The Trans-Continental Burrito Express

Following yesterday’s review of El Burrito Express I found this article about a supposed trans-continental burrito shipment tunnel that would deliver a California style burrito to those in Weehauken, NJ in 42 minutes. I had to share this.

Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click “deliver” on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss.

The story begins in any of the three dozen taquerias supplying the Bay Area Feeder Network, an expansive spiderweb of tubes running through San Francisco’s Mission district as far south as the “Burrito Bordeaux” region of Palo Alto and Mountain View. Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city.

Once in the tubes, it’s a quick dash for the burritos across San Francisco Bay. Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey.

Ever since Isaac Newton first described the laws of gravity in 1687, scientists have known that the quickest route between two points is along a straight line through the Earth’s interior. Through the magic of gravity, any object dropped into such a “chord tunnel” at one end will emerge exactly 42 minutes later at the other end, no matter the distance. But for hundreds of years, the technical challenges of building such a tunnel were so daunting that it remained a theoretical curiosity. Only at the start of the 20th century did the idea become technically feasible, and to this day the tunnel linking the East Bay with New Jersey remains the only structure of its kind in the world.

From the outside, the Alameda facility looks like any other industrial building. Behind a chain link razor wire fence sits a windowless white hangar some three stories tall, surrounded by a strip of green lawn. If you could see underground, however, you’d see that the building sits at the center of a converging nexus of burrito pipes. High pressure pneumatic tubes from all over the Bay Area emerge in the center of the facility, spilling silvery burritos onto a high-speed sorting line. The metal-jacketed burritos look like oversize bullets, and the conveyor belts that move them through the facility resemble giant belts of delicious ammunition. Within a few seconds of arrival the burritos have been bar coded, checked for balance and round on a precision lathe, and then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The mouth of the tunnel is a small concrete arch in the side of a nearby hill, about as glamorous as an abandoned railway tunnel. Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away! To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps. At the tunnel’s deepest point the burritos will be traveling nearly two kilometers a second – even the faintest whiff of air would quickly drag them to a stop.

The launch tube for the burritos lies just under the tunnel mouth and looks like what it is: an enormous gun. Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion as they plunge into the lithosphere.

No one who built the Alameda-Weehawken tunnel had quite this future in mind for it. The tunnel had its origins in the early 1900’s as an ambitious project for speeding mail delivery between New York City and the booming Pacific port of San Francisco. The telegraph and railroad had linked the city to the East Coast, but transferring documents, currency, securities and diplomatic correspondence across the country was still a slow affair fraught with danger. In 1911, the celebrated British civil engineer Basil Mott approached the plutocrat Andrew W. Mellon with an audacious plan to build a straight-line tunnel 2500 miles long connecting New York City with San Francisco, allowing packages to be sent between the two cities using only compressed air and gravity. The tunnel would resemble the pneumatic tube systems that had served New York City and Paris so well for mail delivery, but on an incomparably vaster scale. Cylinders containing up to sixteen pounds of mail would be able to make the continental transit in less than an hour.

Construction on the tunnel began in 1913, and it quickly grew into the largest public works project in the young nation’s history. Not until the Eisenhower Interstate system in the 1950’s would there be a bigger or more costly civil engineering project. Drilling the tunnel required over 19 years of continuous effort by thousands of miners, often working in conditions of intolerable confinement and heat. Over 22 million tons of rock had to be removed, much of it from unprecedented depths, all while keeping the tunnel perfectly straight over thousands of miles. Just keeping the tunnels cool required more water each day than flows over Niagara Falls.

The tunnel opened to great fanfare in 1933, with a congratulatory message in Morse Code flashed by powerful searchlight from the San Francisco end to waiting dignitaries on the New Jersey side. It was already obsolete. The first regular mail shipments sent from San Francisco in the spring of 1934 had to compete with the sophisticated air mail system that had grown up during the tunnel’s long construction. To make matters worse, breakdowns in the tunnel were frequent, especially in the central “hot zone” where temperatures could exceed 900 degrees Centigrade. Mail would frequently arrive singed or deformed from the intense heat and pressure. While they could never beat the speed of the tunnel, airplanes could deliver documents at far lower price and risk in just a few dozen hours more. In 1936, at the height of the Depression, the tunnel ceased operation less than three years after it had opened.

In the years to come all kinds of schemes would be floated for how to put the tunnel to use. For a brief time after Pearl Harbor there was serious thought given to using it as an enormous gun barrel that could fire artillery shells across the Pacific at Japan (the risk to life in San Francisco if a charge went off prematurely was deemed too great). In the early days of the Cold War, both ends of the tunnel, along with the Chicago and Cedar Rapids access shafts, were considered as enormous fallout shelters. The low point in the tunnel’s fortunes came with a 1971 proposal (mercifully never enacted) to use the Weehawken side of the tunnel as the world’s deepest garbage chute. On the San Francisco end, meanwhile, squatters from the thriving San Francisco countercultural scene had begun using the tunnel as an easy place to take shelter.

