Come here and say that: On Saturday, Grub Street New York reported on an Extreme Tag Team talk with Anthony Bourdain and David Chang from the New York Wine & Food Festival. Grub Street called it Ten Things Anthony Bourdain and David Chang Hate. You know Chang: The chefpreneur of, like, five Manhattan restaurants under the Momofuku franchise: Noodle Bar, Ssam Bar, Milk Bar, Ko. Grub Street's distillation went like this:
Cupcakes: "I hate fuckin' cupcakes," said Chang. San Francisco: "Fuckin' every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate. Do something with your food," said Chang.Now, we know that San Francisco is artifice shy. The ingredients here are so good, local defenders say, all a chef really has to do is source the best stuff and get the hell out of the way. We're not so sure. Daniel Patterson proves both the necessity of patient sourcing, and how beautiful produce can turn luminous in a chef's hands. By contrast, a meal we had last spring at Noodle Bar was really kind of meh -- Out the Door on a bad day would've been better. And the overly sugary soft serve ice cream and greasy cookies we scarfed at Chang's Milk Bar one night? Thanks for making our stomach feel shitty for an entire evening, Escoffier.
Actually, Chang's dig reminds us of one ex-A16 chef Nate Appleman made about S.F. early last month, in an interview with the New York Times: "In San Francisco the audience is easy. You put tripe in a bowl and tell them it's from a humanely raised cow and they're going to eat it." Local slapdowns came fast. S.F. blogger line cook took a tweet-shot at none other than the napoleon of Momofuku: "In NY you can put a bowl of anything in front of someone, tell them David Chang made it, and they'll eat it." Snap!
We've noticed a disturbing trend at our local bakeries. Maybe it's because we're based in San Francisco, but "geeky cakes" seem to be on the rise, specifically ones that involve iPhones.
Major fans of Web sites like Cake Wrecks and Cake Failure; we sifted through so many awful specimens we finally amassed a sizable failed cake collection.
Word to the wise: iPhones are particularly difficult to render, especially in cake format. Here's an example of one done particularly well, from local baker Debbie Does Cakes (yeah we know).
Raised in Grand Rapids, Mich., Kiino graduated from Amherst College in the mid-'90s with a degree in geology. Though she worked as an environmental geologist in Chicago and Boston, truth is, she was fixing for a job in the kitchen -- even, as it turns out, a job with no paycheck attached. In 1997, Kiino went to work as an unpaid volunteer at East Coast Grill, Chris Schlesinger's fire-happy New American place in Cambridge, Mass.
A year later, she moved to San Francisco and found work at LuLu. In '99, she moved up Delfina, Craig Stoll's mashup of Northern Italian culinary gestures and Chez Panisse sourcing. Kiino eventually became chef de cuisine. While there, he stage'd at Da Delfina and Da Caino, Tuscan restaurants that are actually, like, in Tuscany. By 2007, she'd left Delfina, kicked around a bit at Boulette's Larder, Rubicon, the French Laundry, and Patterson's Coi. Il Cane Rosso opened in July -- the name comes from Kiino's red-brown dog, a three-legged rescue mutt named Cody. In our Q & A with Kiino, she talks about her passion for pickling, argues that music in the kitchen is a mistake, and suggests why the cupcake trend might be way past stale.
SFoodie: What definitive moment made you realize you had to be in the kitchen?
Kiino: I think it was my first real restaurant job working at the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass. More than a single moment, I realized over the course of a couple months that I loved being part of a fast-moving, well trained kitchen, looking out to our customers eating the food that we had just cooked. It was a really amazing experience to make a plate of food and then have an immediate and direct connection to someone eating it. I loved the fact that I was able to make the same dish over and over, and each time was a chance to make it better.
To suit that discerning, value-hungry audience, Michelin put together a list of its famously anonymous inspectors' favorites for good value under the rubric of Bib Gourmand. This year's guide added 18 eateries to the current list, to make a total of 62. Michelin unveiled the list today online at famouslynonymous.com. Newcomers include Flour + Water and Dosa and the East Bay's Camino and Picán. Funny, we think of those last two as kinda pricey. Hmmm -- could it be that Michelin inspectors are different than ordinary diners?
