What would Batman and Robin think? With its chic industrial/gothic design, the new “market hall” style Whole Foods that opened recently near Lake Merritt in Oakland certainly could be used for a set on the next Batman flick. (Note: we won’t be defending or condemning the corporation itself here. We instead refer you to Mark Morford’s sharp analysis of the friendly giant.) We wish we’d known about the opening day festivities, what with an......

We celebrated our birthday this week with a French-Food-Themed evening out, East Bay style that we thought you might like to try, too. Pixar's ">Ratatouille, followed by dinner at Liaison Bistro. ...

A few photos of French restaurant Chapeau! on Clement...

It doesn't feel right that we're subbing in for SFist Ced, who's on hiatus for a few months -- so we're doing a combination Gastronomique/Philistine review in his honor! Before heading out to the SF Youth Orchestra's Peter and the Wolf holiday concert this afternoon, we grabbed brunch at new trendy Mission bistro Weird Fish. Weird Fish is a combination seafood/vegan restaurant at 18th and Mission -- and the fish isn't really that weird. For......

Last week's winner, the Guardian. The SF People's Organization is having a meeting this Saturday. Letters about guns in the Castro. Everything is better with strippers -- union woes, men against women, and a no-fatties proposal at the Lusty Lady. Hating on fixie bikes -- and big ups to SFist Sarah L for pointing out to us how awesomely combative the comments in response have gotten (typical comment: "My god man, do you have an......

Last time we saw Jill Grove on the stage of the SF Opera, she blew us away. She was a glorious Preziosilla in La Forza del Destino, showing up in a full Matrix garb, outfitted like Carrie-Anne Moss's Trinity as we wrote at the time. She came back to San Francisco, a place she now calls home, for a sold-out recital with pianist John Churchwell at the temple Emanu-El. We were sitting in the......

In which SFist eats our way around the Bay Area in alphabetical order... A short while ago we read the scoop, on SFist, about a new French restaurant on the scene. If you live in the area around Guerrero and 22nd, you might be thankful for the opening, a few months ago, of a friendly little French bistro calling itself La Provence. Whilst the neighbourhood itself might not conjure up images of neat little lavender......

Last week’s roundup covered quite a few places in the Mission: Pizzeria Delfina, the resurrected Window, the Thai-French fusion at Baku, dim-sum at Big Lantern, and Crazy Sushi. We thought it was a lot, but we were very far from being exhaustive: we snubbed -- for now -- the new Provence, on Guerrero, or the Annex, a budget French restaurant on Valencia. We ignored the new menu and new ownership at the Last Supper......

In the movie Barbershop, Isaac is this white guy who talks, dresses and acts like the other characters, even though they all are African-Americans. And we were thinking of him when we got our hands on Thomas Keller's latest cookbook, Bouchon: here is this American chef who talks about France's culinary traditions, who cooks according to century old French recipes, who even bears an Alsatian name. Bouchon is Keller's other restaurant, the French bistro......

Sometimes, what we want is a damn cheeseburger. We want it medium well (too much pinkness grosses us out), we want it on a good bun, and we want it topped with lots o' melty cheddar, healthy tomatoes, crisp red onion, a good glop of mayo, and nothing else. We think Bistro Burger is fine, we adore Burger Joint when we can get it, and we think Perry's makes a splendid one (though their......

At the behest of those who know better, we skipped the decidedly lame Media Bistro mixer occupying half of 111 Minna Gallery for the Dirt Press lauch party situated on the other side of the space. Founded in Brooklyn, circa 2003, as a collaborative effort between a small cache of artists and writers, Dirt Press began as an online journal of arts and letters, published thrice yearly. The entire operation became bi-coastal following Editor-in-Chief......

Well, okay, this isn't really a crime movie, but if an octopus really did attack San Francisco, heck yeah it would make the Blotter! The cops think a robbery in the Richmond's Ocean King restaurant on Tuesday (glad Gourmet de l'Ouest wasn't there when it happened!) may be linked to a robbery in Oakland at the Korean Bistro. Both restaurants were hit by a multiethnic trio of robbers (two African-American, one speaking with an obvious Vietnamese accent). Despite what you see in the movies, multiracial gangs are actually fairly rare, which made the cops think the robberies were linked. We can't decide if it's depressing, typical, or a good sign that criminals can't transcend race. The gun battle on Tuesday at 18th and South Van Ness outside a tire-rim store, which injured four people (one of whom was a bystander), has been traced back to two Western Addition gangs whose members happened to cross paths outside their usual area. The Mission gang force is annoyed. "In the Mission District we have problems with our own gangs. We don't need gangs from other areas coming to visit us," he told the Ex. And Oakland's coming back strong in the 2005 murder count, after a surge forward by perennial second-placer San Francisco, with three killings yesterday and two today. Oakland's total is now at 13 murders for 2005, and San Francisco is at 16 as of last week. Hey, there's a Blotter special today too -- since you've asked, there's a list of all the pictures we've used as Blotter illustrations since we started, after the jump....

In this special edition, we offer a cookbook review. Regular column after the jump. We're certainly not the types to indulge in the latest tome of unmanageable recipes from some celebrity chef. But the one man who we would trust to write a good celebrity cookbook has gone and done just that. That's right, from the man who brought you the coke-and-booze-and-sex-and-coke tell-all Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain, has made a study of his classic french......