By the early 1970’s the tunnel was a derelict, a mostly forgotten relic of a more adventurous time. The turning point came when Robert Cavanaugh, a New York financier with a serious taste for Mexican food, happened to come across a mention of the tunnel in a zoning proposal. The globetrotting Cavanaugh was a fanatic of the recently-invented Mission burrito but bemoaned being unable to get it anywhere outside of San Francisco. Examining blueprints of the defunct mail tunnel on a flight home to New York, Cavanaugh became intrigued by the coincidence in size between a foil-wrapped burrito and the diameter of the old transcontinental mail tubes. By the time the plane landed, he had come up with an audacious plan.

Cavanaugh realized that the intense heat of the transit that had so beleaguered mail service would actually work to his advantage in a burrito tunnel. The burritos could be stored frozen on the Western end and arrive fully heated through in New Jersey. Furthermore, advances in electrical engineering meant that containers would no longer have to be propelled by compressed gas. The burritos already came conveniently wrapped in aluminum foil – it would be trivial to accelerate them with powerful magnets.

Encouraged by his back-of-the-envelope calculations, Cavanaugh formed a consortium and, in a stroke of genius, convinced the Carter Administration to subsidize the tunnel’s operation in exchange for access to the geothermal heat it would produce. Convincing skeptical businessmen to buy into the plan proved more of a challenge – it took six months to persuade suspicious taqueria owners to switch to a salsa with lower magnetic permittivity. Finally, in July of 1979, all the pieces were in place. After a successful July 2 dry run with a sawdust mock burrito, the tunnel ceremoniously opened on Independence Day. The inaugural burrito (carnitas with lettuce, salsa and avocado, no beans) was loaded into the breech at the Alameda terminus at 10:05 AM and was served to a beaming Cavanaugh, Vice President Walter Mondale and New York mayor Ed Koch in Weehawken 64 minutes later. Two hundred burritos followed that same day; by the end of the decade the tunnel would be delivering over two thousand burritos an hour.

In the early days of the burrito tunnel workers on the Alameda side would sometimes use it to send small packages or letters, inking the code words sin carne on the wrapper to alert those on the other end that the ’burrito’ required special handling. This changed after September 11, when strict security measures went into force. Homeland Security officials have been quick to recognize the unique threat of a tunnel that could give terrorists unimpeded access to the entire underside of the nation. They’ve also been alert to the danger a “dirty burrito” could pose if it made it into the New York food supply. Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff would not comment on specific measures his department has taken to protect the tunnel, but he said his office does take the potential threat very seriously. “We’ve known since the first World Trade Center bombing that New York is a top target. We’re taking appropriate measures to make sure the tunnel and the burritos that pass through it remain safe and secure.”

The greatest risks to the tunnel, however, are likely to come from Mother Nature herself. During the 1989 Loma Prieta quake the tube misaligned by over four inches, requiring extensive redrilling, and experts estimate that an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater on the Hayward Fault could put it out of commission for months. An ambitious expansion plan to begin next year will address some of the seismic hazards while also widening it enough to allow super burritos to make the transit for the first time ever.

Burritos speeding through the tunnel fight a constant battle against friction. At the start and end of their journey they hover in a powerful magnetic field, seldom touching the sides of the tunnel. Past the Colorado border, however, the temperature of the surrounding rock exceeds the Curie point of iron and the burritos must slide on their bellies in their nearly frictionless Teflon sleeve, kept from charring by pork fat that slowly seeps out of the burritos as they thaw. By the time the burritos reach Cedar Rapids (traveling well over a mile a second) they are heated through, and anyone who managed to penetrate into the tunnel through the Cleveland access shafts would find them ready to eat.

Remarkably, people do descend into even the deepest sections of the tunnel, though with a far more serious goal in mind than lunch. Geologists from around the globe have been flocking to the tunnel for five decades. “People in our profession get excited about new road cuts,” says Adam Rifkin, Dean of the Geology Department at the University of Nebraska. “You can imagine what it’s been like for us to explore the world’s deepest tunnel.” Indeed, the Alameda tunnel is the only place in the world where scientists can directly study the aesthenosphere, the boundary layer separating the earth’s crust from the hot mantle. The trip down through the access shafts is harrowing – the descent takes the better part of a day, and temperatures can rise to nearly a thousand degrees Centigrade. Most of the work at the depth of the tunnel is done by robots, but geologists must occasionally descend in person to make repairs or to do work that is too difficult to automate. “It’s a lot like standing in an oven,” Rifkin says. “At the lowest point we’re nearly as far from the surface as the Space Shuttle, and in many ways it’s a less forgiving environment.” Still, he adds, “I wouldn’t give it up for the world. This is probably one of the dullest places, geologically speaking, in the whole country. Under our feet are five miles of silt from the Rockies before you even get to the first rock. Thanks to the tunnel, though, we can punch right through that. It’s like a time machine through the planet’s history.”

