There's nothing like the "Bauer Bump."

Blogs, Tweets, Yelp write-ups, email newsletters, check-ins on Foursquare-- the new social-media options may be the shiniest, coolest toys on the block right now, as evidenced by the full house attending The Future of Food Media, one of several industry seminars presented as part of SF Chefs 2010.

But after a 90 minute discussion between Oracle corporate chef Robbie Lewis, Yelp executive Ruggy Joesten, Marlowe owner Anna Weinberg, PR specialist Andrew Freeman, and moderator Paolo Lucchesi of San Francisco Chronicle's Inside Scoop SF, it came down to this: A great review from Michael Bauer, the Chronicle's longtime head restaurant critic, is still the golden ticket that every restaurant dreams of, the one sure-fire way to guarantee a full house for months to come.

For the longtime print writers, editors, and public-relations folks in the audience (as well as, presumably, Bauer himself, who was seated unobtrusively near the back of the room), it was satisfying to hear Anna Weinberg, owner of Marlowe, insist that Bauer's dubbing their lamb-laced bacon cheeseburger the best in the city had an instant, and huge, impact on her business.

(And that burger was no accident; Weinberg and her chef Jennifer Puccio did loads of food trend research before opening, looking for what local diners really get passionate about. Which turned out to be, unsurprisingly, pizza and burgers.)

For all that Yelp's Joesten had to say about his company's proprietary, scam-searching algorithm for rating and ranking user reviews, a smart professional critic whose palate and judgment you trust is still a more reliable guide than a blogger hoping for perks and freebies, or an anonymous poster with any number of axes to grind.

And there's the other bonus: good writing! Among all the long-winded digressions about data mining and statistical analytics (which got many of the industry types and interested foodies fidgeting in their seats and yes, probably checking their tweets), no one mentioned the enjoyment value of professional criticism until the closing minutes, when audience member Jan Newberry, food editor of San Francisco magazine, noted that no one goes to Yelp for the prose, whereas good criticism is also good writing--entertaining, informative, able to put a restaurant, its chef, and its scene into a social, gastronomic, and cultural context.

(As a former restaurant critic for both the Bay Guardian and San Francisco magazine, I was often asked how I "got paid to eat." My response? I didn't get paid to eat, I got paid to write. Eating was just what I happened to write about.)

Still, there was lots to say about how a restaurant, or a chef, can build a community and a brand through judicious use of Twitter, blogs, Yelp, and more.

As Weinberg noted, "It's a free 24 hour a day focus group. Looking on places like Yelp, you can start to see trends. If 10 posts in a week tell you the soup isn't so great or the bartender was rude, you know that maybe it's time to get a better soup, or a better bartender."

Said Lewis, "You can use to engage your customers, start a direct dialogue with guests, ask for feedback rather than it getting blasted all over the internet. It can be great for customer touch-back, especially when they've given you positive comments. Thanking someone for a positive post builds loyalty instantly."

According to Lewis, customers love to get a glimpse "behind the velvet rope," and hearing that the sommelier is really jazzed about a new Cab or that the pastry chef is doing something fantastic with the season's first pluots can galvanize these would-be insiders into showing up that very night.

But how much transparency is too much?

Said Lucchesi, to much laughter from the audience, "You know, Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin in NYC just started tweeting. Now, he's James Bond suave, with an olive-oil French accent, probably one of the world's most respected chefs. But his tweets read like a 12-year-old girl is writing them!"

The Mayor was a no-show to the Grand Tent's grand ribbon-cutting shortly after the panel concluded, but that didn't stop the crowd from oohing over the dramatic sabering of a magnum of Domaine Chandon, or the star-studded posse of chefs and restauranteurs clustered around the thick orange ribbon. And with a scissor and a snip, the crowd surged forward to check out Friday's main event, "Hog in the Fog," a food-and-cocktail walk-around under a big white tent in Union Square.

