Detour, the Castro neighborhood arcade bar in newly expanded space at Sanchez and Market formerly known as Brewcade, is launching a new menu next week (Dec. 6) that the owners say better reflects their blended Asian families.

Sibling owners Tiffny Vergara Chung and Shawn Vergara, who are part both Filipino and also own Blackbird down the street, launched Detour in July serving mostly standard bar fare. But they have now engaged consulting chef Sean Thomas to debut a more eclectic, street-food-inspired, pan-Asian menu that they see as more "personally meaningful, a little playful and great to enjoy with a cocktail and a game of Pac Man," according to a release.

"The Sisig-inspired tacos, that feels like something I could have had as a kid," Vergara says, adding that there will also be a Japanese curry dish to reflect his Japanese side, and Korean dishes to reflect his brother-in-law's family's food.

Food is also going to be served at Detour, as it already is, until 1:30 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, and until 11:30 p.m. every other night — later than most outfits in the Castro.

The new menu, launching on Friday, December 6, includes some Filipino-inspired "crispy sticky" adobo chicken wings, sisig tacos, as well as longanisa — the Filipino-Spanish sausage similar to chorizo — turned into a corn dog with soy-calamansi Dijonnaise. Taking cues from other street foods in other parts of Asia, the menu also includes "okonomiyaki" tots topped with shredded cabbage, kewpie mayonnaise, katsu sauce, bonito flakes, and seaweed; a "mapo" Frito pie; Thai chicken and rice with spicy cucumbers and ginger-soybean sauce; the Detour Loco Moco topped with a fried egg and brown gravy and served over steamed rice and macaroni salad; and a Korean-inspired kalbi burger with charred scallion sauce, sharp cheddar, and banchan relish.

Pizza is staying on the menu in the form of two "Midway Breads" — one topped with smoked bacon, ssamjang sauce, savoy cabbage, green apple, and white cheddar; and a vegetarian flatbread with bulgogi-style mushrooms, buttered kimchi, toasted seaweed, sesame mayo, and green onion.

After closing for a brief remodel, Brewcade morphed into Detour over the summer after four successful years in the smaller space at one end of the building. The combined Detour space includes the flatiron-shaped restaurant space that was formerly home to Hecho and Botellon, neither of which lasted more than two years.

Detour opened with a limited menu that included a couple of sandwiches and pizzas, with a promise that a burger was going to be added. But now, instead, the whole menu is getting a creative overhaul.

And, as before, there's a roving cocktail cart for everyone who doesn't want to abandon their game.

Previously: Brewcade Morphs Into The Detour, Softly Reopens In Expanded Digs With Food, Roving Bar Cart

Ousted Groupon founder Andrew Mason, now 34, has relocated to San Francisco, lost 30 pounds, and since last fall he's been working on a new venture: Detour. It's a mobile app, currently in beta testing, that provides cool-sounding audio tours of San Francisco that The Verge has already compared to "a particularly good episode of This American Life."

Mason founded Detour with Yishai Lerner, Groupon's former vice president of mobile engineering, and as he told the Chron, he was inspired to create the app after doing an audio tour of some ruins in Rome, with his wife, sharing one pair of earbuds. Detour has the added benefit of being GPS-enabled, so you can follow your own path through a neighborhood and suddenly someone could chime in to tell you what's right around the corner.

The unique part about Detour sounds like it's more of an intimate, well-informed look at a neighborhood, almost like when Amelie leads the blind man around her own neighborhood pointing out the sights and smells, in Amelie. For the S.F. tours Mason has created so far, he has Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, for instance, talking about his favorite Tenderloin haunts, and radio host Ninna Gaensler-Debs giving her tour of North Beach and Chinatown, complete with a jazz soundtrack and interviews with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other living members of the Beat Generation.

Mason describes it to TechCrunch as "more like a location-based documentary" than a typical audio tour.

Eventually, there will be the ability to upload your own personal tours, which will be vetted and reviewed by users, and the tours will cost $5 or $10 to download, with a portion of that going to the contributor. You can start making pitches now, right here.

As The Verge mentions:

Mason being Mason, Detour can also get weird. One of the tours available at launch is a cupcake tour of the tony Marina District narrated by "philosopher Ulrich Fürst," who in reality is a friend of Mason’s doing a dead-on impression of the filmmaker Werner Herzog. "While you feast on delicious local pastries, Ulrich questions the metanarrative scaffolding that supports your sensorial enjoyment," reads the description, which describes the neighborhood as a place "where capitalism is fueled through the parasitic symbiosis of indulgence and restraint."

The Chron quotes Mason, regarding his recent past, saying that Groupon's 2011 IPO was "a hazing process for introducing you to the club of corporate douchery."

It should be noted that Mason hardly needs the money from this new venture: He was worth $400 million by the time he left Groupon in 2013. The Chron also immediately undercut this Detour venture in a way, via the following, in the introductory paragraphs of their piece:

"People have an enormous hunger to have really compelling experiences in their cities," Mason says. Then a seagull poops on his head.

For anyone looking to describe Mason's last few years, the moment offers an irresistible opportunity for metaphor.

Nice.

[The Verge]
[TechCrunch]
[Chron]

If your morning commute involves the northside of Park Presidio, take a deep breath and expect a few minutes delay. Bay City News is reporting via the Examiner that the area of Park Presidio near California Street is closed to traffic due to a power pole that's currently "dangling precariously." The pole had been damaged in an earlier accident.

A detour has been set up onto side streets.

What a delightfully diverting game of Muni roulette! Several stops on the 43 line will be "intermittently closed." Maybe they're open; maybe they're not -- the only way to know for sure is to waste your time walking over to them to check! And then waste your time walking to another stop. And hey, where exactly ARE those other stops? There's no map on the sign, so if you don't know the area, you're out of luck. But it's not like the Presidio Trust has any interest in tourism, right?

We called Mark Helmbrecht in the Presidio Trust's Office of Public Affairs (415-561-5418, if you're interested), and he confirmed, yes, there's no way to know when the stop will or won't be open. We emailed Muni, too, and they haven't offered any new details. Here's a thought: why not just say, "the stops will definitely be closed from 9 to 6. And here's a map to where you should go." Skip the guessing game and just tell people what to expect. At least that way, the Trust doesnt seem unreliable and undeserving of, well, trust.

We have to hand it to the Presidio on this one -- in the field of Diminishing Public Confidence In Muni, they've actually outdone Muni. At least with NextBus we knew when to wander out to the stop; and now the Presidio has found a way to circumvent NextBus. Well done, everyone.