› paulr@sfbg.com
As you step into Roy’s Restaurant, you will notice the names of many cities stenciled in gold on the glass door — places where other Roy’s Restaurants can be found. You might feel as if you are sidling into one of the branches of a Parisian house of couture or the district office of some international brokerage firm. My eyes darted briefly to the end of the two-columned list, half expecting to see the reassuring words “FDIC insured.” I didn’t see them. But then, insurance, whether from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or some other gracious entity, isn’t really necessary at Roy’s. The place has found its feet here, and they are feet that move with a definite San Francisco style.
When our Roy’s opened six years ago, I walked through the doors into a fabulous inaugural dinner party and was disappointed. It was a lovely restaurant, yes, with innovative and well-prepared food conceived by Roy Yamaguchi, the founding chef and eponym — but it wasn’t in Hawaii, and the island magic seemed lost on the streets of San Francisco. The handful of Roy’s Restaurants in Hawaii are among the original ones, and they reflect the islands’ paradisial temper; life moves a little more slowly there, and people are less tense with the metropolitan urgencies. The Roy’s on the Big Island even has, for alfresco types, a kind of docklike deck extending over the water, and if you take a table there, you can practically hear the just-caught fish flopping around on the weathered timbers. The cooking reflects the immediacy and locality of the ingredients — seafood just minutes from the sea, beef from cattle raised on the Big Island — as well as the distinctive blend of influences, from Japan, Polynesia, and Europe, that give the Hawaiian Islands much of their gastronomic and cultural flavor.
Transport all this to a gritty and often chilly stretch of Mission Street and you have the restaurant equivalent of a heart transplant. There is no dock whose pilings are lapped by soft, warm waves, no purple sunset or palm fronds waving in a gentle breeze; there is just damp concrete and Muni buses. Even the interior decor is mostly in the urban vein: a huge exhibition kitchen and a honeycomb of wine bottles similar to the one at Bacar. If, like me, you remember Roy’s as part of the Hawaiian enchantment, you might well find the difference shocking and even disappointing. But this is unfair to our Roy’s, which in truth has become an excellent restaurant very much in the metro-California manner. If the long list of cities on Roy’s front door reveals that Yamaguchi has built an empire, it also tells us that, like the Roman Empire and its ecclesiastical successor, he has done so by adapting a core formula to local conditions, tastes, and expectations.
Roy’s core mostly has to do with the food, and its center of gravity (the menu’s term of art is “classic”) lies within the confines of the prix fixe, a $35, three-course dinner. The street signage describes the restaurant’s cooking as “Hawaiian fusion,” and for me the fusion isn’t so much East-meets-West as East–meets–West Hollywood. Yamaguchi cooked in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and he has a Wolfgang Puckish flair for boldness — grilled shrimp (part of the prix fixe first course) served with wasabi cocktail sauce, for instance, or a large, spherical crab cake ($15) mounted like a trophy on a pedestal of tinglingly spicy kimchi — sweet, hot, sour, and rich, all in the same bite.
The fixed-price dinners all open with the same appetizer trio, of which the shrimp is a constituent. Its companions include a single, but heavily meaty, baby back rib — tender as the night, Szechuan spiced and wood grilled — and a chef’s-choice item that might be a nicely crisped pot sticker. On the question of main dishes, choices open out. Here we find four possibilities, reflecting a world of influences. Large prawns in a tangle of pad thai — threads of carrot and daikon radish tossed with rice noodles — seem quite comfortably Southeast Asian, while charbroiled short ribs (of beef) are as tender and engagingly stringy as Grandma’s pot roast on a chilly Iowa night.
I was pleased that the hibachi-grilled salmon was wild king salmon presented on a molded pad of jasmine rice, though it seemed a bit late in the season for the fish to be local. The dish I found most representative of Roy’s local sensibility was a mahimahi filet, crusted with macadamia nut crumbs (a very Hawaiian touch), then sautéed and served with lobster-butter sauce (a rather French touch, I thought) and thick slices of new potatoes. The overall effect was less one of fusion than of California cooking. One minor note of discontent: the potatoes were undercooked.
Our friends, who are Roy’s devotees, urged upon us the melting hot chocolate soufflé, an innocuously cakey-looking object that was indeed filled with melted chocolate. At the touch of a fork, it oozed out like lava onto the plate. Less dramatic, but also texturally memorable, was a macadamia nut almond tart — a disk of one’s own, tasting a lot like pecan pie and topped with crumbles of macadamia nuts and a shift knob of vanilla bean ice cream. The tart was almost too sweet for me.
The devotees made a point of saying they prefer Roy’s to Boulevard. I am not sure I agree with them, but I understood their point, and perhaps the real news is that Roy’s and Boulevard can be mentioned in the same sentence these days — can be compared. The two, while neighbors, are very different sorts of restaurants, but each is a San Francisco restaurant, sprinkled with a bit of the local pixie dust. For Roy’s, member of a chain whose roots are halfway across the Pacific, that’s certainly some dust it’s glad to have. SFBG
ROY’S RESTAURANT
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.
Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–11 p.m.
575 Mission, SF
(415) 777-0277
www.roysrestaurant.com
Full bar
AE/DC/DISC/MC/V
Moderately noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Paul Reidinger
East meets West Hollywood
Starch Control
› paulr@sfbg.com
While we wait to be instructed on the lessons of Iraq by James A. Baker III — the Bush family consigliere assigned the Mosaic task of leading us forth from the Mesopotamian desert — let us consider the lessons of the Thanksgiving meal just past.
The bane of all holiday cooking is starch, and the Thanksgiving meal is the apotheosis of holiday cooking. Therefore: Thanksgiving = starch. You have your mashed potatoes, your bread stuffing, your bread, your pie crusts. By some point late in the afternoon or early in the evening, you can’t believe you ate the whole thing.
How, then, to curb starch without being a killjoy? Other holiday meals will require other answers, but at Thanksgiving this year at our table, the answer was to serve succotash — the ancient Indian dish of corn and beans — instead of potatoes and stuffing. There were a few bleats about tradition, but the general feeling seemed to be that the succotash was wonderfully tasty and much less … stuffing. It was also a tip of the cap to the Indians and the immeasurable sorrows that overtook them. Thanksgiving really ought to be consecrated in their memory and honor; we need not be self-flagelutf8g or ostentatiously guilty to recognize that but for their horrendous loss, most of us would not be here. And we do right by them and ourselves, it seems to me, when we incorporate bits and pieces of Indian life into our own evolving traditions while remembering where they came from and what they meant. If we don’t do it, no one will.
As for the current fashion of brining the turkey: bah and humbug, I would say. My far simpler and less messy alternative is to rub the bird the day before with a couple tablespoons of kosher salt and a couple more of herbes de Provence. Before roasting, work some softened sweet butter and a few smashed garlic cloves under the skin at the breast, back, and legs. Roast breast side up in a hot (450 degrees) preheated oven for about 25 minutes, until the skin is golden. Flip the turkey over and reduce the heat to 350 degrees. Keep turning the bird every 30 minutes or so and allow about nine minutes per pound. No stuffing, of course, and let the turkey rest under aluminum foil before serving.
The salt point
As a partisan of salt, I could hardly help but love a restaurant called Salt House, and I did — and do — but … how funny that there apparently are no saltshakers at the bar. I was casting about for one, wanting to salt something up a little while waiting for someone to arrive, but I had to settle instead for pouring myself more water from the glass jugs the staff set out for your very own. Water is nice, of course, but sometimes only salt will do.
Salt House is the latest project from the brothers Rosenthal, Mitchell and Steven, who for the last decade or so have run the kitchen show (and I mean this quite literally) at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio, where the exhibition kitchen is of the capital-E sort. The first stage of the Rosenthals’ exit strategy involved opening their own restaurant, Town Hall, in an old SoMa building a few years ago. Salt House is their Chapter Two and coincides, more or less, with the end of their reign at Postrio.
Like Town Hall (which is just around the corner), Salt House has been installed on the ground floor of a venerable structure, a century-old building that used to be a printing plant. The restaurant’s street-front space is boxy, fairly narrow, and deep — like a garage bay for an 18-wheeler, if there are such bays. In keeping with SoMa’s postindustrial fashionability, there are exposed wood beams (including a kind of indoor arbor, sans greenery, near the host’s station) and exposed brick, along with a line of light fixtures that look like barrels beginning to explode above the dining room and neoquaint incandescent bulbs dangling over the zinc bar.
Mostly, though, I noticed the windows, huge multiglazed modern marvels that admit oceans of light while giving the entire redo a distinctly sleek, Mies van der Rohe cast. If you want to know if an old building has been rehabbed, look at the windows; if you see a certain waviness, like heat rising from pavement on a hot day, you are probably looking at original window glass and an unrehabbed building. If you see gleaming perfection, a sheen like the undisturbed surface of a pond, you are looking at renovation money, and perhaps at Salt House.
The food might be called California pub food, but it is pub food of a high order. As at Postrio, the Rosenthals have orchestrated a brass band of big flavors. Even the little bar snacks are vivid: the house-made “pot o’ pickles” ($5) — an array of vegetables including cauliflower, baby carrots, pearl onions, and wax beans — jumps with a vinegar charge in its fist-sized crock; and the mixed nuts ($5) — almonds, pistachios, a cast of thousands — are roasted with one of life’s great improbables, truffle honey, along with sea salt. (This was the dish I was trying to salt up at the bar, incidentally. The sea salt had settled at the bottom of the crock, a fact we discovered only when the crock was nearly empty.)
