Restaurant Girl Speaks

Restaurant Girl in the New York Times

2011-08-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

My photo made it onto the New York Times' style blog today:

A lovely weekend at Milliken Creek

2011-07-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

This last weekend, my fella and I were invited to stay at Milliken Creek Inn, which is right on the Napa river. Those of you who are already familiar with my stories might know that I'm not the biggest fan of Napa, finding it overcrowded with drunk tourists and cheesy tasting room employees, so I was skeptical of this invitation, but wanted to escape the San Francisco fog.

How wonderful it is to know that there's still rustic charm in Napa! Milliken Creek Inn sits right on the river, which is a tide river, ebbing and flowing from both directions. There are several buildings on the property, which originally housed a tavern that stagecoach riders would stop at on their mail routes in the 1800s.

This was the first weekend away the Mister and I had since we were married last October, and Milliken Creek was such a sweet place--they are all about the romance. The Inn's lovely general manager ticked off the personal butlering services she's done for the Inn's guest over the past year: organized plane-writing in the sky for an anniversary, a butterfly release, bought lingerie, and procured a special bottle of wine of which there were only 10 left in the world. She joked, "The only thing I won’t let someone do is fish off my river bank!" (and you wouldn’t want to, nor would you want to swim in the river).

We dropped our bags off in the luxe room and headed into town for some oysters and beer at the Oxbow Public Market, wandered around the Ferry Building-esque food court and came back to the Inn for a spa treatment--one of the best this cynic has ever had. The line they use for facials is Eminence Organics, which I'd never heard of but is definitely on my list of skincare to recommend.

Although the Inn kindly offered to make us a reservation anywhwere in Napa, we didn't feel like dining out and so bought all of the fixings for our favorite picnic dinner (baguette, boquerones, prosciutto, soft cheese, cornichons, and a 12-pack of Pacifico) and ate on our private deck.

The morning brought a cute picnic basket packed with a hot breakfast (you order it the night before by hanging a tag on your door and they deliver it starting at 8am) and the daily papers.

I'd definitely recommend a stay at Milliken Creek for any couple who's looking for some romance, especially since the Inn is celebrating their 10-year anniversary this year, and offering special packages that include a driver, dinner reservations, chocolate and strawberries (um, did I mention they covered our entire room with candles, roses, and rose petals while we were enjoying the 6pm Winemaker Hour in the Inn's lobby?!?), and a few frisky treats that couples can indulge in when they come back to their room in the evening.

The packages range from $900-$1200 for the 2-night package, and regular room rates depend on the season, from $275 for a “Milliken” room in the off-season to $650 for a luxury room during the high season.

So Much Sake

2011-04-09T19:46:00.001-07:00

Over 500 people showed up for the Japan fundraiser at Yoshi's this afternoon. Chef upon chef outdid each other with offerings of internal organs prepared in just the right proportions...and the live jazz made all the food that much more savory.

More to come...

Chefs United Raised $42K for Sendai

2011-04-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

Sunday night's fundraiser at Prospect was by all accounts a smashing success, we raised $42,000 for the people of Sendai City and Miyagi prefecture, and it seems that folks had a great time.

Longer post to come, for now I've got to prepare for Saturday's event at Yoshi's! (Buy tickets here)

If you're looking for posts about the trip to Japan that the hooligans above took in 2009, you can find them HERE.

** Update**
A little more about the fundraiser on Sunday night:

Each of the chefs that I visited Japan with (pictured above) created a dish inspired by our trip to Sendai in 2009. They each gave their dish a name--the word that reminded them the most of Sendai.

Prospect opened its doors on a Sunday night, which is huge for a restaurant, so many many thanks to all of the waiters, bartenders, and amazing cooks who (I'm assuming) worked tip-free (which is basically for free) on Sunday to bring this menu to the 120 diners that showed up in support of the Miyagi prefecture.

Each course was paired by the chefs and their team with a different sake or wine (all donated, as was much of the food--the Albarino Amy Currens procured for Chef Ravi's asparagus/crab/uni dish was especially refreshing) and all were made with ingredients from Miyagi like Matcha (Lissa Doumani's delightful green tea and strawberry dessert), Sendai red miso, and Miyagi oysters. Having visited the farm where Miyagi oysters come from has given me such an appreciation for them, as we see them on most restaurant menus worth their salt in San Francisco.

No Words Minced at Quince

2010-04-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I just wanted to have a snappy title for a post about dining at Quince. But words *weren't* minced at the Oregon Certified Sustainable Winemakers' dinner last Tuesday, where a select few Oregonian winemakers showcased their current releases.

When I hear "biodynamic" or "organic" wine, the word "sludge" flashes through my brain before it can help itself. It's unfortunate that the biodynamic/organic label can carry negative connotations in the haute wine world. Just as some of the city's best restaurants will use organic, local food and utilize green business practices--and not tout it--many of my favorite Californian wineries farm organically and produce their wine biodynamically, without making a big deal on the label. (Quintessa and Unti come to mind).

Adelsheim Vineyard's and WillaKenzie's Pinot Blancs were a refreshing way to start the meal, and the Montinore Estate's Borealis went wonderfully with the first course, a salad of raw, shaved asparagus with lardo and grana padano cheese. The wine was an interesting blend of 45% Müller-Thurgau, 24% Gewürztraminer, 18% Pinot Gris and 13% Riesling that worked well with asparagus--a hard vegetable to pair wine with.

I paid more attention to Pat Dudley's lively explanation of how the LIVE certification process works than to my second course of lasagnette, she was so animated when describing the different elements of the biodynamic treatments that were serving as the family-style table's centerpieces.

I helped myself to second's of Montinore Estate's Willamette Valley Pinot Noir ("It's WillAMit, dammit!," joshed the proprietor of Panther Creek as I mangled the appellation's pronounciation). The spiciness of the pinot surprised me, but I suppose the cool climate there on the coast forces the grapes to grow a thicker skin, providing the resulting wine with a little spicier tannin.

After the roast duck with quince mostarda course (which was great with the Bethel Heights estate-grown pinot noir), plenty of wines had been passed around the table and the vibe was a bit looser. So loose, in fact, that Terroir co-owner Dagan Ministero suddenly leapt up and seized a new bottle from the side table.

Conversation froze as Ministero removed his shoe and placed the base of the bottle inside, repeatedly slammed the shoe against the brick wall of Quince's private dining room and began to sweat a bit as the cork inched out millimeter by millimeter. Weak applause followed the pouring of the (possibly bottle-shocked?) pinot. While I'll certainly remember that parlor trick for my next camping trip, can somebody please send Mssr. Ministero a new Laguiole??

Press Kit

2010-03-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

Last night I dined at Picco for the first time, and chef Bruce Hill came out of the kitchen to sit down at our table after we'd finished. His iPhone rang, and he glanced at the photo of Brussels sprouts that popped up and excused himself.

"Hi sweetie," he said quietly. "Mm hm. Mm hm. Just put them in the pan until one side is crispy and then put on the lid to steam them until they're done on the inside. Mm hm. I love you. Bye."

He hung up the phone and smiled sheepishly.

"Sorry," he said. "Since I'm not home during the evenings, I try to set my wife up to eat well while I'm gone, and she had a question about the dumplings I froze for her." (Sweetest. Chef-husband. EVER.)

He put a small, heavy package on the table.

"Here's your press kit," he said.

I stared at the heavy rectangle uncomprehendingly--I thought he was going to be providing me with background materials for a writing project I'm doing for him.

I peeled open the square and burst out laughing when I realized it was the patented Chef's Press he invented last year, about to be released by Williams-Sonoma.

"This is so much better than the press kit I was thinking of!" I exclaimed as I tore the wrapper off the gleaming stainless-steel sheets.

Chef Hill showed us how it worked on my mom's hand. His invention is quite simple--it's a set of three stainless-steel plates with slats cut into them, so they look like jail-bar windows. The middle slat is bent up at a 90-degree angle to form a handle. Each plate weighs 9 oz., and they can be stacked on top of each other to weigh down cuts of meat (or anything that needs to be pressed) of different sizes.

Chefs have been using weights and the backs of spatulas to press items on a grill as long as there have been grills, but solid pieces of metal often make the pressed food soggy. The slats cut into Hill's Chef's Press allow for the food to release excess steam as it cooks quickly.

Hill invented the press because his tiny kitchen at Bix was struggling to keep up with the demand for his famous burgers--turnover on the popular dish just wasn't happening fast enough. Before long, Hill's colleagues were clamoring for presses of their own (they've been being put to good use SF's high-end restaurant kitchens for over a year now).

"Just take it home and test it out on a grilled-cheese sandwich," suggested Hill (possibly sensing my own culinary limitations). "Use two presses."

Today's lunch cooked so quickly I nearly burned it--the country bread I layered with aged Dutch gouda (my parents are notorious cheese-smugglers and I was lucky enough to have a visit from them in January) was pressed flat and evenly, with just the right amount of crunch to it.

This little invention might be enough to start me cooking.

Drinking Lessons

2010-02-22T13:38:00.000-08:00

I bellied up to the bar at the Hunt Club inside the Sorrento Hotel just as the press preview of last night's Drinking Lessons with Duggan McDonnell and Neyah White was about to begin. Everyone else had a glass of water beside them, and the 2pm Seattle sunshine had made me mighty thirsty, so I grabbed the bottle in front of me, a pretty vintage alcohol bottle filled with water.

Pouring myself a full glass, I quickly took a huge mouthful as a couple of Seattle's top food writers and editors gave me the curious side-eye. As my mouth began to burn, I realized I had--in fact--poured myself about five fingers of pisco, the artisanal grape brandy that McDonnell had distilled down in Peru and wasn't even on the US market yet.

Turning bright red in shame, I swallowed the mouthful of pisco as the bar around me erupted in laughter and applause.

"Yes, Ella, that's pisco," remarked McDonnell dryly.

"Everyone, meet Ella Lawrence!" laughed Michael Hebb.

I wished myself anywhere but in front of a full bar of my colleagues, but the buzz I'd gotten from swallowing about three shots of the strong brandy in one go quickly evaporated my embarrassment and I was able to focus on McDonnell and White's lessons for the afternoon.

McDonnell's Peruvian pisco is "achelado," or mixed-varietal (like a wine from the Côte-Rôtie). Red and white grapes (some of them from 90-year-old Peruvian vines) are fermented and distilled separately and then mixed and bottled--Pisco is never aged, which is why it's always clear--like water. :-/

The taste of the new world segued into a history of the Old World as White, in full Professor Cocktail mode, discoursed on bourbon and scotch--two very different whiskys that share some common background.

Because, by Tennessee law, bourbon barrels can only be used once, bourbon barrels are used all over the world: I've spotted Jack Daniels' barrels in Argentinean and Chilean wineries, ageing reds. It turns out that sherry is a big influence in the making of Jameson, because sherry barrels are used to age that Irish tipple, and some Glenmorangie is aged in barrels that have held Chateau D'Yquem Sauternes, the "PhD of a whisky thesis," quipped White as he flamed a piece of orange rind over a custom-created cocktail called the "Barrel to Barrel," featuring Nocino, Jameson, and an Oloroso sherry.

Well Read and Well Fed

2010-02-20T14:03:00.000-08:00

Here I am in Seattle as a visiting "Cocktail Curator," having booked Neyah White of NOPA and Duggan McDonnell of Cantina to be guest bartenders and lecturers at one of avant-garde chef provocateur Michael Hebb's symposiums at the Sorrento Hotel.

Night School is a collaboration between Hebb and the Sorrento Hotel featuring the country's leading intellectuals, musicians, bartenders, and chefs. It's a modern equivalent of the Algonquin (with Hebb channeling Dorothy Parker). This weekend the lineup includes Sean Nelson and Erin Jorgenson tonight (a sold-out show of indie rock meets chamber music) in addition to Drinking Lessons both tomorrow and Monday nights.

Last night we dined on Lesley Hazelton's houseboat. The dedicated drinker, smoker, and author ("After the Prophet" is her most recently-published title) had made Yorkshire puddings (crisp, freshly-herbed popovers that perfectly soaked up the sauce from her cast-iron pot of Bouef Bourguignon) for the group of six that spanned nearly five decades.

At the table was Jonathan Raban, correspondent for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, among many other powerhouse publications, who regaled us with stories of his undercover dealings with the Tea Party Movement and Sarah Palin.

Next to me was Nassim Assefi, who was so sweet and gracious. I told her I'd been impressed by "Persepolis" as we discussed the trials that intellectuals have (and are) facing in Iran, and she said, "Oh yes, the author is a dear friend of mine." I listened more than I spoke after that.

Deborah Jacobs had me cracking up (whoever propagates the stereotype of librarians as dry and boring has not spent any time in this woman's presence!) and left early a after a few glasses of grappa and accidentally prank-calling Rem Koolhas.

My life has been lacking in the company of older intellectuals since I amicably parted ways with the crowd at Angelo Garro's Renaissance Forge (the Alice Waters worship got old, and anyway I don't think she has very good table manners), so it was inspiring to dine with people who have first-hand knowledge of Hillary Clinton, Kofi Anaan, and Bill Gates.

Since everyone at the table had written many books, there was much gifting and inscribing (Nassim gave me a copy of "Aria" after she dropped Hebb and I off--though neither one of us had a pen handy for an inscription--bad writers!), and it made me want to step up my act so I can soon inscribe a work of merit more important than a cycling anthology at my next dinner party.

Not only is Lesley one of the foremost scholars of Middle Eastern religion, she covered the automobile industry for the Detroit Free Press for 10 years and is a licensed pilot who is extremely down-to-earth and modest about her numerous accomplishments and awards. Plus she makes a mean stew.

Everybody's Gotta Eat

2010-02-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

Instead of lounging around eating bonbons and wallowing in roses this Valentine's Day (which is traditionally cursed for me anyway), I got out of bed and pedalled to the Tenderloin at 9am to volunteer with some friends at Glide Memorial, bagging lunches for their meal program.

When I arrived, a sparse group of volunteers was seated on hard plastic chairs, watching the beginning of Reverend Cecil Williams' 9am service on a television being broadcast from upstairs.

We were trundled down a long dark corridor by a very large black man wearing a plastic apron and missing some teeth. We shuffled past the last seated recipients of the morning's hot meal handout in the dining room, spooning oatmeal directly from a plastic tray, and were introduced to a short man with a round chin and a squinty eye.

"I'm Popeye," he said gruffly, "because I look just like Popeye." (He did). "We're going to make 1,200 sandwiches today, people, so just put these hairnets, gloves, and aprons on, and we'll get started."

The 12 or so volunteers looked at each other apprehensively. Suddenly, a group of 40 teenagers poured in, directed loudly by a brunette woman who quickly realized that we'd do well if she directed us, too.

The teenagers began opening little lunch bags on the dozens of large folding tables and dropping cereal bars and packets of mustard into each one. Over more folding tables, six of us began to open large bags of sandwich bread.

Assembly-line style, we busted out 1,200 sandwiches in under an hour. Near the end of the sandwich-building, a volunteer came out from the kitchen, where she'd been placing sliced meat into the large flip-tubs that were then carted out to the room we were making sandwiches in.

Barbara, a schoolteacher, was a regular volunteer at Glide with her husband. We asked her how the meals were allotted--Glide serves two hot meals a day, but the 1,200 bag lunches were getting packed in huge plastic garbage bags to go elsewhere. She told us that 50 here, 30 there, would go to different organizations.

"Everyone's gotta eat, you know?" she asked as she tucked a sandwich into a plastic baggie and then placed it into another industrial-sized flip-tub.

Yes, I do know.

Beerunch

2010-02-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

What better way to kick off Superbowl Sunday than with a brunch featuring beer? This morning, as part of beer week, MateVeza put on a "beerunch," a beer and food pairing brunch featuring morning-friendly brews.
At the Mission Rock Cafe, mellow hipsters in their early 30s gathered to pair MateVeza's yerba mate-infused IPA with huevos rancheros. Dogfish Head Brewery was well-represented; their spicy Pangaea Ale cut refreshingly through rich salmon.

HE'BREW ("the chosen beer") poured the Rejewvenator with a root-vegetable medley and 21st Amendment's Belgian Doom offset glazed ham nicely with hoppy bitterness complementing the ham's sweet maple glaze.

Speakeasey's Payback Porter was pleasant and cacao-infused, but the real winner was Magnolia Pub & Brewery's Smokestack Lightning Imperial Stout. The dark-roasted stout was rich and chocolatey, with a bittersweet bite that had everyone going back for seconds and thirds. Paired with bacon-y, pecan-studded roasted brussels sprouts, the ashy, intense stout became smooth and creamy.

Blue Bottle is Taking Over the World

2009-05-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

When I first moved to San Francisco, a bike messenger friend turned me onto the best coffee I'd ever had, which could be found in a little alleway in Hayes Valley, in the garage behind an architecture firm.

Everybody knows that Blue Bottle coffee has taken off since then, and their latest venture is inside the MOMA's new rooftop sculpture garden. The sculpture garden is on top of the parking garage so it's not actually inside the MOMA, it's connected to the fifth floor via an enclosed walkway, and the space that Blue Bottle is inside is all windows, so the garden, and the sky, and the city, can be viewed from inside on a rainy

day (like this morning was).

The nice part about it not being completely connected is that you can still go up there if the fifth floor is closed for an installation, which it often is.

The garden has been really well designed to showcase the art there, which seems like a no-brainer (it's an art museum, after all) but so often museum architecture can be show-offy, which takes away from the art itself. At the press preview, the line was out the door for espresso at the Blue Bottle counter. Expect it to be longer when the MOMA opens the rooftop garden to the general public this Sunday, which is free of charge.

I've got something to say

2009-04-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

For the next six weeks, every Tuesday I'll be opening my big mouth on on 7x7's "Bits and Bites" blog. Topics will vary but will always have to do with "how to be a better diner." If you have any ideas for what you'd me to write about, please leave them here!

eet smakelijk,

Restaurant Girl

Last Night in Tokyo

2009-03-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

Wandering through Ginza on our last night was like being in Barcelona: a drink and a skewer here, a beer and a chicken ball there. First we went to a place that had exactly enough seats for all of us, and had some skewers of pork stomach, pork belly, and pork intestine, and really tender braised tripe, the leanest meat I’ve had so far on the trip, which says a lot about the richness of Japanese meats. I’ve really garnered an appreciation for meat fat here that I didn’t have before. I hope I impressed my chefs!Then off to a second place with a very strict mama-san (we didn’t have Jiro around to warm up the Mama-sans any more and we all missed him sorely) who spoke great English and served some tender chicken tail (a part of the chicken I never even knew existed), and some little peppers that were like Friuliano peppers that we’ve been seeing the whole trip. The place was literally built into the bridge that the city train ran over, so every time a train passed overhead (about every 2-3 minutes), it sounded like there was a taiko drum festival in our honor.

After that was sushi: the first time we’ve eaten sushi since arriving in Japan (I’m not counting the sushi we ate in the kitchen at “Grand Chef Suzuki’s” tasting demo...as a waiter, and I think as a chef, food eaten standing up doesn’t count. Which is probably why we all pack a few more pounds than we might need to.). I think Sho-san really wanted to impress upon us the fact that JAPANESE CUISINE DOES NOT EQUAL SUSHI, and we got it. We really did. This trip has completely changed the way I look at food, though it’s too close to the trip to really say how just yet.
The best sushi (I thought) was the uni, which tasted like fresh, refined sea water, but super creamy. We also had a crazy red clam that was moving, and a white fish that was blowtorched and squeezed with lemon (TACHIUO, ‘scabbard fish’), not to be eaten with soy sauce. Also great and really fresh was a sardine.

One thing that's really interesting about this part of Ginza is the little streets and places full of character that when viewed from the outside lend this crazy party atmosphere to the streets. They’re all festively decorated and there are lots of people going in and out, and the energy of people eating and drinking and having a good time surrounds them all. Then, when you (literally) duck in, it’s a different world, and much more approachable. Real people, doing their after-work thing, and you could never even begin to try the food at all of them, though we did our best. We ate at least four meals a day, every day in Japan and most days we had a full dinner at one place and then went to another for a second dinner.

It’s been really great listening to all of these chefs put their heads together and talk about different projects they could potentially do after being so inspired by this trip. Getting to see and eat all of the things we did, things that no ordinary tourist would ever even dream of doing, was an experience impossible replicate. As a travel writer, and someone who travels a lot even when NOT writing about it, it’s very rare that I get to just sit back and not make any decisions, and to have had a trip of this caliber without having planned any of it myself...I was REALLY impressed. And it was many of our first time to Japan.

The kinds of conversations the chefs were having about food almost seemed to make the world smaller. Think about it: cross-culturally, the heart and soul of food is the same everywhere. Things are skewered, they’re stewed, they’re stuffed. One thing we’ve all really liked about the back-room, family-style food we’ve been eating in Tokyo has been that that food has not taken the foreground. We’ve all been eating constantly, obvio!, but the kind of food we’ve been eating: simple, soulful, smoky (the “smoky” restaurants Sho-san referred to in an email early on was not regarding cigarettes, but rather the wood smoke filled with meat smells and pork fat that permeates everything), has not evoked the restaurant critic in any of us. Rather, it’s provided a great background for conversation and the ambiance of the evening and great fuel for creative thoughts that obviously revolve around food.

