Towse: views from the hill

Metaphorical.net – a fine place to wander, full of strange and wondrous things.

His nibs likes to watch boats, which is one of the reasons we live where we do.

Because San Francisco made some decisions back when, the city isn’t the hub of container ship and other commercial ship traffic in the Bay. The city with that distinction is across the Bay: Oakland.

We still can watch the merchant ships come in, though, because the Bay is deeper on this side of Yerba Buena than the other, so the ships come through here, about midway between Yerba Buena and San Francisco, duck under the Bay Bridge and turn toward Oakland.

Sure, we still get some cargo ships that off-load down south of Pier 68, but our commercial traffic is mostly cruise ships. In fact, there is work progressing to improve/increase the availability of cruise ship tie-ups in town by developing the James R. Herman International Cruise Terminal at Piers 30/32. Currently, the only cruise ship tie-up is Pier 35, which is near Fisherman’s Wharf and all the sightseeing things everyone wants to do.

Besides the cruise ships, the floating traffic on this side of the Bay includes the ferries, the tugs, the sailboats and the dinner cruises.

Yesterday, a Hanjin ship came in, sailing far closer to the Embarcadero than usual.



“Maybe it’s going to dock down south,” we said. That sometimes happens. We haven’t given up all of our merchant shipping.

We could see a couple crew up at the bow watching the traffic on the Bay, enjoying the view. A bit later, someone, the Captain we guessed, came out on the bridge and was snapping photos of the shoreline. The ship slowed down before it got to the Ferry Building and inched along as the crew gathered at the side and took pictures. Dusk was coming on and we could see their flashes going off as they passed the Ferry Building. The ship slowly moved past the view.

“How nice,” we thought. “Even the merchant seamen are excited to be here.”

We didn’t know the half of it. After the ship passed under the Bay Bridge, it hung a very sharp left and headed over to Oakland. The ship had sailed close-in and out of the usual routes simply so the captain and crew could get a close-up view and photo op.

Camera phone photo from within The House on Grant.

Digital photo taken from just outside The House’s front door. (click for larger image)

No comparison, right?

For now.

Most camera phones currently in use have low resolution, a fixed focus, no flash, and no zoom. Photos tend to be poor quality, fuzzy pictures of friends at a party or street scenes or someone’s eyeball staring at the camera.

Camera phone quality is improving at an astounding rate, however. In 2003, Samsung introduced a 1-megapixel camera phone. In spring 2004, Samsung introduced its first 3.2-megapixel camera phone, followed by a 5-megapixel camera phone in Fall 2004. Buzz is that camera phone manufacturers will be coming out with camera phones with hard-drives, telescopic zoom lenses, and video and MP3 players.

Just the other day, his nibs sent me a link to an article about Toshiba starting to ship a 0.85-inch, 2-Gbyte hard drive for mobile devices, with a 4GB due out mid-2005 and 8GB by 2006.

Zounds!

0.86″

What a world. What a world. What a world.

I came across Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette from a link in a post in eGullet, one of my favorite foodie hants.

How could I not like a blog with the Julia Child quote in the header, “Life itself is the proper binge.”?

Orangette writes well about subjects I like to read about. She gets the Friday Pick this week, though, because above and beyond her paeans to biscuits and her esteemed position (just discovered!) as one of five finalists for the “Best Food Blog—Writing” section of the 2004 Food Blog Awards, I was knocked over by her tribute last month to Burg, her dad, on the second anniversary of his death.

Sometimes foodie writing seems way easy. You describe the juices roiling out of the blood-rare beef or the wafts of sugar scents when you cut the crust of the Grand Marnier souffle in preparation for pouring the sauce in a slathering mass inside and over and around the concoction.

Setting her food writing aside and writing about Burg, Molly shows that she is an incredible writer. And her dad was an incredible guy.

Check out this blog.

The page of blog posts was getting too long for my aesthetic sensibilities, what with going on and on in the foodie bits and elsewhere.

For those into noticing, I’ve made two changes:

(1) I’m now showing the last ten posts on the page, not the last ten days or whatever it was I had it set to before.

(2) I’ve used the blogger hack for expandable posts to keep my super-long posts from taking over the whole block of real estate. To test the hack and make sure it worked, I added the hackish “fullpost” code to the Sam’s Grill and The House foodie posts.

For those who are really paying attention, I modified the hack slightly. I don’t have the MainOrArchivePage “Read more!” embedded in my $BlogItemBody. I didn’t like the fact that every blog entry would have the “Read more!” link, even if there was nothing more to read.

