• Bostonians celebrated the patron saint of fishermen, as well as the deliciousness of cannoli. [MP: Boston]

• A genteel evening at the Ravinia Festival turned into an all-out food fight. [MP: Chicago]

• One "raven" had his/her own personal festival of writing MenuPages user reviews: 43 at last count! [MP: Philadelphia]

• One San Francisco taqueria will cause festivities in your tummy (in a good way). [MP: San Francisco]

• Hey, how would you think to pronounce RA Sushi? Yeah. You're wrong. [MP: South Florida]

What’s a foodie to do now that Slow Food Nation has left the building? Apparently quite a bit!

SATURDAY

• Party on Block 18: There’s a big ol’ foodie block party going down on 18th Street between Dolores and Guerrero. Tartine, Craig’s Place, Delfia, Bi-Rite Grocerry, Dolores Park Café and Bi-Rte Creamery are keepin’ it real and hosting what may be one of the best block parties in the city. You can purchase a $15 ticket for one of three meals—spit-roast Niman Ranch pork shoulder, Fulton Valley brick grilled chicken, and vegetarian paella and corn on the cob—or get sweets, sides, and sandwiches ranging from $2.50 to $5. Better yet, if you’re of age you can also enjoy the wine and beer garden. The party runs from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m and all proceeds will go to the Women’s Building. Want advance tickets? You can buy them from 18th street businesses.

• Of course, the 18th Street block party has a little friendly competition from the Inner Richmond. The Hukilau is hosting the 7th Annual Sam Choy Poke Festival . There’s going to be an outdoor stage and a Poke Receipe contest.

SUNDAY

• 2008 Ghiradelli Chocolate Festival The 2008 Ghiradelli Chocolate Festival is getting things done on Sunday. The festivals runs the entire weekend, but we think the Tea and Chocolate “Pair and Share” workshop from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. sounds interesting. Here’s a blurb about the Iyemon Cha Green Tea that will be used for the paring:

Be among the first in the country to savor an authentic and organic green tea experience. Steeped in two centuries of Japanese green tea tradition, Iyemon Cha recently made its US debut in San Francisco. It is the world’s only bottled green tea made at the esteemed 200-year-old Fukujuen tea house in Kyoto, where master green tea blender Ryozo Taniguchi hand selects the finest tea leaves to create a beverage of unsurpassed quality.

That’s all she wrote ladies and gentlemen. Thanks to a labor-free Monday it was a short week. No complaints from us.

[Photo via Brett L./Flickr]

• Cupcake bakeries are embroiled in a delicious trademark dispute. One is called "Sprinkled Pink" and should welcome the chance to get rid of that name. [LA Times]

• Tropical Storm Hanna has caused so much flooding in Goniaves, Haiti, that trucks bearing food aid can't even reach the area. [NY Times]

• You know that chemical BPA? The one that's probably in your water bottle? Well, it might be reducing your ability to learn and remember. That explains so much about college. [Canada.com]

• San Francisco's mayor wants to use local food for school and prison meals. [San Francisco Chronicle]

• Oh hey, speaking of sprinkles, it turns out that the former director of external affairs at Dunkin' Donuts (Dunkie's, for the Bostonians among us) was embezzling like crazy. [Boston Globe]

There's a delicious blind item over on Line Cook about a certain "tavern" where blogger/chef Richie seems to have had an awful experience. It went up last week under the headline "Nothing Interesting" and, fools that we were, we believed him. But that was a mistake, because it was interesting, as is almost any story about laughably bad restaurant service. Here's our favorite part:

The chef (not the big name, but the exec) came into the bar and cuddled up with a girl on the couch...something that seemed strange when one was trying to make a week old kitchen work. After the 45 minutes passed, I headed to the host desk--only to stopped short with "YOUR TABLE WILL BE READY SOON!" being shouted at me. I never even got the chance to ask about it in the first place....what if I just wanted to know where the bathroom was?

Then there's the food. Well, you go look at the pictures for that.

So where is this mystery "tavern?" Anybody know?