Ichinokura Sake Brewery

2009-03-25T01:29:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Northern California, one has a pretty good grasp of how wine is made. I was glad to have this background when visiting the Ichinokura Sake Brewery on our third day in Sendai City, because I would have felt a little lost in this huge plant. For many Americans, an introduction to sake came while dining at a sushi restaurant. A ceramic pitcher of hot, high-alcohol sake arrived, it washed down the sashimi and the nigiri in little cups, and we thought that all sake was the same. That’s a little like drinking a glass of white zinfandel straight from a box and thinking that all wines are pink and sweet.Sake (which is technically a beer, because it’s brewed and is derived from a grain), is often compared to wine because of its alcohol content (higher than a beer at around 16-20%) and because it works so well paired with food.
Sake’s flavor elements come from simple ingredients and a complicated process. The biggest factors that influence the finished product are water, rice, and yeast; other factors that have a hand in the sake’s flavor are weather and geography.
Sake is produced by fermenting rice. First, the rice is polished to remove the exterior of the rice grain (where protein and oil live), and the “pure core” of the rice is fermented. The more rice is polished away, the more high-quality the finished sake will be.
The rice is then soaked and washed, then cooked and fermented by adding koji and yeast (which change the starch into sugar, and then the sugar into alcohol) for several weeks. Koji is a mold that converts the rice’s starch into a simple sugar, which feeds one of many varieties of sake yeast to begin fermentation. The fermentation is often slowed by lowering the temperature; either by refrigeration or in snowy winter climates.After the rice ferments, it is pressed, and the liquids separate from the solids. Some sake has distilled alcohol added: this sake is called honjozo-shu, and is the cheap warm sake that many Westerners remember as their introduction to sake. After filtration, the remaining lees are removed (except in the case of nigori, where it is left in the sake to add a sweet taste and a creamy texture), and the sake is filtered and pasteurized (in most cases). Then, the sake rests and is diluted with water to lower the alcohol content and is bottled and drunk.

There are several different classifications of sake, with the most important being:

Junmai-shu. This is "pure rice sake," made from only rice, water and kōji, with no other additions.

Ginjo-shu is made from rice polished to 60% or less of its original weight. Sake made from rice polished to 50% or lower is called daiginjo-shu.
The term junmai (“pure rice sake”) can be added to ginjo or daiginjo, resulting in junmai ginjo and junmai daiginjo.
Sake can be served chilled, at room temperature, or heated, depending on the preference of the drinker, the quality of the sake, and the season. Hot sake is usually drunk in the winter, and high-grade sake like junmai daiginjo and junmai ginjo are not drunk this, because their delicate flavors and aromas will be lost through heating. Sake is often heated to hide the flavor of low-quality sake.
Aside from being served straight, sake can be used as a mixer for cocktails, like a “saketini” or a “sake bomb.”

Sake is best consumed within 2 or 3 hours after opening the bottle. It can be stored (in the refrigerator), although it is generally recommended to finish the sake within 2 days.

Needless to say, we drank a LOT of sake in Japan.

Current Obsession: MUJI

2009-03-25T00:52:00.000-07:00

CURRENT OBSESSION: MUJI
Japanese minimalism and perfect design meets sustainability
I’m currently obsessed with the minimalist eco-designs from MUJI, which translates from the Japanese into “No Brand.” I first discovered it in Sendai City on a food tour with a bunch of chefs. We’d been out to a super-homey yakitori (skewered meats roasted over an open charcoal grill) restaurant the night before, and our host had pointed out the groovy aprons that the yakitori chefs were wearing (in addition to dish towels wrapped around their heads, a standard here in Japan).Sho-san (our Japanese host, who lives and works in San Francisco) told us he’d take us to a place where we could get the same aprons for cheap, and the next day we went to MUJI, on the ground floor of a shopping mall (where it seems everything cool in Japan is located). MUJI is like a Japanese Ikea but with clothing: everything you could possibly need for home, body, and travel, but designed well, and it’s all made out of organic cotton and other sustainable fibers like bamboo.
At the end of the food tour, after our flight home from Tokyo to San Francisco was unexpectedly cancelled, we realized that we’d all brought just enough clothes to last us for an eight-day trip, not the nine-day trip we were suddenly faced with. Most of us had been wearing the same clothes juuuust enough to keep the funk at bay. The chefs didn't really care; a couple of them had bought a new pair of socks or a new t-shirt (stinky boys!) but I couldn’t face the thought of wearing the same clothes for the (x) day in a row.

As the chefs were tucking into yet another fried meal in a mall (this time in Tokyo), I noticed another MUJI. We'd blown through the first store in a whirlwind, picking out aprons and chopsticks with a determined speed, and while I had bought my aprons with the intent of wearing them as modified dresses when getting back to San Francisco (they’re cute and well-designed, two hallmarks of Japanese culture that I’ve discovered, and fell in love with this week), I hadn’t really taken a look at all that MUJI had to offer.

I could have stayed in there for much longer than the hour it took for the chefs to come wondering where the hell it was I’d got to. The clean lines and lack of any distinguishing labels brought to mind the understaded chic of Yoji Yamamoto, and the amount of things available was mind-bogglingly typical of the quality of goods that the Japanese consume on a regular basis. What drew me in first was a series of well-cut striped shirts, and a linen shirtdress with a pintucked tuxedo front fit just right.
MUJI's prices are low: for $160 USD, I left there with the shirtdress and tights, a pair of grey leggings and a pair of striped socks, a striped longsleeve T, a pair of flat black booties with round toes and only four shoelace-holes that I don’t think we’d see the likes of outside of Japan, and those were only the clothes.

MUJI also equipped me with a selection of travel accessories that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else and have been looking for in all one place for years. Sure, there’s the Eagle Creek packers and the Rick Steves luggage dividers and the racks of German-made ergo-design stuff that you’ll find in the outdoors-equipment stores, but MUJI’s toiletries bags and packing inserts are made of the finest, lightest-weight nylon that squeezes down into wispy little balls of nothing yet can zip tightly around six pounds of dirty laundry (I know, I squeezed all mine in the second I got my brown-paper recycled MUJI bags back to the hotel’s concierge, where all of my luggage had been in stasis since we returned from our futile journey to the airport the day before).

Maybe I’m just an organizational freak, but a frequent traveler often has their rituals and their weird little tics that they can’t live without: mine are an oversized pashmina scarf, a series of earphones, eye-masks, and writing materials and several little bottles of in-air moisturizing liquids that keep me from suffering and prevent jet-lag once I’m on the ground. All of these are now neatly arranged into easily accessible little corners of my purse in black-and-white checked bags that weigh under an ounce each and are designs worthy of the Comme des Garçons label.

There’s a few MUJI stores in New York City, but the across-the-pond prices have inflated and there was just something about buying it all in Japan that really satisfied that “I got something that’s completely utiliarian and that I can’t find anywhere else in the world” itch.
Wait, am I the only one who has that itch?

A Nice Lunch

2009-03-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Today we had one of the best meals we’ve had the whole time in Sendai City. After the food tasting we had yesterday (several different cuts of several different preparations of ueber-rich Sendai Beef and several different types of Nigiri sushi, and a camera crew) by the time I sat down at the table for the tasting menu the hotel’s executive chef had prepared for us, I wasn’t hungry in the slightest. That meal was an assault on our stomachs; large portions of in-season produce, fishes, and beef that just kept coming and coming--ten courses later I felt like I was going to die from too many calories; and I’d only had one or two bites of every different dish that was presented to me. There were only two chefs that ate every bite: Damon, and Ravi, and Shotaro did his best but by his last dumpling he was sweating and couldn’t eat dessert. But the presentation was lovely and I really enjoyed opening little bowls to see what was inside, especially the the main course, several pieces of thin-sliced Sendai beef that had been wrapped around different vegetables and steamed inside a bamboo tree trunk with river rocks that kept the beef elevated above the bottom of the slice of trunk so that the fat could drip down.So when I got on the bus today for our excursion to the sake brewery and then to the oyster farm, I hadn’t eaten anything and I was still feeling uncomfortably full from the day before (we had attended a ‘processed seafood tasting’ where we had to give feedback on several different kinds of frozen, smoked, dried seafoods; then we’d gone to a panko place and eaten fried things for hours; Bruce and Damon and I stopped after 9 or 10 skewers but the others went on and ate 17 skewers) and I was nervous about the meal. Yesterday was kind of an overwhelming day, food-wise, with a traditional Japanese breakfast in the morning, then that killer lunch that went on for hours and then all the fried stuff. I was not feeling well.The lunch we had was the perfect size and all the flavors were great. I was honestly scared of eating! but the sashimi was so fresh and the flavors were so perfect that I ate almost everything presented to us. There was a sashimi course, some pickles, miso soup (with seaweed from the lake that we were sitting on), local Miyagi rice which was amazing, for a bowl of plain white rice it had so much character and was really tender. The main course was miso-glazed mackerel that had been cooked for a long time and had a butter burr, sancho and miso paste on top and a little bite of cherry custard to the side.I loved the custard dish Cha Wan Mu Shi, which was egg and dashi steamed inside a teacup; with a little hidden piece of something (yesterday it was a shrimp and a piece of chicken, that custard was broken and the serving was too large) inside of that. Then we had slices of a delicious little thing, a couple pieces of fish wrapped in a shiso leaf and then wrapped in a skin of rice flour and egg yolk and deep fried.Dessert was a tiny scoop of cherry-leaf ice cream that had been flavored with strawberries as well. Sendai strawberries are some of the nicest I’ve ever had.

Maguro Bidding Market

2009-03-19T15:08:00.001-07:00

This morning we were on a tuna battlefield! The bidding market was amazing. I rolled out of bed late, after having slept less than two hours and having drunk all of the beer in my mini fridge and stumbled down into the lobby with my sunglasses on at 5:45am. We got into our bus with doilies (all of the vehicles here have doilies on some parts of them, our bus has doilies where people’s heads rest) where the mayor was waiting for us. We arrived to the market and changed into our white rubber boots and flourescent pink trucker hats that had “Sendai” printed on them and walked along a catwalk above the bidding. I wish I had better words to describe how the auctioneer and the bidders sounded: an auction sounds funny in one’s native language as there’s a very specific intonation used by the people involved...in Japanese it sounds even funnier because the noises are so different. And I think Japanese sounds very ‘cute’ anyway, I like the short sounds and the way that vowels are drawn out, and the “HAI!” of agreement. It seems like people say things with as few words as possible, which seems very efficient to me. Down on the bidding floor, I was very happy to have been issued the flourescent pink hats (though sadly I was not allowed to keep mine, it would have been an awesome souvenir) as there were hundreds of people milling about, all with white boots, all looking at the fish as intently as we were. I enjoyed especially identifying some of the fish we had eaten the night before, and looking at the cuddly-looking Fugu swimming in shallow pans.This is a wholesale market, so it was interesting to see where the fish that consumers see in the fish market or the farmers’ market comes from. There were big prawns with their heads on and eggs in many colors stuck to their legs (some had green eggs, some had yellow eggs), and the huge tuna all lined up on the floor, that would be hooked through the mouth and wheeled away when they were bid on.Each tuna had a number painted on it, and potential buyers got there very early before the auction even started at 6am (they arrived at 4:30 am) to check with their own eyes the fish before bidding on them. The fish were absolutely gorgeous, all had their tails cut off, I think so potential buyers can see grade of the meatIKIJIMI is the method used of killing the fish, in which the gills are cut after the brain is spiked and then they cut the tail off to grade the meat. This method of killing stops all movement in the fish, so the meat does not get bruised by flopping around. Also tuna is the only warm-blooded deep sea fish so getting the blood out quickly keeps the meat from producing enzymes after death that would turn it brown.
After the tuna are sold, they are brought to the maguro cutters who are employed by the wholesalers (their representatives are the ones doing the bidding, the brokers) and the tuna is sliced into loins. We visited a cutting table that had one man who had been cutting for 30 years, his boss had been cutting for over 40 years. Watching him cut with the two different kinds of knives was interesting; he de-boned an almost 200-lb bluefin tuna (the biggest at the auction was about 220lbs) with an effortless grace that belied the fact that he was basically wrangling a barrell.
We had a really special treat: the maguro cutter sliced off pieces of tuna for us right there and somehow chopsticks and soy sauce and a plastic plate appeared, and us carnivores dug right in and felt as though we’d hunted something.

Sendai Beef

2009-03-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

There are five thousand heads of cattle at the Hikadami Ranch. The beef is marked “Level A5” by the Japan Meat Grading Association (the highest grade possible) and is called “brand beef.” Sendai beef is considered to be the highest-quality beef in Japan. The cattle are grain fed for three years. Their primary food is corn and soybeans.There are 12 scales in marbling standard. The beef are a cross between Wagu and Japanese Black Angus, so all the cows are jet black. The meat is not graded until the beef is slaughtered, it’s like maguro: you have to look at the cuts of meat before it can be ranked.These are like the Ferrari of beef, very expensive but you’re purchasing a “hand made” steak. It costs a lot to raise these beef for three years. The cost of Sendai beef is five to ten times higher than normal beef; it costs about $50/lb.It’s a myth that the cows are massaged, but they are fed beer if they’re not feeling well to give them energy.In 1973, growth hormones were banned in Japan. If growth hormones are used, the beef grows too fast to have a lot of fat marbling. It smells good at the beef ranch. There’s cedar sawdust on the floor and the beef (all male, all with their horns) are very calm as they greet us. They are not agitated like American cows and they kick their poop out of the back of their pens. There are five beef per pen and they have plenty of room.When my (now) ex-boyfriend was visiting me in California for the first time, he and I drove from San Francisco up to Healdsburg for the weekend to meet my family. He’s Argentinean, and his family had a large estancia where he spent weekends and summers growing up. As we drove through southern Sonoma County, where the dairy cows are kept, I rolled up my window as normal to block out the rancid cow smell.Che nearly gagged at the smell coming through the closed air-vents. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll be through this area in just a few minutes. It doesn’t last very long.”
“What IS that?” he asked me. I told him it was cows, duh! hadn’t he ever smelled a cow before? and he rolled down his window to get a better sense of the smell.
“Ellita,” he said. “That is NOT what a cow smells like. Those cows smell poisoned.”
I realized that the beef we know in the US is, in fact, poisoned. I’d never thought of it that way before. The beef in Sendai is not like that.

Miso Pretty

2009-03-18T01:03:00.000-07:00

This trip is such a whirlwind of information and eating that I'm surprised my brain hasn't short-circuited from all the ingredients I'm learning about and that my stomach hasn't short-circuited because of all the never-before-consumed foods I'm putting into it.

Yesterday we visited a miso-production factory and a Sendai beef farm. The miso is the same red miso that's produced for the label Eden Organics, and the moment our bus pulled into the parking lot an hour outside of Sendai city, the warm comforting smell of miso pulled us in.

We were given a presentation on miso's origins (made in this spot under a feudal lord for centuries, then 400 years ago was 'liberated' to the public) and on how it's made (soybeans are cooked and koji mold and salt are added, then the starter ferments for different lengths of time: white miso is the mildest and ferments only a few months, while at the other end of the spectrum black miso has an incredibly extracted taste after 2.5 years of fermentation).

Interestingly, Japan can't grow enough soybeans for its miso production, so imports soybeans from the USA and uses them to make miso (in combination with soybeans grown in Japan). We tasted two different kinds of miso soup: one was made with American soybeans and had been prepared for us with spinach and bacon (!!) and the second was a traditional miso soup with seaweed and tofu, made with milder Japanese soybeans.

Everyone scrubbed up (white suits and white hairnets) and trouped onto a catwalk to peer through the windows onto the floor below, where we unfortunately weren't allowed.

The factory was almost reminiscent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, complete with 24-hour-a-day automated machines to monitor the bean paste's fermentation and beeping machines belching out strange brown pastes.

One of the best things about traveling with a group of talented chefs (and there are many) is that every conversation turns into a think tank. Listening to them talk about different ways they'd use miso was fascinating--making a meat jus with miso and red wine or swapping out the anchovy in a puntarelle salad with miso were just a few things that probably wouldn't occur to us ordinary mortals.

Japan

2009-03-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

Somehow I've gotten lucky enough to be selected as the media person that accompanies several well-known San Francisco chefs on a food tour of Miyagi prefecture, Japan.

I'm getting paid to travel to Japan for a week, eat a few bites of perfectly formed; perfectly presented Japanese food over several long meals, and write about it. I'm writing this blog post from my hotel room, where there's a nightie provided, in Sendai City.

Sendai City is the capital of Miyagi prefecture. Sho-san, the executive chef of Yoshi's in San Francisco, recommended me as the media person to accompany this tour of Japan, a trip meant to introduce regional Japanese ingredients to people who matter; a.ka. San Francisco chefs, and I'm here to record the experience.

Here's who's on the trip:

Shotaro "Sho" Kamio, executive chef of Yoshi's in San Francisco and Oakland.

Ravi Kapur of Boulevard, a friendly acquaintance of mine since a few years back

Bruce Hill of Bix and Picco, and one of the calmest, kindest souls I've met in the food industry. He's been my go-

to for what to expect and how to act in Japan since I met him last week at a sake tasting.

Paul Canales of Oliveto; one crazy mo-fo who is always wearing a beret and always down for any kind of adventure. I've known Paul for three days and I already would trust him with my first-born.

Staffan Terje of Perbacco, a fellow northern European, with whom I can discuss rigid social customs and love of raw fish with; with no fear of judgement. He's also the only person on this trip who's taller than I am.

There are also some culinary school instructor-chefs, who I have not yet gotten to know as well as I should have as, I've been busy gossiping and eavesdropping on the SF chefs. Scott Saunder and Lars are representing Greystone in Napa (where I just spent an amazing week at the wine writers' symposium, and Damon is a chef-instructor at Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco.

Dinner at Sho's family’s restaurant last night was one of the most amazing I’ve ever eaten. It was all served family style, with were huge steaming hot-pots on the table (long enough to accommodate about 25 diners, we only filled up about half the spaces, the other half which were filled by a rotating cast of Sho’s friends and family that stopped by here and there).

The menu, copied from my Moleskine pocket notebook (Chef Hill asked me "How many of those do you use a month? Because it looks like you're BLOWING through that one"):

Sea pineapple, a “sea squirt” only found in Miyagi. It is kind of like a big, orange oyster that is extra slimy and tastes like cucumber. They grow whole on rocks, two meters down. There are two polyps on top and to cut it open, you stab a knife first in the polyp with the + sign, then the one with the - sign.

Mackerel sashimi. The best I’ve ever had.

Pickled pig ears with kim chee.

Skewers of beef and beef tendon with hot mustard. They were boiling in a big square metal pan

that was connected to a gas outlet. Delicious!

Pickled pig skin in strips with grated daikon. The daikon here is not spicy, it's fresh and grated.

The textures were what really wowed all of us. In the same dish, there was chewy, slimy, crunchy, and every flavor delicious.

There were whole cabbage leaves cooked in hot-pots. There were four different kinds of

hot-pots that started out with raw ingredients and were cooked by the time our second courses arrived on the table...unfortunately I was only able to taste two as my stomach is not as big as I wish it was.

All the food is local, and the ingredients are surprisingly similar to what we find in San Francisco (Sendai City is actually on the same latitude).

The food kept coming and coming. Luckily I've been in the business long enough to only swallow what really appeals to me...unfortunately everything appealed to me last and I already have a stomacheache from eating too much.

Here comes a chicken wing.

The crowning glory of the evening was the two platters of horse sashimi that were brought out as our last course. Tenderloin, vein, ice-cold liver, and the neck fat from right underneath the mane were on the plate.

The pure flavors, the richness, the textures...the food here is almost overwhelming, but not quite. It's deeply satisyfing. I din't know if I could have been this open to strange foods if I wasn't already a 'food person.' I mean, pickled strips of pig ears and pig skin? tripe? weird chewy things that I have no idea what they are but am pretty sure they come from the inside of a pig? I've only been in Japan for three hours and I'm already obsessed.

65 Effing Covers

2009-02-21T16:31:00.000-08:00

I'm back in full force. With my A Game on. I worked my first Friday night at The New Restaurant last night and it was like getting kicked in the face. Some restaurants serve 65 people dinner and drinks in one night...I personally served 65 people dinner and drinks last night (and I'm only one of four waiters working at any given time there).

I arrived almost an hour before I was scheduled to; The Restaurant has more than 40 wines by the glass, all of which I'm required to know, none of which I knew before starting work there a few weeks ago. I have a growing stack of flashcards stuffed in my purple suede Mariano Toledo bag (a relic of my life as a fashionista in Buenos Aires), and when I went to retrieve them a thin gay coworker with a fondness for jazz hands shrieked at me, "Is that your bag? I just stole it. It's mine now."

I missed working in restaurants.

I'm back, bitches!

2009-02-10T02:33:00.000-08:00

For reasons that will be explained later, Restaurant Girl is back, after a two-year hiatus. When I left my last job and said I'd never wait another table again, my funniest co-worker said, "Honey, NEVER say NEVER!"

He was right.

I'm back working at a Restaurant, a really good one. Waiting tables fits into my life perfectly; so perfectly that I'm living in my first home in San Francisco and I'm not even having any wait-mares this time around. My focus lately has been on wine, and this New Restaurant has a killer wine list.

This time around, I can finally speak Spanish. I spent the last two years living in Buenos Aires with my Che, and while it sadly didn't work out between us, I was left with a good understanding of Spanish--the reason I travelled to South America in the first place. I wanted to learn what my bussers were saying about me.

