Jackson West’s Obsessive Compulsion

Since bloggers of late have been coming under fire for being able to write and publish without feeling bound by the ethical norms associated with traditional journalism (thanks a lot, Matt Fucking Drudge), I would like to clarify exactly how I go about putting together my posts.

First off, I try to go do fun things. Things that anyone might like to do. Like read books, and go to theaters, and buy records and eat (and eat, and eat). Now, back in the old days, before blogs, I might just do these things and think “Wow, that place was great, and if someone asks, I might recommend it.” The problem with that system is, of course, the fact that memory is not really the finely tuned instrument you would always like it to be, which results in lots of answers to queries for advice like, “Well, there’s that place I went to last month, what was the name? You know, the place next to the place where they cook the stuff? That place is great.” This is not a good way to make or keep friends.

Blogs, on the other hand, use the incredible power of computer technology and the innerweb to not only help you archive and organize information, but make it available to your friends twenty-four-seven. This means when your friend calls right while you’re trying to complete a mission in Grand Theft Auto, you don’t have to pause the game and have one of those “Try the curry place; But I don’t like Indian Food; What about the chinese place; I don’t eat pork; Okay, what about the new french bistro; That’s too expensive; Why don’t you fuck off you indecisive bastard; etc.” conversations. Instead, you say, “Check the blog, dude,” hang up, and continue sniping innocent bystanders.

But that’s not to say that I post on every single restaurant or even I visit. There’s only so many times you can write about the same taqueria two blocks from your house that you visit maybe three times a week. So here’s my system:

• You may notice that I generally like the places I post about. This is because I don’t really post about places I don’t like. Why waste the time? Would you want to read a blog that trashes its subjects? I mean, besides Gawker? I write about places because I want people to go there and do business. If my post means that the place fills up with hungry people, then they’ll stick around long enough for me to get back and enjoy the food again. Of course, if a place totally falls off, or if I need to warn you about somewhere where you shouldn’t waste your money (Papa Potrero’s, I’m looking at you) then I will point it out. But in general I try to stay positive.
• I do ascribe to at least some semblance of ethics. I will not write about a place unless I’ve eaten there at least twice, with the last time being within the week. This means that I’ve tried the place on different days and different times of the day, eaten different dishes, and that the information will be relatively current from the date on the post. I also work anonymously, which is incredibly easy since I don’t think anyone even reads this blog, much less local restauranteurs. It’s the Craig Claiborne way.
• For other reviews, of shows and the like, I try to stick to things local to the bay area. There are plenty of writers covering national events and recordings for major publications. There are also more than enough blogs doing same. So I might review a local show by a national act, but I won’t review a nationally published book that I happened to buy at a local bookstore. Does that make sense?
• If, for whatever reason, there might be some kind of bias or conflict of interest involved in a post, I will let you know. For instance, if I know one of the artists at a gallery show, I will qualify my critique with this information. This doesn’t mean that I won’t try my darndest to be relatively objective - just because my friend is in the show doesn’t mean that I can’t make constructive comments about their work or the work of others.
• I will try hard not to censor myself. Of course I would like to keep my job and the love of my mother, so I would not post anything that would compromise those and other things. Do you really need to know that when I last ate at New Sun Hong Kong I was stinking drunk? Or that I only went to the Strokes show to get in the pants of a punk rock girl? Okay, maybe you do. So forget about it. I’ll post what I want, using the language that I use, and if you object, suck it.

So those are the ground rules. Enjoy the show.

For years denizens of the south bay have been feasting on some of the best south asian cuisine available in the United States. Way, way better than New York City’s Curry Court on second avenue and sixth street. As good, if not better than, the offerings available in London or Toronto. Of course, probably not as good as the stuff in Mumbai. But when you combine the talents of the south bay shamans of tandoor with the general excellence of San Francisco restaurant culture, you’re in for a treat.

One group of eateries is almost single-handedly changing the face of Indian food in San Francsico - the Naan ‘N Curry gang. With locations in the Tenderloin, the Haight, the Inner Sunset and Downtown, you are never far from some of the best curries this side of the Pacific. And here’s the kicker - these are not your mum’s white-linen curry joints. These are communal-table, serve-yourself, affordably-priced meccas of quality food in an egalitarian setting for hardly any money. Their business model begs the question - if here, why not at Le Colonial or Jeanty?

While french bistro cooking comes with too much pretentious cache here in the States to make a real bistro next to impossible, tandoor grills come with no such baggage. At Naan ‘N Curry you order from their menu at the counter, get your plastic number, grab some napkins and silverware, choose a squeeze-bottle sauce or two, and then help yourself to free chilled water or hot chai. The service is incredibly fast - my lunch showed up within ten minutes of my order - but no frills. Still, this means you don’t really have to tip, making the great food an even better bargain.

