San Francisco Food Blog

Hopefully you'll still be able to eat sushi after seeing this.

​This Google ad popped up during a random session of surfing local food blogs. It has managed the nearly impossible feat of putting us off of craving sushi for a minute and has evoked numerous bad '80s horror movie scenes in the process. However, it has made us realize that we'd actually be willing to pay more for food that's not quite that fresh.

​As anyone who watched the Super Bowl knows, Denny's is offering free Grand Slam breakfasts today from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. We thought it made sense to revisit John Stuart Mill's concept of opportunity cost -- use this handy chart to figure out whether Denny's "free" is actually worth your while.

Read more in "Denny's Complimentary Grand Slam Only 'Free' To Those Who Can't Do Math."


Graphic by Audrey Fukuman. Click to enlarge.

Clean up your own mess afterward.

​Tues., Feb. 9, 2010

Lunchtime self-protection rule number 403: If you're standing outside Dennis Leary's downtown sandwich shop The Sentinel, fretting over your 30 seconds in front of the menu before the fast-flowing line washes you up to the counter, and the woman behind you says, "GET THE LAMB MEATBALLS," in a tone that usually proceeds the reading of someone's Miranda rights, you obey her.

If you are a food writer who ends up on a park bench minutes afterward, lips gory with tomato sauce, clutching the last red-stained hunk of bread in your fist, fretting over how quickly you devoured three of the tenderest, feta-flecked meatballs that have ever graced a seeded roll, you may feel the need to pass the command on.

The Sentinel 37 New Montgomery (at Stevenson Alley), 284-9960

rhondawinter/Flickr

Brits get a taste of Sexy Soup Lady.

​Our favorite morsels from the blogs.

Urchin report: London's Financial Times gave readers a taste of San Francisco Saturday. London restaurateur Jacob Kennedy begins at Boulevard and finds his way (via chef de cuisine Ravi Kapur) to Nopa for the best pizza Kennedy says he's had outside of Rome, and service "of a standard we can only dream of in Britain." But it's reporter Tracey Taylor's sidebar about S.F. street food that captured the most pungent local flavor (including a quote from yours truly). Taylor offers a competent summary (with the odd quaint spelling) of last year's cart-food milestones ― like this (after the jump):

J. Birdsall

Mission Burger's chili on cheesy tater tots.

​As a daily windup to the Weekly's Best of S.F. 2010 on May 19, we've teased out 92 of our favorite local dishes that taste like here. All the tasty details after the jump.

T. Palmer

Eat your vegetables.

​Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff, co-manager of the Sunset's natural co-op grocery store Other Avenues (3930 Judah at 44th Ave.), is like some kind of vegan sorceress in the kitchen. Her latest trick? She's made beet juice, avocado, and other ingredients (including, okay, raw cacao powder) taste like brownies. OA's new raw and vegan "chocolate mini luv cups no. 9" ($5) are a sweet way to get some of your five-a-day.

​School gardens: We love them, we love them not. Even if mulching in chemistry class isn't your thing, drinking, eating, and dancing probably are. At Food From the Heart, a celebratory event going down at the Ferry Building this Friday, Napa Valley vintners and Marketplace vendors will be doling out pours and bites at reasonable prices, as live bands churn out salsa music for wine-warmed dancing feet. Proceeds from the evening will send a local farmer to Slow Food's Terra Madre next fall in Turin, Italy, and benefit Slow Food San Francisco's garden projects in public schools. Be sure to check out the French chocolate painter from Recchiuti and, funds permitting, buy a custom creation, your own likeness, perhaps, to give to your loved one as a token of your esteem ― for yourself. Details after the jump.

Freshness is important. So why is there a whole festival devoted to beers that, even if they were stamped with a born-on date, would proudly show that they were six, nine, or sometimes more than 12 months old? Barrel-aged beers are increasingly popular among the craft beer set (there's even a panel discussion on the subject tonight at the S.F. Courtyard Marriott, 299 Second St. at Folsom).

Jeff M./Yelp

​Brewers are experimenting with maturing strong beers inside wood vessels and discovering aging embellishes the contents in unique ways. Tomorrow night's event at Berkeley brewpubs Triple Rock and Jupiter will feature several dozen beers of all styles aged in a variety of spent spirit barrels. You'll definitely find an imperial stout aged in used bourbon barrels (contributing vanilla, toffee, and oak flavors) and might see anything from a double IPA aged in tequila barrels to a chocolate porter aged in Zinfandel casks. More info on Tuesday's events after the jump.

Deep-fryers and ice cream are the only sure things in American cuisine: You can sell just about any ingredient to just about anyone if you dip it in batter and fry it ― or puree it and add it to frozen custard. If anyone is going to test the limits of our love for ice cream, it's Humphry Slocombe. Witness the Mission shop's rotating selection of microbrew ice creams in honor of SF Beer Week. This week it's stocking the cases with six batches at a time, rotating in new flavors as the old ones sell out. The section rotates frequently ― check Slocombe's Twitter feed for updates.

Order a tasting flight of four for $4.50 and beg samples of the other two from the counter person, and you can taste the whole six-pack at once. Actually, a better strategy is to taste all of the flavors before you eat a whole scoop, because some of the scoops are decent and some (almost) disgusting.

We observed the work of New York-based Street Vendor Project firsthand late last year, when director Sean Basinski kindly let SFoodie sit in on a workshop designed to educate prospective entrepreneurs on the difficult and complicated legalities of setting up a street-based business in New York City. Basinski, a lawyer, is a passionate advocate for the more than 10,000, largely immigrant street vendors in the Big Apple; for six months he was even one himself, hawking burritos on the streets of Manhattan. For the past six years, he has further honored the hard work of these people through a street-food festival, the Vendy Awards, which Basinski now hopes to host in other cities across the country.    

Watch Basinski's short video explanation of the goal and then vote for the Vendy Awards (via the Pepsi Refresh Project's "Refresh Everything" contest) to hit the road and head west. The top 10 ideas selected receive $25,000 towards reaching the creative goal.