Bay Area Restaurants

Vertumnus, Arcimboldo's portrait of Emperor Rudolph II. Photo: Wikimedia Commons " width="667" height="500" class="size-full wp-image-62199" />Vertumnus, Arcimboldo’s portrait of Emperor Rudolph II. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Post by Maria Godoy, The Salt at NPR Food (5/19/13) It takes a lot of chutzpah to reduce one of the most powerful men on Earth to a pile of fruits and vegetables. Luckily for art lovers, Giuseppe Arcimboldo had nerve to spare. Arcimboldo created this unorthodox produce portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II back in 1590. By that time, the Italian artist had been painting for the emperor and his powerful Habsburg family for more than 25 years, so presumably, they’d grown used to his visual jokes. (The emperor has “peachy” cheeks and “ears” of corn, get it?) Though he also dabbled in the angels and saints that were the standard stuff of art in his day, Arcimboldo is best known for his “scherzi” or “capricci” — “meaning jokes or games,” as David Brown, a curator at the National Gallery of Art, explains in this video. “It’s very clear that’s how they were meant to be seen,” Brown says. “They were a source of amusement or entertainment, because there was this element of surprise.” That they also often feature an element of fruits, berries or other foods is partly a reflection of the Renaissance blossoming of natural sciences, like botany. “At a distance, they just look like heads in profile or three-quarter view,” Brown says. “Up close, they look like an incredible variety of nature’s wonders.” That talent for upending the viewer’s expectations helps explain why Arcimboldo — whose work, Brown says, fell into “virtual oblivion” after his death — found new champions among 20th-century modernists. (Picasso and Salvador Dali were among his fans). The latest to pay homage to this Renaissance man is American Philip Haas, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker (for Angels and Insects) and contemporary artist. This weekend, the New York Botanical Garden opened a new exhibit featuring Haas’ giant, 15-foot-high fiberglass sculptures based on Arcimboldo’s “Four Seasons” — winter, spring, summer and fall personified as people, crafted of foods, trees and other natural elements. Winter, on display in downtown Milan, Italy, in 2011. Photo: Luca Bruno/AP As in the originals, Haas’ sculptures contain clues to the foods of the 16th century, when Arcimboldo painted. Winter is a craggy-faced old man, and his “cravat” is made of oranges and lemons — imported from the warmer south, they were one of the few fruits that could be seen in Renaissance Italy during the colder months. Summer. Photo: Courtesy New York Botanical Garden Summer’s bounty — in the shape of a young man, naturally — includes eggplant in his skull and corn ears, two crops introduced to Europe from Asia and the New World. Autumn. Photo: AP/Courtesy New York Botanical Garden A fall-ripening gourd caps Autumn’s head. Figs dangle from his ears. The grapes that tumble from his head like hair and fill his wooden barrel chest both nod to Italy’s fall wine-making season. Like Arcimboldo, Haas says he was attracted by the idea of playing with context and viewer’s expectations. “Arcimboldo was making a painting from the natural world, and then he turned it into a painting and [others] stuck it in a museum,” Haas tells The Salt. “I took it out of the museum and put it back into the natural world.” The sculptures have been on a tour of Europe and the U.S., where they were most recently on display at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. By transforming Arcimboldo’s seasons into colossal 3-D sculptures, Haas says he aims to change how the viewer experiences not just the art but the natural world that surrounds them, too. “S

