Shaker Lemon Pie from A Sweet Spoonful

You've probably heard. The New York Times and NPR are both saying pie is the new "it" dessert. In her piece for the New York Times, Julia Moskin writes "Pie had been lurking below the radar in recent years: taking cover during the ice cream trend, perhaps waiting to see which way the macaron tide would turn." Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you have another vote. Or maybe you're tired of food trend predictions altogether. Maybe, you simply like to poke fun at them as Cheryl Sternman Rule has done in her witty post, The Most Superlative Food Trends List Anywhere.

Trends aside, you've got to admit you've been seeing some major pie love lately. For her piece "Cupcakes are Dead, Long Live the Pie," Bonnie Wolf writes, "Texas and New York restaurants offer pie happy hours. Pies are showing up at weddings, and pie shops are opening in a neighborhood near you. Pies come in sweet and savory, maxi and mini, deep dish and deep-fried." Reading and musing on pie this past week got me thinking about my two very favorite spots to grab a slice. One is here in San Francisco. The other? Brooklyn, New York. Judging by what these neighborhood shops are baking each day, I'm thinking pie is here to stay.

Mission Pie: San Francisco, CA

If I lived in the Mission, I'd eat a lot of pie thanks to Mission Pie. They have a seasonally rotating menu of pies and source their fruit and produce from local and organic farmers. If you are even a distant fan of banana cream pie and haven't had a slice of theirs, your New Years Resolution has been written. I also love their Black Walnut which is not, as is often the case, too, too sweet. And they have a fabulous savory line with everything from pot pies to quiches and galettes. With their buttery walls and big communal table, this is a great spot to enjoy a flaky piece of pie and some peace and quiet right in the heart of the bustling Mission.

Mission Pie
2901 Mission St. (at 25th Street)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 282-1500

Four & Twenty Blackbirds: Brooklyn, NY

Four & Twenty Blackbirds has been getting its fair share of press lately. It seems like everyone from Ready Made Magazine to The New York Times is chatting about this charming pie shop in Gowanus, Brooklyn run by sisters Emily and Melissa. They're known for their Salted Caramel Apple pie and fruit pies made with aromatics and bitters. When I visited over Thanksgiving, we tried the Maple Custard and that infamous apple. I'm not sure if I was more smitten with the pie or the space itself. Emily and Melissa have done an amazing job of creating a very old-fashioned yet modern and breezy space that you just want to linger in for an entire afternoon. It feels good in there. No one's rushing to get to their next meeting or yammering away on their cell phones (at least when we were there--I'm sure it probably happens). The sisters do savory items as well and make one mean cup of coffee. When in Brooklyn, eat this pie.

Four & Twenty Blackbirds
439 3rd Avenue (at 8th Street)
Brooklyn, NY 11215
Park Slope / Gowanus
(718) 499-2917

The Winter Fancy Food Show is here in San Francisco through Tuesday, sprawling through the windowless, blue-carpeted acres of the Moscone Center. It's huge, filling both the North and South Halls on either side of Howard Street, over 2000 vendors on display, all here to make deals, talk shop, taste, schmooze, scope out the competition, see which way the market is moving. It's the biggest food-product show in the country, attracting all levels of the industry from big distributors with furry-suited mascots to small cheesemakers. The sleek Italians are here, promoting the wines of Sardinia, just a few aisles away from the guys touting a line of wine-bottle carriers and gift bags.

So what's on display? Everything. It's both cheering and depressing at once. Everyone seems to have the utmost faith in their product, a shiny white-teeth optimism that of course America needs bacon-flavored microwave popcorn that's also vegetarian and kosher, or applesauce in astronaut-style squeeze bags. Would you like to try a glass of water shipped from Siberia? Wouldn't you like to fancy up your dessert presentations with chocolate-truffle foam, now in a handy squirt can? Goji berries are good for you, you know. Here, you can eat them in cookies.

