There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

We feel way dirty for posting this, but maybe someone cares. According to what is supposedly actually Paris Hilton's blog via some youth-oriented contraption called "MySpace," the omnipresent socialite is going to be at Macy's Union Square tomorrow at 3 p.m. to launch her clothing line....

You already know about The Reaping, and Firehouse Dog and you’d have to live under a rock not to know about Grindhouse but there are two film events starting this week that you MUST NOT MISS. The first is part of PFA’s “Closely Watched Film” series. This week they’ve brought Thai legend Apichatpong Weerasethakul for Q&A after screenings of his films Tropical Malady (Friday) and Blissfully Yours (Saturday). He’s coming from Thailand! You can’t miss that! ...

This weekend we started our taxes, so we are now feeling particularly poor. In need of activities that that will suit our penny-pinching ways, while also distracting us from the cold hard reality of our financial state, we turn to Albany, a little town north of Berkeley. ...

If it’s as beautiful and warm as everyone says it will be this Sunday, then we’re headed to the Thai Buddhist Temple in Berkeley for the Sunday brunch. We haven’t been in awhile, and we’ve been craving that Mango Sticky Rice. Brunch in general is not usually our thing -- the long wait to get seated for an over-priced generic egg scramble usually makes our tender hangovers worse and not better. But the brunch at Wat Mongkolratanaram in Berkeley does not disappoint. It’s a weekly fundraiser for the temple. For around $5, you can get a tasty and pretty authentic Thai meal, including their delicious mango sticky rice for dessert. ...

Cultural Learnings of Blogosphere for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of -Ist-a-verse Jagshemash! Borat is a hit. It's getting rave reviews, grossing millions, and definitely the most quotable thing we've seen in ages. But Borat seems to have missed most of the -ist cities, and we were all wondering how the film would have been different if he'd made his way around the world on the -ist tour. In Shanghai, Borat would be observing Inane Learnings......

We had our excuses (Hangar One Thai Boxer cocktails, delectable nibbles, interesting gossip opps, and supreme people watching) for staying for the entire CHOW launch party at Bix. It was fascinating and delish, which is always a wonderful combo! ...

This has been a rough week for your -ist pals, though you wouldn't know it from the great posts all over the network. Plagued with server problems, our tech team (led by the great Neil Epstein) toiled around the clock to solve the glitches as they arose. Seriously, we've said, typed, and thought the phrase "server problems" more in the past week than we have for the last 35 years combined. Why not say it......

The Ghost of Mae Nak is a sweet confection with a surprisingly tart center. A contemporary version of a classic Thai fable that director Mark Duffield compared to the Western world's Dracula myth, The Ghost of Mae Nak adheres closely to the "vengeful spirit" structure we've seen in The Grudge and The Ring, right down to the spirit's long, stringy hair and ability to kill folks just by showing up and looking creepy. Though the......

More folks than we'd ever expected mentioned the January 16th New Yorker article about Bunkerd Faphimai and his gym, Fight and Fitness to us, perhaps because our favored male companion trains there. "What's it like in there?" they'd ask us. "Is it scary?" "Well, no" we'd say, right before they'd remind us that the love of our life spends a lot of his free time choking and beating people, so maybe our perception is......

In training for the first ever pillow fight club at Justin Herman Plaza yesterday evening, we upped our protein intake and worked on our cardio and conditioning. We honestly did not know what to expect, all we knew is that we didn't want to be out of breath, like so many laps around the school yard we completed in elementary school. Arriving thirty minutes early, we started warming up, roadwork, push-ups, a couple of......

You had a dose of Dosa last week, and we so agree with what SFist Sam wrote that we should leave it to rest. Especially since Dosa probably won't need us to give it word of mouth to succeed: it reminded us of Ti Couz for wrapping fillings into thin pancakes, dosas and crepes being vague cousins; and it reminded us of the Mission's Osha Thai for the dating couple clientele, the energy, the......

