — that will remind you of some hidden square in some city of Mediterranean Europe. (Staff) 3665 Sacramento, SF. 921-3200. Mediterranean, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Sushi Groove is easily as cool as its name. Behind wasabi green velvet curtains, salads can be inconsistent, but the sushi is impeccable, especially the silky salmon and special white tuna nigiri. (Staff) 1916 Hyde, SF. 440-1905. Japanese, D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

SUNSET

Sea Breeze Cafe looks like a dive, but the California cooking is elevated, literally and figuratively. Lots of witty salads, a rum-rich crème brûlée. (Staff) 3940 Judah, SF. 242-6022. California, BR/L/D, $$, MC/V.

So Restaurant brings the heat, in the form of huge soup and noodle — and soupy noodle — dishes, many of them liberally laced with hot peppers and chiles. The pot stickers are homemade and exceptional, the crowd young and noisy. Cheap. (PR, 10/06) 2240 Irving, SF. 731-3143. Chinese/noodles, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tasty Curry still shows traces of an earlier life as a Korean hibachi restaurant (i.e., venting hoods above most of the tables), but the South Asian food is cheap, fresh, and packs a strong kick. (PR, 1/04) 1375 Ninth Ave, SF. 753-5122. Indian/Pakistani, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tennessee Grill could as easily be called the Topeka Grill, since its atmosphere is redolent of Middle America. Belly up to the salad bar for huge helpings of the basics to accompany your meat loaf or calf’s liver. (Staff) 1128 Taraval, SF. 664-7834. American, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Thai Cottage isn’t really a cottage, but it is small in the homey way, and its Thai menu is sharp and vivid in the home-cooking way. Cheap, and the N train stops practically at the front door. (PR, 8/04) 4041 Judah, SF. 566-5311. Thai, L/D, $, MC/V.

*Xiao Loong elevates the neighborhood Chinese restaurant experience to one of fine dining, with immaculate ingredients and skillful preparation in a calm architectural setting. (PR, 8/05) 250 West Portal, SF. 753-5678. Chinese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Yum Yum Fish is basically a fish store: three or four little tables with fish-print tablecloths under glass, fish-chart art along the wall, and fish-price signs all over the place. (Staff) 2181 Irving, SF. 566-6433. Sushi, L/D, ¢.

RICHMOND

*Pizzetta 211 practices the art of the pizza in a glowing little storefront space. Thin crusts, unusual combinations, a few side dishes of the highest quality. (PR, 2/04) 211 23rd Ave, SF. 379-9880. Pizza/Italian, L/D, $.

Q rocks, both American-diner-food-wise and noisy-music-wise. Servings of such gratifyingly tasty dishes as barbecued ribs, fish tacos, and rosemary croquettes are huge. (Staff) 225 Clement, SF. 752-2298. American, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

RoHan Lounge serves a variety of soju cocktails to help wash down all those Asian tapas. Beware the kimchee. Lovely curvaceous banquettes. (Staff) 3809 Geary, SF. 221-5095. Asian, D, $, AE/MC/V.

Singapore Malaysian Restaurant eschews decor for cheap, tasty plates, where you’ll find flavors ranging from Indian to Dutch colonial to Thai. Seafood predominates in curries, soups, grills, and plenty of rice and noodle dishes. (Staff) 836 Clement, SF. 750-9518. Malaysian, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Spices! has an exclamation point for a reason: its Chinese food, mainly Szechuan and Taiwanese, with an oasis of Shanghai-style dishes, is fabulously hot. Big young crowds, pulsing house music, a shocking orange and yellow paint scheme. Go prepared, leave happy. (Staff) 294 Eighth Ave, SF. 752-8884. Szechuan/Chinese, L/D, $, MC/V.

BAYVIEW/HUNTERS POINT/SOUTH

Bella Vista Continental Restaurant commands a gorgeous view of the Peninsula and South Bay from its sylvan perch on Skyline Boulevard, and the continental food, though a little stately, is quite good. The look is rustic-stylish (exposed wood beams, servers in dinner jackets), and the tone one of informal horse-country wealth. (PR, 3/07) 13451 Skyline Blvd., Woodside. (650) 851-1229. Continental, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cable Car Coffee Shop Atmospherically speaking, you’re looking at your basic downtown South San Francisco old-style joint, one that serves a great Pacific Scramble for $4.95 and the most perfectest hash browns to be tasted. (Staff) 423 Grand, South SF. (650) 952-9533. American, B/BR/L, ¢.

Cliff’s Bar-B-Q and Seafood Some things Cliff’s got going for him: excellent mustard greens, just drenched in flavorfulness, and barbecued you name it. Brisket. Rib tips. Hot links. Pork ribs. Beef ribs. Baby backs. And then there are fried chickens and, by way of health food, fried fishes. (Staff) 2177 Bayshore, SF. 330-0736. Barbecue, L/D, ¢, AE/DC/MC/V.

BERKELEY/EMERYVILLE/NORTH

Café de la Paz Specialties include African-Brazilian "xim xim" curries, Venezuelan corn pancakes, and heavenly blackened seacakes served with orange-onion yogurt. (Staff) 1600 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 843-0662. Latin American, BR/L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Cafe Rouge All the red meat here comes from highly regarded Niman Ranch, and all charcuterie are made in-house. (Staff) 1782 Fourth St, Berk. (510) 525-1440. American, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

César You’ll be tempted to nibble for hours from Chez Panisse-related César’s Spanish-inspired tapas — unless you can’t get past the addictive sage-and-rosemary-flecked fried potatoes. (Staff) 1515 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 883-0222. Spanish, D, $, DISC/MC/V.

OAKLAND/ALAMEDA

Mama’s Royal Cafe Breakfast is the draw here — even just-coffee-for-me types might succumb when confronted with waffles, French toast, pancakes, tofu scrambles, huevos rancheros, and 20 different omelets. (Staff) 4012 Broadway, Oakl. (510) 547-7600. American, B/L, ¢.

