The Exploratorium’s new digs boast stellar water views. Photo: Amy Snyder

The museum cafe, long a place of soggy sandwiches and mediocre meals, is getting a makeover in the Bay Area. Case in point: The recently reopened Exploratorium in new digs at Pier 15 in San Francisco, which offers creative fare tied to the mission of the museum, known for its interactive exhibits and playful approach, designed to encourage curiosity and experimentation.

Think seawater cocktails. Honeycomb with almonds and apricots. And living or fermented foods.

Visitors have three eating options: The 200-seat Seaglass restaurant, complete with panoramic views, a glass-topped raw bar, and open kitchen, which serves up familiar, family-friendly fare like tacos, pizza, and sandwiches — albeit with a sustainable pedigree — along with more adventurous eats such as marinated sardines, batter-fried green beans, and kelp salad with quinoa. There’s even a local riff on Welsh Rarebit (that’s gussied up grilled cheese to the uninitiated.) A full-bar serves cocktails promising a taste of the sea and in-vogue drinking vinegars known as shrubs. Near the museum’s Embarcadero entrance, the Seismic Joint offers take-away chow such as a chickpea-battered fish fingers, various spins on clam chowder, salads, and sandwiches. Mobile food trikes (built by Luigi Oldani and crew of CRO Cafe) roam the floors, peddling espresso Thanksgiving coffee, baked goods, and Strauss organic soft-serve ice cream.

The culinary duo behind the Exploratorium’s restaurant menu features acclaimed chef Loretta Keller of Coco500, a perennial Chronicle Top 100 restaurant, and her Coco500 partner, catering operations manager Clay Reynolds. The pair, who previously partnered with Charles Phan of Slanted Door fame to run The Moss Room at The California Academy of Sciences, have teamed up with Bon Appetit Management Company, known for its emphasis on scratch cooking with sustainably sourced ingredients, for the Exploratorium’s edible enterprises to form the Curiosity Catering Company.

Keller talked with BAB about her plans to feed people well and offer a side of education at the Exploratorium.

Clay Reynolds and Loretta Keller join forces at the Exploratorium. Photo: Gayle Laird

What got you excited about creating food for the Exploratorium?

What resonated with me about this project was a sense of place. The Exploratorium moved from this dark, cavernous space to a venue 800 feet over the water. Place is both a subject to explore and engage with at the Exploratorium. For me that means something in terms of food but also as a human being.

The environment and human experience, that’s everything to me. The importance of farming and where our food comes from is a very familiar mantra in the Bay Area. When you spend as much time as I do as a professional inside the food industry here you can get to a point where you’re in your own zip code. It can become precious and you can lose sight of the fact that our work is not done.

More than any other reason to be involved here, the museum offers a new and incredibly creative, intelligent and organic opportunity to do work on environmental consciousness, sustainability, and awareness around food and the planet. The Exploratorium is a great way to shake things up and have people engage with an exhibit in a hands-on way. That’s where the learning begins.

Is that where the honeycomb comes in?

Yes. The honeybee is in peril so by serving the honeycomb I’m hoping to help people stop and think and connect the bee with the almonds and the apricots — that’s why those things are always going to accompany the honeycomb. We want it to be a real exhibit and educational model that people will become intrigued by and realize how endangered bees are, which means your almonds are endangered, and all your stone fruit is endangered, and a whole way of eating is at risk. Bees are struggling with so many things right now; they’re overworked and experience bee jet lag. Bees want to winter in Florida, but instead almond growers in California pay exorbitant prices to have them flown or trucked here and put to work to meet demand. California is the biggest producer of almonds in the world, something like 70 percent, and people just take that for granted.

Japanese chef Sachio Kojima, who developed fervent fans for his sushi over the years, heads up Seaglass’s seafood and fermentation section. Photo: Gayle Laird

How are you incorporating living and fermented foods into the menu?

We are so lucky to have master chef Sachio Kojima, who had his own popular restaurant, Kabuto Sushi A&S, on Geary for more than 20 years, come on as our director of fermentation. He’s making seaweed and kelp salads, with kelp gathered from Marin, Mendocino, and Monterey counties, we’ll have algae on the menu too. And from our pickling program, we’ll offer traditional Japanese pickles, kimchi, and sauerkraut.

Visitors to the Exploratorium’s Seaglass restaurant can order from a raw bar full of sustainable seafood.
Photo: Gayle Laird

Where does sustainable seafood fit in?

We are doing an ocean bar, serving sushi, sashimi, and oysters that Sachio oversees as well. It’s all West Coast, Monterey Bay Watch-sanctioned seafood.

We missed the herring run this season but we’ll be serving herring next Spring. And we’ll serve anchovies in season too; these are really the last of the commercial fisheries within the bay. People have to understand that their choices are becoming so limited with regards to fish. There are very few wild fish that are sustainable. So we’ll be serving what people think of as bait and also serving whole fish. That starts a conversation in the U.S. because most people here are not used to seeing a whole fish or bait on a plate.

Sea grapes add a salty kick to cocktails at the Exploratorium. Photo: Loretta Keller

What about seawater and its connection to the new space?

My partner Clay Reynolds wanted to serve filtered seawater to drink, but the technology isn’t quite there. And then we wanted to run the dishwasher on seawater but it became clear that that was a whole project on its own. But the Exploratorium is using seawater to heat the building, which is quite extraordinary.

