Wine

Revenge

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Cut to wide-awake eyes in a moonlit room. In the dream, he could drive my funny little car that no one else but me can drive. He knew how to sweet talk it into first gear, and fearlessly came to complete stops at stop signs. Marveling at his confidence, and competence, I leaned into his big soft arm and he leaned into me, then pulled over and parked and miraculously, as happens in dreams, the stick shift didn’t get in the way.

There’s another guy, way out in Railroad Flat, who calls me to talk car talk, and who tells me, by way of flirtation, how many future–fried chicken hearts he keeps in his freezer. And I don’t have the chicken farmer heart to tell him it’s the livers I like.

The one up in Lake County, he doesn’t call. But when he did, we talked for hours about all the people he’s going to sue, including his neighbor who puts out food for deer and squirrels, and who punched him when he pointed out that it’s against the law, and nature, to feed wild animals.

The big wet spot on the bed next to me has nothing to do with my bladder, so you know. I sleep with hot water bottles on cold nights, and this one sprung a leak. It’s just water. But it might as well be urine, or blood. That’s how freaked I am. And, unlike the other two or three times in my long life that I have nibbled on the earlobe of insomnia, this has nothing to do with dread of death.

The guy driving my car in the sex dream, he may well have accomplished what no amount of religious upbringing or adult talk therapy has managed: helping me wrap my brain around my impending point-of-viewlessness. And on our first date! By accident, by reminding me about onions! Christ, he was so cool, and good.

So, instead of lying awake last night worrying about death, I was lying awake worrying (more like knowing) that I was never going to see this great, cool, good driving man again. Hold on a second. Let me check my e-mail …

Yep. Wow, that didn’t take long. He slept on it, unlike me. Apparently didn’t have the same dream I did, and very succinctly decided friendship yes, romance no. So, let’s see, that makes 1,439,187,009 really really close, loving friends. And exactly nobody to hold me at 4 a.m. when I forget about onions. Or I should say, nobody to snore and grunt and roll away from me at 4 a.m. when I forget about onions. (It’s best not to ask for too much, with odds like mine.)

Merle Haggard has a song where a woman breaks his heart and he’s going to get even by breaking every heart of every woman he sees. Some day I’m going to get me a boob job and break the heart of every man who lays eyes on me, or on them. However that works.

As for deerkind, I exacted my revenge with a big pot of venison chili last weekend, courtesy of the refrigerator and garden of Johnny "Jack" Blogger (Robert Frost’s Banjo) and Sister Mary His Wife, my favorite Catholic ever.

Gardens are good, in Idaho. I don’t know if a pot of chili ever was made — until this one — without opening one single can. Lard be praised, I hardly even had to shake anything into it. There were five kinds of peppers, all fresh-plucked from the garden, at least three varieties of tomatoes, tomatillos — all from the garden. Onions and bacon fat were the only things not grown on the premises. Oh, and the venison. I wish I could say that it was hatchet-ground, but that would be hatchet-grinding the truth, and I prefer just to stretch it.

The deer was courtesy of a wonderful and talkative woman from Portland, Ore., who’s husband (lucky us) has an unadventurous palate. Which drives her crazy, and would me too. So they fight. I’ve met this guy, and he’s a great guy. But if he doesn’t learn to eat new things, I’m going to get a boob job and break his fucking heart.

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My new favorite restaurant is Mi Lindo Yucatan. It’s a lot cheaper at lunch time, though, so if you find yourself in Noe Valley between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.: Platillo Mi Lindo Yucatan is a mixed platter of … let’s see, there was a shrimp ceviche tostada, some salad, a tamal, a cheese empanada, chicken this, pork that. But my favorite was a couple of barbecued ribs. Nice place, interesting menu.

MI LINDO YUCATAN

Daily: 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

4042 24th St., SF

(415) 826-3942

Beer & wine

MC/V

Fall Arts Preview 2008

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> johnny@sfbg.com

I don’t know about you, but I hear something is happening in early November. Since I can’t quite identify exactly what it is, let’s focus on all the events around it this fall — especially the spaces on stages and screens and pages and in museum and gallery rooms.

A little birdie tells me this fall will be propagandized, rather than purely politicized, into infinity. In times like these, it helps to have art that finds a realm outside the false promises, a place from which to look back at our society — including the politicians who try to rule it — and say: you better perform!

That’s the case this week’s fab four cover stars, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, JoAnn Selisker, and Tim Sullivan. This quartet of singular creative forces is united in using imaginative performance to reject inhibiting norms.

Gómez Peña and his group La Pocha Nostra are bringing Mapa/Corpo 3 — an interactive ritual involving "political acupuncture" that was banned in the United States for three years — to Theater Artaud as part of Litquake and the Living Word Festival. At SF Camerawork, they’ll also be trying out what they call performance karaoke, which is sort of an aesthetic, political, and ethical update on the popular game Twister. There, they are part of "I Feel That I Am Free But I Know I Am Not," an extended exhibition (curated by Chuck Mobley) that also includes some live video by Sullivan, whose photographic and video work looks at everyday imagery and familiar pop iconography from new and sometimes hilarious angles.

New views of everyday pop banality are also JoAnn Selisker’s forte. Presented by Litquake and ODC, her latest piece, Off Leash: Who’s a Good Girl? uses text and dance to explore the relationship between dogs and their best frenemy, humans. Everything goes full circle with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore — you can see some of Gómez Peña’s flair for radical sexual and political performance in his past activism with Gay Shame, and like Sullivan and Selisker, his image doesn’t come from Macy’s. In his new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights, 256 pages, $15.95), he shows readers a San Francisco that Frommer’s doesn’t know about.
This fall, Gómez Peña, Bernstein Sycamore, Selisker, and Sullivan are just part of a blitz that’s bringing everything from multiple Chinese art exhibitions and film programs to the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s Milk. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy season.


>>Connect four
Cover stars: A quartet of our favorite artists and performers sounds off


>>Diverse moments
Dance: Highlights run from modern to the Bard
By Rita Felciano


>>Curtain calls
Stage: Theater gets political, playful, potent
By Robert Avila


>>Vizzy with the possibilities
Visual Art: We scope out the promising shows
By Katie Kurtz, Kimberly Chun, and Johnny Ray Huston


>>Sino the times
Visual Art: Bay Area museums and galleries home in on Asia
By Glen Helfand


>>Olympic disc toss
Music: Will these new music releases go far or fall flat?
By Kimberly Chun and Johnny Ray Huston


>>Stage names
Concerts: Got live if you want it — and you do
Johnny Ray Huston and Kimberly Chun


>>“Daughter” goes to the opera
Classical: Amy Tan revamps her bestseller. Plus, more classical picks
By Ching Chang


>>Forecast: blackout
Clubs: The season’s prime parties offer plenty to fall down about
By Marke B.


>>Autumn reels
Film: 10 big-screen release dates to remember — for better and worse
By Cheryl Eddy


>>Cinemania
Film: 50 ways to rep film this fall
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>Notes of a dirty old man
Lit: Or, a portion from a wine-stained notebook
By Charles Bukowski

>>FALL FAIRS AND FESTIVAL GUIDE
More festive events than you can shake a bare tree at
By Duncan Scott Davidson, Kat Renz, and Ian Ferguson

The circle game

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Say "Kumbaya," somebody. Despite vast differences in sound, intent, and commercial appeal, a thin yet unseverable bloodline connects the big, bold, Brill Building, pop-factory-perfect songcraft of Carole King, last heard coursing off the AM radio, and the stripped-raw, close-to-bare-bones rasp and moan of Tiny Vipers’ Jesy Fortino, delivered to a small clutch of listeners at the Elbo Room last year. Eyes squeezed shut, plucking her acoustic guitar beside just one other guitarist, Ben Cissner, she was a small dark star, poured fully concentrated into the sparse minor key chords of "Swastika," and, as gutsy as the loudest reaches of the underground, she sang as if her life depended on it: "If I would let you into my heart / Would you thank the Lord / Would you tear it apart?"

Superficially, so far away — doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore? — from King’s monumental oeuvre, which seems almost incidental amid the gushy, gossipy tidbits propelling Sheila Weller’s bio, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation (Atria), concerning King’s beleaguered marriage to her first husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, with whom she wrote such songs as "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," among many other classic pop numbers, even after he fathered a child with one of the pair’s vocalists. Likewise Weller makes much of Mitchell’s out-of-wedlock daughter and penchant for using her songs to seduce paramours like Leonard Cohen, Graham Nash, and James Taylor — the last often credited with spurring the singer-songwriter movement and acting as a unifying thread between Mitchell, King, and Simon — and Simon’s uninhibited, proto-pro-sex feminist "eroticism"; read: sex in a cab was "no problem." Yet as remote as the early-’70s phenomenon of the singer-songwriter seems, the form appears to have returned: could this be the revival of core values of craft and voice, the intimacy and immediacy of a writer on a single instrument, during a tumultuous time for the music industry, post-Auto-Tuned disasters and Ashlee Simpson lip-synch blowouts — the adult flip-side to the bubblegum remnants of High School Musical, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers?

The initial energy of so many turn-of-the-millennium garage rock bands may have petered and innumerable hip-hop artists may have turned toward dully materialistic navel-gazing, so hail the return of the soft-spoken singer-songwriter who can break down a tunes to its bare, unadorned components. The stars are aligned; the signs, apparent: from Outside Lands headliner Jack Johnson landing at the top of the Billboard 200 chart with his latest album, Sleeping Through the Static (Brushfire/Universal), earlier this year, to ex–Castro Theatre ticket-taker, proudly folkie Devendra Banhart being adopted by Parisian couturiers and glitterati, from the MySpace-inspired success of Colbie Caillat and Kate Nash to the iTunes-buttressed popularity of Eureka native Sara Bareilles — hell, not to mention everyone and their dog documenting their solo acoustic version of "Bubbly" and posting the video on YouTube. This quiet flurry of activity undoubtedly whetted someone’s appetite for all things unplugged.

Those with eyes trained on pop cycles might point to the rise of antiwar sentiments throughout the country, coupling it with the renewed attention given to the softer, sincere sounds of singer-songwriters — a worthy theory, though apart from the many unfortunate CD-Rs of anti-Bush agit-pop that crossed my desk during the last two presidential elections, the generally apolitical vibe of the music from this crop of singer-songwriters seems to belie that notion: championing green issues are as didactic as these writers get. Instead this current wave of earnest songsmiths has more to do with both a reaction against the insincere, canned, possibly un-nutritious mainstream boy-band and Britney-centric breed of pop from the recent past — the likes of which could only be enjoyed with a semi-size dose of irony — and a response to an easy access of technology, which allows just about anyone and their mutt to make their own music at home, bypassing Brill Building–style hit-factories.

This time, the slew of sensitive men — solo fliers ranging from Iron and Wine, Conor Oberst, and Adam Green to Josh Ritter, Jonathan Rice, and Ray LaMontagne — sequestered behind acoustic guitars or pianos, working freak-folk, soft-rock, commercial pop, and Grey’s Anatomy–friendly veins, are being almost eclipsed by the multitude of womanly singer-songwriters. Natural women all, including Feist, Kimya Dawson, JayMay, Brandi Shearer, Yael Naim, and Ingrid Michaelson, among others. As much as King, Mitchell, and Simon are considered mothers of these singer-songwriters — along with predecessors like Woodside resident Joan Baez and ’60s folk hit mistress Judy Collins and successors like the many estrogen-laden ladies of the ’90s Lilith Fair outings — so too are indie sisters Liz Phair, Sarah Dougher, and Cat Power, a holy trinity to homemade, once-bedroom-bound DIY divas who make their own clothes, hope to carve out their own path, and find their own vox.

