San Francisco Food Blog

vidiot/Flickr

Deragon is cofounder of the New York bar PDT.

​New York mixologist John Deragon from East Village speakeasy PDT is in the 415, guest bartending tonight at Beretta (1199 Valencia at 23rd St.). PDT, of course, popularized bacon-infused bourbon (an ingredient in its maple syrup-sweetened Old Fashioned).Deragon reportedly met Beretta barkeep Ryan Fitzgerald when Fitzgerald was apprenticing at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans two years ago.

From 8 p.m. to midnight tonight, Deragon will be mixing up five cocktail specials: the Solstice and the Newark (Deragon creations), the Witch's Kiss and French Maid (concoctions devised by Jim Meehan, a PDT partner), and Remember Maine, from ex-PDT bartender Lydia Reismueller. Each is $10 -- sort of a bargain, since the drinks at PDT cost you an extra $3. And a round-trip ticket.

exuberance/Flickr

A slice of pie and a serious buzz make it even prettier.

​Pie-loving drunks will again be able to find pie and booze in the same location. The Mission Mission blog is reporting that the popular Pie Fridays at the Rite Spot Café (2099 Folsom at 17th St.) with "amazing pie" has plans to return, starting next Friday, September 11.

The Rite Spot is open for happy hour Fridays from 2 to 7 p.m., and pints are $2.50 with $3 well drinks and wine. A small vineyard wine list and what the bar claims to be the best Irish coffee is also offered, along with tequila and scotch to wash it all down.

Gravel & Gold

An art, clothing, produce, good vibes -- and now bean -- dispenser in the Mission.

​These days, art, food, and apparel don't amount to more than a hill of beans. Tomorrow, from noon until 3 p.m., or while legumes last, food activist and artist Mark Andrew Gravel will be serving up bowls of the soupy stuff at Gravel & Gold, a new gallery, shop, good vibes epicenter, and CSA drop-off location set up in the old Minnie Wilde space (3266 21st St. at Valencia). A Meatpaper player, the principal behind Agrarian Art Labs, and publisher of Food + Sex Magazine, Gravel will scoop you either black beans with rice or gallo pinto, a prominent national dish of Nicaragua, depending on, presumably, his chefly whim. Come scope the luscious Eatwell Farm produce, get pre-colonial on some beans, meet people, and, you know, talk about things.

Foreign Cinema

Think of it as a kind of retrospective.

​A week from today -- on Thursday, August 20 -- chefs Gayle Pirie, John Clark, and their crew are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Foreign Cinema (2534 Mission at 21st St.) with a blowout fundraiser that starts at 6 p.m. Tickets cost $65 per person and benefit DrawBridge, a nonprofit arts program for homeless kids in the Bay Area.

The chefs plan on highlighting menu favorites from the restaurant's last decade, paired with libations that include specialty house cocktails. "Exciting performers" include: musicians, dancers, magicians, acrobats, henna artists, and more -- no word if the fire jugglers who whooped it up for Foreign Cinema's eight-and-a-half-year anniversary will make another appearance. Maybe the quirkiest nonfood event is the auction of skateboards designed by 16 local residents, including skateboard photographers and comic sketch artists. Check out the decks on display (through August 18th) at Laszlo Bar, which is next door to Foreign Cinema.

To purchase tickets for the anniversary bash, call 648-7600. Space is limited.

Paula T./Yelp

The Empanada Lady has launched a new place for sampling flaky goodness.

When it comes to empanadas, flaky is a good thing. The quest for perfect flaky Chilean empanadas just got easier with the opening in the Mission of a "satellite" Chile Lindo café location (3147 22nd St. at Valencia) by Paula Tejeda, better known as the Empanada Lady. She's been making the tasty savory turnovers professionally since 1995, when she and then-husband Dennis opened a small factory at the Redstone Building (2944 16th St. at Capp, open to the public Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.). Regulars at Dolores Park and the Make-Out Room have probably already sampled Tejeda's goodies ($4-$5) -- the Empanada Lady is a frequent vendor there. She's reportedly working with La Cocina to further expand her business.