We’re using seawater in a cocktail. It turns out that the health department doesn’t recognize seawater as a consumable, so we’re not allowed to serve seawater per se. But there are kelps available that contain seawater, and there’s a Monterey County kelp called sea grape, that we add to our signature martini, which tastes great with a little bit of seawater. So we’re garnishing the drink with this kelp whose buds are full of seawater, when you burst them in your mouth you get a nice jolt of salt.

We’re including seawater in other ways in the restaurant too. The multi-hued glass tiles are based on a museum exhibit called “Color of Water.” To create the piece, a fixed-position camera took time-lapse photos of the bay, the color variations are caused by sunlight, tides, and microorganisms.

The piece in the dining room called “Thermal Mixing” also demonstrates the dynamics of the bay: It’s a triptych of panels of colored water of different temperatures that swirl like giant mood rings on the back wall. “Icy Bodies” is an exhibit where fragments of dry ice are pushed into a tank and spin around like comets across a sheet of water below a glass-topped bar. All these are nods to one of the most extraordinary places on the planet for moving water.

What role does food play at the museum?

By and large, with few exceptions, the food served at museums in this country is like prison food, just terrible. All this money was being spent on creating the new Exploratorium, which is a gift to residents and visitors of San Francisco, and so it’s critical that the food match the museum and its surroundings.

First and foremost we want to serve healthy, well-prepared fresh food to the museum goers, that’s our mandate. The challenge within that framework is to build in education, implicitly and explicitly, about sustainability. I get to be creative and think outside the box. We plan to do corn education tied to an exhibit and blind wine tastings at our adult nights. At the Exploratorium it’s not about looking at stuff, it’s about interacting with stuff. There’s an intimacy here that provides a direct way to get to people’s minds. And food has always been a great platform to reach people because it is so intimate and it’s a necessity; people have to eat every day. There aren’t that many mediums that offer that.

Details:

The restaurant is open during regular museum hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10am-5pm; Wednesday evenings until 10pm; every Thursday evening adults only (ages 18 and up) 6pm-10pm. It caters primarily to museum guests, but the public can access the restaurant from an exterior entrance.

Photo by Andria Lo. Pickled vegetables by RicePaperScissors

Maybe you’ve had your fill of friends posting pics of their latest meal on social media. If you are hungry for something more satisfying than pin-ups of perfectly plated pancakes, sundaes dripping rivulets of caramel or lurid lasagna, feast your eyes on the images in Sip. Savor. Share!, a photographic love letter to San Francisco’s food and drink, markets and mixologists, sponsored by the urban art collective Femme Cartel. The show opens May 9 and runs through May 26 at the Mission’s Roll Up Gallery.

The show features the work of local artists:
• Molly DeCoudreaux (head photographer at SF.Eater.com, frequent contributor to Refinery29, The Bold Italic)
• Aleksey Bochkovsky (contemporary art photographer)
• Andria Lo (documentary and editorial photographer, including at 7×7)
• Anna Vignet (SF Chronicle contributing photographer and cookbook artist)
• Sarah Deragon (owner/head photographer of Portraits to the People)
• Flee Kieselhorst (portrait and fine art photographer)
• Gennesis Gastilo (photoblogger at Mother Cerveza)

Femme Cartel food photography show

Femme Cartel is known for showcasing cutting-edge, urban art, from tough to girly. Its founder, Emily Howe, calls herself  “a community organizer at heart.”  ”We started with shows that focused on women artists because they seemed to have second-class citizenship in art world. Now we often include a male artist (who supports feminist ideals),” says Howe. Bay Area Bites interviewed the co-curators of this food photography show and two of the featured artists.

Bay Area Bites: You’ve done graffiti inspired art and a hip take on fashion illustrations.  Why food now? 

Emily Howe: We love San Francisco and Oakland and the food world encompasses social justice, community gardens and feminist foodies. For many years, women were relegated to the kitchen, then they joined the workforce but were  STILL expected in the kitchen as supermoms. Now, there is a return to the domestic arts, but we are reclaiming those domestic arts in new ways: it’s a choice to bottle your own beer or pickle your own vegetables.

BAB: Why a focus on female photographers?

EH: In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to think about gender, but if you look at who gets in art shows, who wins grants, who are the curators, jurors, art professors, deans of art schools — across the board it’s proportionately more men. The breakdown should be 50/50, but the big names are dudes. One of our goals is to showcase emerging artists and help people get their first show with an exciting launch. Christina Bohn, my co-curator and I  picked images that we loved and would buy ourselves. We also wanted to represent certain themes: coffee culture, cocktail culture, food trucks, Asian food, Mexican food, nightlife.

Christina Bohn: It’s timely now since the Bay Area is so into food and hand-crafted cocktails. And we include a range of images from instagram photos to fine art.

BAB: How did you find the artists for this show?