Some have complained about the decor and cleanliness, but I think V.S. Naipaul would agree that these are signs of authenticity, not wanton neglect. The downtown digs are pretty minimalist - but if you don’t like how the place downtown looks, don’t bother going to the place in the ‘Loin. There’s a reason Ted and Thom of Queer Eye’s Fab Five stick to their respective specialities - cooks cook, decorators decorate. And the cooks at Naan ‘N Curry don’t seem to have wasted their energy learning things ancillary to cooking.

The menu doesn’t change much, and is pretty much indinstinguishable from those at more posh places. You’ve got your curries, your biryanis, your vindaloos and masalas. Of course you have the tandoor, the vertical clay oven used to make the distinctive breads like naan as well as barbecue lamb and chicken. Today I ordered the Daal Ghosht (lamb and lentil curry) with a piece of plain, buttered Naan - and I spent six dollars. The curry was thick and spicy, thanks to the dried chili floating around in it, and was definitely not spiced with the industrial cumin-paprika-turmeric curry powder you buy at the supermarket. While it may be disconcerting to some to get a bite of the whole spices used in the curry, I know that this is a sign that their spices are at their freshest and most flavorful. Like the hot chili, you just spit it out and set it aside on your plate. Same goes for the bones still attached to the hunks of lamb - just try to cook a boneless curry if you want to find out how disappointing the results can be.

My personal favorite is the tandoori lamb chops. Four chops on the rib, heavily seasoned and crispy on the outside, a perfect pink medium-rare throughout the center. Just sheer delight if you love lamb (and I do). Now four lamb chops at the supermarket might cost you as much as this dish costs - nine dollars! I mean, this is the refined elegance of colonial Indian cuisine for the price of a hamburger and coke at Bennigan’s. If you ever plan on visiting San Francisco, wear flowers in your hair and for the love of Ganesh, eat at Naan ‘N Curry.

Taking a drop by Friendster during the day, I noticed that the beautiful Tanya was promoting a night of Brazilian music at the bar she tends, the Cafe Royale. I decided to drop in and put back some of Berkeley’s Takara Nigori (unfiltered) sake, which is a personal favorite. Besides, it’s always good to visit a place where you know the bartender.

Hopping along with my recently lamed roommate Ramsey, who was going in the same direction to pick up a some Valentine’s lingerie for his girlfriend at Macy’s, we got to the place at about 8:30. The place wasn’t packed, but the stools at the bar were all taken. The musicians had just begun setting up. I’d been to the Royale before, including a semi-anniversary party, and it was pretty much as I had remembered it - brushed steel bar backed by shelves of wines, marble tables, black and white tile floor, the back wall covered in art, a pool table and a big plush velvet couch in the middle. I think that the space was recently cannibalized from a gallery, perhaps by the owner, and it still has that gallery space feel too it, which is not a bad thing.

Ramsey and I ordered chilled nigori up and took a seat on the couch. Balacobaco, the trio, began to perform. At first the vocalist, Nadia Bandeira, was a little tentative, but as the night went on and she and the musicians warmed up she definitely grabbed our attention. Along with a keyboardist and drummer, the smooth samba rhythyms and melodies flowed nicely. Nadia introduced each song’s Portuguese lyrics with an English explanation, which in contrast to the otherwise cheery and upbeat music were generally about loss, injustice and betrayal. Leave it to the Brazilians to make heartbreak danceable.

The Cafe Royale does not have a license to serve hard liquor, probably due to its relatively residential surroundings and its likely history as something other than a bar. What they do have is a selection of upscale wines and beers and mixed drinks based on rice wines. Think Mojitos, Cosmopolitans and Martinis mixed with Korean soju instead of rum, vodka or gin. This would be fine if the bartender had some help, but with so many complicated drinks to be made and the lone keep also busy announcing the band, taking care of checks, washing glasses and generally being all over the place it slowed the service. If the place had been more crowded that night I wondered how one person could have handled it. Tanya’s a trooper, though, and the evening went fine.

Probably due to the posh surroundings and the relaxed atmosphere, the Cafe Royale is a great place to take a date. The drinks are good and the seating comfortable. With live music events and an ever changing array of art on the walls, it can be culturally stimulating, too. Still, I feel the place is struggling to find a marketable identity and I worry if it has enough clientele to guarantee it’s staying power. So visit now or you may miss it!