Chile Lindo's offerings include empanadas de pino, a mix of spicy beef (ground by hand, of course) and onions, raisins, hard-cooked egg, and pitted olives. The queso is a unique jalapeño version that adds a spicy kick to the traditionally mild Chilean empanada. Since Chile Lindo is next door to Esperpento, Tejeda has been able to arrange sangria and wine service. It's a concept that makes for easy, breezy dining while watching Mission denizens go by.

Chile Lindo is open Thursday through Sunday, 6-11:30 p.m. Place a pick-up empanada order by calling 621-6108.

Just Tom/Flickr

A slice of potato-pesto: No more drunk dialing.

Finding that all-important late-night slice of pizza near the 24th Street BART station has, until recently, been a futile adventure in sad drunk dialing: Twin Peaks, will you heed my call? Too late for delivery. How about Noe Valley Pizza? Another no. There are closer pizza joints, such as Serrano's or Mr. Pizza Man. But when it comes to quality, they're more like Domino's, and that can't be a good thing.

With the recent opening in the Mission of Escape from New York Pizza (3242 22nd St.at Mission, 206-0555), those late-night pizza searches might be a thing of the past. Escape took over the Tortas el Primo spot, and is open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. (unofficially till 2:30), Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Sunday through Wednesday, be sure to get your slice before the clock strikes midnight. Decisions, decisions: the Glorious Chicken and You Say Potato (both $4) are said to be current bestsellers.

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.

Lucas: Keeping up with demand

French macaroons may be killing on the dinner-party circuit, but at the sleepy end of Valencia, Anthony Lucas is baking squashed-looking drop cookies for stoners and church ladies. His shop has been open a little more than a month. Yesterday, as a line snaked through the space (a former acupuncture joint) Lucas was struggling to keep up with demand for the Whole Wheat Oatmeal Raisin. "How soon before they're ready?" a woman in Sunday slacks and a silky, polka-dot blouse asked. "Just as fast as they come out of the oven, ma'am," Lucas said.

Lucas, 31, is an unlikely baker. In 1997, he was a starving accounting student at SF State. "My friend jokingly told me to make some cookies," Lucas told SFoodie. "I went ahead and ran without looking back." Before long, Lucas was involved in serious cookie production out of his apartment, loading up the trunk of his car to make deliveries. Sam Zanze, the cheesecake maker, was an early mentor. Deliciously chewy, caramel-sweet Toffee Chip are one of Lucas' best sellers. Ditto the oatmeal-raisin, made with oats sourced from Giusto's.

The Valencia shop is Lucas' first. Like everything about Lucas, it seems to succeed through skin-of-the-teeth perseverance. Take the décor, rows of Straus Creamery milk bottles lining narrow alcoves along the back wall. Two days before the shop's grand opening, when the tchotchkes ordered for the shelves hadn't turned up, Lucas' architect had an inspiration: Milk bottles, filled with white paint. Lucas himself thinks his success is less serendipity and more design. "One of my customers said, 'Maybe you're good at baking because you're a mathematician,'" Lucas said. On Sunday, he seemed to be calculating just how long that batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies would take.
Anthony's Cookies 1417 Valencia (near 25th St.), 655-9834

Lance H.

We love El Tonayense's taco trucks -- we gave them our Best Burrito award in our 2007 Best of SF issue, and wrote about them in our 2008 cover story "State of the Cart", where they made our Top Ten street food list -- but some people apparently don't.  

If you spend a few minutes talking to head cheesemonger Colin Shaff of Mission Italian spot Bar Bambino (2931 16th St. at South Van Ness), there's no doubt he takes cheese just as seriously as he takes wine, which makes the bar's upcoming Cheese + Wine Tasting all the more alluring. After a successful run of tasting events last year, Bambino kicks off its new series this Sunday around the theme of cheeses newly recognized by the DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita) -- which is more interesting than it sounds. "The DOCG is an Italian quality assurance label for food and wine products," he says. "Just to give you an idea of how rare it is, there have only been five cheeses recognized since 1996. It's a very big deal."