A few months ago, as we waited in vain for a table at Flour + Water, my uncle described something he’d eaten for lunch: the “extremely hot pepper” (#28) at Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant, essentially, he said, a massive jumble of dried chili peppers with, in a little protein-flavoring agent role-reversal, a small quantity of chicken mixed in as well. Although my uncle is a demonstrative lover of hot food who grows big swaths of peppers in his Fairfield backyard, he reported (with a grin) that he’d managed only a few bites of the dish. He’d packed it up though, he said, envisioning, perhaps dangerously, that he might keep the capsaicin-logged concoction in the fridge indefinitely, and occasionally pluck out spoonfuls to add to his weekly stir-fries.

He told me all this because he knows I like hot food too. My tendencies border on the anti-social. I tell servers I want dishes advertised as spicy to be “hot, for real,” and enjoy powering through the molten reality with which I’m soon confronted — even if my dining companions are put off by my sweaty face and pained countenance. At El Metate, I’ll ask the owner for a cup of the habanero salsa he often keeps in the back. At Vientiane Cafe in East Oakland, I’ll take a nibble from one of the whole Thai chilis interspersed throughout a pile of rare beef larb — just to see if it’s hot. Of course, it’s hot, I find out five seconds later. The larb itself was delicious and just hot enough. Shouldn’t that be enough to know and savor? No, I need to taste the heating agent, to put my hand on the burner. That moment invigorates me, and I revisit it when I can: paring off a half-centimeter-length sliver of pepper, downing it, and waiting gleefully for lightning to strike my tongue, chest, and gut. There’s an element of daredevilry at play, which is an odd impulse for someone normally quite adverse to risk-taking — afraid of heights, wary of germs, and, when possible, disinclined to drive on busy highways.

As I flipped through the restaurant’s menu on Sunday though, the “extremely hot pepper” didn’t call out to me — perhaps because I’d breakfasted on thick Casa Sanchez chips, homemade guacamole, and sriracha sauce. If I were handy, I’d affix a bottle to a sprinkler set-up and have red ribbons spitting around the breakfast table every morning, but after the wake-up call I’d given myself, I needed a balanced lunch, not a saucer of lava. Entranced by the promise of authentic, Halal-ified Beijing cuisine, we ordered too much food — a customary decision given our habit of picking at leftovers before bed-time — sipped some tea, and surveyed the surroundings.

The restaurant has some quirks. Water comes in plastic cups of varying sizes and hues. Mine was green and translucent, but I saw several customers sipping from flimsy red “keg party” numbers and tall, clear, non-disposable ones too. The store-front outside seems scarcely wider than my outstretched arms. A mirrored wall inside makes the room look twice its size, but it really boils down to eight tables or so, a tiny counter, a clean-looking kitchen you can peer into, and a bathroom located beyond the kitchen. When we arrived towards the end of Sunday’s lunch service, the place was full of adorable children, and for the entirety of our meal, they scampered past our table, to and from the bathroom in the back, which didn’t bother us at all. The owner was gregarious. Initially, he stopped by our table every few minutes. He hovered, asking questions, and then stepped back briefly, before leaning in to hover some more. He was nice though, not nosy, and once the dishes started landing on the table like chili oil-dosed bombs, they were all we could focus on.

The “warm pot with sour green sliced fish” (#54) began with frills of Napa cabbage nestled in a clear, sparkling broth. Perfumed with sprigs of cilantro, the liquid had a slightly sour, vegetal flavor; it recalled fresh pickles, specifically a sauerkraut that had been just briefly brined. Logs of soft, lovely tofu and boneless sections of flaky white fish poked out from under the cabbage, and cellophane noodles squirmed at the bottom of the bowl. A few drops of chili oil added a gentle, burning undercurrent, balancing out the sourness whenever it began to build. As we hadn’t guessed the “sour green” in the first dish meant cabbage, more followed — hot and sour-style (#40). Cloaked in a smoky, sweet sauce studded with dried chili segments and ginger, each thick, slippery band of cabbage was soft and yielding, melting in the middle, yet just firm enough on the outside to hold together.

The beef pancake (#62) arrived, a misshapen satchel of bubbly, brown-blistered dough wrapped around thin, salty beef pounded or pressed into sheets. Green onions wafted from each rough-cut slice. It was surprisingly hard to eat neatly. The layers of pastry and meat fell apart with a little prodding, and grease gushed out. The flaps of dough were quickly slick and chopstick-resistant. Looks weren’t the point though, and fingers worked just fine. The lamb dumplings (#63) looked like pale pot-stickers awaiting a dip in hot oil. The skin was thick and chewy, but not doughy, a jewel of juicy, chives-scented lamb lurking within each tidy sack. They were fantastic with chili oil and a touch of black vinegar.

It was a rare journey to the edge of the city, a drive down Portola, then Sloat, and its rows of cookie-cutter houses, a flat, spare, washed-out landscape so unlike the one I usually wander. The Mission wasn’t warm by the Mission’s standards that afternoon, but when I emerged from the car on Sunday afternoon, stepped past the intersection of 43rd and Vicente, and felt a cool mist speckle my face, I inhabited a different world. At that moment, I felt blessed by San Francisco, its ridiculous micro-climates. It was the edge of the city, it was the edge of August, the time when tomatoes just a few miles inland start to pucker and weigh down their vines, and I was going to eat a “warm pot” — not because someone on Yelp recommended I do so, but because it just felt right.

Done alone, a night of drinking is considered sad, unhealthy, even pathetic. Pretty fun too, if you ask me, but I once had a therapist who told me otherwise. An adventure in the company of friends, on the other hand, promises shared experience, a way to fortify and express friendship. In either case, setting means a lot. Draining a few beers on a weekday evening at a dive three blocks from my house is a pleasant, if fairly pedestrian activity. I pair it with a game I want to watch, or someone I’d like to see. It’s technically going out, but too close to home to feel very exciting. If I’m making a night of it, I prefer to leave my neighborhood and go somewhere far from the places I do laundry, buy groceries, and wait for buses, a setting where I won’t see anyone I don’t want to see, or suffer the irritating, familiar personalities populating the Mission on weekend nights. I also like going somewhere where good eats await in the early morning hours. When I can, I go to Chinatown.

I’m aware white people have been pursuing “exotic” vice on Grant St. for a century-and-a-half. I don’t feel part of this tradition. At least, I’d hate to be some obnoxious urban explorer strolling jauntily down narrow stone streets, ducking red lanterns, hoping to catch a whiff of opium sliding out from under a door as I head to Li Po Lounge or Buddha Bar to sip the same drinks I can order anywhere else. I don’t fantasize about gambling dens teeming with shady characters. I’ve read up on the salacious criminal history of the place and seen a few movies, but the allure has little to do with Chinatown’s past, and a lot more to do with its present.

