Chefs United Raised $42K for Sendai

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.

Press Kit

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.

Last Night in Tokyo

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.

A Nice Lunch

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

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

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

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

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.

The Best of Restaurant Girl

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?

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.

Tripe Tacos

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.

This just in...

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!

Florio

The tiny little Bistro Florio on Fillmore Street at Bush has been serving up unpretentious food on ugly plateware for eight years, and it couldn't be better. Beloved by Pacific Heights locals (like the CEO of Visa and the owner of the Forty-Niners)and visitors (Mick Jagger and Sharon Stone always stop in when they're in town) alike, Florio manages to consistently get everything right.


I dined with two girlfriends in the window table, and was warmly welcomed by the staff, including owner Doug Biederbeck (who also runs Bix and the MarketBar). We began our meal with martinis, of course (two dirty Ketel Ones for them, for me a French Blush: Grey Goose vodka shaken with Chambourd and served with a twist), a small bowl of mixed marinated olives (with some beans and garlic floating around in there) and a plate of chicken-liver crostini. A little too much liver and not enough crostini, but the braided sourdough that is delivered directly on the tablecloth (hey, it's a Bistro! they don't mess around with bread baskets)helped.


A grilled asparagus salad, resplendent with aioli and extra-virgin olive oil came next, as did an ooey-gooey artichoke and egg dish, cooked over the open stove flame in a cassoulet dish. Both were good, and true to what seems to be the Florio credo: fresh food, prepared unassumingly and with skill.


A pasta course followed; ricotta stuffed pansoti and garganelli, which I especially liked. The hand-rolled and -folded pasta was complemented by plain brown shell beans, fennel, and shrimp. No sauce, none needed.


Mains were steak, steak, and more steak. I ordered the bavette and my two friends shared the steak for two; a gigantic piece of ribeye; both served with pommes frites, the ribeye with a side of spinach. Both steaks were disappointingly cold, perhaps they'd been sitting in the window as we finished our pasta course. The bernaise sauce that accompanied the meat was no bueno either, much too sweet and overly-cardamomed. But I've had the steak frites before (it is, after all, what Florio is known for) so I knew this must've been a fluke.


Service was friendly and attentive; we especially admired the busser, who appeared with a steak knife nanoseconds after I dropped mine on the floor.