Archival photo of Alice Waters at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of CUESA

On May 18, CUESA will be celebrating the 20th Birthday Bash of the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, with special events throughout the Saturday morning market.

For $20 a ticket ($10 for children 10 and under), market goers can create their own seasonal fruit shortcakes at stations “curated” with market ingredients prepared by four top local pastry chefs: William Werner of Craftsman & Wolves, Francis Ang of Fifth Floor, Jen Musty of Batter Bakery, and Luis Villavelazquez of Les Elements Patisserie. There will also be coffee, tea, and a juice and mimosa bar filled with fresh-squeezed juices, fresh fruit and vegetable purees (don’t miss the surprisingly refreshing fennel-frond puree), sparkling water and Champagne. The market’s founders will do a presentation at 11am.

Preview of the mimosa bar

The first regular weekly markets, held in front of the Ferry Building, happened in 1993. Do you remember 1993? I do. The scars of 1989′s 6.8 Loma Prieta quake still criss-crossed the city. A post-earthquake, post-financial crash, pre-tech boom recession meant jobs were scarce but rents were cheap. But change was coming, mostly notably along the waterfront. Since 1958, the Embaracadero Freeway had sliced across the northeastern edge of the city, throwing the piers from the Bay Bridge northwards into concrete-shadowed gloom. Ferries still left from the Ferry Building, but to get to them, you scuttled as fast as possible through the building’s dimly lit, grubby passages, no more inviting than a New York City subway tunnel. Then, in 1991, the earthquake-damaged freeway was finally removed, and the City realized it had a civic jewel–the greatly underutilized Ferry Building, suddenly revealed in all its Market Street-anchoring glory–on its hands. It would take another seven years before renovations would begin that would return the Ferry Building to a modernized, food-glorying version of its original 1898 self–but in the bare stretches of concrete out front (remember, those pretty, palm-dotted, skateboard-ready plazas are still at least a decade away), a culinary revolution was getting underway, one head of oak-leaf lettuce at a time.

Aerial view of an early Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market across from the Ferry Building. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

In 1992, a small group of San Franciscans including Sibella Kraus, then a forager and produce-finder for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, writer, restaurant critic and Hayes Street Grill chef/owner Patricia Unterman, and local developer Tom Sargeant organized themselves into the San Francisco Public Market Collaborative, with the idea of reclaiming the waterfront for a public market that would connect farmers directly with chefs and home cooks–in fact, with any curious city eaters. After endless meetings with representatives from the City and the Port, they got grudging approval for a one-time-only open-air market in Ferry Plaza parking lot on Sept. 12, 1992. At the time, the Alemany Market, located near the freeways at the base of Bernal Heights, was the city’s only regular farmers’ market. If you were a chef, you relied on distributors and vendors from the wholesale produce market near Bayview. If you needed speciality items, you could swing through Chinatown, the Richmond, or the Mission, if you had time, but mostly, you talked to your delivery guys on the phone, and hoped they’d show up with something close to what you’d asked for.

The success of the one-day market took even the optimists of the collaborative by surprise. The group immediately began pressuring the city to give permission for a regular market, bringing farmers and urbanites together on a weekly basis. By 1993, there was already a few months of precedent: the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market had set up in Civic Center in early spring. Starting in May, the market slowly gained momentum, and word spread between interested cooks and farmers alike. Here was the place to come to get stuff fresh, straight from the ground. Farmers were learning, too, that these new customers were curious. They didn’t just want as many bunches for a dollar as they could get; they wanted to sniff and taste and know what it was they were seeing. By the time the summer was over, the farmers didn’t want to leave. They’d found a new outlet for their produce, one that required a lot of more hands-on time, but also could command a better price that wholesaling. And there were relationships forming, between up-at-3-am farmers from Watsonville and Guinda and city customers who were entranced at the idea of farm-fresh corn and just-picked melons showing up just down the hills from their Telegraph Hill doorsteps once a week. After yet more negotiating with the city, and the market became a year-round event.

