When the three-alarm fire broke out two doors away last night at 3212 Mission, the Blue Plate restaurant was just filling up its 70 seats, says Sean Thomas, the chef de cuisine who was on the line at the time. "Some of the cooks and some of the servers noticed it, mainly because there were all these people standing outside taking pictures," Thomas tells SFoodie. By the time staff and patrons stared to smell smoke, police and fire officials rushed in to tell everybody they had to evacuate. Pronto. "It was clear that everybody had to go," Thomas says.
Surprisingly, Blue Plate was unaffected. The restaurant is open for regular hours today. No water damage, no lingering smell of smoke.
The ground-floor restaurant on the other side of the burned building, Los Panchos, did suffer some damage ― a little fire and water damage to one of the bathrooms and other parts at the rear of the space. Anna, one of the counter staff at the Mexican and Salvadoran restaurant, tells SFoodie that 95 percent of the restaurant was unaffected. Staff were working on repairs today, while Los Panchos was open for business as usual ― unlike Lotus Garden (3216 Mission), the Vietnamese restaurant on the other side of the burned building from Los Panchos, which suffered significant damage and is closed indefinitely.
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Sat., Apr. 9:
Starbucks Ocean Beach Cleanup
Ocean Beach, across from Beach Chalet Brewery and Restaurant, 1000 Great Highway, 8 a.m.-1 p.m.
For its 40th anniversary, Starbucks is hoping to recruit 2,000 volunteers for an initiative to clean up Ocean Beach. Complete description here.
Green Festival
Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St. (at Brannan), 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
You'll eat well at this oh-so-crunchy event: Indian food from Colorado, pie from Uhuru Pies in Oakland, vegan corn dogs and garlic fries from Gourmet Faire, tamales from Donna's Tamales, and much more. Complete description here.
Chicken thighs have gained a lot more respect of late ― they're the kind of thing that Mario Batali tells his audiences to buy, and food magazines like to slip into recipes for braises and tajines. Despite the boosterism, they're still considered home food, homely cousins to duck legs; it's still a rare restaurant that makes chicken thighs the center of a dish.
But Barbacco's budget-minded mission freed up Staffan Terje to put chicken thighs on the menu, where they've become one of the restaurant's signature dishes. The meat, simmered until it can be teased apart with a fork, is glazed with reduced cooking liquid and then spooned onto a bed of garlicky escarole. The dish is thick with intrigue: toasted almonds slip onto the fork, then explode unexpectedly between the teeth; the electric-green Castelvetrano olives, easier to spot, change the tenor of the dish from soothing to bracingly saline each time you encounter them. The whole garlic cloves, other other hand, only appear menacing; they've been simmered in oil so long that they dissolve into a gush of custard. They're hardly homey, Barbacco's chicken thighs. But you can make them at home, too.
Sticking matzo ball soup on your restaurant menu takes straight-up chutzpah. Everyone thinks their grandma makes the best one on Earth, or if they're not Jewish, their friend's grandma. SFoodie knows only two establishments in San Francisco with the cohones to serve this Passover delicacy year-round: deli vets Moishe's Pippic and Miller's East Coast Deli. With Passover less than two weeks away, we slurped down a bowl from each place recently to see whose matzo ball soup could be mentioned in the same breath as bubbe's.
A small bowl of soup from Miller's ($4.99) contained an entire meal's worth of ingredients. Two baseball-sized matzo balls were joined by carrots, onions, celery, a child's plate's worth of noodles (we suspect they'll be removed come Passover), and a dozen or so chunks of chicken, all dunked in a peppery broth that tasted more of vegetables than poultry. The matzo balls were light and fluffy but lacked that great matzo-meal flavor SFoodie grew up with. Still, as a perpetually growing (ahem) Jewish boy, we couldn't help but get excited by each heavy spoonful we shoved in our mouth.
Thomas Thong, who's cooked at the Slanted Door and worked briefly as sous chef at Heaven's Dog, is teaming up with Alembic bartender Danny Louie to launch TomKat, an Asian food truck. Louie tells SFoodie the partners are already leasing the truck, and they've filed an application with S.F.'s Department of Public Works to secure vending rights at three spots: Downtown near 101 California, in South Beach at 185 Berry (near AT&T Park), and in Potrero Hill near Whole Foods.
