San Francisco Food Blog

aloveletteraway via Flickr

The essence of Cali

As for the pizza wars of the Bay Area, our attitude is, Flame on! Let us just go on record as saying that the apotheosis of all that is great about California's big, sloppy love affair with Italian and Mexican cuisines is evident in the corn, cilantro, cotija, and lime pizza at the Cheeseboard Pizza Collective (1512 Shattuck at Vine, Berkeley). Delfina may try, Pauline's may try, Little Star may try, but nothing beats sitting on the grassy median in the Gourmet Ghetto on a hot day, biting into that first taste of fresh lime and tangy cotija and feeling it mingle with the exhaust of the cars going by. (Oh, Berkeley -- so pompously polarfleecy and environmental, so automotive!) Days when it's served merit a pilgrimage (interested parties should familiarize themselves with the Cheeseboard's schedule), with a stop at Comic Relief along the way to load up on Love and Rockets anthologies -- for those of you who like a little California on top of your California. Add one of the Cheeseboard's vaguely '70s-ish hippie salads, and you've got even more California on the side.

Forget the flute music

San Francisco has its share of great teahouses, but the newly opened Om Shan Tea (233 14th St. at Natoma) is in a class all its own. It feels like an actual funky little neighborhood teahouse you'd stumble into while traveling in Asia, rather than an idealized simulacrum of someone's notion of what tea should be, which is inevitably high end, featuring lots of Asian-y modern décor and also endless flute music. Let's put it this way: Om Shan Tea is to most other local teahouses as Osento was to Kabuki. It's the physical manifestation of a kind of laid-back, improvisational San Francisco many thought had ceased to exist.

Whether it's a sign of this city's future or its past, five dollars gets you a small teapot of bitchin' pu-erh, and endless hot water refills from an electric teakettle bubbling away next to your table. Bring someone you actually want to spend time with, and settle in for an afternoon of wandering, digressive, caffeinated conversation.

SFPT via Flickr

American idyll: A vision of sidewalk farming from PARK(ing) Day 2007

Perhaps you are feeling garden envy. Perhaps you are on the waiting list for a community garden, and are feeling like the local Politburo will never grant you your allotment. Perhaps you like to smash things.

Take a look at the sidewalk in front of your apartment. If it's wider than four feet, there's a good chance that you can break up the perimeter, cart it away, and replace it with chard. Or mint. Or beans. Or a lemon tree. If you're a tenant, you can do it with a landlord's signature. (If the sidewalk is already cracking, it's going to be cheaper for said landlord to convert it back to dirt than replace the concrete.) All it takes is paperwork, the mundane glue that binds us to civil society. Urban greenscaping nonprofit Plant*SF aims to facilitate your dreams of urban-ag food security.

Have fork, will travel: Our idea of a sweet gig

In what must have been one of the pleasantest book projects of all time, Simon Majumdar traveled the world eating and writing about it. The result: Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything, published in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster's Free Press. We can imagine the pitch meeting: "It's going to be just like Eat, Pray, Love! minus the praying, and the love. It is a license to print money!"

Interested parties can question Majumdar on his ridiculous good fortune at Book Passage in the Ferry Building tonight at 6 p.m. They can also peer into the morass that is the journalistic research process in this comment thread Majumdar posted on Chow while casting around for destinations. Two of our favorite suggestions after the jump.

Rachelmanfredi via Flickr

Sign of the times: Does the formula of pizza plus Mission equal a sure winner?

Such is the life of the new restaurant in San Francisco. On the plus side, you're in business the minute your doors open. On the minus, you don't have much time to ramp up your skills before the mob descends, fork in one hand, knife in the other, eager to pass judgment on your deliciousness. Or lack thereof.

With the understanding that Flour + Water is a very new, still-in-rubber-pants restaurant (and that SF Weekly critic Meredith Brody will offer a detailed take in coming weeks), we can tell you that the restaurant is, in essence, Beretta minus the cocktails. Both are treading a path already paved by the success of Pizzeria Delfina. Both serve a similar style of fresh, simple, competent Italian food. Both lack the spark of weird genius that takes Craig Stoll's food at Delfina to the level of the sublime. Both are lodged in much more date-appropriate spaces than Delfina's, and charge prices that make it very difficult for your average couple to escape for less than $50.

i,max via Flickr

Grist has a nicely conspiratorial analysis (*cue X-Files music*) of the current investigations into the origin of the swine flu epidemic. Among the highlights:

The World Health Organization helped author a paper for Science that pinpointed the likely source of the swine flu as La Gloria, a picturesque pig-farming village in the Veracruz Mountains. But the World Health Organization isn't doing any research in La Gloria itself. Instead, the town is filling up with scientists funded by a consortium of biotech and pharmaceutical companies. They have stated their intention to do a rigorous investigation of backyard pig-farming operations. As opposed to, say, the enormous pig farms at the village's perimeter. Where hundreds of pigs are kept all squished in together and fed -- oh! -- biotech corn. And low-dose antibiotics. The kind that might, I don't know, create an antibiotic-resistant flu, perhaps? Is someone maybe trying to blame an epidemic on poor, small-time pig farmers? Scandal!