Eatwell Farm stand in the early years–no crowds! Photo: Courtesy of Eatwell Farms

And from the beginning, the chefs came, too. In those first years, as I was learning my way around the city’s food scene as the weekly restaurant critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, every trip to the market was punctuated by running into a half-dozen other food writers, editors, cookbook authors, and chefs. It was a pretty small world, and for a few hours every Saturday morning, it really was a village. (Look, there’s Alice, sniffing the peaches!) The original core group of founders had reorganized into CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture–none of which were the food-world buzzwords that they are today. From the beginning, the market’s organizers had a larger vision: to educate minds as well as palates, and to change the way people, both home cooks and chefs, thought about the process of getting food to their tables. Meeting farmers every week, hearing how the weather or gas prices or labor issues were affecting their crops, seeing how their produce was shaped not season by season but week by week, was a living education for everyone shopping at the market. And farmers learned, too: about what they could sell, what flew off the table and what, like puntarelle, minaret-shaped romesco broccoli, padron peppers, or fuzzy-sheathed green almonds, needed a little more nudging to get piled into the chefs’ carts and make it onto menus across the city.

David Winsburg of Happy Quail Farms, who helped create the craze for padron peppers. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

As the renovations of the waterfront and the Ferry Building got underway, the market moved to accommodate the construction, from various parking lots around the building, then north to another parking lot off Green Street near the Embarcadero. It remained for several years, then moved back, now to wrap around the Ferry Building, filling the back parking lot and wrapping around the building. I can still remember one blustery December 31, a vendor calling out, “Free rutabaga with every purchase!” and the delicious rutabaga-potato mash I made on New Year’s Day. Or the blissfully sunny February days, the market stalls glowing with sunshine-colored citrus, everyone outside eating oysters, when I’d come back to visit from self-imposed exile in gray, slushy, freezing New York City and wonder why I’d ever left. (Three years away from San Francisco was all I could stand.)

Autumn market sign. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

There was a brief, unsuccessful attempt at a Sunday morning market; much more popular were the two lunchtime markets for downtown workers and weekday visitors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Innovations at the market–from the Waste Wise initiative, which brought large-scale composting and recycling to the market, to the ban on plastic shopping bags, later adopted by the city as a whole, has made a small but significant change for the better in the way we shop and eat. Hundreds of schoolchildren come through the market every year, learning where their food comes from, and how it gets from dirt to plate.

Info Booth at Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

Every day, says executive director David Stockdale, he talks with people from all over the world who are interested in learning from the market. Many of the vendors with brick-and-mortar shops inside the Ferry Building–Michael Recchiuti, Frog Hollow Farm, Prather Ranch, and soon Rancho Gordo and Humphrey Slocombe–started out as vendors in one of the three weekly markets. It’s become not just a market but an educational tool, a visitors’ destination, a fun place to go for breakfast or lunch, and a showcase for some of Northern and Central California’s best produce, week in and week out. Happy birthday, CUESA, and thank you for all you’ve done.

Do you have memories of the early days of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market? Please share in the comments section, below.

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.

Guests and host Leslie Sbrocco tape the sixth episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED.
Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Check, Please! Bay Area’s sixth episode of Season 8 airs on Thursday May 16 at 7:30pm on KQED 9. View other airtimes and channels.

You can watch individual restaurant segments as well as view the entire episode online. The website provides restaurant information not specified on the show and you are free to share your opinions on the restaurants featured. This season, Leslie Sbrocco will continue to share wine (and spirits) tips with each episode.

The sixth episode of Season 8 features these restaurants: Hunan Home’s Restaurant (San Francisco), Radius Restaurant and Café (San Francisco) and Guerilla Café (Berkeley).

Fun in the greenroom after taping the sixth episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED. Lyrics Born autographs Leslie’s foot. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Watch Leslie Sbrocco share her Wine Tips about Santa Barbara County Wines:

View more Wine Tips at Check, Please! Bay Area.

Chef David Lawrence in the 1300 on Fillmore kitchen. Photo courtesy of 1300 Fillmore

At events like SF Chefs, we’ve noticed again and again that chef David Lawrence has culinary offerings that stand out. His “Soulful American” bites with roots in England and Jamaica include such dishes as shrimp grits and white grits with pesto, and organic skillet fried chicken, with an upscale twist. Lawrence’s plates tend to demonstrate how the deep South can cozy up with fresh California produce, using classic French technique.