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Mission Street Food began as a kind of accident, which gathered momentum as it evolved from a food truck into a pop-up and then Mission Chinese Food and now even an outpost in New York.A few years later, we’re hoping that another half-baked idea can pick up steam and become something real and lasting, but this time the goal is not just a charitable restaurant but a full-fledged charitable food movement. We will need help to make it happen, just like last time, but we hope you will feel as excited by the potential as we do.First a bit of background: a few months ago, we started talking with The Kitchen Sisters, who produce radio for KQED, about a big event they are curating at SFMOMA. The theme is “The Making Of…” and they’re bringing more than a hundred local artists and artisans to do what they love to do—from making hats to building furniture out of mushrooms—right in the middle of the museum. We wondered what we could do, and as we daydreamed, we came upon the idea of “The Making of a Charitable Food Movement,” which would be a participatory exhibit in which museumgoers would help us build a new food culture on the spot. So here’s what we have planned: On Friday May 31st, as part of the “Making Of…” exhibit at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, hosted by acclaimed radio producers, The Kitchen Sisters, we’re putting together an event called “The Making of a Charitable Restaurant Movement.” The idea is to demonstrate a robust public interest in making food more meaningful by giving back. More than forty of the city’s most respected restaurants will sell $50 gift certificates, of which $5 will fund meals for people in need; gift certificates will be available for purchase May 31 from 10am to 6pm at the museum and online. At the museum, chefs from Bar Tartine, La Cocina, Mission Chinese Food, Stag Dining Group, Tacolicious and Wise Sons Deli will serve snacks for $5 apiece, of which $1 will be donated to The Food Bank. The event will also feature cooking demonstrations by Chad Robertson (Tartine Bakery), Thomas McNaughton (Flour + Water), Jason Fox (Commonwealth), Ryan Pollnow (Central Kitchen) and Jesse Koide (Mission Chinese Food). For every dollar raised by this event, The Food Bank will be able to provide three meals for hungry people in the Bay Area—and the need has been rising in the last few years. We’re launching a new entity, called ShareTable.org, which is a philanthropic platform created for this event, but if enough money is raised to feed 50,000 people, we will expand the endeavor into an ongoing accelerator helping restaurants to benefit their communities.For us, this feels like a bit of a return to the old days of Mission Street Food, when we invited guest chefs to join us in the kitchen and asked customers to bear with our occasional mis-steps for the sake of giving back to our communities. We are even returning here, to our old blog, where we used to announce our latest scheme, from “Mexiterranean” night to “2011: A Seafood Odyssey.” Now we are asking for you to get involved again, whether that means eating ch

I love the power of social media.  One of the things that I find special about it besides relationships that are born is the creativity that is provoked by one small snippet.  The other day as I was enjoying my coffee and catching up, I saw a tweet from Brandi, about an angel food cake recipe.  I have not really thought about angel food cake in years.  I have enjoyed it, but have not really thought about it until Brandi planted that seed.  A seed that continued growing …. I was suddenly taken back to a time when I was a little girl.  I remember my grandmother and mom baking it.  It came from a box, and there was a special pan, one with little legs that helped with cooling the fresh baked cake.  I remember the floury mixture, and the sweet smell as it mixed and tripled in volume until finally it oozed over the top of the mixing bowl.  I loved the caramelly warm sugar smell of the cake as it baked, and how the top slightly cracked.  I would anxiously peek into the oven waiting for it to be finished while being gently reminded “not to open the oven door”.  And my favorite part was when the cake came out of the pan.  I would take my dirty little fingers and scoop out the crumbs that clung to the sides of the pan.  Eagerly, I would nibble off the sugary sweetness. Once I saw that tweet from Brandi, and relived that brief moment, I went to find the pan I had inherited.  I hadn’t used it in years as I thought making angel cake would be labor intensive.  I had time today, and we were celebrating so it would be worth it.  Luckily, I had all the ingredients on hand that were needed for my recipe;  eggs, cake flour and sugar.  On a whim, I added lemon zest from one of the few lingering Meyer lemons.  Last minute I added vanilla bean paste as I love the little speckles of bean in baked goods.  Angel food cake is like heaven, it is as light as a cloud and as sweet as eternity. And I have a feeling you will be seeing a lot of angel food cake this summer. This month we are celebrating by sharing this cake with you.  What are we celebrating you ask?  Chez Us has turned 6!  Six years of getting to know you, and of sharing our lives, memories and recipes.  While there have been ups and downs to blogging, in the end, it is something, we enjoy doing so we keep doing it.  We are blessed from the relationships that have formed near and far.  We enjoy reading your comments about how a recipe changed your life.  We enjoy getting emails telling us your children are now eating cauliflower because of a recipe we made for you.  Or maybe we wrote about a memory that touched us, and through social media you stumbled upon that memory that really belonged to you.  Whatever the reasoning is for you being here, we thank you, and we hope to continue feeding you as long as we can continue cooking. To thank you for your continued support we have finally updated the site.  We met a wonderful woman during the MIXED event, her name is Kita, and she has many talents besides cooking.  She develops websites!  It was a joy to work with her, and she helped make our virtual kitchen easier for you to navigate around.  A few highlights for us (and we hope you) are the sections we created of What’s In Season and Camping Grub;  we plan to change this area with each season and what is available to us.  As well we are highlighting a few fun areas we enjoy in the kitchen off on the right hand side of the front page.  One of the most exciting areas is our newly designed Recipe Index.  It is all still a work in progress as we tweak areas, and we are getting there.  Soon all recipes will be printable – yeah!  Is there something you’d like to see us do over at Chez Us?  Let us know;  leave a comment or drop us a note. More Angel Food Cakes to make you swoon: Vanilla Bean Angel Food Cake with Cocoa Whipped Cream – Bran Appetit Strawberry Angel Food Cake – Bobbies Baking Blog Key Lime Angel Food Cake - Foods of Our Lives Rai