At around 7:30 on Friday night, I crossed the intersection of Grant and Bush, and walked up the hill, under the Dragon Gate. As I walked north, past a parade of seafood restaurants with their dedicated hawkers trumpeting specials outside and drab shops selling cheap baubles and katana blades, a procession of tourists headed in the other direction, back toward their Union Square hotels. Families with sulking teens dragging behind, elderly couples in hiking boots and bad hats — they were finishing up their visits to the hallowed strip. They had snapped their pictures, scarfed their expensive dim sum lunches, and purchased a few curiosities to haul home. Dusk was settling down. They were exiting the premises, relinquishing it to the locals and anyone else coming through. It felt like a reverse commute. By 8:30, the streets were nearly empty, and I was at the Buddha Bar with a friend, my hand wrapped around an extremely cold bottle of Budweiser.

Save for us and the bartender, the bar was empty too. A few hours and several drinks later, other actors had entered the scene: a strange, lurching man with gigantic headphones covering his ears and an inability to stay upright on his stool for more than a few minutes, a tall, talkative blond lady, and a waitress in a red dress from the restaurant next door. The waitress was talking shit to the bartender, singing badly and loudly along with The Righteous Brothers emanating from the petrified jukebox.

You lost that lovin’ feeling
Whoa, that lovin’ feeling.

By 11 p.m., the blond lady was playing Liar’s Dice with the bartender. If she lost, he said, she would remove some clothing. If he lost, she said, he’d pour ten free drinks. She won and passed the cherry-topped cocktails out like grocery store samples. The lurching man was gone. The waitress left and came back again. She knew the blond lady; they had cigarette after cigarette outside, cackling. The blond lady had just returned from Vegas, where she’d ditched a wealthy boyfriend only after running up a monstrous tab on their luxury suite. She was drowning out the wheezy jukebox chattering on about the boyfriend and others she’d had. The bar was her stage, the customers her captive audience.

At Buddha, the bathroom is down a flight of stairs, past stacks of empty boxes. The bartender dutifully buzzes open the lock for each costumer requiring relief, a task he repeats over a hundred times nightly. More people were streaming in now — a weary, beach-scorched couple having a nightcap, a bunch of noisy bros who’d cabbed over from a Polk Street meat market — and suddenly the skinny little bar packed with bodies. Every three seconds, the Liar’s Dice cup slammed down on the bar and someone screamed in horror or joy above the din. The weird, jerky rhythmic pattern of buzzer and cup was coming at me in stereo—the former honking in one ear, the latter banging away in the other. An hour before closing, we moved onto the more spacious Li Po Lounge across the street, where the mixed drinks taste like rubbing alcohol and the booths in the back are covered in sleazy vinyl the color of fingernail paint. As we squeaked and slid around a table in the back, I flashed on a flickering memory of a night in 2003 when some friends visited from New York and danced from table-top to table-top, hopping like frogs. I wasn’t sure if the memory was real, but it was in my head all the same.

At 2:30 a.m., my friend and I finally had what we hadn’t realized we’d been waiting for: a hearty “dinfast,” that blurry, yet satisfying repast enjoyed between closing time and dawn by witless forgot-to-eat-before-I-drank party people and late-shift toilers alike. My friend had been to Yuet Lee (1300 Stockton at Broadway) on a few prior occasions. In spite of my eight years in the city and occasional forays into Chinatown, I was a newbie, making a discovery I probably should have soaked up half a decade earlier.

Yuet Lee has a Coca-Cola sign above the door. In what seemed like one minute, I went from leaning against a pole outside of Li Po to sitting on a chair at a brown Formica table inside a bright spare dining room, craning back my neck and twisting my head in order to see the specials board without my glasses. I opened the fat menu and gazed at the dish descriptions. The letters, numbers, and characters started to undulate across the pages. My friend reached over and quickly closed it. The specials were the thing, it seemed, and that was fine by me. At that point, anything hot and greasy was fine by me. In the center of the room, a table of uniformed cops bellied up to a spread of brown-sauced noodles on white plates. Several beleaguered couples in party attire languished in the corner, chewing on spareribs. The restaurant was really bright, seemingly brighter every second, as if the lights were being turned up as the clock ticked along. I suppose that is typical of late-night establishments. Harsh florescents keep the drunks from falling asleep.

Our food arrived almost immediately after we placed our order. A glistening, pale nest of rings, tentacles, and assorted indeterminable bits, the peppery fried squid had a lovely crunch. The lip-stinging saltiness was oddly refreshing after the evening’s liquid diet. I recall a heap of noodles less vividly. They were very thin and yellowish, coated in a dry sauce redolent of curry. Slices of barbecued pork poked out from the tangles, along with half-circles of soft onion. I could have eaten buckets of this, in part because sucking up the clumps of noodles required such little effort. Though tastier, the mango chicken was harder to finish. In my state, I had a hard time getting my grease-slicked chopsticks to hold on to each slippery chunk of mango. Eating at the breakneck speed my liquor-logged stomach demanded was impossible under the circumstances, and at times, the constant tumbling of food from stick to table or napkin-shrouded lap was so maddening I couldn’t focus on the flavors. After it fell for the third time, I picked one errant morsel right off the table with my fingers. Whenever I managed to get mango and chicken in the same bite though, the pay-off — sweet, half-melted fruit and tender thigh meat — made up for the ordeal.

Chinatown is both physically and psychologically distant from my usual digs, stuck in the center of the busiest part of the city, yet remote at the same time. It’s on a different time-table. Overrun by tourists during the day, Grant Street is comparatively serene at night, unlike my neighborhood, which, apart from folks taking photos of the murals along 24th St., draws larger crowds when the sun drops down. As a general rule, I prefer going in when most people are going out, and for that, there’s no place like Chinatown after 9 p.m. I’ll never head across town for a burrito, even if it’s amazing, because I live in the Mission, but I will take two forms of public transportation in order to drink a Budweiser — the most ubiquitous of mediocre bar beers — in the right place. That place’s proximity to salt-and-pepper squid ensures subsequent visits will end the same way — with too many drinks and a few plates at 3 a.m.

photo by Aimee Shapiro

I was all set. We had lots of dishes to prepare, of course, but the night before I was focused on crafting an enticing, verdant elixir with which to prime the appetites of our guests — prior to the impending assault of assorted cheeses, breads, olives, pickled peppers, octopus and tomato salad, roasted corn relish, watermelon with salt, and two bastardized briks — one with ancho-and-roasted tomato-stewed heritage pork, currants, and cilantro, and the other with morels, thyme, feta, beet greens, chard, and kale.

