Bay Area Bites
Northern California: I begrudgingly respect it!
First of all, if you’re one of the shockingly large number of people referred here by my friend Ben’s home cooking newsletter, welcome! Thank you for gently nudging me to get back in the saddle with each passing notification.
The most notable recent development in my culinary life was a trip up to the Bay Area for some friends’ baby shower. The Bay is, in my experience, a perfect place to visit for 72 hours and not a moment longer, before you can get dragged into too many conversations about generative AI. This trip bore that out: we crashed with lovely and generous hosts, hit up the excellent Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMoMA, and got on a plane to Burbank just in time to catch a Passover seder.
With Oakland, my preferred port of entry, just a 48 minute flight away, I’ve had many opportunities to eat my way around the Bay over the years. That means I have many old favorites to return to, not just new spots to try out; between those competing prerogatives and lots of friends to catch up with, it’s a lot to squeeze into one itinerary. That said, I never regret a trip to Beit Rima, the Palestinian restaurant that’s been rapturously acclaimed for good reason. Logistically, it’s my favorite kind of spot — reliable and beloved, but easy to stroll into for a Friday lunch.
We had the ful, which was a bit thicker and more pastelike in texture than I generally prefer my fava beans (I’ve gotten hooked on the version at House of Mandi here in LA) but a tasty and filling meal base, and the musakhan. I loved the fun-sized riff on the iconic dish: just a single chicken thigh over a single round of pita in lieu of a massive platter. So cute!
On our first night in town, we met the baby shower-ers for a double date at Wojia Hunan Cuisine in Albany, just north of Berkeley. Compared to the massive stateside popularity of Sichuan food in the last decade, Hunan is somewhat underrated as the other Chinese regional cuisine for spice enthusiasts. Wojia was a case in point as to why that’s a mistake.
One of our dining companions doesn’t eat meat, so our order skewed heavily towards veggie dishes like this eggplant, pictured in its more presentable state before we pounded it into a saucy, gooey, pepper-laden paste, and a sneaky-good stir fry of chives and dried bean curd.
We did smuggle in this extremely not-vegetarian pork stir fry, studded with chilies and absolutely slicked with oil. But half the peppers were green, so this was basically health food.
Our final notable meal of the trip — not counting sugar infusions at local standbys Humphry Slocombe and Starter Bakery, where we picked up pastries on the way to hang out with some friends and their 5-month-old — was at Prubechu, a Guamanian restaurant in the Mission District. Don’t know much about Guamanian food? Me either! Hence why it piqued my interest when the Chronicle claimed there’s “no other restaurant like it in the continental United States” in a master restaurant list conveniently published mere days before our flight. I should be more specific: Prubechu serves Chamorro food, an Indigenous culture from the Mariana Islands in the Pacific.
In practice, I wouldn’t say the food felt novel, per se — it’s heavy on seafood, coconut and other ingredients one would expect of a coastal, tropical locale, plus some Hawaiian-adjacent elements like barbecue skewers with a sweet, caramelized finish. Out of our 10-dish order, the whole fried fish pictured above was the most visually impressive, while a humble (so humble I forgot to photograph it!) stewed greens situation wildly overperformed expectations. Serving a ceviche-like dish called kelaguen (derived from the Filipino kilawin) with soft flatbreads called titiyas (derived from, well, tortillas) was a nice touch. It reminded me a bit of our recent trip to Okinawa and Taipei, also islands whose food is deeply influenced by all the other nations that stopped by on their trading routes.
We were eating with some high school friends of mine, one of whom had been there before recommended the coconut-braised (I said there was a lot of coconut!) beef and egg noodles above that became a crowd favorite. I went to high school in San Diego, but a lot of people ended up in the Bay — more than in LA, weirdly. Because our 10-year reunion got lost in a fog of COVID-related delays, it was nice to have a smaller meetup.
Since we got back, we’ve been eating unglamorous, fridge-scouring meals to buy time until our next big shop tomorrow. But we have a big Home Cooking Project planned for next weekend, so stay tuned for that.