CB: We have a roster of artists who we’ve worked with in the past, but they represent more fine art, mixed media and collage. Not so much photography. We like to tap into the well of emerging artists. So we hit the Internet hard, Google, Craig’s list. San Francisco is such a beautiful melting pot of people from all walks of life. We wanted to include different threads that make up the whole scene. We pride ourselves on being a launching platform, finding artists who have never had shows and giving them opportunity to get their work out there. We love to connect people. Sometimes we know of a hair salon or pizza place that needs art on their walls and we can match them up with someone from the community.

photo by Molly DeCoudreaux – Bar Tartine

Professional photographer Molly DeCoudreaux grew up in Oakland. “What got me into loving food was the ten years I worked at Baywolf, moving from busser to waitress.” DeCoudreaux enjoys showing food communities, cheese-makers and chefs at work in the kitchen as well as bringing focus to small upstart companies.  ”I can relate to them because I’m scrappy too, I work hard, in a physically strenuous business.”

As for being part of Femme Cartel’s female-focused art show, she says, “Most photographers are men, it’s a gendered profession. There’s a lot of gear and electronics. Sometimes I go into a restaurant with all my bags of gear and some guy still says, ‘Oh, are you here for the waitress position?’ (And I’m 33!)”

DeCoudreaux shoots striking, non-traditional portraits of drag queens, porn people as well as weddings. “Weddings have a certain stress because they only do the ceremony once,” she says. “Food sits still – unless it’s a hollandaise sauce that breaks after 15 seconds.”

She admits the hardest food to photograph is BBQ. “It’s just meat covered in sauce, it can look like a brown mush. You have to light it and garnish it so it isn’t just a plate of brown.” She doesn’t usually work with a food stylist, relying instead on chefs who plate their food artistically. “I like collaborating, being in the kitchen, trying to stay unobtrusive. I like to show real people doing their work.” Instead of a perfect peach tart, for example, DeCoudreaux would prefer something a little lopsided. “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful,” she says.

photo by Andria Lo – condiments at Chinese restaurant

Andria Lo, documentary and editorial photographer and photo director for Hyphen Magazine, grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, where, she says,  ”There weren’t a lot of Chinese people. We ate Mom’s Chinese cooking at home and didn’t go out to eat at Anchorage’s Chinese restaurants.” When Lo and her family moved to Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, she experienced culture shock at the plethora of Chinese restaurants.

Lo caught the photography bug as an art student at UC Berkeley. “It was the magic and camaraderie of the darkroom,” she says, “where people are working individually and collectively at same time.”

Although professionally, she photographs products, portraits, weddings and other subjects, Lo says, ”food photography is one of my passions. You get a finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the city. I especially like shooting the great energy at food events — like ForageSF dinners — it’s a challenge to capture the excitement in the air.”

One of the hardest places to shoot, Lo explains, is in professional kitchens. “While the dining room may be gorgeous, the fluorescent lighting, stainless steel counters and dirty dish racks present a challenge. I have so much respect for chefs. I’m visually stunned by the plating they come up with. My favorite perk is getting to eat their dishes. It’s an impetus to work fast, so that the food is still hot.”

photo by Anna Vignet

Anna Vignet: “There’s a huge variety of world flavors in only a handful of miles in the city. I love trying food from different countries with friends and learning about a country’s food and culture.”

photo by Gennesis Gastilo

Gennesis Gastilo: “Mother Cerveza is a love for the art of mixology and as in imbibing, a love for the people with whom you share your drinks. In the spirit of an intensely diverse and welcoming community, Femme Cartel’s show in San Francisco has at the heart of it: Love is indeed a miscible thing. (Peace begins with a beer).”

photo by Aleksey Bochkovsky

Aleksey Bochkovsky: “I’ve always fed off the energy from streets in big cultural cities. I need to be around people to steal moments of interaction and real feelings, however subtle. Food is a social experience and street food, in particular, interests me for its bouquet of demographic gatherings.”

photo by Sarah Deragon

Sarah Deragon: “One of the reasons I adore San Francisco is because of the dynamic foodie/bar culture. Femme Cartel continues to make history with their unique curatorial projects. I’m elated to be part of this show.”

photo by Flee Kieselhorst

Flee Kieselhorst: “I am a professional freelance portrait and event photographer and the key to my heart is food. When Femme Cartel (my favorite lady positive art organization) announced the call for entries for “Sip.Savor.Share!” I thought “Yes! An excuse to EAT!” My work in this show represents a few consecutive Fridays walking around San Francisco, meeting and shooting new folks, and of course…eating too much!”

Information:
Foodie Photography Show runs May 9-26
Opening reception May 9, 6-9 pm, food provided by Pachamama Cookery
Address:
Roll-Up Gallery
161 Erie Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Twitter: @FemmeCartel
Facebook: Femme Cartel

A bottle of Cleveland Whiskey’s bourbon sits on a shelf with empty bottles at the company’s distillery. Photo: David Kidd

Post by Alan Greenblatt, The Salt from NPR Food (05/03/13)

When it comes to bourbon, Tom Lix doesn’t believe in age discrimination. Most bourbons might age in the barrel for eight to 12 years or more, but Lix figures his are ready to drink in less than a week.

Lix makes Cleveland Whiskey, a new brand of bourbon that exemplifies two major trends in American whiskey-making today: the desire to speed up the process and the effort to establish a local identity.

His distillery is located far from the rolling hills of Kentucky; it occupies a large, ground floor space in a state-owned manufacturing incubator in Cleveland that’s also home to a couple dozen other companies that make things such as artificial bones. Lix has taken advantage of his mechanical-engineer neighbors to work on the custom machinery that makes his quick-aging product possible.

