In the House with Mama Vangy

After five hours on one plane, missing the quick layover in Miami (funky jet stream) and waiting three more for the next jump to San Juan, then flying almost three hours before undertaking the two-hour, white-knuckle drive on the autopista to Mayagüez, it was time for some Vangy food. Mmhm. Food's cooking.

The first day's menu featured arroz con pollo con habichuelas, pretty self-explanatory. We also got bacalao, which is salt codfish, and viandas, the assorted, yamlike, starchy tubers that you dress with Spanish olive oil. My aunt Jossette also made guineos en almibar, which are ripe bananas in nectar. No idea why this dish is that popular, but it is very sweet and goes with an otherwise salty cuisine.

There also was the requisite mixed salad, and as an appetizer one of Vangy's "secretaries" fried up some surullitos, or sticks of cornmeal. No doubt in my mind why these are popular, especially with a cervecita, a can of Bud or Coors Light or whatever that's eight or 10 ounces (not too much, stays cold).

A few days later, we're back. For a change of pace, there's arroz con gandules, or pigeon peas. The main event is pasteles, tamale-like bundles made with plantain or yucca masa and stuffed with chicken, olives and finely chopped onions, peppers, raisins, love. (If you're having yucca, they're more savory and come in a beautiful sunshine-yellow color, as opposed to the smokiness and dark, exotic tone of the maduro masa. ) Today's "secretary" also had some boneless beef ribs. You know, in case the pasteles weren't enough.


For sides, green-plantain tostones (shown in their glorious fry) also came out with some more salad. There wasn't much difference between these two meals in terms of authenticity or taste, but for some reason the second time I couldn't stop eating. Kristen's eyes got really big as I put away three pasteles, most of the ribs, spoonfuls of the stewed gandules that had small balls of plantain thrown in.

Vangy also told Kristen that she needed to learn to have beer with her Puerto Rican food -- the best advice on record from a grandmother-in-law.

Next post: el pescado.

Buffaloed

A quick recommendation: Almost as good as TJ's frozen buffalo burgers are the chili-lime chicken burgers. Not bad in a pinch. However, stay away from the salmon burgers and the turkey burgers with embedded bits of corn and peas.

User-Generated Discontent, redux

I say redux as a shorthand to say "You read it here first." Turns out the Chron had this big story while I was away on frigging food bloggers having all this fun being more than a little annoying.

Looks like the Fifth and Mission gang whiffed at the First Rule of Cyberspace, which is recognizing that people who spend at least a dozen hours a day glued to computers want more than anything to be recognized. Now the fur is flying in the most tiresome and predictable way. “We ARE important! How dare some restauraeur dish like that? I’ll never eat at that place, ever!”

One thing I’d like more than anything is for people who say they’ve never been so offended and will never spend their dollars here or there, ever, to actually stick to their pledges and stay home, in front of their computers. That way I and restaurant staffers everywhere can relax. The market for dining out is big and forgiving enough.

In a future post, I'll relate my favorite restaurant story, from the Pijp in Amsterdam -- one that would never have happened, ever, if I hadn't been such a mensch.

Back like Plumpjack

After nine days of letting the hair down with the little lady, K and I went to get cleaned up and then got a little snack at Pizza Inferno, that place on Sutter and Fillmore, which actually wasn't bad at all.

The place, full of lively color with a couple of flat screens (tonight featuring the NCAA final), specializes in square pizzas that could be a little thinner and crisper, but let me assure you that they are lightly sauced and that the ingredients are fresh and toothsome. (You can also just have some olive oil brushed on.) The tap also featured Arrogant Bastard Ale from a brewery I've never even heard of. (Turns out during weekdays they have a happy hour on pints and pitchers, as well as a two-for-one pizza deal until 6:30.)

K and I split a salad and a fancy veggie with artichoke hearts, Roma tomatoes, roasted peppers and maybe other goodies, and you think that it's not enough food, but it is. The highlight was the vinaigrette on the salad, Knockout, probably the best I've had. The waiter even said as much when we ordered.

Rest assured that I've got quite a bit to report from my excellent, excellent meals abroad. Stay tuned.

Review: La Vie

I've waited a couple weeks to write this one up, which should tell you something right there.

Uh-oh.

I liked certain things. Ingredients were crisp, fresh, light. But two problems overwhelmed the smaller positives. First, the terrible service. Our waiter did the egregious head-turn a couple times when we signalled for his attention. Trust me, I was a waiter. I know the move. The joint was busy, but not that busy. We had to ask for several things -- water, an extra fork, this or that condiment -- more than once before they arrived.

