from Grub Street San Francisco

What about Bob’s?

Among the doughnut shops crowned in Bon Appétit’s latest listicle: Dat Donuts in Chicago; Kane’s in Saugus, MA; The Doughnut Plant in NYC; Randy’s in L.A.; and two in the Bay Area, Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery and Dynamo in the Mission. [Bon Appétit]

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Filed Under: lists, bob’s donuts, bon appetit, bouchon bakery, dat donuts, dynamo donuts, randy’s donuts, the doughnut plant

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from Grub Street San Francisco

This image was altered for your SFW consumption.

In a new book due out in March, erotic photographer Tony Stamolis does the food porn concept one better, placing pictures of naked women alongside carne asada tacos fresh from a truck. The first “T” in the book’s title, T & T & A, we believe stands for tacos, and as the book’s promo copy reads, “There are connoisseurs of French Bordeaux. And connoisseurs of Tang Dynasty woodcuts. And there are connoisseurs of topless women and cheap-ass Mexican food.” T & T & A is squarely aimed at those in the latter category.

Stamolis hails from Fresno, CA, he’s shot for Flaunt and Nerve, and his work appears in Taschen’s New Erotic Photography. His last book, Frezno, is a pictorial atlas of the aforementioned drunkest city in America, and most of the taco and titty photos in his latest were shot there as well.

For those buying the book, good luck reconciling your twin cravings for food and sex without getting a confused headache.

T & T & A – Official Site [Very NSFW, via Eater]
T & T & A [Sump Books]

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Filed Under: bookshelf, books, tony stamolis, truckin

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from Grub Street San Francisco

Fred Eckhardt

A new reason to get a growler: In honor of their 30th anniversary, popular IPA-maker Sierra Nevada Brewery is releasing a series of limited edition beers called The Sierra 30 that are collaborative efforts with other renowned brewers — one of the first releases, Fritz & Ken’s Ale, is a joint brew between Sierra founder Ken Grossman and Fritz Maytag of Anchor Steam fame and home-brewing evangelist Charlie Papazian. Ken also made this little documentary video in which he talks to the living pioneers from “the good old days” of the craft brewing movement, including Fritz and mustachioed beer historian Fred Eckhardt, who wrote the highly influential and oddly academic-sounding 1983 tome A Treatise on Lager Beers.

The Sierra 30 Project [via Bottoms Up]

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Filed Under: video feed, anchor brewery, booze you can use, fred eckhardt, fritz maytag, ken grossman, sierra nevada brewery, videos

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from Grub Street San Francisco

Roaming Hunger marketed itself at this weekend’s street food fest in L.A.

A war is brewing amongst street food aggregators, both web- and app-based. There’s the Taco Loco iPhone app, and TruxMap, which boasts a real-time, Google-Map-based food truck locator. Now there’s Roaming Hunger, which aggregates tweets from food carts and trucks in seven cities including NYC, L.A., and San Francisco, ranks vendor by popularity, and features a blog. As the battle for street-foodie traffic wages on, please watch out for stray, projectile empanadas and the like.

Roaming Hunger [via SF Weekly]

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Filed Under: app-etizing, cartology, roaming hunger, taco loco, truckin, truxmap

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from Grub Street San Francisco

Alice Waters’s next tome, due out in April, is called In the Green Kitchen, and in it the doyenne of American locavore cuisine will be teaching “the art of simple cooking,” with basic techniques and recipes for things like chicken stock and sautéed greens, as Eater reports. The book is in the vein of Julia Child’s The Way to Cook and Thomas Keller’s holiday hit Ad Hoc at Home, but also not unlike Alice’s last book, The Art of Simple Food.

The twist this time is that she’ll be pimping her Green Kitchen project, and she’ll be joined by star friends like Keller, Rick Bayless, Lidia Bastianich, and Dan Barber, who’ll be on hand to serve as models in the how-to photos, and to offer their input if the great lady asks for it.

Alice Waters’ New Book to Be Called In the Green Kitchen [Eater]
The Green Kitchen [Official Site]
Earlier: Alice Waters To Graciously Bestow Three More Books Upon the World [Grub Street]

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Filed Under: books, alice waters, dan barber, green kitchen project, julia child, lidia bastianich, rick bayless, thomas keller

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from Grub Street San Francisco

The boudin blanc with red sauerkraut, mustard, and duck-fat-fried potatoes at Camino.