Bourbon is typically aged over a period of time in which fluctuating temperatures throughout the day move distilled liquor in and out of the pores of oak barrels. Lix uses pressure to speed this up. He pours distillate into a stainless steel vat and throws cut-up pieces of barrel in after it.

He wouldn’t let me see his machinery — “intellectual property,” he says — but it sounded something like an overloaded washing machine during the spin cycle. Each beat, Lix says, is roughly the equivalent of 24 hours in a stationary barrel. The agitation squeezes the wood like a sponge and the “aging” of each batch is done within a few days.

Cleveland Whiskey founder Tom Lix learned to make spirits when he was in the Navy.
Photo: David Kidd

Lix is not the only small distiller seeking to cut the maturation process back as much as possible. Many are using smaller barrels, which work faster but end up costing more. Tuthilltown Spirits, in Gardiner, N.Y., blasts music through stereo speakers in order to get the barrels vibrating.

“Small distillers are always looking for ways to get their product to market fast,” says Frank Coleman, senior vice president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, who notes that the number of small distillers has doubled over the last three years. “There’s definitely a gold-rush mentality right now.”

No wonder. Sales of bourbon have increased by 69 percent over the past decade, Coleman says, while sales of so-called super-premium brands have quintupled. Exports of whiskey, especially bourbon, have grown exponentially.

That’s the market Lix entered into in March, with the release of his first batch of Cleveland Whiskey. Lix, who learned to make spirits during his Navy days, formerly owned Public Interactive, which makes Web applications for public radio stations. (I didn’t know about this connection before meeting him for this story.)

He let me compare a few sips of his product alongside Knob Creek, which is the brand we favor in our house for making sidecars. I should say that I don’t drink bourbon straight and rarely drink whiskey that isn’t Irish. To me, Lix’s mix tasted better than the Knob Creek, with less burn and less of an alcohol aftertaste.

Not everyone’s a fan. Matt Wunderle, a whiskey aficionado from Cleveland who now lives in Columbus, calls it “a disgustingly dark bourbon” and likens it to paint thinner.

“It smells like a wood shop,” Wunderle says. “It’s hard to describe how bad it is.”

You can’t fool Mother Nature, say the traditionalists. But the collective wisdom of crowds is what matters in sales. Lix sells out of his run of 1,000 bottles a week, which retails for about $35 a bottle. He intends to double production this month. “It’s not nearly enough,” he says.

Sam McNulty, who owns a half-dozen restaurants in Cleveland, says one or two of his bars will be sold out of Cleveland Whiskey at any given time. “They’re definitely coming back for seconds,” he says. “A lot of the traditionalists, quite frankly, are afraid of what Tom is doing because it’s a very disruptive technology.”

If Lix’s methods are novel, his branding is in keeping with a larger trend. The habit some people have picked up of asking for local beers is starting to catch on with spirits.

Lix says he test-marketed the Cleveland name in cities as distant as Boston and Dallas and got a good reception, but it resonates best among the proud locals.

“I always wonder what the sales are like in Pittsburgh,” says Chris Wilson, manager of a local outpost of an Ohio chain of taverns called Winking Lizard. “If they came up with a whiskey called Pittsburgh, I sure as hell wouldn’t try it.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

A pregnant woman holds a glass of wine.
Photo: iStockphoto.com

According to a new study published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, there doesn’t seem to be any measurable risk.

The study found that drinking up to two alcoholic beverages per week during pregnancy is not linked to developmental problems in children. But even the study’s authors caution that abstaining from alcohol is still best for mothers-to-be.

The research was done at the University College London, using data collected as part of the Millennium Cohort Study. The researchers looked at about 10,000 children born in the U.K. between 2000 and 2001. When the children were 7 years old, they were given math, reading and spatial skills tests. And parents completed questionnaires about the children’s emotional and social development.

The researchers found that children born to women who consumed a little alcohol during pregnancy had higher test scores on some tests compared with children of nondrinkers. But the researchers conclude that most of these differences were too small to be statistically significant.

“While we have followed these children for the first seven years of their lives, further research is needed to detect whether any adverse effects of low levels of alcohol consumption in pregnancy emerge later in childhood,” professor Yvonne Kelly, of the International Centre for Lifecourse Studies (ICLS) at University College London, and co-author of the study, said in a statement released by the journal.

The Department of Health in the U.K. recommends that pregnant women avoid alcohol altogether. But if moms-to-be do choose to drink, the government’s advice is “to not have more than one to two units of alcohol once or twice a week, and not to get drunk,” according to this U.K. government site. Under the British government’s definition, a small 4-ounce glass of wine is about one-and-a-half units.

Experts on fetal alcohol syndrome in the U.S. aren’t so convinced by the new findings. “Failure to see an effect doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, or that drinking in pregnancy is safe,” says Dr. Robert Sokol, director of the C.S. Mott Center for Human Growth and Development at Wayne State University, in an email to The Salt. He explains that the ability to detect effects of low levels of alcohol exposure depends largely on what’s measured.

Another shortcoming of the study is that people tend to under-report alcohol consumption when they’re questioned about it, says Dr. David Garry of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. And in this study, women weren’t asked to recall how much alcohol they drank until their child was 9 months old, so memories may not have been so clear. It’s “not a convincing study,” says Garry.