The bussers in the new Restaurant are great--the best I've ever worked with. Tonight, the The Wolf and Romeo were on the floor. They're the only bussers I've ever seen drink wine at the end of their shift (most bussers pound cerveza) while still on the floor (this Restaurant gives its employees the respect they deserve, which includes an end-of-shift drink).

I dropped the check on my last table and headed toward the bus station, rubbing my stomach. I've gained about 15 pounds since working harvest and being on vacation, and while it's mostly muscle it doesn't sit well. I've decided that this newest incarnation of Restaurant Girl will not pork out from late-night snacks and post-shift cocktails.

"Hey, you feeling sick?" asked Romeo, in Spanish.

"No man, I'm not sick."

"So why you touching your stomach like that?" he asked.

I decided to go for brutal honesty. Latinos always respect the straight-up, especially when it comes to body image.

"I'm not sick in my stomach, just fat there," I responded in Spanish.

I began to struggle through my sidework (it's always hardest the first week or so) as the two bussers compared their glasses of Syrah.

"Hey Lobo," Romeo said, as he peered at me over the rim of his Spiegelau Bordeaux. "You think the new girl is fat?"

The Wolf looked me up and down with an objective eye.

"Where you think you look fat, New Girl?" he asked.

I thought about it. "Right here," I answered after a pause, rubbing my lower belly and muffin top. "I gained a little weight last month."

The Wolf and Romeo looked me up and down again.

"Naw, you still look all right," said The Wolf (who could take on any street thug in any neighborhood in this city).

"Don't worry about it."

"Thanks, guys..." I said as I turned back to my sidework.

I knew they would tell it like it really is. Bussers always do. I remembered a huge fight I'd gotten into with my busser at the last restaurant I'd worked at, two years ago. He told me if I got any fatter I wouldn't be cute anymore. I flew off the handle and accused him of sexual harassment...then dated a Latin man for two years and appreciated the honesty and objectivity he always presented me with.

Sometimes, things just come across better in Spanish.

Cellar Rat: Week One at Unti

2008-09-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

Cellar Rat: Week One at Unti Vineyards

Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 08:53:07 AM

(first published in the SF Weekly)

When the price of a burrito in Healdsburg bypassed that of a burrito in the Mission, I knew it was time to hightail it from my hometown to the big city. That was four years ago, and I hadn’t pictured heading up north again any time soon. This summer, though, I was offered a job as a seasonal cellar worker during harvest and I wasn’t about to turn it down.

Unti is a small-production (6,000-7,000 cases annually) winery in the Dry Creek Valley, making European-style reds like Barbera and Grenache quite well. I’ve always been a fan of their wines and I leaped at the chance to be winemaker Sebastien Pochan’s assistant, especially since I am the first female to ever work in the cellar at Unti.

Healdsburg during crush-time is a flurry of activity, and it’s most apparent at this time of year where the town’s main revenue and tourism comes from. Wineries crank into overdrive, with big-production facilities like Kendall-Jackson and Clos du Bois working 24 hours around the clock to churn out millions of gallons of juice coming from
thousands of tons of grapes. Unti is not like that.

Saturday at 8 a.m. there was already fruit waiting for us--several half-ton plastic boxes of Sangiovese that had just come in from the vineyard. Unti has 60 acres of vineyards and all of their wines are made from estate-grown grapes. The winery also sells fruit to numerous other wineries and individual winemakers, including Boulevard Restaurant Wine Directors John Lancaster and Robert Perkins.

Besides me (who is working 6 days a week), there are three part-time workers: two noted restaurateurs (one from Sonoma County, one from San Francisco)--friends of the owner and the winemaker--and an Unti cousin, up from Santa Cruz on the weekends.

I climbed into a stainless steel tank and began hosing it down, learning how to sterilize the equipment we’d be using to crush and de-stem the fruit: tanks, hoses, clamps, and gaskets all had to be cleaned with a solution, rinsed, neutralized and rinsed again. Within an hour or so we were sorting through the grapes, raking the discarded stems and making sure none of the hoses or pumps backed up with fruit and juice that was rapidly getting dumped into a stainless steel tank the size of a Manhattan apartment.

After we finished the first lot, the two tasting room employees came out onto the crush pad and the equipment ground to a halt.

“It’s time! It’s time!” Sebastien called as he jumped down from the platform. “Time for tradition!”

The six of us took seats at the picnic tables and George Unti produced a bottle of vintage Champagne.

“We always have a champagne toast after we crush the first lot of the harvest season,” he explained, as the yeasty bubbles were poured into my glass.

I clinked flutes with my new co-workers and looked out over the Dry Creek Valley: land where my family lived and farmed for more than five generations. I might be able to get used to being home again.

The Most Amazing Video. EVER.

2008-07-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I got this video from Shreve at the Daily Coyote and it's maybe the best thing I've ever watched.

Tawdry Tales II: In which our debaucherous waitress flees her Sonoma County misdeeds, conquers San Francisco, crashes, and burns.

2008-07-15T21:01:00.002-07:00

This is a follow-up story to "As The Creek Dries," a piece of mine which ran in the North Bay Bohemian three years ago. Though it eventually won an AAN award for food and wine writing, it ensured I'd never work in a Sonoma County restaurant again.

**
I didn’t know when I moved to San Francisco that this would mean moments of mouth-agape wonder, making me feel so often like a Midwestern tourist that I’d go and get a giant tattoo on my arm to prove that I belong.

I had one of those moments this morning as I returned from the artists’ enclave in Chinatown where I’ve been spending nights without even wanting to sleep with any of its residents: a painter, a photographer, a hairdresser.

Through the sun and the cigarette smoke produced by a small, clean man wearing slippers on the steps of Grace Cathedral, I saw the Bay Bridge. After three months, the same thing still happens when I see the water from a hill: I stop, I stare, my jaw goes slack and I have another San Francisco moment.

It doesn’t matter that this town is full of guys who don’t call me and that my housemates are very much unlike me in many ways, because last night was spent reading aloud and then translating a letter from a heartsick Nazi to Gretel, dated 1942 as part of an upcoming exhibit where the early model tape recorder will be mounted on the wall with the letter and my voice will emerge, reading the lines to Gretel in German, then in English.

I am considering a move into the pantry where I slept last night, because I now live in a big, beautiful, expensive space that I don’t use enough, and each time I put a personal object of decoration on the windowsill it is silently removed, although my roommate’s glass full of water and rocks is allowed to find permanent residence there.

A lot has changed since I burned all my bridges, and a few creme brulees, in Healdsburg. After the price of a burrito shot up to six dollars and I barely recognized the town where my family had lived for four generations before me, it was time to get out. The plaza was filled with visiting yuppies antiquing and drinks were more expensive than in the Castro. It was time to leave the Hamptons of the Bay Area and move to San Francisco.

Finding a job was no problem--when you grow up in the wine country, have your first taste of Dry Creek Valley zinfandel at the dinner table at age seven, and start working in restaurants ten years after that, the food and wine knowledge tends to stay toward the front of your mind. I took 5 shifts a week at a well-known Bistro and plowed face-first into the trough of San Francisco nightlife, honking it up like a greedy sow.

Married bartenders? Hey, I’m not breaking any vows. Hard drugs? Gimme more! Expensive designer shoes? A girl only lives once. But table after table, it began to dawn on me. This town wasn't Healdsburg. I wasn't waiting on dear old folks who found me charming. My transformation from cute young waitress to hard-edged professional server was happening, and the girls I was waiting on were starting to be younger than me, and cuter than me, and with more expensive shoes. I realized that this was where everyone had gone--I ran into more people from my high school class than I ever had back in Sonoma County. I was waiting on my peers, young people who'd left their small towns to actually make something of themselves, and I wasn't fooling them. Sure, my consistent $300 a night matched their junior corporate salaries, but to them it looked like I was wasting my life. And I was.
.
Something had to give.

For two years, I drifted from hip new restaurant to famous classic bistro back to hip new restaurant, following the money shifts and blowing my tips the next day on Diesel jeans and dinners out with other waiters. My friend’s lip cracked because he he only drank coffee and beer for two weeks straight. Another waiter I knew went to rehab and lost all his shifts.

The last time I entered the party waitress cycle, I got fat and fired. The chance of getting fired is less now; I’m too good at what I do. The change has to come from within, but the truth is that I don’t want to change. I like being bad. I like breaking the rules, smooching my married lover in the off-camera corners of the restaurant and making out with the doorman at the bar we all frequent. I like smoking cigarettes while it’s still daylight. But I also want to have a spectacular ass.

I fear so much becoming a floozy; an old pro with a raspy voice who flirts with everyone because she doesn’t know how else to behave. When is it time to stop this lifestyle? At age 30, 35? Or was it time to stop it five years ago?

Turning these doubts over and over in a hung-over haze, I began to drown myself with tables, thinking that if I could just work enough I’d be able to stay out of trouble. It worked for a colleague of mine: he stuck himself with the insane schedule of five lunch shifts a week at Boulevard, followed by five dinner shifts a week at Jardiniere; on his day off he worked at a wine shop at the Ferry Building and on the one day a week he had to himself he was too tired to get into much of anything.

I worked ten shifts a week between two restaurants/ working a shift every day or double-shifts, for five months. As summer crept in and the 200 people who had lunch at the business restaurant I worked in during the day wore fewer clothes and looked more refreshed, I began to get bitter.

“I’m a writer, goddammit,” I’d mutter to myself as the other waiters chattered about their most recent one-night stands. “I don’t deserve this shit,” forgetting that the shit had been my choice. I set myself an arbitrary savings goal ($5K) and told myself when I reached the goal I was going to travel somewhere. I made it to $4,500.00 before pulling a no-show at my night job and giving 2 weeks notice at the fancy lunch place and bought a ticket to South America.

The decision to go to South America came out of nowhere, really--I thought I’d take off for a few months and learn Spanish, returning to the restaurant world with the secret knowledge that the cooks I worked with couldn’t gossip about me any more without me returning a barrage of profanities, shocking them and forever earning myself respect and ditching the nickname “Guera (blondie).”

South America cracked me wide open. All the feelings I’d been avoiding by partying too much and working too much came out, and I was really alive. Suddenly, it was okay to be overjoyed for no reason. It was okay to burst into tears at the drop of a hat. People celebrated with you, or patted your hand and said, “No llores mas, linda,” and that was that. I spent two months traversing the continent, staying with friends of friends and tagging along with hiking groups. I felt lonely, got ragingly sick, and walked four days to get to Machu Picchu anyway. Then, just before I was set to fly back to San Francisco, I met someone.

I quit the restaurant industry on December 30th, 2006; and realized during my first week off that I hadn’t seen the sun go down in California in almost ten years--every day had been spent inside a dining room getting ready for service. The change from 5-2am-er to 9-5er was strange at first, but suddenly being in sync with the rest of the world actually felt nice.

Plus, I discovered this thing called happy hour, which is almost as good as happily ever after.

Converse 100 year anniversary party--Buenos Aires

2008-06-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

Converse had a bitchin' party to celebrate their 100 year anniversary in Buenos Aires. A big warehouse was filled with with the young fashion set and free-flowing champagne until the wee hours.

Designer from Ay not Dead (right) with her DJ friend (in her design).

In front of the ladies' room.

Fashionable gents.

Last Day in Sao Paolo

2008-06-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

The last show of SPFW. I was one of the few who liked the creepy music and futuristic, doll-like collection; though everyone agreed that this designer should pair with Tim Burton on his next project!

SPFW after party. We were verrry tiiiiired.

Hugging the Zaha Hasid shoe sculpture in front of the Melissa boutique. Unfortunately, the shoes are not available yet.

But some other ones were!!!!!

We happened to run into Alexandre Herchcovitch (and a TV crew) in his boutique, which was great since I hadn't been able to ask him all the questions I wanted to backstage after his men's show. For what we talked about, you'll have to read my story!

SPFW Photo Essay

2008-06-23T10:11:00.000-07:00

Andre Lima doing some backstage pinning before his show.

Red Bull was the drink of choice at the Kenzo (yes, THAT Kenzo) party.

Beautiful Gisele Buendchen on the runway for Colcci.

Another taxi...

Me and Paolo, fashion director for Portuguese Vogue.

NEON afterparty.

The Poko Pano bikini that will be mine...

That's right. I tewtally hung with Gisele.

Ronaldo Fraga

2008-06-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

I want to keep you gorgeous readers updated on what's going on at SPFW as quickly as possible, so I'm transcribing my thoughts from the runway directly from my notebook. Coming to you (almost) live from the second row at Ronaldo Fraga:

Definitely the biggest commotion so far, this beloved designer has created the biggest production yet. The invitation arrived as a big fish wrapped in newspaper, and the runway, bathed in blue light, has giant metal bowls piled with at least 10lbs of rock salt into a pyramid. There are thick boat ropes dangling at the head of the stage and I already feel like I'm under water.

Truly theatrical. All the models lined up horizontally behind the rope and walk out one at a time, their colorful fringed visors hiding their face (except for a sparkle of pink lip gloss on all models, male and female) and making the group of semi-hidden models into a bed of coral. Beautiful, intricately embroidered shifts and fishscale-styled shoes in metallic leather. Flats and 40s style square t-strap heels, they're over the top and I love them. Hair is twisted up into false dreads and knotted on the head like rope.

Relaxed, breezy beach wear in muted colors with really creative cuts. Mix-match prints done well, like madras plad shorts with an ethnic, batic, geometric top. HUGE oversized clutch like a quilted fish. Sometime the nautical theme goes too far (like with burlap sack purses and burlap sack printed silk dresses) and I am not crazy about the fish-printed denim:

stuff but I looooove the print separates and the innovative, yet flattering, cuts on everything:

There are only a couple embroidered pieces but they are by far the best, showcasing Brazil's long (and wealthy) history as one of the world's biggest textile producers:

At the end of the show, the models come out slowly, hand-in-hand, snaking through the big salt bowls like a multi-celled, sinewy creature, stopping and sitting delicately amongst the bowls as Fraga comes sprinting out to take his bow amongst his well-deserved standing ovation.

Alexandre Herchcovitch, Summer '09 Menswear

2008-06-19T17:18:00.000-07:00

Besides the semi-creepy brownface that Alexandre Herchcovitch sent his models down the runway at Sao Paolo Fashion Week in, the Middle-Eastern influence in his menswear collection gave the clothes a beautifully ethnic edge, like the super-intricate beading on these pants:

Talk about mixing and matching prints; Herchcovitch does it with such mastery that his clothes are just on the edge of fashion-victim territory without crossing over. "I design for someone [who's] like a more-open minded person, [open] for trying new colors, shapes, and prints," Herchcovitch told me backstage.

If this collection says "politically problematic territories" to you, you're spot on: war zones, countries that suffer totalitarian government, and the traditional garb from places like Eastern Europe, Turkey, Pakistan and India were Herchcovitch's inspiration for the show.

Can't wait to see what he comes up with for the women's clothes tomorrow!

Sao Paolo Fashion Week, Day 1

2008-06-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

So much of any fashion week involves lines: standing in line, wondering if you're in the right line, craning your neck to see who else is in line, and then rushing to the door.

I arrived in Sao Paolo after 24 hours travel from San Francisco. The theme for Fashion Week this year is "Japan," in homage to Sao Paolo's huge population of Japanese people. There's three floors in the Bienal center, all connected by a huge central tower/console covered with video screens and filled with computers.

There's some beautiful exhibits here in addition to the shows (which I'll get to later),

like some current looks by Kenzo (who is also here at SPFW) and some older couture from Comme des Garcons.

Mariano Toledo

2008-06-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

The architecture in Buenos Aires mixes the old with the new, soaring glass office buildings alongside Baroque cupolas. The city’s foremost fashion architect (and founder of La Escuela de Diseñadores Mariano Toledo), does the same with his clothing designs. Patent leather and jet-bead details add a tough edge of urban shine to his flowing, feminine designs in muted colors for day; his evening collection fuses sleek, shiny fabrics with a soft structure and geometric construction. “It's very intersting to be able to talk about, 'soft structures,' a construction that's geometric and 'volumetric,'" he says from his exclusive boutique in Palermo SoHo.The designer (who studied architecture in his university days) known in the local press as the “architect fashionista” always knew he would have a life in fashion, beginning with his obsession for drawing typical costumes from different cultures, especially the Spanish and Dutch with their layers and lace.
Toledo, who counts tough female musicians like La Mala Rodriguez among his favorites, drew inspiration for his current collection from the protagonist of Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers. Toledo’s elegant warriors marched the runway at Buenos Aires Fashion Week in kimono-style jersey dresses with exaggerated shoulders, waists cinched with patent leather or beads. On almost every piece was a mandala, centered in the back of a top or the hip of a jacket, or stamped onto the arch of a stiletto bootie.

LV Spring 2008 Ready-to-Wear

2008-05-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

Louis Vuitton's spring 2008 bags seemed to parade themselves down the runway; the odels dressed in identical Nurse-Rachet-Sexy chiffon were mere accessories to the hand-splashed, painted purses reminiscent of late-nineties' street art with a high-glam gloss. Spring separates turned the models into tulle-draped bonbons in various states of delicious unwrap; clothes and scarves draped in a manner as to draw the eye to the models' right hands, which held the all-important bags. Geometric stripes on skirts and boxy tops reminded the viewer that Marc Jacobs' retro-loving hand was behind it all, but the high-gloss of sequins and satin on shoes and skirts left no doubt that the luxe was pure LV. This spring's ready-to-wear collection takes a whimsical turn away from the stiff pastel ruffles of previous years' collections; perhaps yet another sign of Jacobs' re-creation of himself as a designer, and as a person.

Stella McCartney for Adidas

2008-05-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

Amidst a flurry of tiny bowls of vegetarian risotto (Stella's a vegan, and doesn't use any animal products in any of her clothing lines) and tons of free champagne that nobody was drinking (except me. Hey, who cares if it's noon? It's FREE!), models wandered through the palatial conference center at Buenos Aires' hipodromo (racetrack) in muted-colored yoga clothes. The best of the beautiful fashion-media world was in attendance (though I didn't know who any of them were, until my Argentine photographer pointed out who edited which women's magazine, which actress was known for stealing which polo player away from his wife, etc.).

The fashion show was an acrobatics exhibit, models jogging and stretching through a nature-inspired backdrop (screens with trees and water projected on them, and a treadmill hidden inside some fake grass--it was cooler than it sounds) went through a full range of movement to show that the clothes can actually be sported-in. I'm sure I'm kind of behind the times because I actually didn't know that sport clothes could look cool...I usually work out in ratty yoga pants and whatever stretched-out t-shirt that is too old for daytime use.

The show ended with three girls doing some sped-up sun salutations and balancing poses (and the schwag was a white yoga mat with a canvas strap). Kind of made me wish I'd skipped the champagne so I could go home and do some downward-dogging. Instead, I went shopping.

So Hem So Hot

2008-05-11T18:39:00.000-07:00

And by So Hem I mean SOuthern HEMisphere, of course. Australian fashion week's just finished and while I haven't yet been to that continent, the buzz from Sass & Bide's show is loud enough to reach Buenos Aires. Here's the item that everyone's talking about:

They're "Black Rats," the ultimate skinny-jeans-meets-leggings. It's the current evolution of the skinny jean. I mean, really, how skinny can you go? This has got to be the last step before the fashion pendulum swings the other direction and mega-flares come back.

These are FEROSH! High-glam rocker all the way. And of course you've got to be a sample size to wear them (ie, NOT ME), but nobody said heroin chic is easy to attain.

They're not available on Sass & Bide's website yet, but I bet they'll sell out faster than a Tickle Me Elmo. After all, leggings are the new black.

Mixed Match

2008-03-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

Remember that show from the '90s, Clarissa Explains it All?

Clarissa, played by a now-boring, non-vajayjay baring Melissa Joan Hart, is blond and sassy and her parents pretty much leave her alone except to offer her sage advice when she gets stuck. She’s also got a wardrobe that exemplifies everything terrible about the early ‘90s: clashing colors, contrasting patterns, a total jumble that a first-job stylist must have put together, probably bitter that she was working for Nickelodeon and not MTV.

I’ve got my best Clarissa interpretation on today: I’ve combined a skirt and sweater I’ve never worn together before, and I’m feeling goood. I can’t remember who gave me the rough, off-the-shoulder, green and white striped sweatshirt, but it makes me feel pretty sophisticated (probably because it’s a cast-off from one of my mom’s hairdresser friends, because at 9 years old, I’m already tall enough to wear adult clothes). The skirt is my favorite, with not one, not two, but THREE ruffles of stonewashed blue denim cascading from a pale-pink, v-front panel of polka-dotted canvas.

P.E. is first, and as we walk around the track for a mile, two girls with big bangs scuff up dust with their feet as they pass me. They’re carrying on a conversation and they don’t notice me as I bend over to tie my red L.A. Gears.

“Stripes with polka dots?” one of them says to the other. “Doesn’t she know any better?” It’s not until I’m confronted with points and giggles at the lunch table that I realize the girls had been talking about me.

For some reason, this memory flashes through my head as I’m backstage at Buenos Aires Fashion Week, scoping the models’ personal style. There’s a tall, skinny girl smoking a cigarette (there’s no indoor smoking ban in Argentina...yet) by herself in the corner, and two models are giggling with their heads together in the makeup chairs. I photograph the solo model, noting her crazy scarf, Wellingtons and a leopard-print hoodie framing her runway-ready face. She looks bored, and is dressed very differently from the crop of shorts and oversized-sweater-wearing models that flock in a group from the soda machine to the ashtrays to the makeup chairs.

