Category: Food & Drink

San Francisco is one of the best places to eat in the world and I have yet to find a place that doesn’t cover some country in the world.

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Park Cafe: My Kind of Dive

I like going out for breakfast when I can. I love me some bacon & eggs with a side of toast and hash browns. I don’t really need an upscale kind of place to eat, just one that’s clean, quick and cheap. That’s where the Park Cafe comes in because you’d never know it was there. It’s small, hidden in the Stonestown Medical building and you’d never think about it and probably miss it when you’re walking by.

My wife and I decided to try it one day after I had a dentist appointment. It was close to noon and I hated going to the dentist because he always treated me like a five year old tell me how awful my teeth were and how they were all going to fall out if I didn’t brush them 3-6 times a day with fluoride rinses afterwards. Needless to say, I changed dentists and found one who was nicer and cheaper. I digress a bit. We decided to try the Park Cafe, at the time bacon and eggs with toast was just $2.99 each and you got coffee with it. This of course was prior to the dot com bomb, but today they prices are now $4.99. That’s still a deal in my book. The nice part is they can scramble your eggs well so their fluffy and hard and overcooked and you get three slices of bacon, not the skimpy two most places offer. You can also swap out the toast for a bagel at no extra charge.

Hardly anyone goes there, except probably the doctors in the building during their lunch who are too lazy to walk across the mall. There’s no windows inside the place so the best view you’re going to get is of beverage container. I was always a kind of odd duck there as I used to get Martinelli’s apple cider to go with my breakfast there. I can’t stand orange juice unless you add in some vodka [which I don’t recommend for the mornings] and apple juice for some reason made me want to drink more water. I think we were one of the only houses prior to having kids that stocked apple juice.

To find the place you walk in the front door of the building and walk straight toward the elevators then turn left. They have no website and you’ll hardly find anything on them if you search google. My apologies for the shaky picture, but it was a quick shot on the way out of the building this morning. We would have stopped in to eat, but our daughter doesn’t like doctors too much yet because she’s been getting vaccines every time she’s gone, so I could understand her wanting to get the hell out of there, but if you’re ever out that way check them out and tell them I sent you.

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Pesto alla Genovese

While I have a Germanic last name, I grew up in an Italian household. My family traces it’s roots back to Genoa in the Ligurian provence of Italy. As a kid what we ate was considered ethnic food. For most kids my age Italian food consisted of Spaghetti-O’s. For us it was pesto. It was something no one had heard of and you never saw it on the menu’s in Italian restaurants.

I learned how to make from my Mom who learned it from her Mom, etc, etc. When my Dad lost his job and we were low on cash we had pesto with tagliarini pasta at least once a week. Tagliarini is kind of like fettucini only thinner. When basil was in season she’d go to the farmer’s market down on Alemany and get a box sometimes two boxes and then the chaos would begin. I got the job of stripping the leaves off while my Mom and Grandmother would pull out their wooden bowls and mesaluna’s and start chopping the basil. It wasn’t the real way you’re supposed to make it as it was normally ground with a mortar and pestle, but these were more modern times pre-cuisinart. I loved it and ate it up by the piles. A couple of nights as a kid I had it before going to a Boy Scout meeting and apparently all the garlic that was in there became very apparent to everyone in the auditorium.

After I got done with the leaves it was time to grind the pignoli [pine nuts] and chop the garlic…lots of garlic. I think I had the easiest jobs of all. While pulling the leaves off the stems was tedious it wasn’t anything compared to chopping the leaves with the archaic double bladed knives that probably dated back to the 20’s. When the chopping was done my Grandmother would put the chopped leaves into a large bowl and slowly pour in olive oil [not the traditional Ligurian extra virgin olive oil, but good enough] and slowly stirred the chopped basil and oil until it got a creamy texture. Then I got to add the pignoli and garlic and finish up the stirring. My Mom would then start jarring up the extra and that would go into our downstairs freezer.

We always saved the last bit for dinner that night and my Dad who used to work down in the Marina would be told to drop by Lucca’s and get some fresh tagliarini for dinner. Typically you add some parmesan cheese to the mix, but my Mom and Grandmother always liked to let us decide how much cheese we wanted on it. This tradition carried on for years until a day in the 21st century my Mom wanted some pesto, but didn’t have it in her to go through the process. I suggested we try the food processor and of course she balked.

So I bought a bunch of basil picked the leaves and threw it into the food processor we had at my house. I tossed in about 5-6 cloves of garlic and a little olive oil and turned it on. Slowly adding a little bit more and more until it looked about right, but I left out the pignoli because I was lazy and they’re kind of expensive. We found some fresh tagliarini at a local upscale grocer who I won’t mention and brought it over to her house to make dinner one night.

