Some restaurants took the ushering in of a new year as the time to bow out of the city's restaurant scene. Elizabeth Falkner is officially out after closing Citizen Cake on the heels of Orson's shutter. No longer will you venture out to the Richmond District to eat Dennis Lee's ramyeon at Namu, as the team focuses on their pending Mission restaurant, Namu Gaji. And farewell, dear Hooters.
Other restaurateurs (State Bird Provisions, Hong Kong Lounge II, Quick Fix) saw December as the time to ready for the beginning of 2012. So, alas, happy new year's eating! Here are new places to check out as 2012 grows older.
Openings
• The Ritz-Carlton renamed its restaurant Parallel 37 (600 Stockton at Pine), updating its menu and expanding its bar program.
• With their State Bird Provisions (1529 Fillmore at Geary) former Rubicon chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski are serving small plates, dim sum style.
• The pairing-focused Maven (598 Haight at Steiner) opened with small plates and accompanying drinks.
Rice Plate Journal is a yearlong project to canvas Chinatown, block by block, discovering the good, the bad, and the hopelessly mediocre. Maximum entrée price: $10.
If you're looking for someone to blame for Chinatown's profusion of mediocre cha chaan teng, restaurants serving Hong Kong takes on Western food, point to the success of ABC Bakery Cafe, whose original location opened on Jackson Street in 1990. And if you're looking to point to any SF restaurant that comes close to getting cha chaan teng food right, that'd probably be ABC, too.
It's more or less the Denny's of Chinatown, with stiff, full-color menus and beige-on-beige cafeteria decor (one friend called the architectural style "nursing home"). Once I made it to the top of the line and was ushered to a seat, it took about as long to flip through the menu in search of lunch as it did for the waiters to notice me. Which is to say: Nowhere near quick.
The menu could be considered an encyclopedia of HK tea shop food -- baked spaghetti, curry ox tongue, sizzling-platter pepper steak, macaroni with Spam, not to mention noodle soups offered in variations minute and baroque enough to befuddle sneakerheads. It even befuddled the waiters, too: On one visit, a friend pointed at a plate of fried rice on another table he wanted to try. The waiter first asked her coworkers, then the diners, who all shrugged, so she finally ordered the wrong dish. (It was still too good to finish.)
And while several experiments with ABC's noodle soups never amounted to much, it took only a glance at the glassed-in cooking station that juts into the dining room to figure out which dish I should order: Hoi Nam chicken. In slow, unceasing rhythm, ABC's Hoi Nam chicken guy, who perpetually looked like he'd rather be out on smoke break, took a cleaver to chickens, scooped rice into bowls, and ladled up broth while his assistant arranged the plates onto platters. Stacks of Hoi Nam chicken sets rose and ebbed as waiters ferried them out to the tables. The Hoi Nam chicken is so brisk and regular that it's the quickest dish on the menu to order.
Cold weather calls for fortification, of home and hearth, of self and soul. Or you could simply drink fortified wine. Some of the best known, and most seasonally-specific, fortified wines are the great Ports of Portugal. But there's a California equivalent: Quady Winery, which has been making sweet, fortified wines in Madera since 1975.
Quady's two Starboards* -- Batch 88, in the style of a ruby Port, and its Vintage 1996, made in the style of a traditional "vintage" Port -- both drink with the character of the Port styles they emulate. In fact, they're made from the same Portuguese grape varietals as the Portuguese wines.
Wine: Batch 88 Starboard
Notes: In the deep-red Batch 88, luscious notes of butterscotch and caramel dominate, with elements of red cherry, quince paste, and milk chocolate. Toward the finish, there's a touch of black pepper and a tiny pinch of nutmeg. It's solid, enjoyable, and perfect for sticky-toffee pudding.
Sells for: About $24.99 at BevMo (3455 Geary and 305 Van Ness) and Mollie Stones (635 Portola).
Although Juhu Beach Club, the Indian food pop-up from Top Chef alum Preeti Mistry, stopped serving lunch this fall, Mistry's relaunching it as a series of dinners at La Victoria Bakery this week -- in preparation for opening her own restaurant in the Mission sometime this year.
Mistry says, "This is not some fine dining Indian mash-up, just plain, good, totally-not-traditional Indian food. It will be unapologetically spicy, saucy, and full of love." (Also: vegetarian-friendly.) Highlights from Juhu Beach Club's menu this Thursday: dahi puri, vada chaat, mung ne dal, and pav bhaji, an old favorite from her lunch service.
It's a big year for high-grade iced coffee. Portland's big-and-getting-bigger Stumptown unleashed bottled "stubbies" of cold-brewed goodness in May. La Colombe followed suit in August with iced coffee encased in elegant containers, and Grady's large bottles of New Orleans Cold Brew showed up seemingly days later.
Now local heavy-hitter Blue Bottle Coffee has stepped in to the ring with limited, bottled versions of its popular New Orleans and Kyoto-style iced coffees. The coffees contain only the ingredients of the beverages made for Blue Bottle's growing collection of cafes and are described as "velvety & sweet" (New Orleans) and "strong & black" (Kyoto).
Blue Bottle's Ferry Terminal kiosk, as well as the Oakland-based Webster Street Roaster are currently the only two outlets carrying the iced coffees. If sales go well, the company says it will consider expanding the release this summer.
What: Rice Paper Scissors lunch pop-up
Where: The Schwab Room, ground floor, SFMOMA
When: Friday, January 6, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Cost: varies
The rundown: Sharon Lockhart's Lunch Break exhibition at SFMOMA contemplates workers' activities during their lunch breaks through film, photography, and writing. Celebrate the show's final weeks by becoming a living part of the exhibition. Escape your day job to eat Vietnamese food from Rice Paper Scissors -- dishes such as tomato-sardine banh mi, vegan smoked "duck," and pan-fried sardines in a lemongrass tomato sauce with housemade mayo, cucumbers, jalapenos, and cilantro. Here's to lunch!
Yeah, that's what most of us have been saying to ourselves over the past few weeks, but it's true, according to the USDA. NPR's food correspondant, Allison Aubrey, looked over the agency's food consumption data and reported some of the numbers she found: 185 pounds of meat, 31 pounds of cheese, 273 pounds of fruit -- all of which add up to 1,996 pounds per person per year. (Visual Economics translated those figures into a chart, which, strangely enough, looks far more innocuous than the numbers themselves.)
