fresh herring

​Ever wonder where the many tons of fish landed by San Francisco Bay's commercial herring fleet throughout the winter go?

There's a growing market for local and sustainable seafood, but the bay's herring -- an inexpensive fish that lends itself to a variety of preparations -- doesn't end up at the wholesalers that line the piers along Fisherman's Wharf. Instead, the fish are processed for their roe, which is consumed as a delicacy in Japan.

That's about to change. Over the summer, local herring fisherman Ernie Koepf was instrumental in getting California Department of Fish and Game regulations revised to allow for a market from November through March for fresh herring. (The prior regulations, geared to the roe fishery, allowed only a token quota: fresh herring could be landed for only two weeks early in the season, before the fish are abundant.) The department will issue up to 10 permits, each allowing a boat to land up to 1,000 pounds of herring per day for the fresh-fish market.

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Jonathan Kauffman

La Boulange's walnut peasant bread. Not gluten free but maybe one day!?

​Sheryl Davies is a self-described foodie. She also has Celiac disease, a condition that prevents the small intestine from fully absorbing food. The damage is due to a reaction to eating gluten, and that means, for Celiacs, cutting gluten out of the diet is a must. Since there's nothing so satisfying as eating a loaf of bread in one sitting, that really sucks. However, Davies decided to stop drooling over her husband and non-Celiac children's dinners, and decided to do something about it.

Enter the Bay Area Gluten Free Buying Club. Modeled after CSAs, the idea is, you sign up for a box, and once a month, you pick them up from an agreed upon location. Right now, the only location is in Palo Alto, but Davies hopes to expand. There are a few boxes to choose from, including family, kid, foodie, dairy-free, and gluten free facility only.

We had the chance to talk with Davies about the whole operation, and here's what we learned:More >>

Mary Ladd

Giant dancing Jelly Belly? Why, it must be the annual NASFT Fancy Food Show at Moscone.

​Indulgence came in the form of cheese, oils (including a new cooking oil made from tea), cured meat, candy, chocolate, and toffee yesterday at Moscone Center, part of the annual NASFT Fancy Food Show, going on through Tue., Jan. 18.

Mary Ladd

"Ace of Cakes" dude Duff Goldman, pimping a new line of baking products.

​Some 80,000 food and drink products from 50 countries are showcased at this year's trade show. For many food retailers, it's a chance to browse and order new products (yuzu sauces or Kobe beef hot dogs, anyone?), as well as figure out the latest food and beverage trends. It's likely you'll overhear the word "copacking" as often as you will "Burrata."

This is a trade show that is neither subtle nor shy. Yesterday we saw a dancing giant Jelly Belly, a pretty cake made entirely of cheese, and a table of fiery hot sauces. Drinks made with aloe and coconut remained popular, crackers showed up with fruit and herb flavors, and EcoTensils ― sturdy, paperlike serveware ― ruled at many booths for sampling.

On Sunday, specialty retailers had a chance to gawk at Duff Goldman and his new line of cake-making products. In other celeb news, reps for Guy Fieri said that the TV front man would be in house today to hawk his line of BBQ sauces and salsas, adding that Mario Batali was in the same booth "two or three years ago."

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Jun Belen

Lumpia from 2010's breakout Hapa SF Filipino food truck.

​Deciding on the top 10 food story threads of any year is tricky (did the things we ate in the past two month somehow obliterate all memory of those from the prior 10?) but this year the task was especially arduous. It was a year packed with material: Blue Bottle got served, American Apparel-style; micropatisseries bloomed; Asian sandwiches busted out; and the hand sprouting from the long arm of policy makers slapped down the Happy Meal. In the end, what made the list were the trends we think changed the terms for 2011, radically remaking the local food landscape in ways we're even now taking for granted.

Eric Wolfinger

Jason Fox brought an idiosyncratic vision to Commonwealth.

​10. The Return of the Iconoclast
"For every cooking-school grad who wants to see her name on an embroidered chef's jacket and a Food Network show," writes SFoodie's Jonathan Kauffman, "there's another who just wants to do something unique, no matter what the size of his business. In the social media era, you don't need a four-star review to succeed ― you need a distinctive point of view, a loyal following, and perhaps a little street cred." Read the full entry.

9. Street Food Gets Serious
In a matter of months, the city's pavement cuisine made the leap from card table to truck. Read the full entry.

