Today in gossip, innuendo, and cold hard facts about the San Francisco restaurant scene.
You'd probably have to take a day or two off work, glued to your laptop, to keep up with the Japan relief fundraisers ― and that's just the food and drink ones. Fortunately, Tablehopper's been diligent about keeping a list.
It's becoming clear that the birthday celebrations for Chez Panisse's 40th will be sort of sprawling and complicated, not unlike Alice's appearance at Twitter yesterday. Inside Scoop gets a bead on the tribute menus the upstairs cafe has already rolled out, honoring the restuarant's inspirations. This week: Claudia Roden.
And Tablehopper reports on Stinking new owners for the Old Clam House.
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Art of Chai Class
Where: Mission Creek Kitchen, 550 Alabama (at Mariposa)
When: Sat., April 16, 2-4:30 p.m.
Cost: $45
The rundown: The Starbucks chai latte you slurp like a soda from the jumbo cupholder in your Wrangler? Not exactly in line with Indian street-food tradition, though its a start. To take you deeper into chai understanding, the Chai Cart's Paawan Kothari is teaching a class tracing the drink's history and culture in India, different methods for making, and how to choose its main components, plus an overview of Indian street snacks (chaat). You'll sip chai and nibble on chaat, and walk with a shopping list and samples of Kotahri's teas to experiment with.
Tickets at Brown Paper Tickets
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The Lauren Kiino-wich
Where: Pal's Takeaway, 2751 24th St. (at Hampshire), 203-4911
When: Wed., Mar. 30, 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m.
The rundown: Not content with moonlighting at Coffee Bar, Il Cane Rosso partner Lauren Kiino has signed on to take up the guest-chef gauntlet at Pal's Takeaway Wednesday. The Kiino creation: Marin Sun Farms beef brisket with fennel ketchup and a slaw the precise details of which you'll just have to take on faith will yield something delicious, on a crunchy Acme roll. And, if you're lucky, Pal's won't be sold out of the toffee "crack" ex-Bruno's pastry talent Kat Zacher has been dropping off with owner Jeff Mason.
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artisan and the novelty.
Source:
House of Bagels, 5030 Geary (at 15th Ave.), 752-6000
Price: $7.35 for a half-loaf
Toast-appropriateness: 1/10
SFoodie's countdown of our 92 favorite things to eat and drink in San Francisco, 2011 edition.
One of San Francisco's best doughnuts has never seen the inside of a Fryolator. Okay, so the oven-baked morning bun at Pinkie's Bakery isn't a doughnut, though it offers all the comforts of one: an all-over sanding of cinnamon sugar that feels good against your lips, an interior texture of finely articulated air chambers. It compresses when you bite it, and springs back when you put it down to take a sip of coffee.
In fact, says Pinkie's owner Cheryl Burr, the morning bun is made from the house challah dough, with four discrete applications of butter: 1) kneaded into the challah itself; 2) spread on the rolled-out dough; 3) brushed atop the formed rolls; and 4) shellacked onto the just-baked buns, before the application of sugar. Somewhere, amidst all that buttering, lurks the true genius of Pinkie's morning rolls: a thin veneer of house-made apple butter, jelly-rolled into the spiral. Burr cooks down Granny Smiths for five hours with vanilla beans and sticks of cinnamon, then perfumes the resulting pomade with Meyer lemon zest. You'd probably never know it was there in the finished bun, that apple butter. It's more shadow than presence, a sweet-tart shading with the kind of subtlety that ― let's face it ― would be pretty much lost on the doughnut.
Pinkie's Bakery: 1196 Folsom (at Eighth St.), 556-4900
Indian Feast: Dhaba Walla Pop-Up
Where: "Somewhere different and unique" according to the event listing; exact location to be revealed via Twitter or e-mail
When: Sat., April 2, 6-11(ish) p.m.
