Food: June 2009 Archives

'Monday Munchies' returns. Yay! Also, if you can't afford to eat / be seen at Waterbar, calm down and listen: We have a review of Jollibee's, ready for your reading pleasure later this week. Until then, enjoy this.

by Tiffany Maleshefsk The very ritzy-ish Waterbar, normally way out of our wallet’s reach, offers a prix fixe menu on Mondays called Shellfish & Champagne. And their prix fixe menu, which is billed as a "deal" even though it's still out of reach for many of us, is a tad more reasonable. For $60, eaters get three courses and three flutes of champagne. Or, go for the bargain-basement deal three courses for $40 (sans champagne).

We recently tested out the Shellfish & Champagne menu when the shellfish of the evening was Dungeness crab (our absolute favorite). And to keep things interesting, we brought a pal who didn’t need to restrict herself to the prix fixe menu.

Here’s a blow-by-blow of how the meal went down.

The current wave of cocktail nerd-dom has reached such great heights that there's a whole cottage industry of cocktail bloggers out there and a whole annual conference (Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans each July) devoted to the mixologists' blogosphere. If you're a beer-and-shot kind of person, you'll probably want to stop reading and click away now. But for those of you who want to geek out on things like flavored bitters, vintage gin drinks, and making your own falernum, here's a roundup of cocktail blogs to beef up your booze knowledge and satisfy your cocktail curiosities.

by Ted Weinstein

This week's cocktail recipe comes to us from H. Joseph Ehrmann, the bar manager at Elixir and director of Cocktail Ambassadors. Elixir is currently offering a Happy Hour punch deal -- $8 for two cups of a different punch each week between 4 and 7 p.m. Now, from H's mixologist notes:

Warning! Ending soon: the chance to have some of the world's most delightfully smooth, luxurious orbs to pop into your mouth (both large and small, depending on your own predilections). No, the Bush Administration hasn't returned to try to outlaw sex; legendary chocolatier Joseph Schmidt's 16th Street store is closing forever at the end of the month.

Everyone loves chocolate -- especially "bitches," as a female friend loves to remind us whenever we reach for a Snickers. From Willy Wonka to Kylie Minogue, people love shoveling it into their greedy, sugar starved mouths.

Saturday's Great American Food and Music Festival looked like it had win written all over it: Diners, Drive-ins and Dives' Guy Fieri, alpha-male grilling fanboy Bobby Flay! A16's Nate Appleman! Boulevard's Nancy Oakes! LA's Pink’s Hot Dogs!, Tony Luke's Cheesesteaks! Booze! Jazzy tunes! Sun!

I came across a recipe for the Algonquin Cocktail, a classic from the early 1900s, in the book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails and thought it might be a fun drink to do a spin on. I had been wanting to figure out a recipe using the Zirbenz stone pine schnapps for quite some time and thought that rye would mix well with it. At the time one of my fellow bartenders told me that pineapple was a relative of the pine cone so that was an obvious next step. (After researching this I figured out he was wrong and it is not related, but the flavor still works.) I substituted Drambuie for the dry vermouth (a spiced honey liqueur made from malted whiskey), and after a couple go rounds it was obvious that it needed a little more acid so I added the lemon juice. I named the drink The Vicious Circle, which was what Dorothy Parker used to call the group of writers otherwise known as The Algonquin Round Table.

by Tiffany Maleshefski

Fleur de Lys's Hubert "Let It Fly In the Breeze And Get Caught In the Trees" Keller won the main challenge during last night's the premier episode of Top Chef Masters. He wooed the judges' tongues with Cold Scottish Salmon (featuring carrot and petit pea soup with cinnamon croutons), Creamy Mac & Cheese with Prawns, and Mushrooms & Fresh Herbs). In addition to basic cable glory, Keller's win landed $10,000 for the Bay Area's Make-A-Wish Foundation. Aw.

As SFist Deborah and your editor took advantage of Orson's first-ever lunch service today (we both recommend the fried chicken sandwich on parmesan bun, complete with expertly fried dark meat that made us binge), we got word from our regular bartender, Jessie, that they're having a quasi-screening party for tonight's premier episode of . See, famed SF chef Elizabeth Faulkner (executive chef/owner of Orson and Citizen Cake) will be a contestant on the show. So, we recommend you heading over to cheer her on to victory.

Although he brought this up over a year ago, SF Chronicle's Michael Bauer needs discuss it again. Because nothing has been done about it. What on earth are we talking about? Perfume stink in restaurants. Bauer hates it; in fact, he even has a strict no perfume policy in the Food & Wine department. As he explains, "To me it's almost worse than secondhand smoke. I've had clouds of stinky floral perfumes engulf me as I try to enjoy my meal. Not only does everything end up tasting like a truckload of gardenias, I leave with a headache." Which: true. (Though, we have to add, it's not nearly as bad as Castro trash who sport tank tops and/or flip flops at eateries, which are acts of hostile selfishness.)

Restaurants are shuttering like mad these days. Because people are poorer. But it's your job, hungry/employed consumers, to keep San Francisco's top-tier food reputation going strong. So, why not check out some of SF's esteemed eateries on a rare Monday night out on the town, via SFist's new Monday food feature?

In an effort to expose the fructose- and sodium-laced underbelly of the Bay Area foodie scene, SFist asked famous gastronomic types to reveal their junk food habits of choice.