#135 | SF Restaurants: From Best, to Dreamy, to Vandalized
AI Stole Your Cookbook. Now What?
Butter, Olive Oil, Flour
Even the grocery list is a love poem, a prayer—
God, let me keep what I love.
Peaches, cheap. Books, brilliant—
mine so I can underline.
How aromatic the apricots,
how sharp the novels.
Together,
we have planted an orchard.
I don’t understand the word defensive:
are you supposed to just sit there?
I don’t think we have this word in Romanian;
we also don’t have a word for camel toe.
Or panty line: if you don’t see one
does it mean you’re going commando?
You always put a spell on me.
And everything I want is here—
but where am I?—Lucia Cherciu, Poetry Foundation May 2023
Hey there - I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to Eat.Drink.Think., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
👉 ICYMI The most clicked link from our last newsletter was a poll on whether you’d consider trying MSG. 44% of you said yes! 32% were on the fence, and 24% said no f-ing way.
It’s Too Hot to Cook! It’s summer in San Francisco, aka October, and despite our constant complaining about the cold, foggy weather, when the temps hit the 80’s, all we do is complain about the heat. Grass is always greener, right? On days like this, we don’t dare turn on the oven, so we resort to something that only requires a sharp knife and cold fish: crudo. In this case, dice up some local halibut filets, pour a cold glass of sake, and try to find the coldest place in the house to eat (the garage in our place). Halibut Crudo with Avocado Crema and Yuzo Kosho. Edible SF
A Dreamy Scandinavian Brunch Restaurant: Janelle Bitker talks to Nichole Accettola about her new cookbook, Scandinavian from Scratch: A Love Letter to the Baking of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and how the pandemic triggered recent menu changes at Kantine. “Cookbooks in the U.S. dedicated to Scandinavian baking are rare. And generally, Danish baking doesn’t have the same renown here as some other European countries — which Accettola feels is a shame.” SF Chronicle (no paywall)
#protip If you’re going to purchase Scandinavian from Scratch (and you should!) remember to shop at your local bookstore because 👇 In SF, Omnivore Books comes to mind, plus Green Apple Books, Booksmith, Bookshop West Portal, Browser Books, City Lights, Blackbird Bookstore, and more. This list, too: Bookstores for food lovers across the country! #shoplocal #notamazon
Speaking of Billionaires: ChatGPT by Open Ai, LLaMA by Meta, Google’s Bard and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, and other AI platforms have apparently crawled the content of over 200,000 books from the Books3 dataset for training AI software to provide answers to, among other things, cooking and recipes. Without permission from the authors. Here are just a few of the local authors whose works were pirated as part of the Books3 dataset:
The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, by John Birdsall
The Zuni Café Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant, by Judy Rodgers
Yummy Supper: 100 Fresh, Luscious & Honest Recipes from a Gluten-Free Omnivore, by Bay Area food photographer Erin Scott
Flour + Water: Pasta, by Thomas McNaughton and Paolo Lucchesi
Super Natural Every Day: Well-Loved Recipes from My Natural Foods Kitchen, by Heidi Swanson
Class-Action Lawsuits Have Been Filed: Including this one in California against OpenAI. Washington Post (no paywall)
Do Authors Have Any Other Recourse? Send a Letter to AI Companies Telling Them They Do Not Have the Right to Use Your Work. Authors Guild
And They Just Took It?
OB/GYN Jen Gunter posted she felt “furious” at finding her books in the data set; poet Carl Phillips, that he felt a “general feeling of helplessness.”
“This was 7 yrs of sweat, blood, midnight joys, pleadings at the beach, ablutions in the bath, panic attacks, poring over dictionaries, thinking how to do it how to tell it, this was surviving things that nearly destroyed me — and they just took it?” Ingrid Rojas Contreras wrote on X, posting a screenshot of her book “Fruit of the Drunken Tree” turning up in Books3. Washington Post
The Atlantic published a three-part series about the controversy here (we don’t have a subscription, and it’s behind a paywall) Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books are Powering Generative AI.
