Food + Drink Archives

San Francisco’s Biggest Ube Festival Is Back for 2023, Baby!

28Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

San Francisco’s Biggest Ube Festival Is Back for 2023, Baby!

Oh, and it’s being paired with another iconic, equally vibrant, and chromatic food: matcha. “Babe, wake up. An iconic duo just dropped.” That was the conversation we had with ourselves when we heard Kapwa Gardens, San Francisco’s healing and culture space that highlights the city’s thriving Filipino community, announced its ube food festival, Yum Yams, is returning next month, following its prior festival held in September of 2022. What’s even more exciting about the event’s 2023 iteration? Matcha will be joining the chat, thanks to a collaboration with Japantown’s KOHO SF; the partnership exists as a means to elevate and celebrate AAPI month. “Just as the purple yam known as ube has become a signature flavor of Filipino Culture, the finely ground green tea powder matcha has bee...

We Asked ChatGPT Where to Get the Best Matcha in San Francisco

28Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

We Asked ChatGPT Where to Get the Best Matcha in San Francisco

San Francisco has some of the best matcha cafes in the world — but does AI know that? The matcha craze that began steeping in 2015 — a frenzy that began stirring after Gwenth Paltrow (and Goop) began pedaling Instagram posts postering the drink — and hasn’t let up. It’s been one of the few foodie trends that’s proven to be evergreen… (literally). In San Francisco, with its gastronomic culture and glowing Asian American community, matcha has a forever safe space. By proxy: San Francisco sits as a bastion for all things matcha. In a city that’s popularized everything from matcha ice creams to matcha layered cakes, it’s easy to stray too far from the center. And when you do come back to that nucleus (read: a v, v, [v] good cup of matcha), it’s important that it’s a truly remarkable trip. ...

This SF Matriarch of Chinese Cuisine Gave the Best Advice on Life

24Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Essays, Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

This SF Matriarch of Chinese Cuisine Gave the Best Advice on Life

It's been over two years since Cecilia Chiang — a beloved fixture in SF's Chinese gastronomy — passed away at 100 years old; her evergreen advice on how to live a "long, fruitful" life remains something to return to, time and time again. The ’50s and early ’60s were years filled with humdrum East Asian food here in the States; most Americans synonymized “authentic” Chinese cuisine with oil-slicked chow mein and bland chop suey. Much like the microwavable TV dinners of those eras, Chinese cuisine was more of a means to an end rather than an exploration of refined flavors and preparations. But Cecilia Chiang — who came to the United States from China in 1949, fleeing the Japanese during World War II to then travel almost 700 miles on foot toward safety — changed the very notions of what we...

Forever Torn Between My Two Favorite SF Cinnamon Rolls

9Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

Forever Torn Between My Two Favorite SF Cinnamon Rolls

To want a classic or to want a spin on the original, it’s my perpetual tug-of-war between these two San Francisco bakeries. My corpulent childhood was punctuated by periods when I would find my breath heavy waiting for a fresh batch of cinnamon rolls to leave a warm oven. Or when I would reach for those sweet rolls that filled aluminum circle trays at Kroger. Or when my mom and I would stop at our favorite local bakery in North Texas to buy artisanal whole wheat bread — putting me in the way of yeasted spirals of cinnamon and sugar and butter. Mall cinnamon rolls will forever be a thing for me. Airports remain precarious places where my self-discipline could fall away to the sight of teal packaging. My adult life continues to oscillate around cinnamon rolls, albeit to a lesser exten...

We Asked ChatGPT Where’s the Best Burrito in San Francisco

8Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

We Asked ChatGPT Where’s the Best Burrito in San Francisco

Can a robot powered by artificial intelligence give good food recommendations in SF? Surprisingly... yes. ‘ChatGPT Takes on SF’ is the series that sees us interact with the controversial chatbot about all things San Francisco, shedding a light on how (hopefully) human-produced hyperlocal journalism can’t be replaced by a machine-learning algorithm. I love burritos; we love burritos; you love burritos; everyone loves burritos. Our affinity for these tortilla-wrapped portable meals knows no bounds. (I *will* wait in line in a lengthy line or walk a half-mile [or more] out of my way to grab a scrambled egg morning burrito from Breakfast Little.) San Francisco even has its own hyperlocal style of burritos: the Mission Burrito. The type, itself, is accredited to Raul and Micael...

