The Muffaletta Report

[ED. NOTE: Today's post is also featured on San Francisco Treats, which is a much nicer blog than what I have going on here. But they asked me to write something and so I did.]

[ED. NOTE PART TWO: It may not be posted there yet, but I'm sure it will be soon.]

Food trucks!!! They’re the black chunky glasses of mid to late 2011! If you don’t own one, you want to. If you don’t eat at one, you’re hopelessly out of touch. FOOD TRUCKS FOOD TRUCKS FOOD TRUCKS. In 10 years, people are going to be like “What was up with the fascination with eating bacon and waffle things on Acme artisanal bread from an idling vehicle in a parking lot? SO WEIRD. Also, I need the hoverboard tonight. I’m going to a Re-Elect Ashton Kutcher for President rally at the oxygen farm.”

NEVERTHELESS, I am a slave to fashion and thus a dedicated food truck aficiondo, by which I mean there are 4 or 5 that appear within 3 blocks of my office every Friday and now it’s like A Thing with me and my coworkers to go.

Today’s lineup at Off the Grid – Civic Center was the usual lineup:

Ebbett’s Good to Go – Fancy-shmacy sandwiches
Curry Up Now – Indian, duh. BLAZINGLY PAINFULLY HOT Indian, I should say
Liba Falafel – What do you think?
HapaSF – “Modern organic Filipino cuisine,” according to the website. I’ve never gone to this one so I’ll take their word for it
Crème Brulee Cart – Man, you guys are phoning it in with the names. It’s supposed to be a funny name! How about “Crème Bru-WAY Cart!!!” or “Crème OKAY Cart!!” “Crème Lisa Bonet Cart!!!”??? THINK ABOUT IT AND GET BACK TO ME.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about food. I wasn’t sure what I was going to get today. Then I was advised that Ebbett’s had a muffaletta today. MUFFALETTA. In case you don’t know and thus by definition have been living an empty and sad husk of a life, a muffaletta is a New Orleans-birthed sandwich that usually features ham of some kind, mortadella, salami, provolone and maybe mozzarella too. Now, all that sounds good, but then it’s topped with olive tapenade, which is the money shot of a muffaletta. Olive tapenade is the Stunt Casting of sandwiches. It makes the muffaletta.



So I go down there and order the muffaletta. The girl who makes the sandwiches says “I made you an extra big one” because that’s the effect I have on women and also I was wearing my Noted Local Blogger smock. Then I ate it.



It was good. The bread was nice and soft, almost focaccia-like, or maybe it was focaccia, which, strictly speaking, isn’t what a muffaletta is supposed to be on but we’ll let it slide. It had the appropriate meats and cheeses. And the olive tapenade was solid.

So, good sandwich! I think it was 9 bucks. Don’t think that Food Truck food is extra-cheap or anything because it isn’t. It actually tends to be pretty steep. But that’s cool. It’s worth it.

SO, IN SUMMATION:

Ebbett’s Good to Go Muffaletta: It’s Like Rain on Your Wedding Day. No, wait, that’s bad.

Ebbett’s Good to Go Muffaletta: Did You Know That the Girl From the College in Your PJs Ad Was Don Draper’s Whore Mother on Mad Men? No, wait, that’s just too weird. Here we go:

Ebbett’s Good to Go Muffaletta: If Sandwiches Were Wu-Tang, It Would Be GZA. There.

This is a non-exclusive list of TV shows I've never seen a single episode of

1. My So-Called Life

I know it's like an iconic show and all, but I was a guy in his 20's when it was on. I mean, come on, that would be kinda weird if I watched it. It would still be kinda weird. Claire Danes was super hot in Igby Goes Down, though.

2. Bones

Come on. I think I saw 5 or 6 minutes once and I was like "What the fuck?"

3. The Beverly Hillbillies

Even when I was like 6 years old I could tell this was dumber than a box of rocks and not funny at all.

4. Battlestar Galactica

The remake, not the original. I was a kid when the original was on and I think I was pretty into it. It was pretty much straight-up scif-fi. The remake is all Very Serious Allegory, right?

5. Criminal Minds

I don't even know what this is supposed to be about. I was just looking at a list of top rated TV shows and this was on it and I was like "What's that?"