Welcome to our newest contributor, SFist Chris! He'll be covering those hard-working Golden State Warriors -- this is going to be the year, we can feel it! And a hearty welcome back to Mom-Marin-Correspondent SFist Amanda! Last week, we had politics on the brain as we gear up for Tuesday's election: City propositions, state propositions, and soon-to-be eleven-time candidate H. Brown. (Hey, was H. the guy on the stairs in our blind item?) In other news: we visited restaurants (French and Thai), we recovered from our Halloween hangovers (nice picture choice, SFist Jackson!), and we might be getting some extra movies off Netflix. Check out some zine art, make some chicken stock, or start looking for Bachelor-alum Jesse Palmer around town. ...

A short PSA: yesterday we (aka. SFist Sam) investigated the food of Provence. Since no one has done more for the PR of the Provence area than Peter Mayle --except maybe for those guys Cezanne and Van Gogh-- we have to mention he will be signing his new book, Confessions of a French Baker, Saturday at noon at the Ferry Building's Sur La Table. The French baker is the one prominently featured in A Year in Provence, of course. He also will be at a ticketed event tonight at the Clay, tomorrow in Danville, and Saturday at 6pm in Sebastopol (cf. info at the very bottom of this post). As it is about food in France, we will review the book, hopefully next week, as we only received it today. Last week, we started our epic "battle thai," with a lackluster visit to Osha Thai. We usually give at least two visits to a restaurant, but we were not particularly in the mood to go back there. We instead opted to visit Marnee Thai. We had checked out Thai Chef, a block away from the original Marnee, and at the time really felt we should see how the reference in the neighborhood fares against the new young guns....

There are two categories of Thai restaurants, nowadays: the lounge-y kind, with black clad petite waiters and waitresses, ambient music with a techno beat, sleek furniture. The traditional kind, also known as kitschy, with wooden sculptures, convoluted gilded frames hanging on the walls, and waiters outfitted in bright pink or electric blue silks. In the first category, one could find the Castro Thai Chef, the Mission Baku. In the latter, Surya, Thep Phanom, or......

Let's take a look behind the scenes at the Gastronomique production studio. The question that we get all the time (email us your questions, comments, or suggestions here, btw, we want your input) is: how do you pick the places that you review? Well, that's easy: we read the free weeklies, and if a restaurant advertises with "grand opening" and "take 10% off your meal with this coupon," we are in. Consider Thai Chef,......

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......

Restaurants are popping up in the Mission like zits on the face of a teenager. And it is our duty, as self-proclaimed food dermatologist, to go and examine them. Today is the overall check-up, where we take a wide look at the scene, the PCP visit if you will, before we return in subsequent posts with the magnifying glass of the specialist on two new and hip Mission spots which are buzzed about a-plenty.......

Every time we'd visit Patpong, we'd stop and consider visiting Greco Romana. Look at that facade! Last week when we were driving aimlessly, searching for food ("Where should we go to eat" "I don't know. where do you want to go?" "I don't know, where do you want to go") and growing painfully close to snapping at one another, our companion said "Let's go to that Greek place by the Thai place." And that,......

NAATA must be so proud of the great opening night screening of Saving Face at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. There was a big crowd outside the Castro Theater as we arrived, and as we entered the theater we were disconcerted by all the folks who seemed to be reserving seats for others. Then, we realized that we were being total rubes, and that the "purses" in the theater chairs were......

A feature in which SFist brings attention to restaurants in the oft-overlooked Richmond and Sunset districts. We hope you're inspired to try new some new places, and we'd love to hear recommendations of Westside joints you'd like to see reviewed, so please send your thoughts our way, or leave them in the comments. Out in the Sunset, you can't swing a cat without hitting a pretty decent Thai restaurant. We're reminded of the line......

SFist admits that we already have plans to see Constantine, which we hear is crap but the opportunity to see friends we haven't seen in ages, plus a pan from LaSalle makes us psyched to see it. That we're actually leaving the house, cats, and dog to see this movie in an actual theater in enough to make this film our Big Budget Pick of the Week, and we'll see you at one of......

San Francisco's favorite but least read Q&A columnist, the Essefficist, cracks a bad joke or two about eleven-year-old strumpets and checks into how to get racist cab drivers in trouble....

In what has to be the most delicious way to help those who lost their lives, loved ones and communities in the Tsunami disaster, a group of foodie bloggers from around the world have donated their formidable talents in recipe writing and wine pairing to put together "A Menu for Hope." Derrick over at Obsession With Food was where we first found the menu. He contributed a recipe for Khari Poori with Mint Chutney,......