Of course, one can’t discount the release of resurrections and reissues of neglected and forgotten femme singer-songwriters such as Vashti Bunyan and Ruthann Friedmann and late greats Judee Sill and Karen Dalton, whose latest private recordings were unearthed via Green Rocky Road (Delmore) in June. And Mitchell’s unique guitar tunings, experimental mindset, and maidenlike purity of sound has made her one of the most oft-referenced artists of the last few years, thanks to such explicit shout-outs as Wayfaring Strangers’ Ladies from the Canyon (Numero, 2006). But no less influential is Phair, whose classic Exile in Guyville (Matador) got the royal reissue treatment this summer: her pro-sex, third-wave feminist, Midwestern rejoinder to riot grrrl writ large, with a gatefold sleeve and a slip of naughty nipple peeking through. At the same time, Dougher — cover girl in Johnny Ray Huston’s take on the last, more-riot grrrl-centered singer-songwriter movement in the Guardian about a decade ago — took a more polemical tack on the Northwest coast with her K Records releases, while working tangibly for greater female rock visibility by organizing the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls and teaching courses on the history of women in rock at Portland State University.

But Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, appears set to be the Joni Mitchell of this generation — even as Marshall has largely turned her back on originals with her latest Jukebox (Matador). The Seattle-based Fortino’s almost gothic melodrama seems to draw more than a little inspiration from Marshall’s What Would the Community Think (Matador, 1996), while San Francisco transplant Thao Nguyen of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down borrows Marshall’s clarion-call, half-sung, half-spoken phrasing for her far more fancy-free, loose-limbed, and shambling songs. Nguyen sounds positively, happily tipsy on the old-timey bounce, finger clicks, and sandpapery soft-shoe shuffle on We Brave Bee Stings and All (Kill Rock Stars).

Yet Marshall’s most indebted sib might be Emily Jane White, 27, whose Dark Undercoat (Double Negative) evokes the former’s haunted and haunting, hollowed-out sensuality as well as her songwriting savvy and way with a hook. "Everybody’s got a little hole in the middle / Everybody does a little dance with the devil," the Oakland singer-songwriter croons on her "Hole in the Middle," sliding around the curves of this verb or the other and letting her voice drift off into the meaningful silences between the words.

The surprise is that this intensely eerie, closely miked singer-songwriter also turns out to be one of the more deliberately political-minded. Of "Hole," she said recently while breaking from the recording her second album with Greg Ashley, "I originally wrote that in response to the war in Iraq when that first started. Yeah, it’s about American imperialism."

And perhaps that’s the key to why the music by this former member of an all-girl band, the Diamond Star Halos — much like those seemingly apolitical numbers by other singer-songwriters — has increasingly relevance today: White and other crooners are foregrounding the everyday loves as well as the overseas skirmishes in a way that transcends the desensitizing glut and so-called objectivity of news headlines, sound-bites, and bloggable blurbs — and acutely personalizes it all. Call it the resensitizing of pop.

"I’ve always believed that your personal experience is political," says White, echoing the first wave feminist tenets, "and everyone has a story to tell, about how they’ve lived their lives and what has happened to them, and the experiences they’ve gone through. Not that what I think I do is revolutionary or anything, but one positive thing about being a singer-songwriter is people have contacted me and said they’ve felt a strong sense of encouragement or inspiration, so I think putting myself out there says something."

Emily Jane White plays Aug. 22, 8 p.m., $8, at the Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. www.uptownnightclub.com

Cava22

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If, like me, you occasionally succumb to the temptation to judge a restaurant by its name, you might suppose that Cava22 is some kind of champagne bar … all right, a cava bar, cava being the word the Spanish came up with to describe their méthode champenoise–style sparkling wines. And you wouldn’t be completely wrong; the place, opened last winter by the Valle brothers (Ramón and Samuel) and Roger Magaña in a cavernous Mission District setting that had previously been the home of Bahia Restaurant, does offer a token selection of sparkling wines, including a rather wonderful espumosa de muscatel from Reymos ($7 a glass): a bit on the fruity-sweet side, but not cloying.

But despite the name, the big deal at Cava22, booze-wise, isn’t the selection of cavas and other sparkling wines. The big deal is tequila, of which several dozen varieties from the different age groups (blanco, reposado, añejo) are offered to purists and aficionados by the (shot) glass, mostly for less than $10 each. At least in this sense, then, Cava22 is the Mission’s answer to Tres Agaves in ballpark yuppieland. And since non-aficionados can be found all over town — even writing pieces like this one — the drinks menu also includes an array of margaritas and infused tequilas, along with a smattering of concoctions made with other liquors. Or you can simply turn the sheet over to find a nice selection of beer and wine. Many of the wines are from Spain and Argentina, several are available by the glass, and all are reasonably priced.

If I’m making Cava22 sound like a gigantic bar, this is because in many respects it is. Certainly it’s gigantic, a box with a high ceiling supported by a line of wooden pillars marching down the middle of the room. And certainly there’s a bar, lit by a line of bordello-red ceiling lanterns and complete with a television mounted over the door so bar patrons can watch fútbol matches on Telemundo. But there’s also chef Roman Beltran’s food; it’s good food, a sort of Spanish-Mexican amalgam, and fairly priced. That, plus the drink, plus the large number of tables, means that Cava22 is a good place to know about if you’re flying out the door by the seat of your pants, hoping to indulge one of the great pleasures available to the urban diner: that of just drifting along with friends until a suitable place presents itself, complete with an available table.

The guacamole ($5.50) disappointed me, I must say, notwithstanding the generous allotment of deeply crisped tortilla chips. It was too oniony. (I have been making guacamole often in recent weeks, and my version includes, in addition to avocados, just some minced garlic, a pinch of cayenne, a squeeze of lime juice, a pinch of salt, and some chopped cilantro. No party-crashing by onions!) On the other hand, we loved and devoured a plate of roasted garlic cloves and fig compote ($6.50) — a clever variation on the classic Spanish quince paste known as membrillo — suitable for spreading over grilled bread spears with some cambozola cheese. The cloves themselves looked a little drab, like old rubber fittings the plumber might be replacing, but roasting gave them a mellow sweetness and an almost buttery spreadability. Cambozola cheese, incidentally, isn’t as fancy as it sounds; it’s an industrial German product, with a manufactured name meant to make us think of two of its more storied relations, camembert and gorgonzola. Still, it’s tasty enough and a good value. It’s also vegetarian-friendly, as are the empanadas ($6), a pair of corn-dough canapés filled with squash and peppers and napped with a sharp-edged tomato sauce.

But this is not a vegetarian restaurant. Meat is the motif among the main courses, although there is a paella on offer along with a sizable list of seafood dishes. Typical of the meat possibilities is the Argentine milanesa ($11): thin slices of beefsteak that are breaded, fried, and served with beans and rice. The name refers to Milan, of course, Argentina having substantial Italian ancestry. In a small irony, the Italians themselves call breaded, fried filets (usually of fish or veal) "all’inglese" — "in the English fashion." So, fingers pointing in every direction here. Cava22’s milanesa steaks are profoundly breaded and fried indeed; by the time they reach the table, they’re nearly geological in their earthy crispness and twisted shapes.

Camarones à la diabla ($12), also known as prawns in spicy sauce, is one of those preparations you see on menus all over the place. Here the shrimp are peeled, which is certainly a blessing for the person eating them, and the tomatoey-looking "devil" sauce packs a real wallop. I can’t recall having a more boldly chilefied sauce in any restaurant, and I liked it. Seafood dishes include a choice of sides — beans, rice, roasted potatoes, a few others — and these are on the good side of ordinary.

Service is knowledgeable and efficient, although the dining room is so big that sitting at one of the window tables is like being near the end of a bus line: it takes some chugging to move things from kitchen to table and back again, and you can see your server coming from quite a distance. Luckily the table linens are well-starched and the street spectacle is unending: a human parade dressed every which way and heading in every direction, with many posses making stops at Papa Toby’s Revolution Café across the street, possibly to make inquiry as to the whereabouts of an interesting new tequila bar and restaurant they’d heard about.

CAVA22

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

3239 22nd St., SF

(415) 642-7224

www.cava22sf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Wine and deer

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS A man with a penis the size of a wine bottle told me you can shoot a deer out of season if it’s decimating your vineyard. We live in wine country. We’re neighbors. He had set a bar of post-coital dark chocolate and a bowl of cherries on the coffee table for me, and was making us tea. I like the taste of wine, but would rather live in beer country, or, I don’t know, hot sauce country. Wine bottles hurt.

This morning at the kitchen sink, grinding my Sweet Maria’s, I looked out the window and saw a small nuclear family of deer looking in the window at me, like, "What the — ?"

I opened the window.

"It’s a kind of coffee," I said.

I didn’t have to holler. The deer were right there — and, perhaps not surprisingly, completely weirded out. I admit I don’t always look exactly sexy in the morning, let alone easily categorized. If they didn’t bolt — and they didn’t — I attribute it more to their being surrounded by chicken wire than any headlight-like radiance on my part. Like most animals, including human ones, deer have an easier time getting into situations than getting back out of them.

The chocolate and cherries were a nice touch though, I thought. The tea was a nice touch. The talk of deer, and vineyards? Nice touch. Very neighborly. Our neighbor, my neighbor told me, shoots deer in his vineyard and can’t be bothered with the rest of it, the gutting and dripping and butchery, so he digs a hole with his backhoe and buries his deerly departed.

I don’t like dark chocolate.

My neighbor said his neighbor calls him first, sometimes, to see if he wants the deer.

"Do you?" I said.

He said he can’t be bothered.

I was eating the chocolate anyway, so as not to seem unladylike, sipping my tea in a manner most dainty. Then, being essentially a cartoon character, the chocolate bar turned into a strip of venison jerky, and the hot tea into a cold beer. Not sure if this would qualify as ladylike or not, but I gave Wine Bottle Wiener my number and said, yo, if anyone ever calls him again with any large game or anything, have them call me.

I just love venison. Steaks. Sausages. Liver. I love venison. So does Mountain Sam, and he has sharp knives and can help me, I figure. What I need, my dear alternative-weekly PETA-supporting readership, is a rifle.

Hey, I have grapevines to protect. Check that: I have grapevine. One. I don’t make wine, but me and my chickens eat a few handfuls of grapes every fall and enjoy them very much, thank you. Now the deer have been sneaking into the chicken yard in the middle of the night and helping themselves. And then mangling, tearing, eating through and sometimes just bowling over my elaborate fencing system by way of saying goodbye.

A farmer wearies of mending fence.

I slowly closed the kitchen window, tiptoed across my shack to the door, which I opened and closed soundlessly, and, in my bare feet still, and pajamas, I snatched my hatchet from the wood pile, jumped the fence myself, and damn near got me my first deer ever, chicken style.

After fixing the fence, I went back inside and drank my coffee.

The phone rang. It was him. And he didn’t have a deer for me; he had a bottle of wine. His deep voice was all want, with maybe chocolate and cherries in it, for me.

"I like cherries," I said, and then I didn’t say anything else. He waited very patiently, but I can never find my way out as gracefully as I found my way in. The man was going to need a smaller dick, was the thing … or a bigger woman. "I like grapes. I like deer," I said. My big toe was bleeding and Weirdo the cat was sniffing me like I was piss, but I could not hang up. "Coffee," I said. "I love coffee."

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My new favorite restaurant is Pho Vietnam, in Santa Rosa. These folks do the biggest bowls of noodles I’ve ever seen. I’m talking about the bun, or vermicelli, but I’ve also had the pho, and it’s great too. The place used to be all soulful and divey and crowded and dirty, like I like, but then it moved next door into what might have been a pancake house, with big, soft booths, a posh counter, and carpeting. Funny. Fun. Great food.

PHO VIETNAM

711 Stony Point #8, Santa Rosa

(707) 571-7678

Mon.–Sat. 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.–7:45 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

Goat Hill Pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

While the denizens of Washington, DC must nourish themselves with Capitol Hill Blue, we of the Blessed Realm have easy access to Goat Hill Pizza, and although there aren’t any goats on Potrero Hill any more, in blue or any other color, the views are still magical, the pizza is pretty good, and a longtime spirit of San Francisco abides, despite the passing of a third of a century and the ebb and flow of various funny-money economic tides.