It helped to like pork in all its myriad forms, since besides the figs, grapes, and Cowgirl Creamery cheeses offered at the CUESA table, there was almost nothing for vegetarians, save a lot of tasty cocktails. Table after table offered pork cured, pork braised, pork shredded, or pork confit'd.

No pork crudo was in evidence, but there were plenty of jiggly slices of "head and hoof" terrine topped with pickled mustard seeds. (Made by Chris Cosentino of Incanto, as if you had to ask).

Poggio's Peter McNee laid out a lavish spread of salume, all made from a single pig, including sliced "pigstrami," mortadella, chocolate-brown "bloodella," and more, plus poached cotechino sausage over lentils (a classic Bolognese pairing) and fermented summer sausage on sauerkraut.

Homer Simpson would have been in heaven ("Porkchops and bacon, my two favorite animals!") but after the sixth or seventh porky bite, the octopus tentacles made by A16's Liza Shaw starting looking mighty good.

Nicolette Manescalchi, Liza Shaw and Ross Wunderlich

Why octopus? "Well, I love squid, octopus, all that stuff." said Shaw. Sometimes you have to choose between cooking for the people or cooking for chefs. Today, I decided to cook for the chefs. The people will follow!"

And her octopus tentacles on a stick, with slippery onion and a vivid, herby green-tomato salsa verde, were double-plus good.

You could wash down all that pork with many different cocktails, as long as your taste ran to tart, dry, and spicy. San Francisco bartenders continue to love their bitters, from the aromatic bitters (made from cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, and cassia) in the Rye Buck (Wild Turkey, house-made ginger syrup, lime) from Rye to the orange bitters in the cayenne sugar-rimmed Smoking Gun (Combier orange liqueur, Hennessey Black cognac, smoked peach puree) from Otis.

Everything seemed to have lemon or lime, ginger or cinnamon, plus a dash of herbal/anise flavor, in the form of Chartreuse, Herbsaint, or absinthe. Acknowledging that bartenders have their groupies and their name-brand just like chefs, each bar table had a board announcing the bartender's name and his (yes, they were all male) liquor of choice above the table.

The next morning, it was time for the Anolon Chef Challenge: Restaurant Family Feud (Delfina vs. Spruce), hosted by the Food Network's Aida Mollenkamp and judged by Jan Newberry, Steffan Terje (Perbacco, Barbacco) and Chronicle editor Miriam Morgan. The same conference room was now a Top Chef-style kitchen, with portable cooktop (but no running water), myriad bottles of wine and olive oil, and both a secret ingredient and a mystery basket of seasonal produce, courtesy of CUESA.

The secret ingredient? Local sustainable seafood, including Monterey Bay squid, sardines, and sole. The produce basket had just about everything you could find at Ferry Plaza: tomatoes of all sizes and colors, new potatoes, corn, herbs, figs, nectarines, melons, plums, onions, leeks, and more. The challenge? Three courses, one hour, two chefs on each team.

Mark Sullivan from Spruce

As you might imagine, chefs know how to focus, and halfway through their allotted time, you could hone a Wusthof knife off the single-minded attention beaming down from Delfina's Craig Stoll and Anthony Strong and Spruce's Mark Sullivan and Ben Cohn.

Craig Stoll from Delfina

They had little time or energy for chit-chat, which left Mollenkamp to carry the show, without TV's benefit of tomato-chopping close-ups or suspense-building commercial breaks. But the judges did chime in here and there, as when Mollenkamp asked Terje about his favorite summer produce.

"Summer is hard for me," Terje admitted. "It's like culinary ADD. Winter is more forgiving. Now, when something hits the market, you have to be ready for it right away."

Delfina dishes

The final menus? For Delfina, handmade tonarelli pasta with sardines, fennel, grapes, capers, and toasted breadcrumbs, followed by an impromptu toss of charred peppers, anchovies, and poached squid with pureed and diced tomatoes, lemon, capers and olives, and finally rolled sole poached with fish fumet, white wine, and herbs over tomatoes stewed in tomato juice and camomile tea.

