Once you've gobbled up Joyce Goldstein's latest book, Inside the California Food Revolution, you may find yourself wanting to mull over the weighty topics with others -- what does California cuisine really mean, anyways, and does it depend on who you ask? Tomorrow night at a Taste Talk event at the San Francisco Cooking School, check out a fun and bookish event that promises face time with area culinary stars and a coffee and dessert bar from Neighbor Bakehouse and Crumb.
See also: Inside the California Food Revolution with Joyce Goldstein
Our monthly review explores the city's food trucks gatherings, one at a time, breaking down each one with statistics, descriptions of the scene, and vital info to help you plan a trip there.
Location: 450 Mission, in the alley
Schedule: Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
Market Info Website: Facebook (has the most updates)
Approximate Number of Trucks: 2-3 each day
Parking/Public Transit: Parking is tough, Market street transit makes it easier
Music: No
Booze: No
Seating: Outside in the courtyard of the Fremont Center that connects to the alley
Best for: Quick lunch bite on sunny days
Other notes: Lines get long fast; take an early lunch for best service
Easily one of the hidden gems in the food truck rallies is Truck Stop SF. Tucked away in a small alley barely big enough for the trucks and lines of patrons, this rally hosts a great selection of food trucks, like Hapa SF, KoJA Kitchen, Phat Thai, and the ever-popular Chairman. While it doesn't offer any seating in the alley, it has an unexpected advanced of having access to the courtyard of Fremont Center at 50 1st Street. On a nice day, large groups of co-workers share tables or bench space underneath trees.
See also: Food Truck Bite of the Week: Four Great Food Trucks for Vegetarians
Revisiting Thursday's Ferry Plaza Market, the OG Food Truck Rally
How S.F. Food Vendors Prepare For an Event Like Outside Lands
On the corner of 18th and San Carlos Streets, espresso-only Linea is practically at the Mission's central coordinates, so yeah, the beans are going to have a serious pedigree akin to those people who are always like, "I'm a fourteenth-generation San Franciscan." And Linea's website is currently just a web page attesting to this fact. (But where else are you going to get a shot from a judge of the World Barista Championship?)
See Also: Linea Caffe: A Coffee Shop A-Team
There have been too many a long and drunken night where I've floundered into hofbraus like Lefty O' Doul's with just enough singles to get me a corned beef sandwich to smooth out the inevitable rocky morning after.
No insight as to where this hangover savior has come from. No care but for my own, wasted well being. No idea of the unique history that corned beef has in this city.
So it must have been fate that led me to Debbie Ward in the upstairs office of the city's oldest corned beef plant, adorned with throwback deli photos of sky-high pastrami sandwiches, shamrock clocks, and dated menus of days when the stuff would cost but 25 cents a pound. For the past 103 years, Roberts Corned Meats has been providing corned beef and pastrami to Lefty O'Douls, Mel's Drive Inn, Tommy's Joynt, and a long list of big hitters in the city and around the bay.
"We've weathered the time because we're a specialty house," Ward says.
