An Amateur's Adventures In Dining Out, Part I

Everyone likes to hear about new places to eat. Admit it, when you read a AAA Guidebook covering some new city, you jump right to the restaurant and hotel listings, skipping over the reports of cultural activities and historical monuments. Or is that just me? When I was a kid on vacation, I loved those listings, checking out how many diamonds each place earned, whether there was a jacuzzi involved at the hotel or if it had cable, or if the place served pancakes and/or milkshakes. It was so fascinating for me that for a few trips, I kept a notebook where I wrote mini-reviews of where we stayed and ate. Were the bathrooms cozy? How generous was the restaurant with the maple syrup? Was there a waterfall in the hot tub? These were all significant details.

Finding a new local restaurant that you love is like the sudden joy of spotting an unmetered parking spot that isn't scheduled for imminent street cleaning, or finding a $20 bill on the ground. Except, of course, for costing you money, instead of either bringing it in or letting you keep what you have.

There is a reason why one of the most popular shows on KQED is Check Please! Bay Area, where guests recommend a particular restaurant and then visit the recommended sites of two other diners, and then they all gather around the table with the host and empty plates and decorative glasses of wine--that they don't get to drink until the very end, apparently, which seems crazy to me.

So in this spirit of collecting and dropping names, I will mention a few of the places I've fallen for in the city, grouped by neighborhood, in several installments as inspiration dictates. Keep in mind that as I am an amateur food lover, this is a guide more apt to be a Firestone guide than a Michelin. Except your tires won't be recalled after eating at these places. At least, that hasn't happened to me yet. Obviously you are in more danger of acquiring a spare tire, but that's another matter all together.

RICHMOND/LAUREL HEIGHTS:

BILL'S PLACE. This classic diner is shoehorned into 2315 Clement Street, come fog or sun. All you need to know about the food could be summed up by the motto on the refrigerator magnet: "Home of the Hamburger Since 1959."

The first time I ate there, I was with my Dad, and I had an egg salad sandwich, a pile of french fries, and a pint of Anchor Steam. More importantly, we were sitting on the back patio beneath a big green tree and next to the koi pond. You heard me, a koi pond.

JOHN CAMPBELL'S WILD IRISH BAKERY. For some reason, even though it was practically right around the corner from my old apartment, I never went in to the adjoining pub, The Blarney Stone. But the bakery became my ritual for weekend mornings. At first it was my reward for finishing an early jog through Golden Gate Park, but soon I realized I could skip all that exhausting exercise and just go straight for the scones. That is much more efficient, really.

They lost some of my faith when they stopped selling hot chocolate (really? In San Francisco, home of Ghirardelli chocolate?), but their light and fluffy hockey pucks of biscuit and chocolate chips were reliably tasty and were the perfect pairing with coffee, a newspaper, and NPR.

TATAKI. Sustainable sushi. Need I say more?

Well, yes, there is quite a bit more to be said, but still, sustainable sushi. They partner with Seafood Watch and the Monterey Bay Aquarium to provide the most environmentally-friendly sushi possible. Also, the sushi is damned delicious. Maybe that's the taste of feeling virtuous, but their crunchy spicy California rolls are amazing, especially during the after-work happy hour from 5:30-7.

Go there. Eat it. Support good people doing good work, and eat good sushi. Also, drink beer and sake. I did tonight, which is why words are kind of failing me to describe how good it was. Plus, I keep thinking about the ice cream mochi.

All this talk of food makes me sleepy. That's all for now. For those of you who have visited or who live in San Francisco, where do you like to go in the Richmond and Laurel Heights?

Caution: Drunken Goat In The Kitchen

The last time we prepared a complex meal, Marina raised the stakes by bringing out a fruit salad and a plate of crackers and cheeses as appetizers. I knew I would have to raise my game, at the very least providing an appetizer to keep pace. Crackers and cheese? How serious can we get about eating as adults? I mean, seriously.

So I took some time to look at the cheese selection at The Good Life Grocery on Cortland. Keep in mind, in the past I've tended to just buy mozzarella, provolone, or, if I was feeling spicy, sharp cheddar. It seemed to me that those wouldn't be exciting enough for a Saturday night. I needed something with flavor, even if I had no idea what the flavor might be. I had already selected table water crackers so that the crackers wouldn't overwhelm the flavor of the cheese.

I picked out some dill-flavored Havarti, because I remembered liking Havarti before dinner. Then I saw it. A cheese called the Drunken Goat. I looked closer and saw it was from Spain.

I mean, come on. If you see a cheese from Spain called the Drunken Goat, it would be a gastronomic crime not to buy it. And as it turns out, it is one of Marina's favorites, so ha!

As I wrote about previously, I decided to do something with tilapia this time. It's fairly forgiving to the inexperienced cook in my experience, and it seems to be one of the more environmentally-sustainable fish, from what I've read. I would accompany it with couscous and salad again, because that had proved a reliable and simple background to a light and tasty meal.

We searched online for recipes, and found one for almond-covered tilapia. It sounded good, so I pulled it up. The first item that caught my eye was an instruction that said to sprinkle the fish evenly with salt, and then to dredge in the almond mixture.

"Well, that sounds disgusting," I remarked. "Isn't dredging where you comb a lake looking for bodies?"*

It turns out that dredging means running a moist food through some sort of coating, in this case, a mix of flour and chopped almonds.

