Lou Bustamante

The Bardot Cocktail

With bar superstar power in place at Jasper's, Startlight Room, and the Fifth Floor, Kimpton Hotel group seems to be determined to improve the quality of cocktails for visitors and locals alike. Now, Kristin Almy is at the Grand Café, where she's revamped the menu to serve what she describes as "contemporary takes on classic French and American cocktails."

She adds that, "I wanted the cocktails to taste like drinking with Picasso in Monteparnasse."

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Rob Melrose

Rebecca Frank and David Sinaiko in The Cutting Ball Theatre's Tenderloin

What: Tenderloin Trail Restaurant Crawl
When: Saturday, May 19th, 5-7pm and Saturday, May 26th, 5-7pm
Where: Various spots throughout the Tenderloin
Cost: $75, includes restaurant crawl and ticket to Tenderloin at the Cutting Ball Theater

The Rundown:

If you haven't yet seen Tenderloin, the Cutting Ball Theater's documentary drama about its own troubled neighborhood, here's an extra incentive: For the next two Saturdays, you can pair a three-stop restaurant crawl with either a matinee or evening performance, with all proceeds benefiting the Cutting Ball Theater.

The crawl stops at three locations in the Tenderloin, starting at Farmerbrown, ending at 50 Mason Social House, and hitting up either Fish & Farm or Jasper's Corner Tap in between. At each location, crawlgoers can expect an appetizer and a cocktail, such as Farmer Brown's pulled pork sliders and a Tenderloin Shandy, and Fish & Farm's oysters paired with a Tenderloin Tommy. Jasper's offers a local beer to go along with its pretzel, deviled eggs, or sliders, and the crawl ends with 50 Mason Social House's charcuterie and local cheese plate.

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There are bars in San Francisco known for certain drinks on their menus, like the Irish Coffees at the Buena Vista Café or Margaritas at Tommy's Mexican, but now we have a bar known for having no menu at all. Opening this Thursday is Big, from the team behind Jones and run by barman Brian Felly, a place where every drink is tailored to suit your mood. Looking for something gin-based and tall? Tequila with something smoky? Or simply something strong and whiskey-based? Felly has just what you need.More >>

Te Yuan L./Yelp

Cafe Zitouna's kufta tajine, $10.95.

​SFoodie's countdown of our favorite 50 things to eat and drink, 2012 edition ​Does it sound like a paradox to say that Cafe Zitouna's kufta tajine is spicy and comforting at the same time? Perhaps. Among the soups, pepper-lashed couscous dishes, and mild, sweet-inflected Moroccan stews on the menu, chef-owner Najib Rebia serves a meatball stew as vivid and soothing as the sunlight that floods the cafe most days.

It's all a matter of the layering of flavors. The golf-ball-sized lamb meatballs, which pulse with garlic and cumin, are buried under a bed of long-sauteed peppers, onions, and tomatoes seasoned with Tunisian spices. In the center are two eggs, which have poached in the mingled juices; their yolks ooze out thickly, just a few degrees short of solidifying. Every prickle of chile or flare of coriander and caraway comes with its own balm -- the sweetness of the peppers, the sateen caress of olive oil. It's humble enough to sop up with bread, and opulent enough to linger in the memory for weeks afterward.

Lou Bustamante

The Rock & Rye Old Fashioned with the Rock & Rye Hot Toddy in back

​When Greg Lindgren and Jon Gasparini first opened up Rye Bar, the pair researched all the possible ways to use rye whiskey in cocktails, but it was the lost classic American liqueur "rock and rye" that really piqued their interest. This combination of cinnamon, clove, fresh and dried citrus peels, and the medicinal herb horehound, steeped in rye and sweetened with rock candy, was a popular remedy for colds in the early 1900s.

After some experimentation -- and some unpleasantly astringent and powerful batches due to the oversteeping of the horehound -- Lindgren perfected the recipe by using horehound candy in place of the herb and to sweeten the mix. Originally designed to go into a Rock & Rye Hot Toddy ($10, rock and rye liqueur, hot water, cinnamon stick, citrus), the spiced liqueur also works cold in the Rock & Rye Old Fashioned ($10), which is simply the liqueur, chilled with bitters.

The mix isn't always the same, as Lindgren and Gasparini encourage the bar staff to add their own flourishes when replenishing the infusion at the end of the night, meaning that it can get more spice in the winter and fruit in the summer.

On a recent cold and foggy night, I wasn't sure I could feel the purported curative effects of the horehound in the toddy, but the warmth certainly clung all the way home.