6. Saved by the Bell

I don't think I even knew this show existed until it started seeping into the cultural group consciousness (there's a word for that, right? Something Jungian? I forget) and it was on during a time when I didn't watch much TV and I probably wouldn't have watched it anyway.

7. Dr. Who

This is like some serious sci-fi fanboy shit, right? Never saw it. Don't know the first thing about it. Does it involve time travel in some way?

8. Any show that starts "Real Housewives of"

Just doesn't seem like my thing.

9. Grey's Anatomy

How many medical dramas will there be? Haven't we played out every possible angle? (NB: If you want to see a GREAT hour of medical drama, check out the episode of ER that Quentin Tarantino directed. It's awesome. It's probably streaming on Netflix or some shit.)

10. Two and a Half Men

Kutcher's not sweetening the deal, either.

In which TK enters the craft brewing business

Despite the fact that I have no facial hair and a BMI solidly within normal range, yesterday I joined the ranks of Dudes Who Brew Beer At Home. Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed the brewing process (well, Stage 1 of it, anyway). "Surprising" because I don't really like anything.

I'm not going to break down the whole 4-hour process into what I did because that would be boring. Basically, it involves a lot of boiling things and then cooling things off and then boiling something else and then cooling that off and then pouring yeast into it. It's more difficult than making Top Ramen and less difficult than making chili. It does make your house smell strongly beer-y, for lack of a better word. Not really like beer, but like something related to beer. It's this sort of fetid, yeast-y, agricultural smell. Also, hops smell a lot like marijuana. This must be the reason that so many homebrew guys are probably also big stoners. (The guy who taught the beer-making class I went to acknowledged this reality on several occasions.) I can also say that the process felt vaguely medieval. I can easily see a monk in 1358 doing pretty much the same thing I did, except over an open fire instead of a Kenmore stovetop and also probably not while occasionally checking in on the 49ers.

I ended up with 5 gallons of a dark brown liquid. It is now in the Primary Fermenter, which sounds complicated but which is actually a 5-gallon bucket with an airlock on the top, which is actually a bendy plastic tube that lets gasses out but doesn't let anything floating around in. Every few minutes, the Primary Fermenter makes a reverse-burping sound and, I suppose, gasses come out, although you can't smell anything.

Saturday we do the First Racking, which means we pour the stuff out of the Primary Fermenter and into the Secondary Fermenter, which is a big glass jug. We should have beer ready to drink in like a month. I'll keep you posted.

If this goes well, I'm going to start distilling my own whiskey at home. Maybe I'll grow some tobacco too. And opium poppies can't be that hard to grow, right? Never mind. Disregard that. I never said that.

Finally, a relationship column we can actually relate to.

Man, do I ever love the Chronicle's Union Squared feature. If you're not familiar, they're little stories about couples who are getting married or just got married or whatever. It has, like, how they met - which is usually some way PRETTY FUCKING CUTE - and what their wedding was like and all that stuff. Like, here's an excerpt from this week's example, Megan and Tyler (quick context: both are Stanford grads):

Although Stanford is a backdrop throughout Heinen and Mobley's love story, they did not start dating there. In fact, they met the night of a formal dance on campus, and Heinen had another date. It wasn't until two years later, when both had graduated and moved to San Francisco, that they ran into each other repeatedly while bar-hopping one night in the Marina.

"At the last bar, he left," Heinen said. "And then he came back in to get my number."

See? Cute! They met (or re-met) bar-hopping in the Marina! I'm not even going to say anything mean. You're already thinking it for me. Why do I have to do all the work?

SO that's all great and stuff but what I really want to see is a weekly column about Relationships That Didn't Work Out, you know, like the Normal Relationships Everyone Has. We'll call it either Dolores Parked or Mission Failed. It'll be like this:

Daniel and Juliana met at happy hour at Casanova. "I was totally just there to get free drinks from the bartender, who I used to bang, and make fun of the crowd, but Daniel was actually kinda cool," Juliana remembers. "So we did some key bumps in the bathroom and then later went to this super lame house party, but it was cool because we had some pints of J&B and the music didn't completely suck."

After some fumbling, unprotected sex, the newly-minted couple stopped at Walgreens the next morning for Plan B before enjoying a leisurely brunch and bottomless mimosas. The next few weeks, Daniel happily recounts, passed in a dreamy blur of taquerias, Netflix, and artisanal cocktails. And more sex, but with more condoms and less blackouts.

