Going Out While Social Distancing

Wanna go to that kaiseki in The Mission? They have a 7 address, so our whole crew will be there.

My ‘rents just moved into the 123 High Street building. Now we can meet at the pub on the corner.

He does not stand a chance of a getting a star in Fam Three. The empty storefront next door is in Fam Five, though.

I expect us to be playing whack-a-mole with this pandemic for a few years, and am worried some indulgences of modern life will never come back. For example, fine dining is damn-near-impossible to do virtually. I have a background in the hospitality industry, and have had the privilege to eat some amazing meals in my life. So this is personal.

Now by fine dining, I mean the by-definition pretentious, wasteful, and amazing conversation between diner and chef via the medium of tiny bites on giant white plates. A prix fixe or à la carte menu enjoyed with wine & company over a few luxurious hours. Including the dreaded communal table thing too, I guess. But how are we going to eat at fancy restaurants while we continue to socially distance? And how are restaurant employees going to get back to making a (modest) living? Take-out fried chicken & cocktails from a Michelin star place desperate for cash flow just ain’t financially sustainable. Crenn is doing fancy comfort food like it’s October of 2001, but how is she going to pay rent in Russian Hill on $55 per head?

Lately a lot of my research is connecting a company’s stock price with the digital exhaust left when we interact with the world. A challenging part of the job is controlling for the bias in a cohort of people. When is a group actually representative of a population, or actually random? So while I am nothing close to a computational epidemiologist, and while every machine learning & data scientist is pretending to be a virus expert this week, I have one idea that might help with fine dining while we are in social isolation.

Take a Number for Going Out

Imagine getting your driver’s license or passport checked at the entrance of a restaurant, where they confirm one simple fact: What is the last, right-most, least-significant digit of your mailing address? (Ignore fractions.) This digit is your membership in an slightly-different, in-real-life family — in which of ten virtual neighborhoods do you arbitrarily belong? And importantly, does your number match the last digit of the restaurant’s address? If the two IRL Fam numbers do not match, the restaurant would be mandated to refuse service. That’s it. Think through some implications of this simple restriction:

Maintains Social Isolation

When you go out to eat according to IRL Fam number, you are only ever physically near a fraction of the people in the world. And importantly, these people are always a semi-random subset of the same fraction of the population. The only people who are eating at the restaurant tonight are those who have the same number, those who are in the same IRL Fam. You might even get to know each other.

This is different from just going to local restaurants in the your zipcode, where a rando might jump a cab from across town for the restaurant’s particular charm. (This is especially relevant for experimental or avant garde places that have never relied on walk-ins.) The IRL Fam system is also fundamentally different from going to a different, random restaurant every weekend, because in this case you would still be exposed to a random set of people. And this is very different from restricting the number of people in a particular restaurant, simultaneously. A recent study from Cornell showed how even very small classes still would leave the student community highly connected. This would also thrash most restaurant’s finances.

What’s an address in 2020?

We could theoretically assign a random number, or use your mobile phone number, or even (shudder) use a Social Security number. However, there are additional benefits to using a physical, mailing address for layering our virtual spatial separation atop the existing physical world. Using your mailing address defaults a specific set of people into breaking your social distancing rules: Your roommates, family members, and those in your apartment building. Assuming you still like your kids & spouses after shelter-in-place eases, these are exactly the people you usually want to go out with. And these are the people from whom you are de facto not social distancing from, anyway! You share the same space, breath the same air, push the same elevators buttons, and so on.

What about the service?

This might require that restaurant employees only work full-time, and only at a single establishment. Would employees also need to have a matching IRL Fam? I think that would be too extreme, but goes in the right direction. Maybe we finally abandon the bullshit labor arbitrage of the gig economy, and pass a law establishing full-time de facto employment (i.e. benefits) for anyone who is works 40 hours a week for the same legal entity. San Francisco is already doing this with Uber drivers.

When’s your birthday?

This is no more a violation of privacy than when nightclub security checks the ID of your date who is looking particularly baby-faced tonight… Let’s mandate zero record-keeping or data retention on the IDs themselves, once the IRL Fam number is confirmed. I suppose patrons would need to have an ID with a mailing address on hand, which is a admittedly a bit classist.

Do they have valet parking?

Here is a significant downside. If you are not allowed in 90% of the restaurants in town, you are more likely to drive further to find an interesting one in your IRL Fam.