“Are you ever tempted to sneak a burrito while down there?” I ask Dr. Rifkin, and he laughs. “At the speed those things are going it would probably take your hand off. But really for us this is serious business – we’re fine not having access to great Mexican food as long as we can do the geology. The tunnel has been an absolute godsend.”

Not everyone is as delighted with the tunnel as the geologists. Old-time San Franciscans will be quick to point out that the comestibles in the tunnel flow strictly one way. “In the old days you’d go to a place like Pancho Villa and get yourself a steak burrito in five minutes, maybe ten if it was near lunchtime,” says lifelong Mission resident Howard Washington. “Now the line is out the door even in the morning. And some of those places down in the South Bay won’t even take customers anymore. If you want a burrito in the daytime you have to get it first thing, or else you go to one of the places that isn’t hooked up to the tunnel.”

Taqueria owners have tried hard to cope with the additional demand, but even they admit that it can get hectic. “The New York metro area has fifteen million people,” explains Javier Corrientes, manager of Cancun Burrito on Valencia Street. “San Francisco is barely a tenth of that size. You got all those people out drinking on a Friday night who want a burrito at ten o’clock, just when the dinner rush is starting here, there’s no way we can keep up.” The secret, he says, is to order tacos. “It’s the same fillings, except it’s quicker to put together and you can’t put it through the tunnel.”

The raw economics of the burrito trade suggest San Franciscans won’t be getting quicker service any time soon. Even before tolls and taxes, a burrito sold in New York brings in ten times the profit of one sold over the counter. John Laplace chairs the Northern California Burrito and Burro Council, an industry group representing Bay Area taquerias. “The tunnel is an incredible economic engine for the region,” he says. “Every burrito that goes through the tunnel represents over two dollars in direct tax revenue and over four dollars in indirect revenue through job creation, research stimulus and geothermal energy. I can understand why people get frustrated, but that tunnel has given us far more than it’s taken.”

Of course, it would be best if the tunnel could give back in a more tangible way. Over the years there have been numerous attempts to send New York staples in the reverse direction – operators have tried sending knishes, bagels, pickles and even Brooklyn-style pizza. None have proven as resilient as the humble burrito, and in the end the two cities have bowed to the inevitable. Both tunnel tubes now carry only burritos.

By the time they reach Cleveland the burritos are fully heated through and traveling uphill at about twice the speed of sound. A series of induction coils spaced through central Pennsylvania repeats the magnetic process in reverse, draining momentum from the burritos and turning it into electrical power (though Weehawken residents still recall the great blackout of 2002, when computers running the braking coils shut down and for four hours burritos traced graceful arcs into the East River, glowing like faint red sparks in the night).

At the tunnel exit, a final puff of air slows the burritos to a stop and they are placed in insulated bags. These are whisked to a fleet of waiting trucks, which pass through the Holland Tunnel (this time at a more stately thirty-five miles per hour) and then onward to restaurants and cafeterias throughout the five boroughs.

Is it worth it? Enrique Alnazar, burrito sommelier for Nobu Fifty-Seven, smiles at the very question. The restaurant recently installed a dedicated high-speed pneumatic line to the Weehawken facility, shortening the arrival time for its prize Los Charros burritos from just over two hours to under fifty minutes. Alnazar won’t say how much the new line cost (estimates run into the millions of dollars), but he insists it was worth every penny. “We’ve had people come in and order a magnum of 1978 Château Margaux on the strength of our burritos. They know that we’re phoning in their order to Mountain View the moment they walk in the door, and they know we’ve done everything in our power to keep them from waiting. A lot of restaurants are happy racking up a few days’ supply in the burrito cellar, but that’s not the same as getting a fresh burrito straight from the tunnel – you can taste the difference. The only way to get a fresher burrito than at Nobu is to fly to California, and our customers appreciate that.”

The success of the burrito tunnel has encouraged no end of imitators – whether the Reagan-era attempt to construct an intracoastal barbeque pipeline, the perennial political deadlock over allowing tomatoes in the Northeastern Chowder Viaduct, or the recent fiasco of high-speed BagelRail. But as Chairman Laplace argues, it’s unlikely such a project could succeed anywhere else. “We really have a unique situation here – a population of fifteen million people without access to high-quality Mexican food. There’s no place else in the country like it, and that makes the economics of a transport tunnel from the country’s finest burrito region workable. On top of this you have the burrito itself, which is a really marvelous food — resilient to overheating, isotropic, compact, able to tolerate high G forces.” Here Laplace smiles. “And delicious. Who would want to live in a New York City without it?”

The following is from idlewords.com. I cannot verify the authenticity of this article, nor who the author was, but it was just so damn funny I had to repost it.

