At Los Jarritos, the Reyes Padilla family's sit-down eatery on the corner of South Van Ness and 20th, components of the restaurant's fantastic chilaquiles remo are reminiscent of canonized comfort foods from other cultures.

Like noodles in a day-old lasagne, the quarters of fried corn tortilla are pasta-like, smothered in tomato sauce, congealed, pinioned under an oozing crown of cheese.  Nestled amongst the bits of tortilla, the long-simmered strands of chicken taste as if they have been lifted from a huffing stockpot of soup.  Scrambled eggs are there too, slippery and elusive, binding everything into a velvety mass further enriched and enlivened by a pour of crema.  As the crema melts and disappears, the effect is smooth:  none of the comforting elements stand out unless they're deliberately eaten apart from the others; taken together, the flavors are big and familiar, yet invigorating and, to the uninitiated, new.

Sometimes, the homiest dishes -- foods without pretense or artifice -- are most revealing about the cultures from which they spring, and inspire the most debate amongst their devotees.  However, from countless regional Mexican renditions -- like white sauces in Sinaloa and Guadalajara's polenta-like cazuela cook-downs -- to American adaptations that echo Tex-Mex migas, all chilaquiles aim to soothe -- regardless of a particular variation's provenance and claims to authenticity.

The other weekend, hungover and exhausted from a morning of pick-up basketball, I was looking for comfort in sustenance.  I found it easily, several thousand calories' worth:  two distinct and excellent versions of chilaquiles served up at two very different Mission District establishments.

The chilaquiles at Los Jarritos aren't particularly spicy, merely salty and luxurious.  Cranberry-colored and riddled with ice, a pitcher-sized glass column of agua fresca de jamaica -- a refreshing tea-like infusion of dried hibiscus flowers -- compliments the richness with tart notes as well as sweetness.

Furthermore, you need not make a breakfast of chilaquiles alone.  The "Mexicano" side of the divided desayunos menu -- the one from which you should be ordering -- is rife with other enticing offerings, like machaca, a melange of flank steak, scrambled eggs, onions, tomatoes, and peppers, and huevos divorciados.  The latter boasts tender pork cubes in two sauces -- a red, oily chile colorado and a spicy, slightly sour chile verde -- kept separate and served atop two runny fried egg rounds.  The basket of pillowy, sweating tortillas comes in handy here. Strips of the thick discs are good for sopping sauce and scooping up errant morsels, but, nibbled unadorned, they also offer a welcome respite from the heavy assault of pig and eggs.

Interestingly, there are huevos con amor as well, but they are not as delicious and, surprisingly, no less expensive.

Inside, Los Jarritos looks as bold as its food tastes, like a typically kitschy roadside diner wonderfully lost in translation.  A chalkboard announces specials like birria and menudo.  The tabletops are a lively turquoise; sombreros swing from hooks high up on the walls alongside toy guitars in pastel hues and large black-and-white photographs.  A miniature plastic marlin peers down blankly from a lower perch.  Tiny painted drinking mugs -- the restaurant's namesake -- hang in bunches between the windows.
 
By comparison, the interior of the four-year-old Los Pastores is demure:  a floor tiled in matte brown squares, a beige back counter, and peach walls dotted with a few faded reviews in simple frames.  If the inside of the restaurant is austere, the outside is barely visible at all, even from just across the street -- a narrow storefront at the foot of Bernal Hill, right where Cortland runs into Mission.

Chilaquiles con huevos from Los Pastores. Photo by Bucko W.

Here, the chilaquiles con huevos barely resemble their chicken-laden counterparts at Los Jarritos. Tortilla triangles are fried until they are brittle and brown around the edges, and arranged over a shallow pool of thin green sauce shot through with citrus and chile heat.  Cojita-studded crema tops the chips, darting out in little rivulets from under a trio of overlapping fried eggs that leak yolk at the slightest twist of a fork.  When the big plate arrives, the individual parts are distinct, uncombined, but their sum emerges gradually over the course of eating.  The first few bites contain crisp tortilla, a little sauce, and a sliver or two of egg.  Pour the bowlful of extra sauce over the eggs, and let it soak in.  Once the sauce has done its work, and the broken yolks from the eggs have been swirled in, the tortilla chips will be soft, with just a pleasurable hint of the old crunch remaining.  You can order chilaquiles with steak in lieu of eggs but either way, skip coffee, and instead slurp a pineapple agua fresca -- ultra-sweet, extremely cold, and topped with pale froth like a soda jerk's quaffable confection.

Because chef, owner, and server Irma Calderon does all the work herself, service at Los Pastores is fastest when the room is empty -- early on a weekend morning.  Bustling Los Jarritos is a more polished operation, but a server still sidles up and cracks, "time's up!" five minutes after the menus have been opened -- not that you really care.

