Burger Heaven

Operation Embrace San Francisco got off to a swinging start on Friday with a visit to Joe's Cable Car with Jessica and Sarah.

This little diner has tremendous wattage, and it looked like a great, neon beacon down at the southern end of Mission St. on a foggy night. A large yellow sign on the roof announced, "Joe grinds his own fresh chuck daily," which is impressive, since fresh-ground beef is generally considered the key to a good burger (also impressive because the only thing I grind daily is my teeth). And the menu promises equal satisfaction. "We ask a lot of questions that help us to fully satisfy your stay at Joe’s. Please order your ground steak burger the way you would like your steak cooked. Your patience is appreciated and well worth the wait. Don’t worry - same day service! All of our fresh ground steak beef burgers are served open faced for your inspection...Following food critics’ testing method, slice off a small piece of the patty without bread, taste it and come to your own conclusion."

So I was already in love with Joe's before the food arrived. We split a 6 oz. Fresh Ground Beef Steak with grilled onions on a sesame seed bun, and it was tasty and cooked right to order. With all that fresh grinding, it wasn't as densely packed as commercial burgers are. Instead, it was tender and moist. Sadly, sides (fries and onion rings) were merely average, but milkshakes were superlative. They're made with Bud's Ice Cream, a SF classic which is now produced in Thailand? Anyway, we'll be back. It's hard to imagine a more cheerful spot, with all the neon and Christmas lights and a little animatronic stuffed ape that makes kissy noises at you when you walk in the door.

Swimming

One of my oldest friends go married last weekend in Vermont, so we flew back home for a whirlwind tour of the North Country and Boston. Home, home...yes, that still feels like home.

A few of the friends we saw mentioned this blog. Specifically, that I'm making my life sound like a blur of wine tastings and restaurants and la-la-sweetness. I have two things to say about that. One: Yes, it's true that the blog's a bit uh, sunny. I still can't figure out whether I'm trying to worm my way into the Food Blog Club--all food and nothing but the food, with the occasional food-related travelogue or childhood memory thrown in--or whether I'm creating an online journal of my California life. And if it's the former, I don't want to get too personal. If it's the latter, then I should password-protect this thing. I need some more time to figure out what I want it to be.

Oh, and second: It's actually really nice when people trust you enough to tell you the truth. Yes, kindly, of course.

So in the interest of honesty, I'll say that life has not, in fact, been a bowl of (local, seasonal, organic) cherries. I'll spare you the details, which may or may not involve crying into my steamed dumplings at Taipei on Clement St., but I haven't been this homesick since Camp Timber Trails. We didn't leave Boston because we were unhappy...we left because we were so happy that it made us ballsy. There are far worse places to be homesick than San Francisco. But there was also a lot to leave behind, a home and a community, and I have been feeling decidedly unballsy of late.

I went for a midnight swim in Caspian Lake on Friday night. My friend B, the bride, wanted to do a little mikveh-style ritual with her close friends, so we sat around her on the dock and gave her our blessings for a happy marriage. Then we all got in the water. A cold breeze was blowing and the lake was about as warm as a lake in Northern Vermont can ever be at midnight. I was halfway in, shivering and wet, trying to go under slowly, when I realized that the dock was too far away to go back without getting even more chilled. "It's warmer once you're in the water," B called out hopefully. So I dove in and after a minute of agony, it did get better.

And that, metaphorically, is just about where I am right now: In water up to my waist, too far in to go back, holding on to the idea of the warm shore. And the only way it's going to get better is if I dive in and start swimming.

Fireflies

Yesterday, I talked with a woman at work who had just returned from a vacation in upstate New York. She said that the weather was oppressively hot and humid, but it was nice to go out at night without a sweater on. I said I missed that too, along with the lush green you get in a place where the growing season is so short. So much life happens there in just six months. And fireflies. You don't get fireflies here.

When I got home, I ran into my neighbor, Meredith, a chef who, coincidentally, moved here from Boston about 10 years ago. She and her partner are the kind of neighbors who show up when your moving truck arrives and say, "How can we help?" At first, we didn't even know what to do with that. Do we pay them? Send them flowers? We had incredible neighbors in Boston, but moving help? C'mon. Then we figured out that in some parts of the world, this is considered normal. We're starting to get the hang of it.

Anyway, Meredith and I were both spouseless for dinner, so we decided to go out. I let her pick, since she's always coming up with something new and interesting. "We'll go to Firefly," she said.

I had heard of Firefly. It made the Chronicle's "Top 100 Restaurants" list, and it's not too far from where we live. It's a neighborhoody kind of place set at the end of the 24th St. commercial district in Noe Valley. A comfortable, cottagey room with a fanciful canopy ceiling, soft lighting, and (relatively) affordable prices. The waitstaff know many of the customers by name, and the room has an easy, affable feel.

Firefly's menu takes American comfort favorites, like fried chicken, and polishes them up, working in Asian flavors here and there. Nothing fancy, but carefully crafted, with excellent ingredients... the kind of place where everything on the menu looks irresistible. We split the potstickers, which were filled with sweet shrimp, scallops, and big chunks of crispy water chestnuts, along with an order of romano beans topped with candied lemon peel and a few drops of truffle oil (restraint gratefully aknowledged). For the main course, Meredith had the fried chicken and I tried the tender ribs which were thickly glazed and served with slaw, spoonbread, and beans. It was too rich to eat all at once, but delicious.

Too full for dessert, we strolled down 24th St. and looked in all the brightly lit shop windows. It got me thinking again of summer nights back home. I grew up near the Connecticut River and on June nights the damp fields along the river were lit up with those fireflies. You could go for a walk in the woods at midnight and find your way by their light, just like something out of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here there are no actual, live fireflies. But something about the fog and the pretty displays gave me a very happy, almost wonderous feeling. Turns out this city can seem magical, too, in its own way.