San Francisco Food Blog

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There goes the neighborhood.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Going too Farr: Mission Loc@l's Kate Kilpatrick probes chicharrones both Bi-Rite and ghetto, sampling swine skin from sources as diverse as 4505 Meats and La Gallinita. Her guides? Papalote's Victor Escobedo and David Lew. Here's their take on a bag of Ryan Farr's 4505 Meats' version they score from Ritual:

They're not holding up with Escobedo and Lew. Lew's assessment is less forgiving than Escobedo's. His face reeks of letdown. "That's an abortion of a chicharron. It's not even crispy. It's soggy-crispy," he vents, then turns to face Ritual's storefront. "You ritually butcher chicharrones, that's what you do!"

Kilpatrick's quest for crispity transcendence is really a chance to express skepticism about the gentrification of el barrio. Again, it's Farr's chicharrones that seem emblematic of the Mission's morphing:

Folks here that have lived here for a long time and who are primarily Latino look at that like, 'That's way overpriced,'" says Roberto Hernandez, 53, a neighborhood fixture who says he's noticed the trend "of all these overpriced Latin foods" ever since Ramblas, a Spanish tapas restaurant, opened near 16th and Valencia eight years ago. "But then folks who have never eaten that before will pay for it because it's new and different," he says. "It's like rediscovering Latinos but on an upscale level."

But then, philosophical as you wanna get about cultural shifts, there's always the chicharron clot to bring you back to the moment.

mountaineer/Flickr

It's not all foie gras and Neapolitan thin crust.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Too much fun: Chronicle food czar Michael Bauer reflects on restaurant reviewers' new reality, after all the tweeting and Facebook friending and blogging the Internets have given rise to. For those of you who abase yourself in gray office cubes and imagine the life of a food critic to be like that Julia Roberts movie, where she's supposed to be some big-time food reviewer but does little else besides getting all tangled up in ridiculously hilarious miscommunications? Savor your schadenfreude while it's hot -- Mr. Bauer's doing more work now than he ever did. Here he is in answer to a reader speculating on whether or not he draws extra pay for blogging:

Like others who are multi-tasking these days, I didn't get a raise when I started the blog. All of us in newspapers are doing tasks we never thought we'd do a decade ago before blogs and Twitter. We're reinventing what we do every day. I was at the Association of Food Journalists conference in New Orleans last month and, across the board, my colleagues are doing about twice as much work as they once did, juggling newsprint, video and Internet chores. It's been an interesting and challenging ride as we try to straddle the different mediums. It's more work, but it's also more fun.

To which some wag -- a reader -- who goes by the name goodgolly commented: "You get what you pay for..." Triple snap!

Christopher Chan/Flickr

Taste the inscrutability.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Grant does Grant: The Bold Italic's Nicole Grant plays tourist in Chinatown, a nabe that intrigued Oscar Wilde in 1882. Grant:

These days, it's hard not to think of Chinatown as a larger version of the 30 Stockton, crowded with old, cackling women hoarding doorways and throwing elbows over greens. Still, I'm convinced the real Chinatown must still exist in the back alleys we pass by, somewhere in between Wilde's romanticism and our cynicism. I follow the pink shopping bags to find it.

One place she looks is New Woey Loy Goey.

Nine steps lead me down underground and I enter a brightly lit room with critter tanks of scuttling crabs. A group of men with crow's feet crowd around a lazy Susan. Some read the paper, and some chatter over steaming cups of tea. As dishes start to pour forth from the kitchen, I decide to order "what they're having."

Soup, a seafood plate, eggplant. Grant finds it all intriguing, delicious too. We believe her, but still: Is Chinatown really as shadowy and inscrutable and crone-cackly as all that? Isn't the writer guilty of the same romanticism Oscar Wilde expressed about what he saw as the Chinatown of opium dens and brothels? It's almost as if Grant seeksto find the real Chinatown, and stumbles instead onto a film set. Ah so!