Pulling off contrasting patterns is a hard look to rock, but she’s doing it and I bet she could care less what the girls in with their heads together are saying. That’s her secret (and it was probably Clarissa’s secret, too)--not caring about the peanut gallery when you’re rocking your own style. The problem with my stripes-and-dots combo was that it wasn’t my own, and it was apparent.

Syncophant on Rye: When to Stop Thanking Your Server

2007-07-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

Seems like the good folks over at Chow.com heard that I was a terrific waitress. They've ocassionally consulted me about some "server point-of-view" questions. Here's one...

The Best of Restaurant Girl

2007-06-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

I sent Waiter over at waiterrant an email congratulating him on making it out of the restaurant industry (for now, anyway). He walked out of his last shitty job with dignity and is now working on his book full-time. Hooray, Waiter! Waiter was so cool that he even put one of my postings up on his blog as a guest post.

Since waiterrant is super popular, Restaurant Girl Speaks has gotten over 5,000 hits since my post went up this morning, so I thought I'd offer new readers a few links to some of my favorite postings. I haven't worked in a restaurant since December, and my ramblings of late have mostly been about traveling and not about food or restaurants at all. Of course, if you want to read about what waiters do when they save up their fistfuls of tips and jump ship, there's plenty of that, too.

So here's a few links to what I consider my most entertaining entries:

This one's where I met exiled Portland restarateur Michael Hebberoy and fell under the spell of his eloquent charms.

This one's where I met Angelo Garro, who's now a huge mentor and someone who lets me eat his Sicilian pasta with more frequency than I probably deserve.

Here, I expound on the vicious cycle of waitress cash earning/shopping.

If you've ever waited tables at a high-end joint, you've had them: Waiter Nightmares!

Ever thought your waitress might have been drinking during service? She probably has been.

And here, and here, I pontificate on waiting tables as a career choice.

Many chefs are truly psychotic.

And lastly, the importance of sidework in respecting your coworkers.

Where, Oh Where Has My Resto Girl Gone?

2007-06-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

In case I even have a readership anymore, Hello There. Since I got back to San Francisco from Austria/Germany/France, I haven't worked in a restaurant. Like, I'm actually DONE working in restaurants. Which was the ultimate goal, but now that I'm not a waitress any more, What the Heck am I supposed to write about? So, paralyzed, I didn't write anything for two months. Well, I actually wrote a LOT, but all paying work. Stuff like editing a website, freelancing for the warring alternative rags here in town, and trying to get my dam' name in more national magazines. All the while, drinking plenty of Jeffy B.´s homemade wine and going out to eat (I was even on Nightline a couple of weeks ago when dining at Incanto with Harry Denton).

So Restaurant Girl isn't gone, just morphed into one of those annoying chicks who's all, Um, Waiter? Let me be super high maintenence and tell you how to do your job because I used to wait tables. And because this town already has a proliferation of bloggers who eat out and write about it, I won't bore you with what might be my increasingly out-of-touch opinions about the San Francisco food scene. Nobody's more in the know about what's going down, what's hot, and what's not than waiters at the in-spots, so I'm not going to try to do that, either. Maybe I'll start cooking.

Vienna, part II

2007-03-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

Vienna has all the things I like about Europe in one place. It has the
bohemianism of the best bits of Paris, the beautiful old buildings
you find everywhere but maintained with Germanic sensibility, a
vibrant art scene, the nightlife of Madrid, and terrific food. Oh, and
GREAT coffee. Mmmmm, coffee. And the Austrian sense of humor is much
drier and British-like than the German sense of humor (which is pretty much non-existant), so I am enjoying laughing a lot.

After the first 24 hours I was ready to move there. Beautiful buildings, nice people, clean and tidy, parks, thriving arts scene, and it's more liveable (read: cheaper rent) than San Francisco. My friend Rob the Rockstar took it upon himself to show me everything we could pack into three days, and he said it barely skimmed the surface. We were out every night to several clubs (they don't close until 5 or 6am) and then sightseeing all day.

It rained on Saturday but we went to the Nachsmarkt (Noshing-Market) anyway and got a bunch of yummy antipasto for dinner. On Sunday Rob had to work at the theater (he works backstage at Vienna's oldest Cabaret, called Simpl), and during the day I went to a museum with one of his roommates and one of his girlfriends (of which he has many; it was so funny to watch the girls literally throw themselves onto him in the clubs, and, well, everywhere!).

The installation was really interesting, the artist had taken a bunch of the museum's permanent collection and arranged it as a collage interspersed with her own paintings (all of which had texts written on them), photographs of her with the museum pieces, a video installation, painting on the museum's walls…she really turned the museum/art show structure inside out and to be inside of it was almost surreal, since the exhibit was made for that museum, and it was HUGE, it took up an entire floor. We were in there for almost 3 hours and I could have done with more but it was time to go to the theater.

I got to hang out backstage for the end of the matinee, and met all four of the actors (supposedly the most well-known comedians in Austria, although Rob says there aren't many!), one of whom was voted the "Second Most Handsome Man in Austria" by a women's magazine. I don't know who the #1 was but it was probably either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rob. It was fun seeing everyone rush around for their costume changes and see the crowd and the stage on the monitors backstage, then get to sit in the sound and light booth and watch the cabaret at night. Although truthfully I only understood about half of what was going on, because so much of the humor was accented. I thought I was fluent in German and then I went to Vienna and felt like a doofus because I kept having to ask people to repeat stuff.

Wien and Wieners

2007-03-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

Having spent the weekend in beautiful Vienna with a dear friend I met in Chile last summer, I was still giggling after three days every time he would say, "This is how the Wieners do it," or something relating to Vienna's inhabitants, which are called "Wieners" in German.

I arrived after getting up at 5:30am to catch my Germanwings flight (the cheapest airline in Germany now) from Suttgart to Vienna, just under an hour trip. My friend Rob met me at the airport with a giant picture of me that he had taken of me in Chile (where I am holding a packet of maxipads called "Ella: feminine towels") and printed out in black-and-.white with the maxipads in original color.

After shopping for the fixings for a giant Austrian breakfast (bread rolls, herbed cream cheese, sliced cheese, sliced meat, yogurt, fruit, juice, coffee, granola, and hand-rolled cigarettes for his "dessert") we came back to his house (which he shares with four other people), which is nearly entirely decorated with zebra-print material. His room is painted "Porno Red" (self-described) and he spends as much time getting ready to go out as I do. In short, HOT!

After a power-nap, we saw a lot of beautiful baroque old-city Vienna as well as the Stephans Cathedral, which was a little disappointing as you have to pay 3 euros to climb the stairs up the
tower for the view, and then it stops halfway at a gift shop. We cooked dinner (vegetables in a coconut-milk curry with basmati rice and a giant salad that everyone stuck a fork in at one time or another) and then went out to a show, some friends of Rob´s were opening up for an Italian cover band called Eurosmith.

The lead singer looked and acted and sounded so much like Stephen Tyler that it was a little creepy because you´d think you were at an Aerosmith concert but then you look around and the place was filled with semi-nerdy metalheads and older Austrian Aerosmith fans, and it was in a smallish beer-hall. They totally rocked.

After the concert a group of us went clubbing, there´s an old wall that surrounded the city in the olden days, but now the wall (which isHUGE) is hollowed out and filled with shops and things, and one area had nightclub after nightclub. It was really fun, soo packed. I definitely felt like we had found the party in Vienna.

From the Outside In

2007-02-22T07:06:00.001-08:00

In San Francisco for two days between Buenos Aires and Southern Germany, to acclimate and fill my suitcase with sweaters instead of sarongs, I went out to dinner at The Restaurant. It was nice to be back, but it made me realize just how little you have in common with co-workers once you don't work together any more. Six weeks isn't very much time to be gone, but in the restaurant world it's an eternity. One of the waiters filled me in concisely.

"Well, you and Casey both left at the same time, so for about three weeks everyone was working six shifts and we hated you. Now, things have settled down and we have a new guy."

"How do you like him?" I asked.

The waiter rolled his eyes in disgust and said, "Girl, you know I don't like competition!" and flounced off, doing his perfect Liza Minelli impersonation with a cocktail tray.

Everyone looked thinner (I guess New Year's resolutions have gone into effect, either that or the six shifts a week took their toll) and seemed happy to see me. I know I was happy to see them, but beyond the polite, "So are you coming back to work here when you get back from Europe?" conversation was limited.

I've blogged about this before (probably because I change staff at restaurants pretty often), but it's always a little sad to feel so close with a group of people and then suddenly realize you actually have very little in common.

The food was great, as usual, and I allowed myself to eat everything I'd wanted to in South America but had been too hot to have an appetite for.

I've just arrived in Germany to spend some quality family time, and although I'm missing my Che horribly, it's nice to be in a tranquil little town with NO screaming traffic, NO loud construction, and where the busses stop quietly and orderly without trying to kill you. Buenos Aires and Southern Germany seem worlds apart right now.

Açaí-Oh!

2007-02-12T07:17:00.001-08:00

The foodstuff I ate in Brazil most deserving of attention was a fruit called Açaí (pronounced, "assai"), which grows in clusters of hundreds on a palm-like tree in the Amazon. Remembering having tried it once at the Cafe Brasil in Santa Cruz during my college days, I thought I would give it a try instead of the beer I was craving on the beach in Paraty. We ordered a bowl from the tall Rasta working as a waiter in the beachfront tiki shack under whose umbrellas I was hiding from the sun.

The dish arrived in a square white bowl, and Che and I had to play nice with sharing it, because it was so delicious. Passing the iced bowl back and forth from hand to hand, we dug through layers of sweet sliced banana (and let me tell you how much better bananas taste when they are picked from the tree and sliced at your table), thick honey, and toasted granola, arriving at a hard-frozen mass that was as delicious in its thick, slivered, frozen state as it was as it melted into a custardy-textured berry shake.

Açaí is wild-harvested from Amazonian Açaí palms, and then pureed, frozen, and shipped countrywide. To reconstitute the blueberry-like fruit, it is mixed with a concentrated Guarana syrup (Guarana is another Amazonian fruit, whose energy-giving properties have popularized it on the shelves of hippy food-stores in the USA) and whizzed about in an industrial blender (the fruit is so hard it will break a normal blender after a few uses). It's then either eaten plain, topped with strawberries or bananas, or mixed with granola. Sold from açaí-huts (like smoothie shacks, these little kiosks vend fresh juices, pastries, and plastic cups of açaí), bus station snack shops, or restaurants as breakfast, dessert, or a snack.

I ate it ALL THE TIME on vacation, and it's the food I'll most miss from Brazil. Like a healthy ice-cream subsitute, it's sweet, full of antioxidants and fiber, and gives you energy while filling you up for hours.

Rio, Rio, Rio!

2007-02-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Rio. We are staying at a hostel in Ipanema, which is a neigborhood as well as a beach. We got a private room for the first time in a few nights, which will be nice, as staying in a dorm is not so nice as a couple, especially when, as last night (our first night in Rio) we shared a dorm with 9 other people and one small window. Needless to say, sleep did not come as it was about 100 degrees and the fan didn´t do much once the other 9 came home from the club and passed out.

The Trindade Sea and Forest hostel was the best place we´ve stayed so far, except that the first night we slept at reception, which was loud, and the second night in a dorm. It is run by two hippy yoga instructors from Montreal, a couple in their 40s. It´s all wood, and in the rainforest! I had never been in the rainforest before and there are like 7 plants all growing around one tree, everything is hot, nothing dries, and the bugs are HUGE and LOUD. Plus there are monkeys and jaguars (which we did not see) and giant flying cockroaches and big frogs and huge butterflies and hummingbirds and parrots in many colors (all of which we saw).

Trindade is such a beautiful place. Basically the rainforest comes right down to the beach (which was the perfect beach I had been looking for since arriving in Brazil. Soft, powdery sand, water that is dark green until you get in it, and then it´s so clear you can see your toes when you are chest deep, nice big waves, although it was too expensive to rent a surfboard for me) and in between there´s a tiny little town with lots of campgrounds and no amenities like telephone or internet or supermarket. It was so relaxing and we would have stayed there the whole time but we ran out of cash and the nearest ATM was a half-hour bus ride away so we left and came to Rio.

So far Rio is great. You have all the beachy stuff I wanted here in Brazil, plus city attractions like clubs and dancing and great restaurants (we had Italian last night, although still all we are eating pretty much is fruit and vegetables, the salads were great), and then the big mountains which are soft and curved.

The food here is nothing to write home about, I have basically been living off of papaya, coconuts on the beach, and fruit juice. Things like coffee and alcohol are making me feel really bad (strange, since that was basically my liquid diet as a waitress!), so I´m feeling great, very cleansed, and ready for the daring Rio bikini!!!!

Paraty and beyond

2007-01-26T06:05:00.000-08:00

Today I am brown instead of pink because I have bought every cream for sunburn that everyone recommended to me for my skin, finally finding one yesterday that worked, called Pasta do Agua, which I think had zinc oxide. Anyway, it left me white as a ghost and everyone in the supermarket where we went to shop for dinner things last night stared. I am getting used to the stares, as I am the tallest person I have seen by far since leaving San Francisco and the only tattooed girl.

The difference in going out in the street alone and going out in the street with Felix, both here in Brazil and in Buenos Aires, is profound. Now I see why in many third world countries it is not recommended for women to travel alone. I guess I got used to it last summer in South America, but it was winter and I was bundled up. Everyone here (including me) traipses around in bikinis and little shorts and sarongs, and the attention I receive when on my own is not so nice.
Paraty is a beautiful little colonial town, HOT HOT HOT as is everywhere. I prefer it to sleepy and expensive Ilhabela. There are a lot of little islands in the ocean right around here with beaches, and we are going to look for a boat to take us around for the day (recommended by some Argentinans our age we met at the pousada on Ilha bela. So far, we have spoken with MANY more Argentinans than Brazilians, the whole of Argentina really IS on holiday in Brazil right now!)

We will head to Trinidade next, a hippy little beach spot, before going to Rio next week. We´ll hit up either Buzios or Ubatuba on our way back to Sao Paulo. Buzios is supposed to be amazing, but the Lonely Planet says that since it was made chic by Brigitte Bardot in the sixties, prices there in the summer are double what they are in the rest of Brazil.
This air conditioned internet cafe is a welcome respite from the hot street (and everything is delightfully hot-looking through the Blue Blockers I haven´t taken off since arriving, Thanks Shane!!) but we are going to find a beach and swim for a bit. HOT HOT HOT.

Everyone hear really does wear Havaianas. It´s like the national shoe.

Ilhabela

2007-01-26T06:01:00.000-08:00

The little island of Ilhabela is off the coast of Brazil between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. We have spent the last couple of days lounging on the beaches and sipping fresh coconut milk from the fruit through little straws. There are tiki huts on the beach and vendors walk up and down selling jewelry, sarongs, fake tattooes, barbecued cheese, and popsicles. It´s exactly what I´d imagined it to be and it feels really surreal to be here, burned pink (I used SPF 15 religiously but burned up anyway, have bought SPF 35 for the outrageous sum of about $15 US dollars for a tiny tube--sunscreen and aloe vera and other skin products are really expensive here, I think because the only people who seem to need them are white tourists!! I am by far the whitest person I have seen here so far).

We are staying in a little pousada (like a low-rent B&B) up on a hill with a view of the ocean and coconut trees all around, banana plants, etc. There are giant ants and salamanders in the room (big bugs, little lizards), which is a whitewashed little bungalow with a low door that I hit my head on three times in the first day. After being reduced to tears twice, I received a sign from Felix, taped on the door, that reads (Careful! don´t hit your head again, in Portuguese). Fx speaks a bit of Portuguese, and understands much more than I do (which is about 20% for him of what people say), but luckily everyone is really friendly. They speak in Portuguese to us, and we speak in Spanish to them, and there are a lot of smiles and thumbs up and thumbs down, and things seem to work out.

It´s really relaxing to be doing nothing. It´s also flipping hot here, about 90 degrees 24 hours a day, but sometimes nice winds blow, and the humidity is very high. It rained most of our first day here but nobody seems to mind and goes about their business as usual, since it´s warm anyway so the rain (which is warm) can be kind of refreshing.

You Can Take the Girl Out Of the Restaurant but You Can't Take the Restaurant Out Of the Girl

2007-01-18T08:53:00.000-08:00

Going from my spoiled-princess-waitress San Francisco lifestyle, to the middle of a humid, sleepy, Argentinean summer is a LOT harder than I thought it would be. I was working 16 hours a day before I left San Francisco, writing and putting in bankrollin’ 9-hour shifts at The Restaurant, and now I’m doing nothing but sitting around in Buenos Aires, moping.

Isn’t that awful? I feel like such a spoiled brat; my honey rented us an apartment in posh Palermo, dragged all of this stuff from his place in bohemian San Telmo to make me comfortable (like candles, a giant fan, and loads of fresh flowers), and I sit here whining about how I miss San Francisco and my friends and my cat.

I think I’m just a workaholic; a friend of mine recently said to me, “I took a vacation once in 1985 and didn’t like it very much,” and that resonates so true. With no pressing deadlines (I’ve done some work over here but only a couple of small stories) and no pressure to jump and run to put on lip gloss and curl my hair at 4:30 for work, I feel completely useless.

I should be taking this time to write, but I’m too busy sulking about missing the cat and being afraid I’m going to miss something exciting in San Francisco. Being still and having no agenda each day in a strange place makes me realize how important running around the city and having tons of crazy deadlines meant to me. Traveling before, I’d always been in the company of other foreigners, staying at hostels and getting to know people. Now it’s just me and him, and while that’s lovely too, I need more external stimulation.

We’re going to the beaches of Brazil for 2 weeks, leaving Monday, which I’m really looking forward to. My Che is a workaholic as well, and I don’t think either one of us feels really comfortable being on vacation at home; being on vacation in another place (Brazil) should be easier.

I’ve been eating out some, but nothing really to write home about; it’s so hot that my main staples are ice cream and salads. The good news is I’m much healthier now that I’m not drinking like a fish and consuming 2,000 calories a night at midnight, as is the Restaurant Way. I’ve got time for exercise so I’ve been running this week, but I’m so exhausted for no reason (I think living my life in Spanish, plus the heat, is really taking a toll on me) that I haven’t been writing at all.

Many guidebooks say that January is the worst month to visit Buenos Aires and I have to agree; many things (like restaurants, museums, shops) close down during this month as everyone’s on holiday, and it’s really hot and humid. The fresh breezes that blow through sometimes are very welcome.

Absenteeism

2006-12-27T14:45:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't put up a real post in a while. I've been busy working on this, which ran on the front cover of the SF Weekly today. I've also been packing up, giving notice at The Restaurant, and preparing for a 2.5 month jaunt, again. I'll be with Che in Buenos Aires for 6 weeks, then back in SF for four days, then with the 'rents in Europe for three weeks. Stuff is going into storage, the cat is going with a co-worker, I'm drinking way too much to cope with the stress of it all (which ISN'T working), and stuff.

Happy Holidays

2006-12-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

I am a robot

2006-12-18T00:26:00.000-08:00

Someone just posted a comment on the blog asking, "Are you a robot?" I'm not really sure what that meant but I liked it a lot.

This morning, ie 1:30pm, I was at Trader Joe's getting a few things: a Judy's breadstick, a bottle of green juice, a blemish stick, and kitty litter. Pretty typical waitress morning stuff to get. I was shuffling around in my furry parka and flip-flops because I'd just gotten a pedicure and sipping on the tiny cup of free coffee they give you while you shop.

After the checker finished ringing up pre-made sushi for the fit lesbian couple in matching red fleece vests, army green cargo pants, black messenger purses, and Oakleys, he took one look at my purchases, and me, and asked, "You just wakin' up, girl?"

"How did you know that?" I asked. "It's one-thirty pm!"

"You know, you just all quiet, sippin' on your coffee," he smiled. I told him I was a waitress and as I left TJs (after telling him he should come to The Restaurant sometime; I just can't help myself!) I heard him say to the person in line behind me,

"I knowed she worked nights. I could just tell."

The conversation and the bustle of the grocery store fading behind me, I padded home with my bag in hand, smiling to myself because I have a secret existence here in this busy city: that of a night owl.

There are plenty of us, and you'll recognize us as the ones in the bar at 1am who aren't drunk, but chatting with the bartender sincerely about how his night is going. We're the ones in the sunglasses at the coffeeshop at 2pm, lingering over the New York Times and a bagel. The streets of San Francisco are my domain at lunchtime and before, I share moments with bike messengers and homeless people as I wander the streets just for a look (I can't get enough of this city, even though I've known it all my life), corporate types bustling through their mornings with eyes wide shut.

Coming home at midnight on a Sunday, my whole neighborhood is asleep, and once again I have the streets to myself. I never guessed working late at night would make me feel that the city belongs to me, personally, because I see it during off-peak hours.

Sometimes I have weeks where I'm sick of serving people, jealous of their shiny Christmas presents exchanged in cozy booths as I open yet another bottle of expensive Burgundy for people who are paying to ignore me. Today, though, walking calmly through a city that felt like it belonged exclusively to me, I sipped my tiny coffee and relished my existence.

Holla!

