Like Barack Obama, my first job was scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins.  I made $5.25 an hour, and probably ate equal value in ice cream products at the same rate.  I learned how to peel and slice a banana and put it in a bowl without ever touching the banana meat (there has to be a better word for this).  My right forearm gained a shapely muscle that earned me some high school street cred.  

I also learned that, among other things you can tell about a person by just looking at them, choice of ice cream is surprising predictable based on appearances.  A Chinese parent dragged there by his children chooses vanilla in a cup.  A Illinois suburban townie who has a dumpy overweight boyfriend eats Rocky Road.  Middle to old aged South Asian folks are the sole reasons to keep the Pistachio flavor in stock.  Old white people like butter pecan.  Cougars with heavy make-up and acrylic nails got Daiquiri Ice or Margarita Ice.  Children are unpredictable.  

What, then, would an urban-dwelling, TOMS-wearing, CSA box subscriber choose?  Answer: craft ice cream, for which San Francisco serves as a prolific womb.  Once the craft level of any food product develops, it’s hard for foodies to stomach anything else.  And for good reason.  Who wouldn’t want a boozy vanilla with crunchy cornflakes that was made by hand from a handle of Jim Beam whiskey that was bought at the corner store in the Mission (Secret Breakfast, $3.25/scoop, Humphry Slocombe)?  Why hadn’t anyone thought of adding salt to ice cream before now (Salted Caramel, $3.50/2 scoops, Bi-Rite Creamery)?  Don’t you want your ice cream organic AND served atop Mount Kilimanjaro ($60,000, Three Twins)?

At the pinnacle of this trend is the new Tin Pot Creamery in Silicon Valley.  Not only are their ice creams born of local, organic ingredients, there flavors are peppered with their own hand-made baked goods.  The Earl Grey with Shortbread tasted like high tea at Lovejoy’s on a spoon; you wonder why everyone left tea ice cream at green tea until now.  There are no words to describe how satisfying the Salted Brown Sugar Caramel with Gooey Brownies is.  Other delicious flavors include TCHO Dark Chocolate Shard and Roasted Hazelnut (which may win over some of those butter pecan old folks) Unfortunately, for now, Tin Pot is only accessible via people who know people or if you sign up as a member for monthly deliveries.  Rumor has it they are soon opening a shop in Palo Alto.

The mundane sweetness of simple ice cream and simple ice cream shops (of which Baskin-Robbins used to be) still has a soft place in my heart, equated to childhood summers.  That feeling is accessed when I eat local ice creams, like Grater’s in Cincinnati (how do they keep their chocolate chips so unfrozen?) or Blue Bell in Texas or Mitchell’s here in San Francisco.  The fact that Mitchell’s is located behind a Safeway and has crowds of Asian and Latino families obscuring the entrance speak to how real and how good it is.  No matter how much I rave about Harvey Milk and Honey, I will still shameless buy a quart (yes, quart, not those measly pints) of Blue Bell custard vanilla or Baskin-Robbins Gold Medal Ribbon and eat it by myself.  And if no one is looking, I may sprinkle some organic pink Himalayan sea salt on it, to taste.

I learned to shuck oysters of all sizes at Tomales Bay Oyster Company this weekend.

A beet ‘n horseradish and a curried pickled egg from the newly opened St. Vincent in the Mission. Looks like candy, but at its heart, is a pickle. What more is there to life?

Barley, spinach, sherry vinegar roasted shiitake, spring onions (obviously, I can’t get enough of fresh spring onion) lemon, parmesan. I learned about the original recipe from my extraordinary friend Emily (who learned it from Martha Stewart), and it involves couscous, feta, and red wine vinegar. My version tonight is less of a salad, less creamy, but hearty enough to be the only thing you eat after a long day of work. And you can be proud of the amount of fiber in it, yes!

Fresh from the Alemany Farmers’ Market: fresh herbed fettuccine with spring onions, cherry tomatoes, kale, and sweet basil. Short summer for foggy SF.

Made matzoh ball soup tonight. Perfect cure for a blue, in-and-out fog day. I used mirepoix, garlic, red pepper, and a leftover roast chicken from Canyon Market (Glen Park), plus Vietnamese chicken stock. Sheepishly used matzoh mix, but, hey, I’m not even Jewish. Something about the umami from the bready, eggy, matzohy flavor is so comforting.

220 California Street
San Francisco, CA
Lunch Mon-Fri 11:30-3, dinner Mon-Sat 5-10

If you don’t work in the financial district, there’s something appealing about the idea. The skyscrapered blocks populated with well-dressed bourgeoisie. A stroll to get Blue Bottle coffee that passes a Hickey Freeman haberdashery. Maybe a power lunch with a hard gin-based cocktail, because they do that there.

A friend and I decided to play hooky and live out this fantasy: we went to Barbacco, casual companion to the acclaimed Perbacco, for lunch. The joint is filled with the stereotypical 1% demographic, SF edition: Asians and whites, guys in blazers in non-traditional fabrics, the occasional older dude who wears golf gear to weekday lunch. My dining companion astutely remarked regarding the usual clientele we work with at our day jobs that these diners “step over those people on their way over here”. Their wine list is via iPad, distributed at every table.