Beer and Rap/Flickr

Los Jarritos' version: Hipster insulation.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Chill killers: At Bay Area Bites, Andrew Simmons risks serious bloating on a chilaquiles crawl through the Mission. Simmons:

The other weekend, hungover and exhausted from a morning of pick-up basketball, I was looking for comfort in sustenance. I found it easily, several thousand calories' worth: two distinct and excellent versions of chilaquiles served up at two very different Mission District establishments.

He shows up at Los Jarritos. Pastores, too. The takeaway?

Sometimes, the homiest dishes -- foods without pretense or artifice -- are most revealing about the cultures from which they spring, and inspire the most debate amongst their devotees. However, from countless regional Mexican renditions -- like white sauces in Sinaloa and Guadalajara's polenta-like cazuela cook-downs -- to American adaptations that echo Tex-Mex migas, all chilaquiles aim to soothe -- regardless of a particular variation's provenance and claims to authenticity.

There you have it. Those masses of sauce-absorbing fried tortilla, eggs, cheese, and crema are little more than ingestible Snuggies. With a touch of Chaser.

John McNab/Flickr

The Mickey D's at Guantanamo Bay: That's razor wire, not some PlayPlace encounter zone.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

A tweet turned us on to this report about an ad for workers at the Gitmo McDonald's, from Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy Newspapers: "Out of work and willing to relocate? McDonald's is advertising for an assistant manager for its sole franchise in Cuba -- serving up burgers and fries that sometimes feed detainees at the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay."

The ad appeared recently on the McVirginia.com career opportunity' Web site. Turns out the Golden Arches have been at Gitmo since 1986, owned by a franchisee. "Customers include sailors and their families, at last count 215 war-on-terror captives and their guards, as well as hundreds of Jamaican and Filipino guest workers." Gitmo interrogators have reportedly used Big Macs and fries as incentives to get prisoners to speak. Detainees given a certain level of clearance (and held in a compound called Camp Iguana) can order from the island Mickey D's. Guards pick up and deliver the burgers, fries, and shakes.

Funny thing is, the McVirgina.com ad doesn't specifically mention Guantanamo. Just that applicants must have passports, and be willing to move to Cuba. And make torture burgers.

Matthew Accarrino: SPQR's Febreze?

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Iron lady: Carolyn Allburger checks in with SPQR's Matt Accarino for Eater. It's been a month since the fauxhawked L.A. chef tidied up after the reign of Nate, and there've been big changes at the Pac Heights osteria. For one, it's really not an osteria. "We've transformed from regional Roman cuisine to new Italian cooking, an all-encompassing seasonal Italian restaurant with California inspiration," Accarrino tells Allburger.

Indeed, you get the feeling owner Shelley Lindgren wanted to disinfect the place of any lingering Appleman taint, and Accarrino is the Febreze. Allburger: "So you didn't even look at the old menu before you started?" Accarrino: "Not really, the first week we had brussel sprouts [sic] and cauliflower because they were big hits before, but I took them off. I didn't really know about the restaurant before I moved up here."

Other restaurant owners might've wanted to keep a concept the worked, but not Lindgren, apparently. In reaching for a chef with a style that marks a 180 from his predecessor -- the Gallant to Appleman's Goofus, not to mention a head that seems overwhelmed with hair -- Lindgren has revealed herself to have bigger, hangier balls than the most swaggerific line cook.

RAY S./Yelp

Just another night at Pittsburgh's.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

B-gals: In different posts, the girls of SFAppeal mingle with the hammered and sweaty in the city's murky taverns. Last week, it was Katie Ann Doze sloughing brain cells in Outer Sunset alky pit Pittsburgh's Pub, apparently to sniff the epic cheese of a jukebox stacked with the Police, Hall & Oates, and Huey Lewis. Doze:

Pittsburgh's is the coolest. With its disemboweled pinball and arcade games, a working fireplace and one rapey, dark wooden booth, it's a bonafide dive bar, like the ones in Oakland. Because of this, my friend and I were only allotted a short amount of time here by our other friend, for fear we'd get too drunk and get into fights, never leave, or be murdered. I think he might have been right with all of the above.

