Underbelly schtick: line cook goes all Tony, sloshing around in the brackish waters of restaurant after-hours. You work till long after anyone with a normal life has wiped the drool from the pillow and powered off Chelsea Lately, drinking brown juice into the crack of early. We've been here before, but line cook has an eye for the vivid:
Your grill guy, who already has a nasty habit of a liter of Pepsi and blunt to the head in the parking lot before work starts making frequent trips to bathroom during service. His eyes are alert, but his jaw and edgy demeanor tell a different tale. The food runner that cant remember table numbers was up until 5am with him doing coke, and they're both starting to make your evening very difficult. Manuel, your fastest sautee cook has started asking for booze mid shift to quell his hangover, and by the end of the night everyone has had a sip. Two months later you're dumber, slower, and fat. But fuck it, because you're a real cook, right?He wraps it up with a moral, a plea for professionals to practice moderation or risk a future on the omelet station at Denny's. But even if you have an aversion to morals, it's a nice read.
Don't count on it.
SF Food Wars Mini Cupcake Clash promises to be just as pointy-elbow brutal as the Mac Battle Royale w/ Cheese. Today, SFFW sent out a call for entries -- amateurs and professionals alike are welcome to battle (drop an e-mail to heyyou@sffoodwars.com - go to sffoodwars.com first to see what info to include). A potentially nauseating twist: You can enter savories, if you think they'll be irresistible to the judges, who include SFoodie contributor Tamara Palmer and Gobba Gobba Hey's Steven Gdula.
Event tickets ($10) go on sale next Monday, September 28 at noon. Clear your calendar, since you'll have to e-mail pretty much precisely at noon -- only 170 tix are available. They're guaranteed to go like mini cupcakes.
Your task, should you choose to accept it: Zip around the countryside, taking photographs of as many heirloom apple varieties as you can find, noting the farms where you found them. Send RAFT your list of apples, your pictures, and any appropriate recipes, emailing all submissions to raftalliance@slowfoodusa.org.
Your reward for participation: Your name will be entered in a drawing. Ten winners will receive a DVD of the upcoming film The Botany of Desire. The deadline is October 15.
Adobo Roll-O owner Aimee (last name withheld at her request) grew up watching her dad run small Filipino food businesses in SoCal. "It seemed simple, but at the same time there were risks," she told SFoodie, citing possible police raids of unlicensed vendors. At last week's event, Aimee sold out of her pork adobo, which she based on a recipe from the Filipino region of Bicol -- it contained coconut milk, and packed some mild heat via dried chiles. The pork ribs? She sourced them from Whole Foods. "I wanted to get it from Marin Sun Farms, but it was too expensive," she said. "Whole Foods seemed like a good compromise." Indeed.
Selling alongside Adobo Roll-O last week was Theresa from Asian Street Sweets, selling the sticky rice treats she tasted living in the Philippines and Cambodia for a year, filled with either banana or jackfruit. The one we tasted was delicious, full of lush banana sweetness, the rice infused with the rich green taste of banana leaf.
And where there's Oktoberfest, naturally, there's beer. Suppenküche's beer special is called, simply enough, Oktoberfest, available as Hefeweizen or lager, both $4 a half liter or $8 a liter. Indulge during Lunchtoberfest, and you'll probably end up to sloppy to return to the office. Start trying out possible excuses now.
This is the fifth Eat Local Challenge. Committed locavores believe that local sourcing benefits the local farms and producers, and helps bolster family farms and our wider collective agricultural heritage.
Last weekend, we enjoyed our second visit, tearing through a meal that, like many sequels, was bigger and even badder than the inspiring inaugural experience -- a quick bite a year or so ago. Over-ordering is a personal problem we're not afraid to cop to. When mid-afternoon rolls around and we haven't yet eaten anything of substance, we err compulsively on the side of excess. We picked out four dishes and left with a large sack brimming with take-out containers.
The lap patthouk, or tea leaf salad, was an orchestra of edible percussion: hard roasted peanuts, crunchy fried yellow split peas, some other larger, greener legume or pulse, chewy little shrimp-like things, and slippery greens tossed in citrus and spice -- a rattling spread of off-the-wall textures. Matmos could make a whole album sampling the munching of this salad alone. There was also kyat the palatha, wedges of slightly undercooked paratha accompanied by a bowl of salty, rich chicken curry for dipping, se gyet khauk se', oily noodle ribbons and slices of pork saturated with the intense, nutty flavor of perfectly browned garlic whisked from the heat at just the right second, and finally, a goat curry, the weekend special. The curry was chocolate black, thin and murky, pooling around dark hunks of bone-riddled meat like Precambrian swamp water lapping against moss-slicked stones. Reddish oil flamed in a ring around the edge of the sauce, sloshing ominously up the sides of the bowl with each dip of the spoon. Carved into smaller pieces, the goat was dark red on the inside, stringy yet soft and devilishly gamy. We gnawed, slurped, and thought of oil spills and (weirdly) Macbeth. There was something more than slightly evil about it -- as if it were the product of a dark rite. Antacids -- the feeble pedestrian "good" magic -- were no match.
We get a little scared when we open the fridge and see the leftovers still burbling away through a cylinder of fogged-up plastic. It was really good. We're going to eat it, we swear -- one of these days.
Yellow Pa Taut 15 Boardman Place (at Bryant), 701-8188
It's probably hopeless to expect food that sings at a place where the talent does, and Levende Lounge successor Coda (1710 Mission at Duboce) doesn't disappoint. Sure, the owners have distilled the right jazz club flavor in the exposed brick, banquettes, neo-noir art, and mood lighting. But, says restaurant critic Matthew Stafford in Wednesday's SF Weekly, the food can leave you feeling kind of blue. Like a CD jumbled up with money tracks and filler, certain dishes need serious rehearsal time, while others swing surprisingly hard. Read Stafford's review later today at SFWeekly.com to find out which dishes are downloadable, and which deserve to die. In the meantime, score a preview in the extended excerpt (after the jump).
