Tune in to KQED's weekly podcast, The Writers' Block to hear the Kitchen Sisters read selections from their book, Hidden Kitchens.
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About Hidden Kitchens
Secret, underground, unexpected, unofficial, below the radar, hidden kitchens. Inspired by the popular and highly acclaimed NPR Morning Edition series, Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes and More is a new book by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) exploring the world of street corner cooking, kitchen rituals and visionaries, legendary meals and eating traditions -- a wild, poignant chronicle of American life through food.

Over a thousand listeners called the NPR Hidden Kitchens Hotline with intriguing messages and hot tips about underground kitchens at nuclear test sites, traveling circus kitchens, Burgoo picnics in Kentucky, ramp suppers in North Carolina, hippie kitchens, clam bakes, and more. Hidden Kitchens interweaves these calls with stories from the radio series. A midnight cabyard kitchen on the streets of San Francisco, makeshift kitchens crammed in the racing pits of NASCAR, a secret civil rights kitchen tucked away in a house in Montgomery, the Chili Queens of San Antonio, freighter food from the galleys of the Great Lakes, the most unexpected hidden kitchen of all, the George Foreman Grill. Hidden Kitchens journeys with The Kitchen Sisters as they travel the nation in search of unsung kitchen heroes, community cooking rituals, immersing the reader into an array of unusual and remarkable kitchen cultures.
Purchase Hidden Kitchens (at NPR.org).

About The Kitchen Sisters
The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) have been producing radio programs together since 1979. They are the creators, with Jay Allison, of two Peabody Award winning NPR series, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project heard on NPR's All Things Considered and the James Beard Award nominated Morning Edition series Hidden Kitchens now in it's second season. Their work is recognized for its high production, originality and off beat sense of humor. They teach at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and lecture and provide training workshops around the country. In addition to producing radio, Davia Nelson is also a screenwriter and casting director. She lives in San Francisco. Nikki Silva is also a museum curator and exhibit consultant. She lives with her family on a commune in Santa Cruz, California.
Visit The Kitchen Sisters' web site (at kitchensisters.org).

The Writers'Block is a weekly podcast featuring writers of all stripes reading from their recent work. You can subscribe to this series via RSS or iTunes and receive each new podcast as soon as it is published.
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With so many restaurants in San Francisco, it is typical to research a restaurant before visiting. Today, part two of a list of restaurant review sites on the Internet. For this project, I chose to focus on restaurant review sites that allow participation from the public, as opposed to straight-review sites such as the San Francisco Chronicle or Gayot.

Last week, I discussed eGullet, Mouthfuls, and Craigslist.

CHOWHOUND

The Chowhound website features bulletin boards across the nation broken out by area. San Francisco restaurants are discussed on a San Francisco Bay Area board. This is a very active user community that posts several hundred posts a day.

Pros: Chowhound users religiously seek out the hole-in-the-wall, underrated, unheard of restaurants. They have a vast amount of knowledge about the San Francisco food scene, and keep on top of restaurant openings and closings. When I first moved to San Francisco over five years ago, I used the Chowhound site to get my bearings in a town where the restaurant scene can often be intimidating.

Cons: To say that the Chowhound software is archaic is to be polite. It is bulky, ugly, and daunting for a new user to understand. Trying to search for something on this site? Don't bother. Your best bet is to post a question and lean on site users for help finding an old thread. Administration of this site is heavy-handed and often confusing. The site does not have a model for sustaining itself financially, so users are randomly called upon to give "good will" contributions under threat of the site ceasing to exist.

Participating in Chowhound involves constantly asking oneself if seeking out the excellent restaurants is worth dealing with the bad software, grumpy administrators, and guilt trips for not opening your wallet to give money to a site that is purposely remaining in the dark ages. Many people decide that it's for them, and many people decide that the hurdles are not worth the tips.

YELP

This San Francisco-centric site reviews everything from local tourist attractions to taco trucks. Yelp features reviews by users as well as sponsored listings. All reviews are based on a five-star rating system.

Pros: Hands down, this is my favorite software for browsing through reviews. It is easily searchable and user friendly. It's depth allows a user to see the location of a restaurant, click through to the restaurant's web site, make a reservation, and vet comments by viewing all reviews by a particular person. This is a highly active site.

Cons: The main population of this site seems to be 20-something San Franciscans ... not that there's anything wrong with that, right? Reading reviews on this site, I often feel like I am listening in on bar conversations in the Marina. Curious what they say about the Marina Safeway? "This safeway is the most amazing Safeway ever. It's huge and because it is not in a family oriented neighborhood is not crawling with little brats. Instead it's crawling with single girls stocking up on diet coke and guys stocking up on beer and frozen pizza."

Yelp is helpful for looking up a specific restaurant or checking out restaurants in a certain area. For asking specific questions (ie., "Where to go after the theatre?") or following up on news (ie., "How is Elite Cafe now that it re-opened?"), best to try Chowhound or eGullet.

CITYSEARCH

Citysearch is part of a large conglomeration of media sites run by InterActiveCorp. Like Yelp, this database driven site allows a user to easily search for a specific restaurant or find a restaurant by area.

Pros: Citysearch's active database of restaurants means that a user is usually getting up-to-date information. Sub-group listings allow a user to easily find restaurants based on cuisine or special attribute (late-night, dessert, etc.). Citysearch has paid staff that writes editorial reviews, giving in-depth information.

Cons: Reviews by the public are inconsistent. Some restaurants feature many reviews, while others of the same caliber only feature a few. The main purpose of this site is to make money through advertising, and at no time is it easy to forget this fact. Each page features many ads and sponsored listings, making it difficult sometimes to find what one is looking for through all of the advertising noise.

With a site such as Yelp now on the scene, Citysearch is no longer part of my restaurant finding ritual.