8. Coffee Seeps Farther
Kauffman: "In San Francisco, it's still all too easy to get a crappy cup of coffee. But the walking distance between the average San Franciscan and a good cup shortened noticeably this year." Read the full entry.

7. DIY Revolution
Sean Timberlake describes how urban homesteading played out on blogs, in backyard chicken coops, and in a proliferation of pop-up markets packed with DIY food crafters. Read the full entry.

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Lara Hata

Would Commonwealth's marrow-stuffed squid have played as well five years ago?

​Twelve months, ten storylines: It's SFoodie's annual look back at the year in food.

Daniel Patterson's 2005 essay in the New York Times (of all places!) decrying Chez Panisse's stylistic tyranny over Californian cuisine electrified many of us in the Bay Area food world. But it didn't stop minimalist ― i.e., seasonal, local, simply composed ― cooking from intensifying its hold on the area's restaurant scene. For the past 10-15 years, chef after chef has applied the same French-Italian template to the same seasonal vegetables and same fashionable cuts of meat. The pro: Not only has the Bay Area come up with a distinctive regional style, we're mastering it. The con: Market saturation.

In fact, when I moved back to San Francisco from Seattle at the beginning of the year, one of my biggest worries was how I would handle the conformity. After eight years of reviewing restaurants in the East Bay, I'd written quite enough about the same, perfect dishes. But when I set down to write about the best dishes of 2010, I realized that I'd forgotten about those concerns by March. This turned out to be a year full of idiosyncratic chefs spinning off in a hundred different directions.

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joebeone/Flickr

Was Le Cheval too big to fail? Apparently not, thanks to an adversarial landlord.

​With the great scything-down of 2008 well past us, San Francisco's restaurant industry sent up hundreds of blooms, some of them quite brilliant. Yet competition, normal restaurant-world pressures, and the lingering malaise afflicting the economy killed off a number of significant restaurants. Here are the 10 SFoodie mourns most keenly, listed in alphabetical order:

1. 1550 Hyde.The Weekly called this Russian Hill wine bar and bistro a charming blend of Paris and classic San Francisco when it opened in 2004.

SanFranAnnie/Flickr

Last day of business at Bacar, once an exemplar of epic SOMA style.

​2. Bacar. "Bacar isn't just a restaurant; it's an extravaganza ... with a big budget, an all-star cast, mezzanine seating, and multiple subplots," the Weekly wrote in 2001; the restaurant changed directions rather radically after that, but the epic scale of the place remained.

3. Bruno's. The first official review of my tenure at the Weekly. The Mission bar hasn't closed, but after contracting out food service to Katharine Zacher and Ryan Ostler for a spell it stopped serving dinner (again). Those biscuits! The smoked ribs! Dammit, this one hurt bad.

4. Le Cheval. How could a successful, much-loved Vietnamese restaurant, one of the anchors of the downtown Oakland food scene, close down? It's a rather sordid story, actually ― and not Le Cheval's fault. We wish the owners luck finding a new location.

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Chris MacArthur

Mobile vending went legit in 2010, thanks to events like Off the Grid Fort Mason Center.

​Twelve months, ten storylines: It's SFoodie's annual look back at the year in food.

La Cocina

August's S.F. Street Food Festival drew huge crowds to the Mission.

​What burst onto the scene in 2009 as an underemployed construction worker in a toque taking a propane torch to home-baked custards turned to serious business in 2010. Before this year, San Francisco's street food was the domain of those who needed to improvise to make an extra buck. Some vendors had cooking experience, others didn't, but almost all of them worked from home kitchens to cater to particular subcultures: Mission day laborers, Zeitgeist barflies, Dolores Park's Sunday stoners. Oh sure, the Mission's giddy, tweet-stoked vendor phenomenon hit hard in the summer of 2009, but few expected it to last, despite the odd TV production crew becoming enthralled with Precita Park's mix of scene and setting.

While some San Franciscans longed to have an above-ground street-food scene that could go taco-to-taco with Portland or L.A., the city's complex and punishingly expensive permitting laws meant that was just about impossible. Still, few who'd gotten a taste of the zeitgeist at the inaugural editions of the S.F. Street Food Festival and Oakland Eat Real could deny it: Mobile food vending had a pent-up customer base itchy to open its wallets.

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Michelleysbelly/Flickr

Four Barrel's Probat roaster.

​Twelve months, ten storylines: It's SFoodie's annual look back at the year in food.

