Real candy makers will surely shudder in horror at Ichiban Kan's (22 Peace Plaza; 1931 Irving) $2 "capsule chocolate" maker, but it's a fun thing for amateurs like us to try out. It comes with little bitty teeny tiny instructions that basically offer the most rudimentary directions for tempering chocolate (heat it up to a certain temperature and cool it down to a certain temperature). The chocolate is poured into a mold of two round halves and put in the refrigerator to chill and become solid. Once it is set, you can throw in a filling du choix, run a hot spoon along one edge to slightly melt it to meld the two pieces together, and create one orb of super gourmet deliciousness.
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The San Francisco Small Business Development Center is launching a "Restaurant Series" of seminars aimed at demystifying some of the many hurdles that owning and operating an eatery entails. These are workshops designed to be super-affordable and to separate the truly serious entrepreneurs from the ones with food stars in their eyes.
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- Taste of Microfinance Celebrates Businesses Fed by Opportunity Fund
Remember that really bad Tommy James and the Shondells song? This has nothing to do with it. A few months ago, Jasper's began offering cocktails on tap, starting with a Negroni. Made in a large batch and placed in a keg, the bar is able to pour consistent glasses of the spectacular Campari cocktail night after night. This is especially helpful on a busy night when a good cocktail needs to be in your hand without the requisite 5-minute "craft cocktail" wait.
Then bar manager Kevin Diedrich decided to up the ante by also putting a Hanky Panky on tap, a cocktail made with a little splash of San Francisco urine, a.k.a. Fernet Branca. Made from equal parts of Tanqueray gin and bar-made sweet vermouth, it's a simple drink in construction, but surprisingly complex in flavor.
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- Kegged Cocktails: Drinking Out of the Tap
- The Dapper Diner: Crispy Fried Pig Ears and a Transcendent Pork Trip at Nombe
The Truck: Hapa SF
The Cuisine: Filipino food reinterpreted
Specialty Items: Lumpia, sisig tacos, adobo chicken
Worth the Wait in Line? Definitely. At peak lunchtime, it was a total 15 minutes from the end of the line to food in hand
With the large roster of food trucks cruising the Bay Area, each with its own specialty, there are few that have a menu quite as diverse and well executed as Hapa SF. Chef William Pilz appropriately balances respect for Filipino classic dishes with some Mexican, Thai, and Vietnamese flair. The dishes show the finesse that experience in the kitchen (and not a marketing degree) can produce.
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Disney may have already trademarked the phrase, but we're pretty sure that Denver's Great American Beer Festival is actually the "happiest place on Earth." As soon as the doors open, thousands of wide-eyed beer aficionados storm the enormous hall, gleefully hustling to their favorite brewery booth faster than a child traversing Main Street en route to Space Mountain. The festival, broken up into four sessions over three days, offered unlimited sampling of 2700 beers (no, there's not an extra zero in there) from 580 breweries. To put things in perspective, it takes a whopping 132 tons of ice to keep that much beer cold.
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- Beer of the Week: The Bruery's Autumn Maple Tastes Like Thanksgiving's Sweet Side