Is this all a game?

Given the prevalence of mostly-empty nightclubs with long lines, there is a chance the artificial exclusivity of the IRL Fam system would be fun and dramatic. An apartment with an address matching The New Hotness restaurant would be more desirable. And ironically, this exclusivity would be arbitrary and therefore, relatively fair!

Scaling & the Resurgence

This system could start in a traditionally-quirky place like San Francisco, and expand to restaurants & clubs & bars in other cities. And when the next pandemic (resurgence?) inevitably pops up, when the next shelter-in-place mandate occurs, contact tracing via IRL Fam number would be easier.

Saison

Dinner at Saison was really solid. Spectacular service with attention to detail, an open kitchen with almost-haphazard arrangements of tables around the high-ceilinged, taxidermied space. The smell of the wood-fired stove filled the room. Our winter menu was from late December, 2019. My favorite beverage was a sake, Shirataki’s Jozen Mizunogotoshi (junmai ginjo).

  • We started with champagne and tea made from a bundle of herbs in water. This reminded me of putting a sachet of herbs de Provence in a broth.
  • Then tiny cuts of sea bream sashimi seared on charcoal, served with sea lettuces, orange yuzu, sesame seeds in an oil, and sriracha chili water.
  • Lovely “nose to tail” dish of dungeness crab, featuring every part of the animal including the tomalley. Served with a thick almond milk sauce, and grapefruit.
  • Seared scallop in an oily berbere-like sauce. My wife had a tofu dish with carrots & kimchi.
  • Then we had trout with its roe alongside fartichokes, higher quality than the aquacultured McFarland Springs trout that’s everywhere else now-a-days.
  • Tiny white bread poppy seed rolls, served warm in a little basket on the table.
  • Black cod served with a chestnut puree, and a punchy (miso?) broth.
  • One of our favorite items was uni served over a piece of grilled sourdough, looking a bit like nigiri. The texture was wet from a bread sauce being spooned over, presumably made from their house-fermented bread hanging above the kitchen.
  • Spectacularly-beautiful radish dish, with a variety of colorful radishes & radish greens & flowers presented on a high, white plate.
  • Venison loin sous vide with raw garlic inside, in a demi sauce with ribbons of pickled kohlrabi & grated horseradish, and chanterelles.
  • The standout of the meal was the roasted honey nut squash mashed with a crunchy breadcrumb & herb mixture that tasted like Israeli salad.
  • Weak cheese course that was a bland, soft buffalo cheese wrapped in banana leaves and served with a nice flatbread cracker. Given the high bar of Saison’s ingredients, I would have preferred an actual, editorial cheese course.
  • Then a persimmon and creme fraiche dish, less savory.
  • The first dessert was a disappointment. Something with candy cap mushrooms & chocolate & tea, but the mushroom just ate gimmicky. I would preferred something baked cake-y or tart-y with more crunch, acid, and texture.
  • The second dessert with huckleberry & yuzu was for my birthday, and was very nice.

Review: Al’s Place

(1 out of 5 stars)

If you were to draw-up a list of the saddest fashions, affectations, ill-placed culinary passions, and grande cooking mistakes of the last few years, I think Al’s Place would solidly tick Every. Single. Box. This place is a living, breathing, performative satire of what fine dining should be.

First the place has no air conditioning and a single, beleaguered bathroom. I stood in line waiting to wash my hands, sweating from the warm San Francisco evening, and swapped places with a pregnant woman behind me who was certainly in more dire straits.

Clearly someone has pretenses of being a DJ, since they blare music so loudly that I could not hear anyone at my table a couple feet away. This was the recurring leitmotif of our dinner, and the main reason every one of us was hurrying through our mains and skipping dessert to just get out. Our first server was replaced by someone manager-ish, but they nonetheless misheard part of our order and just straight-up missed one of our wine requests. Each time we caught the attention of a new server, food runner, or host, we adulted and asked that the music be turned down. Call me crazy, but sometimes I go to a restaurant to get to know my companions better, as well as eat some neckbeard / topknot’s confusion cuisine. One of the servers eventually said the loud music was just the “vibe” of the restaurant, and we literally laughed out loud. At one point the woman at the table next to me leaned over, closely, to commiserate about the music. Most of the people in my row of table seats were physically leaning forward to yell. The place was so loud that when we asked for bowls for our shared soup, we were told they had heard us say we did not want them. And so on. The music itself? The usual quirky and dated garbage from the 90s, with a whiff of the post-ironic.