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Tommy’s Restaurant: Tommy has Died

As you probably know from my writings I have a thing for Mexican food. There was a place I used to like to frequent that was an old school Mexican restaurant and it  wasn’t in the Mission District, it was in the Richmond District. It was Tommy’s. A working man’s type of place where the food was good and the cocktails would knock you on your ass. I suppose it was because they were not too far from Trader Sam’s where professional’s go to drink.

Tommy Bermejo who started the place in 1965 has died and it’s a sad day in Tequila history. While Tommy’s didn’t invent the Margarita, they sure perfected it. In margarita history there are several people making the claim to being the inventor and I think it was a guy who owned a joint called Tommy’s Place that got the origination transferred over to Tommy’s.

Tommy’s was all about tequila. They had more types on their wall than you could probably find in one place in Mexico. They serve only 100% agave tequila, that means no mixing “neutral spirits” with it. This is the real Mexico hombre. Their website has a list of the over 100 tequila’s they have on hand from blanco, to reposado to añejo to extra añejo. They even have a page to educate you on the finer points of tequila intake. I always hated tequila until I got a chance to try an añejo which is aged like a fine brandy. You don’t make tequila jello shots with this or margaritas. These are fine sipping tequilas that you enjoy slowly.

Tommy and his wife Elmy where from the Yucatan and the food they served showed that. Sure, they had the guacamole and nachos or “white people mexican food” as I call it, but they had other dishes that were pure Yucatan such as the camarones al mojo de ajo and the pork culetas, but they had kind of California-ized over the years mixing in some of the more Americanized tastes in Mexican food. Still, it was a great place to eat and it was inexpensive to eat there. Always good when you dropping a deuce on some fine aged blue agave.

I never got to meet Tommy himself, or if I did I never knew it was him, but I’m glad to see that the place will live on after him. I think this weekend will be a good day to drop in and have a few shots of  Alcatraz Añejo. Diga a dios que dije hola, Tommy!

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Juanita Musson: Queen of the “Earmuffs”

The what?!?! Queen of the “Earmuffs“? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Well, today it turns out San Francisco has lost another one of it’s colorful characters. Following in the footsteps of Henry Africa, Juanita Musson passed away a few days ago. I had never heard of her before, but when I read some of the comments about her I wish I would have. She ran quite a few restaurants around the Bay Area, but was best known for Juanita’s Galley in Sausalito. I think that she had several restaurants around the Bay Area with the same name, but she made her name closer to San Francisco.

She was called, the Drinking Man’s Julia Child and that’s what caught my attention. She was known as a brawler, a women would could make a sailor blush with her foul mouth before she drank him under the table. She ran restaurants that in addition to the diners there would be dogs, cats, owls, monkeys, goats and pigs that would walk around her restaurants. There were no to go bags at her places. If you didn’t finish your huge portion you had to bring your own bag to bring it home in or feed the rest to the animals that were running around her place.

Juanita was a big woman. She weighed in at around 300 lbs and her huge endowment is where the earmuff joke comes from. She apparently had a penchant for sneaking up on customers, male of course, and grabbing her large pendulous breasts [she was braless before it was chic] and slapping them on either sides of men’s heads. If Emperor Norton was born a bit later these too would have been a hot item.

Juanita was a bit of a drunk, but not like the staggering through the Tenderloin kind of drunk. She was a fun drunk it sounds like. In Sonoma where she died the Sonoma News had the following to say:

Famous for her enormous slabs of prime rib, one order of a Juanita meal could typically feed a table. But diners quickly learned that if you didn’t clean your plate you couldn’t take it home, although you could slip some food unnoticed into a purse or pass a piece of excess beef to the dog that often wandered through the dining room.

Juanita kept a bedroom just off the lobby of the rundown hotel and arriving guests frequently found her fast asleep, her sizeable bulk covered in a flowing muumuu, her door open to the passing parade, her bed surrounded by an enormous collection of dolls.

If you knew Juanita and tried to sneak past her open bedroom door, she invariably sensed your presence and would call out in a shrill, commanding voice, “Hey honey, come in here NOW, and give Juanita a HUG!”

She was fearlessly and completely herself, there was no filter on her mouth or her emotions and she didn’t recognize a variety of conventional boundaries. Her “ear muff” prank consisted of sneaking up behind an unsuspecting diner and swinging each muumuu-wrapped breast up against the victim’s ears. Then she would cackle loudly and leave.

Famous Dallas Cowboys defensive end Ed “Too Tall” Jones got an earmuff and so, almost, did this writer’s 75-year-old father.

