San Francisco, Food Town

In her quirky food tour of San Francisco, which some have started calling “the best food city in America”, my friend Irina Slutsky took me to Zuni Cafe, an elegant and expensive eatery near Haight Valley that “John Perry Barlow, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, introduced me to”; split a $6.50 burrito with me at La Taqueria, “the best of the hundreds of burrito places in the Mission district”; made her daily visits to Mission Pie bakery and Blue Bottle Coffee Cafe; recited the names of the exotic fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood grocery store, dwelling on a crate of huge, thick, flat prickly green things labeled “Nopales, .69 lb” — “that’s cactus, which the Top Chef audience voted to be the essential ingredient last month” – and drove us in her 1990 Honda covered with stickers (e.g. “Geek Pride,” “It was bacon when I got here”), to a neighborhood called Bernal Heights, pointing out “the best sushi restaurant in the city” (Moki’s) as we passed it. Our destination was an obscure and sparsely traveled hill between an eight-line highway and a 165-unit public housing project.

This was Alemany Farm, four and a half urban acres that include a duck pond, a windmill, a greenhouse a few feet away from a clothesline where the residents are drying their laundry (this is after all, their backyard), and row after row of fruits and vegetables — two types of plums, three types of cucumbers, three types of lettuce, three varieties of strawberries, many varieties of apples, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, chard, kale, onions. With the help of people from the area, especially young people, the farm yields about 4,000 pounds of fresh produce every year for people in a neighborhood that previously was identified as a food desert, an area with few if any supermarkets or other places to get fresh food.

One could debate what it means to be a food town. The town of Chewandswallow from “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” might be the only indisputable food town, where food rains down like the weather. But few would argue with San Francisco’s growing reputation.

A food town is presumably a place whose restaurants are diverse, plentiful and renowned, bringing people from all over the world. Visitors to San Francisco list its restaurants as the number two reason to go there (number one is “atmosphere and ambiance”) according to the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau.

A food town is a place where people talk about food. Irina is not alone among San Franciscans who talk incessantly about food. She is a journalist with The San Francisco Appeal, videographer with Geek Entertainment Television, social media maven (she could exceed the Facebook limit several times over) and proletarian (or at least broke) socialite (“I’m inviting 1200 of my closest friends,” I overheard her say laughingly on her cell phone about a fundraiser she was organizing). None of this involves food. But she is also a self-declared foodie. Her focus on food is not because of her birthplace in Kazakstan, where her grandmother tilled the earth on a farm Irina visited every summer until she was nine. She and her parents lived in Pavlovsk, a (farmless) suburb of St. Petersburg, and when she visited her grandmother, she didn’t follow her around picking hot potatoes from the ground the way Lydia Bastianich did with her grandmother, or milk the cows, or lift a finger. No, her ability to “tell a first-rate dinner from a second-rate dinner, although I can’t exactly tell you why” and her eagerness to present strong opinions about coffee and bread are skills she says she acquired since moving to San Francisco five years ago. “It’s so easy to get a great meal here that it trains your palate.”

I’ve always thought that a food town is a place where you can walk into any culinary establishment of whatever price range or cuisine and have a reasonable expectation that it won’t be lousy; the better chance that you’ll have good food and a good experience, the better the food town. In my many trips to San Francisco, I can’t say I’ve never had a mediocre meal, but I’ve been surprised more than once by the diners and dives (but not drive-ins) that have delivered quality.