Visit either restaurant on a Saturday at any time, order up some chilaquiles, and indulge in a self-satisfied smirk as you contemplate the mornings many neighborhood brunchers are putting themselves through:  forty-five minute waits on crammed sidewalks for mediocore food they'll end up scarfing in a 20-minute frenzy.  

Oh, you might be waiting too, but at least you'll be at a table, comforted by the chilaquiles in your near future, sipping an agua fresca, and enjoying good fellowship -- ingredients of which great morning meals are made.

Outside of Schmidt's looking into restaurant. Photo by Aimee Shapiro

One day last week, the lady and I had plans to visit Schmidt's for dinner. When we're deciding what to eat, we tend to favor collaboration and compromise, at least I do. Sometimes, rarely, our tastes don't intersect, and I always want to find dishes we both want, even if it means passing on something I'd really, really like to try. In the case of Schmidt's, a sleek, two month-old German eatery in the Mission District, I knew what I wanted, and would accept no proxies: hasenpfeffer, a red wine-soaked saddle and leg of rabbit with braised lingonberry-sweetened cabbage. In the hours leading up to our meals together, we typically examine menus online and discuss what appeals via texts and emails. Frequently, we have a pretty good idea of what we'll order before we walk through the restaurant's doors. On this occasion, I'd done my research, and knew, without question, that I had to hit that hop. The problem was, I wasn't so sure my lady would dance with me.

I positioned myself accordingly. At around 1:00 p.m., I sent off a quick text:

Was thinking about bunny. Now not so sure.

Her swift response, even more succinct, confirmed my fears:

I will not eat the bun.

Disappointed yet far from resigned, I honed a strategy. It was too early for negotiations. I ate lunch and crafted a diversionary text, giving the impression I was feeling flexible and perhaps willing to eat something else altogether:

Salad good. Still hungry. Tonight maybe fish if on special.

Rabbit is a polarizing meat. The world is full of people like my lady: hyper-carnivorous, adventurous gourmets who gleefully inhale piles of Korean barbecue, fried chicken dinners, and entire flocks in the form of steaming shawarmas, yet turn meek and wane at the prospect of the Easter Bunny, sauteed, on a plate. Rabbits are cute but surely no cuter than fuzzy sheep, baby chickens, and pink piglets -- cuddly creatures we're generally more comfortable cooing over and then, respectfully, consuming. Rabbits are also pets, but even those of us who have never fed and groomed one feel as if we know them. From folklore-steeped tricksters Bugs and Bre'er, to Thumper, Alice's elusive White, and the whole floppy-eared cast of Watership Down, the rabbit has an enduring and frequently anthropomorphized presence in popular culture, one that surpasses those of other commonly eaten animals. In whatever form, such familiar images, voices, stories, and carried connotations grip folks, and that, more than a real rabbit's bobbing tail, vacuous little eye-specks, and pink twitching nose, contributes to the skittishness diners display when there's hare to be had.

In many cultures, rabbits are a symbol of fertility and rebirth. They're associated with the season Spring and, of course, Easter. In real-life, they're viewed as gentle, vegetarian, harmless, and, despite their breeding proclivities, somehow suggestive of innocence. However, to gardeners like my mother in Louisville, Kentucky, they are far from innocent or harmless; they are a nuisance, a virulent menace fond of hopping, rustling and sniffing, through the backyard shrubbery every April to terrorize lettuce, cucumbers, squash, beans, herbs, and flowers. My mom doesn't hunt or even eat meat, but I doubt she'd mind if Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam showed up one year, shotguns at the ready, to declare war on her tormentors, and keep the neighborhood bistro stocked with lapin all summer long.

Back in San Francisco, it was 6:30 p.m. My lady and I rolled into Schmidt's, ravenous. As I'd suspected, there was no fish on special. My lady wanted a sausage, which was fine by me. We had to find another entree. I knew exactly what that had to be but I had to bide my time. If she sensed my profound resolve, she did not let on.

"I just don't think I can do it," she said, her eyes peering out, just barely visible above the menu held in front of her face.
"Do what?" I asked, feigning cluelessness.
"The bunny," she said, sighing. "I'm sure it's amazing, but I don't want to eat it."
"It's cool," I answered, sort of shrugging lightly and waving my hands as if I didn't care. "No bunny, no problem. I'll get a sausage too, maybe the duck one."
"Two sausages? They don't make the sausages here. If you're writing about this, we should get something they make here too," she said, ignoring my allusion.
"Well, I don't want blood sausage or the veal," I countered, gesturing towards the listing for an egg-topped schnitzel festooned with white anchovies, capers, and cauliflower. It was time to play hardball, to throw down cards, and make a final, decisive play. "I'm getting the rabbit," I said, folding my menu and reaching for the beer list. "Will you eat it?" I didn't look up as I spoke, trying to appear focused on selecting an appropriate brew.
There was a pause. "Hell yes."