Where’s the pine nuts? OK, I should have expected that. How’d you make it? You don’t have all the…wait! You made it in a food processor? Yes ma, that’s what I did, so do you like it? She liked it and started doing it that way herself.

Now pesto is everywhere. It’s in mayonnaise, on pizza’s someone will probably make a pesto chocolate bar soon. I see it all the time at the supermarket, but I’ve tried it a couple of times and I still go back to making it myself. It’s cheaper, fresher and just reminds me of good times in my past. Incidentally, if you substitute Italian parsley for the basil you get a great South American steak sauce called chimichurri that I’ve written about previously.

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Anchor Steam Beer

In my misspent youth I had a hobby of brewing beer. The ingredients were legal to buy and it was cheap to make and seeing as there was a home brewing shop three blocks away from me just made it easier. This got me thinking about a little talked about San Francisco tradition, Anchor Steam Beer.

I’ve drank a lot of Anchor Steam beer over the years, but I have yet to tour their brewery which I think I’ll have to do sometime in the near future. What always caught my ear was the fact that the word steam was included in the name. What exactly is steam beer? Now when I brewed beer you boiled the grains and hops on the stove [know by brewers as the wort] for a certain length of time that did produce steam and made the whole house smell like a telephone booth on a hot day [I’m dating myself here, but some of you well know what I mean.] You then strained this into your primary fermenter added water to cool it down and added the yeast.

When I first started brewing beer I used ale yeast because I was told it was easier to deal with. It turns out that steam beer uses a lager yeast that ferments on the bottom and you don’t get the foamy top on your batch. Steam beer using lager yeast is fermented at a cooler temperature more indicative of San Francicisco. As to why the term steam beer is used has a lot of debate. Some say it was because the Anchor Brewery lacking ice to cool the wort would pump the hot wort up to holding tanks at the roof of the building where the cool Pacific air would cool it down causing steam to rise off the building. Other’s have said that it produced a lot of carbon dioxide and it was necessary to let off the steam during the fermentation process. This I can believe because the first time I actually brewed a lager and bottled it up I stored the bottles in my garage and found that my Dad who used to spend his evenings working in the garage would have a few WWII flashbacks when a bottle or two would explode from too much pressure.

Steam beer was started here in San Francisco in 1849 a year before California became a part of the US and the start of the California gold rush when a German named Gottlieb Brekle decided to start a business to help the working man unwind. Steam beer [also known as California common beer] was not the best stuff around at the time. It was cheap to make, cheap to purchase and didn’t taste that great, but got you drunk. It’s a far cry from what the Anchor Brewery makes today. Anchor Steam is still their best known, but they make a much larger selection including ales and barley wines.

Anchor has evolved over the years to become probably one of the first micro-brews commercially available. I’ve had friends who have taken the tours and they’ve said that they’re a lot of fun. Apparently so much fun that you have to book the tour six month in advance now because of the popularity. You also get a taste of the beer at the end of the tour so I’d say give them a call now and book a trip. They only take reservations by phone though so if you’re planning on making the trip call them at 415-863-8350 now. Don’t forget to press extension 0 when you call.

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Wonton Cookies

Way back when I was in the fifth grade i had a teacher named Ruth Omatsu. She was always one of my favorite teachers at Lawton Elementary school because she got us excited about learning. While we learned a lot about science and reading and math in her class it was the special side things she taught us that really stuck with me like wonton cookies.

Bringing a deep fryer around 10 year olds isn’t something you’d get away with doing today, but she decided to teach us to cook one week and she had come up with the novel idea of wonton cookies. They were really simple and delicious. You’d take a wonton skin and drop some coconut, brown sugar and chocolate chip on one half. Then you’d wet your finger and run it around the edge and fold it over into a triangle and deep fry it.

My Mom loved the idea and invited Ruth over one day to show her how to do it. My Mother took it a step further and chopped up banana and pineapple to add into the mix. Really anything sweet would probably work in one of these. If you’re adding in a harder fruit like apples you’ll definitely need some brown sugar to help loosen them up.

While I haven’t seen any Chinese restaurant offering them I think it would be a great idea for them to start. It’s a novelty that I haven’t seen anywhere else and could be a new San Francisco tradition. The only thing that comes close is a Philipino dish called Turon. I’ve seen it in stores, but I’ve yet to try it. From what I understand it’s banana, chocolate and star fruit made to look like a lumpia, but is sweet inside. Even though I dated a girl who was Philipino for six years I had never heard of this before, but it sounds like something I’m going to have to try. In the mean time I’ll stick with the wonton cookie version because it brings back memories of school. I’m sure some of my Asian persuasion friends will chime in on this one. Steve? You out there?