The True Cost of Food on Your Dinner Plate: Dumpling Club founder Cathay Bi, K&J Orchards farmer and Pomet restaurant owner Aomboon Deasy, State Bird Provisions chef Gaby Maeda, and SPUR’s Katie Ettman, talk about how running a food business in the Bay Area is a tricky balancing act:
“There is a lot of tension and thoughtfulness that goes from business owners who want to achieve those San Francisco ideals of paying their workers really well, and having something on the menu that’s $5, so that somebody who can’t afford more can actually eat.” —Cathay Bi for Foodwise
Lawyers, Chow Fun and Money: Helena Price Hambrecht (Haus) talks to Brandon and Annalee Jew about Mister Jiu's evolution, eventual opening, and post-pandemic adjustments as part of her “Founders Things” interview series.
“I think now that I look back, I'm just like, wow. I was completely naive to the amount of responsibility I was in for. I was actually, you know, signing up for personal guarantees for things that I probably shouldn't have. My lawyers were freaking out.” —Brandon Jew
🍕 Free Pizza for Vandals? SF restaurants face a never-ending barrage of vandalism and graffiti, and there’s no solution in sight. Shuggies Trash Pie & Natural Wine restaurant was under constant assault by graffiti taggers; they even resorted to offering the vandals free pizza to stop. The taggers took the pizza and kept right on tagging. The fact that there’s a $500 city fine for private property owners who don’t clean up graffiti in 30 days adds more insult to injury, even though $1000 vandalism grants are available. A Golden Gate Restaurant Association survey found that while 40% of owners reported the crimes to the police, only 19% applied for relief funds, because “why bother.” Sigh. SF Chronicle (no paywall)
The 25 Best Restaurants in San Francisco Right Now: Says Eleanore Park, Brian Gallagher, and Tejal Rao of the NYT. There are some obvious choices and some you probably haven’t even heard of. NY Times (no paywall)
Best of the Bay Area’s Food & Drink: The long-gone Bay Guardian is still alive and kicking online at 48hills.org. And they’re still doing the Best of the Bay reader survey (to be taken with a grain of salt, considering the potential for ballot stuffing). Here are the 2023 Food + Drink Winners, including the best burrito, best overall restaurant, and more. 48Hills
No Advice for You! Trip Advisor ranks only two SF Bay Area restaurants in their Best Places to Eat in the US, one of which is Mersea, on Treasure Island. SF Gate
SPONSORED
Join us in supporting local farms and thriving communities at Foodwise Sunday Supper: A Farm to City Feast, back at the Ferry Building on October 15! Enjoy an abundant walkaround reception and elegant four-course dinner, featuring 30 top restaurants and the freshest fall produce. Proceeds provide vital funds for Foodwise farmers markets, food access initiatives, and education programs, and also support our restaurant community. Check out the lineup and reserve your feast today!
The Mozart of Wine: Have you seen Drops of God, the Apple TV series based on a 44-volume Japanese manga comic book. It pits the daughter (who hates wine) of a recently deceased French wine critic based in Tokyo against his protege, a Japanese man whose obsession with wine is not shared by his powerful and wealthy family, in a blind wine-tasting contest. The winner inherits his multi-million dollar estate, plus 87,000 bottles of really good wine. We loved it and were sad to see it end after just eight episodes. Sure, it’s a bit cliched and melodramatic, but that’s what makes it so entertaining and fun.
Review: Who will win 87,000 bottles of wine? 'Drops of God' is the ultimate taste test. NPR
Official trailer: A full-bodied competition that will keep you guessing with every sip. YouTube
Play Along at Home: The twelve wines from the Drops of God. The Drinks Business
On Repeat This Week: Summer is finally here in SF, and the living is easy.
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
—Bruce
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“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
—Gary Snyder