Thong and Louie, who both grew up in San Francisco and have know each other since they were teens, plan a menu that borrows from different Asian cuisines. "It's a simple menu," Louie says, "just our take on a few classics." That includes banh mi variations (pork with apple and pickled red cabbage; lemongrass beef with pickled carrots and daikon; five-spice braised chicken; vegan meatballs with pickled chiles ― the meats with pâté option). Also: dry vermicelli noodles (vegetarian, pork, beef, or chicken), house-made root chips, and lotus leaf sticky rice (sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf with chicken, Chinese sausage, and mushrooms).
Louie says if all goes well, they should hear from DPW by the third week of April, and should be able to roll out TomKat in the next two months (their truck has already passed a Health Department inspection). And expect to see Thong and Louie at future Off the Grid events ― just before SFoodie got Louie on the phone, he'd been talking with OtG's Matt Cohen about potential future dates. See how things unfold by following along on Twitter and Facebook.
Follow us on Twitter: @sfoodie, and like us on Facebook. Contact me at John.Birdsall@SFWeekly.com
Magic Curry Kart/Wellie Wagon Pop-Up
Where: Valencia, near 22nd Street ― exact location to be tweeted later at both @TretornSWE and @magiccurrykart
When: Tonight, Apr. 7, beginning at about 6 p.m.
The rundown: It might not rain again till November, but the Swedes don't know that. Swedish footwear company Tretorn is still pimping its stylish, faux-fur-lined rubber Vintner boots in town, hawking them from a mobile shop called the Wellie Wagon. Tonight, the Scandinavian bootmobile's pairing up with O.G. street-food vendor Magic Curry Kart: Buy a $60 pair of rubbers, and you'll get a free curry dinner. Bonus: $1 from every par goes to the S.F. Neighborhood Parks Council. Maybe the best part? There's no danger you'll have to scarf your curry bowl in the rain.
Follow us on Twitter: @sfoodie, and like us on Facebook. Contact me at John.Birdsall@SFWeekly.com
We are still suffering from a bit of Top Chef overload, but the new season of Top Chef Masters with new host, format, and judges brought us right back into the world of cheftestants, Quickfires, and knife packings. We tuned in last night for the Season 3 premiere, hosted by our number-one hunky chef as seen on TV, Curtis Stone. Also, the judges this time around ― Ruth Reichl and James Oseland ― are just as topnotch.
The promo: Twelve of the most acclaimed chefs in America, battling in a culinary clash of the titans. San Francisco's very own Traci Des Jardins was the opening's most intimidating, saying she'd been the only woman in most of the kitchens she'd worked in France, and that she'd built a reputation for being mean. We like them fighting words ― we're in!
Other master cheftestants we have our eye on:
• Suvir Saran, who blamed a bite from a rabid dog for his participation, and said his good looks and eloquence would carry him through (adding a "kidding" at the end)
• Hugh Acheson, the self-proclaimed White Swan of the Masters, who parts his lips and speaks in a very interesting way
• Mary Sue Milliken, who does women chef trips with Traci to Mongolia and Egypt, which should be its own reality show
The Sunday Supper: Recreating the Family Dinner Table
Where: Classic Cars West, 411 26th St. (at Broadway), Oakland, 626-1135
When: Sun., Apr. 10, 6:30-10 p.m.
Cost: $55 for four courses; BYOB ($10 corkage)
The rundown: So you missed last week's street-food pop-up that led to a pho (or faux) brawl? This Sunday night, Katie Kwan of KitchenSidecar, half the team that brought you that scrappy event, is co-hosting an underground dinner in a vintage car showroom in Oakland. Using ingredients sourced from grassroots sources around the Bay Area (Berkeley backyard lemons, bartered goat milk, ducks from "a friend of John's uncle," etc.), Kwan and cohort John Richter of Harley Richter Catering are preparing an urban homesteader's feast. Communal eating and camaraderie expected; fistfights not guaranteed.
Menu highlights: Grilled duck hearts with roasted new spring vegetables and faro; apple-cider-braised pig snout with creamy polenta and charred romaine; tangerine sorbet and vanilla bean ice cream
Buy tickets at Eventbrite
Today's notes on national stories, local trends, random tastes, and other bycatch dredged up from the food media.
