It's May, that happy season of blooming honeysuckle and brilliant sunshine, the perfect time to hop a ferryboat to Sausalito and enjoy the year's most intoxicating weather. Just make sure to keep yourself properly fueled during your day in the country. The North Bay's best seafood venue has to be Fish, where the chowder is fragrant with Madeira, linguica, and freshly shucked clams, the fish and chips are all about crispness, lightness, and the rich, meaty flavor of Alaskan halibut, and the Saigon salmon sandwich is ribboned with cilantro, jalapeño, and gingery scallons.
Fish's dedication to organic and sustainable seafood of exceptional quality is reflected in its top-flight ceviche, poke, fish tacos, and oysters both barbecued and on the half shell, not to mention the crab roll, the tuna melt, the fried oyster po' boy, the linguini with clams... Maybe the best way to approach Fish is to check the blackboard to see what the restaurant's trawler pulled in that morning. Order whatever strikes your fancy, grilled on an oak plank and served on an Acme torpedo roll with a little bit of tangy housemade tartar sauce and a pile of gloriously crunchy shoestring potatoes on the side.
You can sit out on the deck overlooking the bay, there's Guinness and Anchor Steam on tap, and if you feel like doing your own grilling, the attached market sells the freshest fish you'll find anywhere. Cash only. Caveat: Despite its rustic counter-service picnic-table setting, Fish's prices tend towards the exorbitant.
Let's do lunch:
SF Weekly food critic Meredith Brody recommends checking out the pelmeny and stuffed cabbage at Cinderella Bakery & Restaurant (436 Balboa near Sixth Ave.), 751-9690.
Drink therapy:
Nobody can drink like Aussies. And while they might know diddly about America's favorite pastime, the folks at down-under-themed South restaurant are certainly game: South's baseball season happy hour offers $5 bar bites and beers and $6 wines (even on non-game days), 3-6:30 p.m. South 330 Townsend #101 (near Fourth St.), 974-5599.
Halfsy Hour at Zinnia restaurant's bar and lounge features half-price specialty cocktails, wines by the glass, and premium brewskis. Continue the cutesy theme by ordering halfsy portions from chef Sean O'Brien's din-din menu. Zinnia 500 Jackson (at Montgomery), 956-7300.
Livin' the life:
It's night two of Sicilian cooking maven Fabrizia Lanza's swing through the Bay Area. Tonight, Lanza (in collaboration with David Tanis) rolls up her sleeves to cook downstairs at Chez Panisse. Think bucatini con le sarde and spezzatine di agnello. But unless you've got $125 (the price includes wine) and, um, a rezzie, you'll be stuck merely imagining them. Chez Panisse 1517 Shattuck (near Vine), Berkeley; 510-548-5525.
Where: Victor's Coffee Shop, 2166 Palou (at Industrial)
Notes: Victor, pictured in the sign, wandered out to the sidewalk just after we snapped this pic. "If you get rich from your picture," he said, "remember to give me some of the money!"
Lucas, 31, is an unlikely baker. In 1997, he was a starving accounting student at SF State. "My friend jokingly told me to make some cookies," Lucas told SFoodie. "I went ahead and ran without looking back." Before long, Lucas was involved in serious cookie production out of his apartment, loading up the trunk of his car to make deliveries. Sam Zanze, the cheesecake maker, was an early mentor. Deliciously chewy, caramel-sweet Toffee Chip are one of Lucas' best sellers. Ditto the oatmeal-raisin, made with oats sourced from Giusto's.
The Valencia shop is Lucas' first. Like everything about Lucas, it seems to succeed through skin-of-the-teeth perseverance. Take the décor, rows of Straus Creamery milk bottles lining narrow alcoves along the back wall. Two days before the shop's grand opening, when the tchotchkes ordered for the shelves hadn't turned up, Lucas' architect had an inspiration: Milk bottles, filled with white paint. Lucas himself thinks his success is less serendipity and more design. "One of my customers said, 'Maybe you're good at baking because you're a mathematician,'" Lucas said. On Sunday, he seemed to be calculating just how long that batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies would take.
Anthony's Cookies 1417 Valencia (near 25th St.), 655-9834
Source: Xiong Farm, Fresno
Wiry, curly pea tendrils come from the same plants peas are plucked from, says Christine Farren, events manager at CUESA, the nonprofit that runs the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. If you're lucky, the shoots will have edible flowers still clinging to them, a sweet (and sweet-smelling) bonus. But act fast, since pea season is withering.