La Mexicana has a 40-year tradition of stuffing its customers with delicious, simply prepared staples (enchiladas, tacos, tamales, chile rellenos, menudo) and specials (carnitas, chicken mole), all served in generous portions at moderate prices. (Staff) 3930 E 14th St, Oakl. (510) 533-8818. Mexican, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Nan Yang offers too many great dishes — ginger salad, spicy fried potato cakes, coconut chicken noodle soup, garlic noodles, succulent lamb curry that melts in your mouth — to experience in one visit. (Staff) 6048 College, Oakl. (510) 655-3298. Burmese, L/D, $, MC/V. *

Superlist! Our annual guide to everything

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Every year, we compile lists of interesting arcana, both frivolous and useful, to guide you through life in the Bay. Enjoy!

Super Index: The Bay Area by the numbers


Superlist No. 823: Antique SF bars

Superlist No. 824: DIY dog washes

Superlist No. 825: Restaurants with DJs

Superlist No. 826: Alcohol rehab

Superlist No. 827: Disc golf courses

Superlist No. 828: MMA fight clubs


Superlist No. 829: Safe houses

Superlist No. 830: Empower lunches

Superlist No. 831: Box office steals

Superlist No. 825: Restaurants with DJs

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› superlists@sfbg.com

It’s a fact: lousy music can spoil a dining experience. We’ve all been to the too-loud restaurant where talking over the cheap sound system quickly becomes a losing battle. And nobody goes back to the place that put the Lionel Ritchie Millennium Collection on loop, or the hole-in-the-wall with the wonderfully authentic foreign food and the borderline torturous background music. Avoid aural indigestion by trying one of the many restaurants that have gone to great lengths to ensure the ambiance is as pleasing to your ears as the food is to your taste buds. The best time to hear dinner’s new soundtrack is typically during the weekend; however, a few eateries serve DJs with midweek meals.

Big-name residents such as Tom Thump lay down the tracks at Frisson (244 Jackson, SF. 415-956-3004, www.frissonsf.com), the quintessential meals and wheels of steel restaurant. With the main dining room’s circular layout and warm colors, the new American cuisine’s premium quality, and the neosoul, jazz-infused electronic audio, Frisson has the right chemistry.

Many DJs spin into the wee hours of the morning, but Levende Lounge (1710 Mission, SF. 415-864-5585, www.levendesf.com) DJs don’t hit the decks until breakfast. Live electronic music, a self-service Bloody Mary bar, and a build-your-own Benedict menu option reinvent Sunday brunch. Levende strives to bring up-and-coming local talent as well as internationally recognized names to the table.

Residents Sabrina and Benji set the mood for the stunning, floor-to-ceiling bay view and noteworthy fusion of California and pan-Asian cuisine at Butterfly (Pier 33, Embarcadero, SF. 415-864-8999, www.butterflysf.com).

Eastside West (3154 Fillmore, SF. 415-885-4000, www.eastsidewest.com) creates a live music feel by putting resident DJ Morgan on a small stage. Its American regional menu features home-style favorites such as macaroni and cheese and buttermilk fried chicken. The mix usually includes Top 40 hits, so you may find yourself humming along between bites.

Head to North Beach’s Impala (501 Broadway, SF. 415-982-5299, www.impalasf.com), where you’ll instantly be transported south of the border. Here the tequila goes down as smooth as the tunes, which residents D-Tek and Zhaldee often infuse with a Latin flair.

If it weren’t for the flatware and delicious rolls in front of you, you’d swear Mas Sake (2030 Lombard, SF. 415-440-1505, www.massake.com) were a nightclub. Resident DJs Kimani, Solarz, Booker, and Chris Fox keep the mashups pumping all dinner long.

Lose yourself in the hypnotizing tunes, jungle decor, and flavorful Thai food at Lingba Lounge (1469 18th St., SF. 415-647-6469, www.lingba.com).

Hit up Poleng Lounge (1751 Fulton, SF. 415-441-1710, www.polenglounge.com) on a Friday or Saturday night if a little hip-hop, a dash of soul, and some Asian fusion cuisine sounds like a recipe for a good time.

DJ Adrian keeps things mellow at Mecca (2029 Market, SF. 415-621-7000, www.sfmecca.com) on Thursdays and Fridays with old-school electronica from the ’70s and ’80s.

As you might expect, Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack (18 Virginia, SF. 415-206-2086) serves pasta dishes galore, but there’s a little something extra on the menu on Fridays and Saturdays: rotating DJs who spin everything from oldies to new wave and punk — but never house music.

At Nihon (1779 Folsom, SF. 415-552-4400, www.nighonsf.com), DJ Gray spins house and lounge while diners enjoy sushi and other Japanese fare.

Sushi Groove South (1516 Folsom, SF. 415-503-1950) is another chic sushi spot where resident DJs spin nightly.

DJs Michael Anthony, B-Smiley, Didge Kelli, and Drunken Monkey make the dinner-in-bed experience at Supperclub (657 Harrison, SF. 415-348-0900, www.supperclub.com) all the more cozy by channeling chill ambient and other funky forms of electronica through the sound system.

DJs only spin in the lounge at Sutra Restaurant and Lounge (100 Brannan, SF. 415-593-5900, www.sutrasf.com), where Asian fusion and downtempo are on the platters. *

It’s the chalk

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When we think of white wine, we think of many things — Brie, student-faculty mixers, summer picnics sur l’herbe, grilled fish — but chalk is generally not among them. Chalk would not seem to have much to do with food and drink at all, except as a means to write the day’s specials on those little blackboards restaurants sometimes hang on the wall or prop up outside the front door. Yet chalky soil is intrinsic to a certain sort of white wine the French have long been masters of and we have struggled with, and I have often wondered why, until reading John McPhee’s riveting piece "Season on the Chalk: From Ditchling Beacon to Épernay," which ran in the New Yorker‘s March 12 issue.

McPhee is our greatest living poet of geology. His 1993 book, Assembling California, had much to say not only about the formation of our state but about that of the west of North America generally — in particular, how young everything is here relative to Europe. The expressions New World and Old World turn out not to be purely sociopolitical. Chalk is old, and it is really not found here; even Chalk Hill, in Sonoma County, consists not of calcium carbonate (like true chalk and its near relation limestone) but of volcanic ash. Northwestern Europe, on the other hand, is streaked by a huge band of chalk, which runs from the downlands south of London to the white cliffs of Dover, then under the English Channel into northern France and the Champagne towns of Reims and Épernay. From there the band curves around the Île-de-France and swoops into the Touraine region of the Loire Valley, where many wonderfully dry, minerally sauvignon blancs and chenin blancs are produced. There is even a tail-end bit around Cognac.