Rye Bar, 688 Geary (at Leavenworth), 474-4448

Elia Varela Serra

Farm: Table's Shannon Amitin and his new roast.

​When Farm: Table opened two and a half years ago, it was one of the first cafes to bring high-quality coffee to the Tenderloin. It was also the first San Francisco business to serve coffee from Verve, the Santa Cruz-based roastery. More >>

Luis Chong

Japanese curry shops were absent from the city before 2008. Now Muracci's feeds the hungry FiDi lunch crowd, while Volcano tends to the needs of the Richmond neighborhood. And let's not forget the JapaCurry truck, roaming the Bay.

Starting this week, there's a new kid on the block: Kare-Ken, which is Japanese for curry house. Last Friday night, SFoodie hit the Tenderloin to attended a preview.

The tiny 8-seat eatery is located at 525 Jones Street, just a few doors west of Shalimar and Dottie's True Blue Café, where its modern facade with vertical wooden slats stands out among the gritty TL storefronts.

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Tequila is big business. Worldwide sales exceed 10 million cases a year, and the US consumes about half of those. That explains how Don Julio / Diageo could afford to host a four-course dinner at Cortez (550 Geary) for local food writers featuring tequila cocktails invented by mixologist Brandon Skaggs and dishes created by chef Jenn Puccio.

The idea was to promote cocktail pairing along the lines of wine pairing. With one big exception, that didn't work for me. The food was great--particularly squash ravioli with smoked brussels sprouts and a crispy Kurobuta pork belly, both on the regular dinner menu--but the drinks were too sweet to go with it. I'd have preferred the tequilas straight, or better yet a few glasses of dry wine from the restaurant's excellent list.

The exception was the Cesar, Skaggs's radical, jalapeño- and cilantro-spiked variation on a Margarita. This not only paired well with various appetizers: it was one of the most delicious cocktails I've ever had. The drink is $11 at the bar. For the next couple of weeks, order one and you can get one of the snacks from the Bar Bites menu for another $2.

The recipe in the press handout was clearly wrong--the drink didn't include Grand Marnier, and six slices of jalapeño would have made it too spicy--so I visited Skaggs recently to get the real recipe, as well as a video demonstration of its preparation.

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It's an open secret that halal markets offer some of the tastiest meat around, often at prices lower than you'll find even at Costco. I've learned from talking with the butchers that the animals are often grass-fed and come from farms in the Central Valley. Lambs and goats are brought in whole, and most of the innards are available.

This week I bought a 2.5-pound bone-in lamb rib roast for $10. I told the butcher, who didn't speak much English, to leave it whole. He took it over to the bandsaw anyway, and thinking he intended to slice it into chops, I called out to him to stop. I took the roast home, rubbed it with two tablespoons of ras el-hanout (recipe follows) mixed with two teaspoons of salt, wrapped it in plastic, let it sit in the fridge for a few hours, roasted it at 350 degrees to an internal temperature of 145 degrees, wrapped it loosely in foil to hold the heat, and let it sit for ten minutes before serving.

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John's Grill celebrated its hundredth birthday a few weeks ago, and as a longtime fan of Old San Francisco and the works of Dashiell Hammett, I made sure to help observe the occasion. Hammett figures into the equation because at one point in his magnum opus, "The Maltese Falcon," gumshoe Sam Spade ducks into John's for a quick meal of chops, potatoes and sliced tomatoes before heading to Burlingame on a bum steer. I myself was on the trail of one of the 8-cent martinis the bar would be offering as part of its commemoration festivities.

A few thousand other well-heeled celebrants were there for the same reason, but like any old-school S.F. restaurant, John's has a warren of elegant upstairs rooms ideal for mingling, and as a result the mood was more convivial than congested. Photographs of the restaurant's satisfied past customers - Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Lillian Hellman et al. - gazed down from the dark oak-paneled walls, and the cocktails were frosty and potent.

John's Grill is of the same genre and attitude as Tadich's, Sam's and Jack's, right on down to the starched linens and starchier waiters, with a menu of toothsome classics like crab Louis, Joe's special, hangtown fry, grilled snapper, oysters Wellington, calves' livers and the Bloody Brigid cocktail: vodka, soda, lime, grenadine and sweet and sour. Plus Spade's circa-1929 chops, potatoes and sliced tomatoes, of course. Why mess with success? (63 Ellis at Stockton; 986-3274.) --Matthew Stafford