Cost: $37 at the door, $33 in advance
The rundown: Roger Feely's packing up the Volvo and getting out of town. For weeks, fans of Soul Cocina and Feely's other food ventures have been waiting for word from the daddy of especially vivid street food about whether he'd join his family in Chicago or stay on in S.F. Today, they have their answer ― Feely's circulating word of Saturday's "Last Supper," a farewell pop-up at a yet-to-be disclosed location. "The menu will be Indian," Feely writes, "mostly vegan with a chicken curry option for you knuckleheads that simply can't do without your meat."
Menu highlights: crispy fried green garbanzos with Soul masala and tamarind popcorn ($4); bhel puri ($5); pessaratu with plantain flower curry and gunpowder podi ($14); ube gulab jamun ($6)
Tickets via Eventbrite, or RSVP on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter: @sfoodie, and like us on Facebook. Contact me at John.Birdsall@SFWeekly.com
Jonathan Kauffman's recent review of Atelier Crenn, a restaurant shaped by chef Dominique Crenn's notion of "poetic culinaria," brought up again the question of food as art. Is the aim of a restaurant meal simply to entertain while satisfying hunger? Could it be purely art? Or both?
In the the U.K., artists Bompas and Parr have wasted no time using food as a primary medium of expression. The duo is best known for installations like the pop-up breathable gin-and-tonic bar in London, where participants strolled into ― then stumbled out of ― a room filled with a fine mist of gin and tonic, and collaborations with architects that have resulted in elaborate structures made entirely out of gelatin.
The latest from the duo is "Dirt Banquet," an exploration of our social and physiological relationship to food and dirt, in one of London's oldest and most ornate sewage-pumping stations, the Crossness. The sold-out April 2 event features a menu that includes pork cooked in an imu (earth oven), Isay Scotch whisky distilled from grain roasted with peat moss, and fermented natto. The grand finale is civet coffee, rare coffee beans "harvested" from civet cat feces, while a "brown note" is played on a sound system. That's a theoretical infrasonic frequency (between 5 and 9 hertz) that reportedly causes humans to lose control of their bowels due to resonance. Yes, wear a diaper.
San Francisco's interest in the food truck rang louder last year than the roar of a Husky generator. But are we in danger of becoming hipster douchebags, Yelping our enthusiasm for upscaled street food while the form's inventors ― the Latino heirs of taco-truck tradition ― wither in relative obscurity?
That's one of the questions raised by the short film by Robert Lemon, ¿Tacos or Tacos?, as it compares hipster food trucks with old-school loncheras in Austin, Texas. We published a YouTube link to the film last December after reading about it on the California Taco Trucks website. Now, Lemon's short is making its way through the film festival circuit, starting with its world theatrical premiere at the Sonoma International Film Festival, April 6-10 in downtown Sonoma.
That momentous announcement we hinted at Friday, the one so big it would drive the charmingly Luddite Alice Waters to begin tweeting? Turns out it was merely biggish.
Waters served up the news at Twitter HQ late yesterday ― Inside Scoop has a point-by-point report that suggests the event was as infuriatingly oblique as it was illuminating. Bottom line: Chez Panisse is celebrating its 40th birthday on Aug. 28, and Waters is marshaling interest in the event to spotlight her career's signature achievement (besides inventing the modern salad, putting goat cheese on every restaurant menu in America in the '80s and '90s, and driving interest in slow food both uppercase and lower), the Edible Schoolyard. The initiative: Eating for Education.
Bakesale for Japan
Where: Multiple Bay Area locations
When: Sat., April 2, 10 a.m.- 2 p.m.
Cost: Items priced individually
The rundown: Since we last checked in, Samin Nosrat's Bakesale for Japan has snowballed, with dozens of locations spanning the Bay Area, Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and even the East Coast. The S.F. locations now include Bi-Rite Market and SPQR, and to Berkeley and Oakland Nosrat has added spots in Marin, San Jose, Napa, and Healdsburg. Contributing bakers include Chez Panisse, Tell Tale Preserve Co., Tartine Bakery, Out the Door, Citizen Cake, and many more. All proceeds go to Peace Winds Japan.
And for all you agoraphobes, don't forget Sabrina Modelle's Online Bake Sale for Japan, all day tomorrow.