Then on Monday, Ramona Emerson offered up a thesis tinged with bitter about San Franciscans' odd love for theme bars (she calls them "thematic"): Rickhouse, Bloodhound, The Parlor, Bourbon & Branch. Girl got issues:

Suspenders, VESTS!, unfinished wood paneling, lights so dim that you can't see three feet in front of you and the occasional password all perpetuate the myth that San Franciscans can only really enjoy drinking when they think it's the Prohibition, and apparently during the Prohibition it was very dark indoors, and everyone was a badass, because if they drank like a San Franciscan drinks they were pretty much breaking the law 24/7.

Sounds like somebody needs another Old Fashioned. Or maybe not?

Photos by Mabel/Flickr

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Talk soup: Ben from Cooking with the Single Guy engineered a redo of Oakland restaurant Commis, and blogged about it Monday with signature photo finesse. He's made his first visit in June, when James Syhabout's Asian-inflected, diligently layered take on California pastoral was only a couple of days old. Ben's recent meal was nearly as all-out worthy, even considering that the introductory fixed price had been jacked up by 10 bones. But the most amazing thing? The hostess recognized him from his first visit, even chatted about his gym workout, which he'd mentioned the first time round. Maybe she's a blog groupie ... In the end -- even though a dish of duck cooked two ways flirted with meh -- Ben was swooning over more than just shiso soda:

Looking back at each course and the enjoyment I got out of each one (even the duck), I decided that the $59 price point is a real value for what you get. I didn't feel hungry or disappointed, and in fact left rejuvenated and inspired. It's the kind of dinner that makes you want to go talk to people about dining and life.

Holy wow.

The Ethicurean

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

History lesson: The Ethicurean's Bonnie Azab Powell tells the story of the fire at Vacaville's Soul Food Farm. Really, it's ultimately about the stirrings of a phoenix-like recovery for the family-run pastured chicken-and-egg operation, which Powell calls the Bay Area's "It Farm." Here's Powell's vignette of farm owner Alexis Koefoed speaking at a fundraiser at Pizzaiolo last month:

Alexis gave a speech that left few dry eyes on the patio. She talked about how hard farming was, how isolating, and how easy it was to forget at 6 a.m. when your hands were covered with chicken poop about all the people who felt a connection to your food. The fire had woken her up, she said, and the outpouring of support had at first embarrassed her, then touched her, and finally had made her think differently about what she did. "Soul Food Farm belongs to everybody now," she said. "All of you. I can't fail." And she urged everyone there to reach out to other farmers they knew, to offer a helping hand, or even just a hand in friendship.

Cool. Even thought the efforts of friends Sam Mogannam of Bi-Rite and Daniel Patterson of Coi helped keep Soul Food Farm from immediate fail, the whole incident showed many us about how much we value a place like Soul Food Farm. Even if we rarely -- make that never -- buy its offerings. Still, we wanna know that someone, even just one tiny commercial farm in Vacaville, is raising birds the way generations of farmers did, before farms became animal-fattening factories.

Photos by Mavis/Flickr

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Blog mooch: Foodhoe spent a day at Foodbuzz's weekend First Annual Blogger Festival. As you can imagine, it was all farm-to-table talks and grazing sessions through the taste pavilion Foodbuzz engineered at the Metreon: Ryan's chicharrones, 479° Popcorn, Mission Minis. But the meat of Foodhoe's post concerns the dinner for a coupla hundred bloggers sprawled through Greenleaf's produce warehouse, a meal oveseen by Namu's Dennis Lee. Temperature issues aside, the food looks tasty as hell. Good thing, considering the audience had the means to serve up big snark.

Photos by Mavis/Flickr

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Grease junky: We missed it when it appeared back in September. But Counter Intelligence, Johnny Waldman's clipped guide to city diners at The Bold Italic, is worth a scroll -- especially his ketchup-smudged manifesto up top. Take his rules for orange juice (among other diner signifiers):

It should not be organic or fresh-squeezed or anything else special. It need only be 1) orange and 2) liquid. Maple syrup should be the only type of syrup available. The menu should be plain, so as not to distract from the grub; should not be slick, or feature a sans-serif font, or mention a website, or contain photos of the food you are about to order. Leave that to Denny's.

