Sarah Kermensky

It's a dead man's party, who could ask for food?

​We had no idea what to expect with this weekend's dead-artist dinner party at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Would it be a goofy farce, or dreary and overserious? Would it be participatory, or would we be merely spectators? And how about the food?

Opening prelude: a table of small bites from Bar Bambino, including deviled eggs, leek and mushroom frittata, and buffalo mozzarella and tapenade on crostini. Promising!

Sarah Kermensky

Leek and mushroom frittata.

​These snacks, as well as jugs of lavender water and wild huckleberry and mint tea, bore subtle meanings within the event's highly literary framework. The conceit was that 12 dead celebrities, through an elaborate metaphysical contrivance/wormhole, had ended up at a dinner salon hosted by Virginia Woolf. Over the course of two hours, McSweeney's editor and poet Jesse Nathan held forth with imagined dialogue and dramatic interplay between the guests, told with a coffeehouse spoken-word flow. The words were interspersed with the freeform jazz of musician Chris Janzen.

Lest you think "How dreary," rest assured this was an accomplished piece of artistry. Janzen and Nathan have honed the piece over two years of intense collaboration, improved with the recent addition of a live band. Janzen's prose was sharp, diabolical, accessible, and obtuse, and the result was a moody melodrama for the intelligentsia (Billie Holiday's date is in the kitchen getting frisky with Virginia Woolf: quel scandale!) Though perhaps better suited for a smaller, more dimly lit venue, the piece nonetheless managed to draw you into its bizarro universe, not letting go for the duration.

But it wasn't really a dinner party. SFoodie is no stranger to the arts, and this was primarily an event for the mind, not the stomach. Don't get us wrong: The small bites, savory at the beginning and sweet at intermission, were totally fine. It's just that the actual food was secondary to the playacting, and we were hungry by show's end. Oh, the price of art ...

A vinyl version of the event can be purchased on Chris Janzen's website.

Brian Smeets/Brian Smeets Photography

Juan Contreras's pistachio-chocolate landscape at Atelier Crenn.

​SFoodie's countdown of our 92 favorite things to eat and drink in San Francisco, 2011 edition.

​Much of the food at Atelier Crenn, Dominique Crenn's laboratory/gallery/restaurant, is designed to be contemplated, a visual interpretation of the season. Baby vegetables are arranged to look like they are growing out of snow-covered "soil"; potato chips are perched on tree branches. Sometimes the gustatory dimension of the dish slips too far behind the visual, but with Juan Contreras's desserts ― like this landscape wrought in chocolate and pistachio that SFoodie ate a few months ago ― are fully realized.

Not only did the dessert resemble penjing, Chinese "tray landscapes," eating it was like scrambling up a steep forest path, encountering new sights at every turn: Cracking a craggy slab of flash-frozen chocolate mousse, a vine of salted pistachio puree might appear. A fork, stabbed into a tuft of airy pistachio cake ― that's the stuff that looks like moss ― might pick up a hunk of poached pear hidden beneath it, too.

When Contreras, a cook on the savory side of the kitchen, announced that he wanted to try his hand at pastry, Crenn sent him to Alinea in Chicago to intern, and you can sense some of Grant Achatz's improvisational, stream-of-consciousness style in the way Contreras brings many complementary flavors together, so that each bite reveals a different facet of the whole. Of course, this pistachio-chocolate dessert was a winter one, and Crenn and Contreras have moved on to new landscapes. But SFoodie continues to marvel over the memory, the true sign of a great dish.

More >>

Meatpaper/Flickr

Ryan Ostler and Katharine Zacher.

​Tonight: Final Meatpaper Event at SFMOMA
Where: Rooftop Garden at SFMOMA, 151 Third St. (at Mission), 357-4000
When: Thurs., April 21, 6-8 p.m.
Cost: Free with half-price museum entry; Tasting plates $5 (3 for $12)

The rundown: It only started last spring, but we couldn't really picture it ending. Meatpaper's Thursday night art-and-eat affairs at SFMOMA are always a ball, intersecting live performance and innovative food without a hint of bourgie pretense. Museum admission is half-price, beer and wine is free, and you always meet some fascinating glitterati. Tonight's cooks will again play with edible flowers, including Leah Rosenberg from Blue Bottle, Morgan Maki and Linh Phu of Bi-Rite, Josey Baker of Josey Baker Bread, and Ryan Ostler and Katharine Zacher of Gypsy Kitchen and Catering. There will also be screenings of Allen Ginsberg home movies and Ginsberg-inspired performance art throughout the evening. Skip your sitcoms and get a sitter for the weans; tonight's your last chance.

New York refugee Jesse Hirsch tweets at @Jesse_Hirsch. Follow SFoodie at @sfoodie, and like us on Facebook.

stevecadman/Flickr

London's Crossness sewage-pumping station, site of the April 2 event.

​Jonathan Kauffman's recent review of Atelier Crenn, a restaurant shaped by chef Dominique Crenn's notion of "poetic culinaria," brought up again the question of food as art. Is the aim of a restaurant meal simply to entertain while satisfying hunger? Could it be purely art? Or both?

In the the U.K., artists Bompas and Parr have wasted no time using food as a primary medium of expression. The duo is best known for installations like the pop-up breathable gin-and-tonic bar in London, where participants strolled into ― then stumbled out of ― a room filled with a fine mist of gin and tonic, and collaborations with architects that have resulted in elaborate structures made entirely out of gelatin.

