The past 24 hours in gossip, innuendo, and cold hard facts about the San Francisco food scene.
Oddly enough S.F. is welcoming two pig-named restaurants to the scene. Grub Street reports Castro's Nirvana is set to close, and will be replaced by The Dancing Pigs (544 Castro at 18th St.), no word yet on a projected opening date or concept behind the name. Mission Mission gets a few more details on Pig and Pie, the restaurant slated for the old Discolandia space (2962 24th St. at Alabama). It's pretty much what we thought: handmade sausages and homemade pie.
Another pending opener: Eater SF shares that the Beachside, a restaurant from the team behind the Outer Sunset's Java Beach, looks to be approaching its opening day. San Francisco Citizen shares a snapshot of the new sign (4300 Taraval at 48th Ave.).
Cafe des Amis sees another chef enter the kitchen in less than a year, and the changes are already rolling in. Inside Scoop reports Mark Sullivan (of Woodside's Village Pub and Spruce) has tweaked the menu and put the front of the house under a new general manager, Joseph Hechmi. Expect a "complete overhaul" of the menu by October.
Here's some food for thought: Inside Scoop reports Hayes Valley Bakeworks (Gough at Fulton), a café from the local nonprofit Toolworks, is slated to open before 2012. The small, quick-serve cafe will focus on Toolworks' mission of providing jobs for the disabled, homeless, and those at risk, and feature baked goods from scratch by Alice Cravens (the chef of now-shuttered Modern Tea).
CSA boxes are like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: You never know what kind of local, sustainably farmed, organic, heirloom tomato you're gonna get. Sign up for the Brewlab club, however, and one thing's for sure: Your monthly shipment will pack a buzz.
Not only will you get beer -- you get home-brewed beer, not sold anywhere.
Founders Sam Gilbert and Emily Ford have recruited an army of homebrewing minions who craft creative brews for the monthly-ish brew pack. The operation manages to skirt the law, at least so far, because nobody is paid to brew. Brewers are reimbursed for their ingredients and consumers are urged to contribute an optional donation.
The sun is mostly out, summer is winding down, and it's a perfect time to get your drink on in a very boozy week. Here's our list of where to go:
Distillery No. 209 Tour
Where: Distillery No. 209, Pier 50 #B
When: Thu., July 28, 5:30-6:30 p.m.
Cost: $25; e-mail wendi@distillery209.com or call 707-363-8182 to make your reservation.
The rundown: Distillery No. 209 is once again is opening its doors for its monthly tour and tastings in its amazing bayfront facility. Distiller Arne Hillesland will lead you through the ins and outs of gin production. Each month highlights a different bartender and drinks using No. 209 gin at the end of the tour.
Cocktail Competition at Orson
Where: Orson, 508 Fourth St. (at Bryant)
When: Thurs., July 28th, 5:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
Cost: $5 online or $10 at the door
The rundown: Watch eight bartenders compete to see who can make the best cocktail using Bloom Gin. Cheer on your favorites from Orson, Bubble Lounge, Zero Zero, DOSA, Brixton, and upcoming Hops and Hominy. The best part is that you get to taste too.
Island Paradise Party
Where: Forbes Island (off Pier 39)
When: Fri., July 29, 7:30-10:30 p.m.
Cost: $75 online; 21 and over
The rundown: Drink Me Magazine is hosting a party at Forbes Island, the kitschy and surreal floating restaurant built to look like an island with palm trees and lighthouse. Enjoy rum, drinks, and a boat ride to and from Forbes from Pier 39. Look out for the smoke monster.
First off, Carlos, welcome to San Francisco. We're happy to have you.
Now that you're here, we have to make a confession. San Francisco is no New York -- in terms of quantity, S.F. simply can't produce the never-ending list of Puerto Rican restaurants you probably took for granted when you played for the Mets.
Now, as a native Puerto Rican, you may be starting to feel nervous, suddenly far from the small comforts that probably reminded you of home. So before you panic, we want to let you in on the city's Puerto Rican offerings -- the list isn't long, but, trust us, it's tasty.
The first time I tried to go to Bacon Bacon Truck, the new food truck with a self-explanatory menu, I arrived too late. Fifty or sixty people already surrounded the truck, half of them holding up cameras to document their own scene. "What's the wait time? About an hour?" I asked one of them, and she nodded, and so I turned around and walked back to the car, passing a group of customers who'd decided to while away the time before their bacon-ified sandwiches arrived by smoking out.
For all the snarky foodistas who've declared bacon as over as Ricky Martin, it still draws a crowd. Bacon Bacon Truck didn't just send out a few Tweets and attract throngs of baconophiles. Now, in its second week, the online TV show Epic Meal Time has already filmed an episode on the truck, and tonight, the truck debuts at Off the Grid Upper Haight. When I stopped by 246 Ritch today to eat lunch, one of the customers was already wearing the truck's "You Had Me at Bacon" T-shirt.
The worlds of food buzz and drinks buzz are different, and that's the only reason we were able to easily get a good seat and fast service at the official opening of Jasper's Corner Tap last night. Foodinistas perhaps looked at menu previews and thought, "bar food."
However, at every barstool we've occupied this month, every time we got to talking to the barkeep, Jasper's came up, not least because the place was raiding area bars for talent. "Have you heard about their specialty beer cocktails?" a barkeep would say. Or the wine list, unusually serious for a pub. Or that Jasper's is making its own sausage.
We expected to see a mob, and if Jasper's were smaller, the crowd, which reached at least 75 people at peak, might have seemed like it. But the space, formerly Ponzu, is huge, with a dining area in the back that's like a separate (and less interesting) facility. So while bar business was brisk, it never felt hectic -- and if the staff can pull that off on a first night, it bodes well for the future.
When we're feeling very poor and very hungry, we sometimes drop in to Cordon Bleu on Nob Hill to quietly scarf down a mountain of food at the counter. On our most recent visit, we got to talking with Katie Yu, the proprietor.
Yu is from Hong Kong and has never been to Vietnam. In 1995, she bought the restaurant from its founders, who claimed to have opened San Francisco's first Vietnamese restaurant in 1968. Think about the timing of that: People probably marched right in from antiwar protests to chow down on the country meat sauce.
"I bought it just because it was a small restaurant," Yu said. "I didn't know how popular it is. It's really an institution. The customers said, 'Don't change anything'."
"Restaurants are odd and intense places to work," Sara Jenkins wrote on the Atlantic's lifestyle blog yesterday. "We are outsiders in many ways, and this creates a bond among the people working together." Jenkins is the chef-owner of New York's Porchetta and Porsena. Her essay, about working nights and holidays, in sickness or health, and always on the fringes of "normal" life, has been making the rounds of restaurant people since it came out. This paragraph in particular struck a chord:
...recently, I've looked around the restaurant and felt a loneliness and a longing for the ordinariness of other people's lives. Here's a table of five women out for a girl's night out. I'm jealous of the normality that allows them to schedule social time in their lives; I'm jealous that they get to sit around a table together and unwind over good food and wine. I idly listen to scraps of their conversation as they discuss the latest movie or a friend's marriage or their vacation, and I realize I don't know how to do that anymore.
The essay reminded SFoodie of why we left the business a dozen years ago, and why so many cooks and waiters move on after their twenties. "I want a life, not a restaurant," we would explain to our friends at the time. Jenkins, an industry lifer, yearns to have both.