2006-12-13T03:04:00.000-08:00

It seems The Man has as good of taste as the people I work with: Bourbon and Branch (one of whose bartenders works with me at The Restaurant) was named NUMBER ONE new bar in America by both Citysearch and MSN. Yeah! I knew that those strong Derby Manhattans had to reach a powerful editor somewhere. My boy Neyah is an amazing bartender; he's an alcohol intellectual that really gets off on stirring the rye the perfect amount of times so that it reaches the most exact temperature, flaming an orange rind just a half inch above a quivering surface tension of alcohol so the oil catches fire and when you drink the drink you fall off your barstool. I may be an elitist service and alcohol geek, but I love it when the things I love get recognition for being as awesome as they are. Holla! (Image unwitting courtesy of SFGate.com)

Stewey Stewerson

2006-12-12T13:31:00.000-08:00

One night at The Restaurant a couple weeks ago, I noticed an extremely tall and attractive young man sitting at the bar. He was glued to his Blackberry, and I thought, "Sweeet! an out-of-town business-type guy, dining alone? Purr-fect prey."

About ten minutes later, a girl came to meet him and they had dinner. I thought no more of it (I don't bat my eyes at boys who are on dates) and went about the evening's busy service. The next night, though, this guy came in with a different girl, and sat two bar stools down from where he'd sat the night before. Two dates, two nights, one restaurant? C'mon!

Two nights later, in with a different girl! When I came in for dinner the night after that, I had a hard time keeping a straight face when the only available bar stool was next to this fella and yet a different girl, but I had a great time telling my date about how many times I'd seen him that week.

MySpace, Match.com, Hot or Not? Where was he meeting these girls, and why was he bringing them into the same restaurant, night after night? Was he clueless or just a playa?

A couple of days later, I had to wait on him. The hostess was cruel enough to tell me the MySpace dater's name, and we had a hilarious time making fun of him, and speculating the personality-type his poor date (she was an eager one, she seemed to like him. Oh, how we wanted to warn the girl of Stew's history!).

I realized after one particularly loud explosion of laughter that we might be within earshot of his table, and told the hostess we had to keep it down after that. She pointed out that anyone who'd bring in eight different girls to the same restaurant in two weeks deserved to hear the staff of the restaurant making fun of him, and that our restaurant also has a menu item of the same name as the MySpace dater. This shouldn't really have assuaged my unprofessional, smack-talking related guilt, but it did.

And ol' Stew had the nerve to:
1) ask me what The Restaurant was known for on the menu--as if he hadn't already eaten everything on it!
2) step into the waiter station (which is tiny), very close to me, and whisper huskily: "Is this where the restroom is?"--as if he hadn't been to the restroom sixteen times here in the past two weeks.

He must live in the neighborhood, but c'mon Stewey Stewerson, find a new restaurant! The staff of ours cannot keep our faces straight any more!

Dining like a Diva

2006-12-07T12:04:00.000-08:00

Here's something for you to do next Wednesday:

The quirky folks at the Barndiva in Healdsburg will be hosting a winemaker dinner. Winemaker dinners feature different wines from one winery, paired with an extended menu created especially for the occasion.

The winemaker dinner at the Barn Diva is sure to be a decidedly entertaining event.
First, it's hosted by the irrepressible Lukka P. Abramski Feldman, he of numerous accents and extensive wit. Also the host of Sonoma County public access TV's newest show, What Lukka Likes, Feldman will deliver as many stinging intellectual barbs as he does glasses of champagne.

Second, the meal's going to be served family-style. Gathering around the long mahogany table at the rear of the restaurant, guests will help themselves to luscious crabcakes while mingling. Yum.

Third, as opposed to being held in a posh, white-tableclothed establishment, the winemaker dinner will be Healdsburg's answer to urban chic this Wednesday. If you haven't ever been to the Barndiva, it would be worth going to check this out. I've eaten there and the food is good.

Here's the menu:

Esterlina Vineyards & Everett Ridge

~Fresh Crispy Dungeness Crab Cake, Blood Orange & Meyer Lemon Aioli
Paired with: Esterlina Vineyards, Riesling, Cole Ranch, Mendocino 2004

~ Barndiva Chicken Pot Pie
Paired with: Everett Ridge, Chardonnay, Russian River Valley 2004

~ Grilled Petit Filet Mignon Foraged Wild Mushrooms, Sautéed Chard, Pinot Noir Demi Glace Paired with: Esterlina Vineyards, Pinot Noir, Anderson Valley 2004 & Everett Ridge, Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley 2004

~ Molten Scharffen Berger Chocolate Cake
Paired with: Esterlina Vineyards, Porto, Sonoma County 2004

$85 (this is a steal for one of these events)

Tripe Tacos

2006-12-04T01:43:00.000-08:00

I've just arrived home from the party of the year (according to a Restaurant Boy); Boulevard chef de cuisine Ravi's 30th. Renting a taco truck (the most reputable in town, according to gal pal the Tablehopper) and parking it out front of Wish on 12th and Folsom, the birthday boy filled up the bar with 200 friends and chefs galore.

Highlights of the evening:
-Drinking a too-sweet Sazerac on the rocks (Pernot on ice with a splash of rye whisky, anyone?), which made me behave myself because I had to drink it really slowly.

-Getting convinced by Incanto chef Chris Cosentino to try a tripe taco. I did, but promptly handed everything after the first bite to the nearest bystander. I'll leave the offal to the "lips and assholes--the other white meat" chef.

-Hearing a fan of Cosentino's praise his restaurant as such: "Dude, I brought a date into Incanto the other night, and although she'd been a vegetarian for eight years, she broke her vegetarianism to try a plate of your calf's brains!" High fives ensued.

-Passing trays of cupcakes after an uproarious round of singing "Happy Birthday" at midnight.

-Watching two line cooks get taken out roughly by Wish's bouncer, and hearing the sweet-natured chef of Nopa offer to go "Be the big guy crying in the corner." I don't really know what this means, but it provided me with a hilairous mental picture. Maybe the sazerac and the cupcake had something to do with that.

**

Very different from last night's cocktail party, a ritzy affair Telegraph Hill. Highlights of last night's party:

-The libations. Billecart Salmon, Flowers pinot noir, and Hansel chardonnay were the respective sparkling, red, and white wines. The food was superb, although the slender society women did not eat much of it.

-The view. Right at the base of Coit Tower, the new home (for which the cocktail/housewarming party was thrown) had a stunning outlook of the lit-up tower and the bay.

-Talking to [one of] the owner[s] of YouTube (who is only a year older than I am) and getting out all three of the questions that my date had double dog dared me to ask:

1) "So, you're the owner of YouTube. What's it feel like to be you?"
2) "Do you read perezhilton.com?"
3) "Do you need a haircut? Because our hostesses hairdresser was invited and he's right over there."

Although my first inclination had been to rudely blurt out all three statements at once, I wound up politely inserting myself in conversation with YouTube guy, who turned out to be a down-to-earth and semi-awkward computer dude, just as I had imagined.

-Telling all of the people I spoke with that I was related to my date in different ways. I told several people that Jeff was my husband, others that he was my cousin, and a few that he was my brother. I plan to sit back and wait to see how long it takes before rumours of my incestuousness start to fly.

After the cocktail party (and admiring how lovely Jeff's sculpture looked in our hostesses living room), six of us dined at Zuni, which gets mixed reviews from just about everyone I mention it to. We had a nice experience, I think both the food and the service are kind of, "eh." but the oysters are always stupendous. Our bartender was ROTTEN, he shook my gin martini extremely hard, was generally surly, and forced us to close our tab instead of allowing us to transfer it to the table.

Afterward, beloved Hotel Biron (industry night tomorrow, anyone?) called and sure enough, we wound up talking to the kitchen staff as they got off work and popped next door to pop some corks as well as our waiter (who commiserated with us about the snooty French bartender) for a chunk of the evening as we were leaving.

'Tis the season for cocktail parties and I look forward to asking more inappropriate questions and lying about the status of my dates for many weeks to come.

Rioja to the Max

2006-11-29T11:34:00.000-08:00

The Restaurant was pretty slow on Monday night, what with the freezing weather and the rain and all, so three out of seven waiters finished relatively early and cabbed across town with one of the bartenders to Tsunami, an ueber-hip sushi joint in the Western Addition with a sake god-in-residence called JoJo. We lucked out and got the biggest table in the house (it was nearly 11pm and they were probably almost closed) and devoured Stellas, sushi, and sake until fishily happy. The waitress was someone I knew from junior college up north in the wine country, and although I'd seen her around town a lot this last year, I could never place her. She nailed it as soon as she saw my face, exclaiming, "Restaurant Girl! The only other non-sorority type from the swim team! Man, they sure thought we were freaks back then, didn't they?"

After settling up (and how is it that I always wind up paying fifty bucks for sushi when I just have a couple of pieces? I'll leave it at that, though, because there's nothing worse than a bill-haggler, especially with a group of waiters) and tipping Lydia enough to have made staying late worth her while, we took our requisite mixed-sake shots with her. It's trouble in paradise when a group of waiters go out--they're most likely all bound to know at least one person in the restaurant they dine in (which is why they went there in the first place), if they don't know someone already, they are bound to be friends with their waiter/chef/bartender by the time they leave, and restaurant people express their affection for one another by knocking back free alcohol together.

**

We were collected by an off-duty hostess from The Restaurant, and made our way to the Hotel Biron, an amazing little wine bar on Rose Alley, just behind the Zuni Cafe on Market Street. I'd found out last week due to a tip from chef de cuisine Ravi of Boulevard that the Hotel Biron celebrates industry night on Mondays; all bottles of wine are thirty percent off! With the help of a dear friend of mine (another waitress/writer type; there are more of us than we'd care to admit in this fine city) we went through a bottle of Dr. Loosen's Riesling and three bottles of a Rioja who's name escapes me. The Hotel Biron is great for a number of reasons, numbers three, four, and five of them are goat cheese, sheep cheese, and cow cheese (reasons #1 and #2 are, of course, red and white wine), on which I nibbled as I sucked down the temperanillo blend. Hotel Biron also has an extensive by-the-glass list, and the wine-geeky bartenders have often let me try each one of the type I wanted (explaining in-depth along the way) until I found a wine that I liked, then gone from there to discuss the different bottles, selecting one that was perfect.

We shut the place down and trundled back to one waitresses' house with a final bottle of Rioja, showing each other our dance moves until 3:30am. I don't go out with the staff of The Restaurant very much; hours are long and we all have our own lives (and aren't waestrels like so many other waiters--including myself at other points of my life--are), so when we get together for an Outing like the sushi/wine night, it seems really special, and I feel lucky to be working with a group of really smart, really interesting folks.

Greasy Breakfast

2006-11-25T16:16:00.000-08:00

In need of a greasy fix? Check out my highly subjective roundup of Sonoma, Marin, and Napa County breakfasts here, or here.

Bourbon and Branch

2006-11-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

I recently, and belatedly, checked out the new speakeasy everyone's been talking about, Bourbon and Branch. Visiting the bar at 10pm with my roomie and a dapper bartender friend who's newly remodeled Luau has just reopened under the name Mercury (with the owners of Zebulon), we were escorted through the heavy wooden door and into the red-wallpapered room for our reserved seats at the bar. (FYI, the bar can't usually be reserved but Restaurant Girl has friends behind many bars in the city, and it was a pretty slow night in the Trender-loin). (photo unwitting courtesy of SFGate)

Bourbon and Branch is like a bartender's wet dream. First, guests can't just walk right in the door. They're viewed through the eye of a camera, which immediately makes them more docile (according to our bartender). If the potential quaffers look like a bunch of jerks, they aren't necessarily let in. A reservation is a must (even if the place is empty), so there's no bar-hopping.

Second, the bar features all kinds of esoteric bourbon, which for some reason is always a bartender's favorite drink (barkeeps, please weigh in here: tell Restaurant Girl why y'all love the mash so much!).

Third, on the back page of the hefty menu (for sale: $500) are listed The House Rules, two of which include, "Do not order a Cosmo," and "The bartender is always right." More of a rule follower than a rule breaker, Restaurant Girl felt inherently comfortable in this purposefully clandestine setting (a speakeasy) at which the parameters are defined, and immediately ordered the Rouge #10. A delicious concoction of house-infused pepper gin (Tanqueray number 10) muddled with fresh strawberries and lime juice and decorated with a few drops of Pastis on the surface of the drink (served up in a martini glass), it was probably the best cocktail I've ever had, hands down (and I don't throw around superlatives like that on a regular basis).

Brandon drank an old-fashioned (he's a bartender, so he likes bourbon, of course!) and although I egged my roommate on mercilessly to order a cosmo (she really does drink them sometimes, but she's not in the industry any more so we'll forgive her that), she followed the rules and ordered some sort of orangey-vodka drink also in a martini glass.

Another round followed, and was a little blurry, as second rounds are wont to be. I allowed the impeccable Neyah to choose my drink (actually, he offered, which was a huge weight off of my mind, and he's such a good bartender that I trusted him to pick something that would be the logical progression), and it was a salad-flavored martini, which is a lot better than it sounds. Probably something like Hendricks gin and very thin cucumber slices, with a tincture droppered over the top (they take their mixology very seriously at Bourbon and Branch; drops are dripped, alcohols are painstakingly stirred until they achieve just the right temperature from the ice cubes that drop down, impurity-free, out of the special ice machine that delivers them nine degrees colder than regular ice), and perfection is achieved.

**
After gentleman Brandon hailed roomie a cab and put her in it, he and I headed over for a late night snack to Farmer Brown, on our bartender's recommendation. DUD! Our bartender had told us it could be give or take, and this night it was definitely take. The joint was empty at 12:15, the bartender energetically sucking face with an off-duty waitress on the patron side of the bar. He grudgingly threw menus at us and sullenly made his way to his side of the bar, staring us aggressively down until I timidly asked what was better: the fried catfish or the chicken. Without an apology, he announced the kitchen stopped serving at midnight and B and I rushed out the door to Globe, which although not the oh-so-hot-spot it was a few years back (so I hear, this was actually my first time dining at Globe), was an oasis of good food and impeccable service in the middle of a foggy San Francisco night.

We had martinis (Stoli for him, Tanqueray for me; sadly, Globe does not have a sassy cocktail menu, nor esoteric alcohols) and some delicious snacks. The macaroni and cheese was bechemel-y and delicious, the salad lardon with just the right amount of bacon grease to wilt the frisee (and two little poached eggs, perfect for sharing), and the white-truffle mushroom pizza gave off heavenly odors. B let me take charge of the menu and discourse with the waiter and order whatever I wanted (what a guy), and the waiter was knowledgeable and friendly, something that's not so easy to find to find at 1am.

A not-so-cynical Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T21:47:00.000-08:00

Until yesterday, I hadn't any plans for Thanksgiving. I was going to stay in San Francisco and not go on a bike ride and wallow in the misery of being an orphan in my home town (my family does not "do" holidays, so to speak of) and refresh www.perezhilton.com every thirty seconds, but I was invited last minute to celebrate Thanksgiving at the Burwells' up in Healdsburg, from where I now sit as the high-powered men play pool and smoke cigars and the ladies sit on comfortable ottomans and sip juicy zinfandel.

I arrived around 3pm after taking a scenic route through the horribly constructed new downtown Windsor and past the old family farm, which Grandma sold three or so years ago to finance her retirement and her move to Oregon. Visiting Healdsburg is always bittersweet for me. It's strange to suddenly be a celebrity of sorts for being a fifth-generation Healdsburger; when grandma was growing up Healdsburg was barely a town, and when I was growing up it was not the groovy land of Diesel jeans and fine zinfandel it is now. I can't even afford to live here now but my status as built-in hick lends me a street cred that people bring up at dinner parties for an entertaining conversation tidbit.

There were twenty some-odd folks here; friends, family, and orphans like me. None of my family lives in town any more, and I don't know that my mediocre salary as a freelance writer and Restaurant Girl will ever afford me the luxury of the beautiful surroundings I'm in right now. That's okay, though, because the paths that I am following in my late twenties seem to be taking me in a direction I never thought I'd see, and I'm thankful for that. Greetings, all, and count your blessings be they large or small.

Creepy Babies

2006-11-22T01:54:00.000-08:00

This is what happens when I stop by the bar, alone, on the way home from work. Instead of writing about something amusing, I surf the internet and find truly strange videos like this.

Just when I thought my biological clock had started ticking! I'll watch this video if I start getting too wistful about how cute babies are.

What do you think?

2006-11-15T11:42:00.001-08:00

About the new blog layout? Please leave your comments.

Ruthless Insouciance

2006-11-15T00:40:00.000-08:00

As so often is the case, my day off was filled with big plans yesterday that disappeared into the stratosphere as I slept through calls from my friends urging me out of bed and on the bike (it was a gorgeous morning, and in my previous life I was a mediocre bike racer)and groggily picked up the cell only at 11am when a writer friend called to say he'd be in the city doing research for his first feature in Details magazine (congratulations!).

I rolled out of bed (only about an inch as I sleep on a mattress on the floor)and washed my face (something that I never let slide no matter how drunk/hungover I am, thanks to my mother's semi-rigorous upbringing) while boiling water for a gourdful of yerba mate. As usual, I f*****d around for way too long on www.perezhilton.com, a ridiculous website that I've been obsessed with for over a year. I don't have television and rarely watch movies, but some cruel friends of mine who know how shallow I can be plied me with trashy celebrity tabloid magazines last year until my addiction was firm and now I feel like Hollywood is my own personal comic book. I couldn't name Kate Bosworth's last movie (or any of them, for that matter) and I couldn't tell you what Nicolette Sheridan's voice sounds like, but I breathlessly follow their love lives and weight losses.

I finally made it out of the house by 1pm but only up the street for a much needed mani-pedi (where I enriched my brain with Ready Made magazine as opposed to my beloved US Weekly) and afterward lazed around the house doing god-knows-what. I know I sent some emails that must have meant something, because I have more stories assigned (for national magazines as well as San Francisco publications, hurrah!) but didn't write a word. I want to feel like I'm this very deep person but the truth is I adore my bourgeois-bohemian (boo-bo?) lifestyle, and although waiting tables is starting to take its toll on my body, the luxuries it affords me (like coming home last night and bidding on a T-Mobile Sidekick II on ebay although it doesn't even match my wireless carrier) are important to me and that makes me feel shallow as hell.

Laundry called around 5pm, and then I went to yoga until 9pm; the class size was me, another student who'd been practicing exactly as long as I have (off and on for a couple of years, more heavily in the last two months) and was at the same skill level, and the teacher. It was excellent, Wendy gave us lots of personal attention and I felt like I really improved. I left tranquilly and filled with love. In short, ready for cocktails.

I went down to The Restaurant all by my lonesome, sat at the bar, and put down a gorgeous hamburger and a serving of bread pudding with caramel ice cream. And three cocktails. I thoroughly enjoyed the (mile-long) walk home, which is absolutely unbearable after my eight-hour shifts (twice as long as a normal Restaurant shift) but after a 5,000 calorie meal felt invigorating. Nick Cave is still singing directly to me through my headphones, and I'm struck by how after almost two years of living here (which have passed by literally in the time it takes to say "I.love.city.living."), I am still struck dumb by the littlest things like a theater poster in the window of a locksmith's shop, the way the air smells at 12:13am in the fall, and the fact that you can never stop discovering little bits of beauty at least every other hour when you live in San Francisco.

Don't You Wish You Were a Waiter?

2006-11-13T03:45:00.001-08:00

Because if you were, you could do fun stuff like this when you got off of work.

Tonight we rented every single lane at the bowling alley in the Presidio, drank Smirnoff Ice malt beverages, and ate nachos with warm processed cheese-food that came out of a machine. The entire staff of The Restaurant, from bussers to bartenders to cooks to the owners. While most of the balls rolled made it into the gutters more often than not, we had style, as proved by one waiter's BAD-ASS moves while bowling. Yeah-yuh!

Acid Tango

2006-11-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

There´s something truly amazing about a 10-piece tango band made up of dreadlocked Argentineans all in their 20s. Last night a group of us went to see underground acid-tango group Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro play a show to release their new CD ¨Mucha Mierda.¨ There were four accordionists, four violinists, a cellist, a bassist, a pianist, and a vocalist. The accoridonists sat on plastic chairs in the front of the stage with the violinists standing behind them. To go along with the ¨A lot of shit¨ theme, the accordionists´plastic chairs had toilet seats zip-tied to them, and the playlists were written on rolls of toilet paper that hung from the low microphones.

The group was shaggy and the smell of hashish wafted through the air. The muisc was wild, untamed. I don´t know where accordions got the reputation for being dorky, but after hearing these instruments play the same notes in semi-perfect time, watching the cute boys passionately stomp the floor and coax, and slam, and shove, the tango notes from the accordions, close enough to hear the bellows slap together, was a bold realization: this is the silent soundtrack that´s playing whenever I have really, really good sex.

I´d seen a tango show before, at the famous Cafe Tortoni, when I was in Buenos Aires this summer. It was lovely, a small venue with slick, gorgeous music and glittery dancers. Last night was piano pounding, accordions shrieking in minor-note disharmony, the music teetering just on the edge of out-of-control, and sometimes the drunk singer would growl in the microphone while wearing a motorcycle helmet perched on the back of his head.

The place that tango has had in my life so far has been relegated to movies, stereotypical sultry women with roses in their hair, flingling fishneted legs about with controlled passion. Later tango, mixed with groovy electronic lounge music, graced my stereo when it was chillout time and I had friends over I wanted to impress with my hip, worldly, tastes in music. Tango in Buenos Aires is a normal part of life, a type of folkloric music that has never gone away and had a resurgence (like bluegrass in America). The passion in both in the music and in its playing, is in-your-face without boundaries like the passion for living, and loving, is here.