Each week on the Food Chain, we ask a chef to describe a dish he or she recently enjoyed. The chef who prepared the dish responds and then picks his or her own memorable meal. On and on it goes. Last time around, L.A.’s Vinny Dotolo couldn’t say enough about Alison Barakat’s fried chicken sandwich at Bakesale Betty in Oakland. What’s thrilled your palate recently, Alison?

Who: Alison Barakat, Chef/Owner of Bakesale Betty in Oakland
What: Boudin blanc with duck-fat fried potatoes
Where: Camino, Oakland
When: December

“Russell Moore’s Boudin blanc is one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Boudin blanc is from the Burgundy region of France, and it’s considered the richest, most treasured of all French sausages. In fact, the French refer to it as the king of sausages. Russell’s version is a most perfect example. He makes his with pork and chicken finely ground with cream, butter and onions and it’s perfectly spiced. It has this amazingly smooth, rich texture and the flavors are out of this world. I loved it served with duck-fat fried potatoes and applesauce. It is the ultimate comfort food: warm and satisfying.”

Russell Moore, fresh off of making a Monday batch of the stuff, responds:

“It’s a funny little thing… I worked at Chez Panisse for a million years while I was pretty young. I made sausages all the time. It kind of became the thing that I made — whenever it was on the menu it always fall on me to do the sausage. For a special event, Alice asked me to make a boudin blanc. I called my friend David Tannis in Santa Fe (he’s back at Chez Panisse now), because I knew he’d have some advice. If anyone knows David, he speaks in really vague, whimsical terms, and he said things like: ‘It should be soft and yielding with a crispy skin, but it definitely shouldn’t bounce back from the casing. It should taste like the things you put in it.’

“After that conversation I basically lied and told Alice I knew how to make it, and I spent the next twelve hours figuring it out on my own. It’s a really tough sausage to get right, to get the flavors right, and there are so many components. It was a big hit at the party, everyone talked about it, and it ended up on the regular menu in the café. But the problem is it took me fucking forever to make every single time, and it still does.

“I stopped making boudin blanc for a long time, but when I opened Camino I thought I’d do it every once in a while. It’s a much smaller place, fewer people on the line, so I can’t do it very often. We happen to be serving it right now, just for the month of February on Mondays only, with a few different kinds of sauerkraut. I think it’s better now than it was. I use Soul Food Farm chickens, which are so good. I start making it in the morning, butchering everything myself, saving the fat, grinding each meat separately, and eventually something splatters on me and I end up smelling like sausage for days. But we’ve got some funny customers who keep coming back for it.”

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Filed Under: the food chain, alison barakat, bakesale betty, camino, russell moore

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from Grub Street San Francisco

Alice takes idyllic Sunday strolls into the Berkeley hills.

“I sometimes come by the restaurant and talk to the cooks. I sometimes walk to a bookstore… Mostly I just stay home. It’s the one time I feel like I can exhale, and just get ready to begin again.” — Slow-food evangelist and Chez Panisse proprietor Alice Waters in the Times’ Sunday Routine column. [NYT]

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Filed Under: quote of the day, alice waters, chez panisse, new york times

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from Grub Street San Francisco

For the first time in sixteen years, sales of California wines dropped in 2009, despite the fact that everyone is boozing it up more overall. New figures show that CA wineries shipped four million fewer cases last year than they did in 2008, The Cellarist reports. About three-quarters of those losses were in exports, and far fewer people in general were buying wines above a $20 price point, even though wine consumption is up two percent. “People just scaled down buying patterns,” says wine industry expert Jon Frederickson, adding that cheaper bottles sold well, such as those in the $9 to $12 range made by larger operations like Sterling and Cupcake Vineyards. Smaller producers and all those overpriced Napa Cabernet-makers were hit hardest, since Trader Joe’s has now opened our minds and palates to the decent cheap bottles we can get from France, Australia, and Argentina. Newsflash, winemakers: That Opus One bullshit only flies during giddy, spendy times.

