SOMA lunchers, take note: The nabe has another worthy sandwich shop. Proprietor Adam Mesnick, also of the Deli Board, changed up the concept of his SOMA 1058 Hoagie sandwich shop earlier this week. The new Rye Project, named after Mesnick's pop-up, features a whittled-down new menu focusing on a few sandwiches served on rye or a Kaiser roll, as well as smoked fish on a platter or on a bagel.
The thinly sliced Romanian pastrami ($14) is a mess of a sandwich in the best possible way. Its meat has a wonderfully dark, smoky appearance and comes dripping with grease, though not so much that it overwhelms the sandwich or the stomach. There's sauce on the side, but you don't need it -- the unadulterated meat, between two thin slices of rye, is enough to make a total experience, especially when you alternate the rich bites with nibbles of the accompanying semi-sour pickle.
Every interesting bartender and bar has some kind of stylistic or philosophic anchor that defines them: an era, ingredients, spirit, or idea.
Some love the history of the bar, and relish uncovering the lore, lost ingredients, and forgotten recipes of past, and manifesting them in a shaker tin. They decipher arcane recipes, take trips mostly to smuggle unavailable ingredients, or reverse engineer their own in a kind of séance with those old bartenders. Others love the classics, refining and restoring those standards with loving precision and studied research, amazing us by alchemizing the platonic ideal of what we consider "ordinary."
There's another group, those that walk a line between the kitchen and the bar, thinking of cocktails more like dishes than drinks. Like bar manager Christopher Longoria of 1760, they build their drinks on flavors and ingredients.
See also:- Drink of the Week: Four Spots to Cool You Down This Week
Drink of the Week: Shrub Runner at Serpentine
Drink of the Week: Conjuring Up Summer with SPF 2020 at Comal
If you get cranky and nervous going more than three days without refried beans and guacamole, Napa's La Morenita is a hearty remedy. A recent short holiday visit to Napa reminded me how important it is to offset that steady intake of wine, gooey and fatty cheese, nuts, fruit, and related gourmet offerings. Those feastly items are great and have their place, but a to-go hook up of still warm and rather juicy chicken, beans, ribs, guac, rice and two kinds of salsa from La Morenita felt more like my every day home in the Mission. The price was right, too: $51.26 ably fed a group of twelve, with extra guac to enjoy later.
There's something about a good deal that really gets me excited. I enjoy finding one, and I love sharing the discovery. So when I was on a run down Valencia the other day and saw this sign, I just had to share.
