In the news, THomas Keller's temporary Ad Hoc is open, Cindy Pawlcyn does fish at Go Fish, and Gary Danko tops the Zagat survey. Pan-Asian Red Ginger in El Granada and Oakland's country French JoJo both receive two and a half stars (**½). Mescolanza in the Richmond District gets two stars (**).
I love food, but I will admit that I am not a hugely adventurous eater. I love to watch the likes of Tony Bourdain travel to faraway places and eat things like, oh, cobra hearts, but i doubt that I'd be able to stomach it myself. In fact, I can hardly stand to think about some of the foods of my own cultural cuisine, Korean.
Frogs aren't considered all that adventurous, and yet, I doubt I could have eaten it, as Reid of Ono Kine Grindz did on a recent trip from his home in Hawaii to San Francisco. The restaurant is Dragonfly, a contemporary Vietnamese restaurant that he read about. He hasn't written any notes about what it tasted like yet, but the picture makes them look, at least to me, pretty damn good.
Over the weekend, I begged for some advice about dim sum in the Bay
Area, with only Yank Sing and Ton Kiang
as names that I had from Michael Bauer's List of the
Top 100 Bay Area restaurants. Thank you to all for your suggestions! However, I ended up at Yank Sing anyway
because our host couldn't stop singing its praises. He warned me that there would be some of the traditional dim sum
like shiu mai and chicken's feet, but there would also be what he called "gringo dim sum." I was worried, but
the new-fangled "gringo dim sum" was just as good as the OG. The photo tour is after the jump...
Now Monkey is on a road trip, and has motored into the Bay Area. For Friday Happy Hour, he was in downtown
San Francisco enjoying another Mandarin & Soda in an almost all-black, wear-your-sunglasses-inside
bar in the lobby of a swanky hotel. Just inside the front door, the ceiling goes all the way up to
skylight, which at Happy Hour, lets some waning sunshine in. The bar has a list of about 40
"signature" cocktails (doesn't that defeat the idea of "signature?"), several of which include: the
Wondertini (Chopin vodka with a splash of Bonny Doon Muscat Vin de Glaciere), San Franhattan (Johnnie Walker Black,
Amaretto di Saronno and dash of cherry juice), and the Dot Com Bust, which is a glass of tap water on the rocks.
We also ordered French fries, which came out in a paper cone resting in a wire frame, mostly because we needed to
sober up. The drinks are fairly strong, and had Monkey singing the alphabet backwards!
As if oil and
gas prices weren't enough, now the heavy rains and cold weather in northern California have made fruits and vegetables expensive. Lettuces are
at an all-time high, and it's difficult to find many things that are normally abundant in springtime.
In restaurants, there's gourmet salad at Mixt Greens
and a new
Japanese vegan restaurant, Cha-Ya, in Berkeley. Hanazen is the closest
thing to sushi houses in Japan, and the Inside Scoop
reports that Upper Noe has more Italian restaurants, Budo will re-open as Cuvee Napa with the move of former chef James
McDevitt to New York, Home restaurants is undergoing staff changes, and Le Colonial has a new menu.
Yesterday's Wine section of the San Francisco Chronicle put out a great feature about a
mini-controversy surrounding corkage fees around the Bay area. Restaurateurs charge a fee to diners who bring their
own wine. However, the loss of revenue for the restaurant isn't always made up by such a fee. The issue wasn't about
how much restaurants were charging. Some restaurants are bypassing the corkage altogether and simply
disallowing BYOB. Bay area diners are more than a little
upset, especially with such a strong, long and deep tradition fueled by wine country's proximity.
Personally, I have no opinion other than that the restaurateurs can do what they want. Diners, as well, can do what
they want. If a restaurant does not allow you to bring your own wine or charges a prohibitive corkage, and you have a
fabulous bottle that you want to drink, give your business to someone else who will welcome you.
San Francisco is abundant with excellent dining opportunities from Chez
Panisse in Berkeley to Thomas Keller's French Laundry, but even New
York, with its own wealth of stellar restaurants, had but four restaurants that were awarded Michelin's top honor of
three stars. Thomas Keller's NY restaurant, Per Se, was among them.
The guide is due to be published in October of this year, and the anonymous reviewing group of one American and
four European inspectors have already started making their way around the Bay Area.