Their menu is a complete mess. First of all, they are too lazy to time the meal correctly and plate their dishes. Al’s Place calls this “family-style” or something, but its just cynical. Compounding this, neither of our two servers could actually tell us how much food to order for our party size, because there was no relationship between the section of the menu and the amount of food that ends up in front of you. There was some myth-making about “chef” wanting to treat proteins as a side, because they think this a comment on steak houses. But note that a real steak house can serve a plate of hot food umm, hot. Eventually we were able to map which lines on the menu were tastes, starters, mains, and sides, but to get this done meant literally taking out a piece of paper and a pen. I wish I was kidding: While negotiating with our servers about Lana Del Lame in background, we wrote our own translation of the Al’s Place menu, from hipsteraunt to English. After delivering an incorrect item with no explanation of what it was, they told us we should not have taken a bite before telling them it was wrong. How else were we supposed to find out what it was?!

The food is… fine. Their french fries were undercooked and soggy, but boy were they salty! Or should I say “brined.” The smoky mayonnaise alongside was too sweet and tasted like a dessert. Marlowe’s fries were better a decade ago. The Al’s Place lettuces were meant to be eaten by hand — see my queuing up for the bathroom sink, above — and for some reason had a bland avocado mousse streaked underneath. Can we please stop putting sauces under the food, to trick wraithy Instagrammers from LA into actually eating a sauce? The Progress does the reversed-salad-thing better. The chickpeas and harissa had some refrigerator burn to the legumes. The cold chickpea salad at Hey Day is better. The Al’s Place bean soup was overseasoned and was a bad seasonal choice to have on the menu during hot weather. But hey, they’ll put kimchee in it so you can think it’s exotic. Or something. The minestrone at any one of a dozen Italian joints in North Beach is better. The Al’s smoked brisket needed to have its fat better trimmed, and ended up tasting more lukewarm St. Patrick’s Day-corned-beef than cozy passover seder.

We only passed on one of our tastes of wine, so an actual professional was involved in their wine list at some point. They had no beers on draught, which is weak in a drinking town like SF. Also there is no hard liquor license, so your cocktails will be those sweet sherry & vermouth-heavy shims instead of a before-dinner classic like a Manhattan.

Al’s Place joins Hakkasan and The Progress as the two dinners that have me doubting the Michelin guide’s star ratings. The Michelin guide used to be insulated from silly trends and dopey culinary tricks, but they are clearly lowering their standards to appeal to teh youths. Al’s Place is also in that rarified competition of least bang for the buck, alongside the stunningly overrated and overpriced Hashiri.

Avoid Al’s Place like the plague. There are many San Francisco restaurants that do the quirky, opinionated, idiosyncratic faux-casual thing better.

Review: Moongate Lounge

(2 out of 5 stars)

Excellent dimsum with just enough cross-cultural elements of comfort food to be playful and interesting. That said, the entire front of the house at Moongate should be scrapped and re-hired.

First the godawful seating: We lucked-out and were able to insist on real chairs instead of the cheap, dopey, upholstered, 70s-garbage-couches in the center of the room. I felt sorry for another customer who was limited in mobility but was still expected to perch in these trainwrecks for her meal. I do not even want to think about fire safety in a place like this.

The cocktails were cloyingly sweet, under-diluted, and served too warm. They have the usual hipster quirky ingredients (e.g. celery), but the bartenders here need to go back to basics: A cocktail is not a sugar bomb to cover up the taste of liquor, but a by-definition spirit-forward balance between high-quality base liquors and a few complementary flavors. Any of a giant list of San Francisco bars do the cocktail thing right: Third Rail, Trick Dog, Cockscomb, Bix. If the techbro-ette wearing a fedora indoors sends back her martini because it is “too strong,” then you are doing it right. We also made the mistake of ordering a red by the glass, which was an overpriced mess, barely a five ounce pour and served too warm. It had no nose, no legs, no body, and no personality.