Hat’s off to you Ms. Omatsu!

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Pink Slime

Seeing as it’s the weekend I can move away from San Francisco and talk about a term coined by Dr. Gerald Zirnstein, Pink Slime. It’s a term used to describe boneless lean beef trimmings that are ground up and processed as an additive to regular ground meat. Since the term is a pejorative one to denigrate this product I thought I’d do a little background research about this horrific meat product that is on everyone’s lips nowadays.

When I first heard the term it was used to reference ground up chicken that  being used to make chicken nuggets. There was no reference to it being used in ground beef, but apparently now I’ve found at least a dozen articles on it yesterday. There are two companies making this product and they are BPI and Cargill. Most of the articles while not mentioning BPI are focusing on it because they use Ammonium hydroxide to sterilize the meat because they are trimmings usually considered not fit for human consumption. This isn’t added to the meat, but the meat is washed and rinsed in it. The meat which people are saying isn’t fit for human consumption wouldn’t really be allowed for humans to eat, so it’s more like meat humans don’t normally eat. To those in the nose to tail brand of eating this is what is known as offal. When you slice open a cow the insides containing intestines, liver, kidneys, heart, etc are what come out and there are very few people that are meat eaters that go for this [except for the few liver and onions types or the steak and kidney pie types]. This is edible, but takes a bit of cleaning up before you cook it. Cargill by the way uses anti-microbial treatments to make it safer to eat not ammonium hydroxide.

Now if you go for the muscle parts of the meat that most of us eat there’s nothing used to sterilize it which is part of the reason we get food poisoning, mad cow and all those other diseases. Pink slime is a sterile, processed meat product. Sounds awful doesn’t it? Let’s talk about Tofu for a minute. It’s a processed, fermented soybean product that doesn’t occur in nature. If we called it processed rotting bean paste it wouldn’t be a good advertising tag line. Would you purchase bee barf? I bet you have. That’s called honey. A study was done in New York where they walked around Central Park telling everyone about the horrors of consuming dihydromonoxide. It’s present in everything we consume and if you consume too much of it, it will kill you. As it turns out, the public doesn’t know basic chemistry enough to understand that what they were talking about was H20, i.e. water.

I am not saying that beef innards are high on my list of things to eat. I’ve never eaten sweetbreads [nice name for a sales pitch] nor have I had kidneys or liver [I may have had foie gras once], but the grinding together of these innards and sterilizing them still leaves them as being 100% beef in origin. I remember a local hamburger joint when I was a kid that sold 25¢ hamburgers that everyone said used sawdust as a meat filler. THAT would be a questionable additive. Come to think of it I have eaten 100% beef hot dogs so I’m sure there were some innards mixed in.

Jamie Oliver who I enjoy watching demonstrated the way he thought Pink Slime was made by grinding meat and dumping ammonia on it saying this was how it’s made. That’s not true. The innards and trimmings when ground are exposed to ammonia gas then washed [BPI] or exposed to antibiotics [Cargill]. Much different than what was being told to us. There was a study published about the perils of Pink Slime which was later pulled as having some serious errors and that it was not harmful to human consumption.

What we have is people reading food labels and seeing ingredients that don’t sound like they’re fit for human consumption and then isolating them then writing up everything about the horrors of what this will do to you supposedly. Pretty much everything we eat today has been processed in one form or another. You don’t know what portions of the cow go into your ground beef. A can of soup usually has more than half you daily salt intake. Many of your store bought fresh baked cookies contain anti-freeze to make them soft. I’m not even sure if the picture I used up above is truly Pink Slime. It’s been associated with it, but I have yet to see a video that proves this to be true. Most of the fast food restaurants have stopped including Pink Slime because of the public outcry, but if you buy a beef and bean burrito from your local 7-11 look at the ingredients and I’m sure you’ll see beef heart as the source of beef. I shudder to think what their nacho cheese is made of. It always looked like yellow Elmer’s glue to me.

In the end, it’s not something I’d choose to eat, but the vilifying of an ingredient that when you take a look at it isn’t as horrible as it sounds by the name someone has applied to it just gets my yellow journalism radar turned up to 11. Now it’s time for me to go and have a cup of rotten dried leaves steeped in boiling dihyromonoxide with a spoonful of bee barf [That’s tea].

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Blacks In Gaming

A good friend of mine helped host a night for the group Blacks In Gaming at the W Hotel in San Francisco. This ran hand in hand with the GDC [Game Developer’s Conference] and I have to say that the party was OFF THE HOOK!