Everyone has a gimmick. These truffles are vegan and aligned with Indian ayurvedic practice, stamped with what could be the logo of a yoga studio and filled with coconut ginger-lemongrass ganache. These crunchy little cheese straws are made by real buttery-accented Southern ladies handing them out as if at a United Daughters of the Confederacy tea.

Tabletop wedding fountains spout ginger-haberno barbecue glaze as an entire Hyatt's worth of men in dark blue suits crunch spreadsheet numbers behind brightly lit cheese displays. Pisco sours are being poured in the Peruvian aisle (a good thing), Lincolnshire elderflower soda in the British one. All the chocolate is decadent, all the cakes indulgent but guilt-free. And everyone is still smiling, smiling, under the fluorescent lights, snapping up samples and trading shop talk about warehouses and brokers, reps and prices. All the packaging is bright, brighter, brightest. Hand-sanitizing stations are set up at the end of every few aisles, even as it's impossible to estimate how many fingers have dug into the big bowls of loose nuts on display at this table, or scooped into that oozing wedge of Brie. One uses a toothpick, looks for untouched edges or single-serving cups, and hopes for the best.

So what was worth trying? The new whole-milk ricotta at West Marin's Bellwether Farms, creamily rich and lusciously smooth, the product of months of experimentation by artisanal-dairy matriarch Cindy Callahan and her son Liam. Unlike their Jersey and sheep's-milk ricottas, made the traditional way from the leftover whey pressed out of their other cheeses, this ricotta starts with full-fat milk that's cultured, like yogurt, then left to coagulate and ripen.

The company's sheep herd is expanding, with lambing happening year-round now. This means more milk, which means the rest of the country will finally get the chance to breakfast on Bellwether's excellent sheep's-milk yogurt, as the company finally begins distribution beyond California. Callahan is upbeat; 2009 was a very good year for her sheep's-milk products. Down the road, she hopes, might be a Bellweather blue.

Representing the green hills of Vermont, the Grafton Village Cheese Company is looking back to the roots of its popular Cheddar. Tasty, wax-sealed blocks of easy-to-love New England cheddar made be Grafton's stock in trade, but right now they're most excited about their old English-style wheels of bandage-wrapped cheddar.

Raw milk from their two best farms goes straight from the milking parlors into the cheese-making rooms. Once the cheeses are formed and cloth-wrapped, they're sent over the Cellars at Jasper Hill, a custom aging facility built by the small-batch cheesemakers of Jasper Hill. The cloth wrapping lets the cheese breathe as it ages, collecting more flavor-inducing bacteria and developing an alluring bovine funk over 16 months in the caves. It's not quite up to the grand complexity of a great English cheddars like Montgomery, but it's closer than most. So far, the company is selling it by the wheel to a small number of cheese stores and high-end supermarkets.

Sauerkraut hasn't hit the scene yet, although it feels like a safe bet that it will by next year. Instead, there's the palate-cleansing, corpse-reviving blast of Mother-in-Law's Kimchi neatly balanced between crunch and bite, heat and ferment.

Putting her mother and aunt to work serving up samples is company founder Lauryn Chun, who got the idea after hauling jars of her mother's homemade kimchi home to New York City following every visit home. Friends devoured the spicy condiment and begged for more. Now, she sells her Mason jars of fermented cabbage in fancy New York gourmet shops like Dean & Deluca as well at Bay Area-based online retailer Foodzie. While Chun organizes kimchi-and-wine pairings in Manhattan, her mother stands by a more traditional approach. "Koreans eat it three times a day," she tells curious customers at her daughter's stand. "If we don't have kimchi, we can't eat."

Something to drink? There's lemon-ginger and berry-hibiscus kombucha, ready to retail at $3.50 a pop over at the Honest Tea booth. It tastes like kombucha does, like diluted cider vinegar with a hint of fruit. It will be rolling out nationally in March, and already the spokespeople at the booth can hear the happy hippie ka-ching at the registers of Whole Foods and elsewhere.