Nearly every dish has some flavor kazoo. In the poutine ($7 at dinner, $10 at lunch), basically a plate of potato chips dribbled with short-rib gravy, it’s the layer of gorgonzola, which not only gives a textural effect like that of nachos but adds a tremendous charge of pungency up the nose. In the shellfish stew ($19), mainly mussels and shrimp, it’s a broth infused with saffron aioli. In the pizzalike preserved tomato tart ($11), it’s the intensity of the preserved tomatoes — along with the squares of luxuriously buttery pastry crust they sit on. In the chili-roasted oysters ($13), it’s the fiery chili sauce, which, it must be said, makes the dish a little top-heavy.
The watchword for fish is crispy. This cannot be a bad thing. A mackerel filet ($9) wears a waistcoat of golden panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs), while pan-roasted skate wing ($24) gets a nice searing on both sides before being plated with roasted, quartered brussels sprouts, chunks of salsify, and dabs of a tarragon salsa. Skate wing, with its corrugated texture, is one of the most interesting fish to eat — getting the last of the flesh away from the bone is like cleaning stray hairs from a comb — and yet we should not be eating it. Too late I learned from Seafood Watch that skate are seriously endangered and should be avoided. Like sharks, they reproduce slowly, and they are taken through the highly destructive method of trawling. (Mackerel are in the “best” category, but that was just a lucky stab for us.)
I would be glad to learn that skate had been replaced on the menu by petrale sole or some other type of local, floundery fish that might not be as fascinatingly ribbed but isn’t teetering on the brink, either. The Rosenthals are eminences here; if they set a good and conspicuous example, others will follow. It would be a great help to ordinary diners if restaurants simply refused to buy and serve any seafood whose populations aren’t in sustainable shape (per Seafood Watch or some similar authority) and indicated as much on their menus — maybe with a smiling or dancing fish icon?
Sundries: desserts ($7) are mostly in the American grain, including a lewdly moist warm chocolate Bundt cake and some nostalgia-laced butter pecan ice cream, presented in two scoops. The house-blend wines, including a fruity-floral white, are available on tap (from steel barrels) and are presented in several sizes of nifty apothecary bottles, near relations of the water jugs and perhaps of the saltshakers, if they ever come to pass.<\!s>
SALT HOUSE
Mon.–<\d>Fri., 11:30–<\d>1 a.m.; Sat., 5 p.m.–<\d>1:30 a.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.–<\d>midnight
545 Mission, SF
(415) 543-8900
Full bar
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Over easy
› paulr@sfbg.com
Changing public consciousness is an inglorious task that seems to involve a great deal of repetition. There is an art to repetition, to saying the same thing over and over without boring or infuriating people or losing one’s patience at their benightedness and resorting to jeremiads. But observation suggests that this branch of the suasive arts is, in our drink-Bud-or-we’ll-kill-you culture, at least slightly in eclipse.
Still, despite the rather dismal state of the art and the basic human resistance to change — our preferred mode of advance is evolutionary not revolutionary, as science instructs us — change does appear, sometimes with notable swiftness. The imperilment of the world’s fish, for instance, is a matter lately ascendant in the global consciousness. (Yes, I know I have mentioned this glum subject before — artfully, I hope.) In Honolulu on Nov. 10, I picked up a copy of the local paper, the Advertiser, to find that the op-ed page carried both an editorial calling for “aggressive management” by Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources of the state’s marine life — in particular, for enhanced protection of the bottom-dwelling and vulnerable species opakapaka and onaga — and an opinion piece (by Bruce Anderson, president of the Oceanic Institute) arguing that aquaculture, if responsibly practiced, can ease human pressure on the seas as a source of food. Research and innovation are critical here.
I was pleased, though not surprised, to find major Hawaiian media paying serious attention to the plight of fisheries locally and around the world. I was also pleased — and surprised — to find that awareness of the issue has seeped to deeper levels. While on a brief visit to a friend recovering from surgery at the Towers (the continuum-of-care facility on Cathedral Hill), I glanced at a menu in one of the dining rooms and saw on offer mahimahi, ling cod, and swordfish — all line-caught, the first and last in Hawaiian waters. There are some questions with all of these fish, and I would not give the menu a perfect ecoscore, since apart from everything else, “line-caught” is ambiguous. Some lines are better than others. Still, it was evident that even in some institutional kitchens, care is now being taken that might not have been taken five years ago. There must be more than a few people in the Towers asking an artful question or two about the food they’re being served.
The final frontier
› paulr@sfbg.com
Regrets? I’ve had a few. At the top of the list is that, due to circumstances beyond our control, I will never get to see Beethoven play the piano — unless we have misunderstood the time-space continuum. This seems more likely than not, given the reliable arrogance of human science, and I do retain a shred of hope.
The also-rans run well behind. I do not expect my idea for a sport-tuned, high-performance Prius — the Priapus, a Prius for men! — to make it onto a Toyota production line any time soon, alas and alack. And I am sorry I can’t remember what many areas of the city looked like a decade ago, before the Great Bulldozing. What was it like to sail down the Third Street corridor? I remember doing it at least once, in the middle 1990s, on a mission to take some moribund computer equipment to a recycling facility near the foot of 23rd Street. There was a certain ominous, video-game facelessness to the buildings, and I was glad when the errand was over.
As for restaurants: once you’d passed south of 16th Street, where 42° sat at the back of the rather dingy Esprit Center (since demolished), you were in a different world. You had passed through border control, a kind of Checkpoint Charlie of culture, and you were on your own. But … change was not far off. Soon the development tide would flow south: there would be a new baseball park, a new UCSF campus, a new Muni light-rail line. And the neighborhood’s obvious virtues — nearness to the city center and the bay, flat streets, warm weather, gorgeous old industrial buildings (many of brick), sweeping views — would begin to be noticed.
Today, Third Street is lined with new live-work and other lofty-looking buildings, and people must be living and working in them (or working nearby), because if you step into the New Spot, a new spot serving Mexican and Salvadoran food, you are likely to run into a wall of these people, at least if it’s around lunchtime on a weekday. They all look to be about 30 years old, give or take, and are dressed with that studied scruffiness I associate with the late, great dot-com boom. Are we now surfing some wave in the space-time continuum back to 1999? Certainly, the traffic and parking situations are horrendous in the area, as they were elsewhere in the city at the close of the last millennium — and the crush is all the more shocking in what I had long thought to be a kind of ghost town, a deserted neighborhood that was fun to bike through on a hot autumn Saturday.
The New Spot is to Salvadoran and Mexican cooking what Chutney (on lower Nob Hill) is to Indian and Pakistani cooking. The look is minimalist clean, prices are low, and the food is fresh and meticulously prepared. My only cavil on freshness concerns the chips, which twice seemed stale to me, though the spicy-smooth red salsa ($1.40 for a half pint, if you want or need that much) covered up much of the weariness. The guacamole ($2.25) is good too, though I would have liked bigger avocado chunks and maybe a bit less lime juice.
The Salvadoran-style dishes dominate the menu and include those old standbys, pupusas (just $1.60 each, but you have to order at least two). These are disks like small pita breads, and they can be stuffed in a variety of meaty and meatless ways. We found the queso con frijoles version — with a good packing of refried beans and oozy queso blanco — to do very nicely, especially with some pico de gallo and shredded, pickled cabbage (curtido) on the side.
Pasteles ($5.50 for a plate of three) turned out to be lightly deep-fried corn pies filled with more queso. (I’d ordered chicken but was pleased with the cheese.) Generally, I stay out of the deep-fried end of the pool, but these pasteles were of a delicate crispness that made me think of golden clouds. The menu lists chile relleno ($7.50) — a fire-roasted poblano stuffed with cheese (or choice of meat) and served with salsa, beans, and rice — as a Salvadoran specialty, and perhaps that’s because it isn’t dipped in batter and fried, as in the more typical preparation you find in Mexican restaurants around town.
The fish tacos ($3.15) are exemplary. I always try a place’s fish tacos, since the range of possible outcomes is so great. Good ones are unforgettable; bad ones are … forgettable. Bland, usually. The New Spot’s menu doesn’t say what kind of fish is used — some kind of cod or pollack, I would guess, or possibly tilapia, judging from the bits of soft, white flesh — but the grill imparts some appealing smoke, and the crispy tacos are filled out with shredded lettuce (instead of the more usual shredded cabbage), diced tomato, refrijoles, salsa, and guacamole. Like a regular taco, really, and the better for it.
The food, it must be said, doesn’t exactly fly out of the kitchen, in part because the dishes are made to order and also because the crunch-time crowds are thick. At the moment, alternatives in the neighborhood are few. But the New Spot is flanked by signs of yesterday and tomorrow; on one side is a faded old-school Chinese restaurant on its way out, while on the other is a café, Sundance Coffee, that could easily be associated with a museum of modern art. The times, they are a-changin’. SFBG
NEW SPOT
Mon.–Fri., 6 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sat., 7 a.m.–5 p.m.
632 20th St., SF
(415) 558-0556
No alcohol
AE/MC/V
Noisy if busy
Wheelchair accessible
Turkey in the sky
› paulr@sfbg.com
Airline food was a rich lode of material for jokery — until there was no more airline food. In the wake of Sept. 11 and apparently as part of the airline industry’s determination to make air travel as uncivilized and distressing an experience as possible, meal services were replaced by the peddling — cash only, please, and exact change preferred — of boxed junk: cookies, crackers, Velveeta spread, and all of the other industrial, hyperprocessed, sclerosis-inducing unfood that has made America the land of the fat.