French champagne experts have often been heard to say over the years that méthode champenoise sparkling wines from California, while good and sometimes very good, simply do not compare to the best of their French counterparts. I have long suspected an element of snobbery here, but the McPhee story suggests that there might also be some empirical reality; "Vines like their feet dry," he quotes an (English) maker of sparkling wine as noting, and chalky soil drains quickly while providing high levels of nutrients. Advantage: France. And England!

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Mythic pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The perfect pizza, like its near relations the perfect golf shot, the perfect holiday, and the perfect sentence, is an apparition of memory. We all have some recollection of a pie (or three-wood from the rough to within 10 feet of the pin) that achieved sublimity. We might have eaten this pie in Rome or Naples, on Chestnut Street or Columbus Avenue, or even in our own kitchen. What we know for sure is that no pie before or since has topped it.

I was reminded, in the course of a recent jaunt into the mountains, how imperfect so many California pizzas seem to be and in what ways. The jaunt was spontaneous and came to an inglorious end at a "road closed" sign hanging from a shut gate in a blizzard at 8,000 feet. But an hour or so before that rebuff it had been lunchtime, and we’d stopped in the as yet unthreatening slush to eat at what looked like it might be one of the last restaurants we would pass before scaling the summit.

The pie, presented with great cheer, consisted of a soft, thick, bready crust, like a piece of insulation, carpeted with "Mexican" ingredients, mostly seasoned ground beef, melted cheddar cheese, and raw onions. Since we were hungry and had brought little food of our own, we ate it up and were grateful, and I probably wouldn’t have thought any more about it if we hadn’t eaten the night before at Gialina, Sharon Ardiana’s new restaurant in the reborn Glen Park.

Apparently, while I was blinking, this quaint and intimate village in its sleepy hollow under Diamond Heights has seen fit to give itself an extreme makeover. The most stunning change is the advent of Canyon Market, which opened last fall in a sleek if chilly space of concrete, plate glass, and bakers’ racks and is a full-scale supermarket, something like a cross between Rainbow Grocery and Whole Foods. The market offers meat, fish, and poultry, as well as a good selection of produce, much of it organic. For many Glen Parkers, the market (like the BART station) is no more than a few minutes’ walk away — a blessing, though parking in the village center isn’t difficult. We spent a few minutes wandering through the market while waiting for a table at Gialina, just across the street. The new restaurant is a lot like the original Delfina: narrow, deep, noisy, busy. And word seems to be out that these are among the best pizzas in the city — maybe the best outright — and, given the improvement in the city’s pizza culture in recent years (Pizzeria Delfina, Pizzetta 211, A16), that is saying something.

Let us begin with the crusts, which are hand-shaped into a form that resembles a circle with corners. Around the edges runs a thick bready bead that will sate the puff fanatics among you, but the central plain of each pie is about as thin as seems physically possible. "Cracker thin" is a cliché (and therefore punishable, in my perfect world), but these are even thinner than that.

Toppings, you might suppose, would be applied sparingly, so as not to snap all those points. But the pies are pretty well laded up, though not Sierra-style. The only pizza we came across that couldn’t fairly be described as hearty was the margherita ($10), and it was lovely anyway. The smear of oregano-scented tomato sauce and shreds of mozzarella had been baked to a slightly caramelized bubbliness; the fresh basil leaves scattered (postoven) across the top were like water lilies in a pond.

Ardiana must have a slight thing for pizza bianca — "white" pizza, i.e., without tomato sauce — since two of the better pies on her brief menu are tomato sauceless. The wild nettle pizza ($13) brings that au courant green together with chunks of green garlic, shavings of pecorino, and flaps of pancetta whose edges are lightly crisped by the oven’s heat. This is a fine combination, but it’s bound to change or disappear soon, when the green garlic season ends.

An even finer combination is a pie of broccoli rabe mingled with fennel-breath Italian sausage and blobs of gamy fontina cheese ($13). This is very close to a classic Italian sauce for orecchiette and is quite convincing on a pizza.

We did not get to the puttanesca pie — echo of another classic pasta sauce — but for red-blooded fireworks, the atomica ($12) will more than do. The ancillary toppings here are mushrooms and mozzarella, but the principal actor is the chile-fired tomato sauce, which packs some real heat.

Among the first courses, we found the meatballs ($9) in a spicy tomato-parmesan sauce to be tasty but slightly rubbery. Better was the antipasti plate for two ($11), an array of grilled bread, salume, spicy black and green olives, herbed ricotta, roasted red beets, marinated wild mushrooms, pickled baby carrots, and frisée salad with radish coins — plenty there to keep two people busy while their pizzas are in the oven.

The dessert Goliath is the chocolate pizza ($9), a squarish crust heavily drizzled with hot chocolate sauce and crushed hazelnuts and festooned with mascarpone kisses. It is fabulous, but it does represent starch overkill as some of the other choices do not. The place is noisy, and only in part because of the Scandinavian Designs–looking blond wood panels on the wall. Many of the patrons bring their tiny infants in for a night on the town — or village. In today’s Glen Park, this must be the latest adventure in babysitting. *

GIALINA

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m.; Sun., 4–10 p.m.

2842 Diamond, SF

(415) 239-8500

www.gialina.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

A half-century of lies

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View pictures of Leola King’s legendary Blue Mirror club here.

Leola King has lived your life, the lives of three friends and then some.

She’s traveled to Africa with the legendary entertainer, Josephine Baker. She’s featured jazz great Louis Armstrong at a popular Fillmore nightclub she helmed in the 1950s called the Blue Mirror, where she also once convinced a roomful of patrons to drink sweet champagne from the heel of her shoe.

She’s played host to the crusading television journalist Edward R. Murrow.

She’s even had a fling with championship boxer Joe Louis. From the ring at Madison Square Garden, he glanced toward her front-row seat, which she’d secured by chance during her first trip to New York, and had his lackeys retrieve her for a date afterward. Their rendezvous appeared as a gossip item in an Ohio paper and remains in its archives today.

