Born In The Beach: Sotto Mare’s Secret To Success Just in case this is your first visit to the blog, let me share something with you: I absolutely love Sotto Mare. The modest, unassuming restaurant on Green Street is one of the best in the city, and one … Read the rest
Desire & Design: Vargas, Hefner and Real Old Paper Earlier this week, we learned of the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner at age 91. A true American original, the pajama-clad Hefner distilled the zeitgeist of Sixties bachelorhood into a publishing empire, and created one of the world’s most … Read the rest
That’s A Lot Of Cioppino: Sotto Mare Gives Back In San Francisco, a city that has for many come to signify rapid change, North Beach is a neighborhood that still holds fast to its traditions. If you live here, you know that our parades, feasts and festivals are part … Read the rest
A New Dynasty in Chinatown: George Chen’s China Live The eastern stretch of San Francisco’s Broadway is one of the city’s most historic corridors. Ever since city planners dynamited the base of Telegraph Hill to make way for it, Broadway has been a vital artery, connecting the Embarcadero … Read the rest
Impossible Burger: The (Not So) Bloody Details On The New Veggie Alternative In a town that traffics in food trends, one of the biggest stories of the past year has been the rise of Impossible Foods. Using a plant-based derivative called heme, the six-year-old Redwood City company has created a … Read the rest
Eggs, Milk Bottles And The Market: New Isn’t Always Better When I was a child growing up in Ft. Lauderdale, we learned a lot of nonsense about what, and what not, to eat. In my memory of that time, the two most demonized culprits were eggs and butter. The nutritionists … Read the rest
Stoking The Fires Of Tradition: Sotto Mare Ten Years On A leisurely walk through North Beach is a rare treat. Easily the most pedestrian-friendly of San Francisco’s neighborhoods, North Beach was laid out for two-legged travel, and our winding alleys and one-way streets can seem a rebuke to the very … Read the rest
The Panucho Reborn: Young Chef Serves Up The Yucatan In San Francisco When Juventino Carrillo opened the first restaurant of his own, he had already been in the restaurant game for nearly a decade. As manager of the popular Bella Trattoria on Geary, Carrillo knew every aspect of the business, and he … Read the rest
North Beach Strange: Sweaters, Static & The Joe Biden Guy North Beach is truly its own creature. As the center of our collective history in San Francisco, North Beach (or the Barbary Coast, as this patch was long known) somehow enjoys a sort of cloistered existence, even today. Travelers typically … Read the rest
North Beach’s Sotto Mare: The New School Is Old School In 2007, Gigi Fiorucci opened North Beach’s acclaimed Sotto Mare, to little fanfare. Though Gigi had been in the restaurant business his whole life, he had no way of knowing what kind of spectacular success the place would eventually … Read the rest