At San Mateo Caltrain Station, Off the Grid Explores a New Market

It’s not often I go beyond the City limits of San Francisco, but when Matt Cohen cajoled me to check out the launch of his new Off the Grid venue at the San Mateo Caltrain Station, I managed only a token demurral.  Not because of the two new vendors he promised, but because there was a wrinkle in his latest venture that intrigued me.  But more on that later.

The new Monday night Off the Grid venue, 5-9 PM at the San Mateo Caltrain “kiss-and-ride” lot, was created at the request of City of San Mateo planners. It is slated to serve up two platoons of eight different trucks each on alternate weeks.  At tonight’s soft launch only six trucks were present (including only one of the two promised new kids on the block) due to last-minute permitting snags. (It is expected to be at full strength next week.)  In addition to five trucks already familiar to Off the Grid fans, Whisk on Wheels, a truck serving Argentine Tapas and sandwiches, made its Off the Grid debut.

Ever eager to vet the new entrant to the field, I selected the “large tapas” option from Whisk on Wheels’ menu: a beef empanada accompanied by a side salad of baby greens with strawberries and reggianito.  The empanada was plump with savory beef and had a nice flaky crust, as good an empanada as I’ve had in a long time, and the salad was an exquisite mélange of flavors and textures. The combination of the two provided good value at $5.50.  I was pleased to learn that Whisk on Wheels will enter the rotation of San Francisco Off the Grid events, and look forward to trying their other offerings.

Now for the chalk talk. Why do I find this event of particular interest?  Forgive me if I get overly analytic, here (an occupational hazard of my previous life as an urban and transportation planner).

I like to think that there are two basic operating models for food tucks, or “street” food vendors generally.   The first model, which I would call the “catering” model, brings food to where the demand is.  The second model, which I think of as a night market, or “hawker center” model, creates a destination for people to gather, sample a variety of affordable food and socialize in their leisure time.  Off the Grid’s first venture, Fort Mason Center, is squarely in the mold of a hawker center, with people coming from far and wide in groups to enjoy a shared dining and drinking experience.  OTG’s other evening and weekend ventures to date (Upper Haight, Berkeley, and McCoppin Hub) also generally fall into this category. By contrast, Off the Grid venues at Civic Center, U.N. Plaza and Minna Street fit the catering model category, primarily serving as a lunch time option for people working in the immediate vicinity.

The Monday evening San Mateo event represents a new turn in the Off the Grid path.  By placing a collection of curated food trucks at a suburban transit station, they’ve expanded  into the realm of catering to workers at the home end of their commute.  This is a model which works very well (albeit on an ad hoc basis) in New York, for example, where some of the best collections of food truck and food cart vendors cluster around busy outlying MTA subway stations like 74th-Broadway in Jackson Heights and Junction Boulevard in Corona.  It’s also a stratagem I’ve seen increasingly applied in Shanghai as its metro system has developed. It will be interesting to see how it plays out at San Mateo Caltrain over time; observations tonight were of a significant number of a debarking Caltrain passengers joining the curiosity seekers and food truck fans already gathered at the event. The stratagem appears to provide  considerable expansion potential for the curated food truck field, given the dozens of outlying Caltrain and BART stations. This “commuter” catering model is also one that can be turned inside out, as it has in New York and Shanghai, with grab-and-go breakfast fare served in the morning at outlying metro stations, though there is no reason to believe that OTG staff have that in mind.

Mentioned: @SFwhisk

Announcing: the Baked Pork Bun Project

叉烧餐包, cha shao can bao or char siu tsan bao in Cantonese

I've been eating baked pork buns for nearly 50 years, since the early 1960s when the 10¢ buns at Woey Loy Goey were a major source of sustenance.  My tastes in Chinese food have grown more sophisticated in the ensuing years, yet I still can't resist the allure  of a comely specimen now and then.  The other day I passed The House of Dim Sum on Jackson Street in Chinatown and spotted a tray of baked pork buns that appeared even bigger than my usual Chinatown favorites from You's Dim Sum on Broadway.  On impulse, I went in and picked up a pair, one for eating on the spot and one to take home to weigh and photographically document. That planted the seed for a project: sample and rate every baked pork bun in town I can get my hands on.  .