“If a woman has had some drinks in pregnancy, I would reassure her that the [child's] development is likely to be normal,” writes Garry in an email to The Salt. But overall, he says, drinking does pose a risk and should be avoided during pregnancy.

Robert Sokol agrees. “It’s still the case that it’s safest not to drink during pregnancy,” Sokol says.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

The Smitten Ice Cream shop in the Hayes Valley of San Francisco serves fresh ice cream with one novel ingredient: liquid nitrogen. The shop is located inside of a repurposed shipping container. Photo: Alan Greenblatt/NPR

Post by Alan Greenblatt, The Salt at NPR Food (4/17/13)

Robyn Sue Fisher’s ice cream shop, Smitten, in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, may at moments resemble a high school chemistry lab, but that’s because Fisher uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her product.

Nitrogen is “a natural element,” she notes. “It’s all around us.”

What makes it essential to Smitten is the ability to make ice cream fresh to order. You walk up and ask for a chocolate, or a blood orange with pistachio. The liquid nitrogen freezes the ingredients together, and your cup or cone is ready about a minute later.

Each serving is made from only a few ingredients — including none of the gums, egg yolks or other emulsifiers normally needed to keep ice cream frozen on its months-long journey from manufacturer to distributor to store to your home freezer.

The mint chip, for example, contains just organic cream and milk, mint and a dash of salt. The first lick is like biting into a mint leaf.

“This is the best ice cream I ever had,” says my son, who is only 7 but already an experienced ice cream taster, as he spoons his way through an order of chocolate.

The store uses a patented machine to keep ingredients churning and mix in the liquid nitrogen in a safe, controlled manner.
Photo: Alan Greenblatt/NPR

Smitten charges a buck an ounce, but a small amount of the ice cream is rich enough to satisfy.

“Knowing there are only a few ingredients makes me feel like I can indulge,” says customer Claire Kensington, the founder of a food, fashion and sex website, who’d returned two days after her last serving for some more mint chip.

Of course, there’s nothing new about making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. In fact, cooking with the stuff has become so trendy lately that Wired felt inspired to put together this how-to guide. (As we reported last year, sometimes these culinary experiments can go dangerously wrong.)

At New York’s Eleven Madison Park, guests brought back to the kitchen after dinner are treated to an apple-and-brandy cocktail topped with a frozen dome of foam fashioned with liquid nitrogen.

“It gives us the opportunity to do a little performance before the guests that’s really easy and quick, and at the same time entertaining,” says Angela Pinkerton, the restaurant’s head pastry chef. “Liquid nitrogen is fun to watch, and everyone’s curious about it. It looks cool.”

It does look (and feel) cool when clouds of vapors come pouring out of the metal containers where the ice cream’s stirring at Smitten. Fisher started serving ice cream out of a kid’s red wagon back in 2009. She spent years developing a patented machine that keeps her ingredients churning in a safe, controlled environment. She goes into the techie details in this video:

The stirring, along with the minus 321 F temperature of the liquid nitrogen, keeps ice crystals from forming and is responsible for Smitten’s smooth texture, which my son likens to a cross between standard-issue ice cream and whipped cream.

“Because it is a different texture than any other ice cream,” says Kensington, “it feels like a new experience, like a new treat.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Macallan – Whisky Art. Courtesy of Ernie Button

Post by Audrey Carlsen, The Salt at NPR Food

Ernie Button was putting a Scotch glass left out overnight into the dishwasher when he noticed something — a white, chalky film on the bottom of the glass. He held it up to the light and, upon closer inspection, could see a series of fine, lacy lines running along the inside of the glass.

As a hobbyist photographer whose work often focuses on showcasing the beauty of everyday objects, Button was intrigued by this discovery. “Wow, there’s something to that,” he recalls thinking.

And thus was born Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch, an ongoing photographic project Button has created to highlight the beautiful but often overlooked science of how liquids dry.

After first noticing the patterns left behind in his glass, Button began experimenting with other Scotch residues, shining different colored lights on them and photographing them up close. The results were strangely beautiful. “A little celestial, or extraterrestrial, almost,” says Button.

Aberlour – Whisky Art. Courtesy of Ernie Button

That was six years ago. Since then, Button, who lives in Phoenix, Ariz., has captured upward of 75 photographs of whisky residues that he considers good enough to share with the public.

Some of his images will even be making their way over to Scotland in May for an exhibition at the Islay Festival of Music and Malt.

And Button doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. “I’m trying to let the work just kind of grow organically and see where it takes me,” he says.

He recently started experimenting with manipulating the whisky as it dries — moving the liquid around to create different deposit patterns.

He has also begun to wonder about the science behind his images. “I find them fascinating in a weird kind of way,” he says. “I think it’s a perfect blend between science and creativity.”

According to Howard Stone, head researcher at Princeton University’s Complex Fluids Group, the rings and waves seen in Button’s images are probably the result of particles that are left behind once the alcohol has evaporated.

These particles, which give the liquor its flavor and color, are present in “very, very small quantities,” says Stone, and can create an “imprint of what the [whisky] was doing when it was trying to evaporate.”

Research has shown that aqueous films tend to form ringlike patterns as they dry. This is because evaporation occurs more quickly at the edges of a liquid, thus drawing particles in the liquid outward.