The latest from the duo is "Dirt Banquet," an exploration of our social and physiological relationship to food and dirt, in one of London's oldest and most ornate sewage-pumping stations, the Crossness. The sold-out April 2 event features a menu that includes pork cooked in an imu (earth oven), Isay Scotch whisky distilled from grain roasted with peat moss, and fermented natto. The grand finale is civet coffee, rare coffee beans "harvested" from civet cat feces, while a "brown note" is played on a sound system. That's a theoretical infrasonic frequency (between 5 and 9 hertz) that reportedly causes humans to lose control of their bowels due to resonance. Yes, wear a diaper.

When did sushi lose all but the most glancing connection to fish and nori rolled in vinegared rice? Oh, about the time American maki makers started loading up sushi rolls the way Burger King loads up a Triple Whopper. If you can palm it like a San Francisco burrito (see: the sushirrito), or it fills the corners of your mouth with mayo, or it packs the kind of calorie count Tim Lincecum sucks down at lunch, is it really sushi? The good news: Even as the typical Crazy Roll in your neighborhood sushi joint has become a craggy, dripping exercise in deep-fried excess, other rolls in both the U.S. and Japan have become subtler vehicles for self-expression. Behold these five example of elaborate sushi-roll ― um ― art, that we'd feel guilty about dunking in soy sauce.

1. Skull maki.
Perfect to bring to one of those Goth potlucks where it's so hard to please anybody.

skulladay.blogspot.com

So, so dark.

​

More >>

bittermelon/Flickr

The Press Club is offering tastes of wines featured in SFMOMA's current exhibit.

​How Wine Became Modern, SFMOMA's new exhibit on visual and design evolution in the wine world, is a fascinating look at both the aesthetics and processes of modern American winemaking, tracing the grape's influence on culture. The exhibit covers 34 years, from the 1976 Judgment of Paris (in which California vintages beat French ones in a blind tasting) to the present, using the era as a frame through which to view design improvements to viticulture and enology.

Separate installations include a demonstration on the effects of oak on wine, a "smell wall" with aroma components of the 1976 Penfolds Grange Hermitage (noteworthy for achieving a perfect score from wine critic Robert Parker) teased out and synthesized by scent artist Sissel Tolaas, and displays of both winery and label design. So many aspects of wine are covered, except ― due to legal restrictions ― the only thing you never get to experience is taste.

More >>

Scott Richards Contemporary Art

Peter Anton, "Continental Assortment."

​Considering how much of our lives are spent longing for sweets, most of us are unmoved to dissect our urges ― funny, since we grow up amassing so much material. Childhood collects its own source-pile of candy paraphernalia: pilled foil wrappers from Hershey's Kisses mingling with the lint in our pockets, the rattle of Lemonheads in their box, cotton candy compressing into sticky fuchsia residue around white paper cones. Once we become sexual, our longing settles on layer cakes, pink pastry boxes wicking butterfat from slablike Napoleons, ice cream studded with nubbly candy bits.

A group art show at Scott Richards Contemporary Art near Union Square promises to illuminate these urges. "Sweet Tooth" rounds up works by Wayne Thiebaud and Mel Ramos, Alex Blau, Peter and Madeline Powell, Doug Webb, and Tjalf Sparnaay, among others, in a show the curators hope will prove self-reflective:

For centuries, the subject of candy and desserts has ... served as an ideal metaphor for human experience. It evokes simple nostalgia and shared memories, while tapping into the deeper realm of human desire. The longing for sweets echoes the pull of erotic pleasure, seduction and decadence, and their inevitable transience. At the same time, commercial sweets can serve as a means to expose our artificial, consumerist culture.

If that sounds uncomfortably like the syllabus for a graduate English seminar, consider this: At least you'll get to look at pretty pictures of cake and candy. Right?

Scott Richards Contemporary Art: 251 Post (at Stockton), Suite 425, 788-5588. "Sweet Tooth" show ends Dec. 31.

Drywell

​Spotted via the Twitter feed of No Salad as a Meal: This poster, designed by local artist Drywell and available on Etsy, conveniently divides up our local neighborhoods into zones of delectable pig meat. Feel free to refer to the Marina from here on out as the Fatback.

Bento boxes, for the uninitiated, are small lunches arranged in compact compartments. They originated in Japan, and a typical meal can be a simple serving of rice, vegetables, and chicken. But bento has developed a fanatical following, and lovers of the lunch medium have turned it into an art form. Not surprisingly, geeky themes have cropped up in more than one bento box. Here are eight fantastic examples.

1. Star Wars Bento

Wendy Copley

​
Wendy Copely writes a blog called Wendolonia where, among other things, she chronicles the making of lovely bento boxes for her son's school lunches. We love this Star Wars installment ― with a honey light saber!

More >>

Jason Mecier

The infamous Nomi from "Showgirls," rendered in real licorice by artist Jason Mecier.

​SFoodie's Tamara Palmer makes the leap from reporting to curating this week, with Friday's opening reception of the "Local Flavor" show at Mission gallery Fabric8. Palmer is collaborating with Fabric8 for the group show, which is devoted to the edible arts and fueled, naturally, by actual food.

Like 14-year-olds and stoners, artists over the centuries have been preoccupied with food, from the wild strawberries of Chardin to local artist Jason Mecier' Red Vines portraiture. "Much like visual art, food can either be easily taken for granted or thoroughly enjoyed as one of life's necessary luxuries," reads the press teaser for Local Flavor. "This exhibition takes the latter approach." The show's Bay Area artists include Mecier, Reuben Rude, Nome Edonna, Rachel Major, Romanowski, Dmitri SFC, Phokos, Andy Stattmiller, and Brandon Maddoc. The show ends Nov. 1.

More >>