You might cavil about the diners Waldman chronicles -- he misses a lot. But you figure he has to stay home and nosh on salads sometime. A man's colon can only take so many slippery, grease-filmed foods with only trace amounts of fiber before it starts to crave a carrot.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Meat cutters: At Civil Eats, Lena Brook probes hospital proteins. Sounds vaguely nauseating, like something cultivated in a Petri dish. In fact, it's the drive to get hospitals to serve smaller portions of meat and chicken -- you know, for the health of patients? Cooked up by a Bay Area physician group, the Balanced Menus Challenge seeks to cut the flesh served up on patient trays and in hospital cafeterias by 20 percent. The problem, according to Brook:

Americans eat an average of eight ounces of meat daily, roughly twice the global average. Hospital food service operations often mirror this trend, offering sizable servings of meat several meals per day. High consumption of conventionally produced meat and processed meat contributes to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, dementia, and some kinds of cancer.

Yeesh.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Street walker: Bay Area Bites' Stephanie Im reveals what she did on her weeks-long blogging hiatus -- eat. In Ho Chi Minh City, no less. Her illustrated report on the city's street food is, well, awesome. Im: "Most often, it is cooked on the spot, right before your eyes, on the street, by someone who has been making that one particular dish over and over, for years, decades, quite possibly, generations." And this:

Back in September, Thy Tran wrote a great article on Street Food Beyond Festivals in which she compares the young street food culture in the U.S. to other places where it has been "long embedded into their daily rhythms." Witnessing the street food culture of Saigon brought that alive for me. Daily rhythm is right, it seemed like everyone eats out all the time whether it's having your morning coffee delivered to your front door from the coffee lady down the street, getting some fruit to-go from the number of fruit vendors rolling around, or popping a squat on a little plastic chair at a tea-party-sized table for dinner. Sure, the convenience, affordability, and quality of product are all great. But it is the daily human interaction, the chit chat, the sense of community that comes with it, that makes this daily rhythm so soothing.

Check out Im's food pics. It'll make tonight's chicken breast and steamed broccoli seem epicly sad.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Right: You thought a career in cheese was all the burnish of artisanal deliciousness, triple crèmes and bloomy rinds and the fromage cart at Gary Danko (Affidelice, anyone?). But Rainbow cheese guy Gordon Edgar of Gordonzola has news for you: Sooner or later, a cheesemonger's life calls for being elbow-deep in slimy, rotting milk proteins. We'll let Edgar tell you:

We had an in store [mozzarella] demo scheduled for the week before. Even though I got about 100lbs of pre-packed bocconcini, we couldn't sell it because it wasn't sealed correctly and it was spilling all over the place. I figured we could give it away, but, unfortunately, it was already rancid. Yuck, spit, hawk, spit, yuck, rinse.

It all had to be emptied, drained, and shoveled into the compost bin, which suggests a moral. Again, Edgar: "This is the real glamor [sic] of working with cheese... Saturday nights spent getting soaked with the smelly discharge of unsellable dairy." Any teens reading this? Smoke only moderate amounts of weed; stay in school; avoid a career in food retail.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

This is just kinda sad: In a major act of retroactive CYA, Kevin Montgomery -- after going all bro-douchey on local coverage of the detention of Amuse Bouche vendor Murat Celebi-Ariner last week (an important story in the, uh, Mission) -- of Mission Mission shows new concern for the plight of the immigrant.

Obviously this isn't going to turn into an immigration blog because of one post, but I invited people to share their stories of real immigration struggles. This is one of those stories.

Follows a long story from a reader, presumably, about a kid scooped up and thrown into ICE detention. And you wanted us to know this because?

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Not Amuse'd: Mission Mission's Kevin Montgomery goes all righteous over coverage of the detention and likely deportation of Amuse Bouche vendor Murat Celebi-Ariner. We'll quote Montgomery in full:

Look, our immigration laws are complete bullshit, but the reality of Murat's (the The Amuse-Bouche Guy) situation is just absurd. This guy is married to a U.S. citizen, could have easily stayed here legally, but instead just let his visa expire while he chilled out selling muffins. His plight is a fucking insult to everyone that has to fight to be here illegally, who have to endure watching their loved ones get deported back countries with oppressive regimes in power while they work for slave wages because of their government-mandated undocumented status, all the while having absolutely no chance to be here legally. Murat had the golden ticket and opted to not cash it in. Let's have a conversation about the people with real problems.