Now I’ll apologize right off if any is offended by me using the term Blacks instead of African-American, but I would have to say that none of the Black folks there seemed to mine. Besides, having the acronym BiG sounds better than AAiG. The first sounds more like a dig me I’m here acronym while the second sounds like something you’d hear as person grabs their chest and falls to the floor. There were quite a few Black people in attendance, but myself being neither Black, nor a game designer still fit in nicely.

Now I’m sure some of you are asking why I would be invited to such an event since I am neither Black nor a game designer. It turns out that I help my old college friend get their website started and I wanted to see what would come out of it. She told me not to bother eating dinner that night and she was right. The food served up courtesy of sponsor Microsoft was incredible. They had trays of sushi, cheese and crackers and completely across Asia table of cuisine [note the deep fried pot stickers were outrageous]. As I was filling my plate I was tapped on the shoulder and offered a wagyu beef slider that was the hit of the evening for everyone. I also received a free drink ticket which got me a Maker’s Mark on the rocks to wash all the food down with.

While traveling around the room and talking with some of the game designers that had booths there was one in particular that stood out to me. That was Subversus Interactive showing of one of their games called Gyromaniac. It was by far the game that attracted the most attention. Why you ask? It’s a flight simulator that takes it a step further. You’re flying machine is traveling inside a human intestine, blood vessel or fallopian tube. It was pretty weird, but so unique in concept that it was attracting a lot of people to play the game. Note, you can also play it in 3-D which only enhances, umm the effect. Vishal Srivastava of Subversus Interactive who wrote the game did a great job of selling the game and caused a large amount of the people who were trying it out to break out laughing. If you have a fear of aliens and anal probes you might want to stay away from the game, but if you ever had the dreams of being a part of the movie Fantastic Voyage you’ll definitely fine this game fun. Check out the movie teaser at the end.

Overal it was a widely diverse crowd and I was surprised I didn’t bump into Willie Brown making a show there at least for a couple of minutes. I did happen to run into an old friend of mine Derrold Purifoy from elementary school and after 35 years we had lots of catching up to do. It seemed to me that most of the people when they weren’t talking about gaming were talking about the food at the W Hotel. It was a great night out and I managed to make it home before falling into a food coma.

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A Letter From Uncle Frank

When I wrote my article on the Treasure Island Hot Dog and not understanding how hot dogs had any association with San Francisco it triggered a response from Uncle Frank of the Schwarz Sausage Factory. While the name sounded familiar I wasn’t aware that they had started in San Francisco. Here’s the letter I received from Uncle Frank yesterday morning:

I read your post about San Francisco having no hot dog connection.

I also notice you quote Herb Caen, a serious hot dog guy.

Actually, San Francisco has a proud, although not well known, hot dog heritage. Up until a few years ago, The City was home to Schwarz Sausage Company, a multi generation family business who have been at it longer than Nathan’s of New York.

And they provide Berkeley’s spectacular Top Dog with some of the finest hot dogs on the planet.

How do I know all of this?

We’re The Hot Dog Hall Of Fame (Mr. Caen was a supporter) and we’ve tasted hot dogs all across the country, easily a thousand places in the 35 years we’ve been doing this.

There’s more to it than that but I thought we should introduce ourselves.

A few of our blogs and web sites:

Our web site: www.TheHotDogHallOfFame.com
Our blog: http://FrankfurterChronicles.blogspot.com
About the collection: http://TheHotDogHallOfFame.blogspot.com
How we got into the weenie trade: http://TheGreatAmericanHotDogMachine.blogspot.com
The Presidential Wiener: http://PresidentialWiener.blogspot.com

With Relsh,

Uncle Frank

I thought I knew a lot about Herb Caen, but I didn’t know he was a hot dog fan, but that makes sense. Hot dogs were always what you got at a baseball game and it was probably one from Schwarz Sausage Factory that I used to get as a kid. While they’ve been sold and are now in Fairfield [like so many other companies that grew too big for San Francisco] You can see their current website at the Engelhart Gourmet Foods site.

Thanks for the info Uncle Frank.

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The Treasure Island Hot Dog

I’ve had to do some research on this one because San Francisco isn’t known for it’s hot dogs like New York, but I remember growing up my Mom always used to buy Treasure Island Hot Dogs at the butcher shop [she was a bit too snooty for Oscar Meyer]. All I can remember about them was they were about a foot long when you rarely found a hot dog that long. I don’t remember anything about the taste being special, but I do remember the name so as I said, it was time to do some research.