Now THAT'S Fusion!

2006-11-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

I didn't think I would be posting from Buenos Aires but I have been to so many restaurants here in just two days that I had to dish some out for the rest of the world. I arrived Thursday morning after an exceptionally long coach flight, with which the details of I shall not bore you. It was hot and sunny here in Argentina's gorgeous capital, and after resting at the pad in San Telmo (the ancient, bohemian neighborhood where tango was born and where the freelance food and fashion photographer I'm visiting lives) for a couple of hours we went just round the corner for goat cheese sandwiches.

My friend "Che" (the international nickname for all Argentineans, hence the moniker Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Argentineans are so named because they say, "che" like North Americans say "hey.") is vegetarian, even though his homeland is home to the best steaks on the planet, and as I was raised vegetarian for most of my life and only started eating meat once I became Restaurant Girl, it's nice to take a break from the heaviness San Franciscan restaurant food and find a different side of Argentinean cuisine. The sandwiches were excellent and it was lovely to sit outside in the sun and watch the street.

There aren't many great sidewalk cafes I can think of in San Francisco (and if you can think of any besides the Cafe du Soleil, where I already spend a LOT of time, please let me know!) so when I get to a city that's got a sidewalk-cafe culture, I happily plop my ass down in the sun and drink coffee or wine, or both, and watch the world go by.

Yesterday Che and I had lunch at an Asian-themed restaurant in Palermo, the ritzy neighborhood right on the river with beautiful ancient trees waving over the cobbled sidewalks. Palermo reminds me of Hayes Valley or downtown San Luis Obispo with the gorgeous weather, shady trees, and cute little boutiques--there was even a Kid Robot store with some great dresses that I refrained from buying (I'm too tall for most clothes here, unfortunately). The food was great, and what I love about restaurants here is that you can get a "Menu del Dia" for something like 15 pesos (or $5) with a main course, a dessert, and a beverage (wine, water, or coffee) and it's good.

The hip-factor of the restaurants here reminds me of the San Francisco dining scene but more relaxed (and everyone's speaking Spanish). For dinner last night, Che took me to Olson, a Northern-European-themed restaurant. He had a baked goat-cheese appetizer (I think vegetarians here must eat a lot of goat cheese) and I had some little fishes (I think it might have been pickled herring) with arugula, caviar, and blanched potatoes on brioche. We both had the pumpkin-Gruyere-mandarin-mushroom risotto for our main course and an apple bread-pudding for dessert.

The bottle of Malbec Che chose do accompany dinner was a little overwhelming but I have made it a policy to always drink Malbec while in South America and he remembered that. The waiter, who had an ueber-hip mini-mullets and a hot body packed into a tight brown-and-white t-shirts like all of the waiters, brought us each a shot of vodka as a present after dinner; Che knew the hostess at the restaurant, so we had a great table, and everyone made much of the fact that it was my birthday. One vodka was infused with chiles and the other with honey.

I love how the restaurants I've been to so far feature foods from different cultures but with a decidedly Argentinean flair. Also I dig how the waiters here wear leather fanny-packs (like some hairdressers do) with all of the tools of their trade in them; there's a pocket for a notebook, a wine-key, and pens. I'd get one here except impressionable me no longer wants to work as a San Francisco waiter--now I want to move to Buenos Aires and be a starving writer. All in all, it was a great birthday.

Celebrating in Style

2006-11-01T10:39:00.000-08:00

Hello world...I'm leaving in just a few hours to celebrate my birthday in style--in Buenos Aires. Will return with more snarky restaurant reviews and work complaints November 10!

Saucy

2006-10-30T10:25:00.000-08:00

I understand now why some restaurant owners do not let their employees hang out at the bar of the restaurant when they get off work. Friday night, after seeing Tom Petty at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, we stopped in at Sauce for a bite after pushing bikes up out of the Civic Center BART station and realizing all of the rock n' roll had made us a little peckish. I hadn't been to Sauce before but kept hearing reviews by co-workers and friends. It's one of the few late-night dining spots that serves decent food and wine until 1am and so it naturally draws an industry crowd.

We ordered two Starbucks martinis (good, although a little sweet), the tomato bisque, and fried calamari. The food was very good (we went with our bartender's recommendation for everything), especially the truffled-white-cheddar-on-foccacia sandwich sticks that came with the bisque. The calamari tubules and tentacles were lightly fried and then the bodies were stuffed with sausage and served in a tomato sauce. We accompanied the soup and squid with a glass of South African syrah (me) and a Santa Barbara pinot noir (him). Both wines were absolutely outstanding.

The problem was that we felt like we were invading a private party. Although the bartender was only about three feet away from us the whole evening, every time we wanted something we had to flag him down, and I felt rude pulling him away from his co-workers that were finishing up the shift and coming to sit down at the bar and have a drink. When we finished our meal, the bartender came over and said, "So, I guess you guys are all set then?" and dropped the check. I'm not normally a dessert person, but I wouldn't have minded looking at the menu and perhaps having a glass of dessert wine. We meekly paid and went along our way, the jovial shouts of the rapidly-loosening employees and their friends following us into the balmy late-night.

Most of the restaurants I've worked at have a no-tolerance policy for employees on the floor the same night of their shift, and I thought they were just mean. Seeing it from a customer's perspective changed my mind.

**

In other news, I've now been privy to a boar roast. I stopped by the forge Saturday to interview Jeff for a story I'm writing about him, and found out that Angelo had decided to go whole hog and skewer one of the little boar he'd hunted last week up in Healdsburg. The other is for a fundraiser on November 2nd, which I will not be privy to as I'm going to Buenos Aires for a week, for my birthday (leaving this Wednesday, which, coincidentally is the Tablehopper's birthday). The boar's feet were sawed off (it had already been cleaned) and it was stuffed with fennel from the garden plot on Potrero Hill, then wired shut and put on the spit where it rotated for two hours and made the whole forge, and our clothes, smell yummy. We served it with a salsa verde (just lots of parsley, garlic, olive oil, lemon, and capers--I was allowed to make the salsa, under Angelo's strict instruction) on braided rolls from the Acme bakery. People started showing up and we managed to eat almost the whole thing, washed down with copious amounts of red wine. I love my life.

Food Writers Who Blog

2006-10-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

It looks like more famous food writers are taking the cue from Michael Bauer's popular foodie blog. Cooking With Amy highlighted some of the newest ones here.

Like Warhol's Factory, but More Wholesome

2006-10-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Check out my column in the SF Weekly about Angelo Garro's blacksmith forge here!

Making Money, Spending Money

2006-10-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

My roommate was right. When I came home from South America, I was so unsettled. I felt like I had too many possessions, led a spoiled lifestyle, and had my priorities skewed (favoring designer jeans and champagne-fueled evenings over seeing the world and connecting with myself). Her response to my bitching about accompanying her to mani-pedis and sample sales in the Marina, "You'll get used to San Francisco soon enough again."

It's true. Working 4-5 nights at the New Restaurant, I'm pulling in enough cash to have paid off my credit card and I'm working enough hours to begin the cycle of thinking, "Oh, but I deserve this.."
1) expensive dinner out
2) gratuitous fashion accessory
3) other expensive dinner out
4) new sneakers
5) expensive haircut, shampoo, and over-tip

So many servers I know get caught up in that cycle of working their ASSES off all week and not doing anything during the days besides having coffee and reading the Times, maybe a walk in the park or some other sort of exercise if they're truly motivated individuals. Because I'd been so broke since returning from South America, I'd virtuously scorned all of the excesses that servers tend to indulge in on their days off. It's like we try to spend all of the cash we made during the week on our weekends; which, amazingly enough for me this week was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday--unheard of! I've actually been able to hang out with non-server friends.

Here's the low-down on all of the money I wasted, happily, this weekend:

Friday: thought about going shopping at H&M but was still feeling virtuous about not spending money (it was only Friday, after all), so I rode my townie bike down Market Street past One Post (the BART station where all of the bike messengers hang out) and had some messenger minutes with friends I don't often see. The day was glorious (as has been the whole weekend) and I pedaled around the Ferry Building (walking my bike through until I got thrown out by the security guard) and drank some juice on the dock overlooking the bay (the one not behind the Slanted Door, but one further north). 4pm, massage at the Mindful Body. I'd been a-hurtin' for weeks and hadn't had a massage in months, so I indulged. Beginning of my spending downward spiral.

After the massage, I hopped a cab (indulgence #2) to Edo, where the fantastic Roxy had squeezed me in for a cut (indulgences #3,4,5: cut, shampoo, styling products). My friend Emiley (the bartender at Treat Street, where I spent last Saturday night) had gotten a haircut there and highly recommended Roxy. Roxy worked magic on my unruly in-between length not-curly-not-straight hair (which one of the servers at the New Restaurant recently likened to a wig), and I strolled down to Mecca to catch the last of happy hour oysters (indulgences #6-20). A dozen oysters, a martini, and a glass of champagne later, I was busily texting everyone I knew to come down and join me. A friend arrived, and we tasted through several of Mecca's appetizers, opting out of the expensive entrees and saving our money for a bottle of Flowers red table wine. It wasn't the best choice to go from drinking a gin martini (me) and a glass of Syrah (him) to drinking a red wine blend that was mainly pinot noir--my error. I should have gone with my instinct and gotten the Red Car Syrah (friend of a friend Carroll Kemp just won a Food & Wine award for "Best Wine under $20" for that wine; funnily enough it was $35 on Mecca's wine list!) but I wanted to see what Flowers could do with their mixin'. A sweet, pretty, feminine wine (indulgence #21).

After dinner (where we had excellent service, even by Restaurant Girl's scrupulous standards) we headed up to North Beach for a Fernet and Cola (a disgusting drink that is popular in Argentina, and I don't know why I ordered it. Fernet should be sipped straight or shot directly after work, and after work only).

Saturday was a leisurely stroll through the park to the Upper Haight for breakfast at Squat & Gobble. Upper Haight street always makes me want to shop and yesterday was no exception. Over the course of the day (which included drinking tall beers on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park and a matinee of The Triplets of Belleville, one of my all-time favorite movies that was playing at the Red Vic) I accumulated some feminine undergarments, a skirt from the Adidas flagship store, a super-80s pair of sunglasses, and some leggings from American Apparel, cementing my status as scenester fashion victim (indulgences #22-30)

I managed to stay away from spending too much money Saturday night but it was only because I passed out and slept 12 hours...brought on by working 5 nights last week and the beer in the park. It's amazing what a difference that fifth night of restaurant work makes. It's the breaking point for me--give me a fifth night in a week and I'll refrain from all exercise (too tired; just trying to recover) and spend hundreds of dollars "treating myself" because I work so hard.

*Sigh.* The fun news is that wearing leggings makes me feel like I'm 13 years old again and I enjoy how awkward that is.

Impromptu Bourbon

2006-10-17T11:49:00.000-07:00

I think I have an excess amount of energy. Saturday, after driving up to Carneros to pick grapes all day with the group of bohemian food-lovers I was lucky enough to fall in with a few weeks back, we crushed and de-stemmed nine 30-gallon barrells of pinot noir and feasted on a spread that Angelo had been making all day. It was the last day of the harvest and the big group of 12 or so of us was HUNGRY.

Angelo, his nephew Gaetano, and Angelo's friend Sandro (all lovely, warm, Sicilian men) had been cooking since 2pm. The feast included wild boar (that Angelo had hunted--he still has one more and he's going to roast the whole thing sometime in January), polenta, quartered fennel bulbs, eggplant done several ways, turnips, roasted peppers, lots of bread... a lot of things that I can't really remember right now but it was one of the most delicious meals I've ever had.

I'm used to "family meal" being a tedious affair in which the kitchen of a restaurant uses the waiters as walking garbage disposals--we're hungry enough at the beginning of the shift (because we don't have anything in our home fridges except for beer and Perrier) or at the end of the shift (because we've been sprinting from table to table all night) to put away whatever the kitchen throws at us. Family meal at Angelo's forge is another thing entirely. Bottles and bottles of wine were opened (from the pinot bottling we did last Wendesday) and the platters of food that piled over the table emptied out after just a half an hour, hungry grape pickers from all walks of life completely satisfied after a day of hard manual labor that they welcome as a respite from their fancy indoor city lives.

So after all of this (and I worked HARD crushing and de-stemming. It's my favorite part, I think because it happens so fast it reminds me of restaurant service, or catering) I decided to go to the Mission with a couple of the group who weren't falling asleep in their plates. We were going to check out the Litquake finale at 12 Galaxies but it was over by the time we got there so we headed over to Treat Street, a super divey bike messenger bar where my friend Emiley works. I'd never been there (I never get as far out as 24th and Treat!) and I wanted to see her. The bar was PACKED from all of the Litquake overflow, and after about a half an hour Em asked me to hop behind the bar and help her. She was alone and I was happy to collect and wash glassware.

The fun and dangerous part about having bartender friends is that you drink way too much and way too long--drinks are free and you're allowed to hang after hours (I was helping clean up). So there were a lot of bourbon shots taken, probably not the best idea after a whole evening of drinking home wine. I had some steam to blow off, though, but Sunday morning I had one of those mornings where I swore I'd never ingest anything alcoholic again.

Fancy Art Event

2006-10-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a fancy-pants art auction, which was a fundraiser for the Larkin Street Youth Services. The Youth Service Organization, which has been a model of excellence in San Francisco and nationwide for more than 20 years, gives youth on the streets the tools they need through housing, medical care, education, and job training, to permanently reclaim their lives.

There were over 200 pieces of reall y cool art at the event. I especially liked the pieces by Ariel Dunitz-Johnson, Felix Macnee, and Jeff Burwell. The event, which cost $100 a head, was hosted at 21 Buena Vista East, 5-stories of excellent taste overlooking the entire city. I wanted to drink sake in the bathroom all night, because the bathroom (one of the twelve or so in the house) had the most exceptional views from the Diet Coke billboard (my personal favorite billboard in the city because it glitters) by the Bay Bridge all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I wound up hanging out at the bar (naturally) for a large part of the evening because a friend of mine was tending bar. The first thing he asked when he saw me was "How on earth did you weasel your way in here?" I assured him that I had a bona-fide invitation from the curator (I had even put on a cocktail dress and faux-shmina for the occasion) and proceeded to swap dirty jokes with him like he was behind the bar at the Restaurant where we worked together.

The food was excellent, but I didn't eat much of it because I was still recovering from the lunchtime dim sum feast I'd had with the Tablehopper at Golden River Seafood & Dim Sum Restaurant, all the way out on 22nd and Geary, a spot so far out in the Richmond I wasn't sure I was in Kansas any more. It was my first time eating Dim Sum and I think I overdid it.

I enjoyed myself at the Fancy Art Event (I always like to get dressed up and look at pretty things and drink free alcohol) but was assured by all involved that tonight is really the night to come. It's $45 and all of the artists will be there. Just my luck, I've got to work on the night of the tawdry fun.

Waiter Nightmares

2006-10-11T17:55:00.000-07:00

In one dream, my college roommate told me she'd be walking down a peaceful tropical beach, when she'd suddenly come upon ten tables that all needed service right then.

A friend of mine who worked the insane schedule of the lunch shift at Boulevard followed by the dinner shift at Jardiniere told me he had a recurring dream in which he'd be working at both restaurants at the same time, and somehow had to take all of his orders and put them in the computer at Boulevard, then manage to get across town on the Muni to deliver all of the food that must have come up on the line by then at Jardiniere. Ouch!

My waiter nightmares are usually a simple re-hash of the stress of the shift I've just finished. It's usually pretty bad when I start a new job (and they never went away for the entire four months that I worked at one of San Francisco's top restaurants this spring) but then taper off after a couple of weeks. I haven't had any since starting work at the New Restaurant, which is a good sign.

I think that because a restaurant shift is so fast-paced, there isn't much time to process the stress of the job during the shift. It's wham, bam, thank-you ma'am (especially in a busy lunch place, where 200 covers are crammed into three hours), and you're off work with a shot of Fernet in hand. It's not until your body has time to relax and de-compress during sleep that your mind can think about the stuff it's gone through that evening. I sometimes wake up with a start, remembering in my sleep some small error I'd made--did I give that to-go box back to the table? did I adjust the tip properly or did I short myself again? why was the GM giving me the hairy eyeball at 9:23pm?

Get Out of the Way

2006-10-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

Remind me to never, ever, own a restaurant. I've been working 5-6 shifts a week at the New Restaurant, and while the bloom is still on the rose enough so that it's not too much of a big deal to spend nearly every waking moment working, I just can't understand how anyone would want to actually own a restaurant and willingly spend all of their time there!!

I will ideally work 2-3 nights a week in a restaurant where I make a gajillion dollars a night so I can afford my San Francisco rent, cocktails, yoga membership, and designer-jeans habit. When I was working doubles all week this spring, I lasted about three months before I quit all of my jobs and disappeared deep into South America. I'm determined to be more of an adult in 2007, like maybe keep the same job for more than a few months and save up some money for longer than it takes to buy a plane ticket to somewhere exotic.

**

Last night after bumping into yet another drunk chick buying a cocktail from the side of the bar that's right next to the kitchen, the chef looked at me, rolled his eyes, and asked, "Now why don't you blog about that?"

Tight spaces in restaurants are such a funny integral part of the way the dining-room floor and the kitchen work. There's something that develops, I call it the Restaurant Ballet, and it's the way people working very very quickly in a very small space move around each other; spinning about it rapid, graceful pirouettes, trays filled with martinis held perfectly aloft. Cooks slam knives down in precision, throwing pork chops on the grill as they reach through each others' arms in an octopus-like Tetris move to shake a frying pan as it's just starting to smoke.

When someone who is not in tuned with this dance comes into the space, it throws a wrench into the works. That's why there are metal bars to separate the service well from the rest of the bar, and why chefs give the hairy eyeball when a server steps over the invisible boundary between the side of the line where the food comes up and the side of the line where the food is cooked.

Sometimes customers unwittingly (or knowingly, which is worse) cross this line, and insert themselves into the spaces where we are trying to work. Everyone has their own tricks to get these people out of there without asking "Could you please move?" which would be a complete non-non in the fancy food world where the customer is always right. My tactic is to bump a purse every single time I walk by. Even if the purse's owner is not in my way, she will be soon. If I actually bumped someone on purpose, I'd feel guilty (I'm of Nordic descent and I'm extremely tall and sturdy) because I'd probably take them out, so a gentle purse bump every six seconds does the trick pretty quick.

One of my coworkers has no compunction about throwing an elbow, but only to guys. He lets the girls stand wherever they want. One waiter tells a story about passing a plate of hot food very, very close to a customer's ear; not so close that it touches them, but close enough that they realize something bad might happen if they don't get out of the way--although what the in-the-way-person doesn't know is that the waiter, an absolute master of balancing, will never let a drink spill or a plate drop, no matter how much drunken gesticulating goes on at the table by the people who are about to eat and drink the goods we deliver.

Restaurant Ballet keeps you in shape, but I think it's also the main cause of Waiter Nightmares, a topic which deserves its own post. More on Waiter Nightmares tomorrow...

Restaurant Girl Reviewed

2006-10-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Restaurant Girl is in San Francisco magazine this month!

An anonymous veteran waitress and freelance journalist offers readers "an inside slice of restaurant life" with her lively blog at RestaurantGirISpeaks.blogspot.com, a mix of gossipy accounts of restaurant drama; philosophical musings on her life as a waitress; and detailed, food snobbish reviews of local restaurants. Anyone who's ever worked in the restaurant business will chuckle knowingly at her insights, but even if you haven't spent any time as a server or host you'll enjoy her confessional, perky prose, The site perfectly conveys the ups and downs of work in the food-service industry, bemoaning the stinginess of a transvestite Barbara Walters look-alike one day, rejoicing that her new hairdo got her some extra-good tips the next.

One post mischievously describes a particularly slow and unlucrative evening that she and a co'worker spent sneaking across the street

to a dive bar to pound drinks. Restaurant Girl never names the places she's worked, so part of the fun is guessing which restaurants she's writing about. So far I've gleaned that what she calls "The Bistro" is a little place somewhere in Pacific Heights and that "The Res' taurant" is near Market and Church. As she posts more, maybe we can figure out exactly which places she'o giving us the dish cn.

BYRON PERRY

Rain Has Come

2006-10-05T14:20:00.000-07:00

And thus begins my year of never-ending winter. It was so lovely to have a month of sunshine upon my return to San Francisco from South America, but today the rain has arrived, reminding me that I missed summer entirely this year and am now in for two more months of winter. Sigh. Last night I went to Angelo Garro's forge in SoMa and helped Angelo and Jeff bottle wine. Helping to make wine is fun! Although I worked at wineries for years (Roshambo, Iron Horse Vineyards, and Michel-Schlumberger), it was always as a tastron, an events coordinator, or a tour guide--never in the cellars.

