I’ve got a few posts in the hopper for this site, but for the next couple weeks or so you’ll find me blogging at San Francisco Natural Wine Week, a loosely organized collective tasting bacchanal happening in the would-be Angers-by-the-Bay from August 23-29. Be there or be a lame ass!
Please click here for more information about San Francisco Natural Wine Week, including event information, contact info and various schedules.
Heard through the grapevine the other day. The staff at Russell Jackson’s upcoming Lafitte restaurant on Pier 5 at the Embarcadero is spending the few weeks prior to opening by getting in shape. And that’s not just honing the finer points of service. Per one staff member, the whole crew is up at 6am getting their butts kicked bayside by a boot camp instructor. Which begs the question: What’s more impressive, training hard in the early morning a few days a week, or getting service industry folks out of bed before dawn?
Jackson hired a personal trainer to get his staff in shape to, well, survive the opening of the new restaurant. Expect a crew that can not only handle the long hours and still provide professional food and beverage service with a smile during opening — they can probably kick your ass too. And look hot doing it.
Richie Nakano, a.k.a. linecook415, hosted a test run of his months’ long quest to perfect his ramen the other night.
(Above: ramen noodles made from scratch go into the 5-day stock made from organic pork bones. An earlier version of the stock was made with the bones roasted first; Richie felt that stock ended up to sweet and fatty, so this effort skipped the roasting and resulted in a silky, flavorful blast of savory pork and umami flavors.)
Earlier in the day I met up with Jon Bonné, a fellow ramen enthusiast who like me, is a saddened by the lack of ramen options in San Francisco, unlike Los Angeles or New York. Beyond Katana-Ya, there’s just not much.
Our particular challenge this day was, as you probably guessed, to find a few wines to match with ramen. (We wanted to look beyond the traditional beer, maybe saké, pairings.)
Ramen, such as it is, can be difficult to pair because it’s made up of so many different elements: there’s the stock, noodles, sliced pork, egg, usually some sort of green, spices, etc. Hence why beer is an easy choice. But why choose the easy way? When matching wine and ramen, one way to do it is to try to work with various flavor combinations. However, we thought the way to go was to work with texture, since in many ways that’s what good ramen is all about: the balance of the diverse ingredients comes together to create the texture of the dish. So in theory at least, looking at that overarching theme might lead to a good match.
The results? Sherry rocks, and is a good choice. But lighter styles like Fino might not hold up so we opted for dry, rich Amontillado from El Maestro Sierra, as well as a few other selections. The El Maestro was the most successful, at least according to my palate.
Another option: Jacques Puffeney’s Cuvee Sacha, a blend of savagnin and chardonnay with a slight oxidative character that matched the umami flavor in the stock, and also hugged the texture of the combined egg yolk and noodle. We tried a few red wines but they didn’t quite work for me. Although an orange wine might do the trick…
(Above: my half-eaten bowl of ramen on the matching table.)
Oh, back to the beer for a moment. Jesse at Beer and Nosh brought along a number of delicious ales, including his home-brewed gueuze style beer, made with a brettanomyces yeast that he bought from a home-brew shop in SF. Jesse related that when a famous California winemaker heard about his purchase of a brett strain for the beer, he excalimed: “you can buy brett?!?”
Jess also has far better pictures of ramen night than I do. View them here.
You can read more about Richie’s ramen plans here, and then there’s a good New York Times story on ramen hunting in Tokyo to read here.
The storms let up Friday night, making for beautiful sky and light.
Grove Street, Hayes Valley
Capp Street & 19th, the Mission District
The Gangway, Larkin Street. A pleasant stop before mind-blowing Thai food at nearby Lers Ros.
*Footage from the original ‘Friday Night in San Francisco’, an incredible guitar performance by Paco de Lucia, Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin.
(Above: A typical layout for a Victorian-era flat in SF, though perhaps originally this was the ground floor of a two level house. It’s similar to a place we recently checked out in the Mission.)
We’re looking for an apartment in San Francisco, which, as in other cities where lots of people want to live, is a challenge. Add to it the fact that we have certain constraints — proximity to BART, either garage or parking, or decent street parking — and our search is narrowed to the sections of town where it seems everybody wants to live. Sorry, Inner Richmond! Sorry, Inner Sunset!
During a recent viewing of a flat, it was pointed out that a number of restaurants were nearby, including currently hip places like Flour + Water. I hear this frequently on this search but it struck me that neighborhood restaurants have a significant impact on rents and the availability of rental units in San Francisco. You sort of take this stuff for granted, but it’s definitely true. Especially when, like us, you’re weighing your options in relation to your needs, and considering paying at the top of your rent budget for a flat that’s, well, on the small side. Oh for a time machine!