I was stunned, then, on a recent Hawaiian Airlines flight to Honolulu, to be presented with not only an actual meal — free! — but a choice of meals. A turkey croissant sandwich, a bag of chips, an oatmeal cookie: it wasn’t much, but it wasn’t bad, either, and I was beyond thankful to have it. Although flying is an ordeal at best, it is slightly less so when one’s stomach isn’t growling for hours on end and one isn’t constantly rummaging through one’s carry-on bag for a blackened banana or a fistful of Trader Joe’s dried cherries or salty pistachio nuts while wondering if one has enough cash to buy one of those $9 airport wraps when one lands, and how many unbearable moments hence will that be?
If food is civilization, in some basic way, what does that make the deliberate withholding of food from or the hawking of barely edible dreck to a captive and immiserated population? Insulting is one word that springs to mind; abusive is another. In recent years all of corporate America, not to mention the Bush government, seems to have been on a savage quest to find out just how much mistreatment the subject population would accept and how much said population would pay to be mistreated. And the answer seemed to be, on both counts, a lot, at least until the Nov. 7 elections, when the word Enough! at last rang across the land. Even I heard it, and I was in Hawaii, not at all hypoglycemic despite the five-hour flight and the usual where-is-the-luggage circus. A big aloha (sayonara version) to George and the gang back in DC, and an even bigger mahalo to the voters of America, who finally resisted the temptation to hit the snooze bar yet one more time.
Where the buffalo roam
› paulr@sfbg.com
Many hamburger places are at some pains to keep you from seeing, or wondering, exactly what’s going into — as opposed to on top of — your burger. So I was rather surprised to find, at Bullshead Restaurant (a West Portal spot that recently opened a branch in the Castro), a glass display case near the entryway, laid out with various high-end-looking cuts of meat along with a selection of preshaped burger patties, as at a butcher’s shop.
“Is this stuff for sale?” I asked.
A staffer behind the counter nodded.
“Even the buffalo burgers?”
“Yes. They’re $10.95 a pound,” she said. She pointed out the buffalo burgers in the case, where they lurked in the back, behind their beef counterparts, and were distinguishable from same by a darker color, almost the purplish shade of a bruise, as were the strip and loin steaks. My first thought was that $10.95 per pound is a little steep for hamburger, even if beautifully formed into grill-ready patties, but on the other hand it’s roughly comparable to the tariff for Boca Burgers, the excellent poseurs made of soy.
Buffalo meat is also supposed to be better for you than beef: lower in calories and cholesterol, higher in protein. The restaurant’s documentation contends that eating it contributed to the well-being and longevity of the various tribes of Plains Indians, for whom the animal was an important source of food. Even if the health factor is a wash, we should still cast a kindly eye on buffalo meat: the buffalo is an American original, its return from near-extinction is a modest but real ecological triumph, and the burgers made from its flesh are, quite frankly, superior to beef burgers, at least at Bullshead.
They are also a little more expensive, on the order of a buck to a buck and a quarter per order, depending on the dosage of meat you want. (You choose between third- and half-pound allotments, and your options include, in addition to buffalo and beef, organic beef and turkey.) But they are dressed just like their more plebeian siblings, in garb that ranges from a simple slice of cheese (American, Swiss, cheddar, jack, or mozzarella) to more elaborate combinations involving mushrooms, bacon, blue cheese, and avocado. There is even a Hawaiian burger, topped with pineapple rings — shades, for some of us, of the dread Hawaiian pizza from undergraduate days.
But let us first consider the terrain as it might appear to a vegetarian or someone who just isn’t that hungry. Our party one evening included such a person, and her eye was first drawn to the ocean burger, where said eye remained until we were told the fish was deep-fried. So long, see you tomorrow. That left the garden burger ($8.95), which the menu card laconically described as a “grilled vegetarian patty” with slices of avocado and a sauté of mushrooms and onions. I was not feeling too optimistic in this matter, fearing that we would be served one of those disks of mashed legumes with bits of carrot and peas and a few sprouts shooting forth like strands of uncombable hair. But the vegetarian patty turned out to be quite nearly fantastic, of plausibly burgerish texture and well seasoned with cumin and just enough cayenne pepper to be interesting. The avocado and sauté were fine, and the side of coleslaw needed only some salt to pass muster.
The pepper jack buffalo burger ($9.75 for a one-third-pound edition) didn’t carry much of a pepper charge — a pity, since pepper jack cheese is a lively variant of a stolid old standby. But the meat was so luxurious it did not matter: it was intensely flavored without being greasy and had been cooked medium rare, as ordered, with a center rosy as a child’s cheeks on a bright winter morn. The organic-beef version (also $9.75 for one third of a pound) was creditable, but it did not have quite the intensity of flavor or the moistness.
We tried the latter — along with an excellent pastrami sandwich ($7.95) served with commendable fries — at the Castro location, which opened recently in one of those upstairs-downstairs buildings across the street from the Cala Market. Previously there had been several generations of Italian restaurants in the split-level space, and a canopy of inverted wine goblets still hangs like a flock of glass bats on a rack above the bar on the main floor. The aura is sunny and pleasant, with an unobstructed view of street traffic (which is ceaseless and stares right back at you), but it doesn’t feel like a place that serves buffalo wings and buffalo burgers, and it doesn’t look anything like its West Portal sibling.
“Don’t you feel like we’re at a restaurant someplace in the Midwest?” one of my companions said apropos the latter location. Yes: apart from the display cases up front, the senior Bullshead is a warren of old wood, yellowish floors, and yellowish light and could easily be named the Pine Cone and be seated beside one of those old two-lane US highways that crisscrossed the country in the long-ago days before the interstates. The setting is a little creaky, yes, a little dowdy, but it is also friendly, and familiar in a profound way. It’s a little bit like the diner in Diner, a spot for impromptu gatherings by the cheerful young, or that nameless café in the cartoon strip Blondie where Dagwood Bumstead is always stuffing his face at lunch. I don’t think that place serves buffalo burgers, at least not yet.SFBG
BULLSHEAD RESTAURANT
West Portal: Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Mon., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.
840 Ulloa, SF
(415) 665-4350
Castro: Sun.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.
4230 18th St., SF
(415) 431-4201
Beer and wine
MC/V
Pleasant noise level
Castro location not wheelchair accessible
The clarifications
› paulr@sfbg.com
Doctrines of infallibility are for popes and neocons, and need I say more? The rest of us lowly humans must make do with the doctrine of fallibility, a splendid coat of many colors. If you screw up in the kitchen, you add some mustard or vinegar — pancake makeup for defaced or deformed dishes — and hope for the best. Or phone out for emergency pizza. If you screw up in print … well, there it is, as the tin-eared Emperor Joseph was wont to say in Amadeus. Errata have a way of accumuutf8g, like spatters on a chef’s apron, until finally a laundering is in order. Herewith a selection of my own recent spatters. [Editor’s note: Also missed by Paul’s hysterical-anorexic editor, Marke B.]
In my recent piece about Alamo Square Seafood Grill (“Sea Rations,” 11/1/06), I wrongly dismissed trout as a responsible choice of fish. True, it is a farmed carnivore, but according to the endlessly useful Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium (www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp), trout is rated in the “best” category. It efficiently converts feed into protein and is farmed in an enviro-friendly way.
In my piece about the Michelin guide’s recent Northern California edition (Without Reservations, 10/11/06), I implied that the Michelin guide uses half stars. I do not know where I got this idea; perhaps there was confusion with other star-giving entities that do deal in half rations. Michelin gives full stars only — or not, as the case may be. Also, while there was considerable distress here as to the NorCal guide’s emphases and omissions, it is worth reminding ourselves that we are probably not Michelin’s principal audience; the green guides are largely for visiting French and other Europeans, so a skewing toward French restaurants with a certain formality of service shouldn’t surprise us.
Most puzzling is my persistent delusion that Belden Place is either “Lane” or “Alley.” In my recent piece on Café Claude (“Charm Latitudes,” 10/11/06 — again!), I stumbled into “Lane.” I also said that it is paved with bricks, because my memory insists that it is, but on a recent flyby I noticed only asphalt, though it is possible there are brick facades or perhaps bricks hugging the earth as foundations. I am relieved not to have described it as “cobblestoned,” which I might have done in the past, though I hope not. Cobblestones would be nice.
Fish in the balance
› paulr@sfbg.com
When I write about seafood these days, I cringe a little, wondering whether, by describing the eating of fish, I am in effect abetting the collapse of the world’s maritime ecosystem. That I would be doing so in a rather tiny way makes no moral difference; nor does the fact that I personally will not buy or eat any seafood other than what I know to have been taken from sustainably managed (and usually local) populations — and this is a very brief list.
Historians of the future may well regard the 21st century as the interval in which the fate of this planet was decided. If we as a species pursue our present course, our descendants a century hence could well find themselves living on a hellishly steamy globe stripped of much of its wildlife. Elephants have been recklessly endangered — and are angry about it, as a spectacular story in the Oct. 8 New York Times Magazine recently demonstrated — while the heavy majority of the world’s fisheries have been overworked to the verge of irretrievable harm. This is the depressing news brought by the British journalist Charles Clover in The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (New Press, $26.95).