Goat Hill is more than a pizzeria with a view (though a better view you won’t easily find), more than a place long famed for its Monday night, all-you-can-eat pizza dim sum extravaganza (though a better deal you won’t easily find): it’s a kind of community center, a locus of mingling, with the restaurant’s co-owner, Philip De Andrade, serving as mingler-in-chief as he moves from table to table, chatting and checking. The restaurant’s long walls are regularly hung with paintings for sale, and, on certain warm weekend afternoons, the place becomes a kind of art gallery that smells of linguica and cheap red wine — just the sort of environment in which to stumble across a surviving Beat writer or unheralded master painter.

Goat Hill is a still-glowing ember of a bohemian San Francisco where life’s riches were enjoyed but neither obsessed over nor paraded as status symbols. If, in a sense, it’s an ambassador from the past, it’s an envoy that’s survived a host of Bible-worthy plagues, from earthquake, disease, and fire to the dot-com boom-bust (in with the Porsches, out with the Porsches!) and the long adventure in misrule that began with a stolen election and will eternally bear the name of the unbearable George W. Bush. The little man will be gone soon, holding hands with Dick Cheney in one of their undisclosed locations while Mesopotamia burns, but Goat Hill will still be there, packing them in on Monday nights.

While a wait for a table is generally an annoyance for people who are hungry to eat dinner, the Monday-night wait at Goat Hill is rather festive, especially in mild weather. Clots of people loiter on the sidewalk and in the street near the door, chatting and flirting and occasionally taking the long view down the slope of Connecticut Street to the city’s luminous skyline, which seems close enough to touch. Of all the skyline views I’ve observed over the years, only those on the eastern slopes of Russian Hill are the equal of those on the north face of Potrero. With a view like that, who needs food? And yet, from time to time, the host does emerge from the restaurant to call out a name, and a party of people — maybe a twosome, but just as likely a sixsome or even more — eagerly marches inside.

The dim sum comparison is as old as time, but it isn’t quite apposite. (Visitors to Goat Hill’s arriviste location in the SoMa flatlands will find the all-you-can-eat deal in effect every day.) Whenever I’ve had actual dim sum at a Chinese place, the servers check off little boxes on a tab when we’ve chosen items to eat, so the final bill varies. At Goat Hill, you pay a flat fee (at the moment $10.95 per head), which buys you unlimited access to the salad bar along with unlimited access to the pies that emerge regularly from the kitchen. A pie arrives; its topping is announced, and, as at a Sotheby’s auction, you point or mumble or in some other way indicate an interest, and you are given a slice. But step lively, because the next pie could be just seconds behind. Or, minutes might elapse, an interval in which you can thoughtfully chew your crust rinds. Some of these can look a little scorched.

The toppings themselves show signs of being drawn from the culinary equivalent of an auto dealership’s parts bin. There’s pepperoni, of course, and also pepperoni with sausage, and sausage with mushroom. (No pepperoni with mushroom.) How about ground beef with green onions ("Italian hamburger"), or spinach with tomato and feta cheese, or chicken with sun-dried tomatoes? Green bell pepper makes repeated appearances, as does pineapple, with ham or with sausage, with or without chunks of jalapeño pepper.

Linguica — the garlicky Portuguese sausage — is underrated as a pizza topping; its flavor is every bit as potent as pepperoni’s, but (at least at Goat Hill) it’s richer and less salty. This last is always an important consideration for the pizza eater who is beyond 30 years of age. I love pizza, and I retain an affection for the sort of pizza gluttony Goat Hill enables, but the older you get, the more likely you are to be sorry the next day not to have exercised more restraint in enjoying your pizza. (The pizza crusts, incidentally, are sourdough and find a nice middle ground between crackery and bready, but the rinds nonetheless have a way of piling on paper plates around the tables. Only across the way, at a table filled with avid men in their 20s, did I notice the crust rinds being efficiently dispatched. It was like watching bright-eyed jackals polish off a wildebeest carcass, bones and all.)

The salad bar, amid all this crust, is not an afterthought. Although it has the look of something you’d find at Howard Johnson’s, complete with sneeze shield, it does offer a broad range of non-bloating items, including kidney beans and chickpeas, tomato slices, mushrooms, lettuce, grated cheese, beets, pepperoncini, and, of course, choice of dressing, to be ladled from big crocks. There’s even a view, at no extra charge.

GOAT HILL PIZZA

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

300 Connecticut, SF

(415) 641-1440

www.goathill.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noise does not preclude conversation

Wheelchair accessible

Lollapalooza day one: Radiohead, Cat Power, Duffy, Gogol, rock-wine pairings

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ChicagoSky lolla day 1 sml.jpg
I was somewhere around the Loop on the LSD when the hangover began to take hold…All photos by K. Tighe.

By K. Tighe

For concert attendees, Lollapalooza doesn’t start until Friday morning, Aug. 1, but for intrepid journalists and their diligent plus-ones, there are kickoff parties, sponsor events, and Chinese dinners that all lead up to the main event. Thursday afternoon, I found myself in the Crystal Ballroom of the Blackstone Hotel, listening to a Sonoma winemaker attempt to explain about the inner workings of my brain and memory. Delving into the deeper recesses of clinical psychiatry and viticulture preferences might not seem like a rock ‘n’ roll time, but believe me it was.

“This is the place where cocaine and chocolate live,” Clark Smith was explaining to a room full of food, wine, and music journalists the topic of euphoria, a buzz word in his recent study: that wine is able to carry emotion in the same way that music can.

From his research, he’s discovered that certain vintages taste differently when paired with certain songs, a phenomenon he proved to us by piping tracks from Lolla artists into the ballroom and making us sip, sip, then sip some more. From my afternoon at the Blackstone, I discovered that Cat Power makes a Pinot Grigio soar, Dr. Dog does wonders for Pinot Noir, and the Love Theme from Superman can make even Sutter Home White Zin taste like a million bucks. I left the hotel drunk (I wasn’t spitting, as proper wine tasting calls for) and starving. My cohort and I dove into some Chinese grub in Wicker Park before heading to the Venus zine kickoff party at the Debonair Social Club. Mates of States were manning the DJ booth, and I was taking care of the bottle service at our booth, alternating nips from the bottle of merlot in my bag (goes great with Stephen Malkmus).

I'veGotMadCred sml.jpg

Under the skin

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS To be honest (which is one of my two favorite ways to be) … I never very much liked ratatouille, or rat-a-tat-tat-ouille, as I have sometimes called it, to be difficult. Nothing against eggplant. It’s just that there are, at any given time, 9,999 other things I’d rather be putting in my mouth, at least one of which, at any given time, is a whole roasted chicken rubbed with black pepper and garlic, strips of bacon stuffed under the skin.

The only reason I mention ratatouille is because there’s a movie that, like most movies, I never saw. Called Ratatouille. But I don’t much go for ratatouille, so why would I want it in italics, with a capital R?

Plus I am the least movied person alive. That’s why I so seldom know what anyone’s talking about. I do see movies, occasionally, but only as a vehicle for popcorn. Home or away, I pop my own. Not that I can’t afford movie theater popcorn; I just like mine better. As it turns out I — famed appreciator of Two-Buck Chuck and Dollar-a-Thing Chinese fast food — am a popcorn snob.

I get my kernels at Rainbow Grocery, so we’re talking organic, free-range, home-schooled, non-HMO, white corn popcorn. And, in one of those cool turnabouts that makes life soupy and worth living, it’s cheaper than Orville fucking Redenbacher and Jolly goddamn Time. Oh, and every kernel pops — for real, Orville. I can prove this in a court of law. I know how much oil to use, so the salt sticks too. No butter. Just salt.

People are always almost beating me up in bars. And not for the normal reasons, either. Most recently it was a matter of my not having seen Ratatouille, the movie. I forget who it was, but it wasn’t the one person in the world who’d have "probable cause" for beating me up in bars for not seeing Ratatouille — the badass biker babe I know who actually worked on that film.

Whoever it was, they were berating, abusing, and downright poking me over never having seen Ratatouille. I didn’t dream this. I know it wasn’t a dream or else it would have been the badass biker babe.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: no butter? Did you just say no butter on your popcorn? You, Chicken Farmer? Butterer of everything, singer of songs about butter, and placer of bacon under chicken skin? No butter on your popcorn?

Well, first let me say that it was Crawdad’s idea to put bacon under the chicken skin. I was 100 percent behind the idea, yes. But ultimately I was, like so many ruiners of life and meals before me, "only following orders." It was her kitchen.

We both knew that the bacon stuffed under the skin and into the cavity would never get crisp, nor exactly palatable to most palates, save mine and maybe the dog’s. But I figured, well, we could always put more strips of bacon on the outside of the bird. To eat! The bacon-inside idea, I imagined, would lasso all sorts of holy cows at the dinner table. It would melt into the meat, and leave an extra layer of pretty pure fat under the skin, essentially turning chicken into duck, and consequently turning us, me and Crawdad, into Nobel lariats.

There’s a word for this. It’s either hubris, dumbass, or joie de vivre … depending where you come from and what kind of mood you’re in.

Speaking of Frenchness, I borrowed Ratatouille from Crawdad that night — something to watch with my bedtime popcorn when I got home.

Got home, popped my corn, salt, no butter, opened the box …

No disc. No Ratatouille. Still going to get beat up in bars, etc. Except: the following night, last night, at Yo-Yo’s, cat-sitting, out of pure boredom, I swear, I touched the "open" button on her DVD player. I’d already scanned her shelves, nothing I wanted to see. And you’re not going to believe this, because Yo-Yo and Crawdad haven’t seen each other in years…. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you.

—————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Cactus Taqueria. There’s one in Oakland and one in north Berkeley. That’s the one I like, because that’s where I lunched with a one-year-old after a grueling five-minute birthday shop for another one-year-old. Best thing about nannying: you always have someone with you to help finish a burrito. And if it’s Clara de la Cooter, she’ll finish all your hot sauce too. We were googy over the carnitas.

CACTUS TAQUERIA

1881 Solano, Berk.

(510) 528-1881

Daily: 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Beer & wine

DISC/MC/V

B Star

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you run a successful restaurant on Clement Street, apparently you face a terrible temptation to open another restaurant on Clement Street — across the road, perhaps, or on the next block. And the new place should appeal to a different socioeconomic stratum. For grand Clémentine, this formula resulted in the opening, about four years ago, of Bistro Clement, an earthier and less formal sibling that trafficked in traditional French bistro dishes.

Now the Burma Superstar people, just a block or so to the west of Clémentine, have borrowed a page from the Clémentine script and, in early May, opened their own companion venture, B Star. In a small, or not-so-small, irony, B Star occupies the space held by Bistro Clement before it went under. If that is a bad omen, let’s consider some favorable ones: unlike Bistro Clement, B Star represents an upmarket, not downmarket, move. (Burma Superstar’s lofty reputation has to do with its food, not its ambience) Also, the menu is, of course, Burmese (-ish), and the new place is on the same side of the street as the parent restaurant.

If you’re on foot, in fact, you’re not likely to miss B Star. It’s the mid-block spot with would-be patrons idling and swirling on the sidewalk and in the doorway. Yes, the crowds have already descended, apparently drawn by alluring whiffs of upmarketry and innovative Asian cooking. That formula has been working at nearby Namu, and now it works at B Star, though the two are hardly interchangeable. While Namu is of the night, B Star has the look of day: knotted pine floors, creamy yellow walls, globes of soft light dangling from the ceiling, and a fair amount of lush greenery. If Namu is an ersatz nightclub, then B Star has a certain gazebo quality, even in the evening.

The menu card adverts to "simple and wholesome Asian-style comfort foods." Never have so few syllables signaled so much to so many; they make me think of meatloaf tataki. B Star doesn’t offer that (does anyone?), but the kitchen does turn out dishes all along the innovation spectrum, from a fabulous, if traditional, platha ($4.50) — a disc of pastry-like flatbread, cut into quarters and presented with an irresistible curry sauce for dipping — to a heart-shaped potpie ($14) filled with Thai-style salmon, carrots, red peppers, zucchini, and snap peas awash in a green curry coconut milk sauce that doesn’t lack for chile punch.