Inside Four Barrel Coffee. [Photo: Kenn Wilson/Flickr] THE MISSION—Looking for a taste of Mill Valley Beerworks' acclaimed food, minus a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge? Head to Four Barrel Coffee tomorrow afternoon, when regular customer and MVB chef David Wilcox will offer $9 Prather Ranch porchetta sandwiches with radishes, pickled mustard seeds, and aioli, or beet Reuben sandwiches with cucumber, sauerkraut, and Thousand Island dressing, as well as $4 pickles. No beer will be served, though, so be advised. The pop-up is out back on Caledonia St. from 11 am-3 pm. [EaterWire] UNION SQUARE—Millennium is holding an agave-centric dinner next Wednesday, May 22, with six courses of tequila and mezcal shots and cocktails paired with dishes like cherry salad with spinach and purslane, sweet pepper relleno, and masa dumplings with porcini mole. Admission is $95 and includes the drinks. Call Alison at (415) 345-3900, ext. 13, to reserve. [EaterWire] HAYES VALLEY—Boxing Room is bringing in a whole goat from Rossotti Ranch for a special dinner this Monday, May 20, and chef Brian West of Petaluma's Risibisi is coming down to give Justin Simoneaux a hand with preparing the five-course dinner. Dishes will include smoked goat ham, goat-neck tortellini, and goat's milk cheesecake, paired with three beers and two wines. Dinner is $100 all-inclusive, with two 20-person seatings at 6 and 8:30 pm; call (415) 430-6590 to reserve. [EaterWire] HAYES VALLEY—Tomorrow marks the third edition of Hayes Valley's annual Ham and Eggs Fire Brunch, which commemorates the fire caused by a local back in 1906 while making the titular breakfast dish. This year's brunch will be at Biergarten at noon, with proceeds going to the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association; those who feel like getting up early can take a walking tour at 10 am before they dine. [Hayeswire]