Treat 'em like other greens, only use a lighter touch. These days at Bix, exec chef Bruce Hill serves them under roasted pork roulade: pork shoulder marinated and wrapped in pork belly, then slow-roasted for 10 hours. The meat's sliced and served over stone-ground polenta and the tendrils, sautéed not with extra-virgin, but with a mild olive oil. "The taste is so delicate, a heavier oil can easily overpower them," Hill said.
Last week was Sexy Dishes Week, and, since SFoodie was feeling rather fetching (and sponsor TasteTV kindly set up some opportunities for us to nibble on offerings from its new Sexy Dishes book), we decided to head for the restaurants closest to water.
Sam's Chowder House (4210 Cabrillo Hwy N at Capistrano in Half Moon Bay) welcomed us with an awesome sunset as well as their two sexy dishes, a simple ahi tuna poke that tasted as good as it did the last time we visited, and a summery ceviche of rock shrimp and bay scallops. We were right to then order a bowl of the namesake chowder, made New England style but lighter and more flavorful than most, as well as some hearty gumbo with Dungeness crab. But we held back from slurping them down, in order to save some shred of room for the entrees we shared, a platter of mixed seafood (fried nice and crisp) and the properly buttery lobster roll, named by the Today show as one of the best sandwiches in America. (And we know that Al Roker does know something about sandwiches.)
Skenes gigged as exec chef at Chez TJ in Mountain View before Michael Mina recruited him to open Stonehill Tavern in the OC. He slogged north to work on another Mina project, but caught the entrepreneurial bug. Thank the Great Recession for giving the 29-year-old chef the idea to bring farm-to-table street food to SF. Skenes was finalizing plans for a sit-down place (he'd been looking downtown and in Mission Bay), when the economy curdled, souring his brick-and-mortar dreams.
When it finally rolls into its atrium space downtown and starts dishing out things like Cava-cured salmon, Carte415 will be only the latest flavor in the ingredient-driven street-food trend that's stirred fierce buzz in town (think Kitchenette, and the phantom Magic Curry Kart and Crème Brulee Cart). Skenes seemed almost thankful that his sit-down plans got scrapped. "It's refreshing to have great food and not be in a formal dining room," he told SFoodie. "Even as chefs, we like to eat at a barstool or in a lounge."
Sushi Rock (1608 Polk at Clay; 614 Pine at Grant) offers more than a dozen creative rolls, many with names that don't seem to logically correlate with its ingredients. For example, neither we nor our server have the ability to tell you why the chefs have named a shrimp tempura roll topped with avocado, tobiko, and banana slices the Sweet 16 ($14.95). We do know for sure that it has an interesting taste that might split your table: While we find the banana to be a subtle and sweet component that doesn't overpower everything else, our dining companion on a recent visit contorted her face in absolute displeasure at its inclusion.
If the fate of the world hangs on a wiener, put us down for a dozen. But a Saturday visit to week-old Let's Be Frank left us sweating Earth's future.
The Marina hot dog joint is the first storefront venue for LBF, whose carts already ply SF and LA, a project of Larry Bain and Sue Moore. Mad props to Bain and Moore for reinventing the frankfurter along Slow Food lines, but the results contain a fatal flaw: the star ingredients just don't satisfy. Sure, the casing around the grass-fed-beef Frank Dog ($5.50) had delightful pop, but its murky filling lacked the creamy texture and swagger of garlic and spices that makes a frankfurter a frankfurter. A Brat Dog ($5.50), made with heritage pork, likewise tasted flat-out weenie. And sorry, guys, girth totally matters. The sausages' diameter skewed more Slim Jim than Ball Park -- they seemed lost in their voluminous (and slightly rubbery) Acme buns.
Ordinarily we'd say Fine, Americans eat too damn much protein anyway. But something as iconic as a hot dog has to be convincingly hot doggy, or we're just not buying -- even when principle tells us it's the right thing to do.
San Francisco writer and occasional NPR contributor Andy Raskin has written a memoir called The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life. Raskin realized that his cryptic book title didn't exactly describe its contents, so he took to the streets of San Fran to ask citizens how they think ramen helped him fall in love. The resulting video is way cute, as people pontificate on everything from how ramen signifies a simpler value system to altogether more primal observations.
"You had the ramen," says one man. "She had the hot water!"
Raskin will share the answer to his burning question at the book's official launch party tomorrow night, 7:30 p.m., at Booksmith (1644 Haight at Clayton). Hayes Valley's True Sake will pour sake tastings at the free 90-minute event.
