Tales from San Francisco: Food

I feel pretty lucky to work near the Union Square Greenmarket, and to belong to a CSA, and to commute through Grand Central where there is a branch of Murray's Cheese, but San Francisco is a pretty good town for eating.

I mentioned to a local friend that I wanted to go check out the Ferry Terminal and its farmer's market; she said she'd take me. Then she called back and said "no, I want to take you to where the locals go". So Saturday morning, we hit two markets.

First up was Alemany - a funky swath of stalls in the shadow of the freeway, complete with fresh tamales, live chickens, and a sea of divine produce. Every fruit seller was offering tastes - each peach was better than the next. There were piles and piles of bitter melon, both smooth bumpy and prickly bumpy. We had tamales for breakfast; my friend bought plums ($1/lb) and tomatoes ($1.50/lb) and basil ($1/bunch) and garlic.

Then we went to the ferry terminal. There was more cheese, more prepared foods, and some of the same produce vendors. But the same glorious peaches? $3 a pound. The tomatoes? $3.50. The ferry terminal is the high rent district.

I did buy some Recchiuti salted caramels for my husband (read, for me.) And we got coffee, plain drip coffee, from a stand that defies logic.

I'd heard about Blue Bottle; they were written up in the Times about six months ago, because of their decadently expensive Japanese coffee siphon. The ferry terminal stand doesn't have the fancy machinery - instead, they're making individual cups of drip coffee. That is, one at a time. They've got an array of tea kettles on burners, six in a row. The coffee person uses the hot water out of the rightmost kettle, and then moves them all over one at a time - and refills the leftmost one. Adjacent to the kettle operation is a rack holding eight ceramic cones. One by one, paper filters are placed in the cones, each filter is dampened with hot water, a prodigious amount of ground coffee is added, and the coffee person begins to pour the boiling water. One cup at a time.

It took rather a while to get our two cups of drip coffee, which was only $2. Given the amount of labor that went into it, $2 was a bargain. The coffee was stronger 'n all get out, but good. Drinkable black good.

The only thing that would have made it all better? Time in a kitchen with all that great stuff.