Spruce dishes

For Spruce, the meal began with a clear tomato-water gazpacho with diced tomatoes and mint, followed by seared sardine over a pork-and-tomato broth with peppers and smoked paprika, then poached sole and squid with leeks, potatoes, and a basil pistou.

The winner? By just the smallest of margins, Delfina. The audience cheered, the chefs toasted each other with well-deserved beers, and the audience, tantalized by unbearably delicious aromas (but no tastes) during the past two hours, headed to the Grand Tent for another chef-and-cocktail go-round.

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?

A provocative question, especially for a food-loving town in a beef-righteous nation. It's a question that I can't even answer, really, not having sampled every burger in the Bay Area, or even the smaller list of San Francisco cult favorites.

But one thing I can tell you is that the burger at the newly opened Spruce is absolutely, unequivocally, utterly delicious.

photo by Jen Maiser

I met a friend there on a recent Monday night about two weeks after it opened. (Was this the most highly anticipated restaurant opening in recent memory or what?) We snagged two seats at the bar and settled in for drinks, I with my bourbon stone sour ($8) and Jen with her Clover Club ($8), a sweet-tart blend of gin, lemon juice, and Hangar One Aqua Perfecta framboise eau de vie. (The former: eh; the latter: double-yum.)

Even though we were splitting a burger at the bar, our meal started with an amuse bouche, a small gift of the world's best beet chips, vivid vermilion and perfectly salted, with a side of horseradish cream. They hit the spot.

We were in a nibbly mood so we shared two orders ($7 each) of housemade charcuterie -- which is surely now the most oft-typed phrase in my restaurant write-up vocabulary -- and enjoyed noshing our way through coins of soft smoked chorizo and glossy slivers of spicy coppa. I devoured the onion relish compulsively, and liked the sprinkling of smoked pimenton. We drank, we talked, we admired the view (chocolate mohair walls, soaring steel trusses, a glittering skylight) and took in the crowd, mostly couples and friends hungrily eyeing their food rather than one another.

When the burger ($12) arrived, it was draped, on request, with a melted slice of cheddar but otherwise unadorned, save for a small garden of lettuce, tomatoes, pickled red onions, and thin sheets of dill pickle on the side. Many regulars of the Village Pub, also owned by the trio behind Spruce, liken the "bun" to an English muffin, and that seems as apt a description as any for the thin, textured, somewhat porous bread. My only complaint is that they really overdid it brushing the bun with butter. Other than that, the burger was perfect -- hefty enough to feel good in the hand, satisfying, well-seasoned (an area where the kitchen clearly excels), juicy, and flavorful. Every bite was delightful and I would have eaten every last pickle if my mother hadn't taught me to share.

The fries that came with it were served in a silver cup, and assuming they are the same ones that accompany the bavette steak on the dinner menu, fried in duck fat. Holy Deliciousness, Batman! Crisp, just the right side of greasy, and perfectly salted; odd, however, that we had to ask for ketchup (and mustard). Is it really so rare to want these condiments when ordering a burger and fries? They should just slap them on the side and be done with it.

The service throughout the meal was spot on, though the lamp on the corner of the bar made it hard for our bartender to tell when Jen's drink had run dry. We passed on dessert, even though they were created by Bay Area wunderkind William Werner, formerly of the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay; a girl has to save a little something for the next time.

I perused the dinner menu while I was there and, despite being written by a devoted minimalist, a few things on it popped out at me -- watermelon and arugula with cured sardines, for instance, and crudo with vegetables escabeche (did I call this new trend or did I call this new trend?).

I'm looking forward to my next visit.

Spruce
3640 Sacramento Street
(415) 931-5100
San Francisco
Open 7 days a week for dinner, M-F for lunch