Clover finds his evidence all around us, in the form of drastically reduced catches from once-bountiful seas (a particularly vivid North American example: the Grand Banks) and in once-thriving coastal towns, such as Gloucester, Mass., and Hull, England, that have become ghostly now that there are no more fish to catch and process. The culprit is an all-too-familiar mechanism of industrial technique deployed to satisfy heedless demand in wealthy countries. The French, rather shockingly, have a taste for orange roughy, one of the many deep-sea species whose slow rate of reproduction leaves them especially vulnerable to human rapacity.
Clover’s description of the North Sea gives us a brief glimpse of a glum tomorrow. Today’s sea is muddy, he says, because its once-enormous beds of oysters and mussels — nature’s water filters — have been decimated by overfishing. The cloudiness inhibits plant growth on the bottom, a place he regards as “a devastated ecosystem” that can no longer heal itself. That leaves just a couple of questions for us, the devastators: Can we heal it if we try, and will we try? And when? It’s later than we think.
Nights of the round table
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If, like me, you associate the letters K and L with wine — as in K and L Wines — you might have to do some expectation adjustment when you step through the doors of KL Restaurant, a Hong Kong–style seafood house in the westernmost Richmond. Despite the heavily maritime menu, the only alcoholic drink on offer is beer, and the only beer is Heineken. No Tsingtao? Not even Sapporo or Tiger? Unheard of. Not that there’s anything wrong with Heineken.
The restaurant’s winelessness did not come as a complete surprise. We’d been advised beforehand by an in-the-know member of our party that if we were going to want wine, we would have to pack it in ourselves. Who would not want wine with seafood? I thought while vaguely intending to take a well-chilled bottle of Navarro gewürztraminer, gewürz being one of those fragrant German grapes that stand up nicely to Chinese food. And: who would want beer with seafood? All of us, as it turned out. The gewürz did not get chilled or packed in, the beer turned out to be a good match with dish after dish (the wine would have too, it must be said), and the result was a tableful of slightly woozy satiation — the way one might feel at the end of, say, a wedding banquet.
KL’s banquetish aura isn’t of the lordly sort. The main dining room is huge, unfancy, and airy; its principal wall hangings are announcements of the day’s specials, hand lettered in Chinese on plain white paper. There is also a battery of aquariums in which various creatures of the deep await their rendezvous with the big mesh scooper. If it weren’t a restaurant, with a telltale sizzle coming from the kitchen, it could be a pet shop. But the tables give us our chief clue. A number of them are round and large, suitable for the seating of up to a dozen — and large parties do show up with some frequency to fill them. There is also an adjoining room that serves as a kind of overflow dining room but would also do (despite its coat-closet starkness) as the setting for a private party — a more intimate banquet, perhaps.
KL convincingly stands for the proposition that the best interior design element in any restaurant is the presence of human beings. If you attract scads of interesting people — families in generational layers, from grandparents to tykes; a crew of early-20s types and their rainbow of RAZRs clustered at a banquet table; the odd outworlder; groups meeting on the sidewalk outside or laughing at the host’s station — you do not need anything else to achieve the buzz, the low but steady roar of enjoyment, all restaurateurs are looking for.
Good food helps too, of course, and KL’s food, considered as a ratio of price to value and as an exercise in variety, is good. The kitchen is particularly skilled at sampan preparations, which involve a peppery batter-fry. I am not sure this is the best way to have Dungeness crab ($14), since most of what ends up covered in delicious, spicy-crisp batter is shell. Still, you do get some batter-on-flesh effect, mostly with the body chunks, and as for the legs — you can scrape the tasty crust off with your teeth before cracking them open. And if that is too much work, you can luxuriate in the surrounding fermented-black-bean sauce, which has the texture of a pilaf and a strong salty bite.
While deep-frying often brings an extra dash of delight to otherwise bland foods, such as the potato, I am obliged to report that the deep-frying of oysters ($8.95) has the opposite effect. The unmistakable flavor of brine disappears, as does the slippery-soft, slightly naughty texture; in its place we find an ordinary meatiness like that of chicken liver. A bright red, slightly sweet sauce served in a dipping plate on the side provided color more than anything else.
Salt-and-pepper squid ($6.95), on the other hand, turned out to be a success: tender with just a bit of chewiness and the pepper in the batter helping cut the grease. Even better was a platter of sea scallops ($8.95) stir-fried kung pao–style, with chunks of red and green bell pepper, chopped scallion, and a heavy showering of peanuts in a dark, thick, smoky-sweet sauce.
The sizzling-rice seafood soup ($5.95) didn’t amount to much beyond its rafts of sizzling rice: just some sliced shiitake caps, bits of chopped scallion, and a few lonely dried shrimp bobbing in an OK broth. And the steamed prawns ($21.90), a platter-filling spectacle of finger-size crustaceans split in half and sprinkled with a garlic-shallot sauce that looked like couscous cooked in bleach, were distinctly disappointing, rubbery in the mouth and tasting of feebleness.
One of the best dishes — oh irony! — has nothing to do with the sea. This would be the minced squab lettuce cup ($11.95), a mu shu pork–like construct (complete with a side of hoisin sauce) in which pristine iceberg lettuce leaves are substituted for the pancakes and the meat mixture is scooped into them. If you’ve ever struggled with squab in a restaurant that served the little fowl on the bone — for flavor or authenticity’s sake or due to the chef’s busy schedule — you will sniffle in appreciation at the ease and pleasure of munching through this dish.
For a restaurant whose clientele appears to be overwhelmingly Chinese, service is Anglophone-friendly and quite gregarious, though I felt the Heinekens were pushed a little too keenly. Service with brio, meanwhile, does not necessarily mean efficiency: we went out of our way to order an item and it never appeared, except on the bill. So: celebrate, but verify. SFBG
KL RESTAURANT
Daily, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.
4401 Balboa, SF
(415) 666-9928
Beer
MC/V
Very noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Don’t block the box
› paulr@sfbg.com
In the Thousand Years’ War between beer and wine, beer has long enjoyed an advantage on the party battlefield, mostly because of the keg, the bunker buster of party drink delivery. Oh yes, kegs do run dry, they must, but has anyone actually seen it happen?
Wine, on the other hand, comes in bottles, and while some of these bottles are, in theory, party sized — the jeroboams and nebuchadnezzars that hold massive amounts of champagne spring to mind — they are unwieldy, lacking the keg’s convenient tap. Could wine’s secret weapon in the struggle for party preeminence be the box? “I drink boxed wine!” is not necessarily an announcement to be shouted from the rooftops in San Francisco, but lately I have had occasion to sample some boxed wines (from Black Box), a cab and a pinot grigio, and I am here to say they are not bad — are, in fact, quite quaffable, though not better than the better Two-Buck Chucks, while costing about twice as much. (A three-liter box of Black Box is the equivalent of four standard-size bottles of wine and retails for about $18, or about $4.50 per bottle.)
It is the box format, of all things, that aggravates. Making the boxes operational is slightly arduous, involving the punching out of stubbornly uncooperative paperboard tabs and the pulling forth of the fugitive spigot, but once all that is accomplished, you have a smart little keg — full of wine. The issue is that the spigot is almost at the bottom of the box, which is fine for flow but does make getting a glass under there a challenge. The solution with a keg is often to set it on some kind of a stool or low table, with plenty of open space under the tap, but the wine boxes aren’t as big and stable as kegs. Little fold-down legs might be helpful, as on Kramer’s coffee-table book about coffee tables.
Also, I did not like the spectacle of white wine gushing downward from the spigot. A little too reminiscent of wee-hours micturition for more delicate sensibilities. And I’m not sure about the recycling; wine bottles are easy, but the wine box would first need some postmortem surgery to get rid of the plastic bladder inside the paperboard shell, and who is going to do that when besotted with party wine and maybe even a blast or two from a competing keg?
Sea rations
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One of the stronger arguments for vegetarianism is variety: there are far more kinds of vegetables and ways of preparing vegetables than there are meats and ways of preparing meat, even if you eat mutton. (And know where to get it.) Fish and seafood too are more various than meats — or at least they have been. There is growing evidence that most of the world’s major fisheries are drifting toward collapse; the British author Charles Clover gives a chillingly thorough review of the evidence in his new book, The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (New Press, $26.95).
Eating fish, then, is no longer presumptively virtuous. It matters what fish we eat: farmed or wild, how and where taken if wild, health of the overall population, and so forth. Earlier this year, while reacquainting myself with Hayes Street Grill after some years’ absence, I noticed that the menu card now gives a good deal of information about the sources of the restaurant’s maritime dishes. The plain assumption is that diners want and need this information, that they are beginning to understand that choices about food involve a moral dimension and that considering the moral dimension of one’s choices need not ruin the meal nor the evening.
Given HSG’s position as an exemplar, I was curious as to whether its attention to sourcing might have begun to influence other seafood houses around town. One of the most obvious places to start looking would have to be Alamo Square Seafood Grill, which since the middle 1990s has sat atop a romantic stretch of Fillmore a block from the hilltop park that provides its name. From the beginning, Alamo Square borrowed a page from the HSG playbook by letting diners choose from among several varieties of fish, cooking method, and sauce. One difference: you did not get fries, as at HSG. On the other hand, there was — and remains — an early bird prix fixe option, three courses for $14.50 and a reminder that Alamo Square began as an offshoot of that long-running prix fixery, Baker Street Bistro, at the edge of the Presidio.