First-world guilt aside, the restaurant perfects the weekday work lunch formula. There’s no shortage of eats for vegetarians, and pesce-pollotarians fare even better. Hearty salads come in 2 sizes, to the delight of those who prefer side portions as mains. A Niçoise salad ($8/11) redux has fresh olive-oil poached tuna. Farro, asparagus, rucola, and parmesan ($8/11) make healthy into filling. Have one of their delectable bruschettes (e.g., cured sardines, fennel, pesto, $3 each) if you need a lil’ more than just a salad.

For those who fall on the Paleo, Atkins, and gluten-free side of the diet world, you’ll be almost too satiated with the brussel sprouts fried in duck fat ($5, with anchovies and capers to boot). The richness of this dish diverts your attention from the drool-worthy pastas (of note, the lasagna, $13) and sandwiches (of note, the “porchetta”, $11). The waitstaff indulges requests for a gluten-free vehicle on which to eat the ‘nduja (pr. en-du’-ha) salame, but only after sending a more senior staff to explain in person that they don’t think any of the options (celery, romaine, carrots) would highlight this dish. Verdict: celery with spicy, spreadable salami is a win, and Barbacco get points for both culinary sensibility and tolerance.

The difference between eating faux Subway-style sandwiches at the hospital cafeteria and dining at Barbacco conjures up the same feeling as watching Sex and the City as a teenager in a Midwestern suburb. It’s aspirational—until you move to a big city, get a real job, grow slightly closer to cougar age, and realize how infantile Carrie actually is. Sure, the idea of martinis at lunch while wearing Manolos (or, Louboutins?) is appealing, but not when it becomes mundane by repetition. Barbacco is a once-in-a-while lunch place, and 99% of us can leave here with our skinny Madewell jeans secretly unbuttoned at the top, both relieved and envious that we don’t work in the financial district.

Barbacco, visuals.  Clockwise from top: sardine, fennel, pesto bruschette; farro, asparagus, rucola, parmesan salad; ‘nduja with toast and pickled pepper.

Best udon kamaage. Honolulu, HI.  And, if you get their bukkake udon, remember that “bukkake” actually means “splash”.

504 Broadway Street
San Francisco, CA
Tues-Sun 5:30-late 

Flavor sets define a cuisine to popular culture, more or less and for better or for worse.  In Chinese cooking, it’s typically garlic, ginger, and scallions.  Italian: basil, tomato, garlic, olives, and parmesan.  French: butter, herbes de Provence, and Bordelaise.  American: grill marks, fried, and buttered.  If you keep these in mind, it makes ad hoc cooking easy.  It’s oversimplified and makes food trite sometimes, but there it is.   

The Basque cuisine formula is more difficult to distill at this point in culture and time.  Fatty foie, bacalao (cod), fennel, garlic, olives, roasted peppers, grilled skewers, preserved seafood, simple things like fried peppers, bigger things like roasted meat with myriad sauces.  You know it when you taste it.  It tastes of ocean, pastures, open fires, and passion.

Txoko gets it right, even if they sacrifice the ambience of a crowded San Sebastián pintxo bar with tipsy eaters spilling out to the sidewalk in order to achieve the accurate flavor note.  Located in North Beach, it’s floor particularly spacious in one of the only parts of San Francisco that can feel as condensed as Europe—they take reservations.  The bar is small in comparison with a limited pintxo menu, and there are no pedestals displays of creative concoctions centered around a toothpick to satisfy amuse-bouche compulsions.  Though we had hoped for more tapas serving style, the co-owner and wine director Ryan Maxey informed us that they switched to the family-style format because it is more marketable.  Hard to believe that this is the case here in San Francisco, but it is what it is.  There isn’t even a crowd jammed at the door waiting—on one hand, this is a relief; on the other hand, doesn’t food taste better when it’s scarce?

Start with one of their many very decent cocktails: the Picon Punch ($10), the Basque national drink, which taste like a soft Coca-Cola for adults, and continued on to at least a few more drinks off of their concise yet quality wine list (take the waitstaff’s recs, or from Mr. Maxey himself). The hard-seared foie on a crispy pan de mie with onions in melted and fried forms ($18) is a near replica of something I could have had at La Cuchara, one of the best pintxo bars in San Sebastián.  The Txuleton ($65, serves 6-8) is amazingly cooked, ample portioned steak with lovely accoutrements of roasted tomatoes and carrots, potato-turnip gratin, and chimichurri and Bordelaise sauces.  Though this could be a point of debate at the table, the garlic potato soup ($9, with delicious bits of bacon and a melted quail egg amidst) is easily shared.  Definitely don’t forget the mushroom arroz ($12/$24, with a dense helping of al dente hen-of-the-woods).  Vegetarians, non-seafood lovers, you may want to reconsider your food life choices before coming here, or maybe coming here will change your mind.

Txoko is just part of the evolving North Beach scene is becoming somewhat of a Little Basque (New Basque? Basquetown?) with other Basque-esque contributers of 15 Romolo, Bask, Piperade, Bocadillos.  What had made this food so appealing to the rest of the world is half how it’s cooked and half how it’s served.  Two of the best 10 restaurants in the world hail from Basque country (#8 Arzak, #3 Mugaritz), but they represent merely the tip of the creative design in food happening regularly on the ground in San Sebastián.  The execution, ingredients, and flavors of Basque food are easily transported to a place like Northern California, but thus far, no one has replicated the ambiance.  If we could teach the stripper-bar goers and the tourists on a one-track path to The Stinking Rose to enjoy better food, maybe we’d have a chance.  For now, Txoko and the like may be the best Basque that America can do.