The past 24 hours in gossip, innuendo, and cold hard facts about the San Francisco food scene.
A packed restaurant with a kitchen staff walkout is among a manager's worst nightmares. Inside Scoop reports that Castagnola's kitchen staff walked out on the Fisherman's Wharf restaurant on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., while the dining room had with approximately 200 Labor Day weekend revelers (a night estimated to bring in between $30-$40k). The walkout was in protest of the restaurant's recent changes: extended hours, new menu, and new management. While the restaurant has already hired a new kitchen staff, Inside Scoop hypothesizes a more covert reason for the walkout: illegal immigrant labor issues.
Everything goes upscale eventually. Mustard long ago moved from yellow and Dijon to an array of artisan flavors. Ketchup, however, has remained mostly moribund, with only the variety of a few brand names to distinguish between otherwise indistinguishable squeezable red pastes.
Now some Bay Area boys, who are currently split between Menlo Park and New York City, are making a choice available in the form of Sir Kensington's Gourmet Scooping Ketchup. The ketchup comes in squared-off jam jars in two flavors; classic and spiced.
SF Weekly aims to be more of an insider's newspaper than a national guide to all things San Francisco, so I don't get to Fisherman's Wharf often. Locals don't dine there as often as they did in the 1960s and 1970s. But ocasionally, visitors to town ask me where they can go eat seafood on the Wharf.So I figured I'd call some of the other professional critics in town: hotel concierges. Concierges wield a lot of power in this tourist-friendly city, and they spend a lot of nights eating out -- often on the restaurant's dime -- to figure out where to steer guests. A few days ago, I polled 10 hotel concierges from both swank and midrange hotels. Where do you send visitors? I asked. More importantly, where would you eat yourself?
Street Eats Benefit Gala
Where: Ferry Plaza
When: Sept. 18, 6-10 p.m.
Cost: $125 to $225, with 35% discount for SFoodie readers
A couple weeks ago, I mocked the Street Eats Benefit Gala, an all-you-can nosh event to benefit the charity OneVietnam.
I called OneVietnam: "A charitable foundation that apparently exists to help its members tweet to each other." I also wrote that the $225 reserved seating means that street food has jumped the shark.
One of these statements I'd like to retract. I have since been in touch with One Vietnam about its mission. (As for the other, how long street food will stay fascinating before people move on to the next big thing is an open question.)
I would like to give a little more detail about the menu for the event and the charity.
First, the food. Most of the 23 participating vendors are brick-and-mortar restaurants, not actual street food vendors. There are some intriguing dishes planned that you won't easily find served from a truck, at least locally. Here are a few:
Ana Mandara: Bo tai chanh -- seared rare beef on fresh plaintain; banh knot -- savory mini blinis with prawns and scallions; prawn & crystal seaweed salad
Bar Agricole: Tea-smoked egg with tonnato
Betelnut: Lemongrass pork sausage, sticky rice & chili lime sauce
Delfina: Chilled tripe Naples street-vendor style
E&O Trading Co.: paper-wrapped chicken
Private Wild Game Dinners
Where: The Big 4, 1075 California (at Taylor)
When: Now through November
Before settling into my job as a music/food/everything writer this summer at SF Weekly, I did something that every college student dreams of (and salivates about): go on vacation. Mine was to Peru for three weeks, four days of which I spent exploring a portion of the Amazon jungle.
Being the tourists we were, my companion and I got to do the novel, story-worthy types of things that locals do every day -- one of which was to fish for piranhas (actually "pirañas" in Spanish).
The Amazon River and its tributaries are, needless to say, unlike anything you'll find on this continent. There are so many sardines that they not infrequently jump into fishing boats -- which was, incidentally, how I caught my first Amazonian fish.
Daniel Patterson, chef-owner of Coi, is freshly back from last week's MAD Foodcamp in Copenhagen, at which he presented a history of beets.
The two-day symposium was organized by René Redzepi, chef of Noma, which has been celebrated for its intricate experimentation of native Scandinavian foods. Heavily covered by the international food press, the event brought together some of the most interesting people cooking today: Michel Bras, Gaston Acurio, David Chang, Andoni Aduriz. (In rock terms, it'd be like the Pitchfork Music Festival distilled down to a 300-person gathering.) The theme of the event: plants.
SFoodie talked to Patterson earlier this week about his experiences. Here are a few excerpts from our hour-long discussion:
Where: Bar Adagio, 550 Geary (at Taylor), 775-5000
When: Thurs., Sept. 8, 6:30 p.m.-8 p.m.
Cost: Free! but you must RSVP: baradagio@jdvhospitality.com
The rundown: Bar Adagio's Cocktail College, the popular series held on the second Thursday of each month, happens tonight spotlighting locally based Encanto Pisco.
Pisco, an unaged grape brandy made in Peru and Chile, became famous in San Francisco during the late 1800s with the invention of the deliciously potent Pisco Punch (pisco, pineapple, lime, gomme syrup).
I get foodstuffs regularly with packaging ranging from non-existent to pretty boxes tied up in a bow, but the packaging for Coco-Zen's Truffles-To-Go made me wish I didn't have to taste the contents.
The Pacifica company's truffles come in a stainless steel tiffin which just screams "gift."
The stainless steel, stacking and clamping, circular containers make hip lunch boxes -- their purpose in India where they originated. They're expensive enough on their own that I was surprised Coco-Zen only charges $34 for the whole package. Amazon sells the same tiffin, empty, for $25 so you are getting the 10, 1.7 oz (huge) Fair Trade Certified truffles for an incremental $9, less than $1 per truffle.
The packaging is great; the truffles, very good. The "To-Give" packaging accommodates two flavors, including vegan choices. I did open the package after all, and did taste all the variations (no re-gifting for me). But that's why I get paid the little bucks. Here are my impressions in order of preference:
As vibrant as the regional cuisines of China are, you wouldn't always know it in America, where Western bistros are encouraged to play and experiment, but chefs at "ethnic" restaurants are often tied to a roster of the classics.
Well, not Sichuan Home, the subject of this week's full-length restaurant review. Here you get a sense of the innovation happening in Chengdu, the culinary capital of Sichuan Province, and of chef Liu Hong's imagination. Tea-smoked duck is stir-fried with peppers and garlic. Lotus root slices are pressed together with ground pork and deep-fried. Fish stew comes with yam cake and seaweed.
We food writers over the age of 30 occasionally like to put out little reminders to you youngsters that the street-food movement in America was around long before people started selling Korean spicy pork buns out of chic trucks. Remember the taco trucks! we like to scold, then embark on some boring anecdote about driving over the bridge in the middle of the night decades ago to buy tacos de barbacoa off a dingy truck on Fruitvale.
In a great LA Times article published today, Gustavo Arelleno, author of "Ask a Mexican" and the forthcoming Tacos USA, schools all of us that taco trucks are totally new school. Back in the late 19th century, horse-drawn wagons known as tamaleros roamed the streets of Los Angeles selling tamales:
On the menu was everything from popcorn to pigs' feet, oyster cocktails to sandwiches, but the majority of them hawked tamales prepared elsewhere and kept warm in steam buckets. Competition spurred innovation -- wagons transformed into portable kitchens with functioning stoves (some illegally tapped into the city's gas mains and water pipes) and featured counters so that as many as eight people at a time could dine around the wagons. One enterprising tamalero even rolled around town in a two-story giant, the top level his sleeping quarters.
What's just as interesting is that, even a century ago, LA's tamaleros faced the same kind of opposition that San Francisco's gourmet food trucks do -- and had just as many fans who kept them thriving.
