Openings

Yes, I’ll be headed to the amazing, new California Academy of Sciences to marvel at the albino alligator and the suspended blue whale skeleton and the high-tech hand-driers in the bathrooms (a true force of nature).

But I’m to be honest, I think I’ll just let my kids look at the fish while I eat.


Charles Phan stands by the living wall that runs between

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've finally reached the age where I can't open my inbox without receiving a birth announcement, baby shower invitation, or photograph of a pink newborn. These are the same people whose weddings I attended about three years back, so it shouldn't come as such a surprise. Yet it does, every time.

 
Stable Cafe turns two weeks old tomorrow.

Anjan and Emily Mitra in their first days at Dosa
in the Mission.

Driving down Valencia on my way to Slow Food Nation on Friday, I spontaneously swerved into the new Four Barrel Coffee, which was just opened by Jeremy Tooker. We’ve covered it aplenty (here and here), but it was my first personal visit.

Eater SF reported yesterday that the Four Barrel back-alley coffee cart is no longer—the end of an era of clandestine caffeination? Perhaps, but in this case the end of one era is the beginning of another. We caught up with Four Barrel owner Jeremy Tooker, who is in the midst of putting the finishing touches on his coffee house, which he expects will be up and running by Saturday.

Every once in a while I think about moving out of the Mission. Someplace quieter, I think, someplace with fewer crazies. But then I come up out of the BART station on 24th Street after work and the smell of grilled meat hits my nose and I think, nah. I can’t leave. Good things just keep happening in the Mission.

We’ve been quietly cheering along Mission Pie since they first opened, because it’s precisely the kind of feel-good food business we like to see popping up in our neighborhoods (rather than, say, another Subway). So we were particularly excited to note that, after many months of construction, including the beloved San Francisco seismic upgrade, Mission Pie has finally expanded.

Do any of you ever suffer from meal regret? It happens to me all the time (a hazard of the job, I guess)—most frequently when I have a disappointing, though calorie-rich, meal then wish that I’d saved I hadn’t wasted 1/3 of a my daily allotment of food on something that wasn’t even that tasty. But occasionally, the meal regret occurs when I’ve already eaten a full meal of deliciousness, then see something else delicious that I wish I could try but am too full to consider.

I don’t generally assign myself any weekend goals—I figure it’s enough to get my laundry done—but this last beautiful weekend I was hot on two projects: To get myself outside, on a hike, in the countryside, and to check out the not-so-new Oxbow Public Market in Napa. I’m happy to report that both were accomplished in one fell swoop. After an 8-mile up-hill midday hike in Santa Rosa, my companion and I, hungry and thirsty to the point of silence, drove the 30-odd miles from the state park to Napa, arriving around 5 p.m.