The restaurant looks none the worse for a decade of wear, except that the northern face of the street sign (wreathed in Christmassy little white lights) has lost its initial A: if, trekking uphill, you come across a place called lamo Square, you are there. Inside the storefront space, the mood is one of candlelit intimacy, and the crowd is varied, consisting largely of people in their 20s and early 30s (neighborhood folk?), along with the occasional interloper. A youngish couple who had Marina written all over them arrived in a silvery Aston Martin coupe, which they parked in the bus zone right outside the restaurant’s door. Oh Department of Parking and Traffic, where are you at those rare moments when you could actually be useful? Not that some DPT timeliness would have mattered in this case, since the canny pair took a window seat with a view of bus stop and car.
Our first order of business was establishing which of the proffered fish we might conscionably eat. Trout: no, a farmed carnivore, with aquafarming the cause of environmental pollution and carnivorous fish requiring on the order of four pounds of wild fish to return a pound of salable flesh. Mahimahi: attractively firm and abundant, though flown in from Hawaii. Red snapper: a local fish with decently managed populations, just a wee bit boring. And … an ahi tuna loin, prepared according to a set recipe. Tuna is dicey: bluefin is a no-no, other varieties somewhat less so.
Red snapper ($13.95), luckily, takes well to blackening even if it’s just the Pacific kind, not the true variety from the Gulf of Mexico. We found the mâitre d’hôtel sauce — basically a garlic and parsley butter — to be just assertive enough to make its voice heard without challenging the fish. The more party-hearty Provençale sauce — of tomatoes, black olives, capers, and garlic, a combination reminiscent of Neapolitan puttanesca — made a nice match with grilled mahimahi ($13.95), a fish that, like chicken, welcomes a little help and usually benefits from it. Platters of fish (not too little, not too much) were served with brown rice pilaf and a mélange of sautéed vegetables, among pattypan squash, zucchini, carrots, and button mushrooms; none of this quite matched good French fries for excitement, but it was all pretty tasty and much lower in fat.
The kitchen handles nonfish dishes with equal aplomb, from an amuse of wild-mushroom pottage spiked with a little balsamic vinegar and presented in demitasses to a fabulous salad of shredded romaine hearts ($6.75) tossed with crisp lardons, slivers of carrot and French radish, garlic croutons, blue cheese, and lemon oil. A soup ($6.25) of artichoke and fennel topped with pipings of curry oil was desperately underseasoned — all we could taste was the sweetness of the fennel — but a few good pinches from the tabletop salt dish coaxed the artichoke flavor forth.
There was even an occasional flash of wit, as in a tarte tatin ($5) made with pears instead of apples and presented in the au courant, deconstructed style: the pear slices were fanned over a floor of pastry. It looked a little like a pear pastry lasagna the chef hadn’t quite finished putting together. On the side, a pat of vanilla ice cream nodded to tradition.
As we left, we noted the Marina couple chattering away in their little surveillance box and the Aston Martin still sitting in the bus stop, ticketless. We gave the restaurant pretty good grades, in the A to A- range, for both overall experience and sustainability. Maybe the place can use one of those As to get the sign fixed. SFBG
ALAMO SQUARE SEAFOOD GRILL
Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9:30 p.m.
803 Fillmore, SF
(415) 440-2828
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Love child
› paulr@sfbg.com
At the Front Porch, you will find a front porch. It’s not the kind of porch you’d see at Grandma’s house, with the bug screens and the swinging lounger; it’s more a big-city version, a covered sidewalk garden casually set with small tables and Adirondack chairs — an alfresco waiting room for those waiting to score a table inside. This is a nice idea, since the Front Porch is one of those restaurants that seems to have been packed from the moment it opened its doors, toward the end of the summer.
If you imagine the love child of Range and Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, you will have a decent picture of the Front Porch. The crowd is hipsterish, though less visibly monied than Range’s; there are fewer black cashmere mock turtlenecks and Italian shoes, more thrift-store ensembles and scruffy beards. The Emmy’s connection isn’t trivial, either, and not just because Emmy’s is but a few blocks away. The chef, Sarah Kirnon, is an Emmy’s expat, as is one of the co-owners, Josephine White. (The other owner is Bix-seasoned Kevin Cline.) Kirnon’s menu is, as it was at Emmy’s, value conscious, though many of the dishes break the $10 ceiling (if not by much), and the food nods in a Caribbean direction (Kirnon grew up in Barbados) while keeping its feet pretty firmly on all-American soil.
Once you are summoned to your table, you will find, inside, a cheerfully honky-tonk look: sage green walls, a floor covered in red and cream linoleum, a long bar of burnished wood backed by an antique cash register, an old-style ceiling of tin squares impressed with artful curves, and a good deal of din. The wait, incidentally, need not be interminable; we waltzed in one evening and immediately bagged the last table for two, and on another resorted to Plan B — immediate seating at the bar — which for me carried happy associations of dinner at Stars’ mammoth installation. The restaurant accepts reservations for larger parties only, which raises the crapshoot factor for twosomes.
The Caribbean notes most resoundingly struck by Kirnon’s kitchen had to do, so far as I could tell, with okra. This semiexotic vegetable, the key ingredient of gumbo, turned up one evening as a deep-fried starter and again in the same evening’s edition of Sarah’s vegan surprise ($9.50). In the latter dish, halved lengths of it, looking like split jalapeño peppers, swam in a spicy tomato sauce along with cubes of butternut squash, while looming in the middle of the broad bowl was a craggy jumble: a stubby cylinder of corn on the cob and a clutch of plantains, battered and deep-fried and looking like giant McNuggets. The overall effect was one of sweet fire, though I think the plantains would have been just as nice and not as rich if they’d been sliced and oven-roasted into chips. And a word of reassurance to those who dislike okra for its horror flick sliminess: in Kirnon’s hands it seems to remain firm and ungross of texture.
Well-crisped plantain chips (for scooping) appeared with the tuna tartare ($8.63), the diced, deep-purple fish quite spicy and topped with scatters of minced scallion and flying-fish roe. Also surprisingly spicy was a stack of heirloom tomato slices ($7), mainly because of the slathering of creole mayonnaise; an acidic counterpoint was provided by a jaunty cap of pickled carrot and red-beet slices.
The main courses glide effortlessly between prole and petit bourgeois. On the nether end we have the Porch burger ($11), a big — but not too big — pat of broiled beef topped with melted cheddar cheese and two slices of crisp bacon. The bun, fresh and tender but … too big. The burger in the bun looked lost, like a little boy trying on one of his father’s dress shirts. At the far end of town we find the tony Dungeness crab porridge ($11.50), a Range-worthy dish whose porridge consists of white polenta (“grits” is the local-color term) bewitchingly scented with lemon. In the middle of the pond of porridge rests an islet of crab meat flecked with habanero peppers and scallion. Habaneros can be scorching, but here they behave.
The porridge’s well-dressed siblings from the starter menu might include a pistou look-alike: a broth of lime juice, rock salt, and puréed mint ($6.50) set with avocado quarters, green beans, and svelte coins of radish and cucumber — tasty and discreetly austere. Indiscreetly unaustere are the deep-fried chicken livers ($6) on a slice of brioche toast with a drizzling of caramelized onion sauce. We agreed that this dish tasted like a cheeseburger, but perhaps that was just the fat talking.
Desserts (all $6) pack a homey punch. We found a subtle sophistication in a slice of pumpkin Bundt cake laced with chocolate chunks and plated with a sensuous puff of what the restaurant calls “sweet cream” and what most of us know as whipped cream. The same cream turns up like a wisp of tulle fog beside a slice of yellow cake with double chocolate frosting — as good as anything Mom used to make. For that frisson of decadence, $2 extra buys you a scoop of vanilla on the side, and as we were especially decadent, we ended up — by accident or design? — with both the cream and the ice cream. The plate looked as if a blizzard had just roared through.
No blizzards in these parts, of course, just — sometimes — unnaturally early rain. We waited on the front porch until it had mostly abated, then made a dash for it. SFBG
FRONT PORCH
Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m. Continuous service: Sun., noon–9 p.m.
65A 29th St., SF
(415) 695-7800
Beer and wine
MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Daytripper, yeah
› paulr@sfbg.com
Among the many excellent reasons to do some daytripping in the Anderson Valley is to refresh one’s sense of hope that the stranglehold of chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon on California’s oenophilic imagination isn’t necessarily eternal. Oh yes, a number of the winemakers along the blissfully unbusy Highway 128 offer versions of these pedigreed old French warhorses along with versions of pinot noir and sauvignon blanc, which are only marginally less familiar and probably no less pedigreed.
But perhaps because land values in the area aren’t quite as insane as in Napa Valley and the better-known parts of Sonoma County, winemakers seem to feel a greater freedom in experimenting with varieties of grapes that are either not well known or not well regarded in this country. Brutocao, for instance, is now offering bottlings of dolcetto (a bright, midweight Italian red) and primitivo, the big red bruiser — and zinfandel sibling — from the south of Italy. Brutocao also offers a zin, and it’s pleasantly smoky, but I preferred the primitivo and its fresh-cherry kiss.