More alluring are the Edwardian English-summer drinks from Belvoir: a lightly herbal elderflower pressé the color of pale champagne, a vigorous, not-too-sweet ginger beer. Lovely on their own, they'd also make wonderful bases for summer cocktails, if San Francisco's bartenders ever look up from their current hot-and-heavy with absinthe and bitters. What could be more ladylike than a double-elderflower whammy with the ubiquitous St. Germain elderflower liqueur?

And then, of course, comes chocolate. Chocolate is everywhere. It's still decadent, still indulgent, saving the world through fair-trade sourcing, scouring out those annoying free radicals, filled with everything from red wine to lemongrass. The cream of the crop, though, is elegant Valrhona, still clad in French Vogue-editor matte black. But the doors to the chateau have been eased open slowly, as the company launches an expanded line of baking chocolates geared towards the serious home cook, along with more single-origin bars and bonbon assortments. A box of 52 squares, each a single bite, is divvied up between 4 levels of cocoa percentage (from a 33% milk to a 70% dark) and 4 places of origin. It's the size of a small jewelry box, and much more of a sure thing, especially for the ladies on your list.

Ginger continues its ascendancy, in both sweet and savory alike. But never better than in the teeth-sticking chewies of the Ginger People, who clearly know just what this sample-weary audience needs.

KQED Radio's Forum: The Decade in Food
In the past decade, the Bay Area's hippest food has changed from teetering geometric towers of raw tuna to a simple slab of pork with a side of potatoes. The dainty Apple-tini ordered in the early part of the decade has given way to the masculine Manhattan. Forum talks about the food and cocktail trends of the decade.

Host: Scott Shafer
Guest: Lessley Anderson, senior editor of Chow.com

Barbecue is literally the slowest of slow foods, not a sauce, but a process, a ponderous and primitive one often measured in days as much as hours. It's much more than mere technique. Like a Bedouin goat roast or a Hawaiian luau, barbecue is a festive carnivorous rite, the sort of party humans all over the world have thrown ever since they could catch the beasts they wanted to eat. Barbecue is a distinctly American tradition, however, and it warrants esteem in our food culture, one that increasingly values authenticity, heritage, and, importantly, a bargain. Historically, barbecue began as poor food. Indirect smoking with hardwood chips and charcoal renders sumptuous feeds from large, inexpensive, uncompromising cuts of meat the non-wealthy can readily afford. Today, due to trend as well as economic circumstance, food writers and chefs champion sustainability, rhapsodize about nose-to-tail eating, and fetishize la cucina povera across cultures. Hip local foodies head to starred eateries to scarf humble ribollita and marrow, and food glossies aggressively explore the homey cooking traditions of everyday people in distant locales.

Even though food tied firmly to a place invariably tastes best in its native setting, barbecue should have a stronger presence here. Sadly, like real bagels and perfect pizza slices, there's something about it San Francisco doesn't quite get.

L.A. export Baby Blues BBQ sits in an old pharmacy storefront on Mission Street at the base of Bernal Hill in San Francisco. The restaurant headed up the S.F. Chronicle's flimsy "new-school" Bay Area barbecue round-up back in February. In the article, the proprietor described his establishment's style as a hybrid, with dry rub from Texas, greens from Kansas City, and grilled shrimp from New Orleans. While only one of those things necessarily has anything whatsoever to do with barbecue, I withheld preliminary judgement, assuming I'd look for proof in the pork. The same writer, Amanda Gold, penned a largely favorable review less than two months later, hailing Baby Blues' offerings as "spot-on," and singling out the brisket and ribs in particular for accolades.

