Gotta hand it to him: Sure, we're only halfway through September, but we're ready to cede Eater's Paolo the award for best score of the month. The catch in question: a tweet by former NY Times resto critic Frank Bruni (in town to flog his used-to-be-a-total-fatty memoir) on, presumably, the morning after a meal at Zuni and its roast chicken with bread salad, Number One on 7x7's list of "100 Things to Dry Before You Die". Here's Bruni's tweet: The Zuni chicken: as sublimely moist and flavorful as ever. But not sold on the "bread salad." Oddly shaped clumps of flinty dryness. Well, those "oddly shaped clumps" result from tearing the bread into bits -- something about creating more surface area for browning than if they'd been cut into cubes -- but, sure, who are we to argue with the ex-critic of The Gray Lady?
We should also note that, thanks to the Twitter machine, we know that the critic who couldn't get enough Snickers as a young chubber hasn't entirely lost his appetite for a good snicker. Another Bruni tweet from S.F.: Zipping thru Castro, en route to Noe Valley, there it was, a "new" manicure place, mischievously named . . . Hand Job. Don't know about you, but we'd list that as Number One on our list of things everyone should try before they die. And we're not talking manicures. Kapeesh?
All the same, it looks like something you'd enjoy. As part of Pioneers of Change, this month's festival of Dutch design, architecture, and fashion taking place on Governor's Island, just a free seven-minute ferry haul from Manhattan, Droog, an Amsterdam-based design lab, along with a gang of independent designers, stylists, and food-centric artists too long and Dutch-sounding to list by name, is presenting Go Slow. This project was conceived as a rejoinder to an increasingly fast-moving society where the special, quiet details of products and processes often go unnoticed. Thus, at the installation's Go Slow Café, the menus are embroidered and tea bags sewn while you wait for the kettle to whistle. You wear slippers. Dishes made with produce pulled from the local garden are served in massive helpings; those prepared with ingredients flown in from faraway locales come in progressively miniscule portions -- from greens grown on site, to cheese from Tennessee, ham from Kentucky, walnuts from Chile, olives from Turkey, butter from Russia, lychees from China, and finally, ridiculously, stardust. San Franciscans, you get the idea. Curiously, to literally embody the super-Slow Food-iness of this endeavor, cooks and servers at the temporary eatery are senior citizens, presumably because they can't help but chop, stir, and sweetly shuffle through the dining room at a gentle, snail-like pace. As you enter, you're told to imagine you're visiting your grandmother for dinner. Let's just hope she's not this Granny.
And she still loves to rattle those pots and pans. When we arrived at her Cow Hollow home for a little supper this weekend, the table was set with hand-painted Portuguese plates (the ones from Square One), an array of room temperature foods were waiting in their cazuelas alongside pottery jars of freshly made alioli and romesco sauce, and the wine was open and ready to be poured. Joyce, a miracle of organization, grilled large skewered shrimp and asparagus on a stove-top plancha at the last minute, simultaneously sautéeing scallops with almonds and white wine.
We began with chunky hand-chopped gazpacho poured over bread cubes -- as Joyce and one of her guests, Indian chef and restaurateur Suvir Saran (a colleague from shared teaching gigs at the Culinary Institute of America), scoffed at the uniform texture of blended gazpacho -- even, sometimes, strained through muslin! In addition to shrimp and scallops, there were grilled padrone peppers, mushrooms stuffed with chorizo and orange peel, clams cooked with large white beans, a potato and onion tortilla, and a wonderfully fresh-tasting ratatouille-like dish called samfaina.Afterwards there were slices of a homey raspberry-buttermilk cake served with panna cotta. (Credit where credit is due: "It's Delfina's recipe," Joyce said. "Perfect texture, with a touch of lemon juice that makes all the difference.")
The first sign that this wasn't your usual beer event was seeing the liability waiver each attendee had to sign before boarding. Throughout the afternoon, the ship swayed gently back and forth, and chances of injury were everywhere: Spilled beer and rain dampened floors, a wobbly entrance staircase, and ladders leading guests higher and higher on the ship. Organizers yelled at a handful of guests for jumping on some stairs -- we watched to see who would fall to their death or otherwise suffer major injury, but everyone exited safely. Then there were the gals who decided to wear oh-so-fashionable but dangerous high-heeled boots -- cute but silly. It was particularly nice to get called out by more than one brew babe, "Empty glass! Empty glass!" The ladies would then offer a prompt refill to our 8-ounce plastic beer cups. All in all, a very tasty afternoon. And no one died.
The limited menu offers falafel sandwiches and bowls, with fries and quirky bottled soft drinks like Boylan's seltzer from New Jersey. The falafel themselves? Pretty much textural elements, craggy and free-form, like hunks of dislodged popcorn ceiling turned brown and savory. The real focus of Liba's falafel sandwich ($7.50) are the salads, spreads, and relishes that turn it into a kind of handheld mezze platter. You get to pick three
The optional hummus may've been little more than a line of subtext wrapped in tahini bitterness, but Liba's olive-orange relish with thyme (again, optional) was the falafel's spiritual thesis: a rush of salty kalamata tannins that nudges the whole thing into the realm of epic. A tomato cucumber salad (our third option) was all about goodness of the central element: ripe, deep red, and tender, and with lush tomato sweetness. All that, plus a flurry of feta crumbles and a neon-sour dill and cardamom pickle, and with self-serve garnishes like rosemary peanuts and sumac onion relish. We couldn't even taste the smear of chimichurri paste the menu promised would be there.
Good thing the pita bread is thicker than you're used to. Liba owner Gail Lillian sourced it from Hamati Bakery in San Bruno. White and faintly spongy like exceedingly flat focaccia, but with characteristically pita brittleness.Thick sweet potato fries ($3) are sweet and palpy, vaguely crisp, and yet far from flaccid. The taste is all about browning reaction, perfumed with a scattering of the chopped garlic-and-parsley mix known as persillade. Not bad for a San Francisco debut. Liba opens for business in S.F. 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Mon., Wed., and Fri. It appears in Emeryville Tue. and Thu.
Every September, the big bourbon PR teams get it popping in Kentucky. The stereotype of tomato-faced suit-guys with bulbous noses hacking up flesh and pressing the porterhouse at downtown steakhouses to rally support for the state's big export is probably outdated. All the same, this time of year, half the restaurants in Louisville offer special bourbon-flecked menus. Many bars do deals and tastings. Bands even play whiskey benefits. Okay, so maybe they don't, at least overtly, but they should. One thing's for sure: Between September 15 and 20, the internationally renowned Kentucky Bourbon Festival goes down in historic Bardstown, with purveyors both large and small sloshing in from all over the state, local food, and beverage-appropriate entertainment.
San Francisco will host its own grain gala a month later. On October 16, for the West Coast edition of Malt Advocate's WhiskyFest, the Marriott on Fourth Street will turn brown from a swelling and convergence of the entire whiskey diaspora: single malt and blended Scotch, Irish, Tennessee, Japanese, Welsh, and Canadian whiskeys, as well as bourbons from Kentucky. Notice is premature because whiskeyhounds aren't typically noted for their speedy reaction times.
You'll want to get your tickets soon, not just so they don't run out before you wake up and turn on your computer, but because the early-bird pricing ends next week. Snag that and you'll save 15 bucks, which amounts to a discreet bonus bottle of mass-produced, non-artisanal bourbon, which, as Gourmet pointed out six months ago, is what you should be drinking anyway.