Into every list a little sadness must fall. Missing from this year's lineup are 11 favorites from last year, including Espetus, Namu, Poleng Lounge, and South Park Café.
One red flag that has us both shrugging and shuddering is the use of sugar as the main ingredient. Sugar is known to cause nasty and troubling yeast infections, a fact that might just give a whole new meaning to the Linger label. The lady mints are made in New Jersey by Admints, who also manufacture regular mints for trade show giveaways. And just like regular breath mints, the manufacturer promises a certain longevity: "Linger is shaped for comfort during insertion and use, and is formulated to dissolve slowly, so the effects last and last." Frankly, we'll take the dated feminine hygiene images of women walking on the beach and listening to soft music over that kind of Linger-ing feeling. Any day.
Otherwise the burgers are, as a hostess told us, close cousins. The same grilled onions, house-made pickles, secret sauce, and toasted Acme bun. At lunch, the burger comes with fresh potato salad, and you can get it to go or perch at a table in the Fish & Farm dining room (sans servers), part of the restaurant's American Box lunch service. At dinner, there are fries on the plate, you can add Hobbs bacon or a fried farm egg for an extra two bucks, wash it down with a cocktail, wine, or beer, and command anything else you'd like from Fish & Farm's menu -- maybe six oysters on the half shell ($15), mac 'n' cheese with ham hocks ($6), or a chocolate peanut butter mousse ($9) that comes with chocolate ice cream, salted caramel sauce, and peanut brittle.
Having sampled both day and night burgers, SFoodie knows they're juicy indeed. The lunch version goes down a soft and succulent treat; but if you want a charred crust, you're better off with the bigger, nighttime version (and ask for it that way -- blackened). The choice is yours.Fish & Farm 339 Taylor (at O'Farrell), 474-3474. American Box lunch takeway: Mon-Fri, 10:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Dinner: Tue-Wed, 5-10 p.m.; Thu-Sat, 5-11 p.m. Closed Sun-Mon.
Yesterday's fundraiser caps off a handful of benefit dinners (including one last night at Il Cane Rosso). The farm has also received direct donations. "As a very rough estimate, I'd say the events, all told, will raise roughly $30,000," Powell said, adding that the figure means Soul Food Farm met its funding target. Last month a raffle organized by Bi-Rite in San Francisco raised a little over $10,000 for the farm, which lost pasture, chicks, and a pair of chicken houses in the Sept. 3 fire.
The prize that saw the most furious bidding was a pitch lunch with Chronicle Books cookbook editor Bill LeBlond. Dinner for two at the kitchen table at Chez Panisse also drew some stiff competition (the winning bid? $800).
Chava's has been back for several years. The current location -- Mission Street between 24th and 25th -- is livelier but possibly problematic. With La Taqueria posted up on the same stretch of pavement, potential customers may be lured away -- which is a shame, because Chava's is no taqueria. Last week, sick once more, and despondent that a certain local chain of Chinese restaurants wouldn't deliver a $15 order, we stopped in to pick up some soup. As we waited, a woman selling flores whisked past our table, cackling into her cell phone between pitches. A man in a half-buttoned blue cowboy shirt and a gigantic white hat ate birria and sipped a glass of Inglenook Chardonnay at the counter.
The cashier gave us chips, salsa, and guacamole, and -- after 15 minutes -- a large sack of various parcels to take home. We walked back to the apartment and excavated: one quart-sized plastic carton containing tomato-flecked broth; cylinders of unpeeled carrot; potato hunks; squash; about a third of a chicken's worth of meat and bones; one small cup of rich, seasoned rice; three foil-wrapped corn tortillas, warm and fluffy; one foil packet of chopped raw onion, lemon wedges, and cilantro; and a really tiny cup of a potent-smelling rust-colored compôte. The onions softened in the broth; the lemon cut through the salt and gave the chile heat a tangy new dimension. After a few tentative dabs, we poured in all of the compôte. Thirty minutes later, we limped toward bed, our head bathed in a soft nimbus of radiating warmth. The rice, most of the chicken, and a tortilla headed to the fridge -- only to re-emerge eight hours later, for breakfast.
Chava's 2839 Mission (at 24th St.), 282-0283
