Melissa Barnes

Cedar Hill's barbecued chicken, brined and smoked over white oak.

West Coast barbecue, almost any Southerner/Texan/Missouran/carnivore will tell you, is not known for its excellence. But lord, do we keep trying. San Francisco's BBQ boom -- I can count nine restaurants and food trucks in the past 18 months -- has brought in a couple of promising newcomers. One of them, Cedar Hill Kitchen and Smokehouse, is the subject of this week's full-length restaurant review.

Jon Rietz and Emily Lai opened the Marina restaurant after working together at Memphis Minnie's, arguably the city's most polished barbecue stop. Rietz, a Texas native, is smoking a variety of meats Texas-style over white oak: brisket, ribs, chicken, pulled pork. The restaurant is frustratingly uneven -- especially when it comes to its brisket, which by rights should be the restaurant's focal point -- but his pulled pork is often fantastic and his barbecued chicken, downright awesome. I'm hoping that, as with the best pit masters, time only improves Rietz's barbecue.

Jonathan Kauffman

Cobb Louis salad at Nettie's Crab Shack, $25.

SFoodie's countdown of our favorite 50 things to eat and drink, 2012 edition ​"Arrange lettuce leaves around the inside of a salad bowl, with a few sliced leaves on the bottom," writes Victor Hirtzler, chef of the St. Francis Hotel, in his 1910 recipe for Crab Louis. "Put crab meat on top of the sliced leaves, and a few slide hard-boiled eggs and sliced chives on top of the crab meat. In another bowl, mix one-half cup of French dressing [ed note: vinaigrette] with one-half cup of chile sauce, two spoonfuls of mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and one teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce. Pour over the salad, and serve very cold."

Was the crab louis (and its poorer cousin, the shrimp louis) invented in San Francisco or in Seattle? And who was Louis? Given the absence of proof, you're free to invent your own myth -- but the salad has been served in this city for more than a century. Over the years, the salad has evolved and then devolved again, often spotted as a gloomy mass of iceberg and frozen crab drenched in sugary orange glop, with canned black olive rings and hard-boiled eggs strewn over top.

It would be unthinkable for a San Francisco restaurant with a name like Nettie's Crab Shack to pass over the Crab Louis. It would be equally unthinkable for the cooks to let the salad stand on its reputation, such as it has fallen. So they've combined elements from another historic salad (the Cobb, invented in 1930s Los Angeles), and dressed a giant bowl of romaine up like a spring frock: jade-colored avocados and cucumbers, beets in swirly rose and gold hues, splotches of saffron-colored egg yolks, and at least a half-pound of pale-pink Dungeness crab meat. Everything is sweet and crunchy-crunchy, pitched to keep the flavor of the crab at the forefront. And the salad dressing is spiked with just enough Tabasco to sparkle, but reminds you that mayonnaise, in its pre-jar days, once played an honorable role in American cuisine. More >>

Lou Bustamante

Making science fun at the Exploratorium

​Where: Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon Street (at Marina)
When: Thurs., April 5th, 6 p.m.-10 p.m.
Cost: Free with general admission to museum; 18 and over

The rundown: The big brains at the Exploratorium have teamed up with Maxime Bilet, head chef and co-author of the Modernist Cuisine for a special night exploring the magic behind cutting-edge cooking techniques. A few of the cutaway pieces of equipment used in the book's striking photos will be on display, along with plenty of experiments. Bilet will be discussing the culinary applications of centrifuges and homogenizers, along with how adding hydrocolloids and emulsifiers to your pantry can make dinner a lot more dazzling.

More >>

Gil Riego Jr.

It's the Disneyland of food truck roundups

What: Off The Grid: Fort Mason Center reopening

Where: Fort Mason

When: Fri., March 23, 5-10 p.m

The rundown: If bacon and egg flavored popsicles, a beer garden, and live music by the Ferocious Few aren't reasons enough to come to the largest mobile food market in California, organizer Matt Cohen says most foods are under $10. With 20 percent more space for tents and trucks, there is more protection from the elements, and 35 vendors will serve up variations of Asian and Latin cuisine, each offering a specialty food that will only be served at Off The Grid.

Among the new faces this year are Belly Burgers, ancient Mayan food by Don Paquito, and what Cohen says are the best fish tacos from Cholita Linda. If you manage not to stuff yourself and have room for a brew, local bars Alembic and Magnolia will be at the beer garden.

Admission is free and an ATM is available since most vendors are cash only.

Don Barrett/Flickr

A few tacos can go a long way for SF public schools

​What: Tacolicious School Project Spring Session 2012

Where: Tacolicious in the Mission and Marina (2031 Chestnut St.) locations

When: Every Monday through May

Cost: See menu

The rundown: Tacolicious owners Joe Hargrave and Sara Deseran are donating 15 percent of the total money earned every Monday at their Mission and Marina locations to nearby public schools.

From 11:30 a.m. until midnight, 11 p.m. for the Marina location, you can put an end to your grumbling stomach and, hopefully, furlough days. Whether it's drinks with friends or a family dinner night, it's all for a good cause.

The project is only fitting with Hargrave and Deseran's three children in San Francisco Community Schools. Deseran's parents are also educators. Money raised from the Marina location will go to the after school program, buildOn, at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology. Proceeds from the Mission location will fund Mission High School in March, San Francisco Community in April and Buena Vista Horace Mann in May.