So I forced one of my friends to snatch a copy of this past Sunday's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle with the knowledge that the Sunday magazine would have the
annual Bay Area Top 100
Restaurants. I got it in the mail this morning, and was excited to look through it, but the first thing that caught
my eye was the story about a Burrito Eater.
Charles Hodgkins is the Burrito Eater. His website, www.burritoeater.com, is basically a food blog in which he chronicles his quest
for the "nine mustache" (out of 10) rated burrito in the Bay Area, ranging from Baja Fresh to holes in the
wall. When he started, he thought he would have hit them all by the time he had eaten from 50 or 60 taquerias, but he
says that there are over 170 places to get a burrito from a walk-up style stand. His top two favorites are Taqueria San
Francisco and Papalote.
I wonder if Charles has ever pondered the idea of coming to Los Angeles.
I'm going to cheat on my own city, Los Angeles, for a moment, and wax poetic about how much I love not only the Bay
Area restaurant and dining landscape, but how well the media there covers it. Every year, the Dining section of
the San Francisco Chronicle compiles a list of their Top 100 restaurants in the Bay area,
and this week, they have released their list for 2006. The restaurants aren't ranked, but listed geographically,
covering San Francisco, Berkeley/Oakland, the North Bay, and the Peninsula, and isn't simply a list of the top most
expensive, high-end restaurarants. Michael Bauer, the Chronicle's restaurant critic, has even included a podcast of how
they went about choosing the 100.
Given that Saveur's website is "stylishly useless," it's
almost unfair to post all the wonderful things that are in the April 2006 issue of the magazine I just received.
Consider it simply an express-view for you as you ponder whether to pick it up in the check-out line. (And I'll do my
best over the next few weeks to post any adventures I have with the recipes).
A look at the changing fare on college campuses, which are ditching the dining halls and favoring the carts
and trucks that serve fast, cheap, and authentic ethnic food like falafel and veggie pakoras at UVM and kimchee and bulgogi accessible to a number
of schools in Philadelphia. Of course, I know all about the In-N-Out truck on the UCLA and USC campuses once a year.
In the cellar, the wine of the month is madiran, a "dark, spicy, tannic expression
of the French southwest."
In a different kind of cellar, Campbeltown is Scotland's "other" whisky region.
San Francisco chef James Schenk (of Nuevo Latino restaurant Destino)
makes alfajores, South American butter cookies filled with dulce de leche.
Stop all the debate. The original recipe for Buffalo wings from the
Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York!
The feature of the magazine is Tuscan trattorias, with recipes for: arista di maiale (roasted herb-stuffed
porkloin), fagioli sgranati (white beans with sage), piselli freschi (fresh peas with Prosciutto), pappa al pomodoro
(bread and tomato soup), insalata di trippa (cold tripe salad - I doubt I'll be trying this one, but who knows?),
pappardelle all'anatra (broad noodles with duck sauce), and fritto misto di coniglio e verdure (fried rabbit and
vegetables - imagine serving that to your kids on Easter!).
We love hummus, and who knew Saveur could
dedicate six whole pages to the simple chickpea puree?
Le Veau d'Or in Manhattan is "a real French restaurant: the music is terrible but the food is
great."
And finally, a look at the endagered Danish tradition of the smorrebrod (different from Swedish
smorgasbord).
The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau and Visa are sponsoring this city-wide, month-long event that
is now in its 5th year. There are almost 100 Bay Area restaurants that are
participating by offering a three-course prix fixe meal at lunch ($21.95) or dinner ($31.95) or both.
Reservations specifically for SF Dine About Town can even be made via OpenTable.
I think the event is purely a promotional thing for both the Convention Bureau and Visa during a month which is
typically slow for restaurants. Works for me, because a few of the restaurants are on my SF To-Dine List (A16!). Although, now I need to find a way up to SF. Unless we can convince Visa to do
the same thing in LA!
Over the weekend, I 
As if oil and
gas prices weren't enough, now the heavy rains and cold weather in northern California have made 
American diners got pretty excited when the Michelin Guide for New York was
released last fall. Now, the organization that reviewed 507 restaurants in New York has 
DIY Foods: Making homemade sausage
Cakes so amazing they'd be hard to cut into
Fruit juice: An invitation to diabetes?
