I've been a restaurant critic for more than a decade now, and I can't say I've ever had the chance to review the same chef twice in one year -- at two different restaurants. In fact, I probably would have avoided it if the chef hadn't been Kim Alter, whose food I enjoyed so much when she was cooking at Plate Shop. Alter's now at Haven, the subject of this week's full-length restaurant review in the Weekly and Daniel Patterson's new Jack London Square restaurant.
Ch-ch-ch-changes: Weird Fish and the shuttered the Corner are undergoing transfer to new ownership, according to Inside Scoop. With this will come new monikers: Dante's Weird Fish and the Perch. Expect the new Weird Fish, which will reopen after a short closure starting this Saturday, to have more emphasis on, well, fish. The Perch will be a European-style cafe, featuring small plates, and should open in about two months.
Second try: Tablehopper reports, via Local Addition, that Ivan Hopkins is still working on opening a restaurant and brewery, this time on Divisadero. He's still jumping through the hoops of the permit process, but if all goes to plan, he'll open Barrel Head Brew House in an old auto body shop in the Western Addition.
Outer Richmond will welcome Cassava Bakery + Cafe this Monday. Tablehopper says to expect Ritual Roasters coffee alongside breakfast and lunch dishes from the former pop-up duo chef Kristoffer Toliao (Luce) and his wife Yuka Loroi (Starbelly).
Something we missed for last week: Eater SF confirms that after only six months Le Bordeaux has shuttered. While the restaurant was sans liquor license upon opening, they did eventually secure one, but it wasn't enough. Au revoir.
Also, a closure from earlier this year. Tablehopper learns, via a reader, that the Mission's Deli-Up Cafe has been closed since early 2012.
Chucky Dugo, pastry chef for Charles Phan's restaurants -- including Slanted Door, Out the Door, and Wo Hing General Store -- started his career in San Francisco, but talked his way into running a chain of patisseries in Taipei. Dugo has been a pastry chef for Charles Phan since the early days, though as he recounted in part one of this interview, he took a few years off to get his life together. Today, Dugo talks about what it's like to run an empire (of sorts), and tomorrow, he'll share a recipe with SFoodie readers.
SFoodie: What's the biggest challenge of being a pastry chef for a group of restaurants?
Dugo: The biggest challenge is that I don't have a designated pastry staff at any location except Slanted Door. There, I have a whole independent pastry team of six people, from platers to production staff, that allows me to do more technical things. With all the other locations, we have a commissary that just makes the bulk product for us, and things are then finished as they're ordered on-site. With desserts, it's generally the same concept, but the difference is that every location has a chef to finish every savory dish while pastry doesn't. Maybe the garde-manger or spring roll ladies are trying to plate my desserts. They can learn, but I have to start out with simpler desserts.
How do you align your desserts with each different location?
The demographics of each location are totally different. I'm still figuring out the Mission [where Wo Hing is situated] -- there's a sort of frat boy/sorority girl thing going on, but then there's also a hipster element. Overall, I think I might be able to put more experimental and interesting stuff here, since the neighborhood is more accepting. Out the Door on Bush Street is a completely different world. At that location, people will drink three or four glasses of wine but won't have dessert because they're concerned about calories.
The bottom line is that I want to sell desserts. I don't have a quota, but I have to make it profitable. So it's really about pleasing people's palates.
Do you find the need to Asian-ify your desserts?
I don't like to do that. I don't want to do an Eastern-Western thing: I'd rather do one or the other, and Charles' thing about dessert is that it doesn't have to be Asian at all. Ultimately, one of our guidelines is giving people what they want.
What do you see as the trends you're avoiding in dessert and pastry right now?
What's been beaten to death is the whole sort of modernist cuisine; the gel and the foam and the sphere. I really try to do desserts that create an emotional connection to people, whether it be taking them back to their childhood or just appeasing the palate. At the same, I try keep it simple. I think there's a way to keep desserts identifiable and familiar, but just give them an edge, whether it be with a [new] ingredient or my take on a classic technique.
The Wild Kitchen, the pop-up that makes San Franciscans' pants pop up, is back for several nights of dinner service before going on hiatus. Iso Rabins, the foraging mastermind behind it all, is teaming up with co-chef Thomas Martinez, formerly of Bar Tartine and Mission Beach, to create a menu that's entirely unique -- and almost entire foraged.
In particular, these meals will highlight local wild mushroom populations. "We're right at the end of mushroom season now, and it just started raining, so there are tons of mushrooms around. We're stuffing the menu with them. Black trumpets, hedgehogs, yellow foot, and bluets -- which you don't get much around here. Definitely exciting." Agreed!
Bean-to-bar chocolate is tough to do authentically, and other than TCHO, S.F. hasn't had a local B2B producer of note since Scharffen Berger shut down their facility, but here's some good news: Dandelion is a weed worth watching. Since their start in an East Palo Alto garage, these chocolatiers have moved to the Dogpatch and are prepping to open to the world in the Mission this summer. In the meantime, you can buy their "Small Batch" bars in stores.
When food carts began to spread across San Francisco like some kind of tasty parasite, one local blogger joked that the next step would be for culinarians to start simply throwing food at people. They weren't far off, if Bread SRSLY's Sadie Scheffer is any indication.
Each week, Scheffer bakes up dozens of loaves of gluten- , dairy- and egg-free bread - in flavors from sourdough to fig-and-fennel - and hops on her bicycle to deliver them in San Francisco and the East Bay.
She also recently launched a line of only-in-San Francisco sandwiches, such as "The Flying Machine," with pork belly, arugula, and apple butter on savory slices of gingerbread, or "The Candyman," with pickled apples, black-bean cake, beet salsa, and yogurt on cornbread.
Newspapers and blogs aren't the only businesses that need to think about search engine optimization. The East Bay Express has taken it upon itself to demand that restaurants pick SEO-friendly names as well. Not long after the paper called out certain bands for being un-Googleable (have you ever tried looking for Girls videos on YouTube, for instance?), EBX writer Ellen Cushing came up with a list of East Bay restaurants with names so generic they're hard to look up online. SFoodie has had issues ourselves googling Local Cafe and The Alley, and we agree with her: "Telegraph" is almost impossible to find online.
Perhaps it's a better idea these days to to pick a restaurant name that's hard for English speakers to pronounce -- the brand-new Kúuup or Tayyibaat, for instance -- rather than a name like Taqueria San Francisco. TSF may have a website, for all SFoodie knows. We've just never been able to find it.
