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The beef jerky at Isaan pop-up Intu-on is a bold rendition of Thai drinking food. Fried and served in hunks with visible grains, the pieces look like twisted trunks of the coastal tea trees in Golden Gate Park. They then pop in the mouth with the help of dried red chile flakes, while fried makrut lime leaves lend citrusy perfume to the dish. It's an invitation to take a sip of crisp, cool wine - and a display of sour, spicy and salty drinking food at its prime. Such is the strength of chef Intu-on Kornnawong, whose pop-up at cozy Hayes Valley natural wine bar Birba is a formidable addition to the region's Thai scene. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a moment when everything seems to be changing all the time and "normalcy" is at a premium, the House of Prime Rib has heightened appeal. It's a place that grants its regulars the fantasy of turning back in time, to sit in the same dining room, with the same glass paneling, cushy circular booths and fireplaces that they remember from childhood. It's the feeling of homecoming: a re-entry into a world where familiar pleasures await. But, as the rollback on indoor dining due to health order has shown, illusion can only resist reality for so long these days. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like many of us, Charles Chen, an Oakland food industry consultant, picked up a hobby while his daily life was curtailed by shelter-in-place: baking. Unlike many of us, he kept at that hobby, and the task of making what he calls "Japanese-style Basque cheesecakes" has become an all-consuming passion. Making a few batches to gift to friends snowballed into baking every day to meet orders coming in through Instagram. Now, five months later, his cheesecakes are distributed by places ranging from Oakland grocer Magnolia Mini Mart to fine dining restaurants like Maum in Palo Alto and Nightbird in San Francisco. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What's the most enduring legacy of the cultural rebellions of the 1960s? Civil rights, feminism, ecological awareness, gay marriage, legal marijuana? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The black vestibule at Bellota has a tunnel-like feel, dramatically framing the kitchen at the top of the stairs. It's like entering the narthex of a culinary cathedral, with all the expected symbolism and symmetry. The expansive open kitchen is sequestered behind a brass altar, with workstations on either side and a center island lined with terra-cotta pots. The flicker of flames from the wood oven produces a dappled glow over the entire space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dorothy Draper's spirit lives in Leo's Oyster Bar. Black and white tile floor, large tropical print wallpaper with bright pink flowers, and over-exuberant details in the compact interior channel one of the most celebrated designers of the 20th century. In the 1930s and '40s she designed such properties as the Greenbrier in West Virginia, the Carlyle in New York and both the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins lobbies in San Francisco. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Huxley became a shining star in the Tenderloin neighborhood when it debuted in late 2014. Owner Kristopher Esqueda opened the charming 25-seat restaurant on Geary Boulevard between Larkin and Hyde. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Food critic Jonathan Gold describes Los Angeles, quite engagingly, as a place where cultures are pushed together in haphazard fashion, "and the fault lines in between them is where you sometimes find the most beautiful things." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By the time you get through watching the "In Defense of Food" special on PBS on Wednesday, Dec. 30, you may be ready to nominate Michael Pollan for culinary, not to mention cultural, sainthood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kids are everywhere at Amy's Drive Thru, the new Sonoma County fast-food joint from the people behind Amy's Kitchen. They're running up and down the aisles between booths, making "graveyards" out of every kind of soda in the machine, drawing on menus with colored pencils and happily chowing down on burgers, fries and milk shakes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the owners of the 21-year-old vegan restaurant Millennium planned to move from San Francisco to Oakland earlier this year, they started a Kickstarter campaign. Chef-owner Eric Tucker and his partner, Alison Bagby, aimed to raise $50,000 to secure the prime Box and Bells space on College Avenue. For the restaurant's fans, it was putting your money where your mouth is. Within two days they were at $41,000, and by the end of the 30-day period, they more than doubled their goal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hand Job Nails. The Sausage Factory. Spunk Salon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the impressive Bluestem Brasserie opened four years ago, it seemed like a missed opportunity. Located in a prominent new building on Yerba Buena Lane and designed by the renowned Olle Lundberg, it offered a sleek interior and upstairs terrace overlooking the urban scene around Market Street and Grant Avenue. With the constant parade of pedestrians and streetcars, and the street's Beaux Arts buildings interspersed with more modern designs, it had a European vibe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drunk food is judged by different standards than other meals. The things you eat when you're out boozing need to be snackable, the better for distracted group eating. They're usually salty, as much to stimulate numbed taste buds as to inspire patrons to drink more. They should be greasy in all the right ways, too, engineered to provide a base before a night of drinking or to soak up the worst of it afterward. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A couple of months ago, Epic Roasthouse became Epic Steak. It's a seemingly minor change, but it represents a new direction under chef Parke Ulrich, who also presides over the kitchen of its sister restaurant next door, Waterbar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

"Just what Hayes Valley needs, another wine bar," I thought when I heard about Birba's opening in early April. The neighborhood already has at least four others, each with its own niche - Hôtel Biron for Tinder dates, Fig & Thistle for pre-theater drinks, Arlequin for sitting in the sun, and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

B-Side Baking Co. overlooks an industrial stretch of San Pablo Avenue that connects West Oakland's warehouses to the interstate, which you'd think is rarely traveled by the sort with a hankering for buttery pastries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Walking into Zoomaak, I counted 17 shimmering disco balls hanging from the ceiling. The neon-lit tables change color every few seconds, as if you're dining on a lava lamp. Techno music booms in the background. Yet the most entertaining - and vibrant - things about the little Fillmore Street bar are its food and drink. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In San Francisco, we like to blur the line between slow and fast food. A cup of coffee now takes five minutes to brew. A porchetta sandwich at the farmers' market requires a 30-minute wait in line. And let's not even discuss the travails of getting an Indian-Portuguese-Ghanaian burrito from a food truck. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My dad can tell you that one morning in June 1952 he ate rice, a slice of stewed pork, half a soft-boiled egg and two slivers of pickled radish, all nestled in a small box made of thin strips of poplar - a biandang, as they call one-container meals in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It's difficult to sit in the Yard at Mission Rock - the new beer garden, food truck court and shopping area made from used shipping containers - and not think about the future. The "pop-up village," which rolled out its opening over the last two weeks of March, is in a parking lot directly across McCovey Cove from AT&T Park, and it will no doubt be a sea of orange and black on game days as the Giants fight for another World Series win. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Customers circle Pineapple King Bakery with tongs and trays in hand, peering into the cases, bumping against one another like apologetic water molecules. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We live in city full of people who would bike 22 miles to breakfast, but groan when it comes to fully embracing a healthy diet. The reason? They'd have to cook at home. It's just too hard to navigate the hidden ingredients (read: butter) when dining out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How to make fast food healthy - or rather, healthy fast food? The problem seems to collectively obsess San Francisco right now. Millions of dollars are being dumped into delivery services like Sprig and Spoonrocket. Loco'l, the anti-McDonald's that Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi are trying to build, just raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via crowdfunding. There is a reason that Sushirrito is still going strong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Balanced precariously on fingers, one oversize triangle of New York-style pizza can sop up a night's worth of alcohol or provide a cheap lunch, folded in half and crammed down on a bumpy train alongside kids doing backflips down the center aisle for spare change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like so many Italians before them, Mattia Cosmi and Alice Romagnoli came to America with a dream of success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I lure my 4-year-old son to Tadu Ethiopian Kitchen in the Tenderloin with the promise of bread as big as a motorcycle tire and as flat as a pancake. He goes for it, and the restaurant does not disappoint: We're soon staring down a vegetarian combination plate, admiring the injera. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If you haven’t heard, bone broth is the new kombucha. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scandinavians are a curious lot, and like many other cultures, their drinking traditions run far and wide. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“Crisis” would overstate it, but when it comes to wine bars, San Francisco is in an existential spot. Beer joints are approaching their event horizon. Cocktail spots have already passed theirs. But wine bars ... remember those? Sometime about 2007? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the USDA began advising Americans to reserve half of their dinner plates for fruits and vegetables, it probably didn’t have the platters at Brenda’s Meat & Three in mind. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The organic burger joint is making its way into the outer neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Flavas Jamaican Grill occupies a bare-bones storefront in downtown South San Francisco, but the food coming out of chef-owner Leroy Douglas’ kitchen is anything but plain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In my initial review of Atelier Crenn three years ago, I alluded to the classic Lily Tomlin skit where Trudy the bag lady looks at Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can silk-screen and raises the question of what is soup, and what is art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When Per Diem opened about 2½ years ago, the Financial District restaurant had two things going for it: an impressive bar that crafted good cocktails and a sexy Victorian-meets-the-Industrial Revolution interior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Oakland dining scene continues to hit all the right notes — the smart beer-centric menu at the Dock, the diner-meets-cocktail shakeup at Hopscotch and the fire-driven cuisine at Camino. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kölsch is an ale-lager hybrid with a strict German upbringing. This clean, bright, delicately balanced beer is made with top-fermenting yeast, making it an ale, but then it goes through a cold fermentation, or lagering. A true kölsch can only be brewed in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, orGerman beer purity law of 1516, within the Cologne (Köln) appellation defined by the Kölsch Convention of 1948. With all these rules, it’s understandable that many of the classic examples are so similar to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What do you do when a concept bombs? It’s a question that Charles Phan of Slanted Door has faced several times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the Claypot House in the Richmond District, clay pots emerge from the kitchen every few minutes, battered and spattered from use. If you’ve reached the end of your bowl of complimentary soup and are waiting for your own clay pot to arrive, the procession from the kitchen can provoke the same wistful stares with which Uber users approach a traffic-packed street. Is this one mine? Not mine. Next one? Sorry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alexander Alioto was destined to be a chef; he’s the fourth generation of his family to put on the whites and cook Italian food. The name is not only associated with one of the most prominent seafood restaurants on Fisherman’s Wharf, but has a long political lineage in San Francisco. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At Liba Falafel’s new Uptown Oakland shop, it’s certainly possible to enjoy fried chickpea balls with no toppings. However, that would be like waiting in line at Bi-Rite Creamery for a cone and no ice cream. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As we forked into dessert, the culmination of a generally well-prepared dinner at Urchin Bistrot, a dining companion looked around the half-filled room and asked, “Who do you think will come here?” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From outside of Blue Plate, the most prominent sign says, "Celebrating 15 years." Inside, in the middle dining room, there's a similar sign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rarely do I get an e-mail that makes me stop everything and rearrange my dining schedule to visit a previously reviewed restaurant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Buy a bottle, pick a record. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Can you imagine a more pedestrian-sounding lunch, at least in 2014, than Cafe Terminus' chicken salad with kale? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In December I discovered Akiko's, the partnership between young entrepreneurs that blended tradition with a modern way of looking at sushi. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Think "bar" and "Russian Hill," particularly that stretch of Hyde Street where cable cars rumble, and the mind takes you to a particularly staid spot. True, Frascati once partied here, and Hyde Street Bistro's wine list might have edged just outside your comfort zone. But this is the realm of Scotch rocks and Chardonnay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Bar Tartine and Le Marais attest, the bakery-restaurant is on the rise in San Francisco. It makes sense: We love handmade breads and pastries. We also adore tiny, chef-driven restaurants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Press, the 9-year-old steak house in St. Helena, made major culinary news in May when owner Leslie Rudd announced he had hired Trevor Kunk, the chef de cuisine from Dan Barber's Blue Hill in New York. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]