Inspired by Button’s artwork, Stone is now conducting research with two of his postdocs, Ian Jacobi and Eujin Um, to further investigate the properties of dried whisky residues. In particular, they are looking into why different types of whisky produce subtly different patterns.

Button has noticed this as well — that using different types of whisky makes a difference. “It seems like the Scotches that are more inland, like a Glenlivet … tend to produce finer lines,” he says.

But even as he tries to better understand how these patterns are formed, Button never loses sight of why he felt compelled to photograph them in the first place.

“I’m a big admirer of finding the beauty in the normal or the sometimes overlooked,” he says. “Take time and observe. … There’s a lot of beauty out there, if you just look.”

Images Courtesy of Ernie Button

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Juliana Calderon, Dennis Leary and Luis Euan

Great eats alert: in the very near future, Dennis Leary will open two new spots–Cafe Terminus and a to-be-named bar at the corner of Geary and Leavenworth in San Francisco. The chef has also added a 40-acre Capay Valley farm to his roster and is the chef-owner of spots that showcase culinary consistency (pulled pork with mustard cabbage sandwich on freshly baked bread, anyone?) with a deeply personal feel: from Canteen, to Golden West, The Sentinel and a bar, plus House of Shields. Leary’s goal of operating seven eateries is getting closer to becoming a reality—the name of his corporation is Pleiades, which means “seven sisters” and is from Greek mythology. Leary presents as a focused and driven chef and is not one to use Twitter or other social media, although he lets his staff post menu updates since they are excited to do so. He appears to be succeeding without being trendy–an example being no TV or clock for a definite old school charm at House of Shields. He is exploring a “100 Menus Project” based upon the 1971 tome, The Hundred Glories of French Cuisine by Robert Courtine at Canteen. A “100 Menus” dinner costs “around 50 bucks.” His office is above the Sentinel and is lined with books and historical images. We caught up in person recently to find out more about his new spots and ideas on hospitality. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Books in Chef Leary’s office

Bay Area Bites: Who are your mentors & how have you grown in this business?
Leary: My business mentors are Angelo Sangiacomo, Drew Nieporent and Chip Conley. Alain Rondelli is a great chef. Angelo and his wife called to congratulate me when I was first starting and I admire that he is self-made, 100 percent. After awhile in this industry, it has become just self-taught and self-directed for me. I don’t think my style is derivative. I have a lot of customers who trust what I do and get it.

I got a nice letter of congratulations from Thomas Keller. That was such a classy gesture and a cool thing for me to see ‘oh, he’s paying attention.’

Publicity upsets the balance. People come in with expectations. I built a restaurant with $50,000 and it’s next to a bathroom and dorm by the Academy of Art. I’m not using fancy china and there aren’t plush seats. Whatever money I make goes back into the restaurants. I’m using the most basic packaging and china, and keeping it as simple as possible. I want people to go in and enjoy themselves with a dining experience that harkens back to maternal child connections. Pretty much every meal we eat, that dynamic is at play and it is always present with just the very act of being served. However, you’re paying for it. That is a relationship that’s attractive to a lot of people and they want a clean transaction.

The service industry has exploded and people don’t make their lunch anymore. They go and get it. With my places, we want to provide sustenance and not get in the way. I love talking to people and feel like I have a real connection to my customers.

Bay Area Bites: Tell us about your new places and farm in Capay Valley.
Leary: The two San Francisco deals are technically done and we’re applying for our liquor license for the bar. I haven’t spent more than 30 seconds in there but am interested in the bar from a design and hospitality standpoint. It’s a tiny place that will become small and beautiful. We’ll have some great cocktails. The area where the bar is still feels urban and interesting and getting the bar space was one of these six degrees of separation things: there’s a whole network of brokers and listing agents that you talk to all the time. Getting the spot has to do with the fact that basic politeness pays off and we made an offer that is attractive.

For Café Terminus, we’re dedicated to simple food and drinks, also with strong hospitality. People want their name remembered—I know I like places where the staff remembers me. There’s more competition in the Financial District now: get a sushi burrito, or visit the grilled cheese chain. But that doesn’t matter. I’m more concerned in referencing culinary tradition in a way without being retro and nostalgic. When you’re trying to do old timey SF nostalgic shit, it doesn’t work.

I use knives and wooden spoons in my cooking style and don’t use a lot of fancy new techniques although I am certainly familiar with them. I’m just not interested and feel like food should not get in the way. I’m not selling an experience. What I want is a lively dining room with a convivial atmosphere and food to be delicious and well-prepared. It’s a business. I’m not trying to prove that I’m smart and it’s not a monument to myself.

I have a 40-acre farm in Capay Valley called Gauchito Hill Farm. There’s a river through it and two farmers, Thea Rittenhouse and Andres Marega own and run their own business and are my tenants. Their business is expanding and this summer I will use some of their produce on my menus. I want to help them out to the extent that I can and not be in the way. They have lettuce and spring mixes, Asian greens, carrots, and herbs. In Capay Valley, there are people who have lived for generations up there. I appreciate that.

I will also start taking my restaurant compost up to the farm, and started training my staff on doing that. I’d rather use the compost myself than see it go to Recology.