The service, oh good-God-the-service: Anonymous, underfed, morose hipsters slouching through the motions, in a poseur’s mid-century modern fever dream of an enjoyable night. The servers clearly want this place to feel like the space age 70s, but it just comes across as hilarious and desperate, like a Lana Del Rey video on xanax. Stop trying to be quirky and cute, and start paying attention to the details. What would make your customers enjoy themselves more? What would service from the actual 70s have been like?

Sons & Daughters

Menu notes from dinner at Sons & Daughters in San Francisco on October 20th, 2017.

  • Aperitif was a glass of Cava
  • Taste was a leek and beluga caviar tartlet (crunchy)
  • Glass sphere w/ celery broth, dehydrated okra seeds, chestnut puree, and hipster bacon
  • Salad of abalone & cabbage, w/ black garlic puree & mild pistachio butter
  • Broccoli rabe, radish, tomatillo salsa (very off, chemically flavor)
  • Delicata squash roasted & pureed, linguini of Granny Smith apples, shaved dehydrated foie gras
  • Very al dente purple barley w/ lobster mushrooms & dark roasted mushroom broth (barely there tarragon)
  • Bavette steak (yawn) stuffed w/ truffles & salsify a few ways
  • Set “Japanese cheesecake” of Big Rock Blue w/ quince (awful, sent it back)
  • Limequat ice cream, buckwheat honey, fennel meringue
  • Sous vide sesame cake w/ dehydrated buttermilk sprinkles, agastache greens, frozen carrot puree
  • Bookended meal w/ a chocolate & honey sphere tartlet

Motoi

Menu notes from our dinner at Motoi in Kyoto, Japan on May 13th, 2017.

  • aperitif: Rice flour dumpling
    (deep-fried rice flour dumpling, stuffed w/ a bit of sweet bean paste, wrapped in prosciutto)
  • amuse-bouche: Firefly squid, beans, potato mouse
    (flute w/ white potato mousse, green peas, broad beans, squid, topped w/ a soft consomme jelly)
  • porc: Baked pork back ribs Cantonese style
    (small slices of tea-marinaded fatty pork w/ crisped skin, strawberries & Italian basil)
  • pousse de bambou: Kyoto’s fresh bamboo shoot, wakame soup
    (lukewarm wakame soup w/ fresh bamboo & shiitake mushrooms & sansho leaf, confused but tasty)
  • asperge blanche: White asparagus
    (shredded white asparagus, noodles, caviar, edible flowers w/ thin onion-y aioli)
  • ris de veau: Sauted sweet bread and herb salad
    (sauteed sweetbreads, bitter green leaves, balsamic vinaigrette drizzled at the last minute)
  • poisson: Panfried Japanese bluefish, Kyoto’s bracken, butter sauce
    (wild bracken, onion bulb heads, beurre blanc w/ tomato concasse)
  • boeuf: roasted Ozaki beef
    (rare, tendon-y wagyu beef, fiddlehead ferns, white onion, w/ cherry demi sauce)
  • dessert-1: Walnuts with lemon
    (walnut ice cream, lemon granita, icy)
  • dessert-2: Banana, coconutscream, rasberry [sic]
    (coconut & raspberry frozen cream wrapped in a brown banana fruit leather, candy-like)
  • dessert-3: Miyazaki’s mango
    (mango, Campari liquid nitrogen granita, meringue shingles, white miso whipped cream, fromage blanc ice cream)
  • mignardises
    (tea & chocolate macarons, champagne meringue cookies, cannelle, also rosewater jelly, chocolate & coconut truffle, cinnamon curl cookie)

Atalier Crenn

We had dinner at Atalier Crenn on Friday night, and here are details on her menu:

