Mental Mastication Manifesto

San Francisco (and the Bay Area by extension) is known, in many circles, as a culinary mecca. The city alone boasts something like 20,000 restaurants, which is mind-boggling given that the city has a total area of 46.7 square miles (ie, it's only 7 miles or so long and wide). An hour away, we have a cluster of internationally renowned wineries, dotting the Napa and Sonoma valleys like so many pins in a war monger's map. Up until this year, the Bay Area had one of the only two Michelin 3-star restaurants in the country (the French Laundry). And so on and so forth.

Given this rich culinary landscape, the food culture in SF is seemingly savvy as hell. We are, on the surface, an extremely well educated consumer base. You can't fall off your fixie without hitting a few self-titled foodies on the way down. Many people can compose an (unrhymed) poem about the differences between an espagnole and a demi-glace and then prattle off the names of 10 local superstar chefs while standing on one leg. This kind of informed consumerism is, of course, good and bad. On one hand, delicious delicious heirloom tomatoes, despite their resemblance to brightly rainbow colored tumors, are pretty much a household fixture and are available on the cheap to brighten your back-patio summer salads. On the other hand, because people are willing to pay, you can charge double for a mediocre piece of meat by calling it free-range, sustainable, organic, or any number of other keywords that float around specialty stores.

This duality also extends to the restaurant scene. Perusing an archetypal fine dining San Francisco menu quickly becomes an exercise in nagging deja vu. Oh, you are featuring beet and Cow Girl Creamery goat cheese salad? Liberty farms duck breast with some kind of root vegetable puree? Niman Ranch steak? Roasted Rocky Jr chicken? Acme bread to start off the meal? That's great, just great. No, no I'm just ever so delighted to eat almost exactly the same thing I had at the place down the street last week and drop $150 on a dinner for two. Nevertheless, sometimes this $150 meal is worth every penny.

Speculating about the many causes of the carbon-copy menus or the inflated costs of food shopping and dining out in San Francisco is outside the scope of this blog and the ken of the author. However, I'd like to chip away at some of the preconceptions that many of the seemingly food-savvy SF natives operate under. Is Acme bread really and truly the shit? Is it possible to get a good deal on cured meats somewhere in the city's borders? Do local, organic foods really taste better than the crap you get at Safeway? Is shopping at the infamous Ferry Building ever worth it?

I don't know. But I would really like to find out, so...

I will conduct a series of extremely pseudo-scientific blind "experiments", each comparing Hyped, Branded, Expensive Entity A to Obscure, Possibly Generic, Possibly Coming from Some Poorly-Lit Ethnic Market, Cheap Entity B. Along the way, I will waste a lot of money and eat a lot of crap before probably discovering that some foods are surely worth the price and deserve all the accolades, while others enjoy a propaganda campaign that would have made Josef Goebbels huddle in the fetal position.

The results of the first "experiment" are forthcoming. Stay tuned!