Most of all, Leola King has come as close as anyone possibly can to experiencing bureaucratic hell on earth. For half a century, she’s been fighting with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which has taken four pieces of her property, wiped out a restaurant and two nightclubs she owned, and left her with a string of broken promises.

Her story is evidence that the ugly local chapter of Western Addition redevelopment history still isn’t over – and it’s a demonstration of why so many African Americans in this town will never trust the Redevelopment Agency.

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Beginning in the 1940s, King successfully operated a series of restaurants and nightclubs in the city, remarkable enough in an era that imposed a double-paned glass ceiling on black, female entrepreneurs.

“Back when I first moved onto Fillmore, it was very popular,” King told the Guardian. “Market Street didn’t have shit. They didn’t have traffic. They didn’t have nothing on Market Street.”

During the height of King’s accomplishments, the Redevelopment Agency infamously launched an ambitious project to clear out “blight” in the neighborhood. It was part of a nationwide urban-renewal trend, and while the project here still won’t be finished until 2009, it’s widely regarded as one of America’s worst urban-planning disasters.

In theory, Western Addition residents who were forced to give up their homes or businesses were given a “certificate of preference,” a promise that when the sometimes decaying buildings were turned to kindling and new ones built, the former occupants could return.

In practice, it didn’t work out that way. An estimated 5,500 certificates were issued to families and business owners shortly before the second phase of Western Addition redevelopment began in 1964. Some 5,000 families were dislodged and many of them fled to other sectors of the city (including Bayview-Hunter’s Point, which is today slated for its own redevelopment), or outside of the Bay Area completely.

Only a fraction of the certificates have benefited anyone. The agency has lost contact information for more than half of the holders, and redevelopment commissioners now openly admit the program is a joke.

“If we’re going to boast about being this diverse community in San Francisco, and we’re going to allow our African American population to become extinct, then how can we show our faces in government if we’re not really doing anything about it?” asked London Breed, a redevelopment commissioner appointed by Gavin Newsom in 2005. “And not just putting black people in low-income housing. There [are] a lot of middle-class African Americans all across America, specifically in the East Bay and in other places. Why do they choose to live in the East Bay over San Francisco?”

A renewed interest in the certificates by City Hall led to hearings this month, and District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has planned another for April.

King obtained two certificates, and attempts to later redeem them both devolved into costly legal wrangling with the agency that lasted more than two decades. She has never regained what she lost.

Leola King’s story is about more than certificates of preference. It’s a story about the troubling legacy of urban renewal.

King welcomes guests into her home on Eddy Street near Fillmore with ease. The living room in what is little more than a two-bedroom converted garage apartment swells unimaginably with antiques – three stuffed chairs with vinyl slips, crystal chandeliers, an ornate dining-room table, lamps, a fur throw.

She insists that she’s just 39 years old, but public records put her closer to 84.

When the Guardian first visited with her in person, she was dressed in black cotton leisure attire. Two chestnut braids cascaded from a gray Kangol-style cap, which she smoothed with her hands as they hugged a pair of light-skinned cherub cheeks.

King made her way west after spending her earliest years behind the barbed wire of a Cherokee reservation in Haskell, Ok. Her mother died when King was young, and her restless father had meandered off to Los Angeles. Her grandparents oversaw her adolescence before she trailed after her father to California, where he was establishing a chain of barbecue restaurants. She married a man at just 14, and a year later, she was a mother. Tony Tyler, her son, is a San Francisco tour guide today and remains a close confidant and business partner.

It was 1946 when she first landed in San Francisco and eventually started her own barbecue pit at 1601 Geary St., near Buchanan, historic building inspection records show. She called it Oklahoma King’s, and hungry San Franciscans were lured to the smell of exotic buffalo, deer and quail meats.

“That end of Fillmore was very popular all the way down until you got almost to Pacific [Avenue],” she said. “Heavily populated. There was at one time in that area of Fillmore over 100 bars alone. Lots of hamburger places. That’s where I had the barbecue pit.”

By 1949, however, Congress had made urban renewal federal law with the goal of leveling slums and deleting general “blight,” still the most popular and awkwardly defined threshold for determining where the government can clear homes and businesses using eminent domain.

The first redevelopment zone in the Western Addition, known as A-1, included Oklahoma King’s. She was paid approximately $25,000 for the property, but offered no relocation assistance or other compensation for the revenue she lost as a result of ceasing her day-to-day business.

Forging ahead, she opened in 1953 what became a hub of jazz and blues entertainment in the Fillmore, the Blue Mirror, at 935 Fillmore Street. The place was decorated with brass Greek figurines on the walls, a circular bar and velvet festoons. King spent a year hopping onto buses full of tourists and begging the driver to drop them by her nightclub for a drink. Before long, her brassy personality had attracted world-class performers, each of them adding electricity to the club’s reputation.

“She was the type of woman who knew how to handle people,” a Blue Mirror regular later said in the 2006 collection of Fillmore jazz-era photography, Harlem of the West. “She could talk to the pimps and hustlers. She didn’t play around, and they knew how to conduct themselves in her club.”

A musician who formerly worked there told the Guardian the Blue Mirror was one of the few places on Fillmore that actually provided live entertainment at that time. Bobbie Webb backed up B.B. King, Little Willie John, T-Bone Walker and others as a young saxophonist at the Blue Mirror with his band the Rhythm Rockers. He said the other establishments nearby on Fillmore were mostly bars except for headlining auditoriums where mainstream acts like James Brown and the Temptations performed. Smaller venues abounded up the street on Divisadero, he said, save mostly for King’s Blue Mirror and the Booker T. Washington Hotel.

“[King] didn’t only have a personality” said Webb, who now airs a show Tuesdays on 89.5 KPOO, “she was a beautiful lady. Personality just spoke for itself. All she had to do was stand there.”

But like virtually everyone in the neighborhood at that time, King rented the place where the Blue Mirror operated. Redevelopment again reached her business in the early 1960s. State booze enforcers, she says, claimed to have witnessed a bartender serving alcohol to a minor and her liquor license was taken away. When the Redevelopment Agency showed up shortly thereafter to sweep the block away, she was ejected without compensation because she wasn’t at that time technically in business.