Okay, so my domain name is down. Which means that even though I’m writing this, you can’t read it. In the future, you can always try http://216.147.54.71/weblog/ if you’re having trouble finding my blog. In the meantime, feel free to paypal some cash to jacksonwest@jacksonwest.com if you’re desperate for me to resume posting at this address. I should have everything back up and running by Wednesday. If you have to know, I had cancelled the email account that Network Solutions was probably trying to notify me at, and frankly I don’t have particularly good organizational skills, so really I’m the idiot I sould be blaming for this mess. Oh well.

Okay, of all the days to get paid on, I get paid on a Wednesday. Not great, but not terrible. Friday would be nice, Monday would be best. But as long as the checks keep coming, I don’t complain.

Since I’m down to about eight pairs of wearable undergarments, I basically end up having to do at least a load of laundry a week. And since I haven’t been able to afford dry cleaning (thank you very much, Internal Revenue Service) I’m down to a total of three twill slacks that I can wear from day to day at work. This has meant some serious choices have to be made as to what slacks I’ll wear when, since everyone knows you can’t wear the same piece of clothing to work two days in a row.

The benefit of this arrangment is that I end up with some cash and an hour and a half to kill in the middle of every week. Luckily, my laundromat is conveniently located accross the street from Taqueria San Francisco and Pop’s bar, quality establishments for the wage slave getting their paychecks garnished for back taxes.

The routine goes like this: I extract the dirty clothes from the piles that have accumulated throughout my room into my granny cart. I wheel said granny cart down 24th, stopping at the Wallgreens for soap, bleach, cigarettes and cash. I proceed to the Giant Wash on the corner of York and fill the frontloaders with a couple of loads. Now I have about twenty five to thirty minutes to get some eating done.

The Taqueria San Francisco is certainly not the best Taqueria in the city (I still think El Toro or Pancho Villa, with their flame-grill parillas are the best) but it’s quiet and roomy, and there’s a TV playing sports at all times. If I’m running short on cash, I just get a carne asada taco and some cebollitas (grilled green onions). Otherwise the carne asada dinner - two skirt steaks grilled hard with rice, beans and avocado - and a Tecate are my choice. I browse the paper, watch some sports, and otherwise have a fine dinner.

By the time I’ve finished my after-dinner cigarette, my wash is done. I drop it in the dryer and then head on over to Pop’s. Pop’s is an interesting place. I guess it use to be more of a divey place full of rowdy lesbians and they let you smoke cigarettes. It’s still pretty divey, and there are still a few lesbians, but they’re less rowdy and you’re not allowed to smoke anymore. My guess is that the owner of the place, who used to tend the bar and therefore was exempted from the smoking ban as an owner-proprietor, got tired of the lesbians being so rowdy and hired some help - even, heaven forfend, some male bartenders.

Well in the eyes of my neighbor Lea, who used to be a regular until she tried to kick down the door in a fit of drunken rage, it’s been all downhill from there. All I’ve noticed is that I’ve gone from always being the preppiest person in the place to only occassionally being the preppiest person in the place. I guess that’s what they call gentrification. On the same token, there are also more aging male meth-heads in the place, which is not an improvement by anyone’s standards, so you can’t always get what you want.

Regardless, Pop’s on a Wednesday is perfectly fine as a neighborhood pub. In fact, it’s a great neighborhood pub. What I like best about Wednesdays is the one dollar cans of Hamm’s. If you don’t remember, Hamm’s used to advertise on all the national networks on Saturday mornings, during the cartoons, with ads that were similarly animated depicting a party-hearty bear and his pals who would do crazy things for “the beer refreshing.” I’m here to tell you that this must have been the most fore-sighted marketing team in history - fifteen years later not only can I hum the theme song, but I buy the beer. Genius.

Of course the nice thing about Pop’s is that their pints of Pabst Blue Ribbon are always an economical two dollars, and besides two televisions and a pool table they also have two of the old tabletop video games - Centipede and Ms. Pacman. The jukebox is a nice mix of hair bands, emo classics, new wave, disco, hip-hop and power ballads. It’s nice to know the younger sapphic set doesn’t exclusively listen to K.D. Lang and the Indigo Girls. The only nod to the past is a Hole album that no one ever seems to play. The barkeeps are universally nice, and one or two of them actually recognize me since I’ve started stopping by on laundry day.

So while one segment of the community may be lamenting how lame Pops has gotten, I for one am glad to have a neighborhood spot that serves the cheap, watery beer I like and is located accross from my laundromat. There’s nothing like going home with a granny cart of clean clothes and a nice buzz in the middle of the week. If you need to do the wash and you have a couple of bucks, drop on in. Last wash is at nine. Just look for the preppy guy drinking Hamm’s.