No, I'm not going to write a blog post every time I try a new baked pork bun specimen. That would leave me with even fewer readers than i have.  I'll keep a Flickr photo set of my explorations, and report back from time to time here. I'll develop a rating system as my sample size grows, since I'm not fully abreast of the current range of prices and heft, for example.

That is all.

Filipino Food is Hapa-ning in San Francisco

Filipino food don't get no respect.  Consider this: there are 324,000 Filipinos in the Bay Area and about 6,000 Thais.  Now ask yourself how many Filipino restaurants you know, and how many Thai restaurants. Filipino cuisine is tasty and varied.  Why should it only be available to Filipinos in the privacy of their own kitchens?

Thankfully, things are changing in San Francisco.  Non-Filipinos are starting to know sisig from Shinola. They now know silog is neither dog nor half-hatched chicken egg; it's as simple and comforting as a ham-and-egg plate, only with a choice of more or less familiar savory meats and deliciously garlicky rice instead of hash browns.

Much of the credit for "outing" Filipino food and bringing it to the larger Bay Area population goes to the contemporary food truck movement.  I once joked to the organizers of Off the Grid that they had set a World Record for the number of Filipino food trucks in one place with THREE: HapaSF, Señor Sisig, and the WOW Silog truck. The Adobo Hobo and the Lumpia Cart, among others, may also grace OTG and other street food gatherings with their presence.

HapaSF's Sisig

Leading the charge to respectability for Filipino - dare I say it - cuisine is none other than the HapaSF truck featured in the Eat Street video above.  Maybe it helps that William Pilz, owner-chef, is only half-Filipino (hence the Hapa); that his reputation for cooking skills and presentation preceded him from a noted non-ethnic restaurant; or that he favors designer ingredients. Make no mistake, though, what he pushes is Filipino food -- it's not Korean tacos or North Indian burritos, tasty as those fusions are.  His sisig over rice is one of the top bites of any street food gathering in Northern California. and his "Shanghai" lumpia are as wickedly good as any I've had - greasy in just the right way.

Not to be overlooked are the Señor Sisig Truck and the WOW Silog truck.  While HapaSF won a critics' award in a recent local food truck rating, Señor Sisig won a readers' choice award, and the lines at SS truck for its more down-to-earth offerings testify to its appeal to Filipino food newbies as well as veterans.  And if you are too hungry for grazing and looking for a full meal from a single food truck, you can't go wrong with a longsilog, tapsilog or a spamsilog from the WOW truck.

Masarap!

Longsilog from the WOW Silog Truck

Mentions: @HapaSF, @senorsisig, @theWOWtruck

Mikey Likes (IZ) IT!

 

I've got to get on the good side of the IZ IT Fresh Grill truck, since it's slated to be a regular at my local farmers' market (such as it is), the North Beach Farmers Market. The NBFM is so close to home that I'll almost be able to roll out of bed and down the hill for a Spammer fix on Sunday morning. Therefore, I'm passing along  a stroke for IZ IT from yesterday's SF Gate's Inside Scoop Blog.

It turns out that Michael Bauer, the Grand Poobah of Bay Area restaurant critics, likes to get down with street food just like the common man, at least if the food is parked right behind his office. In his post, Cross-cultural fries from Japan, China and India he mentions visiting the Wednesday Off the Grid affair on Minna Street, and singles out the IZ IT Fresh Grill truck (pictured above at McCoppin Hub) for his praise:

Every Wednesday Off the Grid comes to The Chronicle, setting up on Mina [sic] Street in a covered area between the two buildings. On Wednesday, there were  seven trucks but my favorite taste was the Chinese chicken drumsticks from IZ IT truck. The batter is thin and delicate but with shattering crust that seasons the juicy meat underneath.