Since opening in 2007, Lawrence’s restaurant, 1300 on Fillmore, remains a draw for Sunday gospel brunch crowds, as well as those looking for a group dinner or bar snack–the fried chicken or skillet catfish; meaty ribeye; variety of grits and even warm chocolate beignets with coffee soda are almost begging to be shared. Lawrence, a London native, is 1300 on Fillmore’s executive chef and managing partner. He has cooked for royalty and was formally trained in the culinary arts at Westminster College. In 1982, Lawrence joined England’s most celebrated and honored culinarians, Albert and Michel Roux, who were definitely considered “celeb chefs” there and were the chef-proprietors of the world-renowned Le Gavroche and the Waterside Inn (at that time, both three-star Michelin restaurants). Lawrence cooked his way through five of their famous restaurants and became a sous chef, in four short years. In 1986, Lawrence became chef de cuisine at Interlude Restaurant in London, which gave him the sweet chance to make meals for none other than the Prince and Princess of Wales; Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon; and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

He left for the U.S. in 1988 in a kismet vacation moment that led to chef de cuisine work with a former Le Gavroche chef named Kurt Graising who was opening 231 Ellsworth Restaurant in San Mateo. Lawrence next landed at the (ornate and beautiful) Carnelian Room and Cityscape restaurants in San Francisco, respectively. While at Cityscape, he created the Chefs for Kids program, which raised thousands of dollars for the Tenderloin After School program. Lawrence is also generous with his time for various local charity events. We caught up in person recently to find out more about his culinary style and career. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Bay Area Bites: Can you tell us about your successes & goals?
Lawrence: The restaurant just celebrated five years of business last October. When we opened the restaurant, it was all fanfare and then the economy crashed. We survived but had to cut back and there was no sous chef, and no general manager. My wife Monetta White and I did all that. We we’re able to do so with the support of the city and the people who came in. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. Now I’m looking at expanding.

Our gospel brunch is on Sunday. For Easter, we decided to try something different, and keep our hours to the daytime and not open at night. I saw hordes of people walking back up to Pacific Heights as they left brunch. Then when I went to Safeway, I saw a line of people, and there were families and kids walking down here. I remember when we first came here and Monetta lived at Bush and Fillmore. Back then, no one went below Bush Street.

Bay Area Bites: What are your best selling menu items…and your favorites?
Lawrence: For the best seller, it’s always the fried chicken. When I walk around and go out, people say that fried chicken is the bestseller. It is so funny because I come from Europe and have worked with Michelin-starred chefs. I have no complaints but my claim to fame is chicken. I just turned 50 in February, and it’s, “Wow, I’m 50 and known for fried chicken.”

I am the most proud of dishes like shrimp and grits and fried chicken. The shrimp and grits dishes really got me to look at this cuisine and what we do. Monetta is from Mississippi and we’ve been together for 19 years. We have a similar thing in England where I am from that is cornmeal porridge: sugar, nutmeg, and spice to make it nice and creamy. I cooked the grits more or less the same way and decided to do it without the sugar. Slowly but surely, people became interested and back then, no one was doing this.

Bay Area Bites: As a chef and businessman, what would you like to be known for?
Lawrence: It’s a fine line doing both. I’ve seen many amazing chefs open restaurants and crash. I’ve seen many mediocre chefs succeed because of their business acumen. As a chef, you have to cook what your customers want instead of what your ego wants. It’s about getting that balance. With the restaurant’s earlier days, I had foie gras, lamb, and rabbit and it was great for me but I couldn’t sell it. I never wanted a hamburger but I put one on the menu because people want it. It’s about finding the fine line between your own ego and what makes sense and sells. That way, you can hopefully still enjoy what you do.

Bay Area Bites: Guilty pleasure?
Lawrence: My thing is chocolate HobNobs. You call them cookies, and I call them biscuits. I don’t buy them because I can’t eat just one.

Bay Area Bites: Where do you live?
Lawrence: We live right above the restaurant. The commute is awesome. I love it. If I get five minutes for myself, I can go upstairs. It gives me just enough time to recharge my batteries. I can pop down if someone is here and wants to say hello, which is the least I can do if they have come all this way to eat at my restaurant. 1300 is my love and will be my love for the rest of my life.

Related Information:

1300 on Fillmore
Address: Map
1300 Fillmore St.
San Francisco CA 94115
(415) 771-7100
Facebook: 1300 on Fillmore
Twitter: @1300onFillmore

1300 on Fillmore was featured on KQED’s Check, Please! Bay Area in 2012.
Watch the restaurant segment from the show:

Guests and host Leslie Sbrocco tape the fifth episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED.
Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Check, Please! Bay Area’s fifth episode of Season 8 airs on Thursday May 9 at 7:30pm on KQED 9. View other airtimes and channels.