Two more commercial and residential properties she owned on Post and Webster streets respectively were also eventually taken under redevelopment.

She pressed on, encouraged by Jewish business owners in the area she’d befriended, including liquor wholesaler Max Sobel and Fairmont Hotel operator Benjamin Swig.

“Whenever I’d lose something, they’d say, ‘Keep on moving. Don’t stop, because you’ll lose your customers. When you open back up, they won’t know who you are.’ They’re the ones who told me, ‘Go get another spot.'”

—————————-

By the time King began work on her third business in the Fillmore, urban renewal projects had wreaked havoc on minority communities across the nation, including neighborhoods in west-side Boston, downtown Atlanta, the celebrated 18th & Vine District of Kansas City and elsewhere.

King opened the Bird Cage Tavern at 1505 Fillmore St. in 1964 near O’Farrell complete with a jukebox, 30-foot mahogany bar, a piano and a gilded birdcage. Then-police chief Thomas J. Cahill tried to block her liquor-license renewal by complaining to the state about “winos” and “prostitutes” in the neighborhood, records show, but regulators dismissed the claims.

“We had viable businesses all around us,” King said. “I had one fellow I worked with a lot named Willie Jones. He was a blues singer. The interesting thing was, I had music in the daytime at the Bird Cage. I specialized in afternoon jazz.”

Despite a triumphant resettlement, nonetheless, the redevelopment agency arrived yet again and bought her building during the expansion of it’s A-2 redevelopment phase and served as landlord for the Bird Cage, a barber shop and a liquor store as it waited for another two years deciding what to do with the building.

On the agency’s watch, a fire broke out next door to the Bird Cage that led to water damage in her space. Federal Housing and Urban Development records show that no insurance claim was ever filed by the Redevelopment Agency. King says the agency removed some of the bar’s contents, mostly kitchen supplies, and made only stopgap repairs to the building anticipating that she would later be ousted anyway. The items they took, she says, were never returned.

The agency then evicted all of the building’s tenants in 1974. This time, King stood fast and had to be forced out by the sheriff. The agency promised relocation assistance, but those empty assurances became her biggest headache yet. In fact, she would spend the next 25 years quarreling with the agency over relocation terms.

King and the agency searched fruitlessly until 1977 for a suitable replacement building before King purchased her own out of desperation at 1081 Post St. She was then forced to begin another endurance test of working to actually extract money from the agency owed to her for properly outfitting the new building.

Meanwhile, the Bird Cage’s leftover furnishings – from oil paintings, rugs and curtains to an ice maker, wood shelving and an antique porcelain lamp – were destroyed when the agency amazingly chose to store them on an outdoor lot off Third Street during her move, a fact later confirmed by an agency employee in an affidavit.

“They moved it all out,” King said, “all these antiques and stuff, into this field where the weather ate it up.”

The agency’s initial response was to determine how it could best avoid legal liability. Redevelopment officials finally offered her about $100,000, which she needed desperately to keep things moving with the Bird Cage’s new location, but King insists today the materials were worth closer to $1 million.

As she was fighting to reopen her bar business, she attempted to redeem an earlier certificate of preference given to her when she’d lost a residential property on Webster Street to redevelopment. In 1983, she bought a condemned, 12-unit apartment building on Eddy Street hoping to rehabilitate it using a federally backed loan.

The deal only led to more trouble. The agency paid for its own roving security to patrol Western Addition properties it had purchased, and before 1431 Eddy St. was ever officially conveyed to King (as well as two other neighboring developers), thieves gutted the building of windows, doors, plumbing, light fixtures and other hardware. (Two buildings belonging to neighboring developers were also hit, and the agency addressed their losses the same way.)

Almost immediately, the agency told her she’d purchased the building “as is” and that they weren’t responsible for the break-in. But according to an internal 1983 memo marked “confidential,” later unearthed when friends of King submitted a records request to the agency, staffers clearly were concerned about the legal implications of offering one building for sale “as is” and actually providing another one on the date of delivery that had been thoroughly burglarized.

The memo shows that the possibility of a lawsuit was of greater concern to the agency than any obligation to compensate King for the lost hardware, regardless of whether proper security was the agency’s responsibility. Records show they did discuss a settlement of little more than $2,000, but King considered the stolen goods to be worth thousands of dollars more.

She managed to eventually finish the rehabilitation of her Eddy Street property after several years of work, and while she lives there today, time and angst took their toll. Each step of the transition to what she hoped would someday become her new bar, Goldie’s on Post Street, involved a seemingly endless round of yet more negotiations, letters, legal threats and bureaucratic backbiting before the agency would lift a finger and allocate money for contractors, necessary seismic upgrades, architects and equipment.

In 1997, then-Rep. Ron Dellums (now Oakland mayor) wrote a letter to top local HUD official Art Agnos (later a San Francisco mayor) on King’s behalf.

“On August 26, Ms. King met with a member of my staff and detailed issues surrounding a 25-year dispute she has attempted to resolve with HUD and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency,” Dellums wrote. “Your expeditious attention to this matter is [a] request, as Ms. King is elderly and experiencing health problems. The resolution to this issue would allow her to live the remainder of her life with some piece of mind.”

It was too late. The federally backed loans she’d received from HUD to rehab her Eddy Street property, from which the Redevelopment Agency strictly enforced repayment, fell into default. Loans leveraged against her other remaining properties began to slip, too, all while she fought with the forces of redevelopment to recreate what she had once proudly possessed.

King’s story may seem like an unfathomable streak of bad luck, but there’s a paper trail for all of it. And her battle, laid out in hundreds of pages of documents saved by King over several decades and reviewed by the Guardian, was ultimately unsuccessful..

By 1997, King was submerged in bankruptcy proceedings and would lose pretty much everything that she owned, including an Edwardian landmark home on Scott Street near Alamo Square where she’d lived for years (partially burned in a 1986 fire, believe it or not) and a residential building on Sutter Street.

Goldie’s was to be her final resting place, a roost from which she hoped to feature cabaret dancing, fresh crab at happy hour, a refined art deco aesthetic and live music performances. She lost that, too. Today, it’s Diva’s just off Polk Street.

