shocker

they sure did spell it wrong. eek.

i was just in portland last weekend. ditto on the clarklewis front. shockingly good. a smart concept what with the multiple permutations of each dish, i.e. small/large/family portions. we ate on a monday and had no problem getting a reservation a day or two beforehand. but that could be because it WAS a monday. go for the 'chef will cook for you' approach. for $30/person it'll knock your socks right off. it's a mindblowing bargain. refreshing to have a warehouse space that actually works. though it was claustrophobic due to the extreme heatwave that roared through the city. bewon. oh yes! pambiche has a stellar happy hour menu between 2 and 6:30pm. oodles of things are $2.50. grab a bench table outside and a palm beach cooler, and eat your brains out. cuban's so near impossible to find here in sf. everything was delicious, plus they've got all sorts of relatively unusual dishes like frituras and ajiaco criollo.

one extra bread@tartine note: it's always a good idea to call ahead to reserve some. that way you can stroll in and not be worried about them running out. which happens. a lot. or best of all, come in the morning (or the day before) and pre pay. then you can bypass the line and scoop up your reserved loaf. tricks of the trade.

i second the accolades for Desiree. it's my favorite breakfast spot in the city, too. best on off-hours like between 9:30 and 10:30 after the office drones have made their way to their desks. and, Squeat, you can save money on cab fare cuz it's wicked easy to get to by muni. the 43 Masonic goes all the way up through the Presidio. disembark as it rounds the corner off Lincoln. Desiree's just a 5-10 minute walk from there. they've also recently added wine and cheese hours from 4-7 thursdays and fridays, if memory serves.

from what i understand the theory behind tartine's late day bake-off is that if, like 98.7% of other bakeries, the bread is produced at the crack of dawn by the time din-din rolls around said bread is practically stale. me, i'd rather stroll in at 3:45 in the afternoon and pick up a still-hot loaf to relish with my evening comestibles. plus, i know if i were a baker not only would this approach set me apart from my peers, i would have the added benefit of working a 'normal' workday. any others not rubbed the wrong way by this approach? on the hipster tip, i get much more of a moneyed SUV owner and/or mousy foodie vibe from tartine's crowd than the one that populates boogaloo's.

i'd wager they (the mirrors) aren't dirty. something more akin to glass patina. but, yes, they sure look dirty. good on you two for taking the leap and checking it out for yourselves. sounds like one yay and one nay. but it still adds up to 'way overrated' if i've done the math correctly.

Ron Siegel now cooks at Masa's.

bear with me if my quoting doesn't work out right. yes, she did receive the best new chef award. which makes it all the more confounding. her featured recipe in the magazine involved ricotta gnocchi, which were on the vegetarian tasting menu the night i dined there. they were gummy and browned within an inch of their life. translation- no high quality bellwether farms ricotta deliciousness left. gaffs are forgivable in the restaurant world. consistency is hard to maneuver, making it all the more precious when it occurs. but at this level you'd expect nothing less. where have i dined? not everywhere, but plenty of places. in town at this level, masa's was fine and dandy. other local favorites in a semi-related genre: quince, incanto, and that benchmark of consistency, delfina. and to reference a favorite of yours, pim, i love me some l'arpege. i'm absurdly forgiving and barely vitriolic. but the sloppiness of charles nob hill boggled the mind. plus one of my fellow diners that night had been before and much the same had occurred. intimations of 'not an isolated incident,' i'd say. does that provide the calibration you seek?

do not go to Charles Nob Hill. i had one of the worst high-end meals ever there. the food veered all over the avoidable mistake spectrum, from over salted to undersalted, to drowning a radicchio salad in a torrent of vinegar with not nearly enough oil to balance things out. and it ain't cheap. i wasn't payin', and i still felt ripped off. and shocked that the place continually garners such accolades.

i'm not so familiar with the mechanics of eGulet's formatting, so forgive my lack of quotes from previous posts. though your article may not have the explicit concerns that bhabha works with throughout his work, there's a parallel undercurrent in both. from bhabha: "An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of 'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness." and from your piece: "but since no one is asking these people to be the subjects of their own food stories the other continues to be fixed, identified and made knowable in familiar ways." the concerns/buzzwords of the post-colonial movement pop up all over the place. but then you drew attention to that yourself. it's an oft-repeated joke in the post-colonial studies world that you can debunk anyone and everyone's viewpoint by saying it's reductionist and/or essentialist. which is true. but also easy. and to what end? it makes for a fun game, but from whence comes the knowledge then, the understanding? your prime quote about the fruit from gold's backyard purportedly contains everything troubling about his writing. but how and why? there's nothing essentialist about his musing. he spins a little analogy and it drives you mad? i don't get it. you said you don't think of him as the great homogenizer. but you focus on the ways in which he does not, to you, comprehend things in a non-homogenous fashion: "the world is nothing if not heterogeneous" i'd be curious to see the specific reductionist evidence about his overgeneralization about south indian cuisine that you mention in passing. for i think it's the only quantifiable evidence, and it's barely accounted for. i'm not saying he hasn't been wrong before. i'm simply observing that your piece hinges on that fact, and there's little evidence supplied to support your argument. if he's so awful at what he does, how then would you recommend people to write about cuisines which they were not born into or are unfamiliar with? i completely agree with your statements about "the truth of course is that culture is always hybrid and at some level untranslatable." does that mean then that writers should not bother at all because they can't possibly honor the infinitesimal variety and fluidity of culture? this conversation started off a little sassy on my part, so i wanted to say thanks for engaging in this dialogue, mongo jones. i think it's a tricky subject worth butting heads over, and i admire your passion about it.

no, no. i love me some Homi Bhabha. it's complicado, that why i said 'for better or for worse.' i think your beef with mr. gold is warranted. it's just that the piece you linked, to me, had a PC, post-colonial studies, dialogue-squishing feel to it. and don't get me wrong, i love me some post-colonial studies too, but it makes for a sticky situation. i don't think mr. gold is the great Homogenizer when it comes to 'ethnic' foods. but if he fubs or over-generalizes and in turn disseminates inaccurate information, then, sure, he should be taken to task, which you did with aplomb. i just fear your invective was, in some sense, as much of an over-generalization as the ones you accuse him of scribing.

that diatribe, for better or worse, feels like Homi Bhabha 101.