You can watch individual restaurant segments as well as view the entire episode online. The website provides restaurant information not specified on the show and you are free to share your opinions on the restaurants featured. This season, Leslie Sbrocco will continue to share wine (and spirits) tips with each episode.

The fifth episode of Season 8 features these restaurants: Bocanova (Oakland), Willi’s Wine Bar (Santa Rosa) and The Rotunda of Neiman Marcus (San Francisco).

Watch Leslie Sbrocco share her Wine Tips about Wines of Washington State:

View more Wine Tips at Check, Please! Bay Area.

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

Guests and host Leslie Sbrocco tape the fourth episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED.

Check, Please! Bay Area’s fourth episode of Season 8 airs on Thursday May 2 at 7:30pm on KQED 9. View other airtimes and channels.

You can watch individual restaurant segments as well as view the entire episode online. The website provides restaurant information not specified on the show and you are free to share your opinions on the restaurants featured. This season, Leslie Sbrocco will continue to share wine (and spirits) tips with each episode.

The fourth episode of Season 8 features these restaurants: Pompei’s Grotto (San Francisco), Lillie Mae’s House of Soul Food (Santa Clara) and SPQR (San Francisco).

Host Leslie Sbrocco and guests from Check, Please! Bay Area relax in KQED’s greenroom

Watch Leslie Sbrocco share her Wine Tips about Napa Valley Wines:

View more Wine Tips at Check, Please! Bay Area.

The Third Annual Coffee Ride

It’s officially a yearly caffeinated tradition; my friend Pamela Palma and I led our 3rd Annual Coffee Ride through the streets of San Francisco yesterday. Close to 50 other coffee-loving cyclists met us at 10AM at Stanza Coffee Bar, our first stop in the Mission.

Everyone filled up their coffee mugs and fueled up with pastries to jumpstart their 30-mile jaunt around the city. By adding more miles and hill climbs, we had designed a more challenging route for this year’s group — including a scenic mid-ride stop on Twin Peaks.

I’d be visiting all of the spots on our schedule for the first time, so I was really excited about exploring these latest additions to the city’s ever-evolving coffee community. And several folks mentioned that they’d be biking in areas or checking out cafes they hadn’t heard of before; it’s always a pleasure to introduce our fellow cyclists to new destinations as well.

Co-organizer Pamela Palma

Stanza serves up an eclectic selection of coffees from around the world as well as some unique domestic offerings such as Blacksmith Espresso from Quills Coffee in Louisville, KY.

Along with their sidewalk seating and tables in the main cafe, they also have a lovely patio out back for their patrons.

At about 11AM, we headed east towards the Bayview / Hunters Point neighborhood. Tucked away on Yosemite Avenue off of 3rd, Trouble Coffee now has a second outpost in another remote locale. It radiates the same quaint charm and vintage decor as its Outer Sunset predecessor and most of its popular menu items: thick-sliced buttery toast topped with peanut butter, cinnamon or Nutella and and fresh baby coconuts. Giulietta Carrelli, Trouble’s irrepressible owner, was manning her cozy coffee nook solo. She greeted our large, thirsty crowd by solemnly announcing she’d be ‘making no lattes’ as she’d survived a rough mountain bike crash just the night before. “Just drip coffees for all of you — and tons of toast!” she said with a mischievous grin. But as her shop’s motto is, “We serve guts and honor,” she graciously prepared one of her delicious lattes upon request.

Energized with Trouble, it was now Twin Peaks time. We wound our way through the various neighborhoods of Crocker Amazon, Balboa Park, Monterey Heights and St. Francis Wood to reach the top.

After taking in the gorgeous views of San Francisco from the summit of Twin Peaks, we headed west towards the Pacific Ocean. Situated just above the Sutro Baths and the Cliff House, Lands End Lookout Cafe is nestled inside the relatively new visitor center that opened last spring. While the Peerless Coffee they brewed didn’t earn glowing reviews from our finicky group, the sandwiches, soups, salads and warm cookies consumed during our lunch stop received plenty of compliments.

