Local food hounds can breathe a collective sigh of relief this week upon learning that Michael Bauer has invested in a new iPhone 5S. He says he's "hoping to get better photos in dark restaurants" with it, and not to be guilty of the woeful flash photography atrocities Martha Stewart got reamed for this week.
Bauer regularly publishes roundups of his favorite dishes at the end of each week of dining, and given how much the noted critic eats out around the Bay, this amounts to rather hefty catalogue of the current local dish-scape. Typically, though, the photos have needed some work, often using a flash. (As many chefs will tell you, it's one of their greatest peeves of the digital age is that their food is constantly being advertised on Facebook and Twitter via horrible, horrible photos that make it look horrible.) In this week's installment, Bauer recounts a technology snafu in which he lost a cache of photos between migrating his data from his old phone to his new one, but he still comes up with a handful to share.
Among the dishes he loved this week were the steak tartare at Bouli Bar at the Ferry Building; a hamachi dish with avocado puree and shaved radishes on a giant seaweed cracker at State Bird Provisions; April Bloomfield's oxtail terrine at Tosca Cafe; and some crab cakes at Palmers Tavern which he says tasted much better than they looked. Hopefully that State Bird photo (above) is a promise of new things to come from this new phone camera, because it looks downright appetizing!