The first thing I discovered was that we, San Francisco, don’t have the only Treasure Island. Apparently there is also one in Florida that also has a lot of hot dog stands. I don’t know where it is, but I certainly don’t associate Florida with hot dogs. The closest association with Treasure Island and the Hot Dog goes back to the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco held on Treasure Island. The interesting part about this story is that the hot dog and hamburger held a rather interesting place there. Because you could buy one and walk away and not have to sit down restaurant style they were not subject to taxation because they weren’t considered meals, but snacks.

That would answer the question why the hot dogs were a foot long. It was just a big snack that you could dump relish, onions, mustard and or ketchup on [these are the typical condiments for hot dogs in San Francisco, no sauerkraut.] So the people who originally came up with the Treasure Island hot dog were kind of trying to make a run around having to pay taxes. Now THAT sounds like old time San Francisco to me. There are apparently hot dog stands on Treasure Island, but I don’t know if they even serve the supposed Treasure Island Hot Dog.

All in all to me a hot dog is a hot dog. It’s a tubular meat delivery device that is more flavored by what you put on in that by itself. If you want to find Treasure Island Hot Dogs for sale you’ll have to go to some old school or high end butcher shops in San Francisco. When I’ve gone into one that has them and asked them why they’re called a Treasure Island Hot Dog no one can tell me. If one of you out there has some more info to share on this let me know. I get a bit OCD at times when I can’t get the answer to my questions.

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Torani Bacon Syrup: So Wrong it’s Right!

My wife and I were out shopping yesterday and wandered into Cost Plus just for the heck of it. I’ve always liked the food section because you can find odd foreign foods. Well today we found a truly weird food and it comes from San Francisco’s own Torani Syrup and it’s bacon flavored.

I posted the picture you see to the left on FaceBook and that started a mass of comments after I said, I’ll get some as soon as I figure out what to do with it. Torani suggests Manhattans, Old Fashioned, Bloody Mary’s and Milkshakes [GACK!] My friends came up with better ideas, vodka bacon on the rocks, bacon carbonara sauce, etc. I’m sure more will come. I added Chocolate bacon truffles because after trying bacon dipped in chocolate I can see why people like the combo.

Torani has a few suggestions of it’s own in the recipe section such as a Bacon Bourbon Sour, Bacon Alexander, Canadian Bacon and Bacon Margarita. These are all drinks and you can see the whole list by going to their recipes section and running a search for all recipes using bacon syrup.

Something I thought of afterwards was that there is no bacon involved in the production of this just like with Bacon Salt [which incidentally is one of my favorite things to add to french fries or popcorn], so that means that it’s kosher and vegan friendly as well as being fat free.

Everything bacon seems to be the new thing with Baconnaise, Bacon Pop, Bacon Lip Balm. Hell, I’ve even heard that there making a bacon flavored personal lubricant. So expect to see more and more of this sort of thing because as almost everyone will agree, who doesn’t like bacon?

If I haven’t given you enough on bacon then you might want to read this blog.

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Birria de Chivo

Since I’ve been talking about burritos it seems only fitting to continue on with Mexican food for another day and I thought what better to talk about than a sorely missed restaurant in Mission La Rondalla and their specialty dish, Birria de Chivo.

For those who don’t speak Spanish, Birria de Chivo is goat stew [sometimes complete with goat head]. Me being allergic to lamb I decided it would be fitting for me to give it a go one day. I had never eaten goat before so this would be a new experience. I didn’t realize how popular a dish this was until the day after when I was talking with some of my Mexican friends at work who laughed at me for just ordering it and not adding in, lean and clean.

When my bowl arrived it had an over powering smell of well, goat. The other Hispanics at the restaurant looked at me with a bit of surprise. I guess they didn’t expect a white person to ever order it. On my first bite I tasted a bit of the peppers and well, goat. Everything about this dish was goat. I felt like I was in a barnyard, but it had a very hearty rustic feel down to the bones in the stew. The part that caught me off guard was the fat and gristle in the stew. After eating about half the dish and having the rest boxed up to take home and after talking to my friend José the next day I learned what lean and clean meant. No bones, no fat, no gristle. I never thought while eating this where do they buy goat meat in San Francisco? I’ve been to many of the Mexican carnecerias in the city and I’ve never seen Chivo in the meat cases. Sometimes it’s better not to ask questions.

Sadly, La Rondalla went out of business sometime ago and for that I’m sad because it was the first place after a long night out partying that I had my first vegetarian burrito thanks to the girl I was dating at the time. I don’t know of any other places in the city that sell Birria de Chivo, but at least I know that if I find one an order it again I’ll remember to add lean and clean to the order. I was glad I stepped a little outside my comfort zone for a day.