From green garlic shoots, to slender asparagus, to sweet early-season cherry tomatoes, I have, with regard to the realm of edible vegetation, a tendency to prize fresh young things. When I saw the green garbanzos nestled like weird little grubs in a big basket in the Bi-Rite produce case, I was consumed by the desire to harness their youth, pea-like flavor, and agreeably grassy pallor, and express them fully and vigorously in a simple yet well-calibrated dish. To work such magic, I began by chopping the leek and letting it slowly fall apart in a pot glazed over with a half-stick of butter. Meanwhile, I roasted four unpeeled cloves of garlic on a hot, dry cast-iron skillet, just the way Rick Bayless taught me. When the peels were flaking off, the exterior blackened in places, and the cloves delectably squishy to the touch, I turned off the burner, let them cool, peeled them, and stirred them into the pot with the creamy, cooked-down leeks. I added the stock, about a quart of water, and the saffron. Then, I realized I had forgotten to separate the beans from their pods. Cursing, I turned off the other burner, grabbed the bag of beans, and got to work.

About an hour, two beers, and two-and-a-half episodes of Eastbound and Down later, I shelled the last bean and headed back to the kitchen. When I heated up the pot again, I realized I’d severely misjudged the amount of beans I’d need. Each relatively large pod contains just one or two tiny pellets. I would have required a wheelbarrow to haul the quantity of beans I truly needed, and an entire television series to make shelling so many bearable. Cursing, I flung open the fridge. I would have to improvise. I spied half a head of cauliflower. The beans would, I thought, dance prettily with such fair white curds as a partner. I hacked the cauliflower up rather brutally and tossed it in the pot with the beans for a steamy dip. Fifteen minutes later, after a nice simmer, everything was tender. I turned off the heat and added salt and pepper.

That’s when I started — as Dave Chappelle would say — f**king up. Using a small, lidless blender better suited to smoothie-making instead of a food processor (ours fell prey to mold a few months ago), I tried to do the soup in four or five very small batches, covering the top with a plate. This was happening after 11:00 p.m., around the time I become capable of doing nothing besides sleeping, drinking, or watching movies requiring little intellectual investment. I should not have been cooking really, much less handling hot liquids. I accidentally pressed the “liquify” button instead of “puree”, and a surge of pale green came bubbling up, rattling the plate, sending a steaming froth cascading out and across the table and floor. I screamed like a small spoiled child, clutching my seared right forearm with my left hand, also incidentally very badly burned. Sickly drops flecked the wall next to the blender. I suddenly realized the front of my shirt was hot, wet, and green. Cursing, I dived for a towel. After mopping up what I could see in my exhausted haze, I limped off to bed.

I awoke to find a trail of ants the size and shape of a patch of body hair churning around the area of floor I’d soiled with soup and failed to properly clean. On the other hand, once strained, the soup — now cool and the appealing color of green tea ice cream — tasted fantastic — rich and lively, with depth provided by the roasted garlic and the chicken stock, texture courtesy of butter and my hapless blender, the beans and cauliflower intertwined in a nutty, herbaceous, harmonious embrace. Later that night, we would serve it in tiny to-go espresso cups with toasted hazelnut crumbles, finely chopped parsley, and neat drizzles of olive oil. I botched the first cup by accidentally dumping in about a shot or two of oil — and cursed — but the rest turned out fine — once I let the lady handle the pouring. Out in the dining room, conversation paused. Everyone was quiet, sipping away. My hand and forearm throbbed a little bit. I was sweating under my apron. So much shelling, so much spilling, so much cursing — and yet the soup managed to hold. It was good, the way I’d wanted it to be. Things don’t always fall apart. The process of creating something so simple and easy might have been unnecessarily tortured and chaotic, but the result, blessedly, was pure and refined, even serene — swirling green peace in the bottom of a soup spoon.

The relationship between a restaurant and residents of the street on which it sits can easily be cracked — not unlike the fragile shell of a mishandled farm egg. The issue surfaces most when the establishment becomes popular. As crowds come to consume, locals are forced to adjust to accommodate (or combat) the inevitable changes that arrive. I occasionally wonder how my life is shaped by the eateries around me. I enter and exit BART most days with the sweaty, steak-y scent of El Farolito‘s morning meats burrowing into my nostrils. Discarded McDonald’s wrappers from the franchise on the corner float like pastel tumbleweeds past the front door of my apartment. Beyond food, the same Latin rock band plays every Sunday all day at the 24th St. BART station. They do largely the same set every week. I have the guitar player’s solos memorized, so if he’s ever sick, I can fill in. The dance studio across the street, above the coffee shop, thumps and stomps most evenings. When I look out my window, I can sometimes see the tops of the dancers’ heads bobbing into view. Last week, I recorded an interview over speaker-phone, and when I listened back to it yesterday, the rhythmic hums and drums from a block party happening just 50 yards away were etched on to the recordings like vuvuzela horns droning beneath ESPN’s World Cup game broadcasts. Through smells, sounds, and sights, the city has its way with your senses — and you either deal with it or you leave.

The problem gets especially thorny when the offended parties — the light sleepers, neat freaks, and territorial denizens of the block — feel as if they’re a more intrinsic part of the city than the offender, particularly when the offender is a trendy, much-blogged, money-making food-service operation with a clientele neither reflective of nor rooted in the neighborhood — and the offended happen to be long-time residents.

Recently, two local situations — one major and one seemingly minor and more than a little absurd — have drawn attention to a reoccurring scenario fraught with peril.

Last month, Mission Loc@l reported on a showdown at Schmidt’s involving, not a dish of leathery braised rabbit or an ill-seasoned terrine, but an upstairs tenant with a bone to pick. Since May 2009, Patricia Kerman, a 14-year resident of the building, has complained about a noisy kitchen fan (which the restaurant’s owner replaced), called a restaurant inspector, allegedly told customers she’d become ill after a meal there, posted a sign (“Bad Neighbors”) in her window overlooking the front door, and retaliated with daily thumps and bumps that rattle the ceiling. Whew. The landlord doesn’t want to be involved; the police can do little, even though Schmidt’s has potentially lost business. Other neighbors don’t support Kerman’s claim, but until both parties (meaning Kerman as well as the Schmidt’s crew) agree to mediation, the standoff continues.

The Castro District sandwich emporium Ike’s Place has faced a stiffer assault on the part of close neighbors reportedly ticked about the loud, snaking lines, the debris collecting outside, and, of course, noise. The parties have tried mediation and failed to reach agreement. On June 29th, Ike’s (already expanding and in no position to abruptly lose business) was facing possible eviction at a hearing for summary judgment. Devotee of the deli’s $8.98 Fat Bastard sandwich were happy to learn that Ike’s won and won’t, at least any time soon, be folding up shop. The landlord will have to decide whether to take the case on to trial or to work towards a settlement. Either way, with Ike’s successfully digging in its heels, and landlord Denman Drobisch reportedly doing the same, the climate can’t help but be permanently sour — fairly pickled, if you will.