Urban renewal won.

———————-

Hopeful press accounts lately foretell a jazz revival in the Fillmore District fueled by enterprising developers deft at financing lucrative redevelopment projects through tax incentives and low-interest loans half a century after the promise of “renewal,” now described euphemistically as “historic preservation.”

But with such a sordid history behind them, it’s no wonder residents of Bayview-Hunter’s Point, many of whom escaped Western Addition “renewal” in the first place, are leery of a pending years-long plan to redevelop nearly 1,500 acres in the southeast neighborhoods.

Bayview newspaper publisher Willie Ratcliff led a petition drive last year in an effort to put the plan before voters. Over 20,000 petition signatures were certified by elections officials, but City Attorney Dennis Herrera ruled the petitions were technically invalid because circulators hadn’t presented the full text of the redevelopment plan to signers. Redevelopment foes have since sued to have Herrera’s decision tossed.

“The misuse by these people is just unbelievable,” King said. “They were fighting me every inch.”

Thanks to Susan Bryan for joining the Guardian in reviewing hundreds of pages of public and personal records preserved in Leola King’s estate. Bryan is currently working with Monkey Paw Productions on a documentary about King’s life

Let the niners go?

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Glenn Dickey has an interesting hit on the 49ers stadium problem: The hell with it, he says; let ’em go.

I still like the idea of a San Francisco football team, but then, I also like Candlestick Park, and I always have. I even liked it when the Giants played there. But I have to say, Dickey’s got the economics right. He’s horribly harsh about the neighborhood (“There’s nothing at Candlestick Park; Hunters Point … is no better.”) That’s not true — and in theory, if the city could find land at the shipyard, the presence of the stadium would spur local restaurants, bars etc. But in practice, it probably won’t: Most football fans don’t contribute much to local business. They pack in food, tailgate and then split.
The downtown Giants stadium did wonders for either economic revitalization or gentrification, depending on how you define it. The niner games at Candlestick have done nothing for Third Street. From that perspective, a new niners stadium would be a waste of public money.

On grappka

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A small peeve of mine is grappa served at or near room temperature, as if it’s cough syrup. Perhaps I am churlish to complain about tepid grappa when having the chance to order grappa at all is a rare treat; even many Italian restaurants don’t offer it. On the other hand, ice-cold grappa is simply sublime — at least for those of us who find it so — and keeping the bottle stashed in the freezer under the bar doesn’t seem like a terrible burden. Can it be that grappa is widely, if dimly, assumed to be just another brandy, like cognac, and, like cognac, is best appreciated in a lukewarmish state?

I keep my own bottle of grappa (at the moment a moscato distillation, from Italy’s Antica Distilleria Negroni) in the freezer, where it was recently joined by a bottle of Swan’s Neck grape vodka. Grape vodka has been, until recently, a minor curiosity whose center of production was France. Most vodkas are produced from grains and potatoes; grape vodka, by contrast, is distilled from wine. (Swan’s Neck uses French wines made from undisclosed varietals and distills them in traditional copper alembics.) The unaged spirit is something of a cross, then, between cognac (distilled from wine but aged in oak) and grappa (distilled from fermented grape-crush remnants instead of wine but not aged), though its mountain-stream clearness seems to put it nearer grappa on the spectrum of spirits. I find myself thinking of it as grappka.

And how do the two cousins compare? I thought I would find little or no difference between them, but a brief taste test revealed that grappa and grappka can be pretty easily distinguished. The latter, despite its vinous origins, is still a vodka and, even when chilled overnight in the freezer, retains vodka’s distinctive edge, smooth and precise as a just-sharpened chef’s knife. And grappa is still grappa and still has a slightly unkempt bouquet of fruitiness, like that of a neglected bramble patch heavy with berries.

I could not say I prefer one over the other, especially when both are ice-cold. The grappka has a grander pedigree and, while potent, is silken in the throat. Grappa is fierier and maybe a little cruder, as befits its roots as a leftover; it must be one of the world’s most lovable overachievers. For digestif honors, I call it a dead heat.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Golden nugget

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZIRYAB

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

528 Divisadero, SF

(415) 269-5430

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Of blood and blintzes

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a new favorite sport!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAUL’S

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

1475 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 848-3354

Takeout available

Beer, wine, and cocktails

MC/V

Bustling

Wheelchair accessible

>

Upside Woodside

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BELLA VISTA CONTINENTAL RESTAURANT

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

13451 Skyline Blvd., Woodside

(650) 851-1229

www.bvrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

>

Getting lucky

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The word she uses is "flexitarian." I seldom run retractions. Not that I never get anything wrong; on the contrary, my impressions of reality are so impressionistic, it would be a stretch to say that I ever exactly get anything right.

This can cause problems.

Give you an example: I want to know what time Penny’s opens for lunch. I look it up. Cheap Eats, Penny’s Caribbean Café, says right there: 11:30 a.m. So I write to Lisa Bitch Magazine, and I say, "Dear Ms. Magazine, Hi! How are you? 11:30 a.m."

She writes back and says stop calling her Ms. Magazine.

And: No. Noon, she says. Flexitarians always have weird rules about eating meat, like only free-range, organic, or only at home, or only in restaurants, or, in Lisa’s case, once every six months, and never before noon. If it’s goat.

I’m assuming she makes early-morning exceptions for bacon. Actually, my assumption is that all vegetarians make exceptions for bacon, all the time. Because how can you not eat bacon? It’s bacon!

(Have I dazzled you yet with my simplemindedness?)

Cut to 12 o’clock. Noon. I’m standing outside Penny’s Caribbean Café, waiting for my new friend Lisa. And for Penny, because I’ll be damned if she’s open. Which goes to show: you can’t always believe what you read in the paper — even if you wrote it.

Sign in the window says CLOSED. No lights. And still I’ve got my nose to the glass, both hands visoring my eyes, like, Come on, come on, Penny. I know you’re in there. Come on.

I love Penny. I LOVE Penny and not just because of her curry goat roti, either. There’s the jerk chicken and pelau and … I don’t know, we just seem to live in very similar worlds. Where Einstein is taken perhaps a tad too literally and time is extra relative. And space …

Nebulous is one of my favorite words.

