Gastronomique: Our Top 10 of The Year
End of year, time to look back and contemplate, account for the lessons and make resolutions. Blablabla. Let's roll over in the clichés of the season like pigs in the mud. So we'll give you our end of year list, and we can always apply the usual defense when taking the hackneyed road: every other lazy ass is doing it.
Note that like both writers I quote, when looking back at the food landscape of 2005, we have you, the readers, on our minds. One writer acknowledges ignorance of and dismisses her readership --I would be loath to suggest an ideal meal, not knowing your taste-- while the other expresses some dialectic hurdles in the potential dialog with his readers--Readers... are, for the most part, as abstract to me as I am to them. Every now and then... a reader will offer a helpful tip ..., but for the most part there is just the whistle and whine of the heedless wind. You, SFist valued readers, on the contrary, have the opportunity to create a conversation in the comments below. With us, or between yourselves. We'll screw up, you'll set us straight, you're darn right. If we do it right, maybe you'll pat us on the back. And we'll try to follow up on the tips as much as we can [which means going to the Palace steak house, eventually, or trying the burger at Kubala's Kitchen].
So here are the 10 things we enjoyed or discovered this year, and please please shoot them down or add your own favs in comments.
Alex bakery's egg custard tart (431 Clement St @ 5th ave.) Golden Gate Bakery in Chinatown deserves all the praise for their egg custard tarts, but Alex's crust is as flakey, the filling as eggy, and there is no line to fight to get them. Plus, they have figured a way to keep them warm and toasty all the time, as if permantently fresh out of the oven.
Marco Polo sesame ice cream (1447 Taraval St @ 24th ave) and other exotic flavors in this timeless ice cream parlor way out in the Sunset. Except for the out-there durian flavors, for which we haven't yet acquired a taste.
Campton Place olive oil ice cream amuse-bouche (340 Stockton St @ Campton place). Chef Daniel Humm's creations always challenged our taste buds, and we loved that. He's leaving SF, so we'll have to try the other funky savory ice-cream: bacon ice cream at Winterland. Maybe it will make next year's list.
Live uni at Hamano (1332 Castro St @ 24th st.) We are sorry to keep plugging this favorite sushi place of ours, but it is to our knowledge the only place where you can find the live uni regularly. We have seen it at Ebisu, albeit not recently, and we guess that Yum Yum Fish (2181 Irving St @ 23rd ave) might carry it.
Delfina Pizza (3611 18th St @ Guerrero) What we said then.
Little Star Pizza (846 Divisadero St @ McAllister) We could not say much about the out-of-this-world deep dish pizzas ourselves, what with having the rug pulled from under our little feet by Jer, but, oh boy did we enjoy it.
El Yucateco cochinita pibil Mi Lindo Yucatan became an instant foodie darling shortly after they opened, with a melt-in-your-mouth pork cooked Yucateco-style to accompany the light thrill for the chowhound effetes of hunting for food in a quote-unquote rough neighborhood; but in our ultimate head-to-head comparison, El Yucateco's (1037 Geary @ Van Ness) came out head-and-shoulders above.
Shaking beef at Dragonfly. We wrote Dragonfly (420 Judah @ 9th ave) would give the Slanted Door a run for its money and felt so vindicated when the excellent Bay Guardian food critic (not that one, the other one) added: Dragonfly serves, in my view, the best contemporary Vietnamese cooking in the city. We rest our case.
Ginseng hen at Happy Shabu Shabu This is flu season, and the best medicine (besides maybe Medicine Eat Station) is a big bowl of chicken soup, served with a whole hen stuffed with brown rice and ginseng. Happy Shabu Shabu (1401 Fillmore St @ Ellis) also serves, of course, delicious shabu shabu. They closed for a little while and should have re-opened by now, and we hope they still serve that delicious Korean dish.
Kepiting hitam manis at Batavia Garden (339 Taraval St @ 14th ave) We loved this crab dish, fried and laddled with a molasse-y black pepper sauce for a ridiculously low price; we also loved the comment by Steve, who told us --in a constructive criticism kind of way-- that we were way off the mark, that there was no there there. Steve's opinion is as valuable as ours, and anyone reading the original post will add Steve's grain of salt to our enthusiasm. So take this as a big thank you to all our commenters: you make SFist better, and if you were a dish, you'd get your own top 10 bullet just for you.