We bottled 50 cases of the 2005 Pinot Noir, drinking plenty of it as we went along, and finished the evening with a lovely dinner of homemade Penne (Angelo's nephew, Giatano, was cranking it out of an ancient machine as I arrived) with a sauce Angelo made with tomatoes from Jeff's parents' house in Healdsburg and sausage made by a friend of theirs whose name I've forgotten but is supposedly a famous sausage-maker. We also had a tomato salad (just fresh heirlooms with olive oil and vinegar and dried oregano that was hanging from the ceiling in bunches, from Angelo and Jeff's plot in one of the city's community gardens), and lots of songs (Hope from the Lincart gallery pulled out a guitar and proved she's got a set of pipes as soulful as Gillian Welch) and laughter. It amazes me how Angelo can have such a slow-food, Sicilian lifestyle right in the middle of San Francisco. Having been introduced to a group of people to whom simplicity and friendship is so important to is inspiring.

After bottling the pinot (two barrels), we punched down the grapes we'd picked last Wednesday. My hands are completely stained purple (although I managed to escape with my clothing free of wine-stains), and I have to wait tables tonight. I'll just wear them like a badge of honor, shrugging casually and saying, "Oh, you know how it goes during crush! I haven't had a day off in weeks and everything's covered in various stages of wine. But, you gotta do what you gotta do!" like a seasoned pro.

Blogger of the Week #54

2006-10-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

Restaurant Girl is Becks & Posh's Bay Area blogger of the week, aw shucks! Thanks for the honor!

Restaurant Girl in the SF Weekly

2006-10-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

Check out the bonafide report of Restaurant Girl's adventures with Michael Hebberoy here.

Michelin Stars Showered

2006-10-03T00:34:00.000-07:00

The Michelin stars have been released! The influential guide, which has expanded into San Francisco and the Bay Area for their 2007 edition, doesn't hand out ratings easily (something like one empty sugar packet left on the table will ensure that no stars are given). I ran into Boulevard's chef de cuisine tonight at Nopa, my new favorite after-hours, industry-friendly dining spot (click here for Amanda Berne's great article in the Chronicle's Sunday magazine this week about late-night dining spots). Glowing and a little dazed, Nancy Oakes' right-hand man was celebrating his star with a sushi-chef friend of his over white wine, roasted sardines, and goat cheese. With food, service, and wine, Boulevard has consistently been one of San Francisco's finest restaurants for thirteen years. Congratulations!!

Here's the rest of the results:
3 STARS
- The French Laundry

2 STARS
- Aqua
- Cyrus
- Manresa
- Michael Mina

1 STAR
- Gary Danko
- Fleur de Lys
- Rubicon
- Bushi-Tei
- Quince
- Range
- Acquerello
- La Folie
- Masa’s
- Ritz-Carlton Dining Room
- Boulevard
- Fifth Floor
- Chez Panisse
- Sushi-Ran
- Chez TJ
- Auberge du Soleil
- Bistro Jeanty
- Bouchon
- La Toque
- Terra
- Dry Creek Kitchen
- Farmhouse Inn & Restaurant
- K & L Bistro - Sebastopol

For more info, see the official release.

**

On another note, last night after I got off of work (very late) and had a couple of Chimays with my co-workers, our competitive edges came out. Four of us (two girls, two boys), instigated a game of pick-up basketball in Duboce Park and whooped the bejeezus out of Jack Falstaff's management team. The final score was 11 to 3, and we won twenty dollars. We played until the cops threw us out at 4am (the group was about fifteen people with two full teams and hangers-on) and have decided to instigate a Sunday night basketball league. If any restaurant staff thinks they can take us on, let me know!

Travesties

2006-10-01T16:08:00.000-07:00

Today I went to the matinee of Tom Stoppard's Travesties: a comedy revolution with Grandma, who was in town for a couple of days. The comic mixture of literature, love, and dadaism reminds me of my own life, and I hearkened back to Lukka's sniggering taunts last week when upon my exit from the Barn Diva I ran into an old "friend" at the bar, white-shirted and fresh off a lunch shift at the Very Prestigious Restaurant where the two of us worked together.

This boy trained me as a waiter there (he's a great server, charming and slippery and smart like a waiter should be), and I wound up hooking up with him a week into my employment at the Very Prestigious Restaurant. I have no interest in blogging about my love life (except when it intersects with a restaurant, and I have sworn to not let that happen any more), but I think restaurant flings are interesting. It's best when they happen between two sides of the house that don't have too much contact.

A fling between a cook and a waitress is all good until it goes all bad--the waitress has got to pick up her food from the kitchen 100 times a night. A fling between two waiters is common (after all, they're cut from the same oversexed, money-loving, snakeskin) and better when it goes bad because they can ignore each other on the floor (they've got their own sections to worry about, after all) but the communal drinking that goes on after work between waiters can be sort of awkward when two of them have just finished with each other. A fling between a waiter and a bartender is relatively uncommon--bartenders are usually too busy scoring with the drunk girls sitting in front of them to bother with the waiters. Besides, bartenders see it all, and probably don't want to hook up with a waiter who's already been passed around town.

Hooking up with this boy at the Very Prestigious Restaurant was a catalyst for a lot of reasons. I'd never gotten together with a coworker before; but more importantly, I'd never had a one-night stand before. Call me naive, but having someone seem so interested in my every thought and action, only to completely ignore me the next day was absolutely shocking. This slap in the face produced a lot of bad behavior on my part, and I moved to San Francisco shortly thereafter.

Seeing this boy at the bar wasn't the dramatic scene that I know Lukka was hoping for, but we were cold to each other. I guess I was pretty cruel to this boy after he spurned me, but although I didn't want a relationship with him, I was hurt by his absolute disregard for everything about me after he'd gotten what he was after.

I know plenty of girls who agonize over, "Why hasn't he called????" when the truth is he just doesn't respect her after she immediately falls into the sack. I won't rail on about the antifeminist double-standards that exist in our culture here, I'll just quietly sit back and have a Scotch (that's the manliest drink I can think of) and realize that all the drama's in our heads, anyway.

A Day in the Life

2006-09-28T10:04:00.000-07:00

Instead of slobbing around in front of the laptop in my pajamas drinking coffee all day, stopping only for an hour of yoga somewhere in the middle, yesterday I decided to go up north for some manual labor in Healdsburg. I was called late the night before that by the owner of a.Muse gallery on 18th and Alabama, who I'd met at the soft opening of my friend Brandon's new spot, Luau. She was going up there to help harvest and crush two rows of Syrah as the guest of chef/blacksmith/Sicilian about town Angelo Garro and his young apprentice Jeff Burwell, who is one of her artists. I'm from Healdsburg, and I hadn't been up there in way too long (ever since I let DPT keep my car after one tow-job too many) so I agreed to keep Lori company on the drive and in the fields.

We arrived at 11am to join a jovial crew of artists and Europeans (including Angelo's cousin from Sicily, Jeff's cousin from Belgium, and an independent filmmaker from Slovakia who was mostly sick because she had put on a nicotine patch in order to kick her 15-year habit) sweating away, sickles in hand. We jumped right in and picked the two rows pretty quick (well, we only picked about 3/4 of a row, having been late). After putting everything through the crusher/de-stemmer it was time for a swim in the young apprentices parents pool while Angelo cooked lunch: wild boar ribs (which is almost common food in the Dry Creek Valley), a delicious pasta, crostini with cheeses, tomatoes, figs, and Angelo's own prosciutto, and lots of wine (jug wine from Preston, which is next door to the house and Angelo's syrah from last year).

More swimming and sunning followed lunch, and then Jeff and Lori and I headed down to the Barn Diva (where I worked and was fired from three times in 2004-2005) to see the general manager, who is a dear friend of mine (hence the re-hiring) and a friend of Jeff's as well (Healdsburg is a very, very small town). We quickly polished off 2 bottles of Roederer Rose (it's good to have friends who manage restaurants) and called it a day. It was 6pm and time to head back to the city; after promising the GM that I would return to Healdsburg next summer and stay in his empty bedroom (which has been empty for a year ever since his hippie chef left to get married in Santa Cruz) and clean for him and see how many more times in one summer I can get fired from the Barn.

**

I drove back to the city and dropped myself off on Cesar Chaves, which was the location of yet another Ghetto Gourmet (which I weaseled a seat at and a ticket to, through my hard work as a waitress on Sunday night. Thanks, Jeremy!!). The food was interesting, and you'll have to wait until next Wednesday to read more, somewhere in the actual printed-word world.

Following the "underground dinner," Michael Hebberoy, his lovely girlfriend Holly (who'd flown down from Seattle for a long weekend), the photographer who's documenting the dinners for his book, two friends of theirs who live in the Mission, and I headed over to Nopa for more wine and dessert. I like the food at Nopa very much, and the three other city-dwellers (we were joined by a friend of Holly's, who was jokingly peeved we were at Nopa at all as she'd wanted to surprise Holly with dinner there tomorrow night) agreed that the food was good but were in disagreement over the mural. I love it (it's an artists rendition of the Western Addition, complete with a hipster walking little dogs in Alamo Square, and I think I can see my old house), they hate it.

Dessert was two baskets of fries (I think Nopa has the best French fries in the city, served with a spicy harissa aioli), chocolate ice-cream, and spiced doughnut holes with a rum-caramel sauce. The fries were gone in a blink and we all picked at the desserts (they were very good but I think we wanted something saltier to accompany the two bottles of Nosis (where's the "G"? Anybody?) verdejo that Michael picked, yum. The two Blue Bottle espresso martinis went down easy, too, which was maybe not such a good thing as several shots of espresso right before bed atcually *do* make for a sleepless night.

The Ghet Gets Vegetarian

2006-09-25T13:39:00.002-07:00

Last night's Ghetto Gourmet at the top-secret location in North Berkeley took place outdoors under the stars and the icicle lights in the back garden of two lovely folks who'd attended a few dinners and hosted one this summer (which was recorded for NPR).

The menu, which was entirely vegetarian (and nearly vegan) was full-fledged late-summer/fall bounty. A hot and cold salad of confit tomatoes, little sea plants, and chrysanthemum fronds led the way to a minestrone-like soup with all of the vegetables distinctly flavored and textured. It's so easy to turn vegetable soup into a hearty mush (which I always seem to do), that the cranberry beans and patty-pan squash pieces floating in an herbed broth, seemed like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And normally I don't even like cranberry beans because it seems like they're on everyone's menu this time of year.

The main course was a butternut-squash lasagna, with thinly-sliced layers of the squash itself acting as noodles interspersed with black and white chanterelle mushrooms, white corn, and parmesan. The lasagna sat atop a puddle of red sauce and was adorned with arugula and more crispy parmesan. Dessert was little chocolate cakes with homemade caramel ice cream and crispy little pieces of vanilla bean.

The Ghetto Gourmet is a BYOB type event, so the communal tables (there were 30 guests in attendance) were filled with pens and wine-openers, all the better to take down names, doodle in gastronomic frenzy on the menus, and open bottles. Musical entertainment was provided by Jeremy's roommate on classical guitar, and some hippie chick from the East Coast wailing about the Mother Earth. Mostly I couldn't take my eyes off of her glittery, tasseled, white Sherpa boots, and the boxer dog who lived there put in a decent effort at hooking up with them a couple of times through the night.

**

Although it was a Sunday night, I should have known this wouldn't stop the roving band of bohemian culinary outlaws who'd just returned from a weekend spent 24/7 drinking Macallan 12-year scotch with Gore Vidal. The boys hadn't slept much and were loopy from a weekend of amazing conversation, food, and company (I knew I should have pressed them to let me be their waitress-in-residence!), so of course I took them out. We met up with Matt Dillon from Sitka and Spruce, who was in town from Seattle trying to get away from the pressures of being the town's most recent four-star chef (and on GQ Magazine's Top 5 Hot List for restaurants this fall), at the 500 club for a few and then moved on to the Lucky 13 until closing time. Fueled by cigarettes, adrenaline, and skyy citrus vodka, we headed over to Baker Beach (which took me 40 minutes to find from Market Street as I never drive in the city) so that the photographers could jump into the ocean while I did headstands on the beach (a yoga instructor told me last week that inverting myself for a minute every day would combat the stresses of waitressing all night. She was right!)

I woke up this morning feeling strangely refreshed after my second night of bohemian debauching in four days, and realized that my theory must be true: it doesn't count as being a lush if you're in the company of other artists. I'm like Kerouac, baby!

A Study in Anthropology

2006-09-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

Friday night was my last night at the foundering ship, and I am certainly glad to be done. I'll save the bitching about mis-management and abusive kitchen staff for my ex-coworkers over a shot of Fernet Branca with a beer back, and talk about the differences between cooks and waitresses instead.

As I may have mentioned, the foundering ship had an entirely new staff when I came back from South America. There were no more Mexicans cooking, instead the place is now being run by 22-year-old "culinary school hotshots" who are too big for their britches. The kids can cook all right, but the attitude that comes across the line with the plates was just too much for me. Too much for everyone that still works there, in fact; at the bar last week, two of the bar managers plotted how to get one of the cooks alone, outside of the building, so they could jump him and punch his face. This kid has a propensity for muttering snide comments under his breath, and their rage was warranted. I talked them out of it.

This huge attitude is compounded by the fact that most of the kids are decently good-looking. There is one cook, however, that we all called either "The Cute Cook," or "The Nice Cook," because not only was he the yummiest to view (over six feet, pretty roses tattooed on his forearm in place of the ubiquitous swallows or pin-up girls, hipster glasses, hot hot hot), he was the one who actually said hello to the front-of-the-house staff of his own accord and didn't look at you like you'd just crawled out from under a rock and asked what year it was like the other cooks do. Also all of the other cooks all have a variation of the same name and his is different, so nobody could remember it.

I can understand why cooks have this bad attitude--they put in three times as many hours as waiters do and get paid less than half as much. Now for me, this didn't make sense after one year of cooking at a fancy-pants restaurant when I was eighteen, so I got a job as a busser right quick. Some people are crazy enough to want to cook in restaurants for their careers, and I commend them for this. I have a great respect for cooks, I just wish they would be nicer to me. And I'm not some clueless waitress that just wants to go out and get drunk and go shopping the next day; I do this work because I'm passionate about food, and it generally confounds a line cook even more when I actually know all of the ingredients in Romesco and Rouille, and how these sauces are prepared.

I'd found out before the shift that the Cute Cook's long-distance relationship was no more, so I gave him every opportunity to ask me out on my last night at the foundering ship. Unfortunately, he did not pick up on my subtle clues, like when I asked him if he was going to come and visit at my new spot... "Blank," he responded "What the fuck is a Blank?" More promisingly, when I explained what and where a Blank was, he sort of ogled me and said "How could I NOT come and see you?" in an extremely sarcastic tone. I think working in restaurants has lowered my standards in men.

They love us in Canada

2006-09-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

Restaurant Girl Speaks got a mention in the Toronto Sun today!

"Ella Lawrence is a San Francisco writer-slash-waitress at high-end restaurants. She's also the phantom behind a popular blog in the industry -- restaurantgirlspeaks.blogspot.com. Working in four-star establishments for the better part of a decade, she's written extensively about the personalities, quirks and secrets of her trade.

...

As customers, we think we're in an intimate setting -- but we're part of a large production number.

"(As a waitress) you can be the rock star of the area you're serving," says Ella, a 27-year- old who can, on a good night in her elite workplace, earn $500 in gratuities.

With two degrees under her arm, she still says you can learn more about the human condition in an eatery than out of any textbook.

The restaurants she has worked in are a haven of indulgence. The industry, at her level, can offer the best alcohol and the best food and the best excesses."

**
Check out the full article for the rest.

Liberace and debauchery

2006-09-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I got a call from my friend Jeremy, who does the Ghetto Gourmet in the East Bay. For those of you who've been living in the dark in regards to the underground restaurant scene this last year, the Ghetto Gourmet is basically a dinner party in someone's living room. Jeremy has roving chefs come to town and cook, artists musicians and writers giving performances, and great salon-type conversation.

Jeremy's call went something like this, "HiEllait'sJeremyihaveafriendintownwhoscookingforfamouspeople
outofanairstreamtrailerandhe'swritingabookaboutundergroundrestaurants
youshouldmeethimIalreadygavehimyournumbergottagobye."

Well, I like meeting new people, especially other restaurant people who are writers, because we are few and far between. Michael Hebberoy and I made plans to meet at Ti Couz for a cocktail and a crepe, and I knew we were going to get along when I texted him, "On my way. Brown hair, blue eyes, six feet tall. Bicycle," and he responded "Long hair blue eyes big truck likes Barry Manilow and walks in the park."

So I threw on my Barry Manilow t-shirt (yes, I really do have one! I only wear it on special occasions because it's very old and for some reason I always wind up getting really drunk when I have it on) and away me and Barry went. I thought I was just going to meet some chef. Who I met was a guy starting a cultural revolution. Hebberoy (or "Hebb" to his friends) is a well-known Portland resterateur who is going through a "very hard break-up with that city," and to get out of the public eye he decided to go around the world and cook for interesting people. His philosophy is philosophers, and in telling about me the sorts of dinner parties he's hosting (at other people's houses), I was reminded of nothing more than the literary salons hosted at the Paris home of Gertrude Stein and her partner in the 1920s.

This weekend, Hebb is going down to L.A. to host a dinner party at Gore Vidal's house. The impressive guest list includes well-known literary and musical figures; not the type you see in (my beloved) Us Weekly, but the type who are quietly doing what they love and believe in and have gained recognition for their work along the way. The guy who started the Sex Pistols is going to be there, as is Madonna's sister.

Hebb's book-in-progress, "Kill the Restaurant," will focus on three groups building culture through feeding people on the down-low: the Ghetto Gourmet here in the Bay Area, a guy in Seattle who serves only the things he grows on his 10-acre farm (except for flour and sugar, although both crops went in the ground this year), and a group in New York. He'll be attending the upcoming Ghetto Gourmet dinners on Sunday night in North Berkeley and on Wednesday in the Mission. I'll be there, doing what I do best: bringing the food out of the kitchen and putting it down in front of people who want to eat it.

**
Also last night I attended the soft-opening of my friend Brandon's new venture (aside from the newly-minted Avenue G), Luau. The bar is on Lombard between Franklin and Van Ness, and I vaguely remember driving by there in my Bridge and Tunnel days. A vague memory of last night is all I posess as well. I know that there were lots of people I didn't know when I got there at 10:30, and then lots of people I did know starting around 12:30 or 1am who began to trickle in as they finished their shifts. I'm pretty sure I was yelling and throwing pretzels by the end of the evening, and was trundled into a cab with my bicycle poking out of the trunk and sent home. I received an email from the esteemed Hebb this morning, which went something like:

"apologies for my sheer drunkiness last night. ended up losing my phone somewhere to boot. i think maybe it is kickin around the bottom of that fuckin truck. it is dangerous to drink heavily with a blog queen...- liberace"

All in all, a successful opening!

No More Ties for Restaurant Girl

2006-09-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

After a night staging, some intensive food and wine training, and my first night on the floor at the New Restaurant, I am happy to report that Restaurant Girl is no longer being choked by a tie, the great waiterly de-humanizer. I forgot what a difference it makes to not have a tie around your neck in your comfort level when waiting tables.

The New Restaurant is a self-proclaimed "not-hip spot," which automatically makes it cool. The groovy owners, who all hail from San Francisco or its outlying areas are "not slicksters," as one of them says, and what this comes through as is a restaurant that's well-designed with a decided lack of pretense. Everything's organic but they don't advertise the fact, they just let the food speak for itself. And last night, on a Tuesday, in a reduced section (two tables), I made the same amount of money as I'd made last Friday night at the foundering ship. Sigh of relief.

The way the New Restaurant does its training is really nice. I came in to stage on a Sunday night (and wasn't paid for my five hours of foodrunning, unless you count a truly delicious dinner and cocktail ordered off the menu at the bar after my shift) and then returned the next day after being offered a position to meet with the owners and review restaurant philosophies and policies, which happily are in line with my ideas on how a restaurant should be run; ie. open doors to management, building sustainable communities through feeding people and being a positive force as a business in the neighborhood you've chosen, and making sure the employees are happy.

I returned to taste through the whole wine-by-the glass list yesterday at 3pm, and then went through computer training (the Restaurant uses one of the most up-to-date and user-friendly systems that's available) before starting the shift. The kitchen puts up just about one of every dish at every line-up, so the waiters can taste it all before they start. They also put up a nice staff meal at 11pm...a welcome change from the new kitchen at the Old Restaurant, who didn't allow the waiters to taste anything (costs too much to feed us vultures the fancy stuff the guests get?) and sometimes put up leftovers that were too disgusting to sell before the shift started (old tapioca pearls from last week's soup, anyone?). Sometimes a salad was put up (no protein was offered in the two weeks since I'd been back from South America) but the chef put most of it on a plate for the "vegan" floor manager ("vegan" in parenthesis because when a meat dish was infrequently put up for the staff to taste, this floor manager would be the first one elbowing you out of the way with their fork, to "know what the food tasted like").

It's easy to tell how a restaurant feels about its waiters by the way they feed them. After all, restaurants are in the business of feeding people. So if a restaurant feeds its staff, happily and with good quality food, you can bet it's a place where all the staff is happy.

Polished and Shining

2006-09-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

Like rats deserting a sinking ship, all of the waiters at The Restaurant are quietly putting their other options in order. While I can't (and shouldn't) speak for other people's projects; ie how they are going to tactfully remove themselves from a Restaurant that has been suffering under mis-management for a year, I can speak for myself.

I have been staging (pronounced in the Frenchy French manner--"stAH-sheeng") at other restaurants around town. Staging, a term that is used when a cook tries out for anywhere from one day to one month at a restaurant, is a way of trying out a restaurant (and having a restaurant try you out) in a relatively low-pressure setting. The resume has been approved, the interview(s) have gone smoothly, and the stage takes place to see if the restaurant is a good fit for the cook (or in this case, the waitress) from both sides.