This is what Mission Mission reader Ian wrote in response:

While you make some valid points about what Murat could have done differently, having looked through the links you provide I don't see anyone "losing their shit" over anything. You've offered editorial that one guy's concerns aren't worth your time and seem upset at people for offering compassion to someone they know and have appreciated, essentially calling this guy being separated from his wife "not a real problem." Meanwhile, a brief scan of your posting history shows no content for the thousands of deported latinos you've suddenly taken up arms for. How about I Get Sick with that?

What do the rest of you think? Is it wrong to report the story of one guy's immigration troubles? A guy who, though he's from France, is part of the Turkish minority there -- the equivalent, say, of a guy from Central America in the U.S. Holler.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Real meat = real gross: At Civil Eats, Caroline Cummins licks tongue: a thick black specimen from a 1,000-pound steer, all evil and turgid, covered in spiny taste buds. Cummins had gone seriously Omnivore's Dilemma, buying a quarter of a beast, as she says, "hung, butchered, wrapped, and frozen, it filled our entire chest freezer." Funny how the off-the-grid idyll can turn into something so, well, gross. And frozen. She says most of it got ground into Manwich (okay, hamburger). But the tongue: what the hell to do with that?

Read how she conquers it (with advice from Eat Real Festival's Anya Fernald). Turns it into something delicious, if resolutely foreign -- to Americans, anyway. It's a kind of moral lesson. "I was, momentarily, horrified. I mean, I was perfectly willing to butcher and grill three of my chickens, but those were birds. Not mammals. For an instant, I fully understood vegetarianism, on that visceral level where disgust and revulsion congregate." It's so not easy being a virtuous carnivore.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Butchery battle: Grub Street's Adam Martin picked up the phone to get to the bottom of whether big, bad Whole Foods is kicking little Drewes Brothers Meats' ass in Noe Valley. SFist raised the possibility yesterday, when it reported on an item by an alarmed member of the Glen Park Parents e-mail list. Apparently Drewes' business is down 20 percent since the 24th Street behemoth unlocked its automatic doors Sept. 30. That's according to Drewes' Josh Epple, who said his butcher shop's been around 120 years -- read what else he had to say here. A comment on SFoodie's post from earlier today drew a link from reader Liz J to a Facebook fan page dedicated to saving Drewes. But the question hanging over all of this like flies circling a steer carcass is this: Are customers turning to Whole Foods because they're grateful to have an alternative to Drewes? Are customers, you know, voting with their debit cards? And can competition make Drewes Brothers better in the long run -- assuming it can survive long enough to adjust? Just thought we'd ask.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Lao chow: At Bay Area Bites, Andrew Simmons stretches out for a trek through some of East Oakland's Lao restaurants. The sunny San Antonio neighborhood at the edge of Fruitvale should be listed as a Bay Area culinary heritage site if such a designation existed. It's a place where restaurants are only a step or two away from the home kitchens they grew from, catering to a mostly micro clientele who know the food so intimately, they won't put up with diluting it for the sake of expediency. We love Simmons bro-dacious attempts at eating Green Papaya Salad's namesake dish, packed with multiple chiles, prepared by Lily Senephansiri:

The first time I visited, I ate the salad with seven chiles and gently steamed at my corner table. The second time I came through, I tried it with twelve and felt, as I desperately seized fistfuls of heat-dampening sticky rice, as if my chest might explode if I dared to down another slippery forkful. According to Lily's nephew Ken, the restaurant's waiter, his aunt will add up to twenty for the most masochistic (and showy) of chile-fiends. Of course, he had to immediately assure me that I, being white and American, could always expect to receive considerably fewer chiles than I'd request. He meant that kindly, I think, but I did feel a twinge of disappointment. I had been proud to hang, at least for half a plate, with twelve, but my "twelve," as it turned out, was actually more like "six," my "seven" just a few. Ken showed me a massive bag of the mean-looking chiles, and I felt better. They were gnarled blue spikes, each only a third the size of my pinkie--sort of like wicked appendages to a knight's armor.