So hey, here comes Lisa, responsible journalist, on her lunch break. She has exactly this much time, and she’s hungry, and she has agreed to eat her biannual meat with me. Me!

Today! I’m beside myself with honor and anticipation, watching vegetarians eat meat being one of my all-time favorite pastimes, right up there with pitching washers and spitting watermelon seeds.

And I’ve been talking up the curry goat. But Penny is showing no signs of peering around any counters or refrigerators anytime soon, so I give up on the window, pack Lisa into my pickup truck, and whiz us to West Oakland, to the Island Café.

Even though it’s regular business hours for them too, by the book, and even though it smells like meat heaven on the sidewalk outside the place … closed. Cooking, you could smell, but closed. Sign on the door says they’re catering a musical event that afternoon in Santa Cruz, sorry!

Aaaaargh! Whisk us back to Berkeley, the clock ticking on Ms. Magazine’s lunch break. And I’m thinking, damn my luck, she’s going to cave and call falafel.

Know what she says? She says, "Stop calling me Ms. Magazine." And she says this, she says, "Flint’s?"

Flint’s!!!

Flint’s? Not to put too pointy of a point on this, but you would think that if Flint’s — everybody’s favorite Bay Area barbecue (not to mention mine) — was back in bidness, Cheap Eats would know about it before Bitch Magazine. Which is one reason why I try not to think too much these days. Because you never know.

So I point us toward Flint’s, thinking, yeah, right, Flint’s, right, sure, like Flint’s is going to be open, way things are going for us, right….

It is! It’s open, and the rest of the day is like a dream. Lisa gets her meat fix, I get to be there for it, get to see Bitch Magazine with barbecue sauce all over her face, just like she got to see Cheap Eats with beans in her hair.

Flint’s is as good as ever. My new favorite (and old favorite) barbecue. New management. No tables. We sat on the slat-style benches in the corner of the place, paper bags spread out on our laps, and went to work. Well, I went to work. They only had beef ribs. Then, after us, they didn’t even have those and started turning people away.

So, after all that running around and frustration and, you know, goatlessness in general … in the end we got to feel lucky. *

FLINT’S BBQ

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

6609 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 595-5323

Credit cards not accepted

No alcohol

Takeout available

Wheelchair accessible

>

The sushi house rules

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› paulr@sfbg.com

An old rule of prudence teaches that you should never eat raw oysters in a month whose name doesn’t have an "r" in it — from May to August, more or less — the warm-weather months elevating the danger of spoilage. Rain and cold do present their inconveniences and discomforts, but they are also balm in the matter of seafood, most of which is delicate and turns bad easily if the temperature starts to rise. One does not like to think of oysters being hauled along I-5 on some infernal July afternoon.

The rule has never been extended to sushi, so far as I know, but it wouldn’t be the worst idea. Although my best sushi experiences have been in balmy Hawaii, and while I have eaten raw seafood here in every season, even our autumnal summer, I am most at ease doing so in winter, when the world itself seems well refrigerated and the albacore tuna, plucked from cold seas, is rushed to the chilly city, where we eagerly await it in a restaurant that, perhaps — with any luck — is well heated.

Barracuda Sushi, which opened last year on a glam stretch of Market Street that includes Café Flore, Bagdad Café, and Lime, is well heated. It is also quite nice looking, with a rust and jade paint scheme, banquettes upholstered in fabrics with fine geometric patterns, and bars fore and aft (the latter a sushi bar). The place is less clubby-looking than Lime (which is a door or two away), but there’s a powerful nightlife pulse nonetheless. If you knew this space as the onetime home of such restaurants as Tin Pan and Repastoria Satyricon, you might not recognize it.

It is one of my pet theories that oft-flipped restaurant spaces at last achieve stability when they become Japanese restaurants. Après le déluge, sushi. Houses of Japanese cuisine must fail occasionally, but the attrition rate is low. So Barracuda (which has a pair of sibling restaurants down the Peninsula) opens with at least one structural advantage.

Another plus, more sensual or aesthetic in nature, is the swirling of Peruvian and Brazilian touches into the food, a reflection not of the kitchen’s whimsy (or not just of its whimsy) but of the large Japanese migrations to South America in the first half of the 20th century. Who could forget that a recent president of Peru bore the unlikely name Alberto Fujimori? Of course, he was forced out in disgrace, but still.

A nice introduction to this pan-Pacific sensibility is the sushi napoleon ($11.95), a disk of rice about the size of a single-serve cheesecake topped with chunks of tuna and avocado — a pair of roll regulars — along with blueberries, slices of mango, and a slathering of mayonnaise. It sounds awful, like something a latchkey kid might throw together as an after-school snack, but it turned out to be both beautiful (with the colors of some elaborate ice cream confection) and tasty-rich in a way Japanese food seldom is.

Most of the food isn’t so aggressively inventive. Gyoza ($5.95), the Japanese pot stickers, are familiar and friendly, though we found the skins to be thinner than usual, and the ponzu sauce on the side was spiked with some minced jalapeño pepper for added excitement. Seaweed salad ($6.95) was presented as an upmarket trio, with three varieties of seaweed (wakame, goma wakame, and hijiki) given three saucings of aji amarillo (mayonnaise-like and made from the mild yellow Peruvian chile), orange tobiko, and lemon. A sushi set ($11.95) consisted of California roll (crab and avocado) and a selection of nigiri, including tuna, salmon, and shrimp; it was good, but you could get it anywhere, even at the supermarket.

But even the fanciest supermarket probably wouldn’t offer anything to compare with the hamachi ceviche ($11.95), the thin bricks of flesh doused with a basil-yuzu-wasabi sauce — truly a New World combination, which produced a memorable sweet pepper-fire effect — and topped with tiny cubes of purplish bronze geutf8 — like jewels — we could not identify. Also distinctive are many of the rolls, including the Barracuda crunchy roll ($12): broiled tuna and avocado wrapped in a long tube of rice, which is then dipped in a light batter and flash-fried. The result is something like a Japanese chimichanga, tasty but quite rich.