My stage tonight went extremely well, and I accepted the position. The new Restaurant is a joy to be at. It's funny how when you're working at a place where the entire staff is miserable, and you're miserable, that you start to accept those as being normal working conditions. I kept telling myself, "It's just a phase. The Restaurant will settle down (or pick up) soon enough, I just have to wait it out."

Leaving for two months and then returning put a lot of things into perspective. Just about everything at The Restaurant has changed since I've been gone, and this has been the common thread at The Restaurant for the last year (the time that I've worked there). While I didn't mind it when I was raking in fistfuls of cash, once the cash stops a-flowin' (and The Restaurant has been scarily slow for the two weeks that I've been back working there) I start to evaluate why, exactly, I'm working in a place that has made me consistently unhappy for the better part of my employment there. I left for a period of time because of a terrible manager; once he was fired I came back but now there *is* no manager, which presents a whole slough of other problems.

The deciding factor of which new restaurant to accept the position from came tonight; the New Restaurant is filled with professionals who are all decently nice people. Nice people are somewhat of a rarity in a restaurant world filled with ex-cons in the back of the house (cooks) and charming coke-heads in the front of the house (waiters). While The Restaurant has been busy trying to cover its lack of panache with a glossy PR campaign and an elitist attitude, the New Restaurant quietly goes about its business (providing excellent food in a nice setting), and people are taking notice--they did over 400 covers last night (on the same night The Restaurant didn't even break 100 covers).

Another restaurant that offered me a position is one of San Francisco's Very Famous Restaurants, and I spent a lot of time thinking about their offer. But after speaking with a couple of servers at the place whose offer I did accept, I feel confident in my decision. The other Very Famous Restaurant serves a specific clientele, a gentrified clientele that sees a big distinction between the people who serve them, and themselves. I'm not into that. While the money is consistently good at this place, I think I would only have lasted about 3 months before I began to hate it. The New Restaurant seems to be a perfect fit. It's run by a few people who have been in the business at comfortable, hip places of quality for a long time. Nice people who happen to love food and run a restaurant. Bon appetit!

Hookahs not Bazookas

2006-09-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

My roommate and I went to Ziryab this weekend, on the corner of Divisadero and Hayes next to Nopa. As far as I know, this is only the second hookah bar in San Francisco, the other one being somewhere in the Upper Haight where I don't go to too much, unless I'm looking for records, Golden Gate Park, or trendy used clothes.

We started off with the meze for two, which is a Middle-Eastern platter filled with all of the trappings: tender, dolma stuffed with ground lamb and cous-cous, with the grape leaf imparting just the right amount of tanginess, moist falafel, bright-green with parsley , chunky-vinegary baba ganoush, smooth pale humus, tabbouleh, and a creamy yogurt-dill sauce. Warm pita arrived to slather everything on, and we made quick work of it while we enjoyed our wines (Spanish Rioja for me, Petite Sirah for her) on the patio under the heat lamps.

The best part about the patio at Ziryab is that there are so many interesting people walking down Divisadero street at 10pm on a Sunday night. As my roommate said, "This neighborhood is like the Mission, but cleaner!" I don't know if I agree with her that far, but NOPA/Western Addition is certainly becoming hip. I guess all of the artists had to move somewhere once the boutiques and yoga studios took over Hayes Valley.

The lamb skewers were up next, perfectly tender and flavorful chunks of lamb meat interspersed with roasted red peppers. The cous-cous the lamb was served over was bland, but the zingy shaved carrot salad gave a nice bite. I could have probably eaten one myself but we wanted to save room for dessert: an apple-tobacco hookah, Moroccan Mint tea, and tapioca creme brulee.

Ziryab is pleasingly quiet, about half-full of locals enjoying a quiet dinner or hookah. The owner flitted anxiously by our table time and time again to make sure everything was right, which I found endearing.

528 Divisadero St. at Hayes, 415/522-0800
Dinner 4pm-midnight nightly, and they've just started doing lunches, too.

Death Knell

2006-09-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

In theory, I've heard that this week is traditionally a slow one in the San Francisco restaurant industry, but it's scary in practice. The Restaurant is overstaffed so servers (who all seem to be new since my return) are squabbling over three shifts a week each, and people are just not coming to eat.

I got sent home after two event-free hours on Thursday night, along with three other servers. Friday night I had a four-table section and it would have been a wash had the host not taken pity on me and given me the late 8-top walk in. Their bill was low for that large of a party but they were the only reason I walked home with over $100 (just barely), my criteria for putting on a tie each night.

Last night, for some reason, I was assigned the same section as another server (the new guy, who luckily I already know and like because we worked at a Very Famous Restaurant in the wine country together) and we pooled tips at the end of the night because we had a table of 20 in the second turn (although we only had a couple of tables each in the first turn).

Pooling tips is a tricky business. I've worked in a pooled house before (actually at the Very Famous Restaurant) and although it might seem fair in practice, one or two servers usually wind up carrying the rest of the staff, bringing in the bacon night after night, no matter how many times everyone says, "It all balances out in the end."

So all the new servers are looking around with wide eyes, asking each other, "Is it going to pick up?" and all the old servers are frantically looking around at each other asking, "Why are they giving the new people all of the shifts and all of the tables?" (My guess is to keep them from quitting), and in the meantime everyone's resumes are sharply polished and ready to be dropped off somewhere else at a moment's notice.

Funtwo's Canon Rock

2006-09-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this has nothing to do with food, but this character may be the best guitarist in the world. The New York Times even said so on Sunday.

Culture Shock

2006-08-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

Although I have experienced firsthand the shock that comes upon returning home from an exotic voyage, it was--well, shocking. I arrived in San Francisco yesterday afternoon to a city that was exactly the same as I left it. Wonderful, but San Francisco had seemed so exotic when I moved here last year. Now, it's just not Buenos Aires...

I made amends with the cat yesterday, and today made the restaurant rounds. I headed back to The Restaurant, which seems to have made some exciting changes in my absence. I'll return there next week, sigh.

After spending way too long gossiping with my coworkers at The Restaurant, I headed home but first stopped by The Bistro to see my friend who'd gotten me the ill-fated job in the first place. The elephant-graveyard waiter who'd been so mean to me when I worked there for a few weeks had forgotten all about his anti-Restaurant Girl malaise, and everyone was warm and welcoming. It's always touch-and-go on the status of returning to a restaurant to say hello when you've quit without notice. I was treated to a Negroni, some radishes, French fries, and a bowl of homemade pozole that chef had cooked up with his wife over the weekend. It's nice to know I'm not despised (though I have been encouraged to visit Mondays and Tuesdays, when the fussy GM is not on the floor).

Tomorrow I'm attending the invite-only opening of some new bar on Castro street, with one of my best friends from back home who is also a charismatic bartender at the newly-revamped Transfer Bar on Church Street. It's amazing how so much has changed inside of me the last two months, but now that I am back in San Francisco my life is exactly the same as it always was.

Empanadas de Pino

2006-08-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

Although Restaurant Girl Speaks is more of a ranting gossip blog than a bonafide food blog, I'm finally including a recipe to cook something South American at the request of one of my readers. This recipe for Empanadas de Pino was torn directly from the Footprint guide to Chile, which Valentino's dad (who was a chef for years at 42 Degrees before it went away) gave me before I left to stay with his family here. He says it's authentic, and he's a bitchin' cook (anyone who gleefully announces on Superbowl Sunday, "Hey guys, I got a deep fryer! What should we put in it?" while sipping a beer at 11am is alright in MY book) so I believe him. Here it is:

"Although other fillings are used nowadays for empanadas, the traditional filling is pino, a mixture of meat, onions, and spices. Most Chilean families have their own recipes: this one was kindly supplied by Manuel and Ximena Fernandez.

Ingredients (to make 20 empanadas--they're small).
Pastry: 1 kg flour; 125 grams margarine, butter, or lard; 1 level spoonful salt; cold water.
Filling: 600 grams meat, chopped into small pieces (or lean minced meat); 2 large onions; 4-5 tsp. cooking oil; tsp. each of cumin, black pepper, chili powder, and paprika; 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped; salt to taste; 4 hardboiled eggs; 1 tsp. flour; 20 black olives; 40 raisins.

Methods
Pastry: in a bowl mix the flour and margarine, add salt (dissolved in 1/2 cup water), gradually add more water to make a soft but consistent pastry and leave it for at least 1 hour, then knead it for 10 minutes before replacing it in the bowl and leaving it covered with a clean cloth.
Filling: heat the cooking oil in a large pan or pot, then add the onion and fry for about 8 minutes. Add spices and salt, then fry for 2 minutes. Add meat and fry for 15 minutes, stirring continuously, until the onions are crystal-like and softly cooked. Add the flour, lower the heat, and simmer for 5 minutes. Leave the mixture overnight. Shell the eggs and cut each lengthwise into 5 pieces.

Making the empanadas: Divide the pastry into 20 pieces, then roll each piece into a thin round shape. One one hemisphere of each piece of pastry place the following: 1 piece of egg; 1 heaped teaspoon of the filling; 2 rasins and 1 olive. Carefully paint the rim of each piece of pastry with water, then fold the empty hemisphere over to enclose the filling, press the rim down. You should now have a semicircular turnover: paint the outer rim with water and fold it down again towards the center of the empanada.

Bake the empanadas in a preheated oven at 200 degrees Celsius. After about 5 minutes, reduce the heat to 150 and bake for a further 14 minutes until the empanadas are nicely browned. To improve their appearance, paint the empanadas with a thin coat of cold water as asoon as you remove them from the oven. Serve hot, with Chilean red wine."

I haven't tried this recipe, so if you do, let me know how it turns out. I just serve the stuff, hey, when I figured out at age 19 that the bussers were making twice what I was getting paid in the kitchen, I made the switch, although I adored cooking. Now I leave it to other people.

Bad Restaurant Girl!

2006-08-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

Having neglected her loyal readership for more than 2 weeks, Restaurant Girl (aka Resting Girl) returns to you from a computer in the port town of Valparaiso, Chile. Having spent the last two weeks in Argentina, I was too busy eating and drinking to blog, sorry! Happily, my South American intestinal maladies have pretty much resolved themselves after a month of gut-misery, and I was able to sample the legendary cuisine of Argentina after just one last bout of unpleasantness in Mendoza.

Steak, steak, steak. Good thing I'm not vegetarian (actually, I was vegetarian for my whole life until I got my first restaurant job, working the cold side of the line at age 18 at Lisa Hemenway's in Santa Rosa)--chefs HATE vegetarians and there's just something so unconvincing about a waiter who tries to sell you your dinner by saying haughtily, "Well, I'm vegetarian (sniff), but I hear the steak is really good here."

I met up with two Irish friends of mine, Trevor and Pat, from the Macchu Pichu trek (during which I was only able to digest white rolls and some white rice), and we stayed at the lovely Hostel Alamo in Mendoza, just over the Andes from Santiago. I took the bus there, which only goes during the day in the winter when then passes are open at the whims of the skies.

Steak and Malbec are Argentinian specialties, and I enjoyed both of them in various combinations during stay. I also took private Spanish lessons, and am happy to report that my Spanish is progressing rapidly, which I will keep a secret upon my return to SF so I can see what the kitchen crew is really saying about me.

In Mendoza, we toured a couple of wineries one day; my favorite was the Fammilia di Tommaso. Not only did they have better wine than the legendary and large winery whose name I've already forgotten, di Tommaso has been using some of the same storage equipment for over 100 years, so everything was all cute and covered with adobe. The other place was just like Kendall-Jackson, except the hospitality crew was speaking Spanish, and not just the guys working in the cellars.

The week I spent in Buenos Aires was less culinary- and more wine-influenced, with the highlight restaurant dinner going as a tie between the live tango show at the famous Cafe Tortoni and a smoky, wine-drenched meal with 5 fellow tourists (two Spanish boys, a Chilean boy--Valentino's cousin who had flown out to meet me--and two Spanish-speaking German girls) at the Parridilla Desnivel in the cobbled San Telmo district of the city, where tango was born. At a parridilla, when you order a steak, you get just that: a giant steak on a plate. A grizzled old man brings up a huge board of meat and forks juicy pieces off onto everyone's plate. Such frivolous things like vegetables and use of cutlery are not included in the price of a steak, so you have to be sure and order them from the waiter.

Terribly, I have not been writing down the wines I've drunk since yesterday (when we drank a Concha y Toro Trio, a blend of sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, and pinot gris from Chile's largest producer. It was bitchin', especially since it was a warm day and we were eating out on the terrace), so all I can say is that it's all yummy and it's mostly cheap, which you probably knew already.

Chile: so much avocado

2006-07-31T08:30:00.000-07:00

Santiago is a lovely town when you have a tour guide, and luckily, I do! Valentino´s cousin Juan Pedro has taken charge of me since my arrival here three days ago, and my intestines are much happier than they were in Peru.

Embarking on our gastronomical adventures yesterday we began the day with ¨cafe con piernas,¨or ¨coffee with legs.¨ These smoke-filled coffee bars in downtown Santiago are staffed by depressed-looking women wearing lots of makeup and shorter-than-short skintight dresses which would not be flattering even on a Hooters waitress. The coffee was expensive and tasted terrible, but it was an interesting slice of downtown Santiago to see. I prefer cheap little neighborhood cafes which serve up cafe con leche, or mugs of steamed milk with a little scoop of Nescafe instant coffee.

After taking the ¨huevos en el cielo¨or little rail pods up to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, we had empanadas de pino, which are little steamed turnovers filled with chopped onions and spiced meat, a quarter of a hard-boiled egg, and a large black olive with a pit. The olives here are much larger and sharper-tasting than any I´ve had stateside, and then empanadas were lovely. Accompanying them was a refreshing drink of ¨Mote con huesillo,¨ which is a strange-looking and sweet concoction in which a large, whole, dried peach is boiled in water with wheat grains. The resulting juice is ladled into a glass with the whole peach and some wheat grains, served with a spoon.

Avocados are prevalent everywhere you look in Chile, and Santiaguenos are shocked when I tell them the price (around $3) for a Haas avocado in California. Here, you get 3 kilos of avocados for about 15 cents.

The bug that was bound to happen

2006-07-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

While such fine San Francisco restaurants such as Fresca serve up Peruvian food that is muy authentico and also muy delicioso, I am doing all I can to stay away from Peruvian food here in Peru.

Arriving last week from Lima to Cusco required some acclimatization; for a person who has lived her whole life either at or below sea level, suddenly being at 3300 meters was a shock to the system. I did my best, hiking through Inca ruins and bartering for hairy alpaca jumpers in the marketplace, to play the part of the open-minded tourist.

However, when the tour guide I hired off the street took me to a mud hut in a tiny Quechua village for a really "authentic" Peruvian experience, I should have said no to the food. I tried a bite of ch´uño, which is a freeze-dried Andean potato. To be exact, the little brown potatoes are harvested and left in a cold field to rot. Once they have rotted, they are stomped on by the locals´feet (which are not pretty as nobody wears socks, EVER, no matter how cold it gets in the Andes). After being stomped flat and inside-out by cracked feet, they are left in the field again to freeze. Once "preserved" like this, the potatoes will keep in a mud attic for years. Wonder of wonders.

So I tasted the potato, which hadn´t had anything done to it except for being thrown into a bowl with some white rice. It tasted exactly like you think a rotten potato that has been stomped on by filthy feet and then been left to freeze in a field would taste: completely disgusting. I fed the rest of mine to a dog when no-one was looking, but the two polite bites I tood were enough to give me a raging bacterial infection. I languished for a couple of days with a resting heart rate of 170 and extremely low blood pressure, but when my fever reached 40 degrees (celsius), the kind woman at the hostal called a doctor who came to my bedside and immediately gave me a shot. He prescribed a ton of medication including a course of antibiotics that I´m sure weren´t approved by the FDA but made me completely better right away.

So much better, in fact, that I was able to leave for my 4-day trek to Macchu Pichu the next morning, although when on the second morning we were invited into a Quechua hut to see how people in the Andes have always lived, I politely declined the bit of boiled potato that was offered to me.

The Inka Capital

2006-07-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

Cusco is an amazing town. The ancient capital of the Inca empire, it has beautiful ruins that were built over by the Spanish in the 1500s. When earthquakes shake the town, the Spanish architecture falls down and the Inca stuff stays.
I´m suffering a bit from the altitude, I hiked around a ruin yesterday for several hours and then drank a couple of Pisco sours last night, BIG MISTAKE. All of the warnings your guidebooks give you to take it easy when you first arrive at a place very high in the mountains (Cusco is at 11,000 feet) are absolutely right. I plan to wander around aimlessly today and eat some fruit.
Tomorrow I´m taking an unofficial tour up into the mountains--a woman approached me on the street to give me a tour of the Temple of the Moon yesterday and I took her up on the offer. Thank goodness I did because it was the best tour I´ve ever had in my life. So tomorrow we are taking the bus for an hour upwards to have lunch with some of her Quechua friends. I´m really excited to spend the afternoon with a traditional Andean family.
I had a really good meal at someone´s home in Lima but will blog about it next time as I am dizzy from computer fumes. I better be a picture of strapping mountain health when I come down out of this place. Thin air makes me feel dopey.

Lima, Peru. Day 1.

2006-07-11T19:07:00.000-07:00

Restaurant Girl won´t be getting the scoop on San Francisco restaurants for a few months (you´ll have to turn to The Tablehopper for your juice) as she´s travelled to South America to see how they do things there. So far, no restaurants have been examined, but what I can say is that the bus system in Lima, Peru, is hilarious! Random automobiles of all sizes zoom along the roads, sometimes four deep in a two lane street, honking, and with people hanging out of all windows. One of these people is the bus hawker, who yells out where the bus is going, pounds on the door if the driver should stop, and takes fares (which seem to be completely arbitrary amounts of money). The bus hawker swings himself all over the outside of the moving vehicle, and watching the grannies get a running start from the street and swing themselves up onto the floor of an ancient Mitsubishi van that´s painted all over the outside with things like the Tasmanian devil and sayings like ¨Read the Bible¨(in Spanish, of course), is much more fun than waiting tables for now.

Subscribe to Restaurant Girl

2006-07-07T13:42:00.000-07:00

Restaurant Girl has finally gotten with the flow and added a couple of buttons so her loyal readership/gossipmongers can subscribe. Just click on the link at the top of the page, or the one at the side of the page above "Dish-Approved Links." No more will you have to wonder if Restaurant Girl's posted again!

This just in...

2006-07-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

MECCA SF has sacked its chef Sergio Santiago and replaced him with a new chef/co-owner Randy Lewis . Lewis, a much-lauded Sonoma County transplant who most recently headed the kitchen at
Kendall Jackson , should bring a breath of fresh air to the restaurant which got dropped from three stars to one-and-a-half by San Francisco's almightily terrifying food critic Michael Bauer. The restaurant, which was bought by new owners last year after a ten-year run by the original queens, looks to be taking a decidedly different turn. The new owners want to make it a dining destination, in addition to a hipster bar scene with smokin'-hot employees of ambiguous sexuality. Restaurant Girl's inside source at Mecca says the new sous-chef is just as delicious-looking as Randy Lewis' food promises to be.

Too bad the entire kitchen staff walked out this afternoon--looks like the two new guys will be running the line alone, unless a cook reads this post and calls the restaurant, wanting to fill in!

Doing Shots During Service

2006-07-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday all of the servers were called into work at The Restaurant, although there wasn't even 40 reservations on the book. All of us looked confusedly at each other, dressed in our white shirts and ties, and wondered how we were going to make any money. Well, we weren't.

There was to be a winemaker dinner the next night, and the restaurant would be closed to the public and we'd be denigrated to the job title of caterers (although we'd still be making our regular wage: MINIMUM). Because it was a winemaker dinner, there were to be 34 wines poured before and during dinner. We were there to wash and polish all of the rented crystal stemware.

Although the servers had sadly been given a three- or four-table section each, two of us quickly gave our tables away and took off our ties. Sitting down on the banquettes to polish, polish, and gossip won out making maybe $50, and we knew we'd get to leave earlier if we gave away all of our tables. Teal was bitter because she'd been given the cocktail lounge for her section (after six months of working in The Restaurant she'd never had to take this section), and I was bitter because I'd had to cut a camping trip with Valentino a day short to come in on a day that I was only on-call to polish wineglasses.

So, what's a couple of girls to do? Run across the street during service and take shots, of course! We grabbed the only other girl who works in The Restaurant (the hostess) and sprinted out the back door with the excuse that we were going to smoke (which only Teal does). Across the street at our favorite watering hole it was happy hour and we perched on the barstools and ordered a couple of Red Stripes. Our friendly bartender made up a shakerful of something refreshing and kamikaze-like, pouring it into four rocks glasses. We all clinked cheers, pounded our beers, and rushed back across the street to the theme song from "Purple Rain."

Heading back into the building, we ran into the owner as he was coming out, leaving for the night. Luckily, Teal had a cigarette in hand. He wished us a lovely evening polishing glassware, hopped in his Mercedes, and sped away. Needless to say, our night was much improved. As we sat morosely buffing, the sommelier felt sorry for us and opened up a bottle of prosecco, with the explicit instructions not to share: the servers working on the floor would have to stay late and finish polishing, and they'd have their own bottle. Suckas.