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Calavera
The 9-year-old San Francisco resident who won the First Lady's Healthy Lunchtime Challenge in July is now officially a chef. Details and more in this Thursday's roundup.
Dia de Los Muertos
Dia de Los Muertos has gotten a little tricky these past few years, as the Mission’s beleaguered Latino community is rightly sensitive to interlopers with little sense of the holiday’s cultural importance watering it down into another generic excuse to party. Leave it to Oakland’s superb
Calavera to fill the vacuum. For two weeks (Oct. 22-Nov. 4), they’ll be churning out nine(!) special mole dishes (including one made with cactus salad and another with bread pudding) and a mezcal-heavy list of cocktails made with ancestral ingredients. The pechuga (grilled turkey breast and heirloom black bean mezcal, piloncillo, pasilla de Oaxaca, and mole amarillo bitters) sounds particularly imaginative. And oh yes, there will be Oaxacan drinking chocolate.
Dia de Los Muertos, Oct. 22-Nov. 4, at Calavera, 2337 Broadway, Oakland, 510-338-3273.
click to enlarge
Secret Menus: PABU
According to
Thrillist, Financial District izakaya
PABU has a secret Japanese whisky cocktail menu written on a scroll and stuck inside a liquor bottle behind the bar. It has to do with PABU's list of "yakuza cocktails," and the Japanese Mafia's obsession with rituals and formality. (One of them is called Mr. Fingers, and it's named for a guy who creates prosthetic digits for wayward yakuza who erred.) Faux-secret things can become tedious pretty quickly, but we're always down for anything that pertains to booze and organized crime.
PABU, 101 California, 415-668-7228.
Move Over, Taco Tuesday
Sausalito's
Poggio Trattoria has introduced Tuesday Night Suppers, a series of month-long, Italian-influenced family-style meals that include four-to-six antipasti, an entree, and dessert. For Ottobre, Chef Benjamin Balesteri's entree is porchetta with fagiolo all'uccelletto (i.e. cannellini beans in tomato sauce). Novembre brings that Bay Area classic, cioppino, while Dicembre's entree is Stinco de Agnello (braised lamb shanks). That's worth braving a ferry ride on a choppy bay for.
Poggio, 777 Bridgeway, Sausalito, 415-332-7771.
Pascal's Wager
Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk aren't the only guys running two companies at once, now that
Pascal Rigo (the founder and later post-Starbucks savior of well-liked-around-these-parts-in-spite-of-its-total-mediocrity chain La Boulange/La Boulangerie).
According to the
Business Times, three years after netting $100 million for selling the chain, Rigo's now been named Munchery's Chief Customer Experience Officer, which is
title inflation if I've ever heard it.
Do It For the First Lady
Michelle Obama’s signature issue has been combating childhood obesity, and the winner of her
Healthy Lunchtime Challenge was
9-year-old San Franciscan Aria Pelaez, who made a “
Barack-amole” with “Mic-Kale Obama slaw.” She’ll be teaming up with
Twenty Five Lusk’s Chef Matthew Dolan next Friday, Oct. 16 from 4-8 p.m. to cook that winning recipe. This is the cutest thing ever. And however you feel about Pres. Obama, surely we can all agree that the White House will be a lesser place when Michelle Obama vacates it in less than a year-and-a-half.
Twenty Five Lusk, 25 Lusk St., 415-495-5875.
