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Last night we tried a new-to-us place in Piedmont: Baywolf. It’s been around for over twenty years, and on our list for at least a couple, so it was high time.

I think they are going for mediterranean food, although if you hadn’t told me that I would have guessed it was just the usual worldly Californian that you see so much around here. I liked the way the restaurant was set up: An old, many-times-refurbished craftsman house with a modern, enclosed deck added to the front for extra seating. Although we sat inside, the deck looked and felt really pleasant.

We started with a grapefruit, avocado, and mango salad with miscellaneous greens that seemed to be spinach and arugula. It was my least favorite dish of the night, mostly because it had this creamy cumin dressing that totally dominated the way everything tasted in my mouth. I get the combination of avocado with cumin, but the sourness of the grapefruit and mango just couldn’t stand up to the aroma.

We also had “duck liver flan” which as far as I could tell was purely a euphemism for foie gras. It was delicious as usual, and served with a nice selection of little pickled this and that (cornichons, shallots, olives).

For the main course, we shared roasted duck with peas, fava beans, artichokes and pancetta. This was the star of the night for me: the duck was perfectly rare in the middle, with a nice crusty coating of fat on top, and the rich, mild combination of vegetables and pancetta was a great accompaniment.

(Not my picture; taken by Flem J. off Yelp, and of a slightly different duck dish. But that’s what the duck looked like).

We also had the Bomba di polenta: polenta layered with short ribs and fava bean greens. The flavor base of this was wonderful, with a great pan sauce covering the plate and smothering some random mushrooms (shitake, and even a few errant chantarelle chunks). The main event though was kind of disappointing: the polenta cakes were all chewy at the edges and I could barely find any trace of the short ribs (though the chunks I did find were darn tasty).

Overall, I’d eat there again, but not before we get through a few more of the east bay places on our list.

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Comments

Dan Olin — 2011-03-06 12:07:14

Love the restaurant reports, good vicarious living!

bryan — 2011-03-06 19:25:22

Ever forward toward 100 bay area restaurants! Nice to know someone is out there listening :)

Well, things are winding down here on our birthday week at tahoe. We skied our last day today at Northstar, our sixth, with one day before that at Sierra. I think my body is finally demanding a break, so it’s probably for the best. As usual, a pictorial record of all the fun can be found at the gallery.

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Comments

Cameron — 2011-02-09 15:50:10

so much fun!

Clare sent me this hilarious animation created to accompany a real transcript of a call Lyndon Johnson made to Haggar to request a few custom pairs of pants:

We’ve reached the point now where we get all our TV and movies from the internet, and so we don’t have a cable subscription. This setup is fine except for every so often when we want to watch something live–sports or awards shows (okay, when Leslie wants to watch awards shows). In these cases we head to a friend’s house or a bar. But not anymore!

It occurred to me that it couldn’t be that complicated to corral some radio waves into my TV’s built-in digital tuner. Right? So I plugged an old FM antenna and I got some pretty crappy reception. Thankfully, the internet was ready to instruct me how a piece of wood and six coat hangers was all I needed for HDTV sports utopia. You can see the result above.

The thing works great! It enabled me to watch the Rangers get crushed live and in person. Hooray! I guess.

Doug got to borrow a Tesla Roadster last week, and he brought it by Clare and Andrew’s place to show it off. We were clearly pleased.

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Comments

Dan — 2010-10-07 11:15:59

Sweet. Ugly gold rims, but it must have been too cool to drive.

bryan — 2010-10-07 15:23:25

Ugly but expensive.

We spent last week with friends in Maui. Just, wow.

Days were mostly spent recreating Corona commercials, snorkeling, and eating huge quantities of food. Check out the gallery for the full story.

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Comments

Dan — 2010-09-16 14:30:48

Great photos, thanks for sharing! Perhaps I must take Johanna some time…

You read that right! It’s the return of restaurant mini-reviews here at overt.org. I have a huge backlog that has been a mental block for years now, not to mention the fact that I started these reviews as “Berekeley Food” and now I live in Oakland and eat in San Francisco quite a bit. So here we are again, with a bit of rebranding.

Hibiscus is a newish restaurant in downtown Oakland with a Caribbean/soul-food feel. It was started by Sarah Kirnon, former chef of The Front Porch in San Francisco. The Front Porch is a fun place, crowded, busy, and unpretentious but with deservedly legendary fried chicken. Hibiscus is definitely going for something more upscale, but the menu reminded me a lot of the same basic themes.

To start, we had a very fresh and tasty squid ceviche that was not as sour as a lot of ceviche tends to be, so the flavor of the peppers and onions in it really came out.

I was sorely tempted to just score the fried chicken at Hibiscus so I could compare it to its ancestral roots. Instead, I went on a limb and tried the pepperpot, which was a stew/braise with (among other things) oxtail, pigs feet, tripe, duck leg, and cassareep (cassawhatnow?). It looked something like this (I didn’t take any pics so I stole this one from Yelp):

The sauce was delicious. It was infused with scotch bonnet pepper oil and the cassareep turned out to have this really fun sweet/bitter thing going on. I actually kinda enjoyed the tripe, the oxtail was good but difficult to access, and the duck leg was the best thing in there. I couldn’t handle the pig’s foot. Just no meat on it anywhere to be found but plenty of fatty pig skin. Oh well.

Leslie got the fried chicken (photo also stolen):

It was outstanding. Nice and crisp on the outside, even the white meat remained tender and moist. It had clearly been brined for a while. I’d say it definitely stood up to its Front Porch forbears.

The prices were a bit high, I thought, for the food and location, but the ambiance was nice and I hope that more restaurants pop up in the area. There’s a chance we’d come back, but there’s so many more places to get to first.

Rock Band 3, due out this holiday, has a “Pro” mode that lets you play using an actual electric guitar, while being scored playing actual guitar tablature.

It’s like my dream come true! Back in college, I spent an unseemly amount of money on a Fretlight guitar after seeing one at the Experience Music Project. It’s an electric guitar with LEDs underneath each fret, which can light up to demonstrate fingerings. The trouble was that the software sucked. It showed scale patterns and chord progressions, but there was no validation that you were doing the right thing nor sense of progression.

Now I can channel my unreasonable urges to master video games into the skill of actually playing guitar. Oh, please, be as awesome as I think you are.

On the deck of our rental in Travis Heights with our Central market loot, the day after Matt and Amanda’s wedding.

Last weekend was the debut race for Doug’s 1986 300ZX Turbo: Sears Pointless 2010. Unbelievably, the car came together in time and ran all 16 hours over two days, green flag to checker. Doug has some pics on his page, and I’ve uploaded a few of the professional shots of our car to gallery. Here’s one of me dealing with some traffic:

We had a video camera in the car, which was unfortunately mounted to the roll cage, so it was pretty shaky on acceleration. If you can stand it, here’s a video of Tommy at the race start:

race start

The whole weekend was a blast. I drove a total about about 30 minutes on Saturday and an hour on Sunday—and that was plenty. It was simultaneously amazingly fun and terrifying and stressful. I did rub another car once on each stint, but always came out clean—no black flags or spin-outs! I’ll get some more pictures up soon.

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Comments

Marc — 2010-03-15 19:06:43

Whoa. We’re impressed. Susan and I watched the race start. This shows our age, but it looked like Steve McQueen in the move Bullitt (1968). Way to go!