Category Archives: General

Feast On This

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Husband and wife, chefs Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani, of Ame in San Francisco. (Photo courtesy of Ame)

* Wednesdays, head to Ame in San Francisco to enjoy a new three-course themed dinner that changes weekly.

That’s three courses with wine/beverage pairings for $55 per person.

The June 24 dinner highlights the distilled Japanese spirit, shochu. To whet your whistle, I’ll let you know what one of the featured dishes that night is “bo ssam” — braised pork belly that you wrap at the table with fried oysters and kimchi. It will be accompanied by “Imperial Jade,” a shiso cucumber-infused shochu cocktail with preserved Meyer lemon and soda, served on the rocks.

* Friday, a new contemporary Indian restaurant opens in downtown Mountain View.

Sakoon, named for the Indian word for “peace,” features a dramatic interior decorated with fiber-optic chandeliers, hand-carved wood panels, and a shimmering waterfall. Executive Chef Sachin Chopra, who previously headed the kitchen at Mantra in Palo Alto, serves up regional Indian cuisine with a modern touch.

* Find pork galore on June 27 at the “High on the Hog” event at Epic Roasthouse in San Francisco.

The al fresco afternoon soiree will feature Pinot Noir tastings, and Executive Chef Jan Birnbaum preparing a slow-roasted whole pig scented with fennel. If that’s not enough, wine writer Jordan McKay also will be on hand to sign copies of his book, “Passion for Pinot: A Journey Through America’s Pinot Noir Country” (Ten Speed Press).

Talk about goodie bags. Guests will get to take home a treat of pork cracklings’ seasoned with sea salt.

Price is $50 per person for everything; $20 for just the food; or $30 just for the wine tasting.

* San Mateo’s modern Filipino restaurant, Bistro Luneta, has added weekend brunch to its lineup.

Wake up to “Eggs Benedict” ($8.95), served with sun-dried tomatoes and Philippine sausage; or a “Fili-Panini Sandwich” ($8.95), a panini filled with pork adobo or barbecued pork. Beverage choices include calamansi juice made from the tiny Filipino citrus ($3.80), and a 1-liter “Sangria Flask” ($9).

Buttery croissant sandwich at Mayfield Bakery & Cafe. (Photo courtesy of the restaurant)

* Palo Alto’s Mayfield Bakery & Cafe also will start serving breakfast, beginning June 22.

Take a bite of a “Croissant Breakfast Sandwich.” A homemade croissant — but of course, with its fab bakery on site — is stuffed with Gruyere cheese, scrambled eggs, and your choice of bacon or ham.  Or dig into a bowl of “Semolina Pudding with Honeyed Cream,” a velvety porridge topped with brown sugar, and a dollop of cream cheese sweetened with maple syrup. Breakfast dishes will be priced from $8 to $15.

A new kids' cookbook by the former food editor of Sunset magazine.

* Treat your kids to a hands-on cooking demo at MacArthur Park restaurant in Palo Alto, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. June 20.

The event celebrates the new children’s cookbook by Jerry Ann DiVecchio, former food editor of Sunset magazine, and artist Francoise Kirkman, who also worked at the magazine. “You’ve Got Recipes” (Trafford Publishing) features waterproof, laminate pages, as well as a French-English glossary with a pronunciation guide for French terms used in the book.

The class is $25. The book is $27.95, and will be for sale at the class. Call (650) 321-9990 for reservations.

* The Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco is getting its grill on.

June 26 from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., get an education in meat from Ryan Farr of 4505 Meats, as he teaches a sausage-making and grilling class. He’ll be joined by meat purveyer, Steve McCarthy of Prather Ranch Meat Co., who will give the low-down on sustainable meat. Mixologist H. Joseph Ehrmann also will show you how to concoct seasonal, fresh cocktails.

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Short and Sweet

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My oh my, the pastry cart.

That’s what apricot season usually is.

But according to reports, this year’s will be even briefer because an early frost and a rainy spring wrecked havoc on fragile apricot blossoms.

So if you still spy apricots at your local farmers’ market, do pick some up to enjoy.

That way, you also can bake this beauty — “Apricot, Almond Brown Butter Tart” by Cindy Pawlcyn, chef-owner of Napa Valley’s Mustards Grill, Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen, and Go Fish.

A taste of the season.

Made with slivered almonds pulverized with confectioners’ sugar, flour, and eggs, the tart tastes faintly of almond paste. It’s moist and sweet like that, too. Plus it has a very rich buttery flavor. (There’s 1 1/2 sticks of butter in this tart, if you must know.) Indeed, the tart’s foundation is a buttery crust that’s pre-baked. Apricot halves poke through the top all the way around, like sunshine bursting through the clouds.

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A Sneak Peek At LB Steak In San Jose

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An 8-ounce skirt steak ($23) with Bearnaise sauce.

In this skittish economy, it’s been awhile since a splashy new restaurant has opened its doors in the South Bay.

Tuesday, finally one does with the debut of LB Steak in San Jose’s Santana Row.

It’s a new concept by the Left Bank restaurant group, which already has a Left Bank Brasserie in Santana Row. LB Steak opens in the same location as the group’s former Tanglewood restaurant, which never caught on the way Chef-Proprietor Roland Passot had hoped. Indeed, even when he was conceiving Tanglewood, Passot thought a steak house would be a good fit at that spot, especially because the high-end retail-restaurant-condo complex lacked one.

The dining room lit with sparkly chandeliers.

But with diners watching their pennies these days, are they really apt to splurge on pricey steaks?

CEO Richard Miyashiro thinks so, especially because at LB Steak, the biggest ticket item is the 20-ounce Porterhouse for $39.95. Unlike so many other temples of meatdom, this one has portions that aren’t all beyond ginormous.

There also are more affordable eats, such as a burger with exotic mushrooms for $14; spaghetti and meatballs with basil ricotta tomato sauce for $16.50; and whole fried snapper with shiitakes, pickled ginger, scallions, and red peppers for $28.75.

Wild mushroom truffle risotto ($18.75).

At lunch time, there’s lighter fare, including a Cobb salad with tuna ($15.75), and a New England lobster roll on brioche ($18).

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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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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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