Madrona Manor. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons] The Bauer Power Hour descends on Healdsburg's Madrona Manor this week, where Jesse Mallgren, "one of the Bay Area's most underrated chefs," is putting out "a finely honed meal that seemed generous and a great value" at $91 for five courses, plus another $68 for wine pairings. Unfortunately, the service is "personable and well-meaning, but doesn't match the sophistication of the food," and the staff's uniforms get special mention: "The staff at restaurants of this caliber generally is impeccably dressed; here they wear ill-fitting black suits and scuffed shoes, like a ragtag team." (Perhaps they're the Bad News Bears on their day off.) In the end, though "Madrona delivers in a Sonoma sort of way," and could even be dubbed "a poor man's Meadowood." Final verdict: three stars. [Chron] Meanwhile, Nicholas Boer continues on the East Bay beat with a trip to Juhu Beach Club, where "the best word to describe" the cuisine is "fun." He's enamored with most of the pavs, particularly the meat versions; the vegetarian Sloppy Lil' P is "too starchy" for his taste. He's also not big on "the sulfur-y punch of black salt," which chef Preeti Mistry thinks "Americans are totally ready for." But with a "hard to forget" atmosphere and servers "obviously jazzed about the food," Boer thinks Mistry has "a bright future built on her food." Two stars. [Chron] Anna Roth scooted over to Divisadero's Wine Kitchen, which she sees as a metaphor for the under-construction neighborhood: on every block between Fell and Geary, "there's at least one storefront boarded up with plywood or a land parcel set aside for condo development." She digs Wine Kitchen's "impressive wine selection" and "ambitious, though less impressive, small plates menu," but dubs the space "strangely soulless," with a "lack of personality that starts with the interior" and carries through to the yuppie crowd. "Gentrification is par for the course in a city like San Francisco, and there's nothing wrong with ambition when it's executed well. I just hope that it doesn't mean a neighborhood as gritty as Divisadero has to lose its roots." [SF Weekly] Josh Sens did a double-dip this month, visiting Charles Phan at both of his new Southern outposts, South at SFJAZZ and Hard Water. South is the weaker of the two, in his opinion: it "hits a lot of flat notes, like a saxophonist with shoddy embouchure." The cocktails are excellent, and bar bites are good, but the whole thing feels messed-up as a dinner concept: "Sit for a full-length dinner, and you're asking for frustration." Meanwhile, Hard Water's "terrific" cocktails, "more composed" food like sausage and Gulf flounder, and "clearer sense of identity" are all to the good, until it's time to flag down a server: even Phan himself, who unwittingly sat down next to Sens, had some trouble getting his order in. Two stars for Hard Water, and 1.5 stars for South. [SF Mag] The Examiner's Cynthia Salaysay was also on the scene at Hard Water, where the "towering shrine to brown liquor...outshines the accompanying food." Though there were a few standouts, like buttery oysters St. Charles and the much-lauded fried celery hearts, and the "rustic-meets-Space Age" room is a winner, Salaysay wasn't impressed by her entrees: "None of the entrees I ordered lived up to the beauty of the drinks," and to make matters worse, "dining at the bar made for some confusion." Overall, she gets "the sense that Hard Water is still figuring out its marriage of top-notch bartending and fine dining, [but she'll] surely be back to drink a few more whiskeys." [Examiner] Jonathan Kauffman found the tortas at closet-size (well, "practically an armoire") La Ciudad de Mexico in the Richmond to be worth packing into the small space: Chef Luis Bolaños, a La Torta Gorda alum, makes tortas "as good as anything you'll eat in the Mission or Oakland," and burritos should be ignored in favor of "freshly-made quesadillas" with nopales or

Embarcadero: Here's an early review of Loretta Keller's new Exploratorium restaurant, Seaglass. [KQED] SoMa: City Beer Store is having a party to celebrate their 7th birthday this weekend. [SFoodie] West Portal: Trattoria da Vittorio is now open. [Eater, Scoop] Also, La Boulange just signed a lease near there, too. [Scoop] Read more posts by Jay BarmannFiled Under: neighborhood watch, openings, seaglass, trattoria da vittorio

The lion skewer in question. Just last week a Tampa restaurant garnered national press for serving tacos stuffed with lion meat, and now a San Francisco Peninsula restaurant has decided to get in on the game. Burlingame's Mokutanya is serving a lion meat skewer as part of an exotic game menu on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and even though the wee portion (pictured) is $70, they sold twenty orders just last night alone. Clearly Bay Area foodists live for this kind of thing. Despite a general outcry on Facebook due to the endangered status of lions, and despite the fact that Taco Fusion in Tampa already quit their stunt after the public outcry there, Mokutanya says the lion will be back next Wednesday. [Eater, Scoop, CBS, Earlier] Read more posts by Jay BarmannFiled Under: stunt eats, kerfuffles, mokutanya

