Ray Bussolari/Bacon Girl

Bacon Medusa, aka Miss November.

​Two years ago, Bigi -- as she calls herself when engaging in Bacon Girl activities -- somehow ended up at the Cochon 555 event as the guest of a friend, despite the fact that she'd been a strict vegetarian for 13 years. "She told me it was a 'charity event,'" Bigi explains. Nevertheless, she spent a few hours wandering around the booths, talking to the farmers and chefs about pork.
"They kept telling me about these heritage-breed hogs, which I didn't know much about," she says. "I was also finding out about how the farmers raised them. This wasn't part of Food Inc. -- this was small family farms, raising their pigs humanely." Then she smelled Allan Benton's bacon cooking at one of the stands, and couldn't resist trying it.

"I stood in that line three times," she says. "And the next morning, I woke up thinking about bacon." Bigi started eating sustainably raised, artisanal bacon every day. For months. In January 2010, she went to a party where her friends kidded her about her new eating habits. "I don't know what to do," she told one, somewhat in her cups. "I'm going to have to start wearing it."

It was as if she had been bitten by a mutant spider or zapped by gamma rays. Bacon Girl was born.

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Gil Riego, Jr.

Spoons of ceviche from La Mar.

​Yesterday, hundreds of people came to the Design Center in Potrero Hill to eat barbecued pork belly sliders, roasted salmon, braised tenderloin, ceviche, and cupcakes, then return to the beginning to start eating them all over again. It was SF Weekly's DISH, our annual celebration of San Francisco's restaurant scene.

Greeted by food trucks and plied with craft brews, attendees could choose bites from 40 San Francisco restaurants and bakeries. Photographer Gil Riego Jr. was on hand to compile photographic evidence of the event.

Luis Chong

​The Bay Area BBQ Championship went down Saturday, with 32 competitors throwing down their best 'cue in the parking lot at the Oakland Coliseum before an A's-Angels doubleheader.

The big winners? Big B's Down N Dirty of Pacifica was named Grand Champion, while Slap Yo Daddy of Diamond Bar was named Reserve Grand Champion. The Throwdown Champion was R & R BBQ, of San Jose, while the people's choice was Smoked Planet of Riverside.

We snapped pictures of some of the amazing meats on display at the event, which wasn't easy because our mouth was watering.

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Kimberly Sandie

Salmon with spring vegetables and XVOO sauce from Locanda.

​ Web editor Jake Swearingen just put up a slideshow of some of the best dishes SF Weekly has photographed this month, including hand pies, tea-smoked duck and pan con chicharron. Why? Because it's lunchtime, the work week is slowing down, and all you have energy to do is drool on the keyboard.

It's cold and rainy. The only way to warm up is to get excited for the next SF Underground Market on Saturday, June 11, and the only way to do that is to check out the greatest hits from its past events. So: some of the hottest pics of the tastiest things to nosh on at SF Underground Market. Let's do this!

flickr/pkingdesig

Josey Baker's Bread.

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Albert K Law/Flickr

Pork belly sandwiches at Kitchen Sidecar.

​The drizzle of Sriracha on pork. The electric zing of jalapeño. The crunch of pickled daikon. There's no part of a banh mi we don't love, and this picture by Albert K Law reminds us why.

Want to see your own picture up here? Join our Flickr pool!

The literary food writer, circa 1973.

​Yesterday, I came across two essays about the self-indulgent language that I and my species ― I'm talking food writers here ― are as drawn to as we are to lardo and feculent-smelling French cheese. Overwriting is hardly a new flaw among our kind. Have you read restaurant reviews from the 1970s? There were an awful lot of bad M.F.K. Fisher imitators who thought that describing bordelaise sauce in 19th-century prose proved their sophistication. Too many essays read as if they were written with giant peacock-feather quills dipped in glittery mauve ink.

Contemporary food writing has its own excesses. On Slate, Noreen Malone appears to be the only food writer in America thrilled to see the end of legendary Spanish restaurant El Bulli, for years the most sought-after reservation on the planet. Not because she's bitter she never got to go, but because its closing signals the extinction of the "I Ate at El Bulli" Piece, or IAAEBP. Larding her essay with a couple dozen links, she cuts through the self-congratulation and artsy-ness to show just how cliched and competitive the IAAEBP has become: Look at me going to El Bulli for a staff meal! Look at me eating a meal Ferran Adria cooked for me! Malone's article almost makes me wish I'd eaten there and never told a soul. (Actually, I just wish I could have eaten there.)

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San Francisco's culinary landscape is an ever-changing one, and this past year was no exception. Scores of restaurants opened and closed, events were thrown, and new chefs stepped into the spotlight. Here are some of the most arresting images SF Weekly and SFoodie captured in 2010.

Lara Hata

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Jonathan Kauffman opened his review of Benu by musing that his plate (above) looked as if it had been arranged by a fairy, and the arresting images of the restaurant's offerings seem to support this theory.

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If today's Google logo didn't already tip you off, it's Pac-Man's 30th birthday. In honor of the yellow orb's milestone, here's a rundown of some of the coolest cakes (and cookies, and cupcakes) that people have baked over the years to celebrate others' special days.

1. Classic Pac-Man

Like the game, this cake is comfortingly straightforward.

maigh/Flickr

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2. Nontraditional
This wildly elaborate version was cooked up for Omar Kooheji, a sofware developer who wrote about the creation on his blog OHMZ. Judging from the vast amount of chips and soda, this was a gamer's dream birthday. ​ More >>

Business Week called it "the most politically incorrect food in the culinary world." On that note, we present bacon, by the numbers.