5 Very, Very (Very) Affordable Coffees in San Francisco

8Apr

By Matt Charnock3 Comments

Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

5 Very, Very (Very) Affordable Coffees in San Francisco

Simply existing on this mortal coil is expensive enough — so here's how you can save some money on coffee in SF. San Francisco and grossly expensive coffee drinks go hand in hand. Arguably, it’s the metro that popularized the $5 coffee (and the ensuing meme culture and societal fodder about how Millennials are throwing away their ability to buy property by purchasing these pricey drinks). There’s no shortage of ways to drop your tax return on boutique caffeine indulgences in SF, for sure. That said: There are a few frugal coffee hacks us coupon-clipping consumers can take advantage of in the seven-by-seven. Here are five of our favorites that could save you some major coin (though probably not enough to bundle up in a downpayment for an SF condo). Capital One Cafe’s 50% off ...

This New San Francisco Eatery Is a Metaphor for SF’s Gastronomic Comeback

8Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

This New San Francisco Eatery Is a Metaphor for SF’s Gastronomic Comeback

Enjoy the floor-to-ceiling vines and handspun pottery while cleaning off your hands from consuming the curry crab. Eating out has always been an experience best punctuated with fantastic company inside a space that elicits conversation. The best meals of my life have rarely been about the food; they’ve all oscillated around the perennial idea that quality time spent with cherished ones exists as the zenith of our humanity. We’re a social species, after all. Our language and peculiarities and mannerisms all, more or less, developed as a by-product of our caloric consumption. In San Francisco, restaurants are synonymous with the city’s heartbeat — its soul and state of being. And when the Covid-19 pandemic all but snuffed out in-person dining, San Francisco’s restaurants, like its res...

This SF Restaurant Owner Just Pulled a Beyoncé

27Mar

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

This SF Restaurant Owner Just Pulled a Beyoncé

Aphotic dropped less than a month after SF’s Palette closed. And, yes: The same team behind the latter is now responsible for the former. The attention span of the modern-day human being is akin to that of the current population of vaquita dolphins — nearly non-existent. Even TikToks are getting shorter, statistically. (It’s one reason why I decided to debut Underscore_SF just a day after I formally announced my departure from The Bold Italic.) But you can’t blame us bipeds for our collective disjointedness; we’re inundated by literally hundreds, if not thousands, of stimuli every time we open our phones or laptops or turn on our FrameTVs. How do you cut through the fray? Tailor to this current moment and time. Tease something briefly. Soft launch it, ASAP. Hard drop i...

This San Francisco Restaurant Is Having an Artisanal Garage Sale

1Mar

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

This San Francisco Restaurant Is Having an Artisanal Garage Sale

Opened in 2019, SF’s Palette restaurant served as a nexus of creativity and cuisine in SoMa — but its hasty closure last month saw that connection fray into thin air. Palette, the San Francisco eater once located at 816 Folsom Street, was beloved for its New American fare and gorgeous art gallery. The space, itself, was a sprawling ode to how food and artist expression exist in tandem — oftentimes on the same plate. But as with literally hundreds of restaurants and bars in the Bay Area, Palette also couldn’t manage to climb out of the financial pits dug by the Covid-19 pandemic. “The pandemic’s ravage brought a new perspective, and opened my eyes to other ways of working, other opportunities seen through the perverse lens of loss, and hope for a better future,” Chef Peter Hemsley says ...

In Life and Death, Boichik Bagels Knits Bay Area Jews Together

17Feb

By Thomas Smith2 Comments

Editors' Picks, Food + Drink

In Life and Death, Boichik Bagels Knits Bay Area Jews Together

There's a communal aspect to a plate of handmade, warm carbs from Boichik Bagels that's hard to share in words. But it's a feeling that weaves so many Bay Area Jews together. When the New York Times called Emily Winston’s Berkeley-based Boichik Bagels the best bagel place in America, random New Yorkers started phoning her store to scream at her and call her general manager a bitch. That’s how emotionally salient bagels can be. As a Jew, I know the almost-sacred role that bagels play in my own culture. Bagels are associated with the Ashkenazi side of the Jewish diaspora–the Jews who historically lived in Eastern Europe. My grandfather was a first-generation Polish immigrant, so a love of bagels is practically in my DNA. When I spoke to Winston just after the New York Times’ historic ...