  • White chocolate shell filled w/ cider, topped w/ creme de cassis jelly (Kir Breton / “Spring has come with its cool breeze”)
  • Trout roe in a tiny buckwheat cheese tart, and black truffle & citrus salad w/ greens (Citrus, Golden Trout Roe, Black Truffle / “Orbs of the air, earth, and sea coalesce”)
  • Shreds of fried potatoes w/ seaweed powder and gold flake & smoked trout w/ foie gras mousse & foie gras crunchy skin & Greek yogurt cream (Fish & Chips / “In search of those swimming creatures, tasty and crispy”)
  • Leek, fennel, (olive?) oil broth, sushi rice paddy w/ kombu, butter poached sea urchin w/ sesame seeds (Koshihikari Rice, Wakame, Barigoule / “Come with me and look into the golden light”)
  • Caviar w/ rice cream (koji?) & salty, buttery, seaweed-crusted rutabaga (Caviar, Rutabaga, Koji / “A burst of oceanic feeling, salty black pearls”)
  • Abalone slices w/ oyster cream, egg yolks & brioche w/ fine herbes butter, whipped beef fat butter (Abalone, Roasted Garlic, Oyster Cream / “The whimsically ebullient blue umami”)
  • Morels w/ lardo & parmesan custard, pine nuts, smoked creme fraiche spheres (Morrel, pint [sic] Nu, Parmesan Custard / “Earthly song of the elfin singers”)
  • Wagyu beef, pickled carrot jelly, edible flowers, roasted chicken cognac sauce (A-5 Wagyu, Foraged Spring Herbs, Carrot Veil / “Under a shroud stirs the tender-footed beast”)
  • Harbison cheese tart, onion marmalade, quince, zucchini weave cover (Cow’s Milk Cheese, Quince, Onion Marmalade / “Green lattice, in dulcet reminiscence”)
  • Pistachio ice cream “olive” (green tea?) olive oil (Recreated Olive / “A precious token”)
  • Chestnut, sage cream in little chocolate egg shells & fillo ‘maki’ wrapped around yogurt, apple, fennel & blood orange ice, rosette of something pickled  (Egg of Chestnut & Sage / Toasted Fillo, Yogurt, Apple, Fennel / Blood Orange Ice / “Walking deep in the woods” / “Strolling on, into the orchard” / “As the earth might have something to spare”)
  • Sorrel, mint sponge w/ pine nuts, blackberries reconstructed from spheres, stuffed w/ ice cream & shaved dark citrus cookie shaved like truffle (“The Forest” / “Spring has come and is full of sweet surprises”)
  • Tree of meringue cookies w/ calabash (?) jam, raspberry w/ chocolate jellies, nougat squares & box of chocolates, a white chocolate bark, white chocolate w/ coffee bonbon, Peruvian dark chocolate square truffle (Mignardises / “Sweetness, bounty, thanks”)
  • Granola sticks to takeaway

Happy Birthday, Hipsteraunt

Last month was the two year anniversary of the website Hipsteraunt, which I built with my friend Lance Arthur. He did the design, I did the random menu generation. It is a quirky bit of AI and NLP under-the-hood, so a user gets menus featuring free-range suspended chicken feet, truffled shisito pepper with achiote, and marshmallow crudo, at a place with an ampersand in its name. The inspiration had been a particular dinner out in San Francisco, at an immensely overrated restaurant. But it could have been Brooklyn or the West Loop. I am a quant & machine learning researcher by happy vocation, but also a chef by training. (Le Cordon Bleu with honors, thank you.) So the term “foodie” has always struck me as what privileged folks call themselves when they like to eat fancy food, but would not be caught dead hanging out with a line cook.

Hipsteraunt remains a tender satire of a certain sort of fetishized dining out. It was meant to be an acerbic call to check-your-privilege, together with a reminder that nothing in food is new. No combination of ingredients or flavors has not been tried a thousand times before. Even offal and the Asian flavors everyone loves to exoticize. (Awkward…) We lived through the fusion cuisine of the 1980s, remember? In hindsight, it might have cut a bit too close to the bone. The site garnered plenty of attention, but less heady pokes like the fake Guy Fieri menu and the brilliant Jacques le Merde have been far more successful. An annoying bug with making menu URLs permanent snagged things up the first couple weeks, too. Nonetheless on Hipsteraunt’s second birthday, I celebrate by raising an artisanal cocktail (a lemongrass aviation, perhaps) and toasting the addition of a few new ingredients: Keep an eye out for those trendy signifiers of faux-edgy cuisine we all love, like burrata and purslane, za’atar and togarashi. Goodbye ginger, goodbye almond milk. But it looks like bacon is still there.

 

Separated by the Same Language

Some snarky, some important advice about America and England.