But San Francisco’s greatest claim to being a food town may be its dedication to a movement with many names (or maybe many different but inter-related movements that share a focus on food) – the green economy, the sustainable food movement, the organic food movement, the artisanal food movement, the slow food movement, the food justice movement, etc. The motto for San Francisco food seemed to be summed up on the awning of a restaurant called DeLessio: “Organic, Delicious, Sustainable.” It is hard to separate a greenie from a gourmet in the City By the Bay, since even when they are not one and the same, they sound alike:

“I think it’s accurate that San Francisco is probably the top food town in the U.S.,” said Jason Mark, co-manager of Alemany farm and the editor of the environmental magazine Earth Island Journal. “Our Mediterranean climate means that chefs have a greater flexibility if they are committed, as a growing number are, to fresh, local, seasonal foods. The strength of the sustainable food movement here means that the consumer demand for quality, artisanal products is very high. Because so many people are eager for artisanal foods, chefs and restaurants know they will have a market. Also, among the U.S.’s major cities, I think it’s fair to say that San Francisco is among the more laid back. In DC, and also to some extent LA, gourmet consists of power lunches. New York City is very fad driven. Here, people want to slow down and savor, and I think that gives chefs, restaurateurs, purveyors more confidence to be original.”

Is there anywhere else in the world where the proprietor of the most highly-regarded restaurant in the region is also the leading advocate for food justice? Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971 (and in doing so is credited with more or less inventing California Cuisine). She launched the Edible Schoolyard in 1996 in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, with a one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom to teach the students first-hand the importance of healthy food. The program has spread to the entire Berkeley public school system and beyond. I visited the latest edible schoolyard, the one at the Willie Mays Boys and Girls Club in Hunters Point in San Francisco, which is having its official opening, a fundraiser, on October 17th. For the first time, I learned the difference between a fruit and a vegetable:

The head of Hunters Point Boys and Girls Club edible schoolyard, Madeleine Van Engel, explained why she thought that, yes, San Francisco is the number one food town – “the quality of the vegetables. You can go to any restaurant and the food is so fresh, even in the ‘cheap’ restaurants.”

Krystin Rubin agreed. She is the co-owner of Mission Pie, a bakery that doubles as a vocational training ground for local high school students and another symbol of the sustainable food movement; a mural outside the bakery offers answers to the question “If you could thank a farmer, what would you say?”

“Because of the climate, there’s more fresh produce available year-round. Within 100 miles of San Francisco there are a large number of agricultural zones. Farmers are able to produce crops year-round, and local, organic, super-fresh produce is significantly less expensive in the Bay Area.

“Being in San Francisco enables us to offer a super-tasty product that’s local and seasonal. We make apple pies until the California apples run out. There’s no reason to sell apple pie with apples from New Zealand, when I can sell walnut pies instead, with walnuts that come from a farm 45 minutes away.” They get many of their fruits and vegetables from the Pie Ranch, a working farm and vocational education center co-founded by the co-owner of Mission Pie, Karen Heisler, a former environmental policy analyst at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

I don’t know what this says exactly, but Alice Waters, Madeleine Van Engel and Krystin Rubin all grew up in New Jersey. Krystin in particular sounded as if she shared my culinary background. “My mother didn’t cook much, and when she did, it was lousy,” she explained. “I was born hungry.” So this made her appreciate quality food from an early age – “I remember the first time I had real jam instead of grape jelly,” and especially appreciated family gatherings like funerals, since the quality of the food went up. After graduating with a degree in religion from New York University, and taking graduate courses in Boston, she changed her avocation to a vocation, and became a successful baker. Then, as she put it, “I burnt out on baking,” so she sold her business, and, through an exchange service called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) became an apprentice to a farmer near the Bay Area for a year. “I spent years working with food without knowing where it came from,” she said, and when Mission Pie began about three years ago, she approached it in a different way from her East Coast bakeries, as a mission.

This was all very convincing. To do my part, I decided to eat at Chez Panisse, the upstairs cafe rather than the downstairs restaurant, starting with “Blue Heron Farm Little Gems lettuce with cream, garlic and bottarga di muggine” and ending with, I thought appropriately, “Jonathan apple and pear crisp with ice cream.”

Photographs by Jonathan Mandell, except two of the pictures in the Alemany Farm collage, which are from Flickr, and the photo of Jason Mark is by Barry Jan.