Just up the road, a pair of wineries are quietly working a revolution in white wines. A major theme here is the making of dry wines from German grapes — mainly gewürztraminer and Riesling — better known for Old World wines of considerable fruitiness and sweetness. The gewürzes at both Husch and Navarro retain the grape’s distinctive spicy-floral perfume, along with some fruit, but have a sunny tartness. Navarro’s Riesling, meanwhile, compares favorably, in my view, to many of the great Loire whites made from sauvignon blanc; it is light but solid, not as thick in the nose as the gewürzes but with a wonderful balance of acid, fruit, and a suggestion of minerality.
It is the Husch chenin blanc, though, that most captures my heart. Here we have a grape most of us would associate with one of those Paul Masson orgy wines from a jug, circa 1973. Yet the French have long known that chenin is noble, and if treated right — if not encouraged to proliferate promiscuously, if grown with concentration in mind — it can produce such splendid wines as Savennières. I am not sure Husch is quite at that level yet, but one goal of the winemakers surely is redemption for this undervalued grape, and that much at least they have already achieved.
Got capsicum?
› paulr@sfbg.com
With time, one finds oneself bidding fond farewells to one’s spicehound friends. Oh, nothing changes too dramatically, except that bit by bit (or bite by bite), onetime fire-eaters lose their taste for the thrill of capsicum. Certain alluring foods of yore — chili, pepperoni pizza, Mongolian beef — start to cause problems, especially if eaten too near bedtime. You still go out with them, your spicehound pack, but when they point at this or that on the menu, wondering which dishes are spicy, they are plotting routes of retreat now, not angles of approach. Everybody is silently hoping to sleep through the night, like babies with dry diapers, not awaken at 2 a.m. with a remorseful jolt and a growing blaze amidships. People sip their green tea, and they do so carefully.
For years I held out against this trend. X and Y might no longer fling themselves into the spiciest dishes they could find, like boys from a Mark Twain novel plunging with a whoop into a water hole of unknown depth, but I still had a taste for flame. Then, recently, I ate at So, a modish Chinese noodle house on that insanely busy stretch of Irving just west of 19th Avenue, and I heard the bell toll. There was no need to ask for whom it was tolling: it tolled for me. It tolled and tolled, in fact, and I ignored it. Later I was sorry, but at the time I was in a bliss of tingling lips and couldn’t be bothered to heed the alarm.
So is an atypical Chinese restaurant in a number of respects. For one thing, its menu consists largely of soup and noodle — and soupy noodle — dishes, as at a Vietnamese pho house. It also has a spare, modernist youthfulness devoid of tired linoleum floors and harsh overhead lighting; the walls are bright yellow and the ceiling a rich gray blue, while a noisy crowd young enough to match the youth of the staff sits at rosewood tables on rosewood chairs. Mainly, though, So is a temple of the incendiary. I cannot recall the last time I found so much chile firepower in one place. It is the gastronomic equivalent of a munitions cache.
So … you have been warned, or summoned. I must also add that portion sizes are simply immense. The noodle soups are served in bowls the size of cantaloupe halves and can easily satisfy two if not three, especially if you open with one of the splendid starters. If you notice that these take a little longer to reach the table than is usual in Chinese restaurants (many of which rush them out in just a few minutes), it’s because they’re made to order and with care. The pot stickers ($5.50) in particular are exceptional; they reach the table nested in a pinwheel pattern, are fragrant with fresh ginger when opened, and — what is most noticeable — are wrapped in homemade dough that has a definite fresh-bread springiness and smell to it. When you eat these pot stickers, you will likely realize that most of the other restaurant pot stickers you’ve ever eaten in your life were prepackaged and reheated items. Mass-market, mass-produced stuff. So’s are revelatory.
Nearly as good are fried shrimp dumplings ($6), also powerfully gingery, and dried sautéed string beans ($5) in a thick garlic sauce. The So chicken wings ($5.25) — really a hodgepodge of wings and drumsticks — are a clever and potent Chinese retort to the American cliché of buffalo wings; So dips its poultry parts into a batter that crisps up nicely, then drizzles them with a molasses-thick sauce of garlic, ginger, and slivered red chiles for some smolder. The sauce accompanying the curry coroque ($4) — three Japanese-style potato croquettes, about the size and shape of Brillo pads — looks similar but has a stronger acid presence: hoisin with some rice wine vinegar?
The starters are tasty but not, as a rule, hot, which makes the arrival of a dish like pork with hot peppers ($6.35) — a platter heaped with a stir-fry of shredded meat, chopped jalapeños, onions, and scallions, with a spicy garlic sauce — rather bracing. Only slightly less forceful is shredded pork with garlic ($6.35), which substitutes serene water chestnuts and willow tree fungus for the raucous hot peppers and adds a splash of vinegar for clearheadedness.
“My nose is running,” said the spicehound emeritus to my left. He found himself confronting the seafood soup noodle ($6.35), a sea of spicy broth clogged with shrimp, calamari, scallops, and napa cabbage — something like an East Asian answer to cioppino. His longing gaze drifted across the table to the seaweed noodle soup ($6.35), a kind of giant egg-drop soup fortified with seaweed and spinach, peas, mushrooms, and shrimp. The flavor of the broth was deep but beatifically mild, like the blue of a lovely sunset at the end of a windless and warm — but not hot — day.
The social experience of So is nearly as intense as the peppery food. We found the place packed early on a Sunday evening; tablefuls of young folk mounted a steady roar of conversation while others waited on the sidewalk, barking into cell phones of many colors until tables opened up. The service at dinnertime is friendly and efficient but forever teetering on the brink of being overwhelmed. During a noontime visit, on the other hand, I found a rather startling calm and was able to notice that a “help wanted” sign was posted on the front door — a clue that business is quite a bit better than so-so. SFBG
SO RESTAURANT
Tues.–Thurs., 5–9:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat., noon–10 p.m., Sun., noon–9:30 p.m.
2240 Irving, SF
(415) 731-3143
Beer and wine
MC/V
Very noisy if crowded
Wheelchair accessible
The Michelin men
› paulr@sfbg.com
Although the Michelin guide is no worse an offender than Zagat as a distant judge of our restaurants — its offices are farther away, but only because the guide is French and cannot be blamed for the relative remoteness of France — there is nonetheless something galling about the colonialism of outsiders’ kiting in to assess us, then trumpeting their findings to the rest of the country and world as authority.
Zagat relies on a vox populi method, actually: its surveys reflect the views of hundreds of locals. Michelin, on the other hand, uses “inspectors” — none of them, we hope, named Clouseau — to provide “objective evaluations” of eating establishments’ kitchen performance, including the “personality” of the cuisine under review. Hmmm. Could it be that “objective” is just ever so slightly subjective? Is there any other way to talk honestly about food?
Last week Michelin brought out its first-ever evaluation of restaurants in San Francisco and Northern California. As in France, Michelin awards us stars for jobs to a greater or lesser degree well done. (Seinfeld’s sonorous dandy Mr. Peterman to Elaine, after deposing her as president of his mail-order clothing company: “And thank you, Elaine, for a job … done.”) We do not seem to merit the subtleties of half stars, but we are graced by the presence of a three-star establishment, and that is Thomas Keller’s the French Laundry, in Yountville.
I cannot say I found this judgment stunning. In fact, there could scarcely have been a less newsworthy bit of news. Somewhat more interesting was the guide’s granting of two stars to Aqua and Michael Mina while a host of other worthy — and, one would have thought, comparable — places, including Gary Danko, the Ritz-Carlton’s Dining Room, and Chez Panisse, must make do with one. Two-star places are supposed to be “worth a detour,” while one-starrers are merely “very good” in their categories, with “cuisine prepared to a consistently high standard.”
Implicit in all this is Michelin’s bias toward inventiveness and innovation — “personality,” if you will, or perhaps “tinkering.” It is not unexpected, in this sense, that les inspectors would not fully grasp the meaning and fineness of a place like Chez Panisse, whose very philosophies — of cooking, of agriculture, of living richly but wisely on this fragile earth — emphasize ingredients, even make stars of them.
Charm latitudes
› paulr@sfbg.com
Presidents are so seldom intentionally funny that when a genuine wit makes it to the Oval Office, we (the people!) tend to notice and remember. As a quipster, John F. Kennedy is without peer in modern times, and while his crack that Washington, DC, is “a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency” might not be his best line, it’s still a pretty good one — not to mention useful for certain latter-day restaurant writers, who admire the deftly phrased paradox while being perennially fascinated by the truth embedded in it. Whether in the New World or the Old, we tend to think of the north as the home of efficiency and practicality, the south of beauty and sensuality, and can ever the twain meet without some sort of Death in Venice disaster?
Kennedy described himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris” — another excellent line — so we know he traveled to France. Did he notice, when there, that France might be the one place on earth where the twain could indeed be said happily to meet — that France is simultaneously a northern land of clean cities, fast trains, and a more or less honest bureaucracy and also a Mediterranean realm on easy terms with life’s sunlit pleasures? If so, he has left us no witticism to announce the fact. But I think he would have warmed to Cafe Claude, which isn’t in Paris but feels as if it is, on some lane in the Marais too narrow even for Europe’s ubiquitous Smart Cars.
Here the lane is Claude Lane, a brief segment of asphalt lined by tall glassy buildings that rise in the complex borderland of Union Square, Chinatown, and the Financial District. Nearby Belden Lane, paved with bricks and lined from one end to the other with cafés, trattorias, and fish houses, is better known as a Euro-style restaurant row, but the basic principle is the same, as is the strollable, alfresco feel. The city seems less encroaching in these places, and that is largely because cars are unable to speed through.