About ten years ago, I moved from Chicago to London for grad school. I intended to spend a few years in the United Kingdom, but my best laid plans saw me there for about five years. This is a much longer span of time than the typical study abroad or a backpacker’s tour. This summer I returned to England for an extended visit and observation. Time has clarified some non-intuitive quirks I didn’t know I had learned while living here. So a list for future expats, tourists and the curious:

  • London dominates English culture, far more than New York or Los Angeles dominates American. It is the largest city in the European Union, sprawling bigger than Paris or Rome, and probably the most diverse. On the ground, London fashion leads New York and Los Angeles by a few years. Yes, even New York City. Really.
  • The most bureaucratic aspect of a very bureaucratic country is consumer banking. Everything about English checking accounts, ATMs and credits cards is mind-boggleingly difficult, inefficient and wasteful. Things are still mostly done on paper, with proofs of residence, reference letters and other signs of class being the necessity. Plan to spend literally ten times the amount of effort screwing around with English banks as you would in America.
  • The opposite is true of The Internet. When it comes to healthy competition among mobile phone providers and ISPs, England is incredibly high-tech. This is probably because England is geographically small and wealthy. So pay-as-you-go plans with dumb phones are convenient and dirt cheap, and getting fiber optic broadband to your flat is trivial.
  • The English are far more sensitive to class than Americans, especially around verbal accents. People in England can be extremely wealthy but still “low class,” and vice-versa. Differentiating wealth from class is probably the most alien aspect of English culture, for Americans. My favorite breakfast place in Bristol has a reputation for being posh (a.k.a. high class), but is actually less expensive than most supposedly bohemian hipsteraunts in the city. The English are more likely to “unlearn” a low-class accent, and Americans mistakenly think splashing a lot of cash guarantees privilege.
  • Restaurant servers in England rely less on tips for their income, which makes the service either atrocious, or more honest — depending on your politics. American-style tipping is becoming more common in England, but still the exception. Go with 10% atop the bill if you had good service, otherwise keep the change. You always have the right to dispute any gratuity automatically included in a bill. Do not tip if you pick up a round of drinks at the bar.
  • Speaking of which, English drinkers take turns buying full rounds of drinks for the group. This is good etiquette, and something Americans should take up. The English will notice if you never happen to run for a round, and you will get a bad reputation. Americans think of themselves as heavy drinkers, but we are actually more teetotaling than the English.
  • “In America a hundred years is a long time, and in England a hundred miles is a long way.” Because English culture is so old and the country so densely populated, there is a lot of diversity even between neighboring towns. Driving a couple hours for a visit is nothing to an American, but can baffle an English person.
  • Most English do a good job of differentiating American politics from the American people, even if we do elect those goofballs in DC. Politically speaking, our country is seen as an isolationist and violent bully. But culturally, everyone loves our hip hop and big-budget movies.
  • The English are as likely to think of themselves as European as not, so membership in the EU is a constant point of political tension here. The English are a bridge between the New and Old Worlds. The snarky newspaper headline is “Fog in the English Channel: Europe Cut-off!”
  • Being invited into an English home for a meal, tea or supper is a big deal, more so than in America. Take it as flattery and bring a bottle of wine.
  • The English can hate their (elected) government, but still love their country. This is one surprising upside of still having a monarch. Americans who hate their elected leaders are more likely to be seen as “unpatriotic.”
  • Taxes in the UK are actually not that much higher than in the US, despite what American politicians imply. My nominal tax rate as an evil banker in London was only a few percent more than it was working in Chicago. The English love to hate on the National Health Service (NHS), but it does a decent job of providing widely-accessible health care. There is a parallel private health care system for the wealthy, which is much more American in style. Most English see health care as a civil right like suffrage, unlike Americans who usually see health care as an expense.
  • That said, the English are not necessarily more healthy than Americans, but they are definitely thinner. You can usually spot the American tourist by their weight and the fact that they do not smoke.
  • The geography is confusing but easy to memorize. Britain or Great Britain is the large island off the coast of Europe. It contains the countries of England, Wales and Scotland. So the Scottish are British, but definitely not English! However the United Kingdom includes Northern Ireland, which is not (Great-) British. Sometimes the UK is represented as a whole (i.e. at The Olympics), while at other times the individual countries in the UK matter (i.e. soccer). The UK flag (the Union Jack) is an overlay of the English, Scottish and old Irish flags. The English flag is about St. George the dragon slayer, and looks like a red cross on white.
  • The English are a pretty secular people. They are not necessarily atheists, but religion is just not that big of a deal.
  • Beer is the only inexpensive thing in England. Well, maybe eggs and milk in the grocery store also. The best and most traditional beer is the hand-pulled sort you find at a pub. Start with these bitters, and then try the bright, alcohol-heavy and bubbly lagers. Timothy Taylor’s Landlord is a fine example. (Most Americans only ever drink lager or the occasional stout like Guinness.) Yes English beer is served warmer than American, but the English weather is cooler too. Cocktails in England usually mean carefully measured 25ml shots, leading an English friend to flatter America as the “land of the free-pour.”
  • The best fish & chips is not found in pubs, but in dedicated shops called chippies. To find a chippy, look for counter service, paper-wrapped fries and a small menu. Good fish & chips -fish has a tasty, crispy batter around surprisingly delicate fish. Greasy fish inside is not good fish & chips -fish. Examples are the Fryer’s Delight on Theobald’s Road in Bloomsbury in London, and Fish Lovers on Whiteladies Road [sic] in Bristol.
  • The solution to late-night, drunk munchies in England is your Middle Eastern kebab shop. Mayonnaise-heavy garlic sauce on your chips is a must, especially after a few pints.
  • Talk is of “the pub” as if there is only one, but this is just a quirk of language. There is not a place called The Pub, or ever just one pub in an area. You just say “meet me at the pub.” Similarly, English folks will refer to “my local [pub].”
  • The weather in England is grey and wet, but actually very mild. This is because of the North Sea jet stream, even though the island is on latitude with Scandinavia. Despite the Dickens novels, snow is rare here. And compared with America, there are very few bugs and insects. There have been people living in every part of England “forever,” so there is very little actual wilderness even though the countryside is green and pretty. The high latitude also means very dark winters, and long summer days. There is nothing like leaving the pub at nine o’clock in August while there is still plenty of sunshine.
  • Americans are terrible with European and British geography, but the English are just as bad with ours. When I mention my hometown of Chicago to many English, they presume it is near the East Coast because of movies with skyscrapers and organized crime. Explaining that Chicago is a seventeen hour drive from New York City usually stuns the table… Two friends from Barcelona and the Black Forest in Germany actually grew up closer to each other than my wife and I, from Manhattan and Chicagoland.
  • Traditional businesses in England have flaky and frustrating hours, especially as an American used to working from nine to five, and running errands outside of this window. While I lived in England, pubs were granted more flexible hours (2005) and smoking was banned (2007). So thankfully pubs are no longer required to close early and go lock-in.

