Fruitcake gets a bad rap. You ask anyone from young to old and they’ll turn up their nose, proclaiming that it’s “dry” or “heavy” or that they’re scared of those neon-colored fruits. Well the times have changed and fruitcake, if made well, can be moist, a little bit boozy and incredibly tasty. At least that’s the case at Arizmendi on 9th Avenue in San Francisco.

Happy Arizmendi bakers: Erin Singer, Suet Cheng, Aeri Swendson

While it seems like many of our families avoid fruitcake, it's been around for quite some time. In fact, the name can actually be traced back as far as the Middle Ages with the oldest reference going back to Roman times where they often included pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and raisins. Since the bread is preserved with high levels of booze, crusaders and hunters were rumored to have carried this type of cake to sustain themselves over long periods of time away from home. All of the neon-colored fruits that folks fear today came much later down the line.

At Arizmendi, you won’t see any of those dried fruits either. Instead, you’ll find small warmly-scented loaves packed with dried fruits and nuts from Rainbow Grocery across town. They use currants, lemon zest, orange zest, raisins, papaya, pineapple, apricots, almonds and cherries along with a smattering of spices like cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice. If you haven’t yet tried it, this is your year. The 9th Avenue location is doing 400 small loaves and they sell out quickly, so make sure to get down there beginning the first week of December to snag yours. They’ll hold until whenever you’re ready to serve it (the brandy functions as a preserver) -- some of the staff actually hang onto their loaves year after year and come in to re-dip them during the annual fruitcake-dipping process.

The fruitcake-making process at Arizmendi

So what’s the secret? The best fruitcakes are started months in advance and dipped in liquor numerous times to allow the flavors to really mature and develop. Arizmendi began making the fruitcakes well over two months ago and they go through a three-dip cycle in brandy. First, the staff spends time cutting up all of the dried fruits, making the dough, and folding it all together. Suet Cheng says, “It’s mostly fruit and just enough batter to hold it altogether." Baker Erin Singer confirms that it’s almost like a scone dough, packed with so many fruits and nuts that it's really barely held together. After all of the dry ingredients are combined, it’s baked and they allow it to cool for 10-20 minutes. While it’s warm they do the first soak in brandy.

Sneaking a taste of Arizmendi's fruitcake

The first soak is the longest, meaning they allow each loaf to hang out for 4-5 minutes in the tub of brandy. Erin says, “they soak it up like crazy the first time around.” The subsequent soakings are for a shorter amount of time, usually 1-2 minutes. After soaking, the bakers wrap the loaves in cheesecloth and plastic wrap and store them for a month. When it’s time to re-dip, they take off the plastic and re-dip with the cheesecloth still on.

I had the chance to try the fruitcake after its last dipping and it was boozier than it will be when you buy it because it was straight out of the brandy. Chatting with the head baker over a cup of coffee and a small slice, I told her how it was the best fruitcake I'd ever had. In fact, I didn't realize fruitcake could be this good. If you could compare the flavor to a color, it’d be the deepest amber imaginable: intensely warm yet simultaneously dark and boozy and packed with chunks of fruit and nuts. And they’re heavy! With each soaking they take on more and more of the liquid making them incredibly moist and dense but in a wonderful-with-coffee way, not a like-a-rock way.

Sure, people do it differently. And it’s been done for hundreds of years which is why, I think, I’m so drawn to fruitcake. The thought that grandmothers and farm hands were dipping fruitcakes in much the same way that I experienced on this sunny San Francisco morning seems important to me. It’s a continuation of a holiday tradition that holds a lot of meaning for some, and little for others. If it’s not part of your cultural or family tradition, I encourage you to make some changes this year. I sure am.

Get Your Fruitcake:
Fruitcakes will go on sale the first week of December and you can call and order one/reserve or just walk in and pick one up. The earlier, the better; they do sell out. Each fruitcake is $14.

Arizmendi Bakery
1331 9th Avenue (between Irving and Judah)
San Francisco, CA 94122
(415)566-3117

Hours:
Tuesday-Friday: 7am-7pm
Saturday-Sunday: 7:30am-6pm
Monday: CLOSED

What do you get when you combine three former Arizmendi bakers with an uber-cool new food truck (housing its own oven)? Well, Vesta Flatbread, of course. Perhaps you've seen them Saturdays at the Grand Lake Farmers Market in Oakland; now Jenya Chernoff, Traci Prendergast and Aron Ford are taking to the streets with their seasonal flatbreads and housemade drinks. Jenya and Traci founded Vesta in 2009 and Aron officially jumped on board this summer. I share a commercial kitchen space with them in Richmond, and was immediately struck with their positive energy, excitement for their new project, and the fact that they prepare beautiful meals for each other while they're cooking in the kitchen (something so many of us neglect to do). So I wanted to chat with them and find out more about their business, the mobile food truck culture, and where they see themselves in the future.