Oh, but fate, it seemed, would intervene: Juliana got a job writing copy for an agency in LA. "I mean, duh, I had been making like ten bucks an hour temping, so it was a total no-brainer," she recounts. Daniel, after asking who was getting her apartment, bid her a bittersweet farewell. "She was a cool enough chick, I guess," he muses now.

Juliana is happy in LA and, after being shown a picture of Daniel and reminded who he is, offers that she has nothing but warm thoughts about him. For his part, Daniel is now seeing his coworker's roommate. "I still kinda wish I had gotten her apartment," he reflects on Juliana. Love can hurt, it is true.

This story just blows my mind

This is from Uptown Almanac:

Bi-Rite Market Hires Bouncer, Institutes One-In-One-Out Policy

The very nice bouncer, who didn't size up my wardrobe or pat me down in search of concealed weapons, informed me that this has started happening on busy weekends lately in response to the fire marshal enforcing capacity limits. He acknowledged the whole situation was "kinda embarrassing." Why? "Because, you know, we're a grocery store."

Anyway, if you can get over the public shaming of patiently and nonchalantly standing behind a red rope for organic peaches and cruelty-free cheeses, Monday afternoon's line was only 2 minutes and 34 seconds long (I timed it, for journalism) and you're treated to a sampling of free tomatoes once you make it to the top of the list.

God, it is becoming SO FUCKING HARD to make fun of anything in San Francisco any more because it ALL MAKES FUN OF ITS FUCKING SELF. How am I supposed to go on as a Relevant Local Lifestyle Critic/Angry Satirist when there are people who *WAIT* *IN* *LINE* *TO* *GET* *INTO* *A* *GROCERY* STORE*????!!!??!!!!!

The following things blew my mind about this story:

1. People will apparently wait in line to enter a FUCKING GROCERY STORE
2. Ummmm, I think that's it. Just that people will wait in line to go to a grocery store.

Seriously, my troubles with waiting for anything are well-documented. If I needed emergency gall-bladder surgery and they said "Sure, we can help you, just put your name on the list and we'll call you when your operating theater is ready," I'd be like, "Nah, it's OK, thanks, I'll self-medicate with Naproxen and shots of Fernet and come back some other time." So the very idea that people who appear to be otherwise Rational and Sane Adults (some of whom may, in fact, have kinda nice legs, but the photo's a little blurry) would stand behind a velvet rope to be admitted into a place to buy Artisanal Sandwiches or Herbes de Provence is mind-boggling to me.

(The comments section should also finally put to rest the stubbornly longstanding SF Urban Legend that Burning Man somehow clears the city [and specifically the Mission] out on Labor Day Weekend. I've been trying to debunk that bullshit for years.)

(I realize this post is basically just an extended comment on an Uptown Almanac post, so I would like to thank the staff of Uptown Almanac for letting me basically steal their material and run with it. If I could fit this entire Rage-O-Gram into a tweet, I would have.)

(Also, speaking of "would have," it's "would have," not "would of," FYI.)

Not really a film review, but more of a meditation on why this film might have happened

Slightly hungover and just wanting to get out of the house, a few of us went to see the new Paul Rudd vehicle "Our Idiot Brother" yesterday. The film, which is as bland and inoffensive as mayonnaise, is interesting in that I can't figure out why it was made. I mean, someone had to champion this film, right? They had to walk the script around LA and have pitch meetings and go home and think "Man!!! I think I'm really close!" And then you get this wallpaper paste of a movie that isn't angry-making like an Adam Sandler movie but isn't interesting or even funny. There are episodes - maybe almost every episode - of "Parks and Recreation" that are funnier than this movie.

I mean, one of the major jokes - SPOILER ALERT, I guess, if you're hell-bent on wasting $10.75 to see this - is that Paul Rudd's dog is named "Willie Nelson." Hilarious, right? The dog is a major part of the movie, and no one passes up and opportunity to say the dog's name. A dog named after a real person! I'm gasping for breath! THAT IS SO FUNNY!!!!

(Plus, this gave the producers a reason to put a bunch of Willie Nelson - the musician (or "musician," I could say), not the dog - on the soundtrack. I fucking hate Willie Nelson. Like nails on a chalkboard. That voice. So I would say the repeated Willie Nelson songs did nothing to enhance my enjoyment.)