I guess getting an earmuff from Juanita was kind of like a badge of honor for some. Keep in mind that this hard living foul mouthed restauranteur who would have chewed up Anthony Bourdain and spit him out lived to the ripe old age of 87. I bet she smoked too. 😉

San Francisco Foodies: Gourmands

Well, finally! I get to talk about food again. I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about people labeling San Franciscans who like food with the term which I assume is derogatory, “foodies” or more specific, “San Francisco Foodies”. I say derogatory because the word “smug” usually comes up in most cases.

Yes, we’re smug, we know it all and we could fix the world if you’d just let us, but let’s put that aside for a moment. Let’s look at the word foodie and how it applies to San Francisco. Originally coined in 1981 by Paul Levy and Ann Barr and used as the title of their 1984 book, The Official Foodie Handbook. It described a person who was not a gourmet who had a very sensitive palate that could discern the difference between a 1978 Chateu la fit Rothchild and and 1979 Chateau la fit Rothchild.  Anyone who comments on my possible misspelling is not a gourmet, nor smug, but a snob who can’t find anything else to pick apart to discredit me.

Foodies are people who have a love of food that tastes good and are interested in why it tastes good so that they could possibly make it themselves. There was a term prior to this that actually fits San Francisco foodies much better. That term is Gourmand. They don’t necessarily have the refined palate of a gourmet, but they can at least tell the difference between a Cabernet and a Merlot and they love food whether it is a succulent slice of prime rib from the House of Prime Rib to a bronco burrito from El Burrito Express. I would say Gourmand is a much more fitting word than foodie. First off, while being a modern word, foodie is almost 30 years old and well, sounds so 80’s even though I don’t remember anyone using the word here in the 80’s. Gourmand in and of itself is a word that has some class behind it, probably because it’s a smug French word and we being the smug people we are should be able to identify with it more.

In a recent story I read in a place I can’t remember, but probably sfgate.com, they mentioned that New York has the most diverse cuisine options to eat followed by San Francisco then followed by, well who cares, I’m trying to focus on San Francisco here. We are the second food Mecca of the US with the flavors of many countries around the world at our finger tips. Yes, we have lots of high brow restaurants in this city, but the people who eat there are perfectly happy walking up to a taco truck or one of the new versions that don’t serve tacos, but some form of portable cuisine that’s fast and easy to get and tastes good when you’re sitting on the curb consuming it.

There is a guy in the Mission who cooks up crepes from a side walk stand that moves around daily and he announces where he will be on Twitter. We have trucks that drive around the city cooking up BBQ, Korean food, even curry dishes. Highbrow? Nope. Good food? You bet.

Anthony Bourdain, a former chef who worked in gourmet restaurants travels around the world eating what he calls good food, well….I beg to disagree. He did a show in San Francisco and ended up eating a burger at Red’s Java House. There are some people that love the place, but I had a burger there once and I’ve done better with frozen burgers from Costco. A good burger shouldn’t be served with processed american cheese in this city. Anthony didn’t focus on any of the great mobile food purveyors in the city, but he did at least start with the House of Prime Rib. Anthony I would call more of a foodie than a gourmand. He’s trying to identify with the normal person who likes food, but he tends to choose places that don’t serve very good food when he steps down to the level of the average person and he basically eats shit.

San Francisco foodies [gourmands] can usually cook for themselves and enjoy cooking. There is nothing better for me than a day in the 60’s which causes me to pull out the BBQ. I try all sorts of different marinades and side dishes and in the event of a major disaster I know that my family will be well fed. I know how to turn a cheap piece of meat into a 5 star dish because that’s what you need to know in this economy. We know that you don’t have to pay $300 for a meal for two in San Francisco and sometimes the better meals you can get for under $15 for two people.

We also like to try new foods that are outside our comfort zone such as the fruit cherimoya. It really does have a taste like bubble-gum and pineapple but with all those seeds you have to be careful not to break a tooth. I have indeed stooped to the level of what some people would call third world countries and through some of my hispanic friends have been able to try chapulines over several shots of tequila. It takes about five shots of tequila for the average caucasian to even think of popping a deep fried grasshopper in their mouth, but I admit, they’re tasty. I’ve eaten dim sum that I have no idea what was in it, but it sure did taste good. I should probably learn more Cantonese or Mandarin to better converse with the vendors to know what I’m putting in my mouth, but if it looks good I’ll try it.

So for now, I’d say we should move away from the term foodie in favor of gourmand because after all we are San Francisco and we’re smug. Get over it.

Valentine’s Day: San Francisco

I am lucky that my wife never even looks at this site and couldn’t even tell me what color it is if her life depended on it, so I’ll share this with you instead.

I never liked Valentine’s Day very much because I always felt guys are on the short end of the stick. It’s all about what you’re buying for your girlfriend/wife. I suppose it’s slightly different in the gay community, but not being gay I don’t know for sure.

I never get even a card on Valentine’s day, but I’m usually expected to “put out” something along the lines of chocolate and sweets or jewelry. Well, I’m lucky. I didn’t marry that kind of girl. When we go out to dinner we don’t like to sit and languish for hours and hours. She’s a simple girl and that’s why she’s put up with me for over 14 years.