What is There to Eat Around Here?

Or, why clams are bourgeois — the presence of clams on menus is indicative of a place where people spend a lot of their money on housing. This is how I found out.

We have all played the proportional rent affordability game. How much of my income should I spend on where I live? One rule of thumb is “a third,” so if you take home $2,400 per month you aim to spend about $800 on rent or a mortgage payment. Some play the hypothetical budgeting version of the game. We might pay more of our income for housing if it means being able to live in a particularly desirable area.

Expensive Housing
Here is a map of income normalized by housing expense, for a bunch of Bay Area neighborhoods. This information is from our Altos Research active market real estate data. More technically, each dot on the map represents the ratio of a zipcode’s household income to the weighted average of single family home list prices and multi-family home list prices. I used median numbers, to minimize the impact of foreclosures or extremely wealthy households. Single and multi-family home prices were weighted by listing inventory, so urban condos matter as much as those McMansions in the ‘burbs. The green dots are areas where proportionally more income is spent on housing, and blue dots are the opposite.

Bay Area Housing Proportional Housing Expense

The data shows that people living in the city of San Francisco spend a much larger proportion of their income on housing than Oaklanders or those in San Jose. If we assume that the real estate market is somewhat efficient, then those who choose to live in certain neighborhoods forgo savings and disposable income. Why is it that housing expenses for living in San Francisco are so much higher than San Jose, even when we control for income disparity?

The Real Estate Menu
Like a proper hack economist, I am going to gloss over the obvious driving factors of proportionally expensive housing, such as poor labor mobility, lack of job opportunities, and a history of minority disenfranchisement. I am a chef by training — culinary arts degree from CHIC, the Le Cordon Bleu school in Chicago — and remain fascinated by the hospitality industry. So instead of diving into big social problems, I focused on something flippant and easy to measure: Where people go out to eat, across areas with different levels of proportional housing expense.