Sure enough, have a scan on Craig’s List of available one- and two-bedroom apartments in locations like Hayes Valley and the Mission, and you’ll find rents ranging in the $2,000’s on up. I wonder, to focus on the Mission for a moment, how much places like Flour + Water, Range, Dosa, Beretta, etc., affect rents? In the sense that property values themselves are affected, then it’s likely that they do. The question is how much? Does proximity to a bustling neighborhood restaurant that’s something of destination itself meant that, say, another $200+ is added to the asking rent amount? Ditto the economic and commercial vitality in the surrounding neighborhood. Hayes Valley, where we currently live, is a great example: Anchored by original restaurants like Hayes Street Grill, Absinthe and even the fratboy-infested Suppenküche, Hayes Street itself now features numerous boutiques and more bars, restaurants and even a ramen truck.
And it seems that new restaurants inspire a bit of neighborhood envy. From an article in yesterday’s Chronicle about removing the restriction on the number of restaurants along 24th Street in Noe Valley:
Yenne and others in Noe Valley began the push for new restaurants on 24th Street four years ago after seeing new, attractive restaurants open on nearby Valencia Street and other areas without the restaurant limits.
There were 29 restaurants along 24th Street in 1987, and today there are 22, according to city Planning Department documents.
In 2006, the city allowed three new restaurants to open in the 24th Street-Noe Valley Neighborhood Commercial District, which runs on 24th Street from Chattanooga to Diamond streets and parts of some adjoining blocks. Of the three that obtained permits, only Contigo, a Spanish and Catalan restaurant on Castro at 24th Street, has opened.
Meanwhile, all leads on a one- or two-bedroom apartment in SF are most appreciated!
We San Franciscans love our wine. And we love our kinky sex. Apparently, we also like to combine the two.
From SFist comes word of the Wine & Rope tasting at local gallery, Femina Potens. And what are they tasting? Why zinfandel of course!
Go here to read more.
I might add that the crew over at SFist is taking a rather, well, sexualized view of wine lately. Besides revealing the bondage qualities inherent to big, bad, dirty zinfandel, they’ve portrayed chardonnay (of the California extraction) as the drink of whores.
The local internets were afluttler last week with word of a new addition to San Francisco’s growing street food scene, this time in Hayes Valley. Two factors converged to make this opening a particularly exciting one: 1) Most of the street food action is taking place downtown or in the Mission, so for a new venture to open in Hayes Valley, well, that’s exciting news; and 2) it’s a ramen truck!
(Above: People waiting, and waiting some more, for their bowls of ramen. On a side note, when a truck or business or whatever displays all those social media tags, Twitter, Facebook, etc, does that mean they’re sponsored to do so?)
San Francisco’s ramen scene is lacking. Sure, there are options but we’ve got nothing on New York when it comes to ramen. And why is that? There’s a fairly large Japanese presence here, and god knows there’s enough sushi options to keep people sated in their quests for the perfect serving of uni.
(Above: the menu. We had shoyu and miso.)
Anyway, Shirohige Ramen-Ya’s truck idea is a good one but I’m sorry to report that the ramen isn’t quite there. It’s not bad, but there’s not enough broth for one thing, and the bowls of noodles just lack balance. Which again, might be an issue with the broth, an element that seems to be essential for pulling all the ingredients together. Combined with the obnoxiously long waits — a problem the guys in the truck (who, it must be said, were friendly and polite) attributed to their water supply. That right there is a major flaw, one that hopefully gets worked out rather quickly. Part of the appeal of ordering a steaming bowl of noodles and sliced pork from a street vendor is that it’s, well, served up fast.
Time for a little Music Friday. David McDuff, whose wine geekdom is perhaps only exceeded by his music geekdom, recently recapped Meeting People is Easy, a 1999 documentary filmed during Radiohead’s sprawling worldwide tour in support of OK Computer. I don’t really go in for these types of films (really, why bother after this one?), but I do love Radiohead. David rightly points to the disconnect and alienation in Meeting People is Easy which, no matter how successfully or not it’s portrayed here, is certainly a recurring theme with Radiohead’s music, something they really tackle in Kid A and Amnesiac.
Here’s a stop-motion fan video (quite good too) that I found via At Ease Web. The song is ‘Wolf at the Door’, taken from Hail to the Thief.
And here’s a video for a more recent song, ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’. More disconnect, yadda yadda, but I’m really posting this because it’s got some great San Francisco footage. Look, there’s the Pork Store! And Amoeba! Then there’s a trip to Japan to, well, attend a Radiohead concert.
… The local art supply shop, Flax, is advertising mask-making andface painting tutorials — just in time for Halloween! And who doesn’t love spooky saturdays?
Via Burrito Justice*, easily one of the top local San Francisco blogs, comes Mother Mother, a rockin’ group from Vancouver. Infectious, poppy rock with solid songwriting. And did I mention harmonies? Harmonies! Sort of a New Pornographers meets the Pixies kind of thing.
Mother Mother has two albums out, and you can stream them both at the band’s website, here.
Here’s a video for “Oh My Heart”, the catchy title track of Mother Mother’s second and most recent album.
*Burrito Justice is also an excellent forum to indulge your inner map geek. Check out this post (and the subsequent ones too) about the new BART system map.
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