SFoodie's countdown of our favorite 50 things to eat and drink, 2012 edition
Trippa alla fiorentina is not a pretty dish. There are no elegant curls of hand-made pasta to photograph. A tuft of baby greens placed on top would only look like a boutonniere pinned to the chest of an orangutan. But there's a reason Florentine-style tripe has been on Delfina's menu for most of the restaurant's 13 years.
It's one of San Francisco's best offal dishes, modeled on the tripe Craig Stoll ate around Florence and Tuscany before starting Delfina. His cooks slice blanched honeycomb tripe into thin strips and braise them with pancetta, aromatics, and tomatoes until the frilly tripe attains an almost gossamer softness.
If you were lucky enough to get to Coffee Bar's The Window early last Thursday, you got to taste the authentic yet accessible Saigon street food from 3 Bottled Fish (http://3bottledfish.wordpress.com). If you got there late, unfortunately, you missed out: the lunchtime pop-up's stash of spring rolls and vermicelli bowls sold out an hour before closing time. But don't fret--there are plenty more noodles to slurp up, plenty more mouthwatering meatballs to chow down on, and plenty more hot chili sauce to drown it all in.
The food scene in this city moves so fast that restaurants more than five years old seem ancient and, three months after they've closed, are mostly forgotten. But the 75-year-old Original Joe's -- the subject of this week's full-length restaurant review in the Weekly -- was closed for five years after a fire shuttered its Taylor Street location, then opened in another part of town, and has been crammed since it reopened. San Francisco foodistas may have short memories, but native San Franciscans, who make up the bulk of Original Joe's fan base, do not.
In terms of the restaurant's looks and its welcome, John and Elena Duggan, grandchildren of founder Ante Rodin, have done a marvelous job interpreting their grandfather's restaurant in its new space. The food? Well, the Italian-meets-steakhouse food's certainly fine, quirks left intact but ingredients improved. In the case of a few dishes, it's excellent.