Nothing Interesting [Line Cook]

Foods of the World, a new site from National Geographic, launched yesterday to relatively little fanfare. The site is equal parts global food bazaar, recipe resource, and exploration/research tool. In fact, the marriage of National Geographic and food in one convenient site makes so much sense that we were more surprised to hear that it didn't already exist than that it was launching at all.

After the jump, more on Foods of the World.

Continue reading "National Geographic Launches Food Site: Foodie-Anthropologists Rejoice" »

Ha, this is great: Remember when we brought you our list of state/county fair food dos and don'ts? Well, an addendum should be made:

Do:
• Eat anything and everything that comes on a stick. The weirder the better.

Because look at how much fun it obviously is to eat this stuff at the Minnesota State Fair. Note: Scotch egg, hoagie, corn-dog-on-a-slide.

In Videos: Foods on a Stick at the Minnesota State Fair [Serious Eats]

• A chemicle in many food and drink containers has been linked to brain cancer (ugh). [Canwest News Service]

• Food distributer Sysco settles with the state of Florida over false fish allegations. [CNN Money]

• The dust is finally settling in that fatal 2003 Rhode Island nightclub fire, and very little of it lands on the club owners. [Chicago Tribune/AP]

• Reaction to LA fast food ban is some mix of insolence and skepticism. [Reuters]

We’ve been trying to do a lot lately. Trying to lose weight. Trying to start our own business. Trying to keep up with SF food scene. Frankly, we’re a little burnt out.

Yesterday we struggled through Boot Camp in the morning, downed two iced coffees afterward, and sluggishly left the office in search of lunch at 3 p.m. Labor Day had come and gone and things were supposed to be business as usual, but we just weren’t havin’ it.

But it was such a nice day that we knew better than not to enjoy it so we went to Ferry Building in search of food for lunch (or linner).

It was hot. We went to MIJITA. We had a carnitas taco and sat alone at a long, colorful table trying to make the numbers on our business plan change for the better. The numbers didn’t look so hot, but the taco was good. Handmade corn tortilla, well-seasoned meat, chopped onions, cilantro and a pour of salsa verde. It was $4 and some change, which is pricy for a taco, but we were there and hard pressed to find something cheaper in the vicinity.

And so it goes. It’s a short week so we’re hoping to shake off the doldrums in time for the weekend. In the meantime, we aim to at least eat lunch earlier the rest of the week—doldrums love low blood sugar.

MIJITA [Menupages]
MIJTA [Official Site]

[Photo via jered/Flickr]

MP: South Florida editor Carolina spent the last week and a half eating her way through South Korea and compulsively photographing everything on her plate.

The dish pictured above almost caused a bit of a rift between myself and my boyfriend. We were wandering around Seoul at around 11 p.m. after a baseball game looking for a bite to eat on the way back to the hotel. I wasn't particularly hungry, but he insisted on finding food, so we stopped at a cart (one of many on this particular street) that displayed meats and seafood in a box with a clear plastic cover. We pointed to the pork belly and held up one finger to indicate "one portion."

Bad idea. Soon after tasting it, we realized that maybe two portions might have been better. My appetite suddenly appeared, and my boyfriend had to fight for what was, in reality, his snack. It doesn't look like all that much from the photo, but trust me, that chili sauce is magical — a perfect blend of heat and flavor.

After the jump, some more of the food highlights from our 10 days in Seoul...

Continue reading "National: 10 Days Of Kimchi" »

Okay, here's a blast from the past: Does anybody have anything to say about the former King Henry restaurant? Or was it King Henry VIII? On Geary Street, in the Tendernob? Maybe it's where the Ambassador is now? This place was such a trip, and it seems to have disappeared down the Internet's memory hole.

This came up during a recent trip to Anzu, where a plate of lamb and blue cheese bread pudding and an order of scallops with peanut sauce followed a fancified Caesar salad and a bowl of soba noodles.

Good stuff, to be sure, but the rather plain atmosphere left us yearning for the former goof-fest was King Henry. That restaurant was an early introduction, for us, to the idea of a non-fusion menu with a couple distinct cuisines. Like Anzu, King Henry served steaks and chops as well as sushi and noodles. But they were way more funny about it.