The second neg was the cost, not justified by the quality, especially in a town with plenty of decent options for cheap Viet. I don't remember offhand the prices, but they were at least the level of Le Soleil without the creativity of that menu, the attention of the staff, or the loving care put into Le Soleil's recent makeover.

Here's where price and service converged to ill effect: It being crab season, and there being five of us, we wanted to rip one apart. "Is one enough?" we asked the waiter? "Mmm, I think at least two," he said. "Two for five people." OK, we said, and started to debate which two flavors (garlic, black bean, salt and pepper, tamarind, etc). Offhand I asked, "By the way, how much per crab?"

The waiter shifted his weight and looked a bit disappointed. "Thirty-eight dollars."

Right. Two for five people. Mmkay. He botched the upsell and pissed off the customer in the process. With the other dishes we were ordering, one crab was plenty, and he knew it. Sorry, but I won't go back. C'est la vie.

Product Placement: TJ's Dry Rub

Da Fanch and I have been devoted to making our own dry rub -- for food, dammit! Come on. This is a family blog. We found a recipe for "Iraqi spice mix" in a Middle Eastern cookbook that required the purchase of many different powders and other things that need to be pulverized. The result is an excellent, pungent rub for all kinds of meats, and I recommend it to anyone with time and a mortar and pestle. A Cuisinart will also do.

Second best: the TJ's "Steak & Chop Grill & Broil" mix, found in the spice rack. It's damn good, it's not too salty, and it has dried lemon zest, a nice touch. Start with it, then doctor it as you see fit. I like to add a little cinammon, especially for pork and chicken served with a couscous sprinkled with walnuts and raisins. Allahu akbar!

Pan Latin? ¡'Perate!

Say what we will about the New York Times and the particular strained relationship we have with it, but one of the best things about it (I think) is that eventually the paper gets around to nailing something right on the head, and then that’s done and over with.

Today it is the article on Latin supermarkets. First let’s get to the beans:

> A walk through the dried-bean aisle at Rancho Liborio in a case in point. There are pintos, both the larger, speckled brown ones preferred by Mexicans and the smaller, lighter-colored ones used in Peru. Pink beans appeal to Puerto Ricans, and black beans to Cubans, Guatemalans and Brazilians.

Pink! As I’ve been telling everyone my whole life, those are my favorite. Now let’s do the spice:

> Attracting Hispanic shoppers is a delicate business, according to Juan Guillermo Tornoe, who runs Hispanic Trending, a market research company in Austin, Texas. Buyers for big chains will often go to Hispanic food trade shows, order everything in sight and then wonder why their efforts to market to Latinos fail. “Well, what are you buying?” he said. “Are you buying hot sauce and expecting to sell it to Cubans?”

Yeah! Most Cubans don’t eat spicy, and in fact their food (at least in Cuba) is rather bland. Is that not what they told you at Cha Cha Cha?

I also love that there's a photo of an obese lady ladling an almost certainly sweetened agua fresca.

So thank you, Bill Keller. But no tres leches for you, Judy Miller.

Making Legumes? Cry Fowl

Wanna give a special shout to some of my favorite sauces for sofrito: ¡El Pato!

For the lentils on Saturday, I threw in a tiny jar of the jalapeño-tomato sauce (I usually use the tomato-chile, in the yellow can) to the saute and let it reduce just a little bit. Then I added the lentils, diced potatoes and a lot of chicken broth and water. That's why they tasted so good.

Now I need to get over the lamb.

Best Food in the (NL) West

According to 42-year-old baseball veteran Steve Finley, it's San Francisco, hands-down:

"There's such an eclectic mix of restaurants in that city," he said. "It's a mini-New York. Sushi. Steak. Italian. Whatever you want, you can find a small cubbyhole somewhere to find really, really good food. You name it, it's fantastic."

User-Generated Discontent

Much has been made of "The Wisdom of Crowds," the counterintuitive thesis and book that says the masses aren't necessarily asses after all. I'm sure you're already familiar with the work and with James Surowiecki's column in the New Yorker, so I won't drill down, but here's an interesting factoid from Bookmarks magazine's review, off Amazon: "The TV studio audience of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' guesses correctly 91 percent of the time, compared with 'experts' who guess only 65 percent correctly." Other than in game shows, mmk, I understand from Amazon's Publishers Weekly blurb that such wisdom comes also comes into play "driving in traffic, maximizing stock-market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google."