Turns out nobody eats a whole damn platter of the stuff. Food is meant to be shared, just as it is in, well, pretty much every other culture but ours. Go figure.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Fried and glazed: At the Bold Italic, Ethan Kanat shows up at 3 a.m. to do a piece of vital reportage: Following Dynamo Donuts' Sara Spearin around the kitchen as she muscles through batch after batch of sinkers. Kanat is as about as funny as you could expect for a guy stoking his synapses on Red Bull, sugar, and coffee:

One of Spearin's partners is fond of telling her that there is a machine to do a lot of the things she does by hand. Of course, that would defeat the point. When you're making a masterpiece such as the bacon maple apple donut , you don't cut corners. I mean, Leonardo could have gotten himself a set of finger paints and just sat out in the yard drawing flowers. But that's not how you get a Ninja Turtle named after you, is it?

Sweet. Now go read.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Not feeling the love: This bit of food criticism set off a hailstorm of bullshit when Mission Mission re-posted it yesterday -- it's a reader comment about Magic Curry contemplating a cart mashup with Banh Mai's Mai Le:

fuck white crackers with their start business loans and white cracker investors appropriating third world food and selling it on the streets to white crackers in sf and getting published in magazines and all you white yuppie/hipster cracker asses praising their bland ass versions in your yelp reviews and shitty cracker blogs. fuck you chef.

If you've got 20 minutes, read the 60-plus reader blasts in response -- it'll remind you all over again about what you love and hate about S.F. This one's our favorite exchange:

[taog:] when a dominant aka oppressive aka imperialist culture appropriates an ethnic cuisine for their own benefit and monetary gain "wins" and is justified to do so strictly for profits sake without thinking about what that does to the actual cultures and peoples who can't survive in the given local economy and people agree to it then i think we should just open up an american apparel on everyones front porch... cause it's just that profitable.
[Ed:] Dude, when you finish commenting can I borrow your Anthro-10 notes from last week? I got my bullshit stuck in my mini fridge.
[taog:] yeah as soon as i'm done listening to raphael saadiq and shopping at the soopahmrkt you white shitfuck

​Our favorite morsel from the food blogs.

This is just sad: Heston Blumenthal is one of the greatest chefs of his generation. His restaurant, The Fat Duck in Berkshire in England, has the stature of the French Laundry. In 2007 and 2009, the Good Food Guide named it the best restaurant in the U.K., and its owner has engineered weird-science dishes that've become the signature expressions of the age, like egg and bacon ice cream and ultra-low heat cooking.

All the sadder that Blumenthal should've spent an interview with 7x7's Sara Deseran shamelessly hyping a kitchen gadget, the $399 SousVide Supreme. The chef was in town Tuesday to do a Billy Mays at CCA, and, well, he just couldn't stop pitching -- even when Deseran asked him about Chang-gate.

[Deseran:] So homecooks now have a counter filled with a toaster, an espresso maker and a sous vide machine. What's next?
[Blumenthal:] There is nothing. Life after sous vide doesn't exist. [laughs] But I think the sous vide machine has been the most important development in the professional kitchen in decades. The control that the water bath gives you means we can explore the nuances of food that we'd never been able to do before. It's as useful for the timid domestic chef as it is for a professional chef.

Read the whole thing. And have your credit card ready.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Power ranger: You know how it is: You're out having a drink, your work buddies have all gone, and the guy who normally sits two cubes away -- the guy you barely know -- starts telling you about his breakup. Like, really telling you, until you sense enough of his insecurities that it makes you examine your beer bottle. You pretend you need to pee, just to shake off the awkward whiff of TMI.

We experienced a milder version of the same thing today reading Chron critic Michael Bauer's parsing of the latest Michelin ratings at Between Meals. Bauer muses on Yelp reader reviewers, Zagat scores, and the cadre of anonymous Michelin inspectors.

