#137 | Why are restaurants so expensive in SF?

Barbara Tropp Taught Us How to Cook Chinese Food

Hello!

Amidst Flowers with a Jug of Wine

Amidst flowers with a jug of wine
I pour alone lacking companionship
With a raised cup I invite the Moon
To toast my shadow, the three of us.

—Li Po, Tang dynasty poet, A.D. 701-762

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 Clare De Boer’s crisped edge Summer Lasagna. While we’re at it, De Boer just posted a recipe for Sheet Pan Charred Yogurt & Herb Chicken, which looks especially worthy, too.

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CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS: Why are restaurants so expensive right now in San Francisco?

Why are restaurants so expensive right now in San Francisco?

It feels like only a few years ago a Saturday night at a cool restaurant in San Francisco might set you back $100. These days, it seems more like $150 and up. Menu prices have been rising, while local diners are eating out less, at least according to OpenTable. This might mean that if it’s your only night out this week or this month, it’s even easier to experience sticker shock. Twenty-eight dollars dollars for a burger? In this economy?! And that’s before you even dare to look at the impenetrable fog of fees at the bottom of your bill. Listen, restaurants have reasons behind their prices. Edible SF

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Pescespada dell’amore. We ❤️ the Swordfish of Love recipe from Viola Buitoni’s first cookbook, Italy by Ingredient: Artisanal Foods/Modern Recipes. This brightly-hued combination of tomato, capers, and olives over swordfish is one of the best-loved dishes in her repertoire. With fresh swordfish (from San Diego) available in Bay Area stores and a steady supply of fresh tomatoes at farmers markets, you can quickly assemble this meal for someone special too. 😉

Achievement Unlocked: We made the infamous Brooks Headley’s Superiority Burger recipe this past weekend. Instead of plopping a veggie burger patty between two buns, we spread the mix on big 10” tortillas and made pan-fried crispy quesadillas. 💪 Highly recommend!

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🇺🇸 This Land Is Not Your Land: The Heist is the podcast series that uncovers the U.S.'s most intricate swindles. In its upcoming third season, the show investigates the U.S. government's appropriation of land from Black farmers, reflecting a wider injustice where they lost $326 billion in land last century due to USDA bias. The Center for Public Integrity

Grab a Seat at the Chef’s Table: In addition to working 60-hour+ weeks running their restaurants, some chefs in the U.S. are leading hunger relief efforts, supporting local farmers, fighting food waste, confronting racism and sexism in the industry, and more. In her new book, At the Table: The Chef's Guide to Advocacy, Katherine Miller (Founding Executive Director, Chef Action Network; Senior Director Of Food Policy Advocacy; James Beard Foundation) shares the essential techniques for chefs to focus their philanthropic efforts; pinpoint their audience and develop their argument; recruit allies and support action; and maybe most importantly, grab people’s attention in a crowded media landscape.

Hummus Diplomacy: “The war between Hamas and Israel has divided American cultural institutions, and now it is spilling into the food world. In this fraught moment, dishes like hummus have become weaponized like never before.” NY Times

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Walanthropy: Walmart and the Waltons wield unprecedented influence over food, policy, and the planet, and with vast new investments in regenerative agriculture, they have the potential to remake the marketplace. Civil Eats

A Forest for the Chickens—Rethinking Poultry Production: Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, founder of the nonprofit Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, shares the history and vision for Tree-Range Farms, a Minnesota-based network of over forty farms stewarding land and raising chickens among trees 🌳 and perennial crops using a method that supports both the land and the birds. Edible Communities

What is Regenerative Ag, You Ask? Per the NRDC, “the holistic principles behind the dynamic system of regenerative agriculture are meant to restore soil and ecosystem health, address inequity, and leave our land, waters, and climate in better shape for future generations.” Natural Resources Defense Council

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🧀 Best Cheese in the World? Norwegian Cheese Nidelven Blå from Gangstad Gårdsysteri, a handmade, semi-solid, blue mold cheese made with pasteurized cows' milk, was crowned 🏆 World Champion Cheese 2023 at the World Cheese Awards on 27 October 2023. See the diverse and delicious-sounding list of also-rans, including Old Amsterdam Goat and Lamucca Di Castagno, here. KRON

🦃 Stuck Between a Freezer and a Hard Place: In preparation for our national leftovers holiday in a couple of weeks, Tamar Adler entertains questions from readers in her Substack newsletter. First up: Dear Tamar, what kind of soup should I make from a quart of last year’s frozen solid turkey gravy? The Kitchen Shrink