[mappress mapid=”33″]So I’m going to do something different today. Today I’m going to take my wife to a special place on Union Street called American Cupcake for lunch. This is a place that isn’t just a bakery shop, but more of a café that specializes in cupcakes. They’ve done so well that they’ve been featured on the Food Network or the Cooking Channel [I can’t keep the two straight anymore]. They have lots to offer outside of their sweet menu which is their cupcakes. They also offer a savory menu which is what you’ll want to get for lunch or dinner unless you like to eat cupcakes for those two meals.

They also have a PBJ assortment to offer as well as beer and wine based cocktails. All of their goodies are organic and sustainably farmed so the eco-geek in you will be kept very happy. I suggest you check them out and see what you think.

Super Bowl Madness @ the Grocery Store

Beer, Booze, Beef and Chips. That’s pretty much what I found missing yesterday at my local Safeway grocery store. Now I don’t know why we would have thought it would better to go during the beginning of the Superbowl pre-game show, but I’ve now learned why the grocery stores are so crowded on Super Bowl Sundays. The shoppers are of three types of people.

  1. The die-hard Super Bowl fan: They’re up and out early in the morning to get all the supplies for the day’s festivities early so they can go home relax and probably be drunk and passed out  into the first half hour of the game.
  2. The “intellectually challenged” Super Bowl fan: THey probably figure they can rush out right before the game because no one will be there because they’re all home watching the game or maybe they forgot something or just wanted their fried chicken hot out of the fryer.
  3. The “I don’t care about the Super Bowl” types: I have to admit, I fall into this group except when the niners are playing it. I could give a rat’s ass who wins because if it ain’t going to be us then it doesn’t matter. Unfortunately all of us think  that everyone will be watching the game so they decide to go shopping at the same time as the #2’s.

Well, it was packed and the aisles of alcohol, chips and meat looked like they had been picked over like some of the photo’s I’ve seen of back east during the blizzard. Empty shelves everywhere and the people were lined up down the aisles. People were complaining about all the people there yet these were the people with a six pack of beer in their hand or a loaf of bread. If you didn’t like all the people did you really need to go shopping on one of the worst days to go grocery shopping? If you need a six pack of beer why not walk down the street to the liquor store and pick it up and pay an extra buck for the convenience?

Well that wasn’t the worst of it. My wife when to pick up a box of rice and beans only find it all spilled out of the back of the box through a hole that had been chewed there. She grabbed another than hadn’t had been rat-shackled and continued shopping. Then as we’re standing in line my wife made a comment to the guy standing behind her. I didn’t know what they were talking about at first, but then realized that along with his groceries he had brought up a bag of hot dog buns that had cleared suffered from rat infestation.

Great, San Francisco has rat infested grocery stores?!?!? Well I guess so since I’ve begun to notice that Safeway stores [who are based in the Bay Area where they started] have started to have a rat trap need their elevator entrances [the rats take the elevator?] on the roofs or their front doors. Now there are sometimes two or three rat traps there. I don’t see them at any other grocery store I’ve been to in San Francisco, only Safeway. I dropped the two words “Safeway” and “Rats” into google and look what it gave me back. Not exactly giving me much reason to go back to shop there. The cashier even admitted to man with the rat chewed bag that they had been having a hard problem with the rat infestations. I really felt like telling her that it wasn’t just her, but every Safeway in the city that you’ll find rat traps outside, but she’s nice and knows me so I’d rather say it to her in a place not as open and public since saying something like, “Your Safeway is infested with rats” in a crowded Safeway may not be good for business and I wouldn’t want to get trampled by everyone running out the door.

This is a sign though that the Board of Health needs to be notified. I know I’ve got a lot of readers in San Francisco so I’m hoping at least one of the 5000+ readers in SF works for the Board of Health or hopefully one of the 50,000+ readers in California works for the state Board of Health and give someone a kick int he butt. When I purchase food I want to be non-rat involved. I know there’s all these weird government guidelines about how many rodent hairs can be allowed into certain food produces, but still when you’ve got obvious evidence a rat problem that you and the guy behind you in line discovered, more people are going to find out about it.

The “It’s-It”: A San Francisco Tradition

Last night I was thinking about things that truly stand out as a San Francisco tradition and one thing came to mind, the It’s It. If you grew up in San Francisco you know this lovely treat of vanilla ice cream smashed between two oatmeal cookies and dipped in dark chocolate. It gave you everything when you had a craving for sweets.The It’s It has changed a bit over the years adding mint, cappucino and chocolate ice cream to replace the original vanilla as well as adding new products to riff on the original, but if you want the original you have get it with vanilla ice cream.