Cafe Claude opened more than 15 years ago, so teething and shake-down issues belong to the deep past. The more pertinent question for a place of this age is whether it manages to be both polished and self-renewing or whether senescence has set in. In Café Claude’s case, the answer is pretty clear: it’s in its prime, lively and well run, with food of the urban-earthy sort — rustic dishes prepared with soupçons of metropolitan flash — so characteristic of a certain stratum of Paris restaurants.
For many people, the ultimate treat in French bistros is a plate of steak frites. For me, it is roast chicken ($12.50), a leg and thigh slow-cooked to a gold-dripping tenderness and served with a bright mix of chard, lemon slices, and black olives adrift in the jus. Fries go quite as well with roast chicken as with beef, but at Claude you have to order them on the side ($4, plenty for two). They are sprinkled with herbs and served with a “sauce piquant,” a kind of paprika-enhanced sauce gribiche, lumpy with stubs of cornichons.
The duck rillette ($5) situates a petite slice of meaty pâté, about the size of a brownie, in a vast nest of greens. If shared by two people, the dish is like a charcuterie version of an Easter egg hunt, with the spoils consisting of a single egg. It is best to think of the rillette as a tasting experience: a burst or two of flavor, then on to something weightier, such as that excellent blast from the past, coquilles St. Jacques ($11). Here we have a trio of sea scallops on the half shell bundled with shrimp, mussels, and mushrooms and sealed, oysters Rockefeller–style, under a broiled cap of Gruyère and bread crumbs. The presentation is simple but impressive, and there is a definite unwrapping-a-present pleasure in cracking through the cap to the glistening treasures within.
Weightier still is lamb confit ($23), two rounds of lamb loin braised to pot-roast tenderness and served atop shreds of green cabbage dotted with black olives and bits of red bell pepper. Lamb fat can get pungent if heated, and I had a worry or two beforehand that lamb cooked in lamb fat would be a little too gamy, but the dinnertime kitchen (under chef Leo Salazar) succeeded in discreetly hitting the mute button, with the result a nice lamby — but not too lamby — flavor.
Complaints: the roast-carrot soup ($7), with a submerged reef of Emmentaler gratings, was tongue-searingly hot. A napoleon ($12) of sliced tomatoes and tabs of feta cheese was underseasoned, though the heirloom tomatoes were gloriously ripe. A pan bagnat ($10) featured a smear of tuna salad apparently made from ordinary canned tuna.
But all this was forgiven and then some when the list of digestifs was found to include Armagnac. Armagnac! A snifter for $8 — not bad. Could this be the next big thing? I sippingly pondered that question while the clafouti monster across the table dove into a griotte cherry version ($7) — eggy, I thought (upon a sample or two), but attractively so and baked in a handsome dish of white porcelain.
Cafe Claude must be one of the nicest spots in town to eat outside. There is less tumult and wind than on Belden, and while conventional wisdom teaches that the alfresco season is fleeting in this land of pampered softies, we must remember that the French have a different view: Parisians will take their coffee at sidewalk cafés even with snowflakes twirling softly down around them. So there is northern charm after all. SFBG
CAFE CLAUDE
Continuous service: Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m. Dinner: Sun., 5:30–10:30 p.m.
7 Claude Lane, SF
(415) 392-3515
www.cafeclaude.com
Full bar
Noisy
AE/DC/DS/MC/V
Wheelchair accessible
Small change
› paulr@sfbg.com
Recently a colleague reminded me — in the course of a brief correspondence heavy on mutual commiseration (for what are writers if not commiserators?) — that while change is often deplorable, it also must be accepted. “Hate change, embrace change” was her pithy, I might even say her writerly, formulation. In silent riposte, I thought of Uncle Theodore, the lovable rapscallion from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, who relieves “his infrequent bouts of depression” by singing “change and decay in all around I see” (a line from the hymn “Abide with Me”) out the morning-room window of the family’s country manse, Boot Magna, when not whoring about in London.
I like to think that while there may be change in much if not all around I see, there is not necessarily decay. But I do not like the bunches of basil I have been finding at Tower Market, now more than a year and a half under the ownership of the Mollie Stone’s chain. The basil is labeled as “local,” and indeed Mollie Stone’s touts its commitment to local, organic, and sustainable agriculture, but bunch after bunch of this stuff seems to consist of bruised, pitted, and withered leaves that would never have been set out under the old regime. I bought a nice-looking butternut squash for soup, but when I cut it open a few days later it reeked of sulfur and had to be rushed to the compost bin like a code blue patient.
Prices, meantime, have risen sharply, and although I doubt this is entirely the result of chain ownership, I don’t think chain ownership — with centralized procurement and, I suspect, heightened attention to that basic business ethic of buying low and selling high — helps matters. The store no longer sells the nifty little boxes of Spanish saffron at the checkout stands either. Instead there is, for twice as much money, some other kind, elaborately packaged to make it look like there’s more there than there is. I passed.
Wonderful restaurants reinvent themselves for Generation Text-message: first Bizou and soon Hawthorne Lane. Change, decay? I dislike change for its own sake, but fatigue is a fact, and people’s wants and expectations do shift. Yet while casualness is fine, and I have a closetful of blue jeans and T-shirts, there is something to be said for special and elevated moments. Take it away, Uncle Theodore.
Mild to wild
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“Mandarin” is a word that suggests a certain grandeur or even haughtiness. Mandarin English is the language of such pompmeisters as William F. Buckley Jr., George F. Will, and all those other East Coast bow-tied toffs with Roman numerals after their names. As for mandarin food: if you are enjoying this style of Chinese cooking, you must sit up straight, keep your napkin in your lap, and not eat with your fingers. Can you see Buckley or Will eating pot stickers with their fingers?
Perhaps that is a needlessly nightmarish image. Mandarin need not mean “chokingly formal.” Even the Mandarin in Ghirardelli Square, despite much plushness and high style, retains an agreeably casual air — and the Mandarin is not the exclusive home of mandarin cooking in the city. Although mandarin cuisine is sometimes known as “the food of the emperors” and is strongly associated with Beijing — China’s imperial city — it can be found in creditable form here in such neighborhood restaurants as Ah Lin, which opened last year on Cathedral Hill in a space left behind when the peripatetic the Window returned to its original home on Valencia.
If you’re looking for cathedrals, Cathedral Hill isn’t a bad place to start your search: at one end of Ah Lin’s Bush Street block stands Trinity Episcopal, an imposing gothic edifice that looks as if it were transplanted from some village in the north of England. If that doesn’t suit, there are plenty of alternative choices just a brief journey down Gough. And at the other end of Ah Lin’s little urban world (to complete our sacred-and-profane cycle) is Wheel Works, a temple of the automotive, whose large, white, mostly windowless garage takes up most of the view through the restaurant’s windows.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to look outside, because the interior of the restaurant is appealing in its modest way: walls done up in a paint scheme of rich blue, with peach accents and some framed art pieces, along with a good-sized light box whose ground-level plantings give it the look of a big (and slightly tippy) terrarium. Linoleum? Didn’t notice any, but then, I wasn’t looking, and one of the reasons I wasn’t looking — apart from the childish hope that if I didn’t notice it, it couldn’t be there — was because I was too engrossed in the food.
As a devotee of spicy food, my Chinese preferences over the years have tended toward Szechuan and Hunan cooking, each of which makes liberal use of chiles — and chilis — to kindle that characteristic blaze on the lips. Mandarin dishes, on the other hand, tend to be milder, but mild does not mean bland, and as the kitchen at Ah Lin proves over and over, even even-tempered dishes can have their own sort of savory intensity.
The restaurant’s chow fun ($6.95), for instance, sounded very Clark Kent–ish to us — wide noodles with a restful choice of chicken, beef, shrimp, or vegetable — but while the array of these last was routine (snow peas, broccoli florets, sliced mushrooms), the noodles themselves tasted as if they had been cooked in some kind of broth. (Chicken, perhaps? Vegetarian sticklers will want to inquire.) This is a very easy and effective way to enliven starches, but just to make sure, the kitchen also added shreds of basil for some freshening perfume.
Another subtly addictive, peppery broth was the basis of the ocean party soup ($5.50 for a small bowl that was more than enough for two people), a mélange of shrimp, bay scallops, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and snow peas. Having sampled this soup and the chow fun, we did feel we probably could have passed a pop quiz on what the restaurant’s vegetable bin held.
The menu is full of classic preparations. I fell into a Proustian reverie — memories of long ago and far away on Halsted Street — while engulfing the excellent mu shu pork ($7.50), notable here for its tender pancakes. Even more impressive was a roasted half duck ($8.25). The bird carried a faint and unsurprising whiff of five-spice powder, but its real power lay in the combination of wonderfully crisp, cognac-colored skin and confitlike meat, juicy and tender. At the price, it’s one of the best bargains going.
There is some spice to be had, mainly at lunch. Orange-peel beef ($5.75) is one of those cardiac-arrest dishes you know you shouldn’t have but can’t resist, and there’s a good reason you can’t resist: the knobbly shreds of meat are perfectly crisp and the dark-brown sauce intense with citrus and basil; this is just the kind of thing we might find Homer Simpson gorging on from a big paper bucket, if only it were a little dryer. Hunan fish ($5.75), meanwhile, featured a tangy-sweet sauce with a discreet hint of heat, but what was more striking was the fish itself — fish cakes, really, with a certain sponginess of texture the price of uniformity in size (for more reliable cooking) and the chance to mix seasonings with the flesh. The cakes aren’t unmanageably rubbery, but they can’t match the more usual cod or flounder filets for velvetiness. Lunches come with a cup of soup, a quite lively sweet-and-sour maybe, and rice — brown rice, if you prefer.