Most of the dishes strike a reasonable balance between familiarity and wildness. Care is taken with putf8gs and other small touches, and the ensemble of crockery, rich in eccentric shapes, has a museum-of-modern-art feel that subtly elevates the food it carries. Also, the kitchen is keenly attentive to the matter of texture and to the value of crunchiness, in particular. We detected a definite crispness in a vegetarian samusa soup (a $7 bowl was plenty for two), whose delights included cabbage, lentils, potatoes — worthies all, though soft — and falafel. I love falafel but had never before enjoyed it in any other form than wrapped in a pita or lavash. Here it resulted in a soup that went crunch, and we only wished that the murky, curry-scented, slightly metallic broth had been a little less harsh.

"It’s missing something," my companion said. Salt? Salting helped but did not cure. Something freshening or fruity, maybe?

Additional crunch turned up in kau soi ($11), a large, shallow bowl filled with noodles, bean sprouts, pickled mustard greens, and ground chicken, each in its place, which made the bowl look like a 3-D map of some ethnically fractured island. It fell to the diner to mix and mingle (as with the Korean beef salad known as bi bim bop), and one of the first things this diner noticed was that the chicken — more shredded than ground, I thought — was wonderfully crispy, in contrast to the soft-focus players. If any dish at B Star manages a rustic sophistication, it’s this one.

Since the menu offered no meatloaf tataki, we settled for a spicy-tuna version ($8.50). The fish had been crusted with crushed peppercorns au poivre-style, seared, cut into slices, and served with a gingery mush dotted with bits of jalapeño pepper and flecks of cilantro. It was also quite chilly, which suggested pre-preparation but also brought a cold-flash counterpoint to a parade of dishes that ranged from warm to scorching.

A nicely balanced dish, in this respect, was the duck lettuce cups ($8). The lettuce consisted of long spears, crisp and cool as an early spring in morning; they were on hand here so we could scoop up the duck, a pile of cooling but still warm shredded meat (like the pork in mu shu pork) perfumed with five-spice powder and laced with a mince of red bell pepper, carrots, celery, and scallions. Our only complaint was that the lettuce spears were not particularly useful as scoops; the regular lettuce cups (of broader and more pliant butter-leaf lettuce) would have been better.

Just as it must be hard to be the child of a famous or accomplished parent, so it must be difficult to be the offspring of a restaurant that uses "superstar" for part of its name. Expectations are bound to be stoked. "Star" is at least more modest than "superstar," particularly when it’s denoted by a symbol rather than spelled out as a word. And B Star does have glints of something special: the best dishes are memorable, the look is appealing, and the staff is as young and energetic as the crowd. A B is good, but give us an A !

B STAR

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

127 Clement, SF

(415) 933-9900

www.bstarbar.com

Beer, wine, soju

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Predictably good

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REVIEW The year is 1976, the American Bicentennial, and snooty British wine seller Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) decides to organize a blind taste test, pitting French wine against the then-fledgling California wine. While in Napa he meets Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), a perfectionist, and his long-haired surf bum son Bo (Chris Pine). Impressed by Barrett’s Château Montelena chardonnay, Spurrier hopes to include it in the competition. It isn’t too difficult to see where all of this is headed, not only because the outcome of the 1976 blind taste test is obvious every time we drink wine produced in the Napa Valley, but also because Bottle Shock isn’t exactly blazing any new territory. The characters are all familiar: an earnest father, his slacker son, and a budding Mexican vintnerready to get out from under the thumb of his white boss. The subplots are equally familiar: a strained father-son relationship and a love triangle. Nevertheless, there is something warm and charming about Bottle Shock. It’s one of those based-on-a-true-story, America-as-underdog movies that are as predictable as they are hard to resist.

BOTTLE SHOCK opens Wed/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Friends of Chet celebrate his 66th birthday

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (Scroll down for a picture of the Friends of Chet)

Lee Housekeeper, the worthy keeper of the flame for Chet Helms, sent out the word to the Friends of Chet.

“This Saturday (Aug. 2) we would have celebrated Chet’s 66th birthday with him at the Great American Music Hall. Some of you would have shared a meal with him at Lefty O’Doul’s. Alas, Chet’s ashes are stashed at the Columbarium but that won’t stop us from celebrating our brother.”

And so 22 Friends of Chet showed up on a beautiful Saturday afternoon on the top floor of the Columbarium in San Francisco to celebrate the legendary rock impresario and symbol of the Summer of Love who died on June 25, 2005.

It was a a lively little group, who talked and joked as if Chet were with us, wearing flowing white robes and looking like Jesus Christ. That is how I remembered him when he appeared at Guardian parties in the late l960s at the time he was energizing the old Avalon Ballroom and rock music. Then it was Chet Helms and the Family Dog and he was at the top of his game.

Carole Vernier was there, looking as if she were still gathering items for Herb Caen (she was Caen’s last assistant). And there was Boots Houston, who did a benefit to pay off Chet’s debts and promoted the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in memory of Chet in Golden Gate park); Eugene (Dr. Hip) Schoenfeld and his wife Lonie (Dr. Hip wrote a famous column on sex and drugs for the old Berkeley Barb and the Guardian); Robert Altman, of the famous last name, but a fine photographer in his own name, who arranged the group photo; and Julius Karpen, who managed Janis Joplin, Chet’s find from Texas, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, her group.

Jose Angel Najera, who used to throw free block parties on Mullen Avenue in the l960s/70s with Chet, Janis and their d his rock star friends, did a beat on Chet’s memorial glass. Everybody chimed in with the beat. Jose’s son Eloy Cipriano Najera (aka CIPRE) let out a freestyle rap in honor of Chet.
“Chet was loving and giving and music is what kept him livin.'” (Full rap below.) Then everyone headed to Lefty O’Douls where even more Friends of Chet were gathered to continue the festivities.

Chet, you inspired another jolly good show. B3

Chet Helms celebrationsmall.jpg

Top row standing left to right: Julius Karpen, Sydney Minnerly, Jose Najera II, Jose
Najera, Lee Houskeeper, Bruce Brugmann, Steve Sodokoff, Scott Mize, Boots Houston, Karen Albin, Jon Diamante, Robert Altman

Middle row seated left to right: Tom Soto, Steve Somerstein, Jose Najera, Carol Vernier

Bottom row seated left to right: Eugene Schoenfeld, Lanie Schoenfeld, Judith Davis, Darice Murphy, Jerilyn Brandelius, Ann Pierson

Eloy’s rap on Chet:

“Chet Helms was born in Texas, and hitch hiked with Janis, she always wanted a Mercedes Benz but now we ridin in a Lexus!

“I remember him and my pops, smokin on chops, around the table, and gettin much props! Passin the wine, and enjoyin the time, and Cipriano raps with a rhyme! That was pulled off the grape vine

“He was good friends with my mother, and he was like a brother to my parents, and he was even the manger for Jimmy Hendrix. So we are all here to give respect thats just, due to a great man from the Family Dog, while your gone we are all in the Fog, but I goin to rise a bay HOG!,

“But Chet was loving and giving and music is what kept him livin’! SO we’re all here to give honor and respect to a man that gave the Hippies a reason for wishin for Peace, and love, and to shine bright like the stars above, and I to be free like a dove! One love! Chet Helms!”

Eloy says check out his websites:

myspace.com/Cipre
Ursession.com/Cipre
Ursessoin.com/BERNALBEAT

Death of teen immigrant farm worker nets $260K fine

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mariaphto.jpg

Earlier this month we reported on Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, a 17-year-old immigrant farm worker whose heat-related death sparked a public outcry against Trader Joe’s and their cheaper-than-thou “Two-buck Chuck” wine.

Jimenez was employed by Merced Farm Labor, which contracts with the same company that supplies the grapes that go into the infamous $2 a bottle Charles Shaw wine, sold exclusively at Trader Joe’s. While Jimenez was not picking grapes specifically for that wine, United Farm Workers asked supporters to pressure Trader Joe’s to ensure that their vendors are contracting with responsible companies.

Jimenez’s death also instigated an investigation by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA), into Merced Farm Labor’s protocols. Today, the state agency announced they’re citing the company for three alleged serious and willful violations of state laws. Penalties could run as much as $263,000.

Makes putting out a little water and shade for your workers look a lot more affordable.

Home field advantage

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Bars are wired for weird times. I know that. The combination of amplified music and vodka makes for surreally truncated, garbled conversation (if any). Which in turn makes for strange looks, nods of unknowingness, flights of fancy, and colorfully elaborate misunderstandings. Then the next day you have to e-mail everyone and say, "Christ, what happened?"

Restaurants are wired for romance. Coffeehouses are wired for wirelessness. That’s why you get coffee on first dates. If they don’t show up, you can check your e-mail. Second date, dinner. Third date, drinks and dinner — then hopefully more drinks, then hopefully breakfast. But you don’t just drink until after you are bored with each other, or are at least married.

I was not on a date. My date, the dumb fuck, cancelled on me. It would have been a second date, so I would have had dinner. As it turned out, I did have dinner with a good friend instead, so it was actually enjoyable — if not romantic — and then we went to see another friend’s band play and everyone was there.

Now, if you’re me, all your friends are in love with all your other friends, with the possible exception of me. And all their relationships are always at various stages of disappointment/dissipation, in which case they may want to confide in you, or else they are on Cloud Nine, in which case they may want you to confide in them.

It might be the same mechanism that makes people rubberneck car crashes or turn into drooling zombies in the glow of the Disaster Channel. They could be safe, held, and accounted for, but some rare, blissless part of them misses loneliness and/or craves the vicarious ache of your dumb fuck dates and serial dicklessness.

And some not-very-rare but raw part of you wants to talk, and tell, and hear, and feel, so this all works out very nicely, or would except that you’re in a loud bar with a lot of strong drinks in your hands. And the next thing you know, if you’re me, all your friends have left, some having said good-bye, some not … and you live an hour and a half away, have keys to several neighborhood couches and crawl spaces, but miss Weirdo the Cat and are in general very, very confused.

It’s late it’s dark you’ve had at least a drink you’re a lightweight you’re afraid to go let yourself in to any of your many oddly departed friends’ apartments because they are probably all in bed with each other, making happy, sexual, slurpy noises.

How did this happen? You trade your unfinished drink for a cup of coffee to go and, replaying the strange night in your head, you drive home on the verge of tears and, more dangerously, sleep. You feel hardly understood, hardly understanding, in broad daylight on solid ground, outside. Let alone at shows.

You remember saying to someone back at the bar: "I think I might try dating younger men, since older ones strike me as disappointingly immature. With younger ones at least I won’t be disappointed. And there will be hope. Insane hope, but hope."

What they heard, between guitar solos and microphone feedback: "I think the fire was in the bedroom, since something something scintilutf8gly immature. With young rum the peaches won’t be disappointing. Something something. I’m insane! Ho ho ho!"

Little wonder they looked at you sideways and left.

Fuck bars. Fuck restaurants. Fuck coffeehouses. From now on I’m going to stay home, in the woods. If my friends want to see me, they are more than welcome here. And I will feed them. Complete strangers too. If they want it to be a date, I have coffee!

We can sit outside, and the only interference to our clear, body-boggling verbal connection will be birds and squirrels, and/or the sizzling of chops and chicken. Inside, the sound of a clock and the smell of bacon. This is called home field advantage.

Which … I think I could use me some.

———————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria Guadalajara. You know how I know? I had just bought about 15 pounds of Flint’s barbecue for my band, and Little Him showed up with a Guadalajara burrito. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, ribs, brisket, and chicken notwithstanding. This burrito was eight-feet long and weighed 420 pounds. Next chance I got, I went to Guadalajara myself for about three solid meals’ worth of al pastor, and was not disappointed. Open late, and pretty nice inside, too.

TAQUERIA GUADALAJARA

Sun.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–3 a.m.

3146 24th St., SF

(415) 642-4892

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Bucking off Chuck

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› amanda@sfbg.com

It was a steamy 95 degrees inside the vineyard, just east of Stockton, where Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez was pruning a shadeless stretch of young vines. It was May 14, the third day of work for the 17-year-old immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico. She’d been working more than nine hours, with just one water break, when she collapsed from heat exhaustion at 3:40 p.m.