In pursuing the proper pairing of a white wine with fish, I went with a safe choice, a sauvignon blanc from Yellowtail, a label that I've found reliably reliable, which was a strong consideration for me.

The fish was easy to cook, if not entirely easy to flip, and it tended to fall apart, so that what I ended up serving on a bed of couscous was less a tilapia fillet and more a pile o' tilapia. But it was light and tasty, and the wine was pleasant and smooth, and they did indeed compliment each other. There was also a salad of mesculin, red pepper, broccoli slaw, dessert radish, and soy nuts, with a peanut vinaigrette that was maybe a tad spicy, but in general was satisfying.

So I was satisfied with another meal attempted and consumed, with no sign of food poisoning for either one of us yet. I perhaps needed a shallower bowl for the dredging, as the almonds didn't really stick to the fish and flower that much, but otherwise, it was good. And maybe next time I'll figure out how to flip a fish over without disintegrating it.



*Yes, yes it is. Dredging has many meanings and uses outside of cooking, including when police use a special dredging tool called a drag to drag a lake.

Red or White?

All I know about wine, I learned in a cellar in Wales. There was this little basement Italian restaurant in Aberystwyth where I went to dinner with the girl I was dating. I remember the red and white checked table cloth, and that was the first time in my life when I asked a waiter for a bottle of the house red.

That made me feel cool. You know you're an adult when you ask for bottles of the house red.

Eli taught me that you hold a glass of red wine with your hand cradling the bowl, and you hold a glass of white wine by the stem, so the warmth from your hand doesn't warm up the wine.

That's all I know. Naturally, I've raised that knowledge where ever I can:

"Would you like a glass of wine with dinner?"
"Sure! Did you know that you should hold a glass of white wine by the stem?"

That's pretty much the extent of what I know about wine. I have gathered, though, that there is a rumor that one should serve white wine with fish. This presents a puzzle.

I'm planning on cooking a fish meal on Saturday, probably something with tilapia, since I've cooked that before. But always, I've used red wine. Red wine is just so . . . red. It looks more substantial than white wine. So I've selected red wine to accompany anything I've eaten: pasta, poultry, pizza, cookies, ice cream, etc.

But because I want to make this meal "right", I guess I'm supposed to pick out a white wine. What would go well with tilapia? Any suggestions?

Stay tuned for the post-mortem on the white wine experiment on Saturday night . . .

Adventures In Dining/Cooking, Episode I

According to Marina, I'm now officially a San Franciscan. I sealed my qualification at dinner at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack by discussing, in regards to our roasted beet risotto appetizer, how the apples and walnuts added a nice texture.

Granted, it didn't make me sound as full-fledged a 'foodie' as can be found in this city, but apparently it is good enough, even if I can't describe a wine as 'grassy but tense.' I know what I like, but I can't necessarily articulate exactly why I like it, not in intellectual terms at least. But apparently I've learned enough to earn my San Francisco passport.

This city loves its food; sometimes, that love might be considered an obsession. It is possible that food has had to tell some of us that it is so sorry, but it wants to just be friends, good friends. Considering the strength of some of the responses on the Chronicle's comment boards to a recent article by food critic Michael Bauer rating the 100 best restaurants in the Bay Area, you would think that any restaurant not included on the list was slated by executive chef's order to be burned to the ground, and the parking lot salted. There were also comments denigrating Mr. Bauer's relevance, integrity, and overall worth as a human being. If you think that's bad, you should see the comments on sports columns. At least people who get irate over restaurant reviews are generally fairly articulate and commit fewer grammatical atrocities.

But there is this to be said for a city that loves food; there are a lot of good places to eat, even if you don't know why you like what you like. And it tends to inspire you to want to cook and eat more healthily. That is the goal that Marina and I have set for ourselves: to cook a good, well-thought-out meal twice a week, preferably shopping locally, with balance and health in mind.

Considering that for years I would thrive on peanut butter sandwiches, lentil soups, pasta, and the occasional tilapia fillet, this is a big step for me. And I'm excited by the prospect. I was weirdly thrilled by the experience of going to The Good Life grocery store and asking the guy at the meat counter for two skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut in half and with the fat trimmed. Apparently people do that sort of thing, and it is considered completely normal. Who knew?

Everyone loves food. Food and good restaurant stories are interesting. So, if I were to write regularly about cooking and eating, that could feel meaningful, but what would distinguish my writing from that of anyone else who writes about food?

Well, like Socrates, I know that I know nothing. That can be fun, writing from a place of ignorance, right?

Here's what I've learned so far:

1) You don't need two whole chicken breasts for two people. That is way more chicken than you actually need.

2) Squeezing a lemon over a chicken doesn't give a whole lot of lemon flavor. You might need to try actual bottled lemon juice.

There is something satisfying in trying something more complex, and having it work well. I recently cooked chicken breasts with olive oil, garlic, some seasonings, served on a bed of couscous and with a side salad including baby spinach, red pepper, broccoli slaw, and radishes. It was a good feeling to create something real, that was healthy, and that tasted pretty good.

And it feels like there is something to write about here. Something less abstract than a lot of what I usually write about, less about ideas and more about experience. So, yeah, a small project, I suppose, small in scale and taken one meal at a time, but it appeals to me.