I analyzed the menus of a random selection of 5,400 sit-down and so-called “fast casual” restaurants across the United States. This menu population is hopefully large and diverse enough to represent dining out in general, though it is obviously biased toward those restaurants with the money and gumption to post their menus online. However there is not a disproportionate number of national chain restaurants, since even the most common restaurant, T.G.I. Friday’s, is only about 2.5% of the population:

Restaurant Histogram

Menu Words
The next step in my analysis was counting the common words and phrases across the menus. Here are the top fifty:

1. sauce, 2. chicken, 3. cheese, 4. salad, 5. grilled, 6. served, 7. fresh, 8. tomato, 9. shrimp, 10. roasted, 11. served-with, 12. garlic, 13. cream, 14. red, 15. fried, 16. onions, 17. tomatoes, 18. beef, 19. rice, 20. onion, 21. bacon, 22. topped, 23. mushrooms, 24. topped-with, 25. steak, 26. vinaigrette, 27. spinach, 28. lettuce, 29. pork, 30. green, 31. potatoes, 32. spicy, 33. white, 34. salmon, 35. in-a, 36. soup, 37. peppers, 38. mozzarella, 39. lemon, 40. sweet, 41. with-a, 42. menu, 43. beans, 44. dressing, 45. fries, 46. tuna, 47. black, 48. greens, 49. chocolate, 50. basil

Pervasive ingredients like “chicken” turn up, as do common preparation and plating terms like “sauce” and “topped-with”. Perhaps my next project will be looking at how this list changes over time. For example, words like “fried” were taboo in the 90’s, but more common during this post-9/11 renaissance of honest comfort food. Now-a-days chicken can be “fried” again, not necessarily “crispy” or “crunchy”.

A Tasty Model
Next I trained a statistical model using the menu words and phrases as independent variables. My dependent variable was the proportional housing expense in the restaurant’s zipcode. The model was not meant to be predictive per se, but instead to identify the characteristics of restaurant menus in more desirable areas. The model covers over five thousand restaurants, so menu idiosyncrasy and anecdote should average out. The algorithm used was our bespoke version of least-angle regression with the lasso modification. It trains well on even hundreds of independent variables, and highlights which are most informative. In this case, which of our many menu words and phrases are correlated with proportional housing expense?

Why Clams are Bourgeois

The twenty menu words and phrases most correlated with low proportional housing expense (the bluer dots) areas:

1. tortilla, 2. cream-sauce, 3. red-onion, 4. thai, 5. your-choice, 6. jumbo, 7. crisp, 8. sauce-and, 9. salads, 10. oz, 11. italian, 12. crusted, 13. stuffed, 14. marinara, 15. broccoli, 16. egg, 17. scallops, 18. roast, 19. lemon, 20. bean

Several of these words of phrases are associated with ethnic cuisines (i.e. “thai” and “tortilla”), and others emphasize portion size (i.e. “jumbo” and “oz” for ounce). Restaurants in high proportional housing expense areas (greener dots) tend to include the following words and phrases on their menus:

1. clams, 2. con, 3. organic, 4. mango, 5. tofu, 6. spices, 7. eggplant, 8. tomato-sauce, 9. cooked, 10. artichoke, 11. eggs, 12. toast, 13. roll, 14. day, 15. french-fries, 16. duck, 17. seasonal, 18. oil, 19. steamed, 20. lunch, 21. chips, 22. salsa, 23. baby, 24. arugula, 25. red, 26. braised, 27. grilled, 28. chocolate, 29. avocado, 30. dressing

These words reflect healthier or more expensive food preparation (i.e. “grilled” or “steamed”), as well as more exotic ingredients (i.e. “mango” and “clams”). Also, seasonal and organic menus are associated with low proportional housing expense. The word “con” turns up as a counter-example for Latin American cuisine, as in “con huevos” or “chili con queso”.

Food Crystal Ball
This sort of model for restaurant menus could also be used for forecasting, to statistically predict the sort of food that will be more successful in a particular neighborhood. This predictive power would be bolstered by the fact that the population of menus has a survivorship bias, because failed or struggling restaurants are less likely to post their menus online.

This confirms my suspicion that housing expense is counter-intuitive when it comes to dining out. People who spend more of their income on housing in order to live in a desirable location have less disposable income, but these are the people who pay more for exotic ingredients and more expensive food preparation. Maybe these folks can’t afford to eat in their own neighborhood?