An hour and a half later, when she finally arrived at an emergency room, her body temperature was 108.4 degrees. For two days her heart stopped and started, then ceased beating completely.

The California Division of Industrial Relations has opened an investigation of the death and her employer, Merced Farm Labor, whose operating permit had already been temporarily suspended by state officials based on past unpaid fines for unheeded heat safety violations, and a permanent revocation could be imminent.

The San Joaquin county coroner determined that heat was the fatal factor, and so Jimenez’s family has filed a civil suit claiming wrongful death. The district attorney and attorney general have also opened investigations.

"We’re hoping to send a signal to farmers that you don’t just hire a labor contractor because it’s the lowest bid," Robert Perez, the lead attorney on the case, told the Guardian. "We think farmers, when they hire a labor contractor, should check them out."

But activists connected to the case want to send the message even further, to stores like Trader Joe’s that market products made with cheap or exploited agricultural labor.

Merced Farm Labor was subcontracted by West Coast Grape Farming, whose president, Fred Franzia, also owns Bronco Winery, makers of Charles Shaw wine — also known as Trader Joe’s cheap and wildly popular "Two-Buck Chuck." Approximately 72 million bottles of the $2 wine are sold each year, exclusively at Trader Joe’s.

United Farm Workers, responding to Jimenez’s death, have asked supporters to fire off letters to Trader Joe’s requesting the company "implement a corporate policy to ensure that its your suppliers are not vioutf8g the law by failing to provide basic protections such as cold water, shade, and clean bathrooms."

So far reaction has been swift and significant. "We always get a big volume of response because our Listserv is very socially conscious," said Jocelyn Sherman, UFW’s director of Internet communications. "But for this we’ve gotten an overwhelming volume of response. It’s the situation. People need something to be done."

Sherman estimates as many as 15,000 e-mails have been sent from UFW supporters to Trader Joe’s, whose spokesperson, Alison Mochizuki, told us the ire has been misplaced: "The unfortunate and tragic death of Maria Jimenez highlights issues and concerns facing all agricultural industries across America. Maria Jimenez was employed by an independent contractor working in an independent vineyard. The vineyard supplies many wineries, but was not supplying grapes for Charles Shaw. The company employing the young farm worker has no more of a relation to Trader Joe’s than they do to any other wine retailer or restaurant."

However, UFW asserts that subcontracting is the historic artful dodge of many a vineyard, and a vendor like Trader Joe’s, which serves a progressive community, ought to exert its clout on these issues.

"Lovingly nicknamed ‘Two-Buck Chuck’ by a member of the wine press, these California wines have become something of a phenomenon in the wine world, and in our stores," trumpets Trader Joe’s Web site. "Contrary to many an urban legend, these super-value wines began as the result of an oversupply of wine and a great relationship with a valued supplier."

"You say you have a great relationship with this supplier," Sherman responded. "Use this great relationship to protect workers."

A spokesperson for Franzia told the Guardian that the company had no comment. Mochizuki said Trader Joe’s — which has 62 stores in Northern California — is committed to protecting workers: "Our vendors have a strong record of providing safe and healthy work environments and we will continue to make certain that our vendors are meeting if not exceeding government standards throughout all aspects of their businesses."

Jardiniere

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Fizz, like buzz, is evanescent by nature, so I was not totally surprised to see that the champagne-bubble lights that once hung in the air above the bar at Jardinière were nowhere to be seen when we stepped inside on a recent evening. Had they been removed as a discreet way of acknowledging the rapid defizzification of American life? Or just switched off? Yet whether the bubbles be gone or merely darkened, the dome overhead remains; it was originally meant to suggest an inverted champagne cup (itself a suggestion of Marie Antoinette’s breast) but, in its bubbleless state, it now suggests a classical aura. One thinks of the Pantheon or some venerable bank building — a structure whose design is meant to radiate confidence, strength, and maybe a hint of transcendence.

Jardinière (the name means "gardener" in French) turns 11 this fall, and while that’s hardly a pantheonic number, the restaurant for the most part has aged well. It helps, surely, that Pat Kuleto’s interior design was one of his more restrained; the elements of whimsy, such as the wavy ironwork railings that line the sweeping staircase to the balcony, are subtle, while the largest of those that originally weren’t (i.e. the bubbly dome) have been tuned to a lower frequency. The biggest star of the design was never frivolous, anyway; I refer to the cheese chapel on the main floor. Its glass door is still conspicuous behind the bar, and although the cheese course has become commonplace over the past decade, Jardinière was one of the first restaurants other than the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton to offer one, and still does.

Blessed are the noisemakers, for they’ve gone someplace else to eat, leaving Jardinière reasonably quiet and conversation-friendly. The restaurant’s floors are mostly carpeted, which is a vast asset in maintaining a livable balance between bustle and din. The balcony, furthermore, is a motherlode of richly upholstered booths that line the outer walls and are cozy little havens in which talk is easy, if not cheap.

Did I say not cheap? Nothing is cheap at Jardinière, and since we’re talking about one of the city’s premiere restaurants, we wouldn’t expect it to be. Nonetheless, prices for many of the main courses have risen into the mid–$30 range now, and that’s a lot more than just five or six years ago. On the other hand, it’s a lot less than what they’d be at a comparable place in New York City. How strange to think of San Francisco as being a relative bargain.

The blow-out-minded might spring for the chef’s tasting menu: $125 for seven courses, plus another $65 if you want the wine pairings. (The executive chef these days is Craig Patzer, and Reylon Agustin is chef de cuisine.) But one can make do quite nicely with the à la carte choices. There was an around-the-horn consensus in our little booth that a spring-into-summer soup ($10) of white corn, braised chard, shreds of duck confit, and tiny cubes of garlic crouton was undersalted, and our server seemed slightly startled by the request for a salt shaker. But the shaker was brought swiftly, therapy was applied, and the soup — made with a rich, almost geutf8ous chicken stock — came to life.

No such issue clouded a lovely salad of little gem lettuces ($10) whose bright green nooks and folds were laden with buttery avocado slices, radish coins, filets of anchovy, and crumblings of hard-boiled egg under a green peppercorn vinaigrette. It reminded me of an Easter-egg hunt, with delightful surprises tucked here and there.

In earlier years, the des Jardins cooking style made ample use of cream and butter, but those luxurious accoutrements seem less in evidence these days. Butterfat was definitely used to smooth the pat of mousseline potatoes that accompanied the Devil’s Gulch pork ($36) — two slices of roasted loin, two slices of garlicky sausage — along with a pair of deep-fried okra knobs and some braised baby carrots and pearl onions. But slices of Liberty duck breast ($37) were fanned out over a bed of plump farro grains enriched not with butter but slices of nectarine and a five-spice gastrique (which also formed an elegant glaze at the edges of the meat).

And a sautéed filet of bluenose sea bass ($36) came to rest like a piece of tender driftwood on a bright beach of crispy sunchokes, Lucques olives, and almonds lightly bathed in a lemon emulsion — possible butter there, but in a modest amount. The saucings generally suggested lean sophistication, and, in a mild anomaly, the main courses struck us as being at least as inventive and nimble as their smaller precursors.

The dessert menu has a greatest-hits flavor, with a strong subtheme of seasonality. Ingredients are immaculate and execution flawless. It’s hard to find a dessert menu now that doesn’t offer bread pudding; Jardinière’s ($10) was made from brioche and plated with a pat of muscat sorbet (which had a singular and haunting flavor) and an almost impossibly fine dice of candied white peaches. Chocolate mousse tarts, too, are hardly unusual, but Jardinière’s elongated wedge of hazelnut marjorlaine ($10) was distinguished by a smooth, dark-chocolate intensity subtly enhanced by espresso oil. For a seasonal touch, there was a cherry tart ($10), about the circumference of a golf ball and complete with latticework; it was escorted by a scoop of Tahitian vanilla gelato and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

In an important sense we know sublimeness, like art, by its flaws. One of our water glasses was cracked, and the service staff, while attentive and knowledgeable, occasionally seemed overeager to remove plates we weren’t sure we’d finished with. Jarring. I wondered if there were a connection.

JARDINIÈRE

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

300 Grove, SF

(415) 861-5555

www.jardiniere.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Well-muted noise, especially upstairs

Wheelchair accessible

The commissioner’s conflicts

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Before the June 5 special meeting of the San Francisco Planning Commission got underway, Michael Antonini had an announcement.

Dressed in a charcoal suit and red-checked tie, with his white hair combed back over his skull, the longtime commissioner disclosed that he was a part owner of a condominium in the eastern neighborhoods, where a years-long rezoning effort is nearly complete. That means Antonini is among the people who could benefit from increased land values due to zoning upgrades.

As a result, Antonini begrudgingly declared that he would have to recuse himself from hearings involving the eastern neighborhoods until the potential conflict is dealt with.

"Hopefully this can be resolved in the next few weeks and I’ll be able to participate at later hearings," Antonini said at the meeting.

But it was a bit late to be complying with the state’s conflict-of-interest laws: Antonini had already actively taken part in meetings in which the plan was discussed. And Antonini also neglected to mention that after he and his son purchased the condo, he voted on two other projects that appear to be within steps of it.

Public records show that Antonini bought the $515,000 condo at 200 Townsend Street in 2003 with his real estate agent son, John. Commissioner Antonini and his wife own a 25 percent stake in the property through a family trust the couple created in 1997. His son holds the majority interest.

Antonini worked hard to play down his stake in the condo at the June 5 meeting. It’s not an investment property, he made clear to the commissioners. There’s no rent generated from it. He’s a mere minority holder in a family trust that controls the condo, and it was purchased as a residence for his son and his wife.

"Because I did not believe our fractional interest in John’s condo represented a conflict, I did not consider reclusing [sic] myself from projects near the condo," Antonini wrote to the Guardian.

But the laws on this are pretty clear. The state’s Political Reform Act of 1974 prohibits public officials from participating in decisions that will have a "foreseeable material financial effect on one or more of his/her economic interests." It also states that any "direct or indirect interest" worth more than $2,000 poses a potential conflict, for which a 25 percent stake in a half-million dollar condo would seem to qualify.

RECUSE ME


Other public officials in similar situations have recused themselves long before the issue became a potential political liability.

Sup. Bevan Dufty bought into a three-unit residential property on Waller Street with two co-tenants in December 2006. He immediately sought advice from the city attorney, who told him he no longer could vote on the Market-Octavia Plan, a series of land-use changes in Hayes Valley, Duboce Triangle, and elsewhere that was similar in scope to the current rezoning efforts in the eastern neighborhoods. The supervisor also couldn’t vote on a major Laguna Street redevelopment project or on legislation making it easier for seniors to convert rental units to condos.

Antonini told us that "only in the last month" did the city attorney warn some officials involved with plans for the eastern neighborhoods that if they held property in the area, there could be a conflict of interest.

"We’ve been working on [the eastern neighborhoods] for the whole six years I’ve been on the planning commission," he said at the meeting. "It’s a little troubling that this issue of conflict is raised now rather than at the very beginning."

The law does make an exception when the economic interests of the "public generally" could also be enhanced by a government decision such as those that have an impact on a large section of the city like the eastern neighborhoods. But the city attorney’s office concluded for now that the condo indeed may pose a conflict. And in the meantime, Antonini told us that the Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento, which helps enforce the state’s Political Reform Act, is being consulted to determine "whether our fractional interest in the condo truly represents a conflict of interest."

The eastern neighborhoods planning process isn’t the only legislation that created a potential conflict for Antonini. The commissioner voted in January 2007 to approve construction of 26 new single-room occupancy units at 25 Lusk Alley, not far from his property at 200 Townsend. The project’s sponsor, Michael Yarne, is a land-use attorney who today works for the mayor’s economic development office. The project was approved, according to meeting minutes.

The project itself relied on a contentious legal loophole in which developers claim their units are "single-room occupancy," a necessity because the area permits residential efficiency hotels where the poor and working-class used to live. Allowing such SRO hotels in areas zoned for light industrial uses enabled the city to preserve some forms of affordable housing. But builders can turn around and lease the opulently large units such as the ones at 25 Lusk, which bear little resemblance to genuine SRO rooms, to well-heeled clients.