[I'll leave it to the reader to decide if the "Mina Street" spelling for Minna Street was a simple typo or a Freudian slip on Michael Bauer's part.] 

I'm fond of IZ IT's Kickers and, especially, its Spammers (see below) but have yet to try the truck's fried chicken.  Mikey likes it. Maybe I will too.

Spammer from the IZ IT Fresh Grill Truck

Mentioned: @IZITfreshgrill, @michaelbauer1 

Whither Mission Chinese Food?

This is not a review of anything. I have yet to eat at Mission Chinese Food, the restaurant-within-a-restaurant conceived and executed by Danny Bowien and Anthony Myint, and make no judgments as to the merits of its food. I’ve followed the buzz and do know it is loved by Alan Richman, The New York Times, and caucasian hipsters generally, less so by my Asian acquaintances (perhaps for philosophical reasons more than anything else).  It was named Best New Restaurant and Best Chinese Restaurant by SF Weekly.  I’m also of the opinion that whatever the lads are doing to Chinese food is not “dumbing it down,” since they are reportedly liberal with both the ma and the la of it when a dish warrants.

What I’m doing in this post is wondering aloud (and wondering if they are wondering) about where they go from here.  With obvious large talents and widening recognition of their efforts in a limiting, though intriguing venue, Bowien and Myint are ripe for busting out of their radical chic popstand at Lung Shan.  But in what direction will they take flight?

On their recent sojourn in China, Bowien and Myint paused to do a popup in a restaurant in Shenzhen, China, just across the border from Hong Kong.  It was an invitation-only affair, primarily targeting Hong Kong food bloggers.  Included among these was a long-term (in Internet time) twitter friend, @e_ting (Janice Leung), who also writes on food for the South China Morning Post.  It was she who first let me know about the event, and tweeted links to bloggers’ reviews as they came out.

This one-off event took place at the Capistrano Restaurant in Shenzhen on June 12, 2011.

According to the invitation sent by Anthony Myint to one blogger,  the event was conceived to cook “our style of Chinese food.”  Attendees were requested to not publicize the event in advance (but were free to blog about it afterward), and were not notified of the venue until the morning of the event.

Reactions to the meal (and many photos) can be found in the blogs of three of the participants, e*ting the world,  Food of Hong Kong and Macau, and joie de vivre. Taste Hong Kong and Chopstixfix that I know of were also invited, but have yet to report on the dinner.

The menu consisted of seven courses:

• Geoduck sashimi with razor clams, in clear tomato broth with herbal oil, and melon marinated in ginger sauce.
• Chawan mushi of steamed egg,  scallop,  apple and chrysanthemum
• Salt-baked prawns, accompanied by a side dish of 3 types of mushrooms in broth with pinenuts. 
• Duck 3 ways -  duck breast,  shredded leg confit in ‘crepe purse’, and fried duck tongue
• Steamed fish roulade with chicken liver & meat,  in broth of ginseng and barley
• Sauterne with mangosteen and chrysanthemum
• Cornmeal bread and cream with cognac, chrysanthemum syrup and Asian pear

When I first heard about the MCF's Shenzhen popup, I assumed it was to staged to seek validation from sophisticated real Chinese-in-China foodies for what Bowien and Myint had already been doing on Mission Street, San Francisco.  The menu and the descriptions and photos which came out of Shenzhen disabused me of that notion.  What they presented was more Bo Innovation than Yu Bo, and a far cry from the meat-centric, ma la happy proletarian fare one would expect at Mission Chinese Food. Why were they running this menu by a gathering of influential Hong Kong Bloggers? Another thing I noticed from the accounts coming out of Shenzhen (and you can make what you will of it) was the unequal prominence of the two  partners.  It was Myint who apparently sent out the invites and Myint whose cooking was photographically featured by two of the bloggers.  One blogger even referred to Myint and his wife as "our hosts,"  while Danny Bowien seemed to be staying in the background.  Who is the Great Helmsman at Mission Chinese food, and where will he take it?

As Col. Hall might say, What are they up to?