Ah, the Internet, this vessel of compulsion, productivity and desire. I blog and comment and this site and a few others in bursts of all three to share, get up to speed, connect. A foodie forum such as this one involves a crowd -- a small, self-selected group of adorable semi-obsessives -- and I am here to give and take. Wise crowds, PW synthesizes, "need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions." Isn't this essentially what the Web delivers? Is Surowiecki rehashing some geek's thesis about the power of the Net? That's so 1995!

The last 10-12 years have seen an explosion of online services, and a whole era devoted to funny fundamentals and paradigm shifts that justified not only a lot of content for the crowd, but also a lot more writers, editors, designers, engineers, business developers (still figuring that one out) and executives. (At the time, this was good for me. I got to work with interesting people, get paid and make something I found valuable. It was even better for the execs, who were in the exalted position of having little or no idea what they were doing, while understanding nevertheless that they would make out no matter what.) All of us were slated to develop content and put it out there for people. One of my favorite online destinations called itself Slate, its founder explaining that the Web was this blank thing they were going to pour stuff into or something like that.

But the crowd was not to be held back. Why pay frustrated college graduates to do digests in between sneaker shopping and snacking? People are so eager to talk about the things they're thinking and doing. The business plans basically wrote themselves; I'm just not sure about the bottom line.

Throwing your hat in with the crowd is weird when you already have more than 100 reviews, as one writer remarks (scroll to March 5 entry), for a place that's only been open four months. Even more unsettling is absence of irony or self-criticism in the dozens and dozens of comments for every venue for hospitality, even if visited but once. Yes, this is America, where we're assured of being good consumers by virtue of spending good money dining and drinking and carrying on. Then we run home, spark up our computers and profess the following: "So nasty," or maybe "It’s tasty."

Whether the shallot vinaigrette, chili dog or piece of shit can be differently nasty or tasty seems to be beside the point. The primary motivation is to be a critic, to put your particular perspective into the mix with countless other takes. Even if we grant that more than 100 reviews (Perbacco, my first Google alert) in total contain everything a person would want to know about a place, it’s 100% irrelevant to someone who personally appreciates what it is and what it does. Less than 10 user reviews is too small a sample, and the signal to noise ratio starts to get muddy at more than 40. So much for diversity of opinion. (One more work-related rant. I once had to copy edit thousands of blurbs on East Bay and wine-country eateries, as well as on food and wine pairings. After about 100, I had no appetite for anything at all. It became a blur of spurious suggestions: "Try the curry chicken, skip the chicken curry.")

What's the crowd raving about? The impulses to share and connect that I've copped to above could be symptomatic of something else. (A way to have your cake after eating it?) Besides, with half of the meals eaten away from home, I don’t think people have a case for puffing themselves up just for making the big decision to sit down somewhere. In fact, it’s a little naïve.

Restaurateur Danny Meyer, who’s gone from gathering recipes to writing a business book, doesn’t tell his staff to put the customer first; the customer is sometimes wrong, even in America. He advises his people to put each other first.

Think about the regulars at several places and what happens when they pop in, whether it's Zuni or Yo-Yo's. These folks don't hit the Yahoo boards or Yelp to get the poop; they know. The staff knows them, says hi and shares a little cheer. (It’s one of the ways the 80/20 rule manifests itself, where 20% of the clientele is more or less 80% of the business.) One-timers will be tended to right after. It's the difference between walking the busy sidewalk and wandering into the busy sidewalk cafe.

Review: Pres a Vi

This generation needs an Eisenhower, someone to sound the alarm about the growing threat of the small-plates/wine-bar complex. You know the scam: $13 dollar "large bites" and $8 glasses of wine, prices justified not by size of portion but by words per menu description. When a single salad is "blended," "layered" and "finished," it's time to stand up and speak truth to power.

Which brings us to Pres a Vi, a new place tucked into one corner of the Lucas Empire in the Presidio that seemed as good a lunch destination as any after a long walk at Crissy Field. The menu at first was inviting. Nothing over $15, with several dishes (including burgers and sausage sandwiches) arrayed together in what seemed a reasonably priced entree division. Turned out it was all small plates. "And what about the burgers? Are they like this?" I asked the waiter, making my fingers into a circle the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.

"No, the burgers are full size," he replied.