"They are allowed where normal residential units are not allowed, because historically SROs were always extremely affordable housing," community organizer Calvin Welch said. "The whole notion of market-rate SROs is a new invention, and that’s why they’re controversial. They’re basically the new version of live-work lofts."

In November 2006, Antonini also voted to approve a liquor license for a new full-service restaurant and wine bar at 216 Townsend, even closer to his son’s condo.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT


State ethics laws say that a public official has a conflict if his or her property comes within 500 feet of a project the official will be scrutinizing and voting on.

Conservatively measuring from the furthest corners of each property, Google Earth puts both the proposed restaurant and SRO within 500 feet.

Bob Stern, president of the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies and co-author of the state’s Political Reform Act, said a public official could face $5,000 in civil penalties for each conflict-of-interest violation. But it’s not common for the chronically under-resourced FPPC to go after local officials, he said.

Mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard wrote in an e-mail that "we take any allegations of conflicts of interest seriously" but added there is a disagreement over whether the "public generally" exception applied to the eastern neighborhoods and that the City Attorney’s Office was seeking additional input from the FPPC.

As for the two projects he voted on near the condo, Antonini apparently told the mayor’s office he had looked into whether 25 Lusk fell inside 500 feet. "Based on his understanding at the time," Ballard wrote, "they didn’t."

That’s a stretch, at best. The projects are in the same block. We walked them off and found that Antonini would have to be splitting hairs to argue that they are outside the boundary — and even in that case, it would be only by a few feet. The rusty red paint job, black trim, and stylish, outsize windows of 200 Townsend are easily viewable from the backside of 25 Lusk.

"If there is a legitimate argument that they did fall within the 500-foot radius, this should be clarified," Ballard stated. "However, given the relative insignificance of the two projects cited in your e-mail and Antonini’s long-standing reputation as an ethical and hard-working commissioner, we don’t have any reason to believe that he would have knowingly and/or willingly violated the state’s Fair Political Practices Act."

But the Lusk Street project was by no means insignificant. "They are highly regulated," Welch said of SROs. "You cannot convert them to tourist hotels without going through a very long and cumbersome process. They are valued for affordable housing so highly that the city regulates their conversion to tourist uses." So instead, the "corporate suites," as Welch calls them, masquerade as SROs. The project was approved in the end, but two commissioners — Christina Olague and Sugaya Hisashi — voted against it.

Antonini told us that he believes 25 Lusk is more than 500 feet away, and as for the restaurant, planning staff recommended approval.

The commissioner told us, "I was the one who brought public attention to the issue of my possible conflict. I believe it is a small issue when compared to my body of work on behalf of San Francisco over the last six years."

The June 5 meeting where Antonini made the disclosure about his son’s condo was part of a long and detailed process that will determine the fate of vast sections of Potrero Hill, SoMa, the Mission District, and Dogpatch. The official planning process for the targeted 2,200-acre area began back in 2001, and the commissioners could approve new zoning plans next month before sending the proposal to the Board of Supervisors.

For much of San Francisco’s history, the city sections poised for rezoning have been home to light industry and blue-collar jobs. But housing has encroached over the last 15 years, and the planning commission is prepared to allow between 8,000 and 10,000 new units over the next 20 years. That will almost certainly increase the value of land in the area.

Residential developers built thousands of pricey condos in the SoMa District during the 1990s, exploiting another divisive zoning loophole that created waves of animosity across the city and aided in a takeover of the Board of Supervisors by a progressive bloc of candidates.

Live/work lofts, as developers called them, were built in areas zoned for light industrial commercial purposes. Wealthy buyers would ostensibly operate businesses out of their homes or live in them as working artists as the zoning required, but few have complied with the letter or — having found ways to narrowly abide by it — the spirit of the law.

"The city turned its head," housing attorney Sue Hestor said. "We have 3,000 units that are supposed to be occupied by artists and probably 90 percent of them are not occupied by artists at all. It’s blatantly illegal."

Antonini has managed to maintain friendships with local moderate Democrats over the years despite being an elected member of San Francisco’s Republican Party County Central Committee. Willie Brown first appointed him to the powerful planning commission in 2002, and he’s been a reliable vote for developers and other large business interests. Mayor Gavin Newsom reappointed him in 2004 and earlier this year tried to engineer Antonini’s election as president of the commission.

Olema Inn

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If Marin County is a state of mind, would it be catty to describe that state of mind as schizophrenic? Despite a compact geography, Marin shows the world a surprising number of faces; there’s Mount Tam, Muir Woods, Black Sands Beach with its sporty naked people, the writhing population centers in the southeast (my least favorite quarter), and — my most favorite — the rolling, wooded, gently farmed county to the west.

West Marin is an enchanted realm, a genteel Arcadian dream. The city is just 20 miles distant, but one does not feel it. For those of us who’ve had occasion to live in one of the metropolises of the East, whose sprawl can take several hours to escape, this swift vanishing of urbis is an abiding miracle. Humanity’s self-absorbed throbbing subsides, and there is peace across a landscape luminously painted by Thaddeus Welch more than a century ago. The two-lane roads, uncluttered with traffic, wend through tidy little villages and country junctions often punctuated by sharp church steeples, past neatly kept fields, pastures, and orchards. And at the end of one of those roads lies the Olema Inn, an oasis of civilization and civility.

The Olema Inn has been a fine restaurant for nearly a decade, but its deeply atmospheric building is far older, with roots extending back well into the 19th century. When you step onto the Victorian veranda, you have a momentary vision of Mark Twain standing there, gazing out, maybe waiting for a stagecoach or looking for a spittoon — and then you see the "Marin Organic" sign and, for better or worse, you’re right back in the early 21st century.

Inside, the building has been buffed to a soft shine. The lobby, with its inviting bar, has the look of an Edwardian salon — plump, comfy chairs amid lots of rich wood — while the dining rooms beyond are a gracious blend of mullioned, multi-light windows, antique pine floors, fresh white walls, and garden views. While Twain lingers on the porch, twirling his moustache, you have been seated in an Edith Wharton novel, where the linens are always well-starched.

The "Marin Organic" sign tells us that the restaurant is a serious food destination: the kitchen participates in the west county’s responsible-agriculture culture while committing itself to do right by the high-quality ingredients thereby produced. The ethic seems almost indistinguishable to me from that of Chez Panisse, and the results are comparably impressive.

Since western Marin is a locus of oystering — Tomales Bay is the home of Hog Island oyster farm, as well as an unknown number of great white sharks — the Olema Inn’s menu offers this bivalve in a variety of guises. You can get eight sizable oysters on the half-shell for $18; they can be cooked or raw (or some of each), with a wide choice of toppings, including tomato and basil, bacon and fennel, and a classic mignonette made with sauvignon blanc. Excellent and memorable, every one — and I would not describe myself as an oyster-lover.

Soup probably doesn’t get enough credit as a vehicle for chefly expression, but at the Olema Inn, it isn’t for lack of effort or ingenuity. A bowl of wild nettle soup ($10) could easily have been mistaken for green paint ready to be splashed on a military rig, except for the large fried oyster, flecked with breading, in the middle. Only slightly less intense a green was a chilled soup of puréed asparagus ($10), poured around a set of large shelled prawns and dotted with slivers of kumquat.

Sand dabs, a local maritime treasure, are known to be bony, and it might be that their reputation suffers because of this, but they make a fabulous fish and chips ($14). We couldn’t find a single splinter of bone, and the tubular strips of flesh were juicy within their golden crust — a hint that the fish had not been frozen. The chips were limper than what one would consider ideal, but they had been fried in duck fat, which more than made up in flavor what had not been achieved in crispness.

The flavor of duck also pleasantly pervaded a steak hash ($18): cubes of potato and beef, dottings of fresh fava beans, and coarse flaps of onion and fennel root adrift in a ducky broth into which a poached duck egg slowly leaked its yolk. The steak had been billed as the star ingredient, but the dish would have been fine without any meat at all — or maybe just some duck confit? Hash is a well-known recycling center for leftovers, but leftover duck confit often finds its way into salads, not hashes. And sometimes there isn’t any leftover confit at all.

Although bread pudding is another locus for leftovers, Olema Inn’s vanilla version ($9) didn’t seem at all fatigued — more like a fresh morning bun, envelopingly soft and warm. Our server was particularly enthusiastic about the chamomile crème brûlée ($9). It did turn out to be almost obscenely creamy — a true custard — beneath its cap of caramelized sugar, though I strained to detect any hint of chamomile in the flavor. The sour love-bite of lemon, on the other hand, was plainly discernable in the profiteroles ($9); they were filled with lemon-cookie ice cream and were assembled from fresh, house-made pastry, to judge by their exquisite tenderness. Wharton no doubt would have approved. As for Twain: he had vanished into the unseasonable mist, and the veranda was clear when we left. *

OLEMA INN

Lunch: Sat.–Sun., noon–4 p.m. Dinner: daily, 5–9 p.m.

Sir Francis Drake Blvd. at Highway 1, Olema

(415) 663-9559

www.theolemainn.com

AE/DISC/MC/V

Beer and wine

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Sweet and spicy

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I dreamed I was pouring hot sauce on my ice cream, and the thought I was thinking along with the action, in the dream, was: So, it has come to this. Hot sauce on every single thing, even ice cream. Is this my nature, then? To go around setting sweetness on fire?

Don’t you love it when the dream interprets the dream for you? And then all you have to do in the morning is make your coffee and sit outside in the sunshine, watching your chickens scratch for gold. You are free to think about other things. Or to go about your business, which in my case is Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, with 10-minute breaks in between for going bafroom, talking on the phone, reading, writing, and plucking.

My most angelic friend kinda wants to be a stripper. We talked on the phone for a long time last night. While we were talking, my mom called on the other phone, 2 a.m. her time, and sang a scary old church song to my answering machine. Poor thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it stops working, on principle, and I have to buy a new one.

"Make me a channel of your peace," my mother sang, after the beep. "Where there is hatred, let me bring your love. Where there is something, something something something." Her phone went bad, but as I recall the last line didn’t rhyme anyway.

If only my mom had electricity, I would buy her an answering machine and retaliate. I would call it at 2 a.m. my time (which is 5 a.m. there), and sing to it, to her, my latest sensitive singer-songwriter hymn about how I like it up the ass.

"Make me a channel of your piece" …

Oh, hi, St. Francis. I didn’t see you there. You’re my favorite saint, you know, even though if you were alive today you would probably be a member of PETA. And your songs don’t rhyme. But I think a city I love might have named itself after you, and I know I did, only I spelled it with an e. You are my middle name, but I don’t consider myself exactly Catholic, you see.

So the other person I talked to for hours yesterday was Johnny "Jack" Poetry. I can call him that again (instead of Johnny "Jack" Journalism) because he quit the paper and put his poems on the Internet. His wife, Mrs. "Jack" Poetry, one of my dearest, oldest, belovedest friends in her own right (I call her Mrs. "Jack" Poetry out of respect, ’cause she’s sort of a recovering feminist), recently became a Catholic. Now, I have only ever known lapsed Catholics, and occasionally, as in the case of much of my family, unlapsed ones. People who were born Catholic and stayed that way. Mrs. "J." P. is the first person I know to become one, by choice! And for this I love her madly.

So she was away at mass, the Mrs., then she came home from mass, while Johnny "Jack" and me were still on the phone, discussing secular matters such as poetry and pork rinds, and — lo and behold — she had a couple of nuns in tow!

My point being that this is exactly why I have two phones now. Because I live for moments like this. It’s right up there with the time the feds knocked on my mom’s door while we were talking, to account for her whereabouts because Bill Clinton was coming to town, make me a channel of your peace. Or the time the cops came and she dropped the phone, left me dangling, and swore at them until they left. Or arrested her, I forget.

