San Francisco neighborhoods yield gastronomic delights

San Franciscans know they live in one of the great food cities of the world. That they aren’t insufferable about it may be because their taste buds are so thoroughly satisfied.

You won’t find them nightly at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse or at the city’s Slanted Door, or on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. No, they have wonderful little places throughout their neighborhoods.

Some of these have gotten some publicity, but others are spots that you only hear about if you know someone who lives in the neighborhood — or follow local bloggers who have shared their dining experiences.

So, when I went to San Francisco for the recent BlogHer food conference, I decided to bookend business with a little off-the-beaten-track dining and food shopping.

While I was at it, I looked for a place to stay that was a little different, too. Something that would put me in the right frame of mind. I found the 86-room Orchard Garden Hotel, a little “green” boutique on Bush St. at Grant Ave., where the Chinatown Gate is.

When I heard that the hotel was California’s first LEED-certified hotel-meaning it was built to nationally accepted standards for “green” building developed by the U.S. Green Building Council-I was intrigued. And, once I checked in, I was tickled by the card-key controlled room electricity, the multi-use recycling trash receptacle, and the comfy furniture made from sustainably grown wood.  Housekeepers even use citrus-based cleaning products. All this, and lots of comfort with down comforters and poofy pillows. It was a good home base for my culinary adventures.

Chinatown ramble

Since the hotel is so close to Chinatown,  my friend Kalyn Denny and I met up and rambled down Grant Avenue. We almost immediately found a shop that I hadn’t  thought about in years. The Wok Shop, owned by Tane Chan. We popped in to browse the huge array of woks and Asian kitchenware. We found stainless steel, carbon steel, cast iron, and iron/enamel woks of varying sizes. There are cleavers, knives, steamers, and chopsticks and all sorts of little Chinese kitchen tschotkes. And Chan was in the thick of it, very helpful and friendly.

When we told her we were ravenous, Chan sent Kalyn and me to Chef Hung’s Restaurant on nearby Clay Street.

Chef Hung’s isn’t anything remarkable, but what we ordered we thoroughly enjoyed. The house special pan fried noodles were crispy and included calamari, shrimp, scallops, and sliced BBQ pork, with bright-tasting bok choy and musky shitake mushrooms. The fried green beans with shredded pork were even better, with a spicy kick offset by chunks of sweet garlic.

Dinner at Delfina

I didn’t want to eat too much at lunch because our dinner was to be at a little restaurant in the Mission, Delfina.

There are actually two Delfinas in San Francisco. The pizzeria in Pacific Heights and the restaurant and pizzeria in the Mission, on 18^th Street - along a strip that friends of mine refer to as the “gourmet ghetto” because it’s home to wonderful spots such as the Bi-Rite Creamery and Market, and Tartine Bakery . These same friends chose the restaurant and there we were on a cool fall evening sitting under a field of pendant lamps, enjoying soul-warming dishes such as salt cod Mantecato with walnut oil and fennel seed flatbread,  gnocchi al ragu with porcini mushrooms and crispy pancetta, and an amazing roasted “Liberty Duck,” with polenta.

As delicious as all these were, my favorite that evening was, surprisingly, the salad. The insalata di campo was a tangy mix of delicate bitter greens, pancetta, chopped walnuts, Parmigiano, and balsamic vinaigrette. It was a marvelous combination of flavors and textures, simple but mouth pleasing. We finished our meal with a smooth lemon vebena-buttermilk panna cotta served with golden and red raspberries and a scoop each of the very interesting Concord grape and candied Meyer lemon gelati.

Creole breakfast

There wasn’t nearly enough time to recover from that meal by the next morning, when I met Lisa Rogovin of In the Kitchen with Lisa at Brenda’s French Soul Food.

Rogovin is a young woman who knows the San Francisco food scene inside and out. And what better to do with all that knowledge than share it with locals and visitors. She takes people everywhere-from the Ferry Building and farmers market all the way up to Napa.

We didn’t do a tour that morning, but she took me a little out of my comfort zone into the Tenderloin for a taste of New Orleans and Creole cooking. It’s in a truly inauspicious location-between a dry cleaners and Taco Bell on Polk at Eddy Street, and it’s only open for breakfast, brunch, and lunch.