These situations really get to the heart of living in a city. The city doesn’t stay put. It changes around you. Pristine, quiet blocks become loud and grubby. Sleepy strips heat up. Buildings rise and fall. Suburbs get swallowed, and new ones pop up. To be content living in a city, you have to embrace the idea that the city is organic, that the smells and sounds are going to change, that not only are your surroundings beyond your control, they are really beyond any control — apart from that dictated by the law, of course. Seeing the individuals making your life harder as the primary problem misses the point. If Ike’s leaves, another restaurant will come along. Instead of being pebbles fighting a fast-moving current, city residents have to adapt and be fluid themselves. The city can be hard and unfair, but it’s undeniably here — at least until an earthquake tosses us all into the sea. My advice to complainers: invest in noise-cancellation headphones, cheerfully demand free meals in exchange for untold patience, and (hopefully) become your nemesis’s most dedicated non-paying customer.

Whenever possible, I shop at farmers’ markets for my groceries, buying braising greens, fresh eggs, and unpasteurized pomegranate juice at Alemany, and when I can stand to brave the scene, meat from the amazing Marin Sun Farms‘ stand at the Ferry Building. I don’t get most of my groceries at farmers’ markets; over the course of a week, convenience and immediate needs demand visits to reputable brick-and-mortar stores. While trips to my favorite markets help keep the fridge stocked, I value the experience more than anything, the routine of getting up early, before my Saturday morning basketball game, and dashing off into the prickly mist to fill empty bags, or venturing over directly after basketball, sweaty, tired, and profoundly hungry, at dire risk of over-spending in shopping for food before lunch.

When I’m back home in Kentucky to visit family, I stop by the Saturday morning farmers’ market near our house in Louisville’s Highlands neighborhood. Situated in the parking lot of a Presbyterian church on Bardstown Road (“food for the soul,” the church’s sign reads), this market is a pint-sized affair — a bit bigger than Noe Valley’s. I go there to buy dinner fixings — and re-visit the scene.

Heading to the local market is a swift, visceral way of getting back in touch with the place you come from. This weekend, I wasn’t buying much — just a few ears of bi-color corn and a bunch of gnarled, stubby dark-orange carrots for a pot of soup — but I took home more than groceries. At the market, I saw faces I recognized, not people I once knew, but features and voices I recalled from schools I’d attended, the swimming pool I’d frequented, and stores at which I had shopped. I wasn’t not seeing people I’d once known, but perhaps their relatives, the next generations, raised in the same place by people staying put, laying down roots. I’m not making a bad joke about inbreeding, just noting that in smaller ponds, you see the same fish (and their offspring) more often. On Saturday, I overheard conversations as I strolled from stall to stall. Over packages of grass-fed beef, two women discussed the summers they were enjoying. “Haven’t been going to Lakeside much,” one said, referring to the massive, quarry rock-lined swimming pool I used to visit nearly daily for bare-footed basketball and long, skin-puckering soaks each summer. “Oh no,” said the other. “It’s been too hot.” And hot it was, even at nine in the morning — the air heavy with the sort of dense, enveloping heat that dampens your shirt before you can make it down the front steps. Here, such heat calls for a day spent indoors, with the air conditioning working overtime.

Farmers’ markets reflect communities. It’s a cliche, yes, but it bears out — in the same way a concert defines a band not just by its music, and its identity expressed through performance, but by the people coming to the show. Mission Bay’s tiny farmers’ market caters to UCSF researchers looking for a break on one of the sunny benches dotting the well-manicured quad. I wonder how many people actually buy groceries there. Noe Valley’s farmers’ market sustains the precious strip’s residents, and entertains interlopers like myself. On a recent visit, we saw adorable gray-haired ladies ordering up pricey steaks “for one” and a yoga pants-wearing mom swish by Sukhi’s samosa stand to issue an unsolicited zinger: “I love Indian food, but it hates my waistline.” It was one of our favorite all-time farmers’ market moments — along with the guy at Alemany who claimed to play classical music for the benefit of his tomato plants.

Whether I’m in Louisville or San Francisco, forays to the market are about people as much as produce, an opportunity to take stock of the swirling community. In this way, they’re all the same — regardless of what’s in season.

Last week, I was not surprised when I read John Birdsall’s S.F. Weekly post about Whole Foods’ planned development of a “street eats” line. While the Onion headline-ready notion of packed station wagons zipping over to America’s fastest-growing supermarket chain (on weekends, after the kids’ soccer games, before trips to the pool, perhaps) to savor authentic street-cart fare made me chuckle, the movement has boomed so rapidly and robustly — resonating from gastronomic hot-spots such as Portland and New York to smaller markets, leaping from local blogs to spreads in food magazines — it’s almost shocking it didn’t break sooner.

Definitions of street-food vary. To some, street-food is literally simply food you buy on the street to eat as you venture walk from one place to another, on foot or by bike. It is sold via cart, van, or basket. You find it steaming from wheeled cases under lamp-posts outside a favorite Mission District bar, wafting from a row of tents at Alemany Farmers’ Market, and hawked from busy Financial District corners. Convenience is at the heart of it. Whether you’re tucking into a pizza crisped in a customized Weber, scooping holes in a crème brûlée with a compostable spoon, or enjoying a bao in the park, you feel as if your food is coming to you. More accurately, it happens to be where you end up going. While the form has evolved to include dishes normally eaten on proper tables, street-food is usually portable, easy to hold, ideally with one hand, while in motion. You eat it the moment after you buy it, ideally immediately. Street-food is also a genre. Just as cart-pushers relish coming up with unlikely delicacies to squeeze into the street food idiom, expanding the realm of known possibilities, street food traditions from all over the world suddenly have a hold on the food-obsessed public’s heightened attention, and chefs are increasingly comfortable crediting, say, Burmese lettuce wraps, Indian puri, or salt-studded pretzels with influencing dishes served at their relatively expensive, artfully designed restaurants boasting public relations teams and Flash-heavy websites. When fancy food hits the streets, and quick bites head uptown, the translations swirl in both directions, potentially to the point of causing cacophony — over-priced white tablecloth tacos that don’t taste as good as they should, and gimmicky riffs on haute cuisine you’d just as soon feed to the bold, foraging pigeon sharing your bench. Still, there’s the one-year-old Street in Los Angeles, a stylish, hip restaurant celebrated for chef-owner (and long-time street-food advocate) Susan Feniger’s inspired riffs on global fast food traditions. The potential for gimmickry makes me cringe, but if the food is actually really good to eat, it’d be tough to judge it by any other criteria. In mining such traditions, restaurants are, in a sense, making a logical leap from cross-cultural comfort foods — menus inspired by what families eat together — to meals tired, drunk people eat alone, as fast as they can, before they pass out, dabs of hot sauce still smeared across their faces.

