Author Archives: foodgal

Ensnared by Zare at Fly Trap in San Francisco

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Mahi Mahi on a bed of wicked good chickpeas.

It’s not every day that a chef threatens to come kidnap you if you don’t make it to his restaurant soon.

But that’s just what Chef-Owner Hoss Zare of Zare at Fly Trap in San Francisco did to me.

In the nicest of ways, of course.

Fiercely proud of his South of Market establishment that he returned to cook at last year, after having been the chef there also in the early 1990s, Zare invited me to come taste his punchy Mediterranean cuisine.

Born in Iran of Turkish heritage, Zare is a self-trained chef with a big personality and playful sense of humor (both de facto requirements needed to kidnap a food writer, after all). Previously, he’s cooked at Restaurant Ecco in San Francisco, and Aromi in San Francisco. He also ran his own restaurants, Zare in the mid-1990s in San Francisco, Bistro Zare in the late-1990s in San Francisco, and Zare Napa in Wine Country, from 2005-2007.

Zare at Fly Trap is as colorful as the chef. Deep red walls, a pressed tin ceiling, and a profusion of old botanical prints hanging everywhere, lend a casual, artsy warmth.

The innovative cocktails ($10 each) are hard to resist. I sipped a “Minted Memory,” a highball filled with gin, Pimm’s No. 1, lemon, and Iranian minted vinegar syrup. It was tangy, citrusy, refreshing, and yes, quite memorable. My hubby opted for the “Absinthe Frappe,” made with Kubler Absinthe, Orgeat, and lemon. One sip was enough to wake the dead, but then if you’ve ever had absinthe, you know how powerful the anise-flavored liquor can be. Sip it slowly and bask in the powerful warmth it envelopes you in.

A signature pistachio meatball in a powerful pomegranate sauce.

Dinner started with pistachio meatballs ($12), so tender, and floating in a pool of  harissa-honey-pomegranate glaze. The flavor of the meatballs, themselves, got lost in the sauce. But if you love big, big flavors, you’ll enjoy the earthy, fruity, tart, syrupy sauce that is definitely a mouth-full.

Smoked trout atop noodles made of cucumber.

Smoked trout ($11) gets a twist with a bed of “linguini” that are really thin, delicate strands of cucumber tossed with dill creme fraiche and topped with glistening orange trout roe. Truly, a lovely dish.

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Take Five With Poleng Lounge Chef Tim Luym — Or “Mosquito” To Those In the Know

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Chef Tim Luym in his shoebox-sized kitchen at Poleng Lounge.

For awhile, it looked like the inside of a tiny cubicle was where Tim Luym would make his mark.

After all, the 30-year-old Filipino-American had majored in marketing and programming at Santa Clara University, before going to work at nearby Applied Materials.

But seeing the movie,” Office Space,” the comedy satirizing workers who loathe their three-walled existences, changed all that. Luym saw his life flash before him. He realized it was not a life he wanted. So he decided to turn his back on that, and follow his heart — and stomach — by enrolling at San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy instead.

An externship landed him at Charles Nob Hill in San Francisco, where he cooked on the line with acclaimed Chef Melissa Perello. When she moved to the Fifth Floor in San Francisco, he followed her.

In 2006, Lyum and a group of investors — none of whom had ever operated a restaurant before — got together to open what was supposed to be a lively night club that merely served a little bit of food.

Papaya salad with sugarcane shrimp.

That place was Poleng Lounge, which nowadays has become known far and wide for Luym’s vibrant, daring take on modern Southeast Asian street food in dishes such as bone marrow with crispy coconut bread, and addicting crispy adobo wings.

Recently, I chatted with him about his quirky nickname, the enormous impact a three-star review from the San Francisco Chronicle can have on a fledgling restaurant, and how he’d like to reintroduce Chris Cosentino to a certain Filipino delicacy the Incanto chef once gagged on.

Q: So when Poleng Lounge opened, it was really envisioned to be a club, not necessarily a restaurant?

A: The whole concept was that it was a club. We had to serve food because of the liquor license. We were an Asian-themed bar, so it was only natural that we did Asian bar food. We opened with a menu of only seven items.

Some nights we only had seven people come in. I would go to the market every morning, and figure out how much to buy, based on how many people we thought might walk in. After awhile, we realized there was no way we could sustain ourselves at the pace we were going. We opened in May, and we realized in August that we were probably going to be closed by December. We would run out of cash flow.

Then, out of left field, we got three stars in the Chronicle. I was just the cook. I didn’t know about media and all that stuff. I didn’t grasp what it meant. When the review came out, a public relations agency told us, ‘You better get ready. You’re going to be busy!’

