Street map: At Grub Street, local street food agregator Matt Cohen offers a user guide to both Saturday's looming street food festival on Folsom and next weekend's Eat Real in Oakland. His tips go something like this: seek out unusual stuff, go pioneering from vendors you've never heard of, have pity on restaurant chefs trying to flaunt their street cred the way a soccer mom might flaunt a new tramp stamp (okay, we kind of added that harsh spin ourselves -- Cohen's much, much nicer to chefs like Jamie Lauren), and stay loaded. All shrewd advice.
Kitchen philosophe: At Bay Area Bites, read new SFoodie contributor Andrew Simmons' pithy take on Julie & Julia. A taste: Following a recipe is like having a conversation with convention across time and, maybe, depending on how crazy you are, the person who devised it. Like aspics, recipes can be shaky propositions; they're not infallible. For a variety of reasons, they don't always work the way they're supposed to; they require the flexibility, improvisation, and intuition only continued evolution through personal experience can provide. Think we heard Rachael Ray say something like that once.
| Tequila Photos/Flickr |
| Reposado tequilas on the bar at Tommy's. |
Nowadays you can enjoy margaritas any way you please, frozen, up, on the rocks, tarted up with strawberries and agave nectar, you name it. The classic local dispensary is Tommy's (5929 Geary at 23rd, 387-4747), purveyor of a zillion or so top-shelf tequilas, but if you want to mix up a pitcher yourself for a festive family gathering, get ahold of Tommy's excellent margarita mix (available in the refrigerator case at PlumpJack, the Jug Shop, Bi-Rite, Andronico's, and other classy grocery stores), mix it up with your favorite tequila, and serve on the rocks. For easy, tasty frozen margaritas, pour a can of frozen limeade in a blender half-filled with ice, fill the empty can two-thirds of tequila and one-third of Triple Sec, add to the blender, and mix it up to your desired consistency. Or for a more classic margarita experience, combine one part lime juice, one part Triple Sec, and three parts tequila in an ice-filled cocktail shaker, mix well, and strain into a chilled, salt-rimmed cocktail glass with a slice of lime. Still tastes terrific.
| Brooksopher/Flickr |
| Chris Kronner: Incorporating dishes from the recent Bruno's pop-ups. |
A tweaked Bar Tartine (561 Valencia at 16th St.) reopens for dinner next Tuesday with an entirely revamped menu steeped in classic Northern California comfort cooking and with an emphasis on shared entrees. New executive chef Chris Kronner told SFoodie the menu is a collaboration with proprietors Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt, owners also of Tartine Bakery & Café (600 Guerrero at 18th St.).
Kronner said many dishes have been tested over the past few weeks at Robertson and Prueitt's house. "We're just tying to make the food more reflective of the style of the bakery, sophisticated but very approachable," said the 26-year-old chef, who's known Robertson and Prueitt since he was 19 and living in an apartment above Tartine Bakery. "It's just kind of a menu that we would all be very interested in going out and paying for."
Under Jason Fox, whose last night was Saturday, Bar Tartine offered moderate portions with finely hewn flavors and a sort of miniaturist's eye for detail. Kronner has a more straightforward style that would seem to fit diners' current interest in value and fundamental comfort cooking. The former chef of Serpentine and Slow Club recently ran the kitchen at Good Evening Thursdays at Bruno's, a weekly pop-up restaurant that ended July 30. Bar Tartine's new menu includes a couple of dishes from the Good Evening dinners, including a Prather Ranch burger and filet mignon with bone marrow.
The burger will be on a brioche bun from Tartine Bakery, part of a greater collaboration between the two Tartines. The menu will also include a few recipes from Robertson's soon-to-publish bread book, including a walnut-fig anchoïade. There'll be what Kronner called "large-format entrees," too, dishes designed to share, such as a chicken cooked in cast iron and a large grilled rib-eye. "We got some really gorgeous rib racks from Marin Sun Farms that we're dry-aging ourselves," the chef said.
There'll be an emphasis on the micro-local, too, courtesy of some 30 varieties of salad greens and herbs grown in a backyard at 18th Street and Guerrero by urban gardener Brooke Budner.
