Restaurants View All →
Hi Lo Northern California BBQ
BBQ eludes me. Even as a committed omnivore, BBQ never took hold of my culinary longings until I went to Hi Lo, the sleek, airy, unabashedly San Francisco style barbecue place across the street from sister restaurant Hog and Rocks. There, I fell in love. I think Hi Lo is the best restaurant to open [...]
Read More →b. Patisserie
I am obsessed with b. Patisserie, a new bakery/cafe in my lower Pacific Heights neighborhood. I sit at the computer inventing excuses to walk over. When I’m out, and pass within two blocks of its pearly white facade and big front windows, I start talking to myself. If I dropped in every time, I’d be [...]
Read More →Ramen Shop
Leave it to Chez Panisse alums to turn a ramen shop into a farm to table experience. The noodles, made daily on site, possess provocative chewiness. Ramen Shop broths, cooked entirely from scratch, conjoin clarity and depth. The pristine garnishes–pork, egg, greens–are radiant with color and flavor. This is ramen at its purest yet most [...]
Read More →Hakkasan
Cecilia Chiang, who in 1968 mounted the first upscale, northern Chinese restaurant in America called The Mandarin, and ran it for 23 years, perpetually complains about the dearth of Chinese restaurants in San Francisco that have gracious service, appointments and decor. So when Hakkasan, the new, high-end Chinese restaurant from London opened, we went right [...]
Read More →Chez Panisse Downstairs
A revolution of sorts swept though the bastion of California cooking when long time chefs Jean-Pierre Moulle and David Tanis left their alternating bi-annual posts of downstairs dining room chef at Chez Panisse. Many of the restaurant’s loyal patrons–the Chez Panisse family–were concerned. Jean-Pierre Moulle, a 37 year veteran, represented the institutional memory of the [...]
Read More →The Corner Store
The Corner Store, an ebullient new pub and restaurant located on the partially hidden southwest corner of Masonic and Geary, has deep local roots. One of the two owners, the chef and a multitude of investors grew up in San Francisco and hung out together since they were in kindergarten. The eventual crew worked around [...]
Read More →Bar Tartine
Six years after it opened, Bar Tartine, the restaurant offshoot of Tartine Bakery, has become Hungarian at dinner and Scandinavian at lunch. Both meals are fantastic–original and luscious. The lunchtime Danish sandwich bar was created when Bar Tartine expanded into a space next door and installed bread ovens. There, Chad Robertson bakes whole grain northern [...]
Read More →Ken Ken Ramen
During the recession, the idea of opening a successful restaurant changed. Instead of raising seven figure capital from investors, passionate cooks with a dish or two they loved to make figured out new ways to get them to the public–pop ups, restaurant sharing, food stands at farmers’ markets, food trucks, community kitchens. They invoked the [...]
Read More →Food View All →
Hi Lo Northern California BBQ
BBQ eludes me. Even as a committed omnivore, BBQ never took hold of my culinary longings until I went to Hi Lo, the sleek, airy, unabashedly San Francisco style barbecue place across the street from sister restaurant Hog and Rocks. There, I fell in love. I think Hi Lo is the best restaurant to open [...]
Read More →b. Patisserie
I am obsessed with b. Patisserie, a new bakery/cafe in my lower Pacific Heights neighborhood. I sit at the computer inventing excuses to walk over. When I’m out, and pass within two blocks of its pearly white facade and big front windows, I start talking to myself. If I dropped in every time, I’d be [...]
Read More →California Olive Ranch Olive Oil
For the first time, in my opinion, a California grower is producing extra virgin olive oil that is comparable in price, quality and availability to the extra virgin oils produced in Greece, Spain and Italy. Less than ten years ago California Olive Ranch started planting high density olive trees that look and act like grapevines. [...]
Read More →Wise Sons Deli
Lord knows we need a Jewish deli in San Francisco and the Wise Sons have made it their mission to bring us one, first as a pop up, then in a booth at the Tuesday Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, and now as a brick and mortar self serve restaurant in the Mission. On the booth’s [...]