On a weekend, we were used to doing maybe 20 covers. That Sunday night after the review came out, we quadrupled in business. We had all kinds of people come in — young, old, and people who had traveled from all over the Bay Area. It was shocking, and a blessing. To this day, I don’t understand it. I know a lot of talented chefs and can’t figure out, ‘Why us?’

Q: When Poleng Lounge first opened, you weren’t even able to pay yourself a salary. So you ended up cooking on the side for the dental fraternity at the University of California at San Francisco to earn extra cash?

A: That was my income while opening the restaurant. It was a means to an end. About 20 people lived in the house. I did this for a year and a half. I’d do themed nights. When it was “Mediterranean Night,” I’d make couscous with lamb or beef, and Greek salad with feta. When it was “Italian Night,” I’d make Caesar salad, linguine vongole, and tiramisu. Some of them had never had this kind of food before. It was all stuff that I liked to eat.

Once the restaurant got busy, though, I had less time. I started having to repeat menus. The worst was when I did a Macy’s cooking challenge. I was so busy that I called a pizza place to deliver to the fraternity. But I must have given the wrong address, because the pizza never showed up. The next day, they were like, ‘Man, we have to talk!’ And I knew I couldn’t do it any longer.

Q: So, being Asian myself, I must ask you the infamous Asian parental question. Did your parents think you were crazy when, after graduating from an expensive, private university and landing a job in high-tech, you told them you wanted to become a cook instead?

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An Ode to Cowgirl Creamery Cottage Cheese

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Cottage cheese that will change your mind about cottage cheese.

My early recollections of cottage cheese are not the best of ones.

Like so many of you way back when, I ate it — but not happily.

It was, of course, diet food, associated with canned cling peach halves or bare burger patties alongside a forlorn leaf of iceberg lettuce. We ate the white, creamy curds because they were supposed to be good for us, because we were counting calories, because we wanted to feel virtuous.

We certainly didn’t spoon them into our mouths because we wanted to.

But I do now.

That’s because I’ve discovered a cottage cheese that actually makes me revel in eating cottage cheese. It’s the clabbered cottage cheese crafted by Cowgirl Creamery of Point Reyes Station.

It starts with organic non-fat milk from Marin County’s Straus Family Creamery. Clabbered cream (similar in taste to creme fraiche) is then added. The result is a creamy, rich cottage cheese. Unlike the standard mass-produced ones that have a sort of sour milk-taste to them, Cowgirl Creamery’s has a pure, fresh milky flavor.

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Spanish Flavors

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Tender pork flavored with rosemary, white wine, and pomegranate juice.

Antonio Banderas. Penelope Cruz. The architecture of Antoni Gaudi.

Sangria. Cava. Tapas. And melt-in-your-mouth Iberico ham.

I love all things Spanish.

When I spied the new “One Pot Spanish” (Sellers Publishing) cookbook by Spanish cooking authority Penelope Casas, it brought back delectable memories of my trip to Spain long ago, when I got my fill of seafood paella, briny olives, and bracing gazpacho.

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My Kind of Bread

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Bread -- made with oodles of chocolate.

Yeah, yeah, yah. I know I’m supposed to eat more whole wheat, whole grain, whole lotta fiber-fabulous bread.

But can you blame me for choosing this “Double Chocolate-Honey Bread” instead?

After all, it’s got all the best characteristics of your favorite artisan loaf — but with cocoa powder suffused throughout, and big chunks of gooey deep, dark chocolate hidden inside.

The recipe is from the new “Kneadlessly Simple” (Wiley) by veteran cookbook author Nancy Baggett.

It’s a bread book all about making loaves using the slow-rise, no-knead method that’s all the rage now.

To be honest, I haven’t been all that tempted by this new trend. So ya don’t have to get your hands dirty by kneading dough. Instead you have to figure out what exact time to stick the dough in the refrigerator, when to take it out for the first rise, then when to put it in a pan for the second rise, and lastly, when precisely it’s ready to go into the oven.  Advanced calculus was easier than this.

Dough, just after the first rise.

When it comes to chocolate baked goods, though, I’ll go to great lengths. So for this chocolate bread, I was willing to give it a go. And the results were so extraordinary, I’d gladly put myself through these timing gymnastics again.

This is definitely not a cake, even if from the outside it might resemble a tea loaf of sorts. There’s no delicate, tender crumb here. This is honest-to-goodness bread with a sugary, crisp hard crust and a dense, yet soft interior that’s shot through and through with chocolate. If you like the French tradition of nibbling on a baguette topped with a piece of good dark chocolate, you’ll find this bread a pure slice of heaven.

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