Happy Chinese New Year: Eat Well & Prosperfeatured
Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy Chinese New Year, everyone! Today marks the start of the Year of the Rabbit, which means that celebrants of this Lunar New Year festival all over the world will be gathering with family, feasting on lucky dishes, and adorning their homes with fresh flowers and red decorations.
For those of us who are into astrology and fun stuff like that, people born under the sign of the Rabbit are said to be gracious, calm-natured, amiable, intuitive, compassionate, and appreciative of the aesthetic and beautiful in life (among a myriad of other “attributes”). James Beard (born 1903) was a rabbit, Michael Ruhlman (1963) is a rabbit, as is Jamie Oliver (1975). Although fortunetellers’ predictions for this year are tumultuous, it won’t put a damper on the festivities.
The annual Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco will take place Saturday 2/19, 5:15–8:00 pm (Market and Second Street to Kearny and Jackson; here’s the parade route).
After you’ve worked up an appetite, lion dancing and such, continue celebrating with some good Chinese Eats. Here are a few standout dishes that will have firecrackers going off in your mouth:
1) Egg Tarts (Golden Gate Bakery)
Egg Tarts (don tat) are the quintessential Chinese pastry, found in any self-respectable Chinese bakery or dim sum house. Growing up, whenever it was holiday time, someone would always bring a box of these sweet treats to the hostess (kind of like the bundt cake of our culture, if you will). The pink bakery box (why is it that the red ribbon holding it together always had a gazillion impossible knots to get through before you could dig in?) would sit on the kitchen counter all day along with the other items put out for grazing.
Golden Gate Bakery is a mecca for egg tart lovers. Devout worshippers line up out the door as fresh batches of these egg custard pastries — with their warm creamy filling, flaky crust, and gentle price — are churned out.
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Tet Celebrations and Vietnamese Eatsfeatured
Tet (the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration) officially kicks off on February 3rd, but the Vietnamese Community Center of San Francisco got the party started early yesterday with its 15th Annual Tet Festival taking place in the Tenderloin’s Little Saigon (Larkin Street, between Eddy and O’Farrell). There were firecrackers and lion dancing, games, arts and crafts, and of course, food.
For those celebrating in the South Bay, the massive Tet Festival in San Jose will be held February 5 & 6 at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.
This year is the Vietnamese Year of the Cat (the only animal symbol in the Vietnamese zodiac that doesn’t match the Chinese zodiac). Tet is celebrated on the same day as Chinese New Year, and many of the traditions are similar. People travel home to celebrate with their family, houses are cleaned, lucky money is given to children, and special dishes are cooked.
In honor of Tet, here’s a list of some of our favorite Vietnamese Eats in San Francisco:
1) Roasted Dungeness Crab & Garlic Noodles (Crustacean)
The An family fled Saigon in 1975 and settled in San Francisco. Since then, their two restaurants Thanh Long and Crustacean have been delighting the Bay Area with their well-guarded family recipes. The restaurants even have a secret kitchen, a small windowless room within the main kitchen, where only family members are allowed to enter to prepare special signature sauces and dishes like their famous Whole Roasted Dungeness Crab and Garlic Noodles. The crab is succulent and blooming with roasted garlic and fragrant Vietnamese peppercorns. The garlic noodles are addictively good. However, vampires (and first dates) beware, the abundance of roasted garlic in these noodles will stay with you all night.
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Best of the Fancy Food Show 2011: Chocolate Paradisefeatured
The Fancy Food Show is one of my favorite events of the year. I mean really, when else is it completely acceptable to graze all day on nothing but chocolate, cheese, and charcuterie…and sample all the top notch olive oil and vinegars on the market. Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend the SF show this year. Good thing my trusty correspondent, Adam Carr has a good appetite. Adam will be rounding up all his favorite finds in this year’s Fancy Food series. First up, the sweet stuff!
*****
There was a lot of candy at the Fancy Food Show, so much that I half expected Gene Wilder to pop out in a purple suit and start singing about pure imagination then have a bunch of little orange guys cart me away for being too indulgent.
Bissinger’s Chocolates brought it again this year. Their Apple Ghost Chili Caramel combined my chili chocolate obsession with my sea salt-caramel obsession. It melded sweet, sticky, salty and spicy in one amazing piece of confectionary. After I cleared the caramel from my teeth I cleansed my palette with one of their Yuzu Gummy Bears, which brought a unique flavor to a classic treat.
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Bay Area Fried Chicken Guidefeatured
Fried Chicken. What’s there not to like? Crispy golden skin. Juicy tender meat. Finger-lickin’ goodness. Apparently, the restaurants of the Bay Area seem to agree. Fried chicken is all the rage, and everyone seems to have a riff on this comfort food favorite: Farmer Brown serves it classic Southern-style, with hamhock greens and mac n’ cheese; Namu makes it Korean Fried Chicken with spicy slaw and pickled daikon; Zero Zero goes thighs-only for its gussied up Chicken and Semolina Waffles with Chestnut Honey Butter; Front Porch uses a cornmeal crust and serves it in a popcorn bucket.
Once you’ve set upon the path to finding the “Best Fried Chicken” it’s a quest that can easily obsess. And, it has its hazards…you know, it’s not quite as artery-friendly as say, a “Best Salad” quest. By no means have I sampled it all — for example, I have yet to try Casa Orinda’s fried chicken, which Michael Bauer swears by, and I’m still dying to try Brown Sugar Kitchen’s Chicken & Waffles — however, I have taste-tested my fair share, and well, someone should benefit from my “research.”
Best Destination Fried Chicken Orgy: Ad Hoc (Yountville, Napa)
The greatness of this fried chicken has taken on almost mythical proportions, with cult followers calling Fried Chicken Night at Ad Hoc a religious experience. Is it as good as everyone says? In one word: yes. One satisfying bite into a hunk of their Buttermilk Fried Chicken and you’ll be born again. It’s not just that the skin is perfectly crunchy and substantial, or that the brined meat is juicy and flavorful, or that it all comes family-style in a big oversized bowl brimming with indulgence. At Ad Hoc, it’s the sum of all the parts that make this a destination dining experience. Your entire meal is orchestrated without the slightest bit of effort from you. Even the drive up to Napa adds to the delicious escapism of the evening. Fried Chicken Night is every other Monday; for an incredibly convenient schedule of exactly which Monday it falls on, check out Inuyaki’s custom FCN-stalker calendar.
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