Instead, I opted to add a [Click permalink for full post] note before the class=”fullpost” span/span code. If you click the permalink to read the full post, that [Click permalink for full post] note will show up partway through the full post, but I decided that was better than having the Read more! link everywhere.

Now, I’m going to play with a trick that I think will get the [Click permalink for full post] note out of the full-post pages.

Wish me luck!

Update:

1) The trick didn’t work, so I made the [Click permalink for full post] note a smaller font and faded gray, so that at least it’s more obvious that it’s what it is. (Which is what, Sal? you ask …)

2) I added [FOOD] to the title lines for the musings on The House and Sam’s. I’d forgotten, until I went back through my archives, that I’d intended to label the foodie posts so I could easily find them again.

OK. Suppose just suppose that you were doing a Yahoo! search for /hitchock dropleaf end table/ and came up with a bucket of hits.

Fifty-eight, to be exact.

Hit #37 is précis’d something like this:

Towse: 09/01/2004 – 09/30/2004

… Chief, Herb Caen, Emperor Norton and Lillie Hitchcock Coit on board … patience for sitting at the end of a telephone line listening … Put a skinny little dropleaf table between them …

www.towse.com/blogger/2004_09_01_archive.htm

If you were looking for something on Hitchock dropleaf end tables, would you spare time to click through to see if by chance I had something interesting to say on the subject?

Bless those serendipitous readers anyway. Without them, my readership would drop to … fifteen or so.

Hope you find what you’re looking for.

I’d been fretting — something I really should give up — over my lack of resolves for the New Year.

We were walking out to lunch on 2005-01-03 when I asked his nibs what his resolutions were.

Resolutions? he said. To continue on as we have been.

That’s not a resolution, I said. If we have no goals, how will we know when we get there? How will we know where we’re going? How will we know whether to make this choice or that?

Tell you what, I said. How about if we have a goal that we’ll not spend so much money paying other people to cook our meals this year or if not that, that we’ll spend more money having other people cook our meals?

He just gave me one of those Sal-you’re-cute-but-I-wouldn’t-put-up-with-you-otherwise sorts of looks.

… I asked for dinner at Sam’s Grill as we were walking home from lunch and was pleasantly surprised to find out he’d made reservations (“she said they were having a slow day and really we didn’t need reservations”) while I was napping, catching up on time lost over New Year’s Eve and the days that followed.

Why Sam’s Grill?

Sam’s Grill and Seafood Restaurant

374 Bush St

San Francisco, CA 94104

Mon-Fri 11:00am- 9:00pm

Tel: (415) 421-0594

Fax: (415) 421-2632

Why? Because they’re only open weekdays 11A-9P. We’re usually elsewhere or busy during their open hours. Sam’s is a Financial District movers-and-shakers or people-who-just-need-lunch sort of place. Half of the restaurant is tables, the other half is private booths.

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Sam’s has been around since 1867. I’d never eaten there. His nibs remembered eating in one of the private booths with his grandparents and mother back in the 40s some time.

The other reason Sam’s was on my list is because one Sunday when we were poking around the restaurants in the Financial District, I discovered that Sam’s has not only seafood but three (count ‘em 3!) different takes on sweetbreads.

Sweetbreads:

Charcoal Broiled with bacon

Sautéed with Poulette

Sautéed with Caper and Lemon

I understand that there are many who don’t understand my passion for foie gras. Readers should realize that close behind my passions for foie gras and maracuja (passion fruit) is my passion for sweetbreads — perhaps, more than perhaps — because his nibs wooed me with home-cooked sweetbreads.

Sweetbreads. I swoon.

Well, usually.

I don’t much care for the sweetbreads at Piperade, although the restaurant itself is tops. We rearranged our calendars at one point to be available for dinner at Piperade on a Monday, when their daily special is sweetbreads. The rearrangement of schedule wasn’t warranted. … but that didn’t dampen my eternal hopes for yummy sweetbreads.

We originally found Isa because on a walk-around Saturday we found their menu listing both sweetbreads and foie gras. Luke, alas, doesn’t offer sweetbreads every night anymore, but when he does …

So, I wanted to try Sam’s for sweetbreads.

We walked in at the dot of when we’d told them we would. Sam’s is a mere twenty minute walk away, down the Montgomery steps and straight on to Bush, hang a right.

His nibs ordered a cup of clam chowder. I ordered a shrimp cocktail. The clam chowder was delish. Really. Not like any other clam chowder I’d ever had, but delicious.

The shrimp cocktail was your traditional shrimp cocktail, but the amount of shrimp! I couldn’t believe they were making much money on the item. I hadn’t seen that many shrimp in a shrimp cocktail since forever.

His nibs ordered the sweetbreads with mushroom sauce. I ordered the sweetbreads with caper and lemon. Both dishes had nicely cleaned sweetbreads. (If the kitchen doesn’t do a good job cleaning the sweetbreads, pulling off the bits and what-not, the sweetbreads cookup stringy and tough.)

His dish was very rich and delish. Mine was lighter. My sweetbreads had been breaded and cooked and then put in a caper, butter, lemon sauce. Served with two small potatoes. I could’ve swooned. They were that good.

I couldn’t, however, finish the dish — the shrimp cocktail had been that engaging. I said I’d take it home. The waiter (for at Sam’s they are waiters, not servers) brought me a box. I popped in the uneaten sweetbreads, the potatoes, the sauce.

His nibs wanted the baked apple, but they were out. (Out?) Instead, he opted for the rice pudding: he has a weakness for arroz con leche – rice pudding – whatever you’d like to call it.

I opted for an espresso. They served the espresso with a twist of lemon, bless them. His nibs gave me a taste of his rice pudding. Bless him and yummmm.

Next morning, I melted some bacon fat in the pan, chopped up the potatoes and tossed them in. When the potatoes were properly browned, I tossed in the sweetbreads (cut in smaller chunks so they’d cook faster) and the lemon-caper-butter sauce.

sigh

I’d eat breakfast more often, if I could have sweetbreads for breakfast.

Can’t remember what else we did Saturday and Sunday, but his nibs had Monday, January 3d, off and we headed up to San Francisco late Monday morning. We arrived hungry a bit after noon. Well, I arrived hungry (not having had bfst), but it had been hours since his nibs’ bfst so he was willing to eat.

“Where?” he asked.

“The House,” I answered. The weather was cooperating, sort of, and we headed down the hill to North Beach around 2P.

The House

1230 Grant Avenue, SF.

415.986.8612

The restaurant was half-full and the server was on the phone. He waved and mouthed (“choose your own spot”) as we settled into a table for four, halfway into the main room. He was still on the phone when his nibs got up to grab a couple menus. “Sorry,” the server mouthed with a shrug of his shoulders, still on the phone.

We checked out the menu. His nibs said he didn’t want to eat much because we’d probably go to dinner too. Maybe an appetizer, he said. Plus the unagi and avocado sandwich, of course. Ummm. Ymmm. Unagi and avocado sandwich, the dish he’d espied on a posted menu back that first day we’d walked by and discovered The House.

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We must have walked by the House a couple score or more times before that first day we stumbled over it and walked in for lunch. The restaurant is nondescript, minimalist. It sits on the corner of Fresno Alley and Grant, across the alley from The Saloon, a rowdy, happening spot. The Saloon is reputed to be the oldest bar in San Francisco, established 1861.

You walk down Grant, pass The Saloon and somehow never notice The House. It’s just a window, a door, and then you get distracted by the Tibetan imports in the window of the shop just a bit further down Grant, not to mention the hoohah that awaits you at the end of the block, where you hit Broadway.

Or at least that’s the way it was for me, until the day I was more than halfway down the half block between Fresno and Broadway and realized his nibs was no longer beside me. I looked back and found him perusing a menu stuck on a window of a restaurant I’d never noticed. “Unagi and avocado sandwich,” he said. “We have to try it.”

So we did.

That first time, we stopped by for the intriguing-sounding unagi and avocado sandwich and were snagged by the goodness and elegance of the simple asian fusion (how I hate that description and yet, should the shoe fit) food.

Monday, we were still discussing alternatives when the server came over and apologized for ignoring us while he dealt with the phone call. He told us the day’s lunch specials and left us alone while we discussed some more. He came back with the house’s signature amuse, lightly vinegared cucumbers tossed with dark sesame seeds and chunks of garlic.

We decided (your choice, his nibs had said) on the white shrimp and chinese chive dumplings. His nibs said, “for the entree, I’ll have the unagi and avocado sandwich” at which point he handed the ordering over to me.

Me? I said. I thought we were sharing the sandwich.

“Are you kidding?” his nibs said. “I don’t share that sandwich.”

Our server just chuckled.

Well. I knew I’d get at least a bite or two and, although the sandwich is to die for, I decided that rather than unagi and avocado, I’d have one of the day’s lunch specials: grilled sea bass with garlic ginger soy sauce served with steamed rice. His nibs asked for an Anchor Steam, while I ordered a 1554.

(Aside. My favorite beer of all time was Trader Joe’s Black Toad beer. Alas, they stopped carrying it years ago. Their source had gone under, they said. I searched the Web looking for the brewery and finally gave up. A month or three ago, Trader Joe’s began carrying a beer they called Black Toad. The beer was good, mind you, a dark beer that wasn’t overly sweet, but it wasn’t Black Toad. If you, like me, are looking for a Black Toad fix, the New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, CO, has the closest thing to Black Toad I’ve ever found. 1554. Ymmm.)

The appetizer came: six dumplings along with a dipping sauce, delicious. The dumplings were arrayed on thin slices of watermelon radish with shredded daikon (I think) and bits of shredded raw carrots alongside. We shared without any mishaps. Luckily, the number of dumplings was easily divisible by two. The dipping sauce was piquant and tasty.

I did get a nibble or two of the unagi and avocado sandwich, which was as delicious as always. The unagi and avocado are served on thinly sliced grilled sourdough. A mixed green salad assortment filled out the plate. One of the things I really like about The House — besides the yumminess of their food — is the way they layout their plates in beautiful patterns, always with an assortment of fresh veggies — shredded or otherwise.

The sea bass was superb, dark and smoky on the outside and tender white inside. The rice was served in a separate bowl with dark sesame sprinkled on top. The fish was served atop bits of a cruciferous vegetable. A delicious sauce spooned on the edges of the plate to accompany the fish.

No room for dessert as we were planning for dinner out in a few short hours.

Before we left, I took a picture of the mural across Grant Avenue from The House, because the graffiti on it pissed me off.

Check out the graffiti that’s blotching up the model’s forehead.

A few months back, I saw a VISA ad on TV and recognized this mural in the background. Monday, when we sat down at The House, the first thing we noticed was that some cretin had tagged the mural.

Why?

We walked home. I took a nap, and woke up to find his nibs had made arrangements for us to eat at Sam’s Grill, a treat I’d asked for before I fell asleep.

We went to the sixtieth bday party for a friend New Year’s Eve at their smashing new home.

Should you be curious, herewith a camera phone photo of mein host and one with his lovely daughter. What a neat person she is.

After dinner and dancing and more, we stumbled back to Dale in the wee hours of the morning. The youngest nib was using Hill as a party pad for New Year’s Eve. (“Just a few friends, Mom. I couldn’t invite more because they wouldn’t’ve been able to find a place to park.”)

I spent Saturday finishing up the February column on moblogs and such and also spent time sorting through piles of clothes, bundling up seven large bags of clothes which I took to the Goodwill yesterday. His nibs took down the Christmas tree: I packed up the creche. This is the first year in since forever that we took down the tree before Epiphany. Funny, the garbage folk don’t seem to know about Epiphany and have their “tree pickup” days the first week in January.

While mulling over the latest bookshelf/title meme, I found myself at MostlyFiction, checking out the writeup on Jorge Amado.

I next found myself checking out other Latin American authors and, from there (is it any wonder that I get lost in the forest?), found myself at MostlyFiction’s current newsletter.

The newsletter mentioned a new review of Christopher Moore’s latest, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror.

Well, Christopher Moore! The twenty-something over on the other side of the hill introduced me to Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story a while back and also Practical Demonkeeping: A Comedy of Horrors.

Practical Demonkeeping begins, “The Breeze blew into San Junipero in the shotgun seat of Billy Winston’s Pinto wagon. The Pinto lurched dangerously from shoulder to centerline, the result of Billy trying to roll a joint one-handed while balancing a Coors tallboy and bopping to the Bob Marley song that crackled through the stereo.”

MostlyFiction is a fabulous site.

From links on the page with the review of The Stupidest Angel and reviews of other Moore titles, I found myself at Christopher Moore’s Web site and his blog.

Once there, I couldn’t resist clicking through on the entry titled ANOTHER MODEST PROPOSAL.

ANOTHER MODEST PROPOSAL makes mention, among other things, of Carnivore, which belatedly reminded me that I’d forgotten to say, “Hi, Tony! Happy New Year!”