Bay Area Bites: What factors are at play with your culinary work in a small restaurant space like Canteen?
Leary: The economics of the Canteen space demand that the food be very simple. It is a business. No one goes into the restaurant business to make a living. You go into it because you enjoy it. I’m not some East Bay idealist and use organic everything and then fail. My food is dominated by necessity and I have to factor in, “What can I get that people will like?”

I’m not there to prove that I’m smart or forage or pickle my own things. Now there’s a whole legion of people doing that and when I did have the time I used to pickle, cure and butcher. Now it comes down to, “What’s a realistic use of my time?”

It’s just me and the sous chef working there and we want things to taste right and go out hot or cold, as they are meant to.

Bay Area Bites: Your sandwiches are creative and have a popular following downtown. What are the bestseller sandwiches for the Sentinel and Golden West?
Leary: At Golden West, it’s the short rib sandwich. Corned beef is the best seller at the Sentinel. I rarely eat anything when I’m at the Sentinel. I just pick and choose bites of things. Our production kitchen is over at Golden West, so there is a lot of logistics to coordinate there.

Rabbit Pate Sandwich from the Sentinel Photo: Mary Ladd

Bay Area Bites: Where do you like to eat in the Bay Area?
Leary: I like Yuet Lee, and places in North Beach, where I live. I like Calzone’s look and that it has neon on the front. They’re nice there and it’s fun to go there on a Monday night. The places I like have been in San Francisco for years. You don’t have to wait in line. They’re not flooded with people. They’re real. You can’t try to be authentic. You need a little weariness and to have been around for awhile. The whole notion of an instant classic, I don’t buy it.

Related Information:

Canteen
Address: Map
817 Sutter St.
San Francisco CA 94109
(415) 928-8870

Golden West
Address: Map
8 Trinity St.
San Francisco CA 94109
(415) 216-6443

House of Shields
Address: Map
39 New Montgomery St.
San Francisco CA 94105
(415) 216-6443

The Sentinel
Address: Map
35 New Montgomery St.
San Francisco CA 94105
(415) 284-9960

Gauchito Hill Farm
Brooks CA
(530) 796-0704
Email Address: gauchitohillfarm@gmail.com

Window looking into South at SFJAZZ Photo: Angkana Kurutach

In Hayes Valley, the new 35,000-square-foot SFJAZZ Center is the first permanent home for SFJAZZ. The new center is already a major draw for musicians and jazz fans locally since every seat in the house offers amazing acoustics. Now, jazz fans also have their own watering hole with casual bites. This week, Chef Charles Phan opened South restaurant, with craft bourbon cocktails by Erik Adkins and food ranging from fried beignets (by Pastry Chef Chucky Dugo) to alligator sausage, tender spicy beef jerky and oysters baked or fried. Bar food is a definite departure from the clean award-winning Vietnamese fare Phan is known for, but South gives him a chance to play and riff. Phan has been open with Bay Area Bites about his growing love of bourbon, and is due to open the bourbon and fried chicken Hard Water concept on the Embarcadero. He just returned from a research trip to Kentucky with Adkins and architect Olle Lundberg and the trio sampled from up to fifteen barrels each day. “We had to stop at that point,” he said with a laugh. Lundberg’s renderings of the space can be seen below.

Charles Phan. Photo: Angkana Kurutach

With a growing empire of Bay Area restaurants including the highly regarded Slanted Door, Phan said he is happy to be a part of this new San Francisco institution, even if he did at first say no to the prospect. Turns out, he does know how to provide quality sustenance for hungry musicians and their fans and has put some thought into how to do that: “A lot of them are always on the road, and it’s tough for them to get a good, warm meal. They’re like gypsies. At the end of the day, we want to provide good food and value.” Because Phan also oversees the SFJAZZ catering and green room operations, he hopes to get musicians to enjoy the food so much that it will be one reason for them to return, again and again.

South’s Alligator sausage. Photo: Angkana Kurutach

South’s Cornmeal crusted fried oysters with jalapeño remoulade Photo: Angkana Kurutac

SFJAZZ Trustee and Boonville author Robert Mailer Anderson helped raise the money to build the new center. He and his wife Nicola Miner are friends to many musicians and writers (including me, full disclosure) and are major Obama fundraisers. Anderson will eagerly share the details of where to get his favorite late night meal of al pastor tacos–San Jose taqueria, here we come. Regarding why Phan was chosen to head up the food for SFJAZZ, Anderson is quick to sing Phan’s praises, “We’re a cutting edge jazz center so we should have someone who is cutting edge in the culinary world.”

South at SFJAZZ Renderings by Lundberg Design

South at SFJAZZ Renderings by Lundberg Design

He is also quick to second Phan’s notion that food is important for any musician: “Because musicians travel so much, they are always talking about food. With the guys, they tend to talk about food and women. The perfect night out seems to include music, food and drinks.”

The fifty seats at South have full window views of the outside scene and the space is perfectly set up for a quick The Battle of New Orleans cocktail and nibble. Part of the South bar peers into the Robert N. Miner auditorium through a large glass panel. SFJAZZ’s Marshall Lamm confirmed that bar patrons can nab a peek during live performances, which may be markedly different in both vibe and appearance than other music spots (guests do need a ticket to take in any performance). Phan noted that because the Miner auditorium holds up to 700 guests, it makes more sense for jazz patrons to plan on getting a cocktail, versus food, at South. During performances, there is also an upstairs bar with views onto a wall filled with breathtaking black-and-white images of jazz greats.