Prices keep to the moderate range, with most entrees clocking in between $16 and $24. The filet with bone marrow is priced at $28. Bar Tartine will be open for dinner Tues. through Sun. (closed Mon.), with brunch on Sat. and Sun.
| wallyg/Flickr |
This week, Chronicle reviewer-in-chief Michael Bauer made no bones about championing Wexler's, a smoke-centric restaurant that opened in June in an old converted Financial District firehouse. He predicted purists would "cringe" at the buzzed newcomer's attempt to elevate barbecue to the realm of "oversized white plates" and fancy cocktails. He shouldn't worry; they won't, because Wexler's isn't purely, by construct, a barbecue restaurant, just what sounds like a very good one, inspired by a number of tweaked and twisted Southern signifiers -- like beans, bourbon, and buttermilk, as well as barbecue -- rendered into a cohesive, upscale whole.
Our own Meredith Brody kicked off her laudatory review of Wexler's with a little 'cue context: "It's easy to imagine the earliest form of cooking -- throwing meat onto a wood fire, from which it emerges smoky and charred -- evolving into what we now celebrate as barbecue, with all its attendant rituals."
Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, the director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda, wants to take it a step further. To him, barbecue is not merely an ancient rite -- and, as we know it best, a Southern cultural treasure -- ripe for fusion-y fiddling; it is a key, perhaps the key, to understanding ourselves. In his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Wrangham comes to the finger-licking conclusion that humanity's greatest leap came, not from learning to farm, or make tools, but a little over two million years ago, when habilines ("the missing link" between apes and humans) first discovered the pleasures of flame-bathed meat -- barbecue in its earliest, least prissy incarnation.
| pbo 31/Flickr |
| Yup, the lights are still on. |
Maybe you haven't even thought about Perry's in years. Not only is it still serving onion soup, Cobb salad, sautéed petrale sole meunière, and weekend eggs Benedict at the original location (1944 Union at Laguna), but a second Perry's (155 Steuart at Mission) opened on the Embarcadero last November.
Anyway, let the 40th anniversary celebrations begin! Tonight marks the beginning of four days of festivities, with a reunion party for Perry's workers over the years (famously including Brian of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, who was a Perry's waiter). For the next two nights, count on celebrity bartenders -- Willie Brown! Carmen Policy! Dwight Clark! (we hear the last two have something to do with football) -- and food and drink promotions, including a 12-ounce New York, regularly $29.95, priced at $19.69 (get it?), and half-price bottles of wine. This Sunday, August 23, Union Street between Buchanan and Laguna will be closed off for an afternoon block party, featuring live music and outdoor BBQ, priced between $6 -8, open to the public.
| Hana Gomoku: Sushi rice with kaiware, shiitake, green bean, carrot, lotus root, tofu pouch, yam cake, hijiki, burdock, broccolini, daikon, cauliflower, and zucchini. |
He created this dish as part of an all-bacon meal requested by a local team of roller derby chicks, something you can fairly easily bake up on Sunday morning and have ready in time for the program's 1 p.m. start.
Brian Boitano's Bacon Corn Muffins with Savory Cream Cheese Frosting
Yield: 24 mini muffins
Prep time: 35 minutes
Cook Time: 22 minutes
For the muffins:
8 strips bacon
Nonstick cooking spray
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons brown sugar
3/4 cup milk
1 egg
3 tablespoons butter, melted
1 tablespoon reserved bacon fat
For the frosting:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon hot sauce
1 bunch chives, sliced
Equipment you'll need:
2 (24-count) nonstick mini muffin tins
A disposable pastry bag
| Photo by Rick via Flickr Creative Commons |
| Buffalo Wings |
9. Buffalo Wings
Anchor Bay
Buffalo, New York
There are a number of creation myths for buffalo wings, the ur-bar-food combo of fried wings coated in hot sauce, served with carrot and celery sticks and blue cheese dressing. We go with the one that places their origins in Teressa Bellissimo's Anchor Bay bar kitchen late on Friday night in 1964. Since then, millions upon millions of wings have been fried to feed hungry drinkers busy getting fried themselves.
| Photo via kellyskornertavern.com |
| Irish Nachos |
Let's do lunch:
Get something a tad more soul-warming than your usual grab 'n' go California rolls. SF Weekly restaurant critic Meredith Brody advises the garlic soup with shrimp, bacon, bread, and egg and a tomato tart at Piperade, 1015 Battery (at Green), 391-2555.
Drink therapy:
It's where the A-gays drink, and with two-for-one cocktails (4-8 p.m.) and a free food spread, it's D-list affordable: Trigger, 2344 Market (at 16th St.), 551-2582.
Get a wedding-style buzz: Munch on $2 bites and buck oysters as you suck down $5 drinks (5-7:30 p.m.), and once you're good and hammered, top it off with $1 champagne (9-10 p.m.) at 5A5 Steak Lounge, 244 Jackson (at Front), 989-2539.