Johnny "Jack" tele-described to me the vision of his sweet wife with a couple of elderly nuns, one wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh baseball cap over her habit, sallying into the wilderness on the world side of his window, hot day, Indian Valley, Idaho, tromping blessed and holy through the weeds, where the ticks are.

My new favorite restaurant is Khana Khazana. Spicy, good, Indian food in Emeryville. The service is very friendly and welcoming. Indeed, it stayed open just for us, even though we showed up five minutes after closing. Points for that, and for hot that means HOT. Portions could have been bigger, for the price. Or I can try and find more work. Either way. *

KHANA KHAZANA

4336 San Pablo, Emeryville

(510) 547-0992

Daily, 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

A lady’s choice

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS There is a kind of chocolate bar with bacon in it, so you know. There. You can go back to sleep now. You can believe in God again, or call and cancel your next 40 years of therapy, or board that airplane, or fall in love. I can’t do any of those things, yet, but you have my permission to go ahead without me. I’ll catch up.

First I’m going to sit here and work on my sweet tooth, which I’ve been trying to work on my whole female life. Before when I passed on dessert, opting instead for another helping of greens, it seemed kind of, I don’t know, cute almost — or quirky. Judging from the looks on people’s faces now, for a woman to not like chocolate … that’s unseemly, grotesque, and just wrong.

Now, y’all know how I love to reinforce stereotypes …

Actually, I do. It’s fun! I mean, ideally I’d be in on the ground floor of the stereotype, like the one where transgender chicken farmers make better lovers. (Neil Young has a song coming out about that.)

All kidding aside, did I ever tell you what I tell people who tell me that "women don’t spit" or "ladies don’t use that word" or "girls don’t go around with a chicken in one hand and a hatchet in the other"? I tilt my head a little, bat my lashes, and go, "They do now, dear." Then I spit and say, "If you’ll kindly excuse me, I have to go chop this fucker’s head off."

But belligerence, like my pickup truck, only gets you so far. It doesn’t get you back to sleep at 3:30 a.m., or into heaven or off the couch or onto airplanes and into hearts. So I am willing to learn to like chocolate, same as I had to teach myself to like applesauce: by putting bacon in it.

Only this time I can’t take credit for the idea. That goes to Vosges Haut-Chocolat, purveyor of Mo’s Bacon Bar. Sockywonk and/or our friend Funiamorari bought me one while they were in New York and gave it to me for my birthday. There’s a picture on the box of a strip of bacon next to a square of chocolate, and a two-paragraph essay on the back by someone named Katrina, chronicling how she’s been working on the bacon + chocolate equation since she was six.

No mention of how old she is now, but since her grammar is pretty good and her spelling impeccable, and since she seems to own a chocolate company with retail stores in Chicago and New York, if I had to guess I’d say she’s at least seven.

My point being: come on! It took me one day to add up bacon + applesauce. Admittedly, it’s easier math. But 365 times easier? Well, six-year-old girls do sometimes have a hard time staying focused, unlike 45-year-old chicken farmers.

Where was I?

Thank you, Sockywonk! Thank you, Funiamorari! This isn’t the first time my wonderful, sisterly girlfriends have helped me become more stereotypical, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Which is a subtle and complicated joke, but would be less so if we could include a group picture here of my wonderful, sisterly girlfriends.

I can’t express how much more confident I will feel now, on dates, when the waitperson asks if we would like dessert, and my date looks at me like, well? and instead of saying, "No, just another pork chop please," I can now say, "Oooh, do you have bacon chocolate bars?" Tilt of the head, bat of the lashes, and the deep-down knowledge that restaurants generally don’t serve candy bars. But at least it will seem like I have a sweet tooth. "I really shouldn’t," I will add, for effect, "but … "

They’re so good! Of course, of course they’d be even better if they were basically bacon with little flecks of milk chocolate in it, instead of the other way around. But my date doesn’t need to know every single silly thought flitting through my sweet mind.

Does he?

—————————————

My new favorite restaurant is Panda Country Kitchen. It’s also one of the windiest restaurants I’ve ever eaten at. Richmond District. I went there with the Maze on a foggy night, and we had tea-smoked duck and I forget what else. Oh, hot and sour soup, which was great, but it became cold and sour soup real fast. Turn the heat on!

PANDA COUNTRY KITCHEN

4737 Geary, SF

(415) 221-4278

Lunch: 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m., Mon.–Fri.

Dinner: 4:30 p.m.–10 p.m., Mon.–Fri.

Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

Club Waziema

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› paulr@sfbg.com

As the fireworks display known as Indian cuisine finds a measure of American celebrity, some of us are left to wonder about an equally spice-rich tradition that remains slightly obscure even in a sophisticated international city like San Francisco. The foods I’m referring to are from East Africa — from Ethiopia and its northern neighbor (and once unwilling province), Eritrea — and maybe the African connection gives us our first clue about their relative obscurity. In my lifetime, most of the food news from Africa has been bad news, beginning with a terrible famine in the West African land of Biafra in the late 1960s to, more recently, a similar crisis in the Sudanese region of Darfur.

Starvation is a chronic threat in modern Africa, and it seems tasteless, somehow, to go out and eat Ethiopian food at a well-provisioned restaurant in a rich city while actual Ethiopians are starving. What would they think of us? What should we think of ourselves? Yet the food is marvelous, and it doesn’t seem quite right to ignore it — and the people who are trying to make a living by offering it in their restaurants — as an awkward gesture of sympathy or solidarity. Our uneasy compromise seems to be to have a certain number of Ethiopian restaurants and to enjoy them, as long as they don’t become too high-profile or glossy. When the first bistro opens with a menu of "modern Ethiopian cuisine," we will know the wind is shifting.

Meantime, there are such lovably unaffected places as Club Waziema, which has been dishing up platters of Ethiopian food on Divisadero Street in the Western Addition for nearly 10 years. When they say "club," they’re not kidding; the deep space has a sort of sports-bar aura in its streetside quarter but acquires a pool-hall feel (complete with pool table) in its raised rear room. In between, opening off the narrows that connects front and rear, is a cozy nook for two that might be a made-over closet but feels like a spot you’d be delighted to find on a 19th-century railcar.

You’d probably be delighted, too — not to mention flabbergasted — to find food like Waziema’s on any 19th-century railcar. Restaurants cooking spice-charged food are like huge aromatherapy candles, bathing their environs with bewitching scents, and Waziema is no exception. Even out on the street, you can smell it before you see it, and once you’re through the door, you’re in the zone.

The menu describes dish after dish as "spicy," without saying what those spices are. (Even the Ethiopian lager Harar is spicy.) The best-known of Ethiopian flavoring agents is a paste known as berbere, which often is made from many of the same spices — cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander, turmeric, fenugreek — that turn up in the Indian garam masala (known to us as curry powder), along with the softening, sweetening presences of allspice and nutmeg. Then there is mitmita, a cayenne pepper-like powder ground from dried red African chili peppers.

If I was taking a quiz, I would guess that Waziema’s lamb stew ($11.50) — boneless chunks of meat simmered with garlic, ginger, and spices — had some mitmita in it, mostly because of the sauce’s red clay color and a distinctive chili, almost Tex-Mex flavor. The menu described the lamb as "mild," but we thought we detected some heat. The beef stew ($10) was similar, with cubes of meat in a rich sauce, except the sauce lacked its sibling’s sunrise glow. It looked more like beef burgundy, and in fact berbere paste can include red wine. If cubed meat isn’t your thing, you might go for the spicy chicken ($10.50), which features a pair of legs braised on the bone in a golden sauce. (Our server asked us if we wanted the chicken "mild, medium, or hot," with the assurance that "hot isn’t that hot." And it wasn’t. It was just right, really.)

Can’t decide? Get the combo ($12.50), which provides half-portions of two of the meat dishes. On the vegetable side of the menu, the combo will bring you sizable samplings of all the meatless dishes. These include spicy lentils (quite dal-like), garlicky collard greens, a vegetable stew (of carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage in garlic sauce), and mushroom chunks in a thick brown sauce like the beef’s. Everything is presented family-style on a large platter lined with a disk of injera, the spongy Ethiopian flatbread made from teff flour. (Teff is an Ethiopian grain with a pleasantly sour taste.) More injera is provided on the side for tearing into pieces and scooping up bites of the various stews.

One lesson to be drawn here is that Ethiopian cooking, like Indian cooking, tends to be vegetarian-friendly. Even carnivores could graze happily for a long while on a platter of the vegetable dishes. (One possible issue for hard-edged vegans: much of Ethiopian cooking is typically done in clarified butter.) Another lesson is that Waziema gives unusually good, I might even say exceptional, value. Prices are moderate, servings are not small, and the sense of bounty is enhanced by the festive heaping of everything onto a colorful platter that lands in the middle of the table like an edible flying saucer.

Divisadero between Castro and Geary remains one of the city’s most vital and interesting restaurant rows. Although there has been some cautious infiltration by upscalers, the neighborhood still has a few days’ growth of beard, and it still has a good supply of places like Club Waziema, where those with a few days’ growth of beard are among friends and the matter of hunger is both an occasion for reflection and celebration.

CLUB WAZIEMA

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

543 Divisadero, SF

(415) 346-6641

www.clubwaziema.com

Full bar

MC/V

Bearable noise

Partly wheelchair accessible

Roti

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Since the crash of Tallula a few years ago, the Department of Innovative Indian Food has undergone some slight shrinkage. True, the overall standard of Indian cooking in the city has continued to rise, and we’ve been treated to spots that emphasize regional Indian cuisine, such as Dosa. But where oh where is the restaurant that will cook a well-spiced duck in the tandoor, then serve the meat in slices as part of a salad with arugula and bing cherries? Tallula was brilliant at this sort of cross-cultural flourish, and I was hopeful it would be the first of its profuse kind.

Perhaps, despite its too-short life, it was. The second of its kind could be Roti, in West Portal — a much better-looking restaurant than Tallula, though shyer about proclaiming its more distinctive dishes. (There is a sibling restaurant in Burlingame.) You could feast quite happily at Roti on the subcontinental foods that have become familiar and perhaps even beloved in certain quarters of blue-state America: tandoori chicken, lamb vindaloo, palak paneer, chana masala. But you might suspect you were missing something, your first clue being Roti’s appearance.

The phrase the restaurant applies to itself is "Indian bistro," and this means, first, no stainless-steel steam tables pushed against the back wall for all-you-can-eat buffets. It also means a Manhattanish look of glossy surfaces and striking lamps and light fixtures arrayed behind a barrel façade of window panes that arc inward toward the door. The effect is a little like that of the original Slanted Door, though with a curve instead of a slant. Certainly the intent of the two places seems similar: to do justice to an ancient cuisine while reconciling it with the reality of modern California.

Hence Roti’s splendid tandoori duck salad ($12), with meat dense, moist, and tender, almost like confit. Tallula’s menu was filled with these sorts of combinations; at Roti, there is a stronger sense of restraint regarding the ecstasies of Californication, along with heightened attention to some traditional Indian dishes that are less well-known in this country. If you think Indian cooks only use lentils to make dal, for instance, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by dal ki mathri ($8), a set of fritters made of several varieties of legumes, including chickpeas. The fritters could have been warmer (they seemed to toughen with cooling) but were complex in flavor and texture. Also, they were endearing in appearance — little golden footballs that could have been part of a Pop Warner awards presentation.

Calamari rings ($8) were given the "Bombay" treatment: a heavy dusting of curry-scented chickpea flour, then a turn in the deep-fryer for some golden crunch. The rings were presented with little dishes of chutney, tamarind and mint, but they were tasty enough to be eaten straight up. They were also tender, which suggested skillful handling, since calamari easily turns rubbery with overcooking. One of the blights of Indian restaurants is that so many of the appetizers and starters are deep-fried, and Roti’s are no exception. But if you must go deep-fried, calamari is at least somewhat less usual than pakoras or samosas.

Chicken tikka — boneless breast meat — turns up in a number of preparations. Among these are the lovable old warhorse, chicken tikka masala ($14), cubes of meat awash in a mild, creamy sauce; and a lunchtime salad ($12) in which the breast meat is rolled up, roulade-style, roasted, and served over mixed greens with naan. Considering the dryness of roasting and the paucity of fat on boneless, skinless, chicken breast meat, the chicken tikka here was remarkably juicy — a credit, maybe, to some ingenious marinade.