Traci roasting peppers

1. Tell me a little about your business and how/why you decided to start it.
All three of us met while bakers/co-owners of Arizmendi Bakery in Emeryville. We love the tradition and community of artisan baking and knew we wanted to make our own bread, but we wanted to expand our skills and creativity and create a business we could put our personal stamp on. Our menu was the marriage of our desire to evoke an ancient region of the world with wanting to dream up something creative and delicious using minimal equipment to sell on the streets. We’d like to think we ended up with a product that has thousands of years of history while reflecting our own “modern” food sensibilities.

2. Do you think living in the Bay Area allows your business to flourish? If so, how so?
Absolutely. People here understand and appreciate our values towards supporting local farms, ranches and dairies, even if this means our products can't be dirt cheap. For us, feeding others is an act of love, and the exchange we have with customers is important. Bay area folks are willing to try new things and explore, they are curious and open-minded.

3. What have been the highlights of being a small business owner in the Bay Area thus far?
Becoming part of the vibrant street food and farmers market community. Since becoming mobile vendors we have been able to meet so many wonderful, dedicated and creative people from all aspects of the food business, talk to farmers about their production, learn about their work and challenges and have a much broader understanding of the processes that bring food to the table.

4. What challenges are you facing right now in terms of growth or vision?
Well, one big challenge is finding our own retail/kitchen space. We have been sharing commercial kitchens, and we are grateful that such places exist. It is extremely difficult to find a reasonably sized space in a neighborhood that can support a retail food business. Mostly this is because of the regulations on building & permit processes in California, which jack up the costs of buying/building to a level prohibitive for most food businesses.

5. What inspires you, day to day?
The farmers' market, the seasons, other chefs.

6. What are your goals for the future of Vesta?
Our long term dream is to have our own kitchen and retail space. Given we launched our new truck August 25th, we are mainly just excited to become part of the nomadic kitchen culture of street food, and start serving up flatbread sandwiches in the East Bay and San Francisco.

Vesta Flatbread
Find them: Saturdays from 9 am-2 pm at the Grand Lake Farmers Market, Oakland. And soon: out on the road in the truck!
For more information:
Like them on Facebook
Follow them on Twitter

Arizmendi San Rafael finally opened April 6th!

I've been looking forward to this bakery opening for months. Seasons, actually. You see, it's not that we don't have Arizmendi in the city. We do. And it's fantastic--although on the opposite end of town from where I live. But my mom is a quick hop from the new location in San Rafael and I find myself at her house often because a) she's cool, b) she cooks for me and c) she has much better cable and cute dogs. So when I heard that Arizmendi had finally opened this week, I made a point to cruise on over and check it out. All in the name of research.

If you're not familiar with Arizmendi, they're not only an incredible bakery but they use a very cool worker cooperative business model. Over thirty years ago now, Berkeley's worker-owned, Cheeseboard cooperative opened. The model was so succesful that they helped open another bakery in Oakland that year--Arizmendi on Lakeshore Avenue was born. The rest is history. So without going into too much detail on the ins and outs of cooperatives (although it's quite fascinating), in short everyone weighs in on decisions ranging from opening hours to new pizza flavors.

Part of their mission statement reads:

Acting on the belief that beneficial change can come through collective action, we are a worker-owned and democratically-operated bakery cooperative. We make decisions by consensus and we share all of the business tasks, responsibilities, benefits, and risks, while being accountable to each other.

Call me crazy but this sense of care and ownership shines through in the product. Without a doubt. In the San Rafael store, this passion is immediately detectable. While I was expecting a more watered-down Arizmendi experience that would possibly cater to a different, more suburban clientele, I was pleasantly surprised.

Here's a peek at what I found:

Arizemndi bakers preparing loaves of multi-grain bread



Customers. Many, many happy customers

When I was chatting with the bakers, they mentioned that the San Rafael store's opening day was Arizmendi's biggest ever (they have East Bay and San Francisco locations as well). It was apparent on my first visit that the excitment had yet to wane.

You'll see all of your Arizmendi favorites, including the english muffin and corn cherry scone!