Gil Riego Jr.

This food-delivering arm could belong to you.

​It's sort of -- well, vaguely -- like an episode of San Francisco's Next Top Food Truck. Matt Cohen, founder of the Off the Grid street-food gatherings, is in the process of putting together the lineup for Off the Grid's flagship Friday events at Fort Mason, which will begin again in late March. And they're taking applications for new vendors who are interested in occupying one of the 10 "tented" spaces -- in other words, people who are selling from a stand, not a truck.

"This is our once-a-year opportunity for people thinking about doing something professional with street food," Cohen says. "We want to get people interested in making a nine-month commitment, bringing in decent money, and turning their idea into a real thing."

Off the Grid is looking primarily for people selling food with Asian or Latin flavors -- traditional or tweaked -- and Cohen says he's committed to helping first-timers navigate the regulatory process, just as OtG did last year with the Musubi Kings. "You'll need to work out of an approved commissary [otherwise known as a commercial kitchen] and have your food handling certificate," he advises. For more information on this process, read through SFoodie's "going legit" series from last year. The online application is posted on Off the Grid's website, and the deadline is Friday.

© Exploratorium

​Combining science and liquor together into a frothy and delicious drink requires the brainpower of the Exploratorium's scientists, and bartending know-how from the Bay Area's best bars. The resulting concoction is the Science of Cocktails night at the Exploratorium happening this Thursday. On it's third year, the event is bigger and better with over 15 bartenders crafting nearly 30 different drinks, experiments, demonstrations, and delicious bites.

The science portion of the evening will indulge your inner geek with experiments like creating instant infusions, the science of shaking versus stirring a drink (including examinations of dilution and temperature), and the anatomy of the cocktail exhibit that breaks down the effect the numerous components have on the drink, led by AQ's Tim Zohn.

On the cocktail side, expect to see the Cocktail Lab crew, along with bartenders from 15 Romolo, AQ, Bloodhound, Jupiter Olympus, Michael Mina, Rickhouse, Wo Hing , and special guest Erik Hakkinen from Seattle's celebrated ZigZag Café. Keep an eye out for the Manhattan Project, a collaboration between distiller Dave Smith (St. George Spirits), Darren Crawford (Bourbon & Branch), and Russell Davis (Rickhouse, Ice Cream Bar). The trio is showcasing locally produced bourbon that has rested in a barrel that previously aged Manhattan cocktails. Mind. Blown.

More >>

​Delarosa, sister restaurant to Beretta and Starbelly, is more popular for its dinner and cocktail scene than for brunch, but the Marina restaurant proves it can deliver any time of day. Long, picnic-style tables create an atmosphere that's far from intimate, but it's lively -- and easy to seat crowds of all sizes. In fact, at brunch, served 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, wait times are short for most groups, particularly if you're willing to scoot up to the bar seats. Delarosa's ample, open windows give the restaurant a bright and inviting feel on a sunny day. A noontime beer never seemed so tempting.

More >>

The Frank Dog: Kinda weenie

Let's Be Frank 3318 Steiner (near Lombard), 674-6755.
If the fate of the world hangs on a wiener, put us down for a dozen. But a Saturday visit to week-old Let's Be Frank left us sweating Earth's future.

The Marina hot dog joint is the first storefront venue for LBF, whose carts already ply SF and LA, a project of Larry Bain and Sue Moore. Mad props to Bain and Moore for reinventing the frankfurter along Slow Food lines, but the results contain a fatal flaw: the star ingredients just don't satisfy. Sure, the casing around the grass-fed-beef Frank Dog ($5.50) had delightful pop, but its murky filling lacked the creamy texture and swagger of garlic and spices that makes a frankfurter a frankfurter. A Brat Dog ($5.50), made with heritage pork, likewise tasted flat-out weenie. And sorry, guys, girth totally matters. The sausages' diameter skewed more Slim Jim than Ball Park -- they seemed lost in their voluminous (and slightly rubbery) Acme buns.

Ordinarily we'd say Fine, Americans eat too damn much protein anyway. But something as iconic as a hot dog has to be convincingly hot doggy, or we're just not buying -- even when principle tells us it's the right thing to do.

Take a good look

Plans for a revamped Emporio Rulli Gran Caffe in the Marina have gotten more extensive than first planned. The cavernous space at Chestnut and Steiner was already due for a makeover that'd take the lush (and frankly dated) Edwardian-ish space with its grand pastry case into the post-salumi age, reborn as Rulli Risto-Bar. The concept pays homage to Italy's casual wine-and-snack joints, with a whiff of upscale Marina. Now, even more structural changes promise to radically change the place. Owner and pastry maestro Gary Rulli -- with input from Italian-born exec chef Angelo Auriana -- has decided to remove the pastry case entirely, replacing it with a wall of wine bottles. Plans call for an antique Berkel meat slicer -- the restaurant world's fetish du jour -- to be on full display. Auriana and chef de cuisine Massimo Covello are already trying out sophisticated new small plates (word is the lobster and roasted beet salad with burrata is killer). Rulli Risto-Bar's full unveiling is slated for July, after a late-June closing.