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San Francisco Chronicle
05-07-2025
- General
- San Francisco Chronicle
This tiny Bay Area town is a surprising spot to find delicious Hawaiian food
Subbing in for MacKenzie Chung Fegan this week is Cesar Hernandez, sharing his favorite recent bites, dishes, snacks and baked goods that don't make it into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for MacKenzie's free newsletter, Bite Curious. I was delighted by the laidback