Early Bird Special: S.F.'s Street-Food Scene

By John Birdsall, SFoodie Editor Tue., Jul. 28 2009 at 9:54 AM

Categories: Early Bird Special

Jen Siska

Creme Brulee Guy in Linda Street: Stafford likes his culinary showbiz.

We've hogged major bandwidth in blog posts about the city's underground, Twitter-stoked street-food scene, treating the phenomenon more as news than the subject of serious parsing from the POV of gastronomy. In tomorrow's Eat column, SF Weekly restaurant critic Matthew Stafford considers S.F.'s flotilla of carts from an eater's perspective, mingling with the crowds in Dolores Park and elsewhere to clock calories from Left Coast Smoke, Sexy Soup Lady, Crème Brûlée Guy, Wholesome Bakery, and others. Turns out Stafford left DP with more than just a giggly contact high -- he discovered food that actually tasted good. Find out which vendors rated at www.SFWeekly.com, and score a table-setting foretaste after the jump.

Factor in our local obsession with handcrafted artisanal all-organic foodstuffs, the hip-speakeasy allure of being in the know, and the fascination with tiny shiny gadgets, and you have a whole new definition of dining out. This metaphysical convergence has resulted in pho carts, curry carts, pie carts, falafel carts, and carts serving something called moo moo cakes dodging permit-happy health, planning, and fire department officials by moving their operations from place to place, cluing customers into their whereabouts (usually in the Mission District's parks, plazas, and saloons) via terse tweets, sometimes updated hourly.