Jazz greats: a view from the South and SFJAZZ building Photo: Mary Ladd

South currently offers eleven cocktails priced at $10, and draft beer and local wine are also available. The Blenheim ginger sparkler is a kicky and not-too-sweet refresher for designated drivers and best of all, concertgoers can tote their drinks back into the auditorium in compostable glasses.

South’s bar: prepped The Battle of New Orleans bourbon drinks. Photo: Mary Ladd

French 75 cocktails at South’s bar. Photo: Angkana Kurutach

Prominent jazz vocalist and fourth generation San Franciscan Kitty Margolis sounded relieved and enthusiastic over Phan’s menu. She noted that his fare is miles better than the sort of dry “bandwiches” she has endured during her career. Since I had never heard the term bandwich, she explained it: a “bandwich” or “gigwich” is an unappealing catered sandwich that is often served to musicians. Sometimes, it may happen that the musicians are performing for a group that is enjoying a fancy dinner that looks and smells great, from afar. The musician’s cold bandwich usually arrives wrapped in plastic with grey mystery meat in between two slices of old looking bread. Condiments are an afterthought for bandwiches and forget about seeing some fresh and green Little Gem produce that Phan is using in his celery root remoulade dish at South. Bandwiches are so terrible that Margolis, who has performed in Italy, Japan and all over the world, now specifies in her rider contract that bandwiches are forbidden.

Celery root remoulade with Little Gem lettuce. Photo: Angkana Kurutach

Phan’s seasonal touches are evident on the menu, which he said can draw from the south of Italy and south of Spain. Margolis and Anderson both discussed how similar jazz and cooking can be, due to the use of improvisation. At first bite, the South menu looks more like improv from the American historic south, with a seasonal and California twist: chive-rice ball (called a calas) with red pepper jelly, cornmeal crusted fried oysters with remoulade, black-eyed pea spread paired with poppy seed crackers, duck rillettes with Creole mustard, and chicken gumbo. The menu is geared towards small plates that seem to point to a lighter approach that incorporates sharing. Breakfast and lunch are slated to begin next month, and Phan hopes that South will draw in locals as well as musicians. “That’s why we’re doing breakfast and lunch, for the folks who live nearby. We want people to use the space all day long.”

Chick Corea plays in the Robert N. Miner auditorium at the SFJAZZ Center. Guests can visit South for food and drinks before and during performances like this one.

Related Information:

Address: Map
201 Franklin Street (at Fell)
San Francisco CA 94102
(415) 539-3905

Dinner daily 5:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Breakfast and lunch opening in April 2013

Twitter: @SFJAZZ
Facebook: SFJAZZ

Photo: Getty Images

A new study finds that even moderate alcohol consumption can increase the risk of cancer-related death. KQED’s Forum hears from one of the study’s authors, who says alcohol is responsible for 20,000 cancer deaths every year. But the study is not without controversy. Some researchers say alcohol may have certain health benefits, and that it’s risky to advocate total abstinence. Forum looks at the mechanism by which alcohol may increase cancer death. Should you give up booze altogether?

Host: Michael Krasny

Guests:

• Christina Clarke, research scientist at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California (CPIC)
• Curt Ellison, Scientific Co-Director, International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research
• Thomas Greenfield, center director and scientific director for the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute, and one of study’s authors

More info:
• Study from American Journal of Public Health
• Drinking Causes 3.5% of Cancer Deaths : Public Health Institute

The rum in that Cuba libre will hit your bloodstream faster if it’s mixed with diet cola. Photo: iStockphoto

According to the results of a new study, this combination will leave you drunker than if you’d mixed the liquor with a sugary, caloric mixer.

“Alcohol, consumed with a diet mixer, results in higher (BrAC) Breath Alcohol Concentrations as compared to the same amount of alcohol consumed with a sugar-sweetened mixer,” says Cecile Marczinski, a cognitive psychologist who authored the new study.

Why? Turns out that sugar slows down the absorption of alcohol from the stomach to the bloodstream.

“In other words, it is not that diet soda accelerates intoxication. Rather, the sugar in regular soda slows down the rate of alcohol absorption,” explains Dennis Thombs, a professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. He published a paper with similar findings.

So what was the motivation for the new study? “I wanted to know if the choice of a mixer could be the factor that puts a person above or below the legal limit,” writes Marczinski, who’s a professor at Northern Kentucky University.

And it turns out, diet soda might just push you past that tipping point. Marczinski’s study found that the average BrAC was .091 (at its peak) when subjects drank alcohol mixed with a diet drink. By comparison, BrAC was .077 when the same subjects consumed the same amount of alcohol but with a sugary soda.

“I was a little surprised by the findings, since the 18% increase in BrAC was a fairly large difference,” Marczinski tells The Salt via email.

Marczinski says she also wanted to determine if the volunteers in her study (eight women, eight men) would notice any differences between the two mixers. Not so much, it turns out.

The subjects didn’t report feeling more impaired or intoxicated after drinking the diet soda mixer, compared to the sugary soda. Experts say this may put them at an increased risk of drinking and driving.

The study is being published in the April issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Copyright 2013 NPR.