And a new discovery for me--intrigued by the name, I had to try one:

"The Chocolate Thing," a simple, yeasted breakfast bun generously studded with chocolate

So while I visited the San Rafael shop for a few breakfast treats, there's a lot more going on at Arizmendi. They do incredible pizzas--you can check online for their pizza of the day and pop in to buy a slice or a light-baked pie to finish baking at home. They also do artisan breads, simple cookies, and coffee drinks using Equator beans. The San Rafael location has a spacious eating area to lounge and catch up with a good book or just people watch from of their huge street-side location. And if, much like me, you can never have too many morning pastries, here are a few additional suggestions. I can attest to their greatness:

• Corn Cherry scone: a simple, delightful combination. Crumbly. A little bit savory, a little bit sweet.
• Homemade english muffin. Enough said.
• Pecan Roll: This is a nice one to share with your breakfast buddy. Light yeasty dough, nuts, caramel flavor.
• Chocolate Chip Cookies: This is not a fluffy, airy cookie. It's rather flat, dense, and generously strewn with chunks of chocolate. One of my favorite chocolate chip cookies around. And yes, I realize for most people this wouldn't be considered a morning pastry...

Generally speaking, each Arizmendi location will have a few specialties that they only do at that location. I chatted with the bakers to see what would be uniquely San Rafael and they said it was just too early to tell at this point. They wanted to start with the standard, successful line of Arizmendi products and give themselves some time to get to know the customers, the location, and what's really popular. As of now, the pizza has been a huge hit (after all, where can you grab a quick lunch right downtown?) and the morning pastry crowd is growing each day. They hinted that there's a good chance you may see them rockin' the Marin Farmer's Market in the coming months, too. So there's a lot to look forward to. But it's safe to say I'm satisfied with the here and now: they're open, they've got the best scone in town, and I've got a pizza in my fridge waiting to be baked off.

Arizmendi San Rafael
(See their website for other Bay Area locations)
1002 Fourth St.
San Rafael, CA 94901
(415) 456-4093
Hours: Closed Mon.; Tues.-Fri: 7am-7pm; Sat. 8am-7pm; Sun. 8am-4pm
Twitter: @Arizmendi_SR

I admit to being a bit of a design snob. I initially judge blogs on the way that they look or their terrible photos rather than the quality of their writing. And I often want to avoid restaurants whose websites have irritated me in one way or another. Of course, once I look further into some of those blogs I find writing I love, and once I actually go to some of those restaurants I find I enjoy them. But first impressions mean a lot.

A couple of days ago, a friend was asking me for a restaurant recommendation. Easy task, I thought. I had some restaurants in mind and just needed to check and see if they were open and send her the websites. What should have been a 5-minute email turned into a half-hour nightmare as I slogged through websites that are more intent on impressing me with movies, music, and other annoyances than on giving me direct information.

Hear this, restaurants: We are not looking to your sites for entertainment. We want to get our information, get out, and get back to watching Eli Stone. Noise of clinking glasses or a dull roar or fancy music does not make us want to go to your restaurant more, it just tips off our employers that we are making dinner plans instead of filing our TPS reports. We don't want to sit through 30 second flash movies of how happy we'll be if we go to your restaurant. We just want the facts: When are you open, what's for dinner, and how much does it cost. And I want to do that in as few clicks as possible.

Oh, and also? We are in the Bay Area -- arguably the technology capital of the world. How difficult is it to learn to code up a simple HTML page? Why are you still making us click through to PDF's of your menus or (horrors) Word documents? It's all about time for me, and opening up the pdf takes up my precious seconds.

MY FAVORITES

Some of my favorite restaurant websites are super basic, nice to look at, and tell me all I need to know.

Spork. Looking at this website makes me want to spend my hard-earned money to hire this designer to redo all other restaurant websites. It's gorgeous.

Bar Jules. The lovely Bar Jules site changes daily and tells us what's for lunch and dinner.

Slanted Door. Chock full of information, and has a handy plug-in to make an Open Table reservation.

Arizmendi Bakery. Arizmendi's pizza changes daily, and Arizmendi has a calendar for the whole month of delicious flavors.

SITES THAT MAKE ME WANT TO SCRATCH MY EYES OUT
(warning, many of these have music)

Bix. I want to send a friend directly to Bix's list of cocktails, as I had an excellent one there the other night. Oh wait ... the whole site is in FLASH so I can't send a direct link!

Market Bar. Don't. Resize. My. Browser. Ever. (And while you're at it, you might want to get spellcheck. Mediterranean is spelled with one "t".)

Spruce. Let's review how many steps I have to go through to find the Spruce dinner menu:

1) wait for flash site to load
2) click "menus"
3) click "food"
4) click "dinner"
5) change my browser to allow pop-ups for this site
6) PDF!

House. Give us prices. Seriously. Not having prices reeks of pretentiousness and is absolutely useless.

And then we have a "bandwidth exceeded" message over at 1300 Fillmore.

Fortunately for us consumers, there are ways around these horrid websites. Menu Pages, while not the prettiest site out there, lists over 4000 menus in San Francisco. And Yelp is the easiest place I've found to figure out restaurant hours.

Let's call out all the bad restaurant websites -- which would you nominate? What are your pet peeves?