Lamb vindaloo ($15) arrived with the chicken tikka masala and in some ways resembled it: cubes of meat in a rich-looking sauce. But vindaloo is generally hotter and sharper than its sibling, and here it was markedly gingery, too. (Vindaloo comes from Goa, once a Portuguese colony, and, as the name implies, wine was a long-ago ingredient. In these postcolonial days, some kind of mild vinegar is generally used.)

As so often is the case in Indian restaurants, vegetarian offerings are strong and varied enough to banish any vagrant yearnings for meat. The only one of these dishes we found wanting was, surprisingly, the palak paneer ($11), lightly spiced spinach cooked with chunks of cheese. The spicing here consisted mostly of nutmeg, which really didn’t have the wattage to compete with chana masala ($9), chickpeas cooked in a spicy tomato-curry sauce. Somewhere between these two extremes lay the mattar kurchan ($10 at lunch, with a disk of poori), cubes of cheese cooked with green peas in a moderately athletic tomato sauce. The sauced cheese would have been excellent spooned over the poori to make a kind of pizza, but I didn’t think of that in time. And it would have been tricky to eat.

How about dessert after all that? We stuck to the ice creams and were well satisfied: two scoops of peach-colored lucuma ($5) and a plate of kulfi ($6), flavored with saffron, cardamom, pistachio, and rosewater, shaped into a sausage, frozen, and sliced like a banana.

As we were getting up to leave, the disputatious person seated to my right said, "It’s good, but not as good as Metro Kathmandu." I felt obliged — politely! — to dispute this diss. Roti is quite as good in its way as Metro Kathmandu, and that’s saying something. (It’s also indisputably better-looking, and that’s saying something else.) The death of Tallula was a real loss but, as Roti proves, not an unredeemed one.

ROTI

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

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

53 West Portal, SF

(415) 665-7684

www.rotibistro.com

Beer and wine

Quite noisy

AE/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Tataki

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Earlier this spring, a young colleague wrote to ask if I knew of seafood restaurants in the city that emphasize sustainability. While I could recall plenty of sightings of sustainable seafood items on various menus in recent years, I could only think of two seafood restaurants that answered to his description — places, in other words, where sustainability is central to the restaurant’s consciousness and is a basic element of menu composition. One is the Hayes Street Grill, whose menu card gives detailed information about where and how particular fish have been taken. The other is a small sushi spot named Tataki that opened about three months ago in an old Subway space at the southern foot of Pacific Heights.

Tataki does and doesn’t look like a typical sushi spot. It does have a small bar in a far corner of the snug dining room where you can sit on ergonomically peculiar stools of black plastic and watch the chefs deftly go about their business, and the bamboo tables were handmade by owners Raymond Ho and Kin Lui. But the pumpkin-colored walls are unusual, and the slate floor, while handsome, does contribute to a noise level that can be surprisingly high for such tight quarters. Of course, nowhere is it written that sushi bars and other Japanese restaurants must be quiet and serene; here it is merely written that, so far as this writer is concerned, it’s nice when they are.

Still, as holes-in-the-wall go, Tataki isn’t bad looking. The real interest lies in the menu. To a glance, this document resembles many others around town: there are selections of nigiri, rolls, tataki, soups, salads, and starters from the grill. But, as at HSG, each menu entry includes information on how the fish were obtained. Many are farmed, and while aquaculture raises all kinds of uncomfortable issues about pollution, antibiotics, and food-chain inefficiency, it does offer one inarguable virtue: aquaculture helps protect wild fish populations from collapse.

Since salmon, whether farmed or wild, is problematic now, Tataki uses a close relation, farmed arctic char, instead. The fish, with its delicate rose-peach flesh, makes a handsome nigiri ($4.50); it also turns up in one of the rolls and as carpaccio. Other nigiri might feature hiramasa ($4.50), also known as kingfish (a yellowfin relative, farmed in Australasia), and California striped bass ($4.50), whose flesh is like a disk of translucent ivory someone spilled Grenache on.

No sushi joint in San Francisco would be complete without a clutch of wittily named rolls to call its own, and Tataki is no exception. The best name probably belongs to the Divisaderoli ($6), chunks of avocado bundled with either tuna or kampachi (a Hawaiian member of the jack family) and scattered with glistening orange grains of tobiko. Tastier, if bearing a less-fun-to-pronounce name, is the Mix It Up roll ($11), a blend of spicy tuna and crab meat that achieves an almost sausage-like intensity of flavor and texture.

But the king of Tataki’s rolls is surely the Extinguisher ($13), which offers not only a serious spice kick but a moment of real visual spectacle. If you like saganaki (the flaming cheese of Greece), you’ll love this scene. But first, the roll itself: flaps of kampachi marinated with chiles, packed in rice, topped with chunks of avocado, squirts of what the menu calls "hot sauce" (chipotle mayonnaise?), and heavy sprinklings of habañero tobiko, fire-alarm red rather than the usual orange. The redness of the tobiko should be enough to caution anyone who’s remotely paying attention, but just to make sure, the chef sprinkles the side of the platter with rock salt, sloshes some rum over the crystals, and lights the whole thing on fire with a blowtorch. This might make an interesting DIY project for the patronage, assuming no licensure issues — probably a large assumption.

The flame, which is mostly blue and not at all raging (its more like something you’d see under a chafing dish), burns down quickly, and you might not even notice it expire, since eating the actual roll is a memorable experience of fire and spice. I love spicy food and I responded to the clever combinations here, but at the same time it did seem to me that the subtleties of the fish were all but irrelevant. Nuance can get lost in firestorms.

A nice chaser to the Extinguisher would be the cold spinach ($4), with the greens "boiled … in soy broth," as the menu grimly explains. The dish sounded almost Dickensian in its bleakness, but it turned out to be four compressed-spinach cylinders cut on the bias and arrayed upright on a plate, like a little diorama of some ancient temple. (Minor complaint: the tightly packed leaves were tricky to hack through.) A more easygoing cold dish — the Sancho Panza of such dishes in Japanese restaurants — is the seaweed salad ($4), which Tataki, in a nice twist, presents in a large porcelain ladle.

Despite mounting evidence that fisheries are collapsing from human exploitation throughout the world — the plight of the king salmon is a recent, local, and particularly disturbing example; see also the death of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland — we seem to have a vestigial confidence that the oceans are too vast to suffer real harm at our hands. If we don’t see it happening, then it can’t be quite real. But it is happening and it is real, and if there is going to be any kind of future for sushi and other seafood restaurants, it will be because Tataki, in its eco-prescience, turned out to be the dawn of a new day. *

TATAKI

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

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

2815 California, SF

(415) 931-1182

www.tatakisushibar.com

Beer, wine, sake

MC/V

Surprisingly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Walk the line

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS "It’s hard to find people to eat pork bellies with me," he said, over pork bellies, and I thought: I’m your girl.

This was my second date of the day. I’d had a chef salad for lunch in another town, with someone else, and was not his girl. I could tell. Still, we walked down the hot sidewalk and into a famous bar with trophied animal heads all over all the walls. I’d always wanted to go there, and liked it inside, so I asked if he wanted to stay, have a Coke, or something. Stare at a moose.

"No," said the guy whose girl I was not. He had better get going, it was the weekend, hard week, and he wanted to be home, had things to do. Long drive.

My therapist wants me to speak on the topic of dating at a conference on gender identity issues. I suppose that I can take this as a compliment. Maybe I will, and maybe I will speak at this conference. Or, hey, hell, maybe I’ll write an actual restaurant review! It’s been a while …

The pork bellies were delicious. Thick, crisp, fatty slices of fried pig in a dark, salty sauce with Chinese broccoli. The duck came with celery and lychee, the Chinese fruit, which is way weirder to the teeth, tongue, and taste buds than any animal organ that I’ve ever eaten. The name of the restaurant is not important.

My date insinuated that I must have some kind of skinny gene.

I speared another square of almost pure fat and, chewing on it, both literally and figuratively, reckoned that hmm, maybe I did. Plus there’s the soccer … sometimes two or three games in one day, ooga.

Really, I don’t know a lot of people who like duck.

"When I was a kid," I said, "my brothers and sisters used to pass me all their pork fat and chicken skin."

My therapist thinks I am articulate and well-spoken, but he’s never been on a date with me. I actually said that — about pork fat and chicken skin — on a date, and knew almost immediately that I wouldn’t be seeing this guy again, even though there was no doubt in my mind that I was his girl.

It was cold outside, after dinner, so he gave me his coat. We walked to a book store. I picked up a book that I have but hadn’t read yet and said, "Did you ever read this?" So he bought it. I wondered if I looked cute in his too-big coat, my hands lost way inside its dark sleeves.

I’m trying to understand guys who like girls like me. The best thing I’ve heard, so far, is that they love femininity, and that I represent a very complicated form of femininity, and therefore they love me. Except they don’t, because — and this is just a guess, but it’s one thing to eat pork bellies with a pretty woman, I’m guessing, and something else entirely to envision them engulfing a pile of table-scrapped fat or three chickens’ worth of chicken skin.

I can understand their problem with the image. Honestly, I get it, only not quickly enough to not hand them the picture.

It’s like: they want you to watch football with them, but do they want to watch you play football? Probably not. What we have here is a balancing act. Everyone knows you have to walk a line — everyone — and that’s hard. For all of us. I begin to suspect that for girls like me and for the guys who go for us, there’s not a thin line. There’s nothing at all beneath our feet. Try to look graceful, and act balanced, while free-falling away from yourself. Or toward yourself. Or both at the same time.

I get motion sickness. Last night, to distract myself, I opened the book that I have but had not read, and I started to read it. The name of the book is not important.

My new favorite restaurant is Soi 4. It’s just a couple of bucks more than other Thai restaurants, but definitely worth it. Especially if someone else is paying. The short ribs are fantastic. Perfectly tender and juicy and then, as if they needed any help, the most amazingly smooth-tasting peanut curry by way of a smother. So good it’s kind of terrifying. I can’t stop thinking about it and have been having nightmares. *

SOI 4

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

5421 College, Oakl.

(510) 655-0889

Beer & wine

MC/V

SECA ’08, ‘Bay Area Now 5’ unveiled

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taubaauerbach kl SML.bmp
A work from Tauba Auerbach’s book, How to Spell the Alphabet.

By Glen Helfand

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith began her review of the current Carnegie International in Pittsburgh with a pulse-taking statement: “Lately, it seems, biennial exhibitions don’t do much except sit there, looking good and offending no one. Instead of being shows that people ‘love to hate,’ or vice versa, these big, often international affairs now inspire mild interest or resigned indifference.” That statement may resonate a bit more in biennial-intensive towns like Manhattan or Venice, Italy. In San Francisco, where the arts are less widely celebrated, the biennial concerns seem to coalesce around issues of regionalism or the perpetually problematized thing we call “Bay Area art.”

So it seemed fitting that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made back-to-back announcements yesterday, May 22, as to the inclusions in, respectively, “Bay Area Now 5” and the “2008 SECA Award” – both the most high-profile exhibitions of artists living and working here. The Yerba Buena folks threw a press lunch, at the fittingly titled new wine bar, the Press Club, and an evening member’s soiree in their theater to celebrate their forthcoming show, actually a triennial, which opens on July 19 and runs through Nov. 16.

In the late period of international biennials, it seems that institutions are upping the ante a bit with higher concepts and more elastic geographical borders. In recent years YBCA has been working with tiers of themes and structures – a standard gallery show plus four guest-curated shows at various venues – that tend to muddle the excitement with structural complications. BAN is no exception. A glance at the press release doesn’t suffice: you’ve gotta look deeper to figure out the scope. “Bay Area Now 5,” which was curated by Kate Eilertsen and Berin Golonu, has the attached subtitle “Inside/Outside,” referring to the not-so-provocative premise that “artists are influenced by their experiences both inside and outside the Bay Area.”

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