Pork giant Smithfield has kindly offered the information that its hogs recently tested negative for swine flu. This gesture is slightly marred by the fact that Smithfield itself selected the samples that would be tested.

Victorcab via Flickr

This just might save you from going home with your ex

We remember attending a party years ago at which a guest pulled us aside and muttered, "What do they have here for the alcoholics?" Inquiries were made. The answer was water. Not even the fizzy kind. And perhaps said guest would have been witnessed pouring half a bottle of wine into a Styrofoam cup later in the evening before woozily disembarking, regardless of beverage options, but still: What with guests who have complicated relationships to alcohol, and guests who are going through laborious and elaborate cleanses that you absolutely do not want to hear the details of, and guests who just aren't in the mood to get tipsy because their ex is there and they're worried that they'll accidentally wind up going home to engage in Guitar Hero followed by sloppy sex, it's good to be prepared.

Which is why we're pleased that San Francisco has delivered up at least one solution, in the form of Golden Star Tea. It looks like champagne. It tastes like champagne (the fermentation process involves champagne yeast.) It even costs as much as champagne, so your non-boozing guests won't feel all low-status. (Clarification: it's as expensive as the bad stuff. Compared to the good stuff it's a bargain.) Rigorous testing recently conducted under highly scientific conditions have shown it to be delicious with Indian food. And it's made by locals, so one can feel all smug and carbon-neutral for supporting the region's jasmine silver needle carbonated tea economy. I know. It's a particularly Bay Area kind of smug, and doesn't come easily at first. But it starts to feel natural after awhile.

Find Golden Star Tea at Whole Foods and other stores, and on restaurant bev menus.

Zipfly via Flickr

This is how you tell if you have the right out-of-town guest as opposed to the wrong out-of-town guest: "There is a place," you say, "where they have deep-fried pickles. Would you like to go?" This can also be used as a gauge of a) who gets to be the father/mother of your child; b) who is worthy to receive your kidney for transplant; and c) who can marry into your family. If they respond with childlike wonder and a sense of adventure, they're in.

So when you take them to Weird Fish and order up a plate of Yo-Yos ($6), a pickle spear coated in tempura batter and fried might seem like all kinds of terrible. But then you take that first bite, experiencing the crunch of batter and the dense vinegar tang under knobbly-smooth pickle skin, and your faith in culinary experimentation is reaffirmed. No longer do you feel stupid for all the godawful things you've tried over the course of your life because they looked "interesting." (Not even for that unfortunate experience with the truffled corn nuts at Alembic, when you should have known better.) All is golden under the battered pickle halo.

Weird Fish 2193 Mission (at 18th St.), 863-4744

Two-week-old Foxy Brown strikes a pose

Novella Carpenter of West Oakland's Ghost Town Farm writes one of the liveliest and most engaging urban farming blogs out there. She's down to earth. Pragmatic. Warm. A little gross. West Oakland makes for interesting farm country. Carpenter has had heritage turkeys devoured by neighborhood pit bulls, and pigs who ran away and were brought back by the local Buddhist monks. The area's a food desert, but the guy who works at the liquor store is friendly and learned how to butcher animals in the old country, and is happy to give tutorials in exchange for meat.

Most recently, the happenings at Ghost Town Farm have involved goats. Which Novella learned the birthing practices of by watching YouTube videos people had posted of their own goats in labor. Why? The world is a strange and interesting place.

LFL16 via Flickr

Turn your budding Eisenstein loose here with a minicam

What could be better than another documentary about sustainable agriculture and local food systems? One made by a 14-year-old, that's what. For the last two weeks in July, the Mobile Learning Institute will teach a select group of Bay Area high-school kids how to research, shoot, and edit their own short films, with the agricultural goings-on that intersect at the Ferry Building as their inspiration. Also planned: field trips, special guest appearances, cooking lessons, and the rather-unintentionally-sleazy-sounding promise of "hands-on learning experiences."

Imagine your kid (or a neighbor's kid, or just some random kid -- we've got a kid shortage in this town, but you might be able to rustle up a loaner) as fledgling permaculture propagandist! The Eisenstein of the vegetable patch. The Leni Riefenstahl of slow-mo egg-laying. The mind boggles.