Around Town:
Magnolia Pub & Brewery (1398 Haight at Masonic) has brought in a new chef, Brandon Jew, and plans a revamp of its menu to push the boundaries of gastropub fare. Magnolia is going whole hog — literally — and plans to include more offal and charcuterie dishes, possibly including a fried headcheese sandwich. But don’t call it upscale, insists owner Dave McLean: “I hate to saddle the menu with a loaded word like ‘upscale.’ It all fits into a gastropub menu,” he says. “The word ‘pub’ comes from ‘public house,’ and I think that all these things — sustainability, using all the parts of the animal — it all goes back to kind of blue-collar comfort food. This is the original beer food. That’s the compelling vision behind this move.”
With a sophisticated, ambitious menu covering all the bases of traditional Japanese fare, O Izakaya (1625 Post at Laguna) in the Hotel Kabuki represents the latest flagship in the burgeoning San Francisco trend — along with fellow izakaya spot Oyaji — for small plates with very big flavors. SF Weekly’s Robert Lauriston is putting his money on the yakimono (grilled) portion of the menu, singling out the grilled pork belly ($4), the slightly sweet, crunchy-outside-creamy-inside golden-brown rice balls known as omochi ($3), and soba with mizuna and poached egg ($9). Check out his full review in this week’s issue, on newsstands today.
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If your flatware drawer looks anything like mine, it's overflowing with takeout utensils: the dreaded plastic forks and knives, crumpled napkins, packets of ancient soy sauce and ketchup, and -- of course -- lots and lots of wooden chopsticks. While I have yet to find a worthy cause for the plastic and condiments, here's an idea for the chopsticks: over the course of two years a man named Shuhei Ogawara collected over 7,000 disposable wooden chopsticks (7,382 to be exact) and built a 13-foot long canoe. At 66 pounds, it's heavier than a standard canoe, and there's still no word on if the thing will float, but it's a damn good idea nonetheless. (via Gizmodo)
-- B.B.
Lunch just got a whole lot drunker: In addition to the April three martini lunch at Scala Bistro, all this month FiDi Italian spot Palio D'Asti (640 Sacramento at Montgomery) is upping the ante with their April Tax Relief Special: lunchtime martinis (Stoli or Beefeater) for $1 each, along with bargain basement prices on foie gras ($10.99). You can't beat that with a fat-engorged duck liver. (via Thrillist)
-- B.B.
As an already coffee-obsessed city, It will certainly be interesting to see San Francisco's reaction to the latest phase of Starbucks' reinvention. Pike Place Roast is being billed as a new, reinvented drip coffee "freshly roasted, hand-scooped, freshly ground and brewed with shorter hold times," which will presumably replace the standard burnt rocket fuel flavor with a smoother (gasp!) more drinkable cup of coffee. I can't help but wonder how much attention the Starbucks braintrust has been paying to the widely-covered, supposed Blue Bottle drip coffee renaissance. Serious Eats gathered some initial reactions to the Pike Place Roast from a store in Rosslyn, Virginia and returned with a very mixed bag.
-- B.B.
Remember that old assertion that you're supposed to drink eight glasses of water a day for good health? The so-called the 8x8 rule -- eight glasses of eight ounces -- is currently undergoing a classic case of myth-busting after an editorial in the Journal of the American Society for Nephrology (PDF) basically calls the idea an unfounded old wive's tale. Slate digs further, seeking the genesis of the 8x8 myth and comes up with evidence dating back to a 1796 German text, with various stops along the way, including this particularly amusing instance from 1900:
"By 1900, the New York Evangelist reported that a women's association on the Lower East Side was being instructed by a Dr. Vinton that one needed to ingest "at least eight glasses of water a day" and take "four times as much water as food." (Incidentally, the girls were also told that it was dangerous to get one's feet wet, that it wasn't good to "wear many skirts," and that their brains were "soft like jelly.")"
-- B.B.
