Last week, when I visited Hapa Ramen to help break down a whole pig, Richie let me in on a new project he’s working on.  He was at first a tad bit reluctant to let the cat out of the bag, but with a bit of coaxing, he’s onboard to let you, loayl Beer & [...]

This past weekend I attended the Craft Brewers Conference, hosted for the first time in San Francisco.  Media badge in hand, I enter the conference with a dual agenda. As a local beer and food blogger, I was excited to see how discussions on beer and food were being explored and pushed forward.  If these are [...]

Hapa Ramen is getting in on the whole animal game for their ramen and porky side dishes and add-ins.   If it’s can’t be made into it’s own dish, or rolled up in some indulgent charcuterie project, it ends up in the stock pot. “I’m NOT doing it for love of the whole animal, or [...]

Local: Mission Eatery wants to be much more than a restaurant. It’s a combination of a sandwich shop, bakery, cookbook library, pop-up restaurant, and cooking class space.  I’ve tried most of these iterations – the brioche at Knead is outstanding, the braised lamb sandwich is my favorite, the prix fixe dinner is an outstanding deal [...]

Opening day of Hapa Ramen seemed to go smoothly.  Water boiled easily, and three hundred servings of ramen went out the door without incident (OK, maybe a few plastic things were melted.  but that’s a sign of too much heat, and that’s a happy problem is have under the circumstances.) My bowl was rich and [...]

On Thursday nights on Clara street, you can smell a wisp of malt aroma drifting through SOMA.  Follow the aroma down a thin alley street, by garage doors and parked cars, and you’ll find an open garage as the source.  Poke inside and you’ll find  Patrick Horn of Pacific Brewing Laboratories and Bryan Hermannsson of [...]

I first met Dontaye Ball at the Underground Farmer’s Market a while back.  Once we setup a black-market exchange program of homebrew for BBQ, we both knew quickly we were going to get along just fine. Shortly there after, I was contacted by a television network, and invited to make a demo tape of me, [...]

While traveling around Mexico, we found most of the beer to be exactly what you’d expect – typical export lagers.  Thin watery, mass produced versions of classic lagers, dumbed down till they taste of almost nothing, and cry out for a slice of lime to add some, any flavor. One bright spot in this sea [...]

After weeks of planning, hours of tasting, and an unknowable number of phone calls to brewers confirming their beer would be there, the “Mostly Barrel Aged Beer Dinner” went off without a hitch.  As usual, Scala’s Bistro and The Sir Francis Drake pulled of this huge feat without breaking a sweat. “Enough preamble, get to [...]

  The people have spoken, and they are saying: more beer ice cream. Jake, Sean and the rest of the team at Humphry Slocombe have made some great ice cream, but they didn’t do it alone.  The local brewing community really got behind this experiment in frozen goodness, and provided the base beers for all [...]