Catherine Cole

Sightglass Coffee's Jerad Morrison.

​In San Francisco, it's still all too easy to get a crappy cup of coffee. But the walking distance between the average San Franciscan and a good cup shortened noticeably this year. Barefoot, Four Barrel, Ecco, and De La Paz coffees are showing up at more cafes and restaurants around town, while Blue Bottle is beginning to loosen its too-tight grip on who sells its coffee. The year-old Sightglass began roasting its own beans this summer, and at the very end of the year, Contraband Coffee, another roaster-cafe, started up in Polk Gulch/Russian Hill.

By the end of 2010, it has gotten noticeably easier to compare local roasters' beans side by side. Markets such as Bi-Rite, Rainbow, and Other Avenues now have wide selections (Bi-Rite's is particularly impressive). The variety on sale can come at a cost; some of the beans SFoodie spotted on recent shopping trips were roasted back when Christine O'Donnell was still running "I am not a witch" ads on TV. In addition, Ma*velous opened on Market and Fell, with six different methods for brewing coffee and beans from three roasters, including a cult Norwegian microroaster whose coffees are only available on Ma*Velous's siphon bar. 

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Joseph Schell

Pickles from Happy Girl Kitchen Co. at the Eat Real Fest, which drew 110,000 to Oakland for street food and urban homesteading demos.

​Twelve months, ten storylines: It's SFoodie's annual look back at the year in food.

At the far end of the spectrum from street food and fine dining, another trend exploded in the Bay Area in 2010: DIY food and urban homesteading.

One of the biggest evidences of the DIY food movement played out in blogs on a global scale: Tigress' Can Jam encouraged food bloggers everywhere to can a different ingredient every month, and hundreds took the bait, including San Franciscans Cam and Anita at Married ...with Dinner, Paige of Canning with Kids in the South Bay, and Marin-based award-winning jam maker Shae of Hitchhiking to Heaven.

FARMcurious sprang up to outfit DIY enthusiasts.

​Inspired by the likes of Oakland's Novella Carpenter (whose book, Farm City, came out in paperback in May 2010), scads of Bay Area residents took up animal husbandry in their homes. Chickens became all the rage; I can personally think of several friends who added coops to their backyards, including Gudrun of Kitchen Girl Cooks.

Of course this newfound interest created its own little economic bubble, and cottage industries popped up all around the bay. Nicole Kramer launched FARMcurious, a one-stop shop for all things homesteady, and Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper briefly brought beekeeping supplies to the heart of the Mission. Classes in everything from chutney to cheese making became abundant, at venues like 18 Reasons, Urban Kitchen SF, the Institute of Urban Homesteading, BioFuel Oasis, and Happy Girl Kitchen. There was a bumper crop of books from Bay Area writers: Rachel Saunders of Blue Chair Fruit released a hefty tome of jams and preserves; Vanessa Barrington taught us how to make everything D.I.Y. Delicious; and Karen Solomon got picked up for a sequel to her 2008 book Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It, due out in early 2011. Oh, and I launched Punk Domestics in July, with an aim to build a curated space for DIY-driven self-publishers everywhere.

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Melissa Barnes/SF Weekly

Bar Agricole was among a handful of ambitious bar/restaurants to open in 2010.

​Twelve months, ten storylines: It's SFoodie's annual look back at the year in food.

To call 2010 a revolutionary year in cocktails would be an overstatement. But it was certainly a year in which cocktail-making became an even more serious pursuit.

Fewer and fewer people walk into a bar expecting to order their favorite drink ― more of us go to a bar to see what the bartender can do for us. A few years back, San Francisco became known for garden-fresh cocktails that incorporated fresh juices, local herbs. But bartenders are putting the muddler in the drawer and focusing instead on concocting their own mixers like tonic water, bitters, falernum, and this year's trendiest ingredient, gum syrups.

Buoyed by the success of restaurants with cocktail bars such as Nopa and Heaven's Dog, this year saw a slew of ambitious new restaurants who believed ambitious cocktails were as important (and PR-worthy) as the quality of the food. The most prominent: The Barbary Coast-era Comstock Saloon; Bar Agricole, which featured Thad Vogler's garden-to-glass approach to cocktails; Prospect, the Boulevard team's second restaurant, which hired the amazing Brooke Arthur to oversee the bar; and the gorgeous Twenty Five Lusk, which is, in terms of square footage, slightly more lounge than restaurant.

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