To catch a d-bag: Tim Carman of Washington City Paper calls Eater a dick for its initiative to unmask food critics. Eater National's Greg Morabito, you see, has this ongoing obsession he calls "To Catch A Critic," in which he urges readers and restaurateurs to bust professional food critics (who operate anonymously) by publishing their pics. (A certain former Eater SF editor obliged locally, by the way, with gotcha photos of Chron's Michael Bauer.) Morabito:
Somehow, a fair amount of critics have successfully avoided having their photographs made public. So with that in mind, we've assembled a handy guide to spotting some of the country's biggest anonymous restaurant critics, including the best possible photos we could find.He reveals pics of the New York Times' Sam Sifton, the Washington Post's Tom Sietsema, even Patty Unterman of the Examiner. Carman's response? An open letter hot with irony:
As for surviving a first year that coincided with the Great Recession, Mason said it's been a challenge. "It's hard to change the menu every day, hard to think of things to put between bread." Still, he said, he feels blessed to have made it.
Pal's Takeaway In Tony's Market, 2751 24th St. (at Hampshire), 203-4911
As for Ideal, it's last day is Friday, and it's uncertain whether the owners will seek a new location.
This morning, the Associated Press revealed that Mission: Readiness, a group made up of retired Army, Navy, and Air Force officers, is fearful that school lunches have overstuffed America's youth to the point where too few of them can meet the military's standards for physical fitness. Weight issues are now the number one reason why recruits don't make the cut. The group's new report says nearly 27 percent of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are too overweight to join the military.
Raised in Michigan, Hoogerhyde traces her food love to London, where she took post-college jobs, first in a pub, later in a restaurant. She made the move to S.F. in 1994, landed jobs at Gordon Biersch and as front-of-house manager at Slow Club. Hoogerhyde was Walker's assistant pastry chef at 42 Degrees. When the place tanked, Hoogerhyde and Walker launched their own business, baking sweets for the case at Bi-Rite Market, including cookies and the now-famous chocolate pot de crème. "We were renting kitchen space from another bakery," Hoogerhyde recalls. "After three years we were like, 'We just need to find our own home.'"
Ice cream was the last thing on their minds.
It was raucous in there, but the service was still markedly friendly as we got down to ordering. Some clearly nice meat in the pork sisig nachos ($9) was obscured by distinctively icky fake cheese sauce, and the sweet potato fries ($7) had a pleasing crispness but cost about twice as much as they should, but there was one item that proved to be a solid value for taste and price. The Mercury Dawg ($5), a bacon-wrapped, kimchi-laden hot dog, could have used even more of the magical Sriracha sauce on top for us heat heathens, but still made its spicy, vinegared point well. It hasn't made us swear off street food that's actually from the street, but it's a good option for the wee hours.
Happy Endings Kitchen at Mercury Lounge 1582 Folsom (at 12th St.), 551-1582; Fri.-Sat. 10 p.m.-2 a.m.
Don't hurl expensive half-green Mexican cherry tomatoes at us because we stopped by the Whole Foods in Potrero Hill to buy some grass-fed steak and salad fixings. As we approached cautiously, furtively glancing around to see if anyone we knew might be spying on us, we noticed a stack of large brown glass jugs lined up along the front window on the bottom "coffeeshop" floor. Growlers, we thought excitedly, recalling the half-gallons of beer we'd purchased at the Bowery Whole Foods' beer room and sucked down in a Lower East Side alley a few years back. Growlers are king shit in New York City ― at least that's what a January 2010 Times article made clear ― big with Greenpoint hipsters and Park Slope dads alike. If Whole Foods started selling draft brew to-go in New York in 2007, San Francisco should be getting hooked up right about ... now.
Whole Foods rolled out kombucha on tap here at the 2009 Outside Lands festival.
Apparently not. Market trend research probably told some folks over at Whole Foods central command that San Franciscans, despite sharing real estate with some of the country's best indie brewers, would rather drink fermented tea than fresh beer. Yes, that's right ― there's a kombucha bar at Whole Foods.
Stable Cafe 2128 Folsom (at 17th St), 552-1199
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In his serial stew sessions at Gravel & Gold, local food and art raconteur Mark Andrew Gravel has always exhibited an almost startling affection for the bean. Today from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m., he's putting his unrelenting advocacy on display at CCA's San Francisco campus. Bean-In, the brainchild of Gravel and cohorts Sarah Magrish Cline and Natasha Wheat, is a temporary (and free) eatery offering bean-based meals, micro-lectures, and conversations in what Gravel characterizes as an examination of "conviviality, adaptability and agriculture as forms of resistance." The menu? Beans on toast. Chilled bean soup. Bean and bread salad. Bean and vegetable salad.