What a breakfast, though. I had the Gulf shrimp and goat cheese omelette, which is served with caramelized onions, and a sweet and savory tomato-bacon relish. It came with a hearty bowl full of grits awash in butter, and an enormous biscuit.

I was tempted by the beignets-maybe a savory crawfish, spiced with cayenne, scallions and cheddar, or the Granny Smith apple with cinnamon honey butter-but they’ll have to wait for my next visit. Brenda’s also serves cinnamon brioche French toast, gumbo, fried shrimp or oyster po-boys, and, well, burgers. The restaurant’s tiny-with only seven tables and a counter-so get there early or be prepared to wait. But, it’s worth it.

Confectionary Row

With so much food in me, it seemed inconceivable that I could eat any more that day, but more was planned, so I did a good amount of walking, finally working my way to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I met my friend Alice Robertson and we took in the very cool Richard Avedon exhibition. Then we took a short cab ride to Hayes Valley, where food writer Amy Sherman promised to show us around.

Call this “Confectionary Row,” for you won’t see much in the way of cheese shops or bread bakers here. Instead sugar rules-in all sorts of interesting forms. But, we were all raised right and before dessert comes lunch. So we shared a meal at Bar Jules, a little café on Hayes Street.

The focus here, as in many San Francisco restaurants, is serving dishes with ingredients from local farmers and offering sustainable meat and fish. The menu changes  daily so one never knows exactly what to expect.

We ate well, sharing a wood-grilled shrimp salad with butter lettuce, radishes, green beans, and a yummy chervil vinaigrette; a Muscovy duck sandwich with white bean puree, wild arugula, and salsa verde; and a delicious but difficult to eat hamburger served not on a bun but thin-sliced toasted bread along with a little salad.

Then it was time to hit the sweets. Our first stop was the delightful Miette Confiserie. Think Paris, but Paris a la “Amelie” with all its stylized dreamy pinkness. The shop has bowls and jars and other displays of candies from around the world.

I loved the locally made poco dolce tabs of bittersweet chocolate with flavors like burnt caramel with sea salt, sesame toffee, and Aztec chile that made my tongue tingle in happiness. There were Hopjes, a licorice hard candy from Holland I’d enjoyed years ago as a child, and there were the very popular chocolate covered gummy bears. It’s floor to ceiling candy, with French-style macarons and other pastries thrown in for very good measure.

Macarons and chocolate

Speaking of macarons, we had to go down the street to Paulette, a marvel of pastels against sleek white walls. It’s easy to find macarons in U.S. cities, but these are remarkable, with flavors as varied as caramel pecan and chocolate coconut to raspberry rose and violet cassis. I bought a box to take to friends in Mill Valley; the teenagers went wild for them.

Next stop? The very elegant, even masculine,  Christopher Elbow Artisinal Chocolate. Elbow began his career in the Midwest, before doing what chefs tend to do-move around a lot; in his case to Las Vegas, Paris, and Kansas City.

In Kansas City he ramped up his chocolate-making skills and started selling them to local markets before starting his own company, including a shop in San Francisco. The chocolates are molded confections that come in dozens of flavor combinations with spices, fruits, nuts, and even wine. They’re also little works of art in glorious designs. I made room for just one, a caramel with fleur de sel. I understand how French women can eat just one chocolate and come away satisfied. It’s just a little taste of perfection.

Alice wanted to try an ice cream shop in the Mission she’d been hearing about: Humphry Slocombe. So we headed off on BART over to 24^th Street. It was a bit of a walk through an interesting Hispanic neighborhood (be sure to check out La Reyna Bakery on 24^th at Folsom), but the pay off was a unique collection of ice cream flavors. We’re talking balsamic caramel, salted licorice, oolong, and honey dew melon. I chose the balsamic caramel, which had a great tart/sweet collision going on. Alice went for a truly innovative creation, Secret Breakfast-basically bourbon and cornflakes. Funny, but it works.

