Bi-Rite Creamery's Sam's Sundae

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It only sounds esoteric.

Number 20: Sam's Sundae from Bi-Rite Creamery

Hear about it the first time, and sure, you think an ice cream sundae drizzled with Italian olive oil and sprinkled with English sea salt is bogus, the kind of thing restaurant pastry chefs think up just to be arch, like black pepper and balsamic vinegar with strawberries. But it just so happens that the elements of Bi-Rite's Sam's Sundae ($5.50) ― chocolate ice cream, bergamot olive oil, and flaky Maldon salt ― have an eerie affinity. It's oil's fruitiness that's the operative flavor here, mildly green oil that isn't infused with bergamot citrus, but crushed along with the olives (the juice is later centrifuged out). And you know bergamot: It's the crazy-perfumed lemon-like fruit that gives Earl Gray a whiff of grandma. Only with a Sam's, polished off in Dolores Park, maybe, amid flesh barers and junkies, grandma probably isn't foremost in your thoughts.

By the way, you can buy the bergamot olive oil at Bi-Rite Creamery, too. It's $16.99 for an 8.5-ounce bottle. Which means you could simulate a Sam's at home if you wanted to, but then you'd miss all that Dolores drama. But that's no fun.

Bi-Rite Creamery 3692 18th St. (at Dolores), 626-5600

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