While the product was started by George Whitney, it finally has passed to Shamieh brothers who moved the factory to Burlingame, so while it is still very closely associated with San Francisco, it unfortunately, ain’t made here anymore, but at least it’s made about 20 minutes away from San Francisco so that’s better than finding out that they’re made in China now.

I went to their web site to find out more about the creation of this wonderful little tidbit that was a part of every San Franciscan child’s heart:

In 1928, George Whitney began what is now a San Francisco tradition. He placed a scoop of vanilla ice cream between two large old-fashioned oatmeal cookies and then dipped the sandwich into dark chocolate. On that very day, the It’s It Ice Cream Sandwich was born. George Whitney sold the It’s It exclusively in San Francisco’s Playland-at-the-Beach for over four decades.

Many generations have savored the It’s It. Throughout the years, the company has gone through many changes yet the product remains the same as it did in 1928. Maybe that’s why It’s It was named “The official food of San Francisco.”

When Playland was demolished in the early 1970’s, the It’s It ceased to exist. Times were grim. San Franciscans had one thing in common; they all missed their It’s It. Then, in 1974, It’s It was reborn. This time It’s It were hand made in a small shop in San Francisco and were sold mainly to mom and pop stores. When the shop became too small to quench San Francisco’s appetite for the It’s It, the company relocated into a larger facility in 1978, relocation just minutes away from the San Francisco Airport.

In the 1980’s, the demand for It’s It spread outside of the Bay Area and throughout California. Soon after, It’s It were distributed and were available in over 15 states. In the early 1990’s, It’s It Ice Cream Co. expanded nearly two-fold when it moved into a new office and dry goods warehouse across the street from its manufacturing facility.

I remember the trips my Mom and I would make down to Playland at the beach for It’s Its, but that was as close to Playland I ever got to go because according to her the place was filled with nothing but hoodlums. I did miss it a bit when Playland closed, but that was only a couple of years after it’s closing day which was Labor Day weekend 1972, the only time I actually got to go to Playland. Just a little side note, George Whitney who started the It’s It was the general manager of Playland from 1926 until his death in 1958.

While they are no longer hand dipped because that would be ridiculous for a company that now has to turn out about a million of these things a week to all the places outside of San Francisco, they still pretty much taste the same as they did. Their web site has a video tour of their factory. I think George Whitney would be proud to see he’s left something behind that’s only gotten bigger over the years.

Cambozola: The heroin of cheeses

It was one of those days. We had some friends coming over and we wanted to have some food available because we always like to eat. I ran out to Andronico’s which is like the food porn of supermarkets to get some cheese and there sitting in front of me was a huge collection of wedges of cambozola cheese. It had been awhile since I had it and I remembered how much I liked it so I grabbed a wedge and went on my way to get some prosciutto di parma and get back home.

Well when our friends came over they decided that they wanted to go out to eat. I’m thinking we’ve got cambozola AND prosciutto di parma in the house [along with a lot of other foods, but still] why go out? Well it turns out we did venture out to the Tennessee Grill and had huge meals that left us feeling like a light dinner sounded best.

As I sat down at the table that night my wife cobbled together some of the food we were going to eat for lunch. She handed me a some toasted bread and I automatically grabbed the cambozola and spread it on to the nice warm toast and noticed it start to slowly melt into the bread as I took a bit.

Oh God. I forgot just how good this tasted, but like the title says, it’s the “heroin of cheeses”. You just can’t stop and you keep going back for more and more. I was cutting up little pieces and dropping them on my salads, crackers, bread. I think I brushed my teeth with it one morning. It is just that good a cheese. I had become obsessed so I went to look up some information on my renewed addiction via Wikipedia:

It was patented and industrially produced for the world market by large German company Champignon in the 1970s. The cheese was invented circa 1900 and is still produced by Champignon. In English-speaking countries, cambozola is often marketed as blue brie.

It is made from the same blue Penicillium roqueforti mold used to make Gorgonzola, Roquefort, and StiltonCream is added to the milk, giving Cambozola a rich consistency. Therind of the cheese is similar to the Camembert rind. Cambozola is considerably milder than Gorgonzola. It features a smooth, creamy texture with a subdued blue flavor.

The cheese’s name appears to be a portmanteau of Camembert and Gorgonzola, given that its flavor profile combines the moist, rich creaminess of Camembert with the sharpness of blue Gorgonzola. It also refers to the Roman name Cambodunum of the city Kempten, where Champignon is located.

OK, I knew it wasn’t make in the Bay Area, but this German cheese with an Italian sounding name made by a company with a French name deserves at least some shrine in whatever town Champignon is in. I started searching for more info on my new love and found that people are putting this on everything now. Hamburgers with cambozola, pizza with cambozola, cambozola cheese pastries. It’s everywhere. It’s got a somewhat strong, but smooth taste, but none of that stinky cheese smell. It’s also a semi-soft cheese so spreading it isn’t too difficult. I just finished a snack of cambozola on toast with some barnier olives from Andronico’s and the tastes went well together. It didn’t even clash with the dark chocolate I had to finish my meal. Then I found out that Michael Chiarello of NapaStyle and Food Network fame has made a sauce with cambozola that he sells through NapaStyle and he even gives a recipe for asparagus with cambozola sauce on the Food Network website. OK, I know what I’m making for dinner tonight.

