Local Diners, Local Gin, & Clay Pot Rice: This Week in Food Bloggery

By Jonathan Kauffman Fri., Sep. 9 2011 at 9:44 PM

Categories: Top Five

Jeremy Brooks/SF Weekly Flickr pool

Highlights from SFoodie this week:

1. Joe Eskenazi, whose love for diners surpasses all of ours at SFoodie, writes a great guide to the five best diners in town -- one of which, he points out, is actually a hofbrau but feels like a diner. Also, we're reminded it's time to go back to Louis'.

2. Lou Bustamante writes about the most romantic gin yet invented, St. George Spirits' Mt. Tam "terroir" gin, perfumed with botanicals taken from the mountain. Take that, lady gin.

3. Of all the restaurants in Chinatown SFoodie has hit to date in our quest to canvas the entire neighborhood, our favorite may yet be Ma's Dim Sum & Cafe, a quiet little spot on Powell where the dim sum is not worth ordering -- the aromatic, slow-cooking clay pot rice with Chinese bacon and spare ribs is.

4. Despite all the gifts kombucha supposedly gives our guts, most of it tastes either like vinegar or fruit soda that's only secretly fermented tea. W. Blake Gray, no kombucha fan, discovers the delicate flavors of House Kombucha, a locally made kombucha that tastes exactly what it is, only more aromatic.

5. This was the week of the shark -- the senate just passed a controversial statewide ban on the sale and import of shark fins, so it now goes to the governor. W. Blake Gray asks: Hey, if you're going to ban dried shark fin, why not genetically modified crops and bovine growth hormone, too?

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