Eager to leave the chilly seaside fog and return to some sunshine, we were luckily welcomed back into the warm weather in the Marina when we arrived at Dynamo Donuts’ cute little kiosk on the eastern edge of Crissy Field.

Unfortunately, by the time our group showed up, they were all out of donuts. So Pamela and I made an executive decision to skip the last two cafes in North Beach — Beacon and Reveille — and get our sugar fix at Stella’s Pastry and Cafe for tiramisu and other Italian delights.

Relaxing in North Beach with cappuccino and an assortment of desserts was a fine way to end our long day of caffeinated adventures. We’ll be back in the East Bay next spring for ride number four!

You can see additional photos from the ride in my Flickr set.

View 3rd Annual Coffee Ride! in a larger map

Guests and host Leslie Sbrocco tape the third episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED.
Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Check, Please! Bay Area’s third episode of Season 8 airs on Thursday April 25 at 7:30pm on KQED 9. View other airtimes and channels.

You can watch individual restaurant segments as well as view the entire episode online. The website provides restaurant information not specified on the show and you are free to share your opinions on the restaurants featured. This season, Leslie Sbrocco will continue to share wine (and spirits) tips with each episode.

The third episode of Season 8 features these restaurants: Maverick (San Francisco), Izakaya Yuzuki (San Francisco) and Souk Savanh (Oakland).

Watch Leslie Sbrocco share her Wine & Spirits Tips about Sake:

View more Wine Tips at Check, Please! Bay Area.

Kale, Broccoli, Artichoke, Blue Flowers

Assess Your Space
How much growing space can you find? How much direct sun (and wind) will you have? San Francisco, in particular, is rife with micro-climates; growing a garden in the Outer Sunset is a very different proposition from planting in the Mission. You can grow lettuces, herbs, and hardy greens, like kale and collards, almost anywhere, but warmth-loving, sunshine-demanding plants like tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers need a reliable 6 to 8 hours of direct sunshine to ripen flavorfully. Making fruit (and seed-filled, fleshy vegetables like tomatoes and peppers count as fruit) takes a lot of effort on the plant’s part, demanding a much higher level of nutrients and food (in the form of sugars produced by photosynthesis) than those needed by leafy greens. So, if your yard is a shady one, don’t break your heart by planting lots of tomatoes that won’t ripen. Stick with cool-loving plants like lettuce, chard, and Asian greens.

Lettuces like cool weather.

Don’t Skimp on the Immediate Gratification
Starting from seed is the cheapest way to get a garden going. But it’s also the slowest, and depending on how slug/snail/bird-mobbed your beds are, it can also be the most dangerous, as just-sprouted tender seedlings are the most vulnerable to pest attacks.

If you need to see some evidence to stay interested, buy some well-established seedlings instead. And fun (and tasty) as tomatoes and potatoes can be, they also take months to produce. So remember to plant some quick-to-harvest treats, like lettuce, spinach, mizuna, Asian greens, arugula and radishes, which go soil-to-table in less than 6 weeks. Beets, too, can be harvested young, when they’re extra-sweet and tender. Sugar-snap peas also grow like Jack’s beanstalk (give them a trellis to crawl up and cling to) and are wildly productive. Plus, they make a great sweet snack right off the plant.

Pea Vines

Know Your Soil
Urban soils, even in residential neighborhoods, can have less-than-pristine histories. That’s why container gardening–or building raised beds and filling them with fresh soil and compost–is usually preferable for edible plantings, rather than digging straight into your backyard topsoil, especially if you’re planting root crops like beets, turnips, carrots, radishes, potatoes. Raised beds or containers can also help discourage critters (like gophers) from digging in from below, while opper strips around the edges can keep snails and slugs at bay. Building your own beds also means you can arrange the height to suit your flexibility; if crouching and bending close to the ground is difficult, plant in barrels or build tall, crate-like beds at a more comfortable level. Sunset magazine’s website offers great step-by-step instructions for
building your own redwood or cedar raised beds.

Get Some Good Books
An invaluable resource–and one that no city grower should be without–is Pam Peirce’s Golden Gate Gardening, now in its 3rd edition. Peirce has been talking to gardeners all across the city for decades, getting their feedback on what grows best where. Her book is straightforward and readable for gardeners at all levels, and explains micro-climates, fog belts, wind patterns, and how to lay out your garden to make the most of both sun and shade, as well as listing all the best varieties of vegetables, flowers, fruits, and herbs for growing around the Bay.

