San Francisco is a city very close to my heart. It’s the first city I visited during my first trip to the United States way back when so my initial glimpse of its skyline and harbor views, my inaugural sense of its smells and throbbing vitality are all indelibly etched into my memory, as only first experiences can be. It has been a city of joyous celebrations over the years: of my college BFFs congregrating from everywhere in the world for Tina’s wedding weekend in 2003, a weekend full of memorable feasts (at Aziza and Ton Kiang, courtesy of Chef Mako) and uhmmm, memorable unmentionables (ahem, courtesy of SF-based Jojolah and me); of Filipino-style Christmases (including, one year, four Christmas eve dinners, or noche buenas, in one night) with Minneapolis-based BFF Tita Joey and John and the colorful cast of characters that naturally gravitate to their dynamic personas; of the last trip I took with both of my parents together. San Francisco and New York City are the two places I try to go to every year to get away from Chicago in order to regroup and rejuvenate. Despite the fact that it is, in my opinion, a theatrical wasteland, there’s a lot of other things that San Francisco can fascinate one with: it’s a hot hub for visual art, design, world music, and cuisine. It was the city’s thriving, one-of-a-kind food scene that I wanted to zero in and explore further during my most recent week-long trip. And it didn’t disappoint: from Burmese food to organic Bolivian to Michelin-reviewed dimsum palaces to exciting nights at two of the city’s hottest new restaurants (Perbacco and Zinnia), San Francisco demonstrated once again that it is the perfect city for collecting memorable culinary experiences. I’ll be recounting the five evenings and four days I ate my way through the city in a series of blogposts over the next week or so, and I’d like to start the series with one of my favorite San Francisco experiences, culinary or otherwise, a walk through of the gourmet food market, the Ferry Building Marketplace.
The Ferry Building, with its architecturally magnificent Clock Tower (modelled after a similar one in the Seville Cathedral), stands proudly at the waterfront on Market Street. When ferry boats were the primary transportation of visitors and commuters in the Bay Area, it was the city’s transportation hub, with 50,000 people going through it at its peak. Over the years, as San Francisco became accessible via bridges and highways, it slowly deteroriated into a misused, obscure, unpreserved historic building. In the late 1980s and 1990s, though, a massive renovation effort was undertaken, converting most of the Ferry Building’s upper floors into upscale office spaces, and its ground floor into the Marketplace, a really impressive collection of food stores, specialty shops, and a couple of restaurants (the one-star Michelin restaurant One Market and one of my favorite Asian restaurants in the world, Slanted Door). On Saturday mornings, right outside the entrance of the Ferry Building, one of the Bay Area’s most heralded Farmer’s Markets takes place.
The Marketplace is always a pit stop for me on any San Francisco trip. I love just walking through the cavernous first floor hallways and breathing in the smells of food lovingly, meticulously, innovatively, picked or procured or conjured or prepared. The variety of food and purveyors represented is also very impressive. I also love the fact that you can graze as you walk through the Marketplace, either with free tastings, or by buying small nibbles from the stores (and you can sit down too if a leisurely meal is what you’re after since many of the stores offer limited seating options). Or if you get tired out from the walking and the grazing, you can take a seat outside the building and just soak in the grandiose, unforgettable views of the Bay Bridge and the waterfront. I did two jaunts to the Ferry Building on this trip, once with Chef Mako and Jojolah, and once by myself, both were just the tonic I needed to forget the stresses and annoyances of daily life in Chicago. I initially thought I could eat my way through the Marketplace, and blog about everything I ate, but realized soon enough that unless I wanted to be in fighting weight to audition for The Biggest Loser, that would be impossible. So, I decided to happily wander and just try the food that caught my eye, a much more practical (monetary-wise and waistline-wise) option.
Delica rf-1 bills itself as a Japanese delicatessen and sells a variety of small hot dishes called sozai as well as prepared salads. It’s one of the largest sozai purveyors in Japan, and the Ferry Building branch is its only US outpost. I’ve always stopped at Delica rf-1 every time I’m at the Marketplace, and personally, I could spend hours going through the deli case with its assortment of wonders. Chef Mako and I had the kakiage, a savory, ingredient-packed tempura made of a mixture of carrots, onions, edamame, burdock root, and small shrimp. It was the kind of food that was made up of ten perfect bites – you were satiated but not full. I also liked the fact that Delica rf-1 served it at room temperature, so the ingredients had the time to settle and coalesce and deliver a blended flavor rather than outshining each one (and your tongue didn’t get burned, unlike in some restaurants which serve kakiage straight from the fryer). We also had a lovely pork tonkatsu, flavorful and coated with panko breadcrumbs made fresh daily by the store from Acme bread (down the hall from them) and a fried shrimp cake, which was perfect finger food, although I thought the breading was a little too dense for this one. On my second walkthrough of the trip, I also tried the sweet and spicy chicken, which was un-greasy fried chicken in a perfectly calibrated sauce, neither too sweet nor spicy. Here is a photo of the kakiage tempura:
Chef Mako, Jojolah, and I also stopped by the newly-opened Out the Door, the take-out/small lunch counter of the more elaborate Slanted Door next door. Despite mixed reviews, it was packed, proving Slanted Door’s enduring popularity with San Francisco eaters. I’ve had several memorable meals at the Slanted Door over the past several years (both at their old location at the Embarcadero and here at the Ferry Building), so this stop was a no-brainer for me. I had my favorite Imperial Rolls which was as good as I remembered them to be in the main restaurant- crisp, slightly charred, ungreasy, overstuffed with noodles, shrimp, mushrooms, and other vegetables. I also liked both Chef Mako’s roasted duck porridge (robust and bracing) and Jojolah’s chicken wonton noodle soup (the wontons were full of meat, not just wrapper, and the broth was very flavorful and comforting). I was just ok with the chicken bao; although the dough was lighter than usual, I thought the dumpling meat was too moist for my taste. The lovely Imperial Rolls are shown below:
I was going to try to have breakfast at Boulette’s Larder, one of the most talked-about and written-up store-cafes in the Marketplace, but on the day I went they were only serving lunch. It had always been a comforting place, with a myriad of heady, heart-warming, nose-tingling smells coming from it’s large kitchen, which prepared organic, seasonal food for carry-out or for sit-down service in the one large communal table or the group of cute, smaller tables outside the store, or for chefs of smaller restaurants or home cooks who needed some initial product (soup base, prepped vegetables, cream, etc.) to help complete their meals. Foiled at my mission, I just hopped on over across the hall and had an astounding risotto tartlet instead. This was crisp, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth dough filled with a sweet rice pudding being sold at Frog Hollow Farm, which also sells fruits, marmalades, chutneys, and conserves from the well-known organic farm in Brentwood. Here’s a photo of the entrance to the Frog Hollow Farm store, with its famous peaches and pears in the foreground:
Jojolah’s favorite shop in the Marketplace is Miette’s Patisserie and he swears by their exquisite, mouthwatering macaroons. Since I was there before lunch and was foraging for breakfast items to go with a Peet’s coffee, I decided to have an intriguing creme-fraiche scone and a chocolate madeleine instead. The madeleine was terrific, but I was totally unprepared for the creme fraiche scone. It was crumbly, buttery almost bordering on the savory, and shaped as a rectangle so unlike a traditional scone, which made for a perfect three bites. I could have had a whole bag of them (they were a dollar each) but there was dimsum planned within the next two hours or so, so for once my self-restraint got a hold of me.
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