Ever get that all-too-common, late-night craving for a hot bowl of ramen?  Maybe you’ve been out drinking, maybe you’ve just been working late, but nothing says midnight snack like steaming ramen. Well, it's your lucky day:  Hopscotch, a Japanese-American fusion restaurant and one of Oakland’s newest bragging rights, has been wowing ravenous late-night eaters with their Friday night pop-up, Yonsei Ramen Shop.

Leave it to Namu chef Dennis Lee to take the SF ramen craze one step further. One step towards fried that is. His ramyun—a Korean version of ramen made with fried noodles (instead of ramen's fresh), plus pork belly, egg, and kimchi—is the new must-eat at the Saturday Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market.  (Fifty bowls are made every week and they sell out fast, so get there early.) We spoke to Dennis about his new soup on a recent Saturday morning as he stirred stock and assembled bowls.

I’ve attended almost every Culinary Institute of America at Greystone World of Flavors conference in St. Helena since they started with Mexico way back when. These conferences are for food professionals only, which is a shame because they are phenomenal. I always get to try something I’ve never had before. That first year, way back when, it was traditionally-made conchinita pibil—a pig roasted in the ground (they actually dug a pit on the grounds of the CIA) by an expert pibil maker from a village in the Yucatán—a man who had never been out of his village, much less hung out a castle-like facility such as the CIA.