There is a downside to this wonderful cheese though…it’s not cheap. A pound will run you between $15-$20 depending where you get it. We used to find the cheapest at costco, but we don’t go there as often as we rarely need a palette full of anything anymore. If you can keep the addiction in check though it is a great cheese to try. It’s pretty easy to find in San Francisco as most grocery stores have it and it seems to be made only by Champignon so you don’t have to wonder whether you’re getting the best brand or not.




The House of Shields Returns!

Way back when [1908 to be exact] the House of Shields opened its doors to customers. It was a place I last got to visit sometime in the late 80’s early 90’s. It had a feel to it like a Bogart movie. Over the years it retained some of the Victorian dusty feel with a bit of an art deco upgrade from the 20’s.

The food was old school. I remember my meal there. Pork tenderloin medallions with mashed potatoes and gravy and some sort of sauted vegetable that was probably there more for decoration than eating. When was the last time you saw that on the menu. I also remember our waiter, “Vinny” in his tuxedoed waiter’s uniform suggested them. He was right. They were great and I think that might have set me off on my now well developed love of pork.

House of Shields was classic San Francisco, Herb Caen and Charles McCabe used to write about it frequently in their columns, yet when it closed it didn’t look closed. It looked more like, “we aren’t open yet.” I haven’t been back since it opened in mid-December, but I think I might make a trip back for old times sake. While I hear a lot about their chef in the press I don’t see any menu on their website and it seems they’re mostly focused on the bar which has now been taken over by retro hipsters ordering appletini’s instead of the old days of, “Gimme something big and strong”  which meant a double scotch, no ice. You didn’t call out a brand name, you didn’t even need to call out what kind of liquor your were ordering.

During prohibition what is now their private dinning room served as a speakeasy that dinner guests could sneak off to for “something big and strong” in between bites of their meal. I have a sneaking suspicion that while the House of Shields is back in operation and the inside has been restored, the new hipster crowd might just kill off that old Bogart movie feel, but you never know.

I noticed that they feature live music on weekends and the bands get to keep 90% of the $5 cover charge at the door. Not too shabby for musicians and definitely not like the pay to play of the 80’s for bands.[mappress mapid=”8″]

Why you gotta love San Francisco

There are a lot of reasons to love San Francisco, but I think one of the biggest is the food you can get here. You can travel around the world’s cuisines without leaving this city squeezed into a 7 mile by 7 mile peninsula. An Austrian friend of mine, Karin on her first trip to San Francisco gave me a wicked little smile when I said you can find any kind of food here. “I will offer you a challenge then.” OK, that was a rather Germanic way of putting it, but even though she was born and raised in Austria she’s of Syrian decent.

“Can you get authentic Syrian food?” I stopped for a second. What the hell exactly is Syrian food? I still don’t know for sure, but I imagine it must involve slow cooked tagines of animal parts served in a spicy sauce. Time to google. Yep, we have seven Syrian restaurants in San Francisco. We never got to try one to see how authentic they were, but even so you can still find any kind of food you want here. We of course have the fresh seafood down at the wharf. House of Prime Rib offers up some wonderous slabs of beef, but those are things you expect to find. The Italian food in North Beach is still great and has moved outside of North Beach to possibly permeate the city. Steak houses are a dime a dozen around here. Where you have to go to find some odder, uncommon foods is the local neighborhoods. Want a little tongue with your burrito? Head to the Mission. Chinese food that the squeamish don’t want to ask what’s in the broth of the soup. Head to Chinatown. Middle eastern and Indian food is everywhere from Yumma’s and Sunrise deli in the Sunset District to Saha Arabic Fusion and Shalimar downtown or Kan Zaman in the Haight. We even have a pizza place that rumor has it, imports its water from New York and brought it’s pizza oven from there as well.

In the picture that goes along with this article is one I took that yesterday at a local grocery store in the Sunset District. This is what I expect to see in a grocery store in the Mission District, not the Sunset. As a matter of fact they had almost an entire aisle dedicated to Hispanic ingredients right down to the candles with Jesus and Saint Mary on them.

I can get most countries cuisines without even leaving the Sunset district, although German and French food is getting harder to find, but there’s always Ethiopian food ready at New Eritrea on Irving Street. We have three Hawaiian restaurants within 5 minutes of my house serving up a plate lunch just like the surfers in Hawaii feast on after a morning of surfing, yet not one of them is near the beach. We got food here and you gotta love it. Now I think I’ll run out for some Southern BBQ today.