As a single bylined reviewer, I have to defend what I do. My power is a very fragile commodity. To gain power people have to grow to trust what I write. One slip up and I've probably lost a reader. So any power I have is because readers have taken my advice and think I speak the truth, at least the way I see it. (OK, take your shots here).

It's all a bit raw: the hint of anxiety about retaining a "power" that's always at risk of slipping away, even the dare to his critics to do their worst. Michael, if you're reading? We'll tell you the same thing we'd tell that guy from work, soon as we got back from the Men's: "Hey, we totally have to catch the N."

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Pim the avenger: Holy crap! The David Chang shit storm is causing some observers to pull the really long blades out of their knife rolls. Hot Food Porn pulls out a blog post from Opinionated About Dining that describes Chez Pim's discovery of the evil Chang's basement, wherein he makes fun of Daniel Patterson. We're totally not joking. Throw in David Kinch, and what you get is a nasty tangle of accusations that'd make a grow house full of paranoid tweakers in the Sunset look sane by comparison. Um, can't we all just get on with opening namesake Vegas mega-eateries and plugging our ghost-written books. Please?

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Go ask Alice: Eater spotted a from-across-the-pond profile of Alice Waters from Elfreda Pownall at Telegraph.co.uk. Of course, "Elfreda Pownall" is one of those Anglo-queeny drag tags, like Dame Edna Everage or Susan Boyle (we kid, we kid: of course Ms. Pownall is real). Still, drag queen though she isn't, the author does swing a bit pervy when it comes to the toke-and-grope scene that was Chez Panisse in the early 1970s. Like this:

At first laid-back hippydom prevailed at Chez Panisse. Most decisions were collective, staff took time off to 'find' themselves and waiters would occasionally take a toke on a joint in the kitchen, exhaling as they walked through the dining-room's swing door (though in those days many of the customers were in their own drug haze, too). Chez Panisse was a small inward-looking group of friends; there were lots of parties and celebrations, lots of wonderful food and lots of sex.

We've been there before, of course, thanks to the very angry Thomas McNamee's 2007 bio of Alice. And, sorry Ms. Pownall, but some of your wording bears a strong resemblance to Mr. McNamee's (Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, hardcover edition, page 54):

It was quite unremarkable for a waiter lofting a tray to suck back a last-minute toke before plunging through the swinging door to the dining room, exhaling as he plunged. It was hardly remarkable to the customers either, many of whom had arrived already ripped to the gills themselves.

Oh dear.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Double in the bubble: Unbeknownst to the other, 7x7's Sara Deseran and Jessica Battilana made separate rezzies at SPQR. They went, they ate, they wrote. Only instead of merging both reviews or scrapping one, they opted to publish side by side at Bits + Bites. It's a "Don't You Want Me" double-take on the Pac Heights osteria that, judging from both descriptions, might no longer be eligible for the term. Instead of dishes with Appleman's muscle, new chef Matthew Accarrino's radiate overthinking. And overplating. Here's Deseran:

Some things remain: The great, Italian wine list is still overseen by the always charming and sweet Shelly Lindgren. And yes, you can still get housemade pasta; but instead of the spaghetti carbonara (which the old SPQR had nailed) being a delicious heart-attack, now the dish is served with a quivering poached egg on top that doesn't bind with the perfectly-made pasta once it's mixed in, leaving an eggy soup in its wake.

And Battilana:

Though the menu still lists house-made pasta (and the list still includes carbonara and rigatoni amatriciana), the one I sampled, a kuri squash-and-prune tortellini with brown bread crumbs, was too sweet, the pasta too thick, the plate too refined. It looked fussy; it tasted like dessert. Main courses, so elegantly plated and beautiful to behold, also seemed overwrought--lamb shoulder braised into submission then molded into a disk, skate cheeks fried hard in butter and then set, just so, on the plate. There was no foam, but there could have been.

Uh-oh, shit's looking bad. Times two.

​Our favorite morsels from the blogs.

Say wha?: Behold our roundup of the most confounding recent snippets from S.F. bloggers. Naturally, we've freed these WTF wonders from anything even vaguely distracting -- like context. For that, broseph, you'll have to click.