Archival photo of Alice Waters at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of CUESA On May 18, CUESA will be celebrating the 20th Birthday Bash of the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, with special events throughout the Saturday morning market. For $20 a ticket ($10 for children 10 and under), market goers can create their own seasonal fruit shortcakes at stations “curated” with market ingredients prepared by four top local pastry chefs: William Werner of Craftsman & Wolves, Francis Ang of Fifth Floor, Jen Musty of Batter Bakery, and Luis Villavelazquez of Les Elements Patisserie. There will also be coffee, tea, and a juice and mimosa bar filled with fresh-squeezed juices, fresh fruit and vegetable purees (don’t miss the surprisingly refreshing fennel-frond puree), sparkling water and Champagne. The market’s founders will do a presentation at 11am. Preview of the mimosa bar The first regular weekly markets, held in front of the Ferry Building, happened in 1993. Do you remember 1993? I do. The scars of 1989′s 6.8 Loma Prieta quake still criss-crossed the city. A post-earthquake, post-financial crash, pre-tech boom recession meant jobs were scarce but rents were cheap. But change was coming, mostly notably along the waterfront. Since 1958, the Embaracadero Freeway had sliced across the northeastern edge of the city, throwing the piers from the Bay Bridge northwards into concrete-shadowed gloom. Ferries still left from the Ferry Building, but to get to them, you scuttled as fast as possible through the building’s dimly lit, grubby passages, no more inviting than a New York City subway tunnel. Then, in 1991, the earthquake-damaged freeway was finally removed, and the City realized it had a civic jewel–the greatly underutilized Ferry Building, suddenly revealed in all its Market Street-anchoring glory–on its hands. It would take another seven years before renovations would begin that would return the Ferry Building to a modernized, food-glorying version of its original 1898 self–but in the bare stretches of concrete out front (remember, those pretty, palm-dotted, skateboard-ready plazas are still at least a decade away), a culinary revolution was getting underway, one head of oak-leaf lettuce at a time. Aerial view of an early Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market across from the Ferry Building. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA In 1992, a small group of San Franciscans including Sibella Kraus, then a forager and produce-finder for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, writer, restaurant critic and Hayes Street Grill chef/owner Patricia Unterman, and local developer Tom Sargeant organized themselves into the San Francisco Public Market Collaborative, with the idea of reclaiming the waterfront for a public market that would connect farmers directly with chefs and home cooks–in fact, with any curious city eaters. After endless meetings with representatives from the City and the Port, they got grudging approval for a one-time-only open-air market in Ferry Plaza parking lot on Sept. 12, 1992. At the time, the Alemany Market, located near the freeways at the base of Bernal Heights, was the city’s only regular farmers’ market. If you were a chef, you relied on distributors and vendors from the wholesale produce market near Bayview. If you needed speciality items, you could swing through Chinatown, the Richmond, or the Mission, if you had time, but mostly, you talked to your delivery guys on the phone, and hoped they’d show up with something close to what you’d asked for. The success of the one-day market took even the optimists of the collaborative by surprise. The group immediately began pressuring the city to give permission for a regular market, bringing farmers and urbanites together on a weekly basis. By 1993, there was already a few months of precedent: the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market had set up in Civic Center in early spring. Starting in May, t

[Photos: Wes Rowe] The sun is shining and it is finally feeling like Spring. So shed some layers, join Eater Dating, and take your new partner on one of these Eater-approved dates. How about we... ...juice it up at Thrive Juicery. ...sit on the rooftop at El Techo de Lolinda. ...try the Korean steak sandwich Rhea's Kitchen. ...taste some South African cuisine at Amawele's South African Kitchen. ...head to Kitchen Mojo and try the popcorn shrimp kimchi po'boys. Join Eater Dating Today. >> ·Eater Dating [~E~]

"Crazy Amy" Bouzaglo, arguably Kitchen Nightmares' biggest nightmare to date, has gone from vilified viral reality TV celebrity to meme, all in about five days. Behold some of the various meme captions that have popped up in the few days since we first fell under her spell. [SFoodie, Earlier, Earlier still] Read more posts by Jay BarmannFiled Under: funnies, amy bouzaglo, amy's baking company