Our favorite morsel from the Web.
Mobile Cuisine Magazine is floating an online poll, for what it's calling the punniest food truck name. There are 10 nominees, culled coast to coast, including L.A.'s Grill Em All, Miami's Miso Hungry, and Baltimore's Juana Burrito. The single San Francisco entry: Chairman Bao. As of 6:39 p.m. PST the L.A. truck Naan Stop was leading (with 133 votes), while the Chairman (16 votes) was tied for third. Ruh-roh: Considering allegations that MobiMunch ― the company that operates the bao truck ― has been accused of, um, being inspired for its name choice, and that the name's been trademarked by somebody else, this could get ugly.
Let's put it this way: We wouldn't want to be Eddie Huang's drywall.
What was it like to live in San Francisco 100 years ago? Apart from the odd lingering quake rubble ― unless you happened to be black, or brown, or a woman, or wanted to keep house with somebody of your own chromosomal makeup ― pretty nice. Probably quite nice at Christmas (assuming you were Christian), with roast geese, spiced cakes, bottles of port, and plenty of fat, crackly cigars.
You can get a taste of the good life circa Christmas 1910 next week at Comstock Saloon, when folks from Drake's Bay will be on hand to shuck oysters, guys from Jacquesson et Fils to pour Champagne, and house chef Carlo Espinas will lay down a four-course, $75 oyster menu, the kind Victorian gentlemen used to call "Lucullan." That includes something named "oysters Victor Hugo," culled from the Hotel St. Francis Cook Book (date-stamped Sep. 23, 1910), "Hangtown salad" (escarole and salt pork with oyster vinaigrette), oyster-stuffed guinea hen, and Epoisses with pickled strawberries.
Tweeds and round-tipped collars are optional, but if you're a gay guy, we strongly suggest holding your boyfriend's hand ― prominently ― for at least part of the meal. Call it justice delayed.
SFoodie's weekly guide to food-crafting gifts for the holidays.
Chances are, unless you have a cultural connection to the Indian subcontinent or U.K., chutney means that jar of Major Grey's you dipped into once when making an experimental Indian meal and then let fester in the fridge door. But chutneys are an extremely diverse family of condiments, used on a daily basis to accent dishes in any Desi household.
Chutneys lend themselves to many winter fruits, so they can make colorful and flavorful seasonal gifts. And just because they're South Asian in origin doesn't mean they won't play well at the holiday table. Their zippy spice and zingy acidity make great foils to all manner of food, especially meats. Take that, Christmas goose!
(Shameless plug: I will be teaching a chutney class at 18 Reasons on Dec. 15 with the lovely Alison McQuade of McQuade's Celtic Chutneys, a true chutney maven if ever there was one.)
With multiple blogs covering new restaurant openings, trends, and gossip with the fervor of Woodward and Bernstein scooping Watergate, local foodies are more than well informed as to what's going in San Francisco's present-day dining scene. But our culinary past? Not so much.
All that changes Saturday with the launch of San Francisco Eats, an exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library's main branch covering roughly 160 years of our gastronomic history. Chief curator Lisa Vestal tells SFoodie the compilation will include upwards of 400 objects, mostly from the library's own collection, including menus, photographs, cookbooks, locally invented cooking gadgets, and a wide variety of ephemera like matchbooks and coasters.
The past year has seen so many high-profile, creative restaurants open that it's been a great time to be a restaurant critic in San Francisco. But there's as much sifting to do as writing. Over the past few months, I've eaten my way through a long string of places that I couldn't imagine devoting a 1,000-word review to. Zaab Thai Cuisine, the subject of a post yesterday, was one ― apart from its salads, of course, which were definitely worth a mention on the blog. Here are four more restaurants that got passed over. (As they demonstrate, I was hunting for new Cantonese restaurants, a search that continues ― hit me up if you have a good tip).
Brother Seafood Restaurant
1830 Irving (at 19th Ave.), 661-8033
The pitch: Affordable neighborhood Cantonese seafood restaurant.
What I liked: I keep looking for more neighborhood Cantonese places with the same quality level as Hakka Restaurant (which serves Hakka and Cantonese food, both beautifully prepared). This three-month-old restaurant, a spinoff of New Hing Lung, has a huge selection of wo choy (set-price) menus as well as Hong Kong-style noodles and a number of interesting dishes like coffee pork ribs and steamed fresh frogs in lotus leaves. Four of us ordered the $68 wo choy menu, and the table was covered in plates, some stacked two high ― everything from clams in black bean sauce to mustard greens to battered, fried spare ribs.