So, confusion right off the bat. That made me go down the list and ask, "What about this? And this?"

We started with potato wedges ("roasted," "fried" and "tossed") that were dry and mealy on the inside. More annoyingly, they had a name, "Jo-Jos." We also split an order of grilled asparagus named "Delta Grass" that tasted amazingly like grilled asparagus.

The next round were the non-entree entrees: tuna tatiki, Korean BBQ-style beef, and rock shrimp risotto. The tuna was raw but a bit chewy, not supple, with a lot of fussy stuff on top. The other two dishes were fine but damn small for their prices.

We ended with a beet salad named "Roasted Beet Salad," easy enough to figure out, but surprises lurked within. The description included "onion ring," which I thought was rings of raw or perhaps pickled onion. In fact it was an Onion Ring, a rather large one: breaded, deep-fried, and topped with the aforementioned beets. I did not expect and did not want a deep-fried onion ring with my beet salad. It was not cheeky or post-modern or retro; it was wrong.

So was the bill: $80 for three people, with only one of us (me) drinking alcohol (a $6 Anchor Steam draft). And the service: weird. Overly attentive, as they tried to clean the table of crumbs after each round and kept asking us how we were "doing," but in that California spacey way. And the feng shui: the room sucked all the energy out of the space, for some strange reason. Fanch pointed out the window sills were just slightly above eye level, making it difficult to look out at the nice view of the Palace of Fine Arts.

Kinda Fresh Pasta

I believe we've tried all the "fresh" ravioli options at Trader Joe's. As fresh as pasta can be after sitting in airtight plastic in a cooler for God knows how many days.

And I'm not talking about the jumbo-sized, which fall apart too easily, but the regular, um, ravioli-sized. Here's how I rank them, 1 being tops:

1) mushroom
2) pesto
3) lobster
4) walnut 'n' gorgonzola

Am I forgetting any?

And look what I found.

I Propose a Roast

One idea that I've been kicking around for a while: People like talking about their favorite things to eat and of course their favorite places to get it, which is of course completely subjective and not portable to others.

So you loved it when they comped you a dozen oysters at Globe. Or that you were accommodated with utmost kindness and consideration by everyone at Delfina. But in this human world, every kitchen has an off night. Sometimes the staff brings you the wrong dish, and you ask whether it's the right dish. "Yes!" the server says, and splits. That's the way it goes, and it doesn't go the same way for everybody. Who the hell cares anyway?

Oh yeah, so my idea is: Let's find San Francisco's absolute worst places to eat. (This is along the lines of my "food is disgusting" rant.) I'd like to try some and make mental notes of what's wrong. Who knows, maybe a few things will come out right. But basically I'm curious how screwed up things can get and how this can possibly be allowed to pass.

Any suggestions, other than the obvious tourist traps?

UPDATE: Here's a start. The Chron allows you to search by rating, serving up 13 crappy places to eat.

Review: Viet Not So Much

Elbo and I went to fill our Noise Pop prescription Friday night, but per doctor's orders we had to take our medicine on a full stomach.

(Here's a full review of the show.)

To comply, I suggested something from the Viet offerings down Larkin Street. Pagolac, where I have supped before, had a line nearly out the door, and Turtle Tower was closed for what looked like a thorough disinfecting. That left Mangosteen, on the corner of Larkin and Eddy with a view of the rockstar-friendly Phoenix Hotel and the crackhead-friendly purveyors of mirth who scuttled back and forth on the sidewalk.

The interior was encouraging: mild tropical colors and materials -- Elbo particularly liked the lazy bamboo wall fan -- made me think these folks had all the right ideas. Then the food came. It wasn't bad, per se. Limp perhaps is a better word.

A mango salad had less-than-fresh lettuce and extremely bland dressing, not to mention too few mango slices. My pho ga was also dull even when plied with green chili slices and basil leaves. Elbo's tofu curry was pleasant but not very interesting.

All this was confirmed the next day, underscored even, when The Fanch said, "Oh, Mangosteen. I've been there before. It was terrible." Now she tells me.

With so many other Viet options in Little Saigon, there's no need to give them a second chance.

Pre-Theater Tip Check: Back Bar at Grand Cafe

The Hotel Monaco still packs in a crowd before the shows, as Kristen and I confirmed last night. We walk in and poke around, but head back toward the dining room past the wood-fired oven to the rear bar area, where there's quick service.

