Grunt work: Hot Food Porn does a little whipping out and comparing today, in a look at the life of an office cube slave v. that of a restaurant line-cook slave. Here's a peek:
6. What to do when you've got a mild cold or headache:And this:Office: You tell your boss you need to take a sick day and go home or you stay at home and watch 4 hours of shitty TV.
Kitchen: Your ass is at work. Unless you're in a coma, in the hospital or in a funeral, you better be at work that day.
8. What to do when you have free time?Sad; true. First office job we had after more than a decade on a restaurant line? Couldn't believe we were supposed to just kill time sitting and buying crap we knew we'd be returning to Zappos, all while waiting for something -- anythng -- to land in the inbox. And we totally irritated the boss by asking her every 10 minutes, "Sure there's nothing you need?" Though honestly, Tom, our current boss? That never happens now. Swear to god.Office: You browse the internet and update your blog about Kitchen vs. Office life.
Kitchen: Anything except for stand around, lean or doing nothing. Wipe and clean something dumbass.
Expect fresh brews from Lagunitas, Trumer Pils, Linden Street Brewery, Santa Cruz Ale Works, Thirsty Bear, and others, in a giant covered beer hall. Sip away in the biergarten while the kids enjoy their own root beer-filled sippy cups; there's a kids' area with Root Biergarten for them to go wild. An intriguing German-style Homebrew Competition (in conjunction with the Mad Zymurgists Club) is scheduled. Entries were collected in San Leandro, Livermore, and Berkeley last month. Other attractions include music, pub food, and -- because this isn't the early 1900s but it is the Bay Area -- an eco fair.
Marco Polo Italian Ice Cream 1447 Taraval (at 24th Ave.), 731-2833
Next week, when the banquet for SFMOMA's commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of Futurism drops, the approximately 400 attendees will be treated to a spectacle that, in part, will be a repudiation of the very thing it's supposed to honor. As reported in the Chronicle yesterday, the banquet, from the arty food collective OPENrestaurant, will be shower guests with panforte drifting to the floor via parachute, and pass nibbles with wry names designed to take the piss out of America's food industry. The event is called OPENfuture: Spinning Marinetti's Wheels, and promises to be a "clamorous" night of "sounds, smells, and constant motion."
Though the original Futurist Manifesto appeared in 1909, F.T. Marinetti's 1932 Futurist Cookbook is one of the movement's best-known documents. The problem for moma organizers? It glorifies Fascism.
SFMOMA assocuiate curator of public programs Frank Smigiel approached OPENrestaurant's Sam White, Jerome Waag, and Stacie Pierce to engineer the banquet. "At first we were a bit hesitant," White told SFoodie. "The Futurist Cookbook is weirdly pro-war and kind of fascist, a big turn off from what were into. At first we were like, we're not sure. Then we did the research, and saw that a lot of its ideas are fundamental ideas about art and life. It gave us a lot of room to come up with something that's a response." In his day, Marinetti rejected Italian food traditions (he wanted to ban pasta, for instance), anything that smacked of a Romantic, pastoral idyll of food.
Gingerbread with Apple Compôte and Apple Sabayon
Yield: one 9" x 13" pan
For the gingerbread:
1 cup molasses
1 1/2 cups boiling water
1 teaspoon baking soda
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease the sides and bottom of a 9" x 13" pan.
Mix molasses, boiling water and baking soda together in a large bowl. Cool to room temperature. With an electric mixer, beat the butter and brown sugar until light; mix in the egg. Sift together the ginger, cinnamon, flour, and baking powder. Add salt.
In three additions, alternately add dry ingredients and the molasses mixture to the butter mixture. Mix thoroughly after each addition to make sure there are no lumps.
Spread batter into the prepared pan. Bake 30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool before cutting.
On Monday morning, when news of Gourmet magazine's demise surged through tiers of media like a lobster thrashing in a pot of boiling court bouillon, Sachs took action: She opened a Twitter account titled SaveGourmet. A 15-year subscriber to America's iconic food and lifestyle magazine, Sachs is hoping that the force of social networking can - if not raise the Condé Nast publication from the soon-to-be dead - at least carry on what she sees as Gourmet's principles in some other form.
"I would love to be able to say I'm raising a whole bunch of money to buy it," Sachs -- a venture capitalist who lives in Brooklyn -- said. "What I am trying to do is see if there's a way to keep the fundamentals of what Gourmet stood for alive in some way, maybe start a movement like Slow Food." Since Monday, SaveGourmet has amassed more than 600 followers on Twitter. Sachs has also written about her quest on her blog, Chapter XVII. On Wednesday, a brief mention of SaveGourmet made it as far as the New York Times.
"Gourmet struck an amazing balance between the aspirational and the attainable," Sachs said. And despite her hope that vehicles like blogs and Twitter might be able to preserve the spirit of the magazine, Sachs said she'll miss Gourmet's authoritative voice. "The overall sense of what's going on in media content right now, everybody online has an opinion," Sachs said. "I think it's even more valuable to have trusted brands. Gourmet had tested recipes, things you could rely on."
Bill Murray asks in Lost in Translation, "What kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food?" One answer: a restaurant that's both fun and delicious, as in Prime Rib Shabu, which opened 10 days ago in the Inner Richmond. The compact storefront is nicely decorated with gleaming wood, pierced-metal light fixtures, and Asian art, but the real focus is the hot plate at the center of every table.
There are five different shabu meals, or sets: thin-cut rib eye ($16.95), hand-cut extra-marbled rib eye ($18.95), thin-cut lamb shoulder ($17.95), seafood ($17.95), and vegetarian ($9.95). All the dinners come with chicken broth, two kinds of tofu (fresh cubes and dried yuba tubes), two kinds of noodles (fat udon and glassy vermicelli), enoki, organic ton ho (aka tong hao, spiky-leaved chrysanthemum greens), watercress, nappa cabbage, and lettuce, each of which you add to the broth as you like. The table is set with jars of chili oil, satay sauce, and chopped green onions, and Prime Rib Shabu's special fresh sauce (soy-based, with cilantro and jalapeño) arrives with the meats.