Why I didn't review it: The quality of every dish was about the same level as Western diner food: homey, functional, one-note. If I lived around the corner, I might stop in now and again for a couple of plates, but none of the dishes stood out, and I couldn't work up the excitement to return.
Michael Recchiuti has signed on as an added attraction for a Saturday screening of Kings of Pastry, a documentary charting the pressures of competing in a prestigious competition called the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (M.O.F.). The San Francisco chocolatier, a formally trained and (we can confirm) skilled pastry chef, will conduct a post-screening question-and-answer session. Some of Recchiuti's chef friends are featured in the film, and he should know what it's like to prepare for a prestigious competition like the M.O.F. And since it would just be cruel if he didn't, Recchiuti promises to come armed with plenty of chocolate samples.
Kings of Pastry Screening with Michael Recchiuti Q&A
When: Sat., Dec. 11, 7:10 p.m.
Where: Balboa Theatre, 3630 Balboa (at 38th Ave.), 221-8184
Cost: $10
Sad, but 2010 was a dismal year for television. The Jersey Shore kids came back for a second season with a new communal smush room in the same year we lost Lost, 24, and Ugly Betty. But the world of food television was much sweeter, and altogether nuttier. This was the year Cooking Channel joined the Food Network family, Top Chef got its just desserts, and the year SFoodie is counting down the 10 best moments in food TV.
10. Papalote burrito Throwdown with Bobby Flay
When Bobby Flay came to San Francisco to challenge Papalote brothers Miguel and Victor Escobedo to a throwdown, we easily threw down. Bobby busted out an all-green burrito (chile verde, green rice, guac, and super-lame white beans in apple-green vinaigrette, all loosely bracketed in dried-out-looking tortillas) to compete with the Triple Threat Burrito. Sistah puh-lease, S.F. is the Queen of Green and no color can come close to the original Triple Threat, the Escobedos' shrimp, carne asada, and chicken burrito. We prevailed, duh, and filleted Bobby Flay could only say, "Don't try to do some newfangled burrito when you're in the Mission District of San Francisco."
The SFoodie Advent Calendar counts down the days before Christmas/Nondenominationalwinterholiday, one treat at a time.
The cold and rain of December always finds us fighting a losing battle against salty-fatty cravings. Maybe it's just our bodies insulating for winter, but we still don't appreciate the extra pounds, and Boccalone's holiday mortadella with black truffles ― available through the end of the month ― isn't helping.
A carnivore's fantasy version of fruitcake, Chris Cosentino's fat- and pistachio-studded mortadella gets a festive touch thanks to bits of earthy-tasting black truffle. There's some restraint here, thankfully, since the intense truffle flavor manages not to overwhelm the sweet and lightly spiced mortadella. It's at its best sliced paper thin, allowing for maximum expression of flavor, aroma, and texture, but the sheer slices also give you the delusion that you aren't really eating that much.
Last night's Top Chef: All-Stars had some major attitude. It went from a rock star (okay, a Jonas brother) to children to dinosaurs to a former host to a megabitch.
The Quickfire Challenge: Create a midnight snack for kids. Joe Jonas would be the judge, and later the surprise guest at the American Museum of Natural History's Night at the Museum sleepover with 150 kids.
The surprise was that there was no winner ― it was a tie between Spike and Tiffani F. Spike made potato and carrot chips with mascarpone and marshmallow dips. Tiffani made a snack that she described as a threesome between a snowball, a moon pie, and a Rice Krispies treat. There was only one solution: The kids had to pick the winner, which meant Spike and Tiffani had to make snacks for all with the help of their fellow all-stars. The two finalists picked teams almost along gender lines. According to Dale L. it was like the Spice Girls with bodyguards (himself and Tre) versus the cool guys with a babysitter (Carla).
If you thought sugar made kids go wild, we had to turn down the volume when Joe Jonas came out. Surprise, surprise ― the kids chose chocolate over vegetables and Tiffani F. was the winner.
San Francisco restaurant scene.
Eater SF also reports that a Russian Hill bar named Black Sheep (2032 Polk, at Broadway) will open this weekend. The pitch: neighborhood bar with small snacks and cheese plates from nearby Cheese Plus. It is not connected to Black Sheep Pub, the Mission gastropub Alex Jackson (The Corner, Parada 22) is hoping to open. [12/10 UPDATE: Cheese Plus says it is not supplying cheese to Black Sheep.]