Why California Wines Aren’t Selling [The Cellarist]

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Filed Under: oenofile, cupcake vineyard, jon bonne, recession is your friend, sterling vineyards

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from Grub Street San Francisco

After completing a culinary tour of Northern California, which culminated in the “Elysian experience” of a meal at Thomas Keller’s renowned French Laundry, writer Mark Vanhoenacker was unable to enjoy food anywhere else. “What restaurant — what affordable restaurant — would never disappoint us?” he whines. Vanhoenacker seeks solace in McDonald’s and is somehow able to convince himself that the two restaurants actually have a lot in common.

He notes that both places have “cheerful, unpretentious service” and leave diners with little treats at the end of the meal — either a Happy Meal prize, or a wooden laundry pin.

At McDonald’s one is not likely to be served such French Laundry delights as a Tajine of Sweetbreads or Confit de Coeur de Veau. (And really it’s a pity to go through life without ever trying the Foie Gras en Terrine with K&J Orchard Peaches, Fennel Bulb and Yogurt Génoise.) Yet these are just the sorts of animal parts that fast-food restaurants have long been accused of stuffing into their burgers. Why is offal okay when Thomas Keller uses it? Both restaurants serve impressive pommes frites.

Clever, Vanhoenacker. Now we’ve got some apples and oranges you might want to take a crack at.

Dining at McLaundry [More Intelligent Life via Eater]

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Filed Under: funnies, mcdonald’s, more intelligent life, the french laundry, thomas keller

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from Grub Street San Francisco

After completing a culinary tour of Northern California, which culminated in the “Elysian experience” of a meal at Thomas Keller’s renowned French Laundry, writer Mark Vanhoenacker was unable to enjoy food anywhere else. “What restaurant — what affordable restaurant — would never disappoint us?” he whines. Vanhoenacker seeks solace in McDonald’s and is somehow able to convince himself that the two restaurants actually have a lot in common.

He notes that both places have “cheerful, unpretentious service” and leave diners with little treats at the end of the meal — either a Happy Meal prize, or a wooden laundry pin.

At McDonald’s one is not likely to be served such French Laundry delights as a Tajine of Sweetbreads or Confit de Coeur de Veau. (And really it’s a pity to go through life without ever trying the Foie Gras en Terrine with K&J Orchard Peaches, Fennel Bulb and Yogurt Génoise.) Yet these are just the sorts of animal parts that fast-food restaurants have long been accused of stuffing into their burgers. Why is offal okay when Thomas Keller uses it? Both restaurants serve impressive pommes frites.

Clever, Vanhoenacker. Now we’ve got some apples and oranges you might want to take a crack at.

Dining at McLaundry [More Intelligent Life via Eater]

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Filed Under: funnies, mcdonald’s, more intelligent life, the french laundry, thomas keller

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from Grub Street San Francisco

The cost of employing a waiter in 2010.

It’s old news for San Francisco business owners, but the Journal today takes note of the huge disparity between what it costs to hire a waiter here compared to anywhere else in the country. The city boasts the highest minimum wage in the U.S.: $9.79 an hour. But for small businesses and restaurant owners, this means spending three times as much per employee (around $20,000) as their counterparts in New York or Chicago, and four times as much as in Boston.

Why so much costlier in California? The state doesn’t allow restaurants to subtract tips from workers’ wages, and local ordinances in SF require restaurants to provide health care and paid sick leave to all full-time employees. The laws make life as a server in SF cushier than elsewhere, but the economics of staffing a restaurant here leave little room for slow months.

Vital Signs: Full Plate of Expenses [WSJ]

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Filed Under: foodienomics, wall street journal

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from Grub Street San Francisco

Though his technique may differ slightly from that of New York’s Eben Freeman, San Francisco’s Neyah White nonetheless does his cocktail shaking with some quick force. Study his shake technique and learn other bartending secrets courtesy of the Chron’s Cocktailian column by Gary Regan.

How to Be a Superstar Bartender [Chron]
Cocktail Techniques: Tips & Tricks [The Cellarist]
Earlier: Eben Freeman of Tailor Imparts the Secrets of the ‘Hard Shake’ [Grub Street]

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Filed Under: booze you can use, jackie patterson, jon bonne, neyah white, nopa, the cocktailian

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