In taking stock of the street-food trend and seeking to integrate it into their 800-pound gorilla of a business model, Whole Foods is following the same logic, trying to reflect the culture it sees bubbling up with tasty, convenient products people will buy. Harvindar Singh, Whole Foods’ Northern California local foods “forager,” told Birdsall he was hoping to sell locally sourced street food from grab-and-go perishable fridge cases or as shelf-stable products in up to 30 stores across the region. Thus far, he’s reportedly met with Crème Brûlée Cart’s Curtis Kimball, his brother, Magic Curry Kart’s Brian Kimball, and Jon Kosorek of East Bay cart Jon’s Street Eats on the subject of a bottled salad dressing. As Birdsall notes, the vendors participating will need to make some adjustments to their wares:

“…[S]elling to Whole Foods means more than dropping off a few trays of crème brûlée at the loading dock. It means tweaking ― or substantially re-engineering ― products to meet the company’s guidelines for sourcing and packaging. ‘They have to feel ready and capable of doing this,’ Singh said of the vendors. ‘This is a whole new business for them. I’d want to make sure they have the volume and know how to do business at this level. It’s a partnership.’”

A Minyanville article published last Friday delves into some of the gritty details that partnership will entail, with Leslie Skarra, founder of a Minnesota-based product development and research firm, weighing to drop knowledge faster than a hand-scalding hot empanada:

“The first thing necessary to go from [a street cart] to the Whole Foods level is to convert the recipe to a formula…If you’ve been measuring ingredients by the cup, the large-scale producer will need the weights. Then, you need to define the process. Usually, there are things specific to a street vendor’s equipment, their environment, that make their products what they are. After that, there needs to be a process of investigation to make sure the original product can be reproduced accurately…[S]cientists will convert the ingredients in the formula into one that would be acceptable to Whole Foods from a sourcing standpoint, a quality standpoint, and work out the necessary scale of operations…What are the risks? Sometimes going from handmade to large scale changes things. This is where many people involved in this sort of translation can underestimate the problems in going from small and slow to bigger and faster. This is known in the industry as ‘scale up’, which is very important to get right, to maintain the integrity of the street food and the things that make it excellent to eat, a pleasurable experience, every time it’s consumed, to drive repeat consumption.”

I have included this whole beast of a quote because it sums up a lot of the issues at play better and no less succinctly than would my paraphrasing. The vendors and their loyal customers will have one major concern for sure — that the efforts required to Whole Foods-ify the products will strip away flavor and authenticity. Crafted on a larger scale, sold from case, not cart, might some of the City’s better-known traveling eateries end up, in Whole Foods’ hands, becoming the edible equivalent of elevator music — familiar, well-loved melodies with their songs’ souls sucked out?

The idea of Whole Foods being some weird suburban bazaar-o full of exotic corporate-approved pseudo-street-food is probably hard for some devotees of the culture to stomach, but the truth is, for most Whole Foods customers, grazing through the grocery’s expansive self-service steam-table offerings is already part of the shopping routine. An influx of street-food products in any part of the store would just mean a few more options. I’m not sure that the products would be seen as anything more than things to buy and eat, probably not valuable cultural artifacts at risk of dilution. Vendors — especially those with families who have been selling food on the streets to make a living, not entertain a hobby — might see Whole Foods as an opportunity to make their food work for them, and conceive of “selling out” as a dream, not a disappointment. It’s a path some might want to go down and others might not. I just hope people who’ve been pushing tamales at Bart stations for 20 years get a shot — that is, if they want one — along with Silicon Valley refugees with over-active Twitter accounts.

Whole Foods has been stocking locally sourced prepared foods for a while. About a year ago, I did a brief interview with Singh for an Oakland Tribune story about East and West Gourmet Food, the Afghan-owned Dublin outfit nearly unavoidable farmer’s markets throughout the region. Familiar with the company’s products from his days running farmer’s markets, he started stocking the company’s vegan bolani breads and savory dips. They sold very well, at one point, he told me — if memory serves me correctly — so well that a few items were turning over as fast as grocery list staples. According to a Wall Street Journal article, also published last week, Singh has had a hand in the draft kombucha that has been flowing at a few area stores. He’s also helped some of the small operations he’s tapped fund their expansions — all facilitated by the company’s 2006 $10 million dollar low-interest loan program for local farmers and producers. When Singh approached her, East and West Gourmet Food’s Nazie Sidiq didn’t worry about getting too big. Her company — really an extended family — grew, and when I turned in the piece, was preparing to grow much bigger. Sidiq told me very plainly that she wanted to be on Oprah, to have the whole world eating Afghan street food, learning about it, embracing it. If Whole Foods can make lesser-known culinary traditions accessible on a broad scale without sacrificing quality, the company is doing a service — to consumers, producers, and, of course, itself. There’s a lot about Whole Foods that gives a thoughtful consumer pause — not least of which is the behemoth store’s propensity for snatching business from small neighborhood groceries and markets. At the same time, unless you think street-food has to be a hardscrabble existence, or that a noble small business is a scarcely sustainable one, the trend is encouraging.

There’s nothing like leaving a place to make you want to make sure you know it before you go. For some people, that means tearing through favorite shops, haunting beloved beaches, and catching up with old friends. For me, that means eating. To that end, I’ve made a list of a few things I need to eat between now and September, dishes I associate with the eight years I’ve spent here. Importantly, I’m not eating in order to remember my favorite flavors (though I do that too). Instead, I’m trying to leave town only after taking stock of the time I’ve spent here, and for someone whose evolving eating habits keep time as well as any clock, keeping the hallmarks at the forefront of my mind simultaneously keep me connected to the people I’ve known and the places I’ve frequented. I’m not speaking of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco, the institutions, the destinations, the places I’ve gone to for special occasions. My fairly recent dinner at Coi looms infinitely larger as a meal than the countless times I, as a lunch-breaking paralegal, bought a salad at Foccacia on Sacramento St., but the fact I ate at Foccacia so often means I do have a lot of time tied up there, a period of my life, really, several years during which I ate one of the establishment’s salads nearly once a week.

Tasty as it is, Ti Couz‘s Salade de Maree is similarly not one of the best things I’ve eaten in San Francisco. It is, however, one of the first things I ate when I arrived. In late 2002, my roommate, a friend from college, and I would go there for brunch, sit outside, drink Bloody Marys, and munch through massive bowls of rice, greens, capers, grape tomatoes, tiny soft scallops, baby shrimp, hard-boiled eggs, cauliflower, green beans, and strips of seared tuna. The dressing was light and lemony. Some people wake up with coffee; I prefer alcohol and acidity.