We split a mushroom pizza topped with arugula, which was delicious but not as crispy-crusty as it's done at Pizzetta. I couldn't resist a couple of oysters (I think they were kumamotos) with a big glass of Bass. They knocked my socks off.

Except for the trashed tourist the next stool over who wouldn't stop offering food to the staff in broken Spanish, we were happy.

Signs of the Coming Gastro-Apocalypse

Sheesh! This was supposed to be a good-food, good-news blog. Now all this:

First, as Michael Pollan said at a food symposium at Berkeley a few years ago (E.L.M., thanks for driving), all the country’s bees are sick. So what do we do to pollinate crops? Breed more selectively to make more of the little fellas, even though that can make colonies more vulnerable to disease. Then what? Import some other buzzers from elsewhere, which inevitably leads to the spread of diseases that makes all the bees sick. Mmmk.

Out-of-control growth isn’t only on the producer side. Frigging
Whole Foods is struggling so hard to keep up with a sector it helped create, as well as the customers it carved out for itself against TJ’s and even Safeway that it’s stocking rotten produce at premium prices. You can say the same thing about Home Depot: Piss off enough people and it’ll be painful bringing them back. I’ll take on the five aisles of holistic health crap another day.

At least Frank B had a good time tossing salad in his swanky New York steak-house tour.

UPDATE: The grain market's abuzz, so to speak, over the bee thing.

Habichuated

Tell me how you like your beans, and I’ll tell you where you’re from. Frijoles negros? Let’s discuss it over daiquiris at El Floridita. Pintos? The first course will probably be pozole. In Puerto Rico, black beans are only for soup, and white beans are pretty popular, but will always be a step down from gandules guisados, also known as pigeon peas or pois Congo, and on the C-list compared with the real deal, habichuelas coloradas or rosadas, reds or pinks.

I’ve gone through most of the methods, dried or canned, with a sofrito (the Creole saute of onions, garlic, tomatoes and sweet peppers) or without, and I’m happy to share all of them with you, but there’s one mainstay that has to, has to be in the stew: pork. The vegan trip won’t impart that flavor and feel, or hold everything together. (Louis Armstrong fans already know, as we know.)

So: Take a long, fatty strip of bacon or even a cut slice of pancetta and pop it into a pot of soaked beans set to boil. Leave it in there for three hours. Then go ahead and brown some diced bacon or salt pork in a pan and start your sofrito with the drippings. Chop up some peppers (pasilla, Anaheim, yellow jalapeños, whatever you have), throw in a couple of spoonfuls of tomato paste. Also check out those little cans of El Pato tomato sauce they have at Latin markets.

Soften the beans for hours, then stir in the sofrito and add salt. If they don't come out perfect, remember that they’ll be better the next day and then the day after that.

The starch basically becomes an afterthought. I'll take red beans and rice any day instead of rice and beans, and no, I don't need them wrapped up in a tortilla.

A Hint of Mint

Welcome back to the occasional series, Sugo on Hugo. It's been at least a year since returning to the cozy, rainy-night basics of a sugo sauce ladeled over a toothsome pasta. The idea behind sugo is just minced meat. No veggies, no music, no veggies, no veggies, except for the onion and garlic chopped extremely fine. Tonight we chose lean ground beef, 5% fat, with the longer threads of the grind broken up with a wooden spoon as it was sauteeing. Don't give me no lumpy sugo, pal.

A large handful of red pepper flakes and a generous pinch of brown sugar later, it still needed something. Ah-ha: dried mint leaves, pulled from the stalks, ripped into small pieces but not pulverized. The more the better: I didn't really measure.

Fabulous. Beef and mint and dried red pepper, just what the doctor ordered as the hailstorms pinged the kitchen window and the thunder shook the fusilli.

King and Chief Probably Had a Big Beef

There's a running food fight between N.Y. Times food critic Frank Bruni and restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, whose new Manhattan steakhouse, Kobe Club, Bruni skewered recently.

Chodorow responded with a $40,000 ad in the Times, forcing Bruni to actually go out and buy the paper instead of reading it online. (Hey, shouldn't he get a free subscription?)

Best quote from another star chef: "If Frank Bruni had poorly reviewed one of my restaurants, I might have pulled a Tonya Harding and broken his kneecaps. I’d have thought, Dude, I’ve gotta do something."

Did I just write "star chef"? I apologize. You may now slap me across the face with a raw turbot fillet 39-foot Colossal Squid.

Calamari, Anyone?

I hear they're a bit tough when they're 39 feet long.