Chez Panisse mafia don Alice Waters speaks to Charlie Rose. [Eater]Your alt weekly lawsuit word count. [Guardian 796, SF Weekly 1,559]SFPD deputy chief demoted. [SFGate]Minor earthquake grooves Pacifica. [Examiner]CBS 5 done got themselves a blog, they did. [CBS5]Tablehopper does Playboy? [Tablehopper]......

San Francisco is really behind on the inane most-expensive food item trend. Serendipity-3, a restaurant in New York, just unveiled to the public (well, mainly for the benefit of Guinness World Records) the world's most expensive dessert. The Frrrozen Haute Chocolate was declared the most expensive dessert in the world on Wednesday by Guinness World Records. The dessert is a frozen, slushy mix of cocoas from 14 countries, milk and 5 grams of 24-carat......

The bay area Michelin Guide 2008 is out, and there’s not much changed from last year: the French Laundry is the only place with 3 stars (the most) in the wider bay area. Aqua and Michael Mina are the only 2 stars in the city. Those Michelin guys are so stingy with stars, Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters still clutches her lonely one. Jean-Luc Naret, the director of the Michelin guide, was handing out press copie......

When you live in a neighborhood overrun by donut purveyors and nail shops, with a fair number of fairly unappetizing Chinese restaurants sprinkled in between, the arrival of a new joint featuring a new regional cuisine is cause for at least a little salivation. In the Grand Lake district, we now have a Flavors of India restaurant, second outpost -- the first opened in Rockridge in 2006. It's not great Indian food. We'll be......

It's the third annual San Francisco Notable Portrait Auction, to benefit Creativity Explored! We love this event. Creativity Explored is dedicated to promoting works by local developmentally disabled artists, and they invite a group of local celebs to sit for portraits by their artists, and then auction them off with the celebs in attendance. Jonathan Richman (!!!!) will also be playing. The event is this Thursday, April 12 at 111 Minna, and you can......

Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 100. (It's all pictures and captions this week, with no dishy Catherine Bigelow text, we're sorry to report.) Total number of people pictured whom we recognize: 14 (including Vanessa Carlton and Stephan Jenkins, Joan Chen, and a Chron reporter we see from time to time when we go out for drinks with Eve). Minority count: 24 (24%). Hats, capes, tiaras: 2, 0 (but 5......

We gobble the various food sections up each Wednesday. These are our favorite tidbits from today's offerings: ...

The new Michelin was stingy with stars for San Francisco: no 3 stars restaurants (the only one in the wider bay area being the French Laundry in Napa), two 2 stars (Aqua and Michael Mina), and a 12 one stars (Fleur de Lys, La Folie, the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Rubicon, Bushi-Tei, Quince, Range, Acquerello, Masa's, Gary Danko, Boulevard, Fifth Floor). Alice Waters got only one tiny puny star for her Chez Panisse in......

We're tired of lying to the San Francisco fooderati: We used to hate goat cheese. There. We've said it. Happily, we came to our senses nine years ago and now we promote the chalky, salty flavor of caprine milk with all the passion of a new convert. Of course, we weren't alone in those dark, pre-goat cheese days. Thirty years ago, few Americans knew anything about this French staple. A woman named Laura Chenel......

We just received last week the Slow Food Guide to San Francisco and the bay area, third guide in the series after New York and Chicago. The Bay Area is in smaller font in the actual title, but the guide actually makes a great job at not discriminating against the South and East Bays. We love Slow Food. Our s.o.'s roommate, Valerie, used to head the Berkeley chapter and many times we would step into......

To get us out of the house, we need more than the promise of comfort food. We have all the comfort we want at home, what with running water and in-house sanitation. We can cook up a comfort storm in our kitchen, should we want boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin or mac&fromage. We'll make exception to any rule, of course, but to get our little tushes in a seat in a restaurant, we require......

California cuisine means something different to everyone. Some equate it with local, artisanal producers. Some cast it as a Mediterranean cuisine realized with California ingredients and American techniques. But for us, it all comes down to the fennel. Every chef who's come through Chez Panisse's kitchens uses this anisey, wintergreen-colored vegetable. We're pretty sure that if you made a pizza with grilled fennel, meyer lemon-infused artisanal olive oil, and rocket, the space-time continuum would......

We loved the empty marketplace we found at the Ferry Building on a soggy New Year's Eve day. Few buyers wanted to come out on the wet holiday. Sadly, many farmers felt the same way, and the thriving market was a shadow of its normal self. Ah, well, we still found some bright green Brussels sprouts to take home for dinner. Brussels sprouts are one of those love-em-or-hate-em vegetables, and we hope you'll use......

Certain summer fruits—tomatoes and peaches come to mind—are poster children for farmer's markets. When these ingredients are bound for the supermarket, they're picked way too early and stored in taste-damaging conditions. We've always thought the European pear (as opposed to its expensive Asian cousin) was more forgiving. It keeps well in a cool environment, allowing a producer to stretch the season for months. It ripens off the tree so you can pick it when......

We're loving the visual tableau of peppers at the farmer's markets right now. Grocery stores charge dearly to provide these vegetables in predictable, saturated colors, but we like the Jackson Pollock-esque coloring of inexpensive market stand peppers. The unripe green color many associate with bell peppers gives way to varying shades of red, brown, yellow, or purple, sometimes all on the same pepper. "Since one plant may have many fruit at different stages of maturity,"......

Bon Appétit readers may remember the "Entertaining at Home" articles: Buffy and Chip invite their dashing and witty friends over for a casual dinner in a Manhattan loft. Or in their Long Island farm house. Or their Swiss chalet. Back when we subscribed, we daydreamed about the perfect life depicted in those features. We eyed the Smoked Trout with Cucumber-Watercress Cream and thought that maybe if we made it often enough, we could conjure......

Special "We had to accept a challenge to a game of dodgeball yesterday" edition. Jennifer over at Life Begins at Thirty spent last week blogging about food. Of course, lots of people do that, including SFist. But what made this exceptional is that it was as part of a series on trying to eat locally and sustainably, both in and out of the house. Of course, it can't always be done. As Jennifer points......

Stacey over at Contraversion links to a hilarious spread in the New York Times magazine. The picture you're looking at is not the work of some photoshop geek. That is a real tattoo on the arm of a real chef who obviously adores Alice Waters. Why? Chef Nino Mancari of Delaware's Fish On! explains: ''I wanted to do a tribute to American food...'Eventually I'll get James and Julia, and with Alice it'll be the......

[Ed. Note: Oh, we are so happy right now. New SFist Derrick of Obsession with Food just wrote a wonderful pair of recipes that would make the perfect wintry, local feast. Since the Trimethyldioxypurist is off in the hinterlands this week, we wanted to get this up right away. So please welcome a new foodie to the table. Bon appetit!] We're getting a bit tired of winter's oranges, but juicy, so-red-they're-violet blood oranges caught......