George Chen’s Chinatown: A Walk With The Owner Of SF’s China Live February 14, 2018 It all started with a phone call last Tuesday morning. It wasn’t a number I recognized, but I picked up anyway. “Joe? George Chen.” A pleasant surprise: I had reviewed Chen’s genre-redefining restaurant China Live in September, and spoken to … Read the rest
North Beach Event: A Crab Feed For The Kids At Salesian Club January 16, 2018 San Francisco is a city known for its distinct neighborhoods, and perhaps none of them possesses more charm and mystique than North Beach. There have been a lot of reasons posited for our unique position in the public’s imagination, and … Read the rest
Pasta Pop-Up Raises The Stakes In North Beach December 23, 2017 North Beach has changed a lot over the past 10 years, and there is one thing that is undeniably better than it used to be: the Italian food. Francesco Covucci, along with his partner Pete Fazio, has been a big … Read the rest
Joe Content’s Got Recipes: Bucatini All’Amatriciana December 15, 2017 It occurred to me just the other day that despite my lifelong fascination with food, I never really write about cooking on the site. It’s odd, because although I write about restaurants here quite a bit, I typically cook most … Read the rest
Sotto Mare’s Rich Azzolino Dishes On Seafood, His Retail Fish Market December 2, 2017 In case you’ve been traveling abroad for awhile, there has been a sea change on America’s fine dining scene over the last decade. As the farm-to-table food revolution that started in Alice Waters’ humble Berkeley kitchen at Chez Panisse 46 … Read the rest
North Beach Event: Tis The Season SF @ Real Old Paper November 29, 2017 Just like that: it’s the end of November. It seems like we barely had time to clear the mushy jack-o-lanterns from our front steps, and Thanksgiving was upon us. Now the feast is over, and Black Friday has (thankfully) come … Read the rest
A Cuisine Comes Full Circle: California Mexican Steps Up November 18, 2017 With last month’s publication of the 2018 Michelin Guide for the Bay Area, the big story was San Francisco’s surpassing of New York as America’s fine dining capital. To be sure, it’s a big deal: we’ve now got seven 3-starred … Read the rest
North Beach Fix: Indian Summer Comes To A Close November 13, 2017 It’s time again for North Beach Fix, our semi-regular compendium of significant happenings, sundry occurrences and notable non-events here in The Beach. We’ve been quiet at the Fix for a while, so let’s get started. As we slide into … Read the rest
Born In The Beach: Sotto Mare’s Secret To Success October 16, 2017 Just in case this is your first visit to the blog, let me share something with you: I absolutely love Sotto Mare. The modest, unassuming restaurant on Green Street is one of the best in the city, and one … Read the rest
Desire & Design: Vargas, Hefner and Real Old Paper September 29, 2017 Earlier this week, we learned of the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner at age 91. A true American original, the pajama-clad Hefner distilled the zeitgeist of Sixties bachelorhood into a publishing empire, and created one of the world’s most … Read the rest