When I think of the pizza I have enjoyed here, Pizzeria Delfina is tops, particularly a special pie with green garlic and speck they ran last Spring. Nonetheless, for every molten Panna and sweet, blistered Margherita I have downed at lovely lunches and dinners with friends and family, I’ve eaten a dozen slices without a hint of artisanal pretense at Serrano’s. Serrano’s sits on 21st, not far from Valencia. Until Fall of 2004, I lived a block away, on Valencia and 22nd, and during that time, the tiny take-out spot was my go-to: Long, floppy, free-form double-slices festooned with an infinitely customizable array of toppings and cooked to order. The routine — stepping up, asking for a slice, and rattling off the toppings you want — encourages ordering hubris — say, extra garlic, spinach, barbecued chicken, corn, feta cheese…

In 2004 — or was it 2005 — I played my first show in San Francisco, a mid-week affair at the Hotel Utah Saloon. Over the next couple of years, I played the SoMa venue at least a half-dozen times. I liked — and still like — the bar’s long, shiny bar, miniature balcony, and prow-like opening into the tiny music room, but a lot of what made playing the Utah so fun was having a bite before the show, specifically an excellent house-made veggie burger patty on a well-toasted bun with good, crispy fries. I associate the Utah’s veggie burger with getting started playing music with my best friends in San Francisco, which makes it something to remember, even if I’ve had plenty of great real burgers on other occasions.

Taqueria Vallarta made me switch from burritos to tacos, at least on occasion. Vallarta’s tacos are tiny, inexpensive, and greasy, topped with concentrated, grill-stewed meats and soft onion strips cooked down to their essence. The meats are arranged in pinwheels along the inside of a silver, bowl-like surface. They bleed into each other, cabeza tangled up with chicken, chorizo mussing up the pastor. Tellingly, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten these tacos for lunch or dinner, but for the three years I left at the edge of Potrero Hill, near General Hospital, they were the only snack I had.

Like a lot of San Franciscans, I shop at farmer’s markets, but I’ve never been devoted just out of a desire to obtain nice produce directly from farmers. A lot of why I love getting up early — even before a morning basketball game — to poke through the stalls at Alemany has to do with the ready-to-eat wares. Yes, Alemany’s row of low-profile tents can’t touch the Ferry Building’s well-publicized armada of awnings, but the prices there are accordingly higher, the clientele less diverse, and the vibe generally tonier and less regular-feeling. When I started going to Alemany, I ate breakfast as I shopped. Usually — still — I buy a cold samosa from the Sukhi’s stand, and gnaw at it as I rummage through bins for unpocked sweet potatoes and fresh-looking chard. It’s never the most perfectly seasoned samosa I have eaten, but for me, it trumps any muffin in town.

I look back at this list I have just written and laugh. For someone who has dashed all over town to taste new things, my regular noshes don’t stray far from where I’ve lived. I’ve been all over the Bay Area, but nearly all of my abodes have been in the Mission. Even as far as fairly inexpensive eats go, I’ve had great Thai at Lers Ros in the Tenderloin, amazing Lao in Oakland at Vientian Cafe, soup dumplings at Yank Sing and Shanghai Dumpling King in the Richmond, a stunningly tasty torta ahogada at Mi Barrio in Fruitvale, and dosas at, well, Dosa, but when it comes to making sense of what I associate with my time here, these five entries, mundane, largely forgettable, are the tastes that came to mind. Even if they don’t reflect my favorites, they do reflect the person I’ve been — busy, inclined to eat for convenience, often within a few strides of my apartment. When I started writing about food in 2008, I started eating better on a regular basis. The work hasn’t been lucrative by any means, but I eat richly, which reminds me: That might be why I got into it in the first place.

When I think of general stores, I imagine rough-hewn outposts in dusty mining towns swirling out of sepia-hued cowboy flicks — places where grumbling codgers hawk dry goods, tools, soap, guns, and clothes to a small population of frontier folk. I’m a scholar of spaghetti (and spaghetti westerns), not by any stretch an expert on expressions of culture and community in isolated towns on the American Western front during the latter portion of the 19th century. Still, I imagine that those stores were places where people went to get the things they could not grow, raise, or make for themselves. And they were dependent on them, not just because they ferried along much-needed goods from faraway places, but because they acted as centers of community activity. Residents of a small town might go to the general store to buy flour and end up seeing each other, sharing stories, and bonding. By my amateurish reckoning, it’s a pretty good example of community coming together naturally, face-to-face, materializing in a place where needs are met, back when needs couldn’t be met anonymously via online shopping or a trip to a big-box retailer.

This is what I was thinking when, last Thursday, I read a San Francisco Chronicle food section story about a “general store” popping up, not in some grim mud-slicked alley of Deadwood, but in Oakland, California — urban epicenter for community-conscious adventures in sustainable food and agriculture. Every few weeks, a revolving cast of Chez Panisse and Eccolo vets set up shop and sell sausages, heat-and-serve entrees, fresh pastas, frozen pizza dough, jams, breads, and ice creams — high-end convenience foods to stock fridges and freezers for quick dinners and easy lunches. In the piece, Chronicle writer Carol Ness draws parallels between this pop-up and the larger trend of which it is emblematic:

“The store is part of the new phenomenon of temporary eateries, farm stands and even one “underground market” that spring up here and there around the Bay Area, sometimes regularly in the same location, sometimes not.”

Simultaneously, however, Ness makes an effort to set this new enterprise apart:

“. . .[S]o far the Pop-Up General Store is one of a kind because its wares carry an exceptional pedigree: They’re made with pristine ingredients — Becker Lane pork, Soul Food Farm eggs, Riverdog produce — by a dozen or so Bay Area chefs, almost all of whom cook or have cooked at Chez Panisse.”

That pedigree, of course, comes at a price the average Oakland resident can’t pay. As portrayed, the general store suggests a movable mini-Ferry Building, a stroller-clogged social scene for self-described “foodies” swooning over chicken confit and bags of freezer-ready heritage pork gyoza, not a place to do serious shopping. That doesn’t necessarily bother me. Elite eating (and shopping) is an articulation of values. I rarely buy shoes, and cheerfully wear the few I own until they fall apart and literally flap off my feet — all because I’m cheap and don’t see the point in having more than a few pairs at a time. I won’t, however, buy steaks at Foods Co. By calling their enterprise a “general store” though, founders Christopher Lee and Samin Nosrit (well-known East Bay chefs I first encountered reading through Novella Carpenter’s Farm City) are actively trying to evoke the sort of life-sustaining community-generating apparatus that came to my mind the moment I saw Ness’s headline — all while selling boudin blanc for $14 a pound. While such a project might draw attention to certain sections of the community — producers, chefs, growers — and bring together others — hungry food writers, people with money — the vibe — however delicious — doesn’t quite jive with the handle.