🥣 Say So Long To Cheerios: “Breakfast — for kids and their time-pressed parents — has been overtaken by a stealthy cereal killer. Behold the breakfast sandwich, the brashest phenomenon to hit the morning hours since the alarm clock, a phenomenon that has wound its way into our lives without us even noticing.” Washington Post

⭐️ Thinking About Pepper: “Listen, children, to what the fiercest spice has to teach.” John Birdsall’s Shifting the Food Narrative

Thai Food Near Me: Is a Thai restaurant on Second Avenue and 34th Street in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood. Thanks to its name, a reference to how people search for restaurants on Google, it has a 4.5-star rating on Yelp and reflects Google’s far-reaching impact on businesses.  Expedite

Here’s our search result: no Thai restaurants with that name near us! 🙃

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Fuchsia Dunlop Taught Luke Tsai How to Cook Chinese Food: Luke Tsai, KQED's food editor, former editor at Eater SF, San Francisco magazine, and the East Bay Express, and who for most of his adult life didn’t know how to cook Chinese food, talks to Fuchsia Dunlop, author of Every Grain of Rice, Invitation to a Banquet, The Food of Sichuan, and more, ahead of her San Francisco book tour.

Barbara Tropp Taught Us How to Cook Chinese Food: When we moved to SF in 1987, we landed on Cabrillo Ave., a few blocks from Clement St. and its diverse, thriving Asian cuisine scene. We didn’t know how to cook Chinese food either. Being so close to Clement also meant easy access to the wall of cookbooks at Green Apple Books, where we purchased Barbara Tropp’s The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking: Techniques and Recipes (1982, William Morrow and Co.). We cooked our way through most of the book, learning techniques like velveting chicken for Hoison Explosion Chicken, how to steam a whole fish, which we purchased live from the tanks of the markets for Steamed Whole Fish with Seared Scallions, and how to deep fry tofu for Down-Home Hunan Tofu, a dish we still make today (that recipe, like most in the book, takes up two-plus pages, thanks to the detailed instructions and specific techniques, otherwise, we’d share it here). The best part of the book was the extensive pantry section where Tropp named her favorite brands of ingredients, like the Koon Yick Wah Kee Chili Sauce and the Han Li Chili Paste with Garlic, which were conveniently stocked on the shelves of the Asian grocery stores on Clement and which meant that your dish would taste just like Tropp’s version. You can find The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking online at Abe Books, or maybe, if you’re lucky, there’s a copy hiding somewhere in the collection of used books at Green Apple. In 1984, Tropp opened China Moon Café (1984-1995) in an old 1930s-era coffee shop on Post St., where we liked to sit at the counter and slurp her cold noodle dishes. More on Barbara Tropp here.

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Neighborhood Gem: 🍕 The Pizza Place, where families with kids in tow populate the dining room in the early evening hours, and the games on the big screens draw in the sports enthusiasts as the night goes on. The restaurant was founded in 2007 by industry veterans David Ashin, with Kevin and Cindy Baryza (Acquerello, Farallon, Globe, Bruno’s, Stars), and inspired by the Boston pizza hangouts Kevin grew up with. You can find Kevin and Cindy Baryza slinging pies, including the bestseller "The Dimitri," named after Dimitri Vardakastanis of Gus’s Market, at the corner of Noriega and 46th. Just look for the extra-large iconic shaka (hang loose) sign 🤟

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SPONSORED

OFRENDAS is a culinary series at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, organized by Jacob Croom of @my.friend.fernando, Emmanuel Galvan of @bolitamasa, and others that invites chefs from across the country to showcase their food and their approach to cooking rooted in Mexican heritage. The theme of this first event is 'Neither Here nor There,' referencing the experience of living within two cultures - feeling a part of both and neither simultaneously. Get tix here!

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On Repeat This Week:

“In stints since 1972, CHIC has assured its position as funk ambassadors — a position its members clearly relish. Rodgers' career is epic in both scope and impact. The 1979 CHIC album Risqué was a disco milestone that became a hip-hop cornerstone. In 2014, Rodgers won the Grammy for Record of the Year with Daft Punk (Get Lucky). This year, he amassed more honors for his work on Beyoncé's RENAISSANCE.” NPR

Set list, because once you hit the play button, there’s no stopping! Le Freak, I'm Coming Out, We Are Family, Get Lucky, Good Times, and Let's Dance.

#protip: Did you know you can listen to all of the Tiny Desk Concerts on your mobile device via the NPR app?

That’s all for this week.

We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
—Bruce

Thanks for reading EAT. DRINK. THINK. from Edible San Francisco! Subscribe for free to receive the next edition.

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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