A second ramen shop is set to move from the portable world into a brick-and-mortar. Inside Scoop shares that Hapa Ramen will open the aptly named Hapa in Spring 2012. The Fillmore shop will border another currently pending restaurant, State Bird Provisions. The Hapa Ramen stand will remain at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Markets.
Food truck news: Phat Thai is readying to hit the City streets. Eater SF shares that the food truck from chef Wannee Hossain and her two sons, will debut at Off the Grid this week, but no word on which one or when. Check their twitter to find pad thai.
They're getting close: Grub Street reports the proxy outpost of Suppenkuche, Biergartern, passed its building inspection, has commenced staff training, and may very well open this month (Hayes at Linden). Prost!
You might know Kreayshawn from the thousands of articles about her on every music blog and reasonably hip magazine (including this one!) Or you might know her from that one song she did -- and when we say "one song," we mean that literally.
But you certainly don't know her as this: one of the many people in front of you in line at Zachary's Pizza in Oakland, a pizza joint so superb that just last night a friend announced, over her first-ever Zachary's slice, "Oh! This is why people like pizza in the first place!"
Kreayshawn, though, doesn't go there. As our All Shook Down blog reports, in a new interview with Vancouver's legendary DJ/interviewer Narduwar, Kreayshawn got quizzed about Oakland pizza. She spat, "Fuck Zachary's" and added:
"Fuck that fancy-ass pizza, man. We don't eat that shit in Oakland. That's fancy Oakland. We eat out the taco truck in Oakland."
Where: La Victoria
When: Wed., October 12, 6-9:30 p.m.
Cost: varies
The rundown: Old World Food Truck, which is not yet a food truck, but whatever, is (figuratively) pulling into La Victoria for one night of pierogi madness. What are pierogies? You're crazy, they're delicious! They're filled and fried dumplings. Is there anything more satisfying than fried dough? Yes, but only when it's stuffed with mashed potatoes. That's carb on carb on fry. Genius!
Fielding your questions about dining out in 21st-century Bay Area restaurants. Have one? Email me.
How often in an internet cafe should you buy a new coffee/pastry while you use their internet for hours and hours?
L.T., as a restless writer who spends an awful lot of time working in cafes, I feel you. I find writing more productive when I can make faces into my screen and swear to myself in front of an audience that is not my refrigerator.
A few years ago, there was a movement to "reclaim cafe culture" and disconnect the laptop in favor of promoting "conversation" and "community." This high-minded stance is why Ritual (wi-fi: yes) gets so much more of my money than Four Barrel (wi-fi: sneer). Smart cafes acknowledge that their afternoon traffic is heavily bulked up by people like you and me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah: Certified organic produce is more expensive than conventional, and the premium prices that organic farmers can charge make their farms more than twice as profitable as conventional farms. But a new study suggests that organic grains, fruits, and vegetables don't have to be so expensive.
The Huffington Post recently reported on the results of the Rodale Institute's 30-year trial comparing side-by-side plots of land producing conventional and organic crops (the full report is here. The institute found that yields were almost equal except in drought years, when organic farms did better. There were a host of other benefits to farming organically: better soil, lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower energy use, more jobs. Advocates of organic farming have trumpeted all these benefits for years, and it's nice to see them proved right again.
But the section of the findings that piqued SFoodie's interest: Economics. While organic farms spend significantly more on labor, they make up for it in lower expenses -- fertilizer and fuel cost big.
San Francisco has a surprising density of local caviar packers. Tsar Nicoulai's wonderful Ferry Building bar is gone, but they, their alumni, and others, continue to produce premium caviar in the Bay Area. One of the more recent purveyors is Tsar Nicoulai alumni Deborah Keane Damond's four year old, San Francisco based, California Caviar Company (CCC).
CCC produces caviar from its own Sturgeon, caviar's birth fish. They farm the fish outside Sacramento and process the eggs in San Francisco. They also import caviar and produce simple and infused roes (more on that another time).
The U.S. places annual limits on caviar imports, particularly from Russia. Fish don't survive the harvest, so careful husbandry is required. Under communism the protection of the Sturgeon population was one of the few things that actually worked. With the fall of the wall however, hard currency opportunists have almost wiped out the species. Beyond any extinction sensitivity you may have, this means you won't be eating caviar legally from the Caspian anytime soon unless someone has per-embargo stocks on hand.
CCC imports farmed, versus wild, Osetra caviar (top varieties of caviar are Beluga, Osetra and Sevruga) from Sturgeon breeds common to Russia and Iran. They offer "Russian Osetra" (denoting the breed not location of origin) from Bulgaria, and Siberian Osetra from Uruguay, at $150 and $105 an ounce respectively.
Local providers stand out through their locally farmed sturgeon caviar. Organic practices, carefully monitored and filtered water, and exceptional year round conditions produce consistent, high quality, well priced caviar.