When I traveled to Europe for the first time at age thirteen, I remembered what my French teacher had told me about shopping in Europe. The way she described it, there was a little store for everything you wanted. You went to a butcher for meat, a cheese shop for cheese, and a bakery for bread. Vegetables came from a produce store, wine from a wine shop. When my family cooked meals in the small Paris apartment we were renting for our week-long stay, we shopped in this manner, and while getting groceries took longer, I recall loving the process. The cheese-monger had a spotless white coat and an elegant way of severing off the tiny wedge you wanted from a big wax-covered wheel. While the fromagerie was cool, a wash of whites — eggshell, cream, and snow — the pâtisserie had a burnished, golden-brown sheen. It was warm and crowded, and I thought oddly of castles upon seeing the jutting spikes of baguettes and rows of pastries lining the windows like toasty battlements. Entering and then leaving these tiny, enveloping works became a weird kind of entertainment, one I cannot associate with shopping in the U.S., unless I’m squeezing through the aisles of Bi-Rite or visiting a farmers’ market. Sometimes I wonder if the American culture of shopping — going one place to get all things, whether it’s Safeway or the Ferry Building — is rooted what once was necessity for people settling at the edge of civilization. Given the choice, I would, naturally, prefer to one-stop-shop at a general store dishing up butternut squash ravioli than one pushing hardtack and pemmican. That would be fun. Nonetheless, the practical ethos of a general store has more in common with gas stations and corner bodegas selling batteries, bottled water, condoms, and medicine (along with porno magazines, booze, and cigarettes) than a D.I.Y. congregation of food-lovers and growers. Despite sourcing products from all over the world, they reflect what the community needs and desires. If only it were boudin blanc.

Since then, Bonny Doon has moved to Santa Cruz, sold a few of its bank-breaking mainstream labels, and most recently, shifted its focus from winsome, cleverly-marketed table fare to quirky, more rarefied wines made using organically grown grapes (invariably oddball Italian varietals) and biodynamic methods. At the same time, owner Randall Grahm has seen his profile grow, not because of the bottles he’s produced, but as a result of his well-publicized literary efforts — from newsletter manifestos to provocative cartoon ads in widely-read wine magazines and crushing commentaries cloaked in clever wine-y homages to canonical novels and poems. That career, a supple, sturdy vine shooting off his winemaking business’s freshly trimmed root, culminated — at least so far — in last year’s “vinthology” Been Doon So Long, a self-curated collection published by the University of California Press. The title, I assume, is a play on Richard Farina’s 1966 novel Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, the book Farina was promoting on the very night he died in a motorcycle accident near Monterey.

After my short strange trip to the old tasting room back in 2002, I followed Bonny Doon in the news, and even made a point of buying the company’s wines when I could. Already thoroughly charmed by his labels frequently featuring wild, splotched, and puckered caricatures drawn by Ralph Steadman, a favorite artist, I was also taken with Grahm’s funny essays, and enamored of the prospect of supporting a good writer by drinking his wine. A few weeks ago, Been Doon So Long won a James Beard Award, and I figured the time had come to reacquaint myself with Grahm’s body of work.

The body is the size of a biology textbook, which is probably appropriate considering the subject matter. At the same time, essays so dense, so rife with potentially unfamiliar terms and allusions that require quick references, suit a more portable package, something to be tucked into a jacket pocket, read in installments on public transportation, and marked with folded corners, underlines, and scribbled notes. Instead, the book is huge, heavy, and handsome. It looks good in a case, or on a coffee-table, but actually reading it requires physical effort. It’s a little cumbersome to hold up while lying prone in bed. If you fall asleep reading it, you might break your nose, so don’t try doing so after reaching the bottom of a bottle of syrah. Instead, you need a strong, straight-backed chair, a cup of coffee, and the warm morning light. Some oenology acumen and a solid background in Western literature doesn’t hurt either. I am equipped with the latter, but — as someone quite comfortable picking out something nice to drink with dinner, yet woefully ignorant of winemaking practices and quite hazy on the cultural worlds and myriad personalities, both human and grape, surrounding them — plenty of Grahm’s jokes (and a few of his key points) swirl above my head like clouds of must. With respect to some of it, like a high school junior trying to make sense of Ulysses, for the first time, perhaps a year or two too soon, I’m happy getting the gist.

Aside from introducing the reader (who is probably already familiar) to Grahm’s general vibe, the book takes two distinct tacks. The first — palpable in his gleeful parodies — is the wine world equivalent of a dis record, and a fairly hilarious one at that — with upstanding luminaries like Robert “Moldavi,” disagreeable trends such as “merlotmania,” and, of course, the critic Robert Parker looking flimsier than 2010-era 50 Cent. The insults are often no less opaque than those hurled by a derisive rapper, and the effect is equally delicious, though with salvos of double entendre, puns, copious footnotes, and a constant barrage of drunken word-play (For example, and there are thousands, the wine “dick” in “Spenser’s Last Case” wields a Gattinara, not a gat), considerably cuter. The formula is consistent and agreeable: Grahm apes the style of a famous author — Thomas Puncheon, James Juice, or J.D. Salignac, perhaps — and unloads a lecture cloaked in a madcap, script-flipping of themes in a well-known work by the particular author — say, “B,” “Cheninagin’s Wake,” or “A Perfect Day for Barberafish.” Most of these are as pleasant and drinkable as a $12 bottle of Gruner, if a bit more demanding, and somewhat heavier on the palate. The song and poem parodies that follow are less successful; they seem watered-down, like Grandma’s pink zin.

The other side of Been Doon So Long is meditative, serious — which is to say, witty, somewhat less goofy, and only a touch softer on the tannins. On page two of his introduction, Grahm starts with his own shortcomings. In essence, he wouldn’t have had to become the writer and marketing savant he is had his wines been as wonderful as he’d wanted them to be. Words — with regard to wine — are where he has made his mark. The success of Bonny Doon and his other labels have kept him a few steps further from the poorhouse than the average grape-stomper, but he has typically been known more for his prose, antics, and stinging satirical flail than for the quality of his wines. Many entries are both amusing and illuminating. In one chapter, he runs through some of Bonny Doon’s best pre-Steadman labels, discussing the Jules Verne-influenced scene on Le Cigare Volant and revealing that the label for his muscat was inspired by a trip to a lady’s underwear boutique in San Francisco. For me — again, the non-expert — Grahm repeatedly uncorks sweet, thoughtful conceits about wine that make me eager to improve my grasp — not on know-how and scoring systems, but the mystery and magic of wine, to see it as a lovely, boundless parcel to discover and unravel in the same way I’ve devoured popular music and steeped myself in its history, absorbing its movements and collections of characters, coming to understand first-hand how certain changes and instrumental colors render certain effects on a listener. On page 220, he writes:

“…[R]emember that wine’s inmost nature is metaphoric (wine can smell like grapes and cigar boxes), that wine’s very essence is linked to mutability and to memory…”

Way back on page seven, Grahm sums it up — his lot, at least — as a “soul’s journey” toward a better grasp on wine’s “animating brilliance, the profound truth of terroir.” His discovery of wine was a stumble, not a search, “a happy accident,” and now it means much more: “winemaking and the culture of wine provide a unique and powerful language that carries the rich metaphoric suggestion of the sweetness and strangeness of life itself.”

