Towse: views from the hill

Scott Howard
500 Jackson St. (between Montgomery and Columbus)
San Francisco, CA 94133
(415) 956-7040. Full bar.
Open Table reservations

We noticed that someone had moved into what seems an unlucky spot at 500 Jackson.

We’d never been to Cypress Club when John Cunin (whom we’d first encountered at Masa’s) had the joint. We would’ve liked to, but we were busy raising kids and not getting up to San Francisco as often as we would’ve liked and all that’s another story, another life.

Cypress Club folded after 9/11, amid rumors and swirling stories and stayed empty, probably due in part to the bankruptcy and furor that surrounded the Cypress Club closing.

The building was vacant for two years after the Cypress Club closed. Todd Kneiss remodeled the place and open with a different vibe in Fall 2003 as 500 Jackson. We tried the place out. We’re always interested in restaurants that are an easy walk from our place and 500 Jackson is just a bit over half a mile.

Boy, was that place all the buzz, filled with the see and be scene set. The place was billed as a casual seafood place. A bit noisy with all the hubbub of the younger crowd. The interior still had some cypress leftover from the previous incarnation. The price was pricey. The food not distinctive. The skate wing was a disappointment. We didn’t understand the reasoning behind the chatter and hype. We never went back.

So we were walking home up Montgomery a week or two ago and saw that a new restaurant had arrived on the scene and went to check it out: Scott Howard has opened Scott Howard. The posted menu had foie gras! sweetbreads! Those two items on a menu require a visit. We needed to see what was happening.

We dropped in on November 22d. The interior has been totally redone. There’s a stainless steel raw bar where I seem to remember we sat amidst cypress panelling during the 500 Jackson incarnation. Mary Risley and a crowd were at a table in the room’s center. We were at a cozy table for two that overlooked Jackson.

We were eyeing the sweetbreads and the foie gras on the menu. When we asked the server about the tasting menu, he ran down what dishes would be served. Sweetbreads! Foie gras! What’s not to like? He’d been talking up Howard’s signature dish, the carrot broth (carrot broth? signature?) and that was on the tasting menu too. We opted for the tasting menu with paired wines.

The meal began with some champagne and an amuse bouche. The dishes on the tasting menu that night included fluke sashimi, sweetbreads with truffled madeira and smoked bacon, foie gras, Scott Howard’s signature carrot broth (more on this later), scallops, short ribs, something I’m forgetting, I’m sure. Upside down cake for dessert. The wine pairings were generous and interesting. A dark, sweet, flavorful sake was paired with the foie for example — something I would’ve never thought to do.

We had a lovely evening and left feeling happy, satisfied and full, but not so overly full that the walk home uphill was a chore.

A delish dinner. We’ll be back again.

Oh, and that carrot broth? The recipe is included in the fold that brings your bill, if you want to decamp with the recipe. I did. Haven’t made it yet, but I will soon. Recipe includes directions and ingredients: 3C diced carrots, 6 1/2C carrot juice. Reduce. Reduce. Reduce. Salt and pepper. 1 C heavy cream. 1/2T curry powder. The broth is served with creme fraiche and drizzled with truffle oil.

The carrot broth is absolutely heavenly. If you ever get to Scott Howard, make sure you order some from amongst the choices you make off the menu.

 
 

The sea is calm. The sky is blue. … The traffic moves east and west on the Bay Bridge.

I always feel a bit sorry for the visitors who have only two days of their lives here in San Francisco and arrive and leave during a wet patch like we had earlier this week, when a couple days later the days look like this.

 
 

My favorite geophysicist/seismologist is due into town for the AGU meeting this week. Here’s hoping that the weather holds for her.

 
 

 
 

  

Sunrise this morning.

A wicked storm just blew through, leaving the air clean and crisp.

For a time yesterday, the CHP wasn’t letting empty trucks over the Richmond-San Rafael bridge because winds were gusting to 65 mph. I watched out the windows as sheets of rain pelted and billowed, chased by winds out of the south.

The workers next door, who are scraping and gouging and prepping and painting, continued working through the storm. The rotty wood gouging turned out to be pretty extensive. Next thing we knew, the worker guys were hauling in new lumber and rebuilding the rotty balconies. Whack. Whack. Hammer. Bzzz saw. Bzzz sander.

Our downstairs neighbors just got through a multi-month inside remodel that gave us days on end of saws whining, worker guys thumping and all sorts of interesting smells. Sure, I love you guys and want your places to look nice, but can’t we all get our rehab work done and enjoy some quiet time?

But enough of the whining.

On Wednesday afternoon, when the storm was just beginning to show its face, we took Muni over to the new de Young to check out the action. The rebuilt museum reopened in mid-October and our friend LucyK was there for the opening festivities. Child of The City though she be, she raved about the new digs. There’s been some [ahem] controversy about the new building from people who loved the old and thought the new rendition looked too much like a Mayan palace plopped in the middle of the park. But Lucy loved it. OK. We needed to go and not just because we’d missed the museum while it was closed. Being as I get twitchy in large crowds, we decided to wait a bit and let the crowds thin before we visited.