They had this east-not-quite-meets-west thing down. The dining room, divided by a pony wall, sported black wood tables adorned with soy sauce, chopsticks, and little dishes on one side. The other side was filled with white tablecloths, wine glasses and steak-knives. And never the twain shall meet.

While you were free to eat whatever you wanted off the menu, they'd ask you when you walked in whether you were there for steak or sushi, and seat you accordingly. It really was adorable. If you have pictures or memories to share, we'd love to see and hear them.

Anzu [MenuPages]
Anzu [Official Site]

[Photo: Anzu dining room via Anzu Official Site]

Christ. After spending all weekend behind the rose-colored lens of Slow Food Nation, we forgot that some of the realities of living and eating in a big city are not so pretty. Sunday's news of a Glen Park store robbery that involved a stabbing and kidnapping definitely snapped us back to reality, though.

This comes on the heels of a major restaurant robbery crime spree, but in spite of the sobering news, it was neat to hear about one of our fave local restaurateurs lending a hand. SFist has a clip from the Glen Park News:

Robbers stabbed Paul Park, the owner of Buddy's Market at about 11 p.m. last night, leaving him for dead. They also kidnapped one of his employees. Park, who had been tied up, managed to get out of his bonds and stagger across the street to Le P'tit Laurent, where owner Laurent Legendre called the police.

Be careful out there, diners, but don't stay home. It's time to take back the dining room.

Glen Park to Heather Fong: SOS [SFist]
EaterWire: Door Foils Robbery, The Counter Does Marin [Eater SF]
Merchants mobilize after violent stabbing, robbery [Examiner]
Le P'tit Laurent [MenuPages]
Le P'tit Laurent [Official Site]

[Photo: Alcatraz via PD Photo.org]

In Oakland, there's a guy named Ivar, an oldies DJ, mechanic, artist, and partner in The Key Printing and Binding.

Most important, though, among Ivar's many talents, is his non-stop stream of consciousness when it comes to hilariously disastrous concepts. Any conversation with Ivar yields at least a couple ideas so deliberately misguided that you yearn to see them put into action, just so that they will exist in the world, such the seagull that lives in your shirt if you don't have health-care and pops out to warn you when you're about to do something dangerous.

A long-time favorite is Ivar's "Bad Drinks" cocktail list, which includes such hits as a glass of blood with microchips floating in it, a glass of pubic hair with a dollop of chili on top, and a glass of pure water topped with several drops of gasoline.

Coming up with these drink ideas never really left the realm of drunk-talk, until Chow's James Norton, who we're pretty sure has never met Ivar, published his own list of "Craptails" in The Ten. The list actually went up a year ago June, but we didn't see it till just now. It's on Chow's front page for some reason. It includes some pretty fantastic bad drinks, such as the Salmon Colada, and now we're thinking Ivar and James should open a concept bar together. Call it something like "Garbage Water," and don't you dare give us a tab. Check out the recipe:

Salmon Colada

3 ounces light rum
2 cups crushed ice
3 tablespoons pineapple juice
3 tablespoons coconut milk
1 ounce fresh Atlantic salmon
Salmon head, for garnish

Blend all ingredients and garnish with a salmon head.

If anyone at the party starts talking about the importance of Omega-3 fatty acids, merely gesture at your drink and say, “Eh? Eh? That enough for ya?” Later in the evening, give your salmon head a name and have it deliver monologues on the commercialization of independent cinema or why the French Laundry is past its prime.

• There's a pretty good chance that meat and milk from the offspring of cloned animals has entered the U.S. food supply. [Reuters via Guardian]

• A severe drought in Ethiopia has left 8 million in urgent need of food aid. [Reuters]

• Lobster prices are at their lowest in years due to decreased demand, so now might be a good time to splurge. [NYT]

• United Airlines reversed the decision to stop offering hot meals to economy class passengers on international flights. [Chicago Sun-Times]

The New York Times ran an expose a few weeks ago about Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, high school students in Manhattan who did a most interesting science project: They dropped a couple hundred dollars on sushi from restaurants and grocery stores, and then sent the fish off for a DNA analysis that would positively identify each sample's species. The result? Mislabeled fish turned up at 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores.

