The past 24 hours in gossip, innuendo, and cold hard facts about the San Francisco food scene.
Tyler Florence may take to the road to serve chicken, and only chicken. Grub Street reveals Florence shared, in an interview with Yumsugar, that the success of the Wayfare Tavern's fried chicken has inspired him to toy with the idea of serving it via a food truck. We would grab a leg.
Mark's Bar is now serving drinks in the former Lush Lounge spot (1092 Post at Polk). The Tender divulges the new bar held a soft opening on Wednesday and is waiting for its temporary alcohol license to become permanent.
SFoodie is on a mission to sit down with the city's most intelligent, influential, and experienced coffee folk to pick their brain about what makes our city such a hot bed of coffee trends.Today we speak with Ben Kaminsky, Ritual Coffee's quality control expert and three-time winner of the National Cupping Championships.
SFoodie: What continues to fascinate you about coffee?
Kaminsky: There's still so much that isn't known about coffee. I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on the roasting process. I want to figure out roasting to the point where we have a mathematical equation: For this given density, for this bean size, for this amount of coffee, how much energy in joules are we going to need to get this coffee roasted.
I'm obsessed with engaging the average consumer so they become capable of understanding what we do. I believe most people don't taste. They eat and they drink, but they don't taste what they are putting in their mouths. They consume food and their body takes in that information, but no cognitive ability is dedicated to really analyzing and critiquing flavor.
The only sure way to develop your palate for wine is to taste more. When you get the chance to taste older, rarer, or more expensive wines than you might normally dink, take it.
That opportunity presents itself this Thursday at San Francisco Wine Center during the Wine Gavel pre-auction tasting. Pre-auction tastings are the single best wine value on the planet,
beyond being invited by collectors to help them drink their wine, and few know about them.
Auction houses aren't in the business of tasting wine, they're in the business of selling it. Pre-auction tastings are meant to attract new customers, educate existing ones, and maximize the bidding on lots that might not otherwise get the attention they deserve. For example, 11-bottle cases are notoriously hard to sell (what was wrong with the first bottle that convinced the owner to off the rest?), so letting potential buyers taste a single bottle helps sell the remaining 10. Individual bottles of prestige wines are often offered from various sellers' cellars to help prove the provenance and condition of their lots.
Thursday's tasting offers wines from Burgundy, Bordeaux, Italy, the Rhone, and California (full list after the jump), along with cheese and charcuterie. Attendees receive a coupon for $30 off an auction purchase of $50 or more, effectively rebating the cost of your tasting if you convert into a buyer. The value is exceptional even if you never bid on a bottle, but if you find something to bid on you've passed through the gateway they provided, and there's a good chance you'll be hooked.
What: Vegucated screening
Where: David Brower Center and Victoria Theatre
When: Mon., October 24, 7 p.m., and Tue., October 25, 7 p.m.
Cost: $15-$40
The rundown: Vegucated is an charming documentary that follows three entertaining New Yorkers -- hilarious, smart, and weird -- who eat only vegetarian foods for six weeks. Weird people make the greatest documentary subjects. (Case in point: American Movie.) Anyone who's ever considered adding more vegetables to their diets (the nerve!) should check it out. Veducated plays in Berkeley on Tuesday and in SF on Wednesday, so you don't even have to cross a bridge to see it. I'm eating a carrot just for that fact alone. Vegucated success story!
Buy tickets for Monday in Berkeley here or Tuesday in San Francisco here.
So your Aunt May is in town from San Diego or Modesto or Charleston and you've promised her two days of guided sightseeing, just as long as you don't have to accompany her to Pier 39. (Don't worry: She'll make new friends in line at the Powell Street cable-car turnaround, anyway.) But where do you eat? Here are six iconic San Francisco places SFoodie often takes out-of-towners to:
You may have never heard of Sysco, but you probably eat its products several times a week -- if not daily. Sysco, the 55th largest company in the United States, is simultaneously the Walmart and the Office Depot of the restaurant industry, supplying ingredients as simple as dried beans and as complicated as prepared entrees and sauces to hundreds of thousands of restaurants and institutional kitchens.
