Highlights from SFoodie this week:
1. W. Blake Gray checks out Le Cordon Bleu, which claims to be San Francisco's first Vietnamese restaurant (opened in 1968). It's now owned by a Chinese-American woman who's never been to Vietnam, but Gray says the meat sauce is still is good as ever.
2. Ben Narasin likes to use the duck eggs he buys from the Alemany Farmers' Market for waffles and omelets, but if you're going to go all duck for your baking needs, a conversion chart may be needed.
3. W. Blake Gray declares McDonald's decision to healthy up its Happy Meals as a victory for San Francisco and our meddling progressives. Supervisor Eric Mar, who pushed for the original Happy Meal ban, must be an awfully hard man to live with right now.
The past 24 hours in gossip, innuendo, and cold hard facts about the San Francisco food scene.
Everyone's favorite chef who-will-eat-almost-anything, Anthony Bourdain, is slated to film an episode of No Reservations at Zeitgeist in a couple weeks. Mission Mission reports, via the Zeitgeist newsletter, he'll sample eats and drinks on Aug. 12, while the camera crew won't have to block the porta-potty eyesores from the frame. Nope, Zeitgeist recently pulled out those stinky plastic buckets and put in brick-and-mortar restrooms. Ooh la la!
Last call for KoKo Cocktails' Bourbon & Bacon night! With the shutter coming this Sunday, the Tender shares tonight is the last time it'll be serving crispy slices alongside bourbon (and American whiskey) drinks. Maybe they'll start this tradition at the pending Hi Lo Lounge?
We've always known the Marina Safeway (aka "Singles Safeway") has played host to love connections over iceberg lettuce and deli meats, but Bernalwood shares a Craigslist missed connection at the Castro location. Maybe the lucky couple will rendezvous where the sparks first flew, and meet at the (possibly) pending wine tasting station.
Jeremy Fox continues to pop up around S.F. while looking for a place of his own. Eater SF, via Citizen Cake's tweet, reports that his next stop will be Orson on August 16.
• Big Mouth Morrissey strikes again! The washed-up hag genius compared the horrific tragedy in Oslo to the everyday tragedy on factory farms and in slaughterhouses. First, this motherfucker ain't even vegan so DO NOT PIN THIS ONE ON US. And secondly: UGH. This is the kind of thing that omnis like to latch onto to be all, "SEE, VEGANS ARE CRAZY!", when really, not eating dead animals isn't so crazy, ya know?? As punishment: The Smiths are out of my Turntable rotation until next week!
• Anne Hathaway is vegan!? I'm not so sure about that, I don't totally trust these random celebrity fawning sites because sometimes they'll be all, "OMG TED HAGGARD IS VEGAN!" and then you'll do some research and it's actually that Ted Haggard said he wanted to eat a vegan. Ya know? That is some lackluster reporting! I'm no better because I'm already spreading the Hathaway rumor but hey, you all know I'm a hack. Anyway, Anne Hathaway's a vegan and she loves Babycakes. Fascinating!
This week at SFoodie we were wondering whether restaurants are required, by law, to serve tap water for free. It's a simple enough question, but it took a surprising amount of digging to figure out the answer.
The Internet provided a few thousand people asking the same question all across the States, but no answers. So we called the Golden Gate Restaurant Association and the California Restaurant Association, who were friendly but equally clueless.
The Grilled Cheese Guy started it.
Last weekend, when we passed him on our way back from the gym, he asked if we wanted a grilled cheese, but we said we were off to review a dim sum restaurant.
He whined about it on Twitter, saying he'd choose grilled cheese over dim sum any day. Of course, dude, otherwise you'd be Dim Sum Guy! We smugly insisted that by preferring dim sum, we were more in touch with the San Francisco palate.
But we don't like to speak for such a large, diverse, opinionated city -- nah, just kidding, we love doing that. However, in this case we decided to take a poll.
It closed yesterday, and the results were convincing.
Quince restaurant continues its series of cheese and spirit pairings this week with rum and artisan cheese ($36, available only in the bar and lounge). While Quince's first effort, Scotch and cheese, is a somewhat established coupling, rum and cheese is far more esoteric.
That makes it intriguing.
Quince's team tasted six rums with 16 cheeses to come up with the three pairings, and one antipairing you won't get to taste. Pairing "with cow's milk [cheese] just isn't worth it," says Katrina Parlato, Quince's general manager. "The rum turns the milk sour. It's completely bitter on the finish. Sheep and goat milk [cheeses] were best."
The pairings that made the cut? Here you go:
is a yearlong project to canvas Chinatown, block by block, discovering
the good, the bad, and the hopelessly mediocre. Maximum entrée price:
$10.
How many menus should a restaurant give you? At Broadway Cafe, the waitress delivered four: one listing the restaurant's Hong Kong specialties (baked rice or spaghetti, noodles, grilled cheese sandwiches), a slightly slimmer one listing its three-for-$19.95 specials (all simple Cantonese fare), a third one that seemed to duplicate the others, and a single sheet, tucked in a plastic sleeve, displaying pictures of the daily specials.
Oh, wait, make that five menus. As we were puzzling through the first four, another waitress brought over an album with photos of all the three-for-$19.95 dishes, presumably for English speakers. Needless to say, it took a while to figure out what to order. After the server made several passes, we were ready to snag her:
"We'd like the boiled chicken with special salt," SFoodie said.
"No more chicken," she shot back.
"You don't have any of this dish, or no chicken at all?" we clarified.
"No chicken at all today," she replied, visibly straining at the effort to stand still. The room -- pale yellow and blue walls, a big-screen TV showing Cantonese cooking shows, no flourishes -- was abuzz with people, and we had been watching her zip from table to table with the urgency of a hummingbird desperate for nectar.
Model Bakery's English muffins are all about anticipation and fulfillment. From the moment you take a light, thick disk out of its sleeve, the buttery touch on your fingers -- in stark contrast with the crisp, dry, dusted crust -- makes you want to take a bite. But you have to toast it, of course, and add even more butter.
So you slice it, drop it in the toaster, and wait. When it pops up, you're eager to get the butter on it before any heat is lost, to maximize melting. I keep a stick of butter at room temperature for just this sort of occasion (no, it doesn't melt in the dish).
Finally, it's that first bite. Oh yeah! The crust shatters beneath your teeth, yielding up that soft spongy center, that wonderful yeasty chew. Makes me want a cup of tea, a wicker chair, and a book. My wife prefers the preserves* I made last summer. Either way it's a perfect weekend morning meal.
On the food blog for DC's City Paper, restaurant critic Chris Shott asks why, in the Yelp age, critics still obey the rule that they should wait a month or more to visit a new restaurant:
These days, a new restaurant is able to access vast new media resources in order to pump up its reputation from day one--or even before it. ... Many places are packed on opening night; long gone are the days when a restaurant didn't see a packed house until a newspaper chimed in. The restaurant industry's PR people have taken advantage of the change. Which makes me wonder whether the pros ought to change their rules, too.
Schott talks to the other critics in DC before deciding that he'll visit a restaurant any damn time he pleases, but he won't write about it until he feels it's ready. As the Dallas Observer's new critic, Scott Reitz, tells Shott, "Hammering a place that still in that early phase, with a full-on formal review, is kind of a dick move."
I don't know that I agree. Call me old-school, but when it comes to the full-length restaurant reviews that come out in print and online every Wednesday, I still wait the standard 30 days before visiting, which means that my review usually comes out a minimum of seven or eight weeks after the restaurant opens, or about 150 reviews behind Yelp.