Although the restaurant is quite small, service can be stressed. The noontime crowd is sizable, and in the evening take-out orders pile up on the cashier’s podium at the rear of the dining room. So: serenity now, and your order will be along soon enough. SFBG
AH LIN
Continuous service: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., noon–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 4:30–9:30 p.m.
1634 Bush, SF
(415) 922-5279
www.ahlinrestaurant.com
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Moderately noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Without Reservations
› paulr@sfbg.com
Many of us have now accepted that the real benefit of sustainable agriculture — whether organic or biodynamic — is, er, sustainability. A globe less beleaguered by pesticides, run-off, and soil exhausted by monoculture is a globe more likely to support life in the future. Nonetheless, it is only human to hold out hope that organic or biodynamic products will also look and taste better, if only because they cost more.
Sustainably produced wine is a more complex matter, in part because sustainable viticulture is in its infancy in this country, and also because one bottle of wine looks much like another, with not much in the way of labeling or logos at the moment to guide us. If I poured you a glass of, say, Medlock Ames’s 2002 Bell Mountain Ranch red blend or of Bonterra’s 2004 roussanne, you would have to seize one or the other bottle from my hand and look closely to notice that the former is produced from sustainably farmed grapes and the latter from organically farmed grapes. And if you didn’t seize either bottle, if you just sipped, you probably wouldn’t have a clue you were tasting earth-friendly wine.
A wine-world irony is that this is pretty much what the winemakers are hoping for: wine that cannot be distinguished on the palate from the regular stuff. The roussanne might actually exceed this standard; it is one of the most beautifully balanced California white wines I’ve ever drunk, a bewitching mix of floral perfume, citrusy acid, and fruity muscle, with enough presence to be an aperitif but able to keep its elbows in too when confronted with food. (Roussanne, incidentally, is one of those white Rhône grapes — viognier is another — that seem to produce far more attractive wines here than they do in France, and for that matter better wines than do California-grown chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. Here I opine shamelessly.)
The red, meanwhile, shows a definite cabernet sauvignon pedigree, though the blend consists only of 25 percent cabernet. (The rest is merlot.) It’s like a rich pinot noir, and although you could probably drink it with pizza in a pinch, it has a definite aristo dimension of reserved potency. The only downside I see is price: each retails for more than $20. That is a little high, but not unsustainable.
In the family way
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When last I saw John Lombardo, proprietor of Lombardo’s Fine Foods, he was hurrying along the sidewalk outside the windows of his recently expanded Mission Terrace operation — a café now adjoins the catering kitchen — on his way home to … change the baby’s diapers? He had revealed to us his domestic mission, with apologies and having first checked to make sure we were satisfied with our food, and it is some measure of how satisfied we were that I forgot why he said he was rushing forth almost as soon as he’d said why. He vanished with a wave of his hand (the family place is just around the corner), and we waved back before reimmersing ourselves in an evening of home cooking, an orgy of manicotti, macaroni, orzo, and lasagna, all made according to what Lombardo told us were “family recipes.”
Cultural dry rot takes many forms — as we can see just by glancing around us these days — but one of the most insidious of those forms, for me, is the loss of ancient culinary knowledge passed down through generations, until some generation isn’t interested or can’t be bothered, and the chain breaks, the knowledge is lost, people end up ordering boxed pizza or microwaving canned soup in desperation. Some family recipes do get written down, and written recipes are better than nothing, but most of them don’t get written down. There is no better way to learn to cook, moreover, than by watching someone who knows what she or he is doing. Cooking is a sensual experience — it requires the engagement of the senses, all of them — and even the best written recipe can never be much more than a ghostly guide by comparison.
Who taught Lombardo how to cook? He graduated from the California Culinary Academy and has been a professional caterer for more than 20 years, so there we have at least two nonfamilial elements of the answer. But as my companion and I stood at the glass case, pointing at this and that with a question or two, Lombardo’s answers tended to include the phrase “family recipe” with some frequency. An orzo salad ($4), for instance, with julienne red bell pepper, shreds of mint, and crumblings of sheep-milk feta cheese folded into the ricelike pasta, was a family recipe. So was manicotti ($6.50), flaps of pasta like pig’s ears stuffed with herbed ricotta cheese and bathed in a garlicky marinara sauce decorated with basil chiffonade. We mopped up the last of the marinara sauce with chunks of grilled Italian bread.
The lineage of the lasagna ($10) did not come up, but any mother (or father, for that matter) would have been proud to bequeath to later generations the animating combination of beef and fennel-scented sausage at the heart of this classic dish. The addictive roasted red-pepper soup (thickened with potato and laced with sunflower seeds), which appeared as an opening act, wouldn’t be a bad legacy either.
Opinion at our little table (the café is tiny: just a handful of tables, though lots of windows) diverged rather startlingly on the matter of the macaroni and cheese ($8). We have never before disagreed about mac and cheese, have loved every one, fancy or plain, with Gruyère and Emmentaler or jack and American — yet the assessor across the table did not quite care for this version, with its faint, Asiatic breaths of nutmeg, turmeric, and mustard seeds and its vivid yellow color, while I found those effects (apart from the yellow) reminiscent of pastitsio, a traditional and beloved Greek dish. We did agree that the accompanying black-bean chili, with its pipings of crème fraîche, was lovely.
For Lombardo, pasta is very much the motif and casserole the method, but his flavor palettes, while heavily Italian, are not exclusively so. Besides the black-bean chili, there is also a fine turkey enchilada casserole ($9): almost a kind of Mexican lasagna, built on a floor of masa and including roasted poblano peppers, white cheese, a chili-scented tomato sauce, and plenty of turkey meat — stringy but tender, like Thanksgiving leftovers.
And there is life beyond pasta and casseroles: the café also offers a range of grilled panini — slices of grilled Italian country bread enclosing such treats as roast beef ($9). The roast beef sandwich includes caramelized onions, shavings of Gruyère, and smearings of horseradish sauce, with a crouton-rich (and under-anchovied but still quite tasty) Caesar salad on the side.
The front of the tiny house is intermittently overseen by Lombardo’s wife, Gwen, whose presence enhances the family-affair effect. She takes orders, runs the cash register, and serves the food while her husband the chef works behind her in the open kitchen, which occupies the long leg of the L-shaped space. It is possible that she also occasionally dashes home on some child-related errand, but when she is in situ, the Lombardos are not so much a power couple — the Bob and Liddy Dole of food — but joint laborers for love in a field that, while difficult, still makes room for little guys. For the restaurant business remains surprisingly, stubbornly local; yes, there are chains, but the chains tend to remind us of how many places are not chains: are instead unique, are expressions of a single sensibility, or are the product of a determined team that’s found a neighborhood niche. Will Lombardo’s Fine Foods turn out to be life’s pinnacle for John and Gwen Lombardo? The excellence of the orzo salad suggests to me that the answer is no — heights still to be scaled — but in the meantime, home is where the heart is. SFBG
LOMBARDO’S FINE FOODS
Continuous service: Tues.–Fri., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sat., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.
1818 San Jose, SF
(415) 337-9741
www.lombardosfinefoods.com
Beer and wine pending
AE/MC/V
Moderately noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Without Reservations
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Like all books, cookbooks must pull their weight. This means, for me, offering at least two and possibly three — or more — recipes I can work into my rotating repertoire. Pretty photographs are nice, as is exoticism or a local angle, but it is one of life’s eternal verities that shelf space is limited, and a cookbook that hopes to find a home in the puritan kitchen must be useful. (I have noticed over the years, in my reconnoiterings and snoopings in other kitchens, that spattering tells the tale. Spattering means: this book actually gets used — it isn’t just sitting there, beautifully posing.)
Although I have thus far made only one recipe from Cindy Pawlcyn’s new cookbook, Big Small Plates (with Pablo and Ernesto Jacinto, Ten Speed, $35), I have already assigned it shelf space in the permanent collection. In part this is because Pawlcyn is a local eminence who has had a hand in such hits as Bix, Fog City Diner, Mustard’s Grill, and most recently, Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen. In part it’s because far more than two or three of the book’s recipes look tempting, though I haven’t gotten to them yet — and the reason I haven’t gotten to them is that the book opens with a splendid recipe for gougères. I have been making these gougères, and when you make gougères, you tend to get caught up in an obliterating bliss.
Gougères are — as anyone who’s queued at Tartine Bakery probably knows — sand-dollar-sized cheese puffs. They are close relations of brioche, the bread that thinks it’s a cake or the cake that thinks it’s bread — I’ve never been sure which. Like brioche, gougères are substantially fortified by butter and eggs. Unlike brioche, gougères rely exclusively on eggs as the leavening agent; there is no yeast. Pawlcyn’s gougères recipe is, in fact, a model of simplicity. It calls for butter, eggs, flour, water, salt, and grated Gruyère cheese, and the equipment list is a saucepan, a mixing bowl, a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and an oven. Best of all, the recipe results in handsome golden puffs that no one can eat just one of.
A word of backstreet wisdom: Pawlcyn’s gougères are best served warm, within an hour or so of emerging from the oven. When they cool, they deflate and look like miniature hamburger buns. Tastewise, though, they still pull their weight.