Terroir is one of Grahm’s central preoccupations, specifically its “Old World” form of expression, when a winemaker attempts to “excavate” the power and potential that already exists within the soil, in the setting, under the sun: “the vineyard itself becomes a sort of mantra or prayer wheel and successive vintages are our reincarnations.” At the same time, he’s frank about his own efforts. He calls the wines he has made thus far “puppy-dog wines,” and wonders if he’ll ever be able to discover terroir — to make a wine that has a taste expressive of its physical place of origin, not jammy, high-fruit, “bimbo” wines that he finds as vacuous and disposable as fast food.

I came away from reading the book thinking of Grahm himself as a product of terroir: the Citroen-driving, tie dye-clad, John Lennon-meets-I.M. Pei glasses-sporting California sage steeped in the post-hippie foment of the very early seventies, soaked in counter-culture and the canon alike, a farmer and an academic. No place but the North-Central coast of California could have birthed Randall Grahm. About a year ago, in a New York Times profile, Grahm described wine also as “a reflection of the human psyche.” Writer Eric Asimov went on to speculate: “No doubt 25 years of whimsical, mercurial wines have been a reflection of his own.” He’s probably right. The wines he has made — and their labels, and the universe of words he has conjured up around it all — reflect his character — and his time, place, and climate. That would make him quite like a grape, one that has doon quite well for itself.

We form relationships with cookbooks, even magazines. We read them for enrichment and entertainment, and we also use them for a purpose — to prepare specific dishes we’re compelled to try cooking. When we learn how to cook something, the dish becomes part of our lives, and we carry the memory of making it along with the memory of enjoying it. I associate particular volumes in my collection with distinct periods of my life. When I was fifteen or so, an old, half-shredded copy of Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook intrigued me with vivid descriptions of unfamiliar cuisines and ingredients. Simultaneously, it vaguely repulsed me with its weirdly unappetizing photographs. A year ago, I constantly flipped through Chez Panisse Vegetables; three years earlier, I pored over the gorgeous Silver Spoon, for the past 50 years, Italy’s best-selling cookbook. My cookbooks — some of them once my mom’s, and a few of those perhaps her mother’s as well — are literally marked with the meals they enabled. Splashes of red and brown fleck a Marcella Hazan recipe for tomato sauce with mushrooms. The entire taco section of Mexican Kitchen looks like a grisly watercolor. They have been touched by hands and worn. Corners have been folded over; pen scribbles show that proportions have, for better or for worse, been adjusted. Someone I know writes the date next to a recipe when she’s cooking from it, so she can look back at the book years later and see when she’s cooked what. I usually try to sort that out by just dating the smudges. It’s a field begging for an expert.

Current wisdom, however, holds that cookbooks are becoming obsolete. While food blogs and recipe-rich websites like Epicurious have been around, relatively speaking, for ages, most web-savvy cooks — skittish about the potential havoc erupting pots and mishandled cutlery are capable of causing — balk at positioning their precious laptops too close to a rowdy kitchen fray. Enter the iPad. I should say from the outset that I will never get one. They look ridiculous, too large and unwieldy to be truly convenient, and too small for comfortable typing. I am biased against it, but I cannot help but believe a significant portion of my skepticism concerning the iPad stems from having absorbed and rejected most vehemently widespread allegations that it’s destined to revolutionize the universe of cookbooks.

Articles and blog posts salivating over the possibilities the iPad poses are hard to miss. Summarizing more than a few of those I’ve read would take a while. In late April, Gizmodo editor Wilson Rothman ably broke down the app onslaught in a New York Times Diner’s Journal column, highlighting the best of what newly-minted iPad owners can expect from the warm plastic tablets: apps like Epicurious and BigOven brimming with grocery list-making functions and interactive aids paving the way for digital app-ified versions of seminal cookbooks.

While at least one person has proven enthusiastic enough to install an iPad in his kitchen cabinet, app-mania drives me a little nuts — and not just because I can’t afford to spend half a grand on a gadget. I can’t deny that it must be nice to cook with such a wealth of information at one’s greasy fingertips, but there’s something so temporary and soul-less about technology’s ability to put reams of information into a very small space. I can draw an obvious parallel to collecting vinyl. I own an iPod shuffle I bought for $50 three years ago, but I still purchase vinyl records, and won’t stop — even though digital music is, at this point, practically free. As a matter of fact, I don’t feel like I actually own an album unless I have it on vinyl. It’s not simply a proprietary longing; without the actual record, music feels ephemeral to me, as if it might suddenly blow away. The comparison doesn’t entirely hold up though: Vinyl records actually sound better than mp3s of the same songs, whereas a recipe’s usefulness doesn’t depend on its packaging, particularly when an iPad can call up ingredient profiles, recipes, and instructional videos with a few brisk clicks. The truth is usefulness doesn’t really encompass the point of a cookbook. Like album art, a cookbook can be stylish, beautiful, and evocative — something people want to display, cherish and share. Any publishers of cookbooks banking on digital downloads down the road shouldn’t forget this.

If their cookbook lending library is any indication, the owners of the newish Local Mission Eatery, on 24th St. near Folsom, probably feel the same way. For an annual fee of $35, members can borrow a book a week, providing they follow a highly generous set of rules. With titles like Ferran Adria’s A Day at El Bulli, Grant Achatz’s Alinea, and a multitude of Craig Claiborne volumes, possibilities run the gamut from fanciful and fantastic to immensely practical. Importantly though, the library applies a dose of community consciousness to the cookbook form, emphasizing that the sharing of a valued text among members of a community makes for shared experiences too. It localizes and articulates a larger phenomenon. When you borrow a cookbook and cook a recipe, you’re immediately tied to everyone else who cooks that recipe. Yes, there are apps for that too — features that illuminate what people in close geographic proximity are cooking — but those are poor substitutes for dripping sauce on the same page.

Two years ago, my girlfriend and I combined our cookbook collections and stacks of food magazines along with our books and records. Since leaving home, I’ve bought cookbooks of my own to supplement those pinched from the old homestead. Lately, I’ve bought some with my girlfriend too. In time, the collection will swell further, and the rows of books will require more shelves. Big, heavy cookbooks take up a lot of space. They don’t blink, come to life, or talk to you. They’re just cardboard and paper — fusions of inanimate ingredients that readily fall apart and rot. Still, I imagine they’ll still last longer than an iPad’s hard-drive — in every sense.