And so, maneuvering ceased; we were eating rabbit.

In the classic 1949 cartoon Bowery Bugs, Bugs Bunny, pacing in circles around his den, carrot in mid-gnaw, makes, in that distinctive, chattering, Flatbush bark, his case for survival to a downtrodden New York City bookie in search of a good luck charm. "These rabbit's feet never brought me any luck," Bugs points out, pleading. "Look at the lives rabbits lead: Dogs, hunters, and hasenpfeffer."

Hasenpfeffer, a red wine-soaked saddle and leg of rabbit with braised lingonberry-sweetened cabbage. Photo by Aimee Shapiro

Bugs could use some perspective. If the version at Schmidt's serves as any indication, hassenpfeffer is an unpretentious yet noble and exceedingly delicious way for a rabbit to end up. For a goofy, unintelligent, nervous wreck of a mammal, this beast sure tastes serious, deep, and soulful after a trip through chef Matt Shapiro's kitchen. Sweet shards of pale meat tumble off delicate bones rising up from a creamy, golden moat of rich sauce, a purple mountain of cabbage looming behind. The picture currently floating around the Internet (to be fair, in the company of a positive, well-crafted mention) unfortunately makes Shapiro's hassenpfeffer look like a symptom of an obscure, unsavory medical condition, or something from one of the Alien movies, a mound of extraterrestrial dung, perhaps. I sympathize. My first crack at pictures in the restaurant's dark dining room turned out so badly I had to outsource art to a real photographer.

Bean Salad. Photo by Aimee Shapiro

The rabbit was the defining triumph but not so magnificent as to obscure the rest of the meal: an excellent Thuringer brat, snappy and juicy, best with a touch of an amazing sweet mustard (Schmidt's sells it, along with other German products such as mini-wieners, bottled, floating in water), a subtle, nutty, toothsome salad of green and waxed bean strips with hazelnuts, fried sage, and a citrus vinaigrette, and spaetzle, sans cheese, in fluffy, mild strands, like scrambled eggs colliding with a bowl of cereal -- in a good way. Far from the sort of heavily branded hot-spot designed to lure diners from around the city, Schmidt's is a new neighborhood gem the neighborhood can actually afford -- truly, simply, a very fine place to eat, much like Walzwerk, the owners' first restaurant, though more austere in appearance, with better food. We ordered some bread too, with the idea we'd use it to sop up every last bit of rabbit essence. This was unnecessary. The rabbit came with plenty of bread, the dense, heavy German sort. Unlike less refined purveyors of wurst, Schmidt's doesn't bludgeon you with excessive portions. Bread abuse in the line of duty -- respect for the rabbit's last luscious remnants -- caused me to walk at a 45 degree angle all the way home, stuffed, my body unable to conjure energy for any task beyond digestion. Yet even as I limped, 'kraut-addled, harebrained, breaded, and in need of a comfortable chair, part of me wanted to head back, to find a way to eat some more rabbit. To rock it, to roll it, slop it, and stroll it, once again -- at the hop.

Schmidt's
2400 Folsom St
(between 20th St & 21st St)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 401-0200
*Cash only

The joint endeavor of Mission District housemates Kale Daikon and Eggplant Kohlrabi (a.k.a. Katrina Dodson and Erin Klenow), Weird Vegetables sprouts a cut above most local food blogs. Do not, for starters, confuse it with a younger, much less weird San Francisco-based rival going by the same name, a site dedicated, seemingly quite seriously, to "celebrating diversity throughout the plant kingdom." In contrast, the one of which I write inhabits a special dimension of biological whimsy, where the crisper spills forth a menagerie of anthropomorphic leaves, roots, and legumes, and a trip to the farmer's market feels like a twisted safari through unfamiliar lands. Stuffed into the blog's strange sieve of language and thought, vegetables are not merely waxed, sticker-tagged produce; they are characters. Identities, needs, wants, and feelings squirm within their husks and peels as well as flavors and nutrients. For Dodson and Klenow, they are ripe springboards for gleeful leaps into philosophy, linguistics, and general poetic absurdity as well as cookery.

Each entry often starts with a vegetable one of them has picked up at the store or market. From there, the specimen is assessed, first as object, then as food, an introduction irrigated with historical context and preparation suggestions, and subsequently sacrificed at the altar of their imagination. Take, for example, the August 2008 post on the lemon cucumber, in which Dodson sums up the chosen veggie as "a piece of produce that boasts the vaguely exotic yet familiar allure of the hybrid, the indeterminate, the mestizo...this fruit masquerading as a vegetable disguised as a fruit (a kind of double drag, F to V to F)." In the April 2009 treatise on farro ("Long Ago, a Farro Way"), a lisp-kissed summary of The Princess Bride acts as preamble to a discussion of the ancient grain's venerability and value, "farro" being, after all, a word perhaps best spoken with "a faraway look" in one's eyes. Clearly, vegetables are weird, often much weirder than we think, and the ways in which people treat these things they plant and eat says something about people too: namely, that they are weird as well. In early June, I visited the bloggers at their house. We skipped through the magic mustard greens garden, scouted scapes, and talked turnips.

