SFChefs Opening Night Party: Desperately Seeking Glamour

John Birdsall

The Alembic's Daniel Hyatt, serving up Maker's Mark.

​On stage, the band was laying down an earnestly folk-rock version of "Poker Face," the singer in a Taylor Swiftian sundress with jeans-jacket overlay. Friday night saw the opening gala for SFChefs 2010, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association's second annual convention of local restaurant and bar talent. SFChefs was conceived as a hometown version of the glittery, big-name-chef festivals that have caught the nation's attention, events like Aspen's Food and Wine Classic and the South Beach Wine and Food Festival.

Friday's kickoff was starting off more South Bay than South Beach. "I'll get him hot/Show him what I got," crooned the Taylor Swift-styled singer for the Front Porch Band, a seven-piece combo from Livermore fronted by Karl Wente, scion of the wine family. It was Wente and the National Pork Board who underwrote Friday's gala, dubbed "Hog in the Fog." Some 30 restaurants (and half as many bartenders) had set up tasting stations in Union Square, under the festival's main tent.

The Pork Board had doled out animals to the chefs, who in turn were cranking out hors d'oeuvre-size tastes to guests who'd shelled out $95 ($75 for holders of VISA Signature cards, an event sponsor) to brush chef-size glamour under rose-colored light gels.

John Birdsall

Mattin Noublia of Iluna Basque: Fail.

​Naturally, the hog dishes varied in quality. Midi's Michelle Mah presided over completely respectable pork rillettes, spooned onto baguette toasts along with something sweet and vaguely fruity. Ryan Farr of 4505 Meats dispensed a kind of nose-to-tail sampler, at least in spirit: gnarly hunks of chicharron, fat-bordered mortadella slices, and some parsley-clogged salad of shredded pork. Namu's Dennis Lee (erroneously tagged in the program as Benu's Corey Lee) looked on as his cooks assembled pork-topped ssam rolls. The winner? Chris Cosentino, piping pork liver mousse into crispy, boat-shaped pork rinds. Easy to eat, hard to forget

Of course, some chefs didn't have quite as much glamour to dispense. Over in the Hog in the Fog's version of Siberia, over by the media entrance, lingered Firewood Café, City Cub of San Francisco, and Branches Wood Fired Chophouse, who'd driven al the way from Ukiah. Chef Munther Massarweh brooded in his gray chef's jacket, and frankly, his lemongrass-braised braised Karubi short ribs on truffled root vegetable puree was not good. Still, it was better than Mattin Noublia's orange-braised pork shoulder. You know Noublia ― he's the scarf-accessorized contender from Top Chef Las Vegas, the guy from Iluna Basque. We took one bite of Noublia's shoulder and dropped it discretely in the trash. Good thing the Alembic's Daniel Hyatt was nearby, offering palate-wiping miniglasses of mint-flavored Maker's Mark.

Nobody said the glamour business came easy.