• Among carnivores and vegetarians alike, the mere sight of juicy baby leg -- peeking out from the gap between the hem of Gymboree overalls and the top of the Robeez soft sole -- is enough to trigger salivation of Pavlovian proportions.
--Meghan Laslocky at Bay Area Bites

• "Fresh and invigorating like San Francisco's chilly fog, Noe Valley is a bracing 'guy' scent that also works for women."
--Noe Valley, SF

• Tenderblogette is currently off defending democracy in West Africa. I am heading out to help restore a turn-of-the-millennium farm house in rural Spain and then off to help with a wine harvest in coastal Croatia. We won't be back until the end of the year.
--tenderblogois at Tenderblog

• Thinking of making pumpkin biscuits.
--Hot Food Porn

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Pure fantasy: Grub Street's Adam Martin plays a sort of fantasy foodie game, speculating where POTUS might dine tomorrow should he choose to escape the money bubble of the Dems' Saint Francis fundraiser. Martin spins WTF matchups involving Obama with Zuni ("if he were here with Michelle"), Swan Oyster Depot ("during Dungeness season, we hope some advisor would mention Swan as the top destination in town for fresh crab"), and Quince ("chef-owner Michael Tusk puts a lot of thought into his cooking, which the president would appreciate"). We have our own suggestion, every bit as unlikely as Martin's. Ready? It's Hooters (353 Jefferson at Jones), and not just for the Five-Wing Flapperstizer. Nope, it's because anyplace as tacky as Hooters might well be the last place gay protestors upset with Obama over DADT and DOMA would set foot. We're guessing that'd suit the White House just fine.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Take a victory lap around your laptop: Congratulations to Carolyn Jung, who came in second for best food blog in a competition by the Association of Food Journalists. Jung's blog Food Gal clocked in behind Between Meals by Chron senior critic and exec food editor Michael Bauer. That's right, Between Meals was named best blog at the AFJ's annual conference in New Orleans. We'll say it again: Best. Food. Blog. In. The. Nation. Think about it, people.

A former food staffer at the San Jose Mercury News (you know, back in the day when dailies had food staffs that numbered more than one), Jung is actually nice -- far nicer than we are. The networking organization draws much of its membership from daily newspaper food and wine writers, with smaller representation from alt weekly staffers and freelancers. Congratulations also to Jonathan Kauffman, staff writer at our sister pub Seattle Weekly, for taking first place in the category of restaurant criticism.

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Come here and say that: On Saturday, Grub Street New York reported on an Extreme Tag Team talk with Anthony Bourdain and David Chang from the New York Wine & Food Festival. Grub Street called it Ten Things Anthony Bourdain and David Chang Hate. You know Chang: The chefpreneur of, like, five Manhattan restaurants under the Momofuku franchise: Noodle Bar, Ssam Bar, Milk Bar, Ko. Grub Street's distillation went like this:

Cupcakes: "I hate fuckin' cupcakes," said Chang. San Francisco: "Fuckin' every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate. Do something with your food," said Chang.

Now, we know that San Francisco is artifice shy. The ingredients here are so good, local defenders say, all a chef really has to do is source the best stuff and get the hell out of the way. We're not so sure. Daniel Patterson proves both the necessity of patient sourcing, and how beautiful produce can turn luminous in a chef's hands. By contrast, a meal we had last spring at Noodle Bar was really kind of meh -- Out the Door on a bad day would've been better. And the overly sugary soft serve ice cream and greasy cookies we scarfed at Chang's Milk Bar one night? Thanks for making our stomach feel shitty for an entire evening, Escoffier.

Actually, Chang's dig reminds us of one ex-A16 chef Nate Appleman made about S.F. early last month, in an interview with the New York Times: "In San Francisco the audience is easy. You put tripe in a bowl and tell them it's from a humanely raised cow and they're going to eat it." Local slapdowns came fast. S.F. blogger line cook took a tweet-shot at none other than the napoleon of Momofuku: "In NY you can put a bowl of anything in front of someone, tell them David Chang made it, and they'll eat it." Snap!