Andrew Simmons: I like how your blog shares practical advice about actually cooking vegetables but also presents them as vibrant players in a somewhat goofy bio-cultural drama. What got you into vegetables? Did the blog evolve organically?

Katrina Dodson: I go to farmers' markets all the time and I spend a lot of time around food people, so I've learned something about vegetables from them as well.

AS: Why are vegetables weird?

KD: Certain types of vegetables can be weird because people don't normally eat them or aren't used to them, or they can be more common individual vegetables, like carrots and potatoes, that just look weird. I'm also really interested in the weirdness of language and how strange the naming of vegetables can be. I'm working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature right now so I think about metaphors all the time. That's the latest level of weirdness on the blog, the newest terrain.

Erin Klenow: I like how the name of a vegetable can freak someone out. The fact that something is called a blood orange is enough to get people to avoid eating it. And nipple fruit? It's pretty funny.

KD: Also known as titty fruit.

EK: It's often noted that people have aversions to eating gross parts of animals but when I mention a certain vegetable to some people, they just go ew ew ew.

KD: There's also the misguided idea that vegetarianism is boring, like you run out of things to eat because you just eat vegetables and nothing else. We're not vegetarians, by the way.

EK: When people ask me if I'm a vegetarian, I just say I only eat expensive meat.

KD: I taught a class at Berkeley on food called "Eating and Being Eaten." It was all about how food is always more than just food. Having that dialogue in my head really affected the blog.

AS: What did the class read?

KD: A lot of different things. There was a food politics section. We read some of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and talked about My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki and Kafka's A Hunger Artist. There was a whole meat theme. We talked about cannibalism too, because that’s a topic I’m really interested in.

AS: You have to bring that up at some point when you're talking about the idea of eating meat.

KD: There's a necessary violence that happens in the mere act of survival. You have to acknowledge it. Even vegetarians consume living things.

AS: When you write about vegetables, they sound like animals or aliens, bizarre creatures that might scuttle off the table. It's carnivorous, in a sense. Why don't you write about fruit?

EK: We do sometimes.

KD: They're technically a subset of vegetables. Vegetables are weirder than fruit though. People are more okay with weird fruit. They're sugary, luscious, and voluptuous. Fruit is meant to seduce. That's its biological function. Vegetables are gross. They have weird outgrowths. They're all like take it or leave it. In the lemon cucumber post, we talked about how "vegetable" is a cultural determination whereas "fruit" is biological. A fruit is any plant with an enclosed seed that comes from a flower. That's scientifically established, but vegetables are really undefined. They're just the edible parts of plants. Technically, anything goes.

AS: Erin, do you work in the food world?

EK: I was a waitress for a long time. Three years ago, I worked as an expeditor at Quince. I had to learn everything on the menu. I read a lot of food writing too. I grew up in Sonoma so I was always close to people who produced food, though I wasn't very conscious of it until later.

KD: I'm from San Francisco. We went to Berkeley together.

AS: I liked how, in the black radish entry, you compiled a list of black foods to see, in part, what they have in common. They're all polarizing. I've eaten black radish before so I think I know what you're talking about when you describe it as being "very radish-y." How would you describe a "radish-y" person?

KD: Kind of abrasive. Kind of funny. Acerbic. Sometimes goes a little too far.

EK: A little refreshing but also overwhelming.

AS: If you were a vegetable, which would you be?

KD: I'm clearly Kale Daikon -- my initials. I said onion once when someone asked me that but it's not, you know, because I have so many layers and you have to peel them off...

AS: But the onion is so common, the cheapest vegetable in the store...

KD: I was feeling like one at the time.

EK: I've always identified with eggplant -- for Erin, I guess. Eggplant are a little inconsistent. They can be delicious and creamy or bitter.

AS: I don't want to read too much into that, but you might be the kind of person that, given proper attention and care, can be a very pleasant cohort in friendship...

EK: I like that it's purple.

KD: I have to say that now I've picked up more of an affinity to the carrot. They're unexpectedly weird.

EK: I could be a turnip too now that I think about it. Roasted, they're so good. I like them but I think about things I want to eat and they aren't usually something I'd want to be.

AS: Maybe be something no one would eat.

KD: Like bracken? But they serve it at Cha-Ya.