We tend to associate Japanese cuisine so strongly with uncooked seafood that we are at risk of forgetting that the Japanese cook a lot of their food too and with their own sort of élan. The lunch menu offers us a series of vivid reminders of this, from udon (the pho-like noodle soup) to various types of panko-crusted cutlets, or katsu. There is even a breaded calamari steak (the poor man’s abalone), which turned up for me in a bento box ($9.50) in the company of a California roll, a pat of white rice, a mixed salad with creamy dressing, and (most welcome on a leaden, tule-fog day) a bowl of miso soup on the side. Across the table, miso soup was neither necessary nor missed, for there came a great bowl of udon ($9.95), steaming like a caldera on some volcanic plain. In the concentrated chicken broth lurked a Medusa’s wig of fat noodles, with flecks of shiso and scallion and slivers of shiitake mushrooms. The tempura shrimp were presented on the side, and we briefly considered the likelihood that we were expected to dump them into the bowl. We didn’t, and they turned out to do nicely when eaten on the side … but had we broken a rule? *

BARRACUDA SUSHI

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–11:30 p.m.

2251 Market, SF

(415) 558-8567

www.barracudasushi.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy if busy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Mussel systems

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When last we looked in on Aqua, the prospect seemed rather marbly and banklike, and the menu included paella. Paella is not a dish you should order even at most Spanish restaurants, let alone at a high-end seafood house, but a member of my party went ahead and ordered it anyway — in the heedlessness of youth — and was afterwards disappointed. "What did you expect?" I asked, from the unassailable position of someone who’d opted for Pacific swordfish grilled in a sheath of prosciutto, the sort of dish you’d expect to find, and enjoy, at a place like Aqua. "I don’t know," was the glum rejoinder.

Years passed, youth faded, and we did not return. The meteoric George Morrone, who’d been in the kitchen when Aqua opened in 1991 and was the chef during our visit — which is what tells me it was in ’91 or ’92 — gave way after a few years to Michael Mina, who ran the show for more than a decade until he left to open his eponymous Union Square restaurant in 2004. His successor was Laurent Manrique, he of the recent foie gras kerfuffle. Manrique does offer foie gras on his Aqua menu, but the offer is a muted one: there is no foie gras cart plying the dining room (whose look, incidentally, seems to have been softened to tones of a summer twilight). There had been such a cart at Campton Place, Manrique’s previous gig. When the foie gras cart and the cheese cart were simultaneously at large in that rather snug dining room, one had a brief vision of dandified bumper cars.

You (which is to say, I) would not necessarily expect a chef renowned for his treatments of foie gras to be the ideal head of a kitchen largely devoted to the cooking of seafood. And yet if this is a paradox, it is a spectacularly successful one; for much (and maybe most) seafood needs a certain amount of dressing up to show well, and at Aqua, Manrique’s instinct for meatiness results in plates of fish neatly balanced between elegance and muscularity.

Part of the Manrique magic has to do with bold spicing. Ahi tuna tartare, for instance, has become something of a commonplace in the past decade. The fish’s reddish purple flesh looks a lot like beef and has its own sort of intensity. But the dish becomes special at Aqua when the cubes are mixed with Moroccan spices (these weren’t specified but had a currylike aura) and a quail egg yolk as a binding agent. (Aqua’s à la carte menu is, like the paella, a thing of the past; today you choose three courses for $72 or a more elaborate tasting menu, with optional wine pairings, for $109.) Across the table, meanwhile, a plate of albacore carpaccio — tissue-thin bolts of flesh looking almost like ice shavings — arrived under a colorful bloom of Fresno chile rings, slivers of daikon radish, and bits of fried shallot: springtime on the tundra.

A whiff of curry subtly recurred in the buttery chardonnay jus our server poured around a grilled filet of walu, one of those marvelously meaty white fish from the deep waters around the Hawaiian Islands. The fish wore a straw hat of pommes alumettes (crispy filaments of potato), while a few quartered baby artichokes lurked at the bottom of the plate. Even meatier was sturgeon, cooked en papillote (in a paper bag) and presented as three cylinders — a kind of faux roulade hedged with braised baby spinach and finished with a rich duck jus, also poured by the server from a small pitcher.

Even if you confine yourself to the more modest prix fixe — and we found three courses to be just the right amount of food — you will be given a few extra treats. There are the warm breads — olive, sourdough, multigrain — in constant circulation through the dining room. There is the amuse-bouche, for us a tripartite presentation on a handsome rack: a lemon oil–slicked sliver of Monterey Bay sardine on celery coins, a profound wild-mushroom soup capped with gratinlike pine-nut pesto, and a smoked-ahi croquette with a perfect and crispy golden crust, despite its fingernail size. And there are the postprandial petits fours, tiny tarts, macaroons, and meringues (including a purplish gray one of taro root) that reach the table as a final bit of punctuation (not counting the bill, of course), at the end of dessert.

You could, if you wanted, dispense with dessert and just double-dip from the list of first courses. But if you do need a sweet fix beyond and before the petits fours, Aqua’s choices won’t disappoint. For the most part they don’t sound spectacular, nor do they have much to do with the restaurant’s aqueous theme. But they are exemplars of their kind, among them the chocolate tart, like a round of bittersweet fudge nested in a butter crust and ringed by a salad of blood orange and mandarin segments, and the Meyer lemon soufflé, lanced with a spoonful of pomegranate seeds and redolent of the citrus’s unmistakable orangey acidity.

I was saddened to find both Maine skate and Atlantic cod on the menu. The latter, in particular, is a decimated species, as the British journalist Charles Clover indicated recently in his book The End of the Line; surely there is something comparable to be had from the better-managed and far nearer Pacific fisheries. For all the hullabaloo about Manrique and his beloved foie gras, no one has suggested that duck and geese are in danger of extinction. But he and Aqua, given their international stature, have a special role to play in ensuring that today’s seafood houses will have seafood to serve tomorrow. *

AQUA

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

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Sun., 5:30–9:30 p.m.

252 California, SF

(415) 956-9662

www.aqua-sf.com/aqua

Full bar

Not noisy

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

>

Me and my bitches

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

Well, dang, that ain’t me either….

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

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

I’m so confused!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MEXICALI ROSE

Daily, 10 a.m.–1 a.m.

701 Clay, Oakl.

(510) 451-2450

Takeout available

Full bar

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

>

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