Read More →Del Popolo
Jon Darsky, who apprenticed with Charlie Hallowell at Pizzaiola, went pro at Delfina Pizzeria, and became the much lauded pizza maker at Flour + Water, has struck out on his own. No, he has not opened a brick and mortar pizzeria. Rather he designed and had fabricated a pizzeria in a shipping container mounted on [...]
Read More →Mendocino “Burrata” of Goat and Sheep Milk
Pennyroyal Farmstead, an adjunct farm of Anderson Valley’s Navarro Vineyards. has put out their first cheese, a soft, creamy combo of goat milk and sheep milk with the texture of burrata, and a flavor that I have only tasted once before, when I camped out in the French Pyrenees with shepherds. They made a similar [...]
Read More →Bastille Day Feast
This announcement came to me through Georgeanne Brennan, a fellow member of Les Dames d’Escoffier. A Bastille Day Feast Saturday, July 14, 2012 Wolfskill Ranch 4334 Putah Creek Road, Winters, CA Gathering time: 11:30 a.m. Tour of historic Wilfskill ranch: 11:45 a.m. Aperitif: 12:30 p.m. Feast: 1 to 3 p.m. All participants bring their own [...]
Read More →Cold Soba at Nojo
We’re feeling the summer in Hayes Valley. While not quite as warm as the Mission, the sun is hot and people walk around in shorts. The urge for cold soba, buckwheat noodles, a summertime favorite in Japan, propelled me into Nojo, Greg Dunmore’s farm inspired izakaya. His chilled soba salad ($8.50), like nothing I’ve ever [...]
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West Maui
Kaanapali, with its perfect year round beach weather and gentle ocean, always strikes me as a big parking lot in paradise. Annually, for 18 years, we stayed in a low rise condo at the Maui-Kaanapali Villas in a unit much enhanced by a long, uninhabited beach on one side–and grandpa next door. Now, ten years [...]
Read More →Bastille Day Feast
This announcement came to me through Georgeanne Brennan, a fellow member of Les Dames d’Escoffier. A Bastille Day Feast Saturday, July 14, 2012 Wolfskill Ranch 4334 Putah Creek Road, Winters, CA Gathering time: 11:30 a.m. Tour of historic Wilfskill ranch: 11:45 a.m. Aperitif: 12:30 p.m. Feast: 1 to 3 p.m. All participants bring their own [...]
Read More →Etxebarri: The Best Restaurant in Spain and Maybe the World
This simple asador in a restored farmhouse in Axpe, a tiny village tucked into a velvety green valley in the Cantabrian mountains near Bilbao, embodies everything I love about food. The menu is just a list of ingredients: most local, some rare, all sourced to be the most exquisite examples of their kind. All the [...]
Read More →Chez Hugon, Lyons
I was following my own footsteps in Lyons using a printout of an article I had written ten years ago. Some things had changed, like my favorite cheese stall in Les Halles, the best indoor food market in town on the Cours Lafayette, a fifteen minute walk from The Globe and Cecil. Small, oozing rounds [...]
Read More →Lyons
Arrived at the Globe and Cecil, my favorite hotel in Lyons, at 11:30 p.m. after a long trip from San Francisco, and immediately set out on a balmy night to find something to eat. Not much stays open late though on the rue de Merciere, in a district of bars, a bouchon called Les Enfants [...]
Read More →Road Trip to Los Angeles
Paso Robles is exactly half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles on Highway 101. I like to break up the drive by spending the night there, and have dinner at Artisan, one of those restaurant treasures you never expect to find outside of the Bay Area. The kitchen makes a sincere effort to find [...]
Read More →Puglia, Italy
Eating in Puglia Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot that stretches along the Adriatic, is one long swath of olive trees– beautiful, noble, silvery, gnarled ones, mere babies at 50 years old. It’s not uncommon to see olive trees with enormous hollow sinuous trunks that are centuries old and still producing olives. The Puglians [...]
Read More →Sicily, Italy
From a stone seat where Goethe sketched the 2500 year old Greek amphitheatre in Taormina, I gazed at the glittering Mediterranean far below agreeing that nothing seems to change on this sunny island–except the prices. Since my last visit two years ago, the cost of everything had tripled. Yet the food, especially in the best [...]
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