The New Western Garden Book; (9th edition) is another must-have for gardeners throughout the West, especially in California. I can’t think of a gardener I know who doesn’t have a dusty, dirt-smeared copy of Sunset’s gardening bible in her shed or garage–and often a newer, more pristine copy among the inspirational gardening books inside.

If you’re limited to what you can fit in pots on your back steps, pick up a copy of A Little Piece of Earth: How to Grow Your Own Food in Small Spaces, local author Maria Finn‘s book about container gardening. Finn knows firsthand about growing edibles without a backyard–she lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, and does all her gardening in pots on her upper deck.

Feed Your Soil
Before you plant a single seed, you’ve got to get your soil right. Yes, this can seem boring; you can spend a whole afternoon hauling bags of compost or smelly chicken manure, double-digging or spreading mulch, and not have as much a sprig in the ground to show for it. But putting in your plants should be the very last step in building your garden. Skip or skimp on this step, and you’ll be fighting bug infestations, weak growth, and nutrient and mineral deficiencies in your plants the whole rest of the growing season.

Do Some Spring Cleaning
Make room for spring! Pull out any bug-infested or mildewed plants that you planted last fall or winter. Quick tip-offs that your plants have bolted and are ready for composting: Thick, bare, woody stems; heavy infestations of aphids (check undersides of leaves); normally low plants, like lettuce, shooting up and producing long, skinny flower stems; an abundance of yellow flowers on broccoli and other brassica-family plants; anything that looks leggy, overgrown, and just plain tired.

Bolted plants are concentrating their efforts on reproduction, meaning their leaves will be bitter and less flavorful. Pull ‘em out, compost them to feed the earth (anything extremely buggy should be discarded, as home compost probably won’t get hot enough to destroy insects and their eggs), and be sure to beef up your beds with fresh compost and/or organic fertilizer before planting fresh seedlings.

Strawberry Plants

Rotate Your Beds
Don’t plant seedlings from the same plant families in the same place year after year. Every plant family attracts a similar family of predators and disease-causing microbes to it. If you plant your potatoes where you put your tomatoes, you’ll be encouraging the same pests in the soil, since both potatoes and tomatoes are in the Solanum family. Think of it as changing your plants’ passwords every season. Strawberries, in particular, should be rotated around the garden frequently.

Feed Your Pollinators
You know what makes a lot of your seed-bearing edible plants productive? Pollinators! That includes not just honeybees but all kinds of native bees, wasps, and other insects that crawl from flower to flower seeking nectar and, along the way, spreading pollen to make the reproductive fruiting magic happen. Planting compatible, pollinator-pleasing plants alongside your edibles will definitely make a difference in how many zucchini, cucumbers, apricots or apples you’ll get. And they’re pretty, too! Bees are particularly fond of blue and purple flowers, so be sure to include borage (whose dainty star-shaped edible flowers are adorable on cupcakes), bachelor’s buttons (cornflowers), and lavender. Other easy-to-grown pollinator buffets include cosmos, calendula, African blue basil, butterfly bush, coreopsis, dusty miller, sweet allysum, lamb’s ear, scabiosa (pincushion flower), rosemary, and sage.

Borage and Nasturiums

Buy Local
Head up to Novato, where the Indian Valley Organic Farm and Garden, an educational farm that’s part of the College of Marin, will be holding a 2-day Spring Plant Sale, complete with farm tours, live music, sales of plants, seedlings, and produce grown on the farm, bouquet making, and tastings, from 10am-3pm on Sat, April 20 and Sun, April 21. Buying seedlings from a farm often means getting more creative choices and more variety–a great way to try out some healthy new veggies. Purple carrots? Easter-egg radishes? Tokyo turnips? Rainbow chard? Golden raspberries? Why not? And consider investing in some perennials, too, like artichoke or rhubarb crowns, which can be productive for decades once established. Go colorful and get ready for a delicious spring and summer dining in the garden.

In Santa Cruz on May 4 and 5, the apprentices at UCSC Farm and Garden program will be holding their annual Spring Plant Sale, organic plants and seedlings grown on the farm, including both annual and perennial vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs, flowers, and fruit.

Artichoke Plant