The brisket was, in fact, good -- shredded, not sliced as is customary, slightly sweet, with a broad, warm flavor that belied the stringy appearance. On the other hand, the chicken was desert-dry and the pork shoulder shockingly tasteless. Sauce helped but it shouldn't have been necessary. Good barbecue doesn't truly need sauce, maybe just a splash of vinegary Crystal. The Baby Blues macaroni and cheese was pretty tasty but that came as no surprise. The tidy tureen of pasta, butter, cream, and cheese congregated in creamy, crust-topped ooze resembled a miniature version of one of the less flamboyant goofily greasy things you'd see on thisiswhyyourefat.com. Pork and beans: dreary canned ones of various stripes, topped with some of the same tasteless pork shoulder. Mashed sweet potatoes: one-dimensional and cloying. Great sides are not a prerequisite for even serviceable barbecue but they sure help, especially when a bunch of people are trying to eat until they can't walk.

Dodging categorization is no boon when it comes to barbecue. Homogenizing its varied nuances with the perceived intent of garnering broader appeal smacks of desperation or at least excessive compromise, not inclusivity. Barbecue pit-masters, are curators of sorts. They consciously nurture and carry on a tradition, just making something they really, really know exactly the way they think it should be made for anyone who happens to be interested. Diners prize authenticity when it comes to regional Italian fare; they should when it comes to barbecue as well.

Maybe we're barking up the wrong tree even hoping to find what we're looking for at a place like Baby Blues. Throughout the barbecue belt, you'll eat some of the best barbecue in the world at church benefit suppers, desolate country grocery stores on two-lane roads, and strange little delis straddling dusty cracks in the interstate, not just at grand 'cue emporiums with bright lights and long lines.

Fittingly, in keeping with another current trend, that of back alley catering and restaurant-esque entities sprouting up all over town, the d.i.y. barbecue operations churning away on the edges of the local food scene actually best the likes of Baby Blues, Memphis Minnie's, and Big Nate's. There's definitely something appealing about outlaw status, and barbecue wears it especially well, even here. While the best pork barbecue I've had in San Francisco had to fly 2,000 miles from a deli case in Allen County, Kentucky, there are a few local super-smokers doing it right under-the-radar:

Try ordering a spread from Oakland-based Sneaky's BBQ for your next business meeting. Since 2008, the smoker-in-chief, a native of South Carolina, has been faithfully recreating the barbecue he knew back home -- husky, succulent pork shoulder with pepper-flecked vinegar-laced red sauce and racks of chewy baby-back ribs -- and delivering it, quite sneakily, in an unmarked van (red like the sauce), to homes, offices, and even park parties. It's popping off on Yelp and Chowhound for a reason. It tastes like vigilance. When you're eating it, you easily imagine the whole ritual -- the meat hitting the grill just after rush hour, and coming off, sticky-black, hours and hours later, as well as the sleepless night vigil, the sense, perhaps, of beers drunk and cigarettes smoked, of bleary eyes peering down and smudged hands reaching to open and close flutes at the proper intervals while the rest of the neighborhood sleeps.

The Broken Record is a mildly Zeigeist-y bar in the Excelsior. Chef Ryan Ostler, an alum of Boulevard, doesn't own it but he cooks from behind a wooden, windowed counter buried in the back. He's a Mission Street Food veteran, no stranger to the underground eatery game. The bar's offerings run the gamut from frito pies and amazing 'kraut-topped boar and pheasant sausages (sweet, high-flying stoner-pub party fare, yes, but not barbecue) to pulled pork sandwiches (serious barbecue). Of course, it's a chef's whim kind of place at heart. Sometimes, you show up and the pork isn't done. Or it is done, but it hasn't been carved up yet. Or it was ready hours ago and now there's none left. According to Ostler, they smoke every day, but quantities are limited. If you miss out, eat a sausage. Barbecue is not, after all, on-demand.

Baby Blues BBQ
3149 Mission St. in San Francisco
415-896-4250

Sneaky's BBQ

The Broken Record
1166 Geneva Ave. in San Francisco
415-963-1713