On to Asian cuisine

Exhausted and full, knowing a big dinner was several hours away, I headed back to collapse at the Orchard Garden, I revived enough to meet Amy and other friends for dinner in the Tenderloin at Bodega Bistro, a marvelous Vietnamese restaurant just a couple of blocks away from Brenda’s. With a dozen of us dining together, we were able to sample many different dishes. The standouts? Try the nom appetizer, a salad of finely shredded green papaya served with Vietnamese beef jerky and ground peanuts in a spicy tangy sauce. Enjoy it with the chim quay, a fabulous glazed roasted squab served with caramelized onions and raisins. The meat is so tender, the skin so crispy, it’s a joy to eat.

Then, head for what they call “Hanoi Street Cuisine.” The bun cha ha noi is marinated broiled pork served with vermicelli; wrap it in lettuce and dip it into a sweet sauce. The nem cua is fried rice paper stuffed with crab meat and black mushrooms. We also had a tender bo luc lac, filet mignon brochettes marinated in garlic, pepper, and lots of different herbs, served with a seasoning sauce.

We brought our own wine, and the restaurant graciously handled the corking and serving. The only challenge was getting home afterwards. It’s not an area we found swarming with empty taxis, so be sure to bring the phone number of a taxi company so you can call for one after dinner, if you don’t have a car.

Breakfast time again

My eating adventures ended with two more wonderful stops. On Sunday, I went back to 18^th Street for a delightful breakfast at Tartine Bakery.  I saw people blissed out on flaky croissants and bread pudding, so that’s what I opted for — a heavenly pan de chocolat and the last of a large pan of apple raisin bread pudding, which was made with a sweet brioche. We also sampled a luscious quiche made with chard, tomatoes, and guyere cheese.

Later in the day, the Bakery offers hot pressed sandwiches and little salads. Throughout the day, there’s an outrageous collection of traditional pastries such as éclairs, Frangipane tarts, devil’s food cake rounds, and a chocolate soufflé cake made with Valrhona chocolate.

While I was on 18^th , I had to visit Bi-Rite Market. I’ve never seen anything like this in San Diego. This place is crammed with every gourmet treat you’d ever conceive of in the guise of a neighborhood grocery store. There are house-made stocks and broths of chicken, fish, beef, and vegetables, containers of rendered duck fat and veal demi-glasse. The cheese counter made me want to weep, what with my favorite burrata, Cow Girl Creamery Inverness, and Bellwether Farms sheep milk ricotta. They had house-made pickled vegetables, Sonoma-grown blood orange marinated olives. It was just too much to look at…

The last supper

My last night was the perfect send off. This time the neighborhood was Noe Valley, easily accessible via public transportation from the Ferry Building.

Contigo is perhaps San Francisco’s best neighborhood restaurant. Owner/chef Brett Emerson (previously of Greens, LuLu, and Chez Panisse) created a Spanish tapas restaurant that is warm, yet modern — with food that one of my friends that evening said she would want for her last meal on Earth.

We had a tsunami of divine dishes, but the standouts were the patatas bravas, fried potatoes with an aioli that was simply perfection;  sardine toasts, served with spiced chickpea puree and pickled onions; calamares stuffed with lobster, mushrooms and more aioli; and the pulpo salad, with cucumbers, pickled red peppers, onions, capers, and mint. The flavors just sang on my tongue.

Finish dinner with the “chocolate caliente,’ a cup of Barcelona-style chocolate that’s almost as thick as mousse, and churros, those addictive cinnamon sugar fritters. Contigo’s only been open for six months and already it has a huge following, and it’s well deserved.

While San Francisco has an endless number of high-profile restaurants and eateries, hitting the neighborhoods takes one to an entirely new level of appreciation for what San Franciscans take for granted-delicious ingredients served with a side of creativity.

Caron Golden is a food columnist for SDNN and writes the food blog San Diego Foodstuff.

Tags: Alice Robertson, Amy Sherman, Bar Jules, Bi-Rite Market, Bodega Bistro, Brenda's French Soul Food, Christopher Elbow Artisinal Chocolate, Contigo, Delfina, dining, Epicurean Concierge, Hanoi Street Cuisine, Humphry Slocombe, Miette Confiserie, neighborhoods, Paulette, restaurants, san francisco, SDNN, Tartine Bakery

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.