Of course, in the wake of this article, the world has been turned on its ear. Predictably, big hitters like Eric Ripert of New York's seafood cathedral Le Bernardin and the guys from Nobu issued impassioned declarations that they never never swap in cheaper, farmed fishes in lieu of the exotic, expensive ones that are advertised on the menu.

So that's a story in and of itself, and probably worthy of more in-depth coverage on this blog. But! The real story here, at least to us, is an op-ed that ran today that takes this bit of fishy business as a springboard for a discussion of the power of the mind to dupe the palate.

The key here is a trick of the trade held close to the heart of magicians, con artists, and other sleight-of-handers: It's easier to fool an expert than it is to fool a naif. Citing examples of white wine dyed red, and chocolate yogurt mistaken for strawberry when eaten in the dark, author Edward Dolnick illustrates just how easy it is for us to dupe our tastebuds when we trust the information coming to us from another source — a wine expert asking us how we like our Pinot Noir, or a lab tech asking us whether we taste the strawberry, or (as it turns out) a menu telling us that the tilapia draped over a lozenge of sticky rice is actually "white tuna."

Of course, there are some food-related slights of hand that make us happy: think meatloaf cupcakes, or Chef Michel Richard's virtual eggs. But we're the first to admit we're not immune to the power of suggestion: the first time we tried one of the virtual eggs (made from mozzarella and yellow tomato) our first thought was not "oh hey, cheese and tomato shaped like an egg." It was "whoa, this egg is rotten."

Given that, we're keeping a more critical eye (and, er, tastebud) on what goes in our mouth. Hey, garde mangers — consider us en garde.

Fish or Foul? [New York Times]

[Photo: Heck knows what kind of fish any of this is anymore. Via sifu_renka's Flickr]

I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t admit to being pretty darn impressed with the Slow Food Taste Pavilions this weekend. Menupages’ own Adam Martin joined Sweetie and I for the Saturday evening session, and we were all impressed with the general pageantry and spectacle of the event in addition to the genuinely great food with which we filled ourselves over the course of four hours.

The only complaint? You weren’t able to buy anything at the pavilions, just collect check marks on your "Slow Dough" card to indicate that you’d been to a station. Of course, I'm not sure how the pricing would have worked if they had decided to sell goods at the pavilions, because we couldn’t help question the seemingly arbitrary “price scale” employed at the event. The Spirits pavilion was two check-marks, but you got unlimited cocktails all night. On the flip side, one sample of pork confit on small slice of toasted bread was three check-marks. Huh? Maybe pork is particularly expensive compared to a bottle of organic vodka.

And so we pressed on.

With each of the pavilions promising the best of what a particular industry or ingredient had to offer, I went into the evening thinking I’d see lots of familiar names and faces, like Blue Bottle Coffee, Cow Girl Creamery or Niman Ranch. But we were pleasantly surprised to see so many new or under-promoted names holding their own among the heavy hitters.

For instance, Counter Culture Coffee Roasters from North Carolina had us at hello with the El Salvadorian roast we sipped mid-flight at the Coffee Pavilion. We were all over the Wild Nunavut Arctic Char, available for the first time in the States, which was prepared by sustainable fish company CleanFish at the Fish Pavilion.

The pork pate from Café Rouge in Berkeley gave the charcuterie sampler some girth. And even the folks over at the Spirits Pavilion had new tricks up their sleeves with Shane McKnight, mixologist extraordinaire at Globe and founder of Urban Lunch SF, going through an elaborate process to create one very special cocktail: Pureed cucumber and lime, lemon juice, muddled cucumbers, St. Germain, Prairie Organic Vodka, mint and soda.

It was great to discover and rediscover food and the people responsible for making it. What’s more, in the spirit of slow food, localism, and sustainability, it's great that so many food purveyors were able to share the spotlight and let the food, rather than the branding, do the talking.

And now it's picture time. See you after the jump...

Continue reading "SFN: A Visit To The Taste Pavilion, Vol. 2" »