The basic plot is that Paul Rudd's character gets out of prison and then ruins the lives of his sisters in one way or another. I got the impression that he's supposed to be one of those Magical Innocent character types who's the only one who can tell people the truth, but whatever, I didn't really care enough to think about it. I just kept going back to Why did this movie get made?

Here's what I hope happened: It was originally a much, much darker comedy called "Our Sociopathic Brother" in which Paul Rudd gets out of jail and then decides to WREAK HAVOC on all those who have wronged him. He returns to his sisters' homes and kills them and their families and burns their houses down before dying in a hail of gunfire. Then this script was progressively watered down by one studio exec after another until we have what's left. Anyway, with all these fine actors and all this money, it's curious that no one thought to make a better movie.

One of the people who went with us took a klonopin and seemed to like it better than me, so if you have to see it, I recommend taking a klonopin first.

I'm still on jury duty. That is all.

What are your Panhandler Rules?

If you're like me (and there is almost no chance of this, I realize that, it's just an expression), on your daily perambulations through the City, you encounter a variety of panhandlers, homeless and otherwise. As with most things in my life, I'm often perplexed about how to handle this fraught situation and so I'm croudsourcing this issue to find out what it is you do.

As I work in the Civic Center area, which is part of/maybe just immediately adjacent the Tenderloin, I see some of the same panhandlers every day.

There is the oddly well-put-together woman who I've written about before who posts up at the corner of Grove and Larkin during commute hours (she's there roughly 7:30-9 am and then 4 to about 6 pm) silently holding a sheaf of Street Sheets and who doesn't look homeless or even really troubled in any way; in fact, she would not be out of place waiting on you in a diner or something. NOT HOLDING THAT AGAINST HER; I'm just saying, it's kinda weird.

(I wrote that prior post about her in 2009. She's still out there, basically every day. I continue to be really curious about what her deal is but I really don't want to stop and talk to her because I pass her every day, usually twice a day, and I don't want to set up a thing where I have to stop and talk to her every day. It has nothing to do with her being homeless; I don't want to stop and talk to anyone twice a day. I'm not one of those people who hangs around their corner store trading neighborhood gossip or that kind of thing.)

(OH SNAP I just looked at the Google Street View for Grove & Larkin and thought I saw her but it's just some chick with a coffee. Goes to show how normal she looks.)

There's the Bearded Disheveled Guy Who's Always Reading a Paperback Book. He can be found in Civic Center Station pretty much all the time. I've actually given him money before.

There's a whole crowd that hangs out around the Main Library. One of them is a guy who wears Rollerblades all the time and skates around passing a football back and forth with one of his comrades. In all fairness, I've never seen him ask anyone for money, so maybe he just likes to wear Rollerblades and throw the rock around and hang out by the library.

UNRELATED: Check out the cool Street View Dog on the corner of Larkin and Golden Gate! AWWWWW, PUPPY!!!!

And so on. My point is, when you see your Regular Panhandlers, what do you do? Do you give them money?

Or I guess, what are your usual Giving Money to Panhandler Rules? I mean, in SF, you probably get hit up for money 5 to 12 times a day unless you're Richie Rich and live in Pacific Heights and drive your Volvo to work and your secretary brings lunch to you. So what are your giving money rules? When do you toss a buck at a panhandler?

(RELATED STORY - I remember reading somewhere years ago about an invitation to some fancy-ass party in a part of town where there were obviously panhandlers and the invitation asked guests to not give money to the "outdoorsmen." Outdoorsmen! FAVORITE HOMELESS EUPHEMISM.)

Have a nice holiday weekend at Burning Man or whatever it is you do. I guess if you're at Burning Man you're not reading this anyway.

Also, I'm still on jury duty but hopefully only for another week and then everything will be back to normal.

Also, we're trying out Boxing Room tonight and I'll totally tell you if it's good or what. Smoked Chicken & Andouille Gumbo! FUCK YEAH. Speaking of restaurant websites, THANK YOU FOR NOT AUTOPLAYING DIXIELAND JAZZ ON YOUR WEBSITE BOXING ROOM. I KNOW THAT MUST HAVE BEEN NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST.

OK, I'm done now.