Always before, we’d taken the bus or trolley down to Market to catch the Muni. Always before, we’d had transfers. Wednesday we’d decided to walk downtown and get some extra exercise. Turns out (who knew?) if you go into a Muni subway station downtown with $3 in bills to pay for two fares, there’s no way to do so. You must have coins, a monthly pass, a transfer or whatever, we were told. No bills. So, we hiked back up to the surface streets and caught a trolley, paying with $3 in bills. We rode the trolley over to U.N. Plaza, where we got off, went back down into the subway and caught Muni using our transfers.

Muni dropped us at 9th and Irving, just a block or so from the entrance to Golden Gate Park. The de Young is just a few blocks in from the 9th Avenue entrance. Easy peasy. Well, easier than finding a place to park …

On our way in, we ate at Park Chow on 9th Ave., because a friend from the quaint village nestled in the verdant foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains told me the last time I saw her that Park Chow was her absolute favorite San Francisco restaurant these days.

It was two in the afternoon. We were hungry. We sat at the bar and ate. I liked the vibe of the place. The bartender was friendly and the staff seemed to genuinely like each other. My short ribs were delish. Nice place, good people, but favorite?

favorite in the neighborhood even?

I wouldn’t go that far. Just across the street is Ebisu, after all.

When I was growing up in east San Jose, we very occasionally made fieldtrips to San Francisco to see the wonders of the Big City. I went to see Daughter of the Regiment with my sixth grade class. I vaguely recall a visit to Ghirardelli Square and Fisherman’s Wharf in junior high, probably soon after Ghirardelli Square reopened as a tourist trap.

I recall a trip to Golden Gate Park and the California Academy of Sciences somewhere in there too. I remember the old de Young, especially its Asian Art section, built as a wing off the de Young to create a space for Avery Brundage’s collection. I could wander for hours, and did. The Asian Art collection eventually came out from under the de Young umbrella and spun off into the entirely separate Asian Art Museum.

The thing I most clearly remember of the park from when I was a pup, besides the Academy and the museums, were the Statues and Busts of Famous People tucked here and there in nooks and crannies. I loved those outdoor artworks — like this one of Verdi, which we passed on our way in to the de Young on Wednesday.

 
 

Past the bust of Verdi, we caught a glimpse of the rebuilding of the California Academy of Sciences.

 
 

Looks like they’re keeping two walls extant.

Memories, loads of memories of that building, not only from the school years but also from the parenting years. When the young guys were young, we made many trips to the Academy, took in the shows at the Morrison Planetarium, wandered through the exhibits of dinosaurs and Indian basketry, checked out the gators and crocs and fish at the Steinhart Aquarium, oogled the cassowary, watched the Foucault Pendulum knock the pegs over and prove that the world turns, and sat through (over and over) the 1906 earthquake re-creation. Ah, Memories, Memories of the Park as a sprout filtered and muddled by memories of the park with our sprouts.

Just steps beyond the Academy’s mud we found the Music Concourse Revitalization mud. What a mess. Here’s hoping what results is something at least similar to what was there before.

 
 

And finally, the new de Young.

 
 

As members of the Asian Art museum, we have reciprocal membership at the de Young, so we had free admission. The Hatshepsut special exhibit would cost us $5 extra, but we decided to forego that and visit it later, before it left at the beginning of February.

We spent as long as we could inside, checking out the Oceanic Art and Art of the Americas, American Painting, American Sculpture and Decorative Art, Contemporary Craft, … We didn’t have time to climb the Tower. Didn’t have time to see all there was to see before we were booted out. Worth a visit. Worth more than one visit. Plan some time. We skipped the Hatshepsut exhibit, as I mentioned, but did see the Jasper Johns prints exhibit and the American photography exhibit.

The new museum is great. Loads more room, hence loads more exhibits. They’ll be rotating the collection through in addition to having the special exhibitions. Come back again. Often. So much to see. Another time.

We headed home again on Muni, which will take your $3 for two seats if you board above ground and deal with the operator. We got off at Montgomery, intending to walk straight home, but got sidetracked by the smells of dinner cooking at Sam’s. Sam’s. Ymmm. Sweetbreads. his nibs had the sweetbreads sautéed with mushrooms while I had the sweetbreads sautéed with lemon and capers. Ymmm. I took some of mine home with the potatoes served with them and had them for breakfast yesterday.

Life in the Big City.

Hip Liz posted his version of

one of these

Hey. I hadn’t looked for a long time. Wotthehill happened last April?

Keeping up my lists of blogs and interesting sites was tedious with the design I’d set for the blog.

I had two options:

1) using Blogrolling.com or Bloglines or a similar tool to create the blogrolls and stash them offsite, referenced and included in the blog template.

I had the unfortunate experience of blogrolling.com going south on me one day and my blog hanging as it displayed because it couldn’t contact the site. Blogrolling.com and alternatives were out.

2) hardcoding the blogs and sites of interests into my blogger.com template, which I’ve been doing for quite a while now. Unfortunately, every time I changed my lists, I had to recompile my site.

Because the lists were getting long and taking up a lot of real estate and because I hated sitting around while my site recompiled, I split off the lists of blogs and sites of interests to another location today and reworked the blog. A link to those lists is available on the blog in the left column under Blogs and Sites of Note.

I’m off to a holiday gathering at Dee Vine Wines at Pier 19. It’s been raining like the dickens and hasn’t let up and I need to carefully work my way down the steps and across the Embarcadero.

Hasta mañana.