Failure of SF grease recycling goes ignored

So the city of San Francisco is trying to recycle restaurant grease into biofuel for automobiles, to save the city's pipes from having a heart attack, and to clean our air, and to save the planet from melting, and it's going to be so awesome, even the Chronicle and its self-styled nemesis BeyondChron manage to agree on its front-page-worthy awesomeness.

Which is why I think it's funny no one mentioned this has been tried before, and has failed.

Two years ago the Golden Gate Restaurant Association named Bay Area Biofuel of Richmond its "preferred vendor" for grease recycling, and then in May 2006 I wrote a big front page article saying the company was growing production based on the partnership, and hoped to soon be profitable. The executive director of the restaurant association said Bay Area Biofuel "has all the right stuff" for the partnership, and according to my notes told me the association had conducted interviews to "find the industry leader" before settling on the company.

In October 2006, my colleague Lizette Wilson checked in with Bay Area Biofuel as part of a industry roundup article. She found the company still unprofitable, looking for more money from investors and drowning in unprocessed grease ("We need to expand production significantly to keep up with supply and be profitable").

By February of this year, the company's website had disappeared.

Then in May, Bay Area Biofuel Inc. of Richmond, CA filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in an Oakland court, according to Dow Jones Newswires' Corporate Filings Alert.

With Bay Area Biofuel gone, the city obviously needed to turn to a different company for its new grease recycling program. It settled on Blue Sky Bio-fuels of Oakland, which according to the Chronicle has been making biofuel for just two months.

I'm not saying San Francisco's new grease-to-biofuel effort will definitely fail, just that the city and its partner Blue Sky need to be asked what they will do to avoid the fate of Bay Area Biofuel and how certain they are about the sustainability of the restaurant grease recycling program. And coverage of the city's high-profile announcement should take note of the dead corporate body lying on this green road to the future.

By all accounts, including those of restaurateurs I interviewed in May 2006, restaurants are more likely to recycle their grease -- instead of pouring it down the drain -- if pickup is timely and reliable. There are well-established companies willing to reliably pick up restaurant grease for less glamorous ends than biofuel, as they have been doing for years. If restaurants are going to be encouraged to switch to a new recycler, it should probably be someone who is going to be around for some time to come.

(Photo courtesy nchoz on Flickr via Creative Commons license.)

Gary Danko's eunuch orgy

So apparently Gary Danko has this fantasy about the end of the world, which involves ... well, read for yourself:

Gary Danko envisions a "delicious and awesome festival" set on the banks of a lake in Udaipur, and featuring eunuchs, platform beds, and fifteen wines, including a Nebuchadnezzar of Krug champagne from 1947.

That's from the New Yorker, quoting from a new book called Last Supper, about the fantasy last meals of various chefs. Udaipur, by the way, is a lake-filled city in India.

Someone PLEASE order this thing with overnight shipping and send me all the other juicy details!! (I'd do it myself, but it's starting to sound like the sort of thing that might be illegal to send through the mail.)

In the meantime, we all should thank Gary, the sole San Francisco chef in the book, for representing our gloriously and freakishly hedonistic city so very, very well!

Then Tyler Florence, recently transplanted to Marin, ruins the whole Bay Area's rep by poring boring sauce on the whole thing and saying he fantasizes about a “classic Southern feast of my childhood ... No frou frou French. No snout-to-tail. No fucking foie gras.”

I love chicken fried steak as much as the next Texas boy, but Tyler it has to be said: LAME! YOUR FANTASY DOESN'T EVEN CONTAIN A SINGLE CASTRATED DUDE!!

New Yorker: No seconds

Your wine bottles are melting the planet, snob

I just got a press release saying I should buy my wine from Oakland vintners because shipping bottles from Napa spews way more carbon than shipping grapes, since glass is so bloody heavy.

And it turns out there is new scientific research to confirm this, described the author Tyler "Dr. Vino" Coleman on his awesome blog.

Which has been covered elsewhere, but everyone, including Dr. Vino, emphasizes the solution of continuing to buy wine bottles, but from a local winery.

Yet Dr. Vino's research found boxed wine "has much less (carbon) intensity" than bottles.

Wine snobs object to boxed wine because it was historically used for low-quality wine and sometimes even marketed to alcoholics as cheap guzzle. Also, the wine suffers is you leave it in the box too long, since it's wrapped in plastic, so you can't age the wine.

The thing is, the vast majority of Americans who buy bottled wine do not cellar -- heck, their wine is lucky to last 48 hours! And the composition of wine, from what I gather, has evolved in response. Most bottles serve as props to perpetuate the acknowledged, romantic fiction that they will be lovingly aged by sophisticated drinkers in the cool, dry caves under their chateaus.

Get with the program, Monsieur Terroir! I'm ready to start buying some quality boxed wine to drink in my sweltering shack!

I'm also ready to start re-using my bottles. Hook a hose up to your tank or barrel or whatever, stick it in my used bottle or portable plastic tank, and fill 'er up! If it works in France it can work here. And ideally I would be able to buy not just from the winery, but at the wine shop, supermarket, heck even my gas station. I mainly use them for Ben & Jerry's anyway, and they're right across from Acme Bread and could give Kermit Lynch a run for their money!

It's time to end this preposterous charade of wastefully shipping bottles around.

Lame waiter words enrage Frank Bruni

He hates

• "Enjoy"
• "Enjoying"
• "Pardon my reach"
• Talking to you in the first person (plural): "Do we have any food allergies ..."
  
• Talking to you in the third person: "Would madam enjoy ..."
• "Enjoy"
• "Perfect."
• "Excellent choice."
• "Enjoy"

Not the freshest story idea, but we must read Bruni faithfully, because some day he is going to lose it, in a restaurant, with the violence, and it is going to be awesome.

NY Times: Tonight, Patronizing Language. Enjoy.

Previously: You May Kiss the Chef’s Napkin Ring

Truffle crisis means you should probably skip the supplement

Not only do California chefs have to buy truffles with worthless American dollars, but it's pretty much no use even trying, according to my awesome chef tipster writes:

Truffles. Theoretically this is their time. There was no late-summer rain in Piemonte, or most of Italy for that matter and so there are no truffles. Some are popping up in the March, Tuscany, Umbria, northern Campania and Lazio, but they're weak and ridiculously expensive. I've got about the best truffle connection you can get and I'd have to pay 2700/lb for little fucking marbles with precious little perfume. I was in Rome two weeks ago and had some - they were ok, but hardly worth it. After three days of packing, traveling and getting into the states, they'll be pointless and most people will probably have to help them along with truffle oil and other such tricks. ... So far, this is a bad year.

The little ones seem to work well enough in special cheeses and macarons, but point taken!

Michael Mina brasserie -- may yet be (Or: My seduction by Laurence Geller)

Last week I had a date with Laurence Geller, CEO of Strategic Hotels & Resorts and, by extension, the owner of the Westin Saint Francis hotel here in San Francisco. He put me in an apron, plied me with wine, cooked for me in a rooftop kitchen, gave me a signed copy of his rather purple novel "Do Not Disturb" and entertained me with the most delightful story about Michael Mina.

Michael Mina was going to make him a brasserie, in his hotel. Michael Mina was going to put it in the old Oak Room. Michael Mina was going to also make a bakery inside the brasserie and give it a window onto Post Street, somehow, and everyone was going to come and it was going to be awesome.

Laurence told me this, and gave me champagne, which made me happy, and then later he told as much to his 10 other guests, even though he did not care for them in that special way in which he cared for me, and he poured us more wine, and we were happy.

There were warning signs. When, the next day, I called the general manager of the St. Francis, a reliable and trustworthy fellow, he let on that the brasserie plans were, well, in the conceptual stage, but still "likely." And that Michael Mina was in talks but not, shall we say, signed on the dotted line. Michael Mina could not be reached for comment.

Actually, Michael Mina was reached for comment, the day after we went to press. Telling me that the plan for a brasserie was very preliminary, one among perhaps 15 projects Mina's company (total restaurants: 10) is weighing at any given time. But he was fairly certain he'd be running the St. Francis' new bar, the Clock Bar. But writing about the brasserie would be, uh, premature.

Well, Michael, you'll have to call Laurence about that one. Careful -- he's a sweet talker.

SF Business Times: St. Francis sees $150M hotel upgrade: CEO: But first, fix tourism (free link)

Truffle inflation reaches crisis levels in Alameda

OK, seriously, NO ONE tell Daniel Patterson about this because he's going to start smashing aromatherapy bottles and taking hostages at Centerfolds or whatever.

It's not even been two weeks since the food writer/chef railed in the New York Times about the evil evil evils of so-called Truffle Oil which, hey, not only is completely unrelated to truffles but which also fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.

Today, from the City of Alameda, where the food has been getting more interesting as the island's military history recedes further into the past, we are presented via the Express with a new gastropub called Hobnob.

Where you can get, no really seriously, Truffle Fries, for FIVE DOLLARS.

Truffle. French fries. In a bar. For five. Dollars.

What could possibly be fishy about that?!

The Express' John Birdsall, a heavily armed food media don, is an impatient man with no time for surface narratives, and he obviously has no problem with this. To wit:

Look no further than the truffle fries — a dish that successfully balances fancy with the familiar profile of good old bar food — as proof of Amy Voisenat's ability to read Alameda. Forget some decadent fantasy of pommes frites sprinkled with shavings of black truffle. Voisenat's vision is a pile of skinny fries with a firm grasp of the ordinary, even lacking, as far as I could tell, the tossing with Parmesan and herbs the menu described. [WTF? They couldn't even deliver on herbs and powdered cheese?? For TRUFFLE FRIES? --ed.] They did, however, come with a ramekin of truffle aioli — really good truffle aioli: pale and soft and with bright acidity, a playful bite of garlic, and the delicious, dog-bed funk of truffle oil.

It was a dish that didn't seem like much on first dunk, but revealed a subtle and unpretentious sense of refinement the more you ate. And if all that truffle stuff seemed weird, I imagine you could ask for ketchup and just go on yakking. [We need to have a long conversation some time about word choice, John. Soon. -ed]

Truffle Oil has been a seductress to some of the nation's top chefs, like the chef de cuisine at Per Se.

And know she's going to instigate a bar fight between Daniel Patterson and John Birdsall, in Alameda, with broken bottles and EVERYTHING, and it's going to be awesome.

Larry Biggie writes in to defend what remains of his honor

A couple of weeks ago I noted that a couple of Oakland entrepreneurs were trying to follow the path blazed by Cafe Gratitude of San Francisco and get customers to finance their cafe bar by pre-paying for gift cards ("The future of restaurant finance is here: Oakland man pre-pays for $1000 of beer").

According to the Oakland Tribune article at the time, the aspiring cafe owners had sold only about $14,000 of the $125,000 they needed in pre-sales, almost entirely to friends and family.

But then there was Larry Biggie, of Adams Point, who pre-paid for $1000 in gift cards.

I wrote, "That's a lot of organic beer, Larry." Heh. I crack myself up sometimes.

Anyway, Larry, who is apparently a banker and also apparently a real, actual person with the best ever name "Larry Biggie," has emailed to say he had coffee more in mind than beer.

He was a good sport about the whole thing and apparently got a good laugh out of my post, which is awesome, because people with that much caffeine in their system usually take every little thing wayyyy too seriously.

Come to think of it, Larry, are you sure you aren't a beer kind of a guy?

I also heard from one of the Awaken Cafe people, Cortt Dunlap, also a nice guy. And yes, Cortt, you're right, I am both a journalist and self-styled programmer, which makes me pretty much the perfect demographic for a place that sells alcoholic beverages and coffee, respectively. Given the scale of my habit I'll need about $6k per year, which I'm not sure I can swing, but on the other hand I did just meet this overcaffeinated banker ...

Chefs turn to witchcraft and sorcery in logical next step for food world

So you've taken Michael Pollan's advice. You replaced science with culture, and then you threw out "anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food," and your "ancestors " get to veto everything you'd like to buy in the supermarket.

Which kind of sucks, since your great ancestors were salt-of-the-earth types in East Texas and Oklahoma who mostly just fried the sort of critters you find around your yard, and you came to San Francisco to move beyond all that, but whatever. You've made the haj to Terra Madre for the Slow Food truffle-and-wine orgy, and even enthusiastically applauded the flag of Iran. Yay!

Locavore, check; organic/sustainable, check; rallied against demon corn, check.

What's next?

Well, it turns out, ritualistically stuffing excrement and chamomile into cow horns and deer bladders is next! Awesome.

It sounds weird at first, but really it makes sense if you think about it. We went organic because we didn't want to eat food with poison on it, right? And then we went sustainable because we didn't want our grandchildren to starve in a sea of fire and sand, right?

Well, now we're going to go "biodynamic" because Lucifer is a being of light that makes us creative and free and because we need "rituals, practices and formulas based on (the) study of nature and the cosmos -- for example, the making and applying of certain preparations by the lunar, solar and astrological calendars."

Wait, what??

No no, hold on, the Chronicle explains further, it starts making a lot more sense:

Two of the preparations, 501 and 500, involve stirring quartz and manure respectively into water in a way that creates a vortex in the water, reversing direction intermittently throughout one hour. The mixture is highly dilute, and often described as "homeopathic" in dosage.

Some other formulas include those injected into compost. One consists of dried chamomile flowers stuffed into intestines (natural sausage casings) and buried underground for six months. A yarrow compost preparation consists of dried yarrow blossoms stuffed into the bladder of a deer, hung from a tree for six months then buried underground for another six months. Oak bark preparation, also used in compost, must be placed in the skull of a domesticated horned animal and buried for six months before it is used.

See, it's not so bad. The whole thing was dreamed up by an Austrian esotericist named Rudolph Steiner who defenders say was quite charming, only very rarely delivering controversial lectures on race and mostly just prattling on about Anthroposophy, which is about "sense-free thinking" and "spiritual science" and other things that make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The key thing is, biodynamics can give you an edge. That's why two-Michelin-starred Manresa chef David Kinch is doing it -- it gets him out of the undistinguished scrum of chefs shopping organic at the farmer's market and into what he called "the next level" on the "voodoo side."

Read all about it, if you haven't already:

Chronicle: Digging biodynamic / Restaurateurs look beyond organic in quest to cultivate pristine produce


(Photo Courtesy anatomist on Flickr)

Alice Waters at Cody's tomorrow night; will get you high, kill us all

Alice Waters biographer Thomas McNamee will be at Cody's San Francisco tomorrow night, 7 pm, which means Alice will certainly be remote-controlling his every last word and gesture and will effectively be present herself. Should be awesome.

The reading starts at 7 and the tentative agenda is:

• 7:05 pm Welcome and inconsolable sobbing from Cody's owner Andy Ross.
• 7:10 pm McNamee hands out Waters' famous PCP-laced tarts to lucky first 20 guests.
• 7:15 pm Reading begins with chapter on Waters' CIA training in Santa Barbara and how she came up with genius ruse of creating hippie restaurant in Berkeley to lure, spy on SDS and Black Panthers and free-thinking professors.
  
• 7:22 pm Visibly intoxicated John Birdsall arrives.
• 7:23 pm Waters "security detail" of Trotskyite drug lords moves to eject Birdsall, not realizing he has concealed a chef's knife under his apron.
• 7:24 pm McNamee's batteries run out just as he was getting to something interesting on arugula, crowd becomes frantic.
  
• 7:25 pm High off organic Columbian cocaine, Waters' "security detail" panics when a foaming-at-the-mouth Birdsall unsheaths his bloody knife. In the ensuing chaos, they spray the entire crowd with standard Chez Panisse-issue Uzis.
• 7:26 pm Ross reminds survivors there will be NO REFUNDS on unsigned books.
  

See you there!

Cody's Stockton Street: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - Thomas McNamee

Women chefs and the 'stainless steel ceiling'

The Chronicle's list of five 'rising star' chefs includes just one woman, and John Birdsall at the East Bay Express thinks this highlights a "stainless steel ceiling" in the industry. He says the business hates women and gays and any man with a complete set of fingers.

But it sounds like Birdsall didn't read Jan Newberry's interesting and well-researched piece in San Francisco Magazine on this very topic a month ago. The awesome picture of Melissa Perello alone warrants a clickthrough (update: now it's gone! But she was running in a field looking very freeeee), but here are some salient excepts:

Laurent Manrique, executive chef of Aqua, didn’t receive a single résumé from a woman when he was looking to hire a new chef de cuisine last December, and Perello says that when she left Fifth Floor, no woman working in the kitchen there was prepared to take her place. Other restaurateurs, like Gayle Pirie, 42, of Foreign Cinema, and Elisabeth Prueitt, 43, of Bar Tartine, say they’d love to hire more female cooks, but few apply.

And this:

However unpleasant the (macho kitchen) antics can get, most female chefs say they take them in stride. Nor is the problem that they’re hitting the glass ceiling, something women in other industries complain about. “San Francisco is a great city for women chefs,” says Michelle Mah, 31, chef at Ponzu. “Everyone here accepts that if you cook great food, that’s all that matters.” Rachel Sillcocks, 29, sous-chef at Healdsburg’s Cyrus, agrees. “The opportunities for women aren’t any less than they are for men.”

Newberry's philosophy for why there aren't more women executive chefs is basically this: They are smarter and less ego-driven than men.

The reason there were more women executive chefs 30 years ago is that they weren't as aware of the downsides of the industry, they didn't have food TV and Kitchen Confidential. Now that the trail has been blazed and been found wanting, Newberry posits, women are availing themselves of supposedly "lesser" opportunities that allow room to breathe, like the pastry station, wine cellar, catering and private chef gigs.

In other words, the only way you can say female chefs are hitting a ceiling is with a macho, patriarchal view of what constitutes success. You know, a view like Birdsall's.

I hasten to add, this is Newberry talking. I would never accuse Birdsall, powerful Godfather of a food media machine, of judging women on attributes other than merit, like appearance.

And in all sincerity, I am by no means saying Newberry's article is the final word on gender relations in the kitchen.

Early returns on District: Horrible service, bad design, painful acoustics, rude overcharging, mixed food. But otherwise, uh, 'very good.'

Fatemeh at Gastronomie realizes District has only been open two weeks, and realizes that it's more of a bar than a restaurant. Nevertheless, she is pissed off.

I'm not sure what the trouble is.

Sure, her eardrums nearly exploded from the "acoustic nightmare."

Yes, the cramped design left her "bumped" every two minutes or so (paging Michael Bauer ...).

Oh, and maybe the bartender forgot her three-item order. Twice.

Granted, her Carpaccio was "swimming" in what appeared to be bottled Caesar-salad dressing.

But is this really such a big deal?

After all, to make up for all its mistakes, the bar-staurant generously berated her date for underpaying for a bottle wine, before grumpily admitting the humiliating incident had been their fault due to a misreading of the menu.

Such sweethearts!

Fatemeh worries:

Is it fair to judge a restaurant a mere two weeks after opening and post a negative review on a public blog? Probably not.

Actually, given that we're all adults and understand that the place may well improve in time, and given that it's open for business and accepting money, it's totally fair.

And given Fatemeh's review, it's totally awesome.

(I haven't found any other early reviews, except for a few written before District's opening. Including this one from the 7x7 blog that recommends District because it is owned by "these tall good-looking guys who could have stepped straight out of the cast of Melrose Place." Great. That really speaks to me!)

Full review:

Gastronomie: District Wine Bar. Just Another Pretty Face?