San Francisco Blog

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.

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.

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

By Meredith Brody

Last Sunday night, I was floating out from the Pacific Film Archive on the wings of satisfied cinephilia after indulging in my latest guilty pleasure - seeing one of the over-the-top, melodramatic, kitschy, wildly sexual movies of Teuvo Tulio, a Finnish auteur of the Thirties and Forties whose wacky Sirkian black-and-white movies have to be seen to be disbelieved. (One movie remains in the brief series, 1946's The Cross of Love, showing at 6:30 p.m. on December 4th, and described as "a mixture of Stroheim, Sternberg, and Cecil B. DeMille.")

As I was leaving, my friend Lynn brought me back down to earth by twirling a little plastic toy in front of my nose: Marge Simpson and her towering blue beehive, sitting on a brown chair. "You can get them at Burger King," she said, "but I don't know if you can get them all - I found out about it late. They're meant to be lined up so they're all sitting together on a sofa."

And then she made Marge's hair spin.

I was caught in a fast-food-toy web. I'm not compulsive (oh no), I mostly buy for my seven-year-old nephew - my sister and I make the quest into a competition, seeing who can complete the series the quickest. (Involving cryptic phone messages such as "You won't believe this, I got the Golden Homer today!", the limited edition Holy Grail of the 16--count 'em - 16 Simpsons toys Burger King put out in association with The Simpsons Movie.) Finding all 6 of the Kung Fu Panda Happy Meal toys at one McDonalds -- that we needed to complete a set of 8 - on the same day as we saw the movie didn't feel quite right, however. It was too damned easy. (The psychologists call this the "theory of intermittent reinforcement," and it's very big in figuring out the psychology of collectors.)

Burrito Eater—"San Francisco's top resource for taquerias and mustaches"—is currently in the quarterfinals of its annual Slab Scrum competition to crown this year's best taqueria. I'm delighted to see my hood—the Sunset—representing admirably: The Inner's Gordo and Outer's El Burrito Express both sitting in the top six at the moment, alongside the Mission's Taqueria San Francisco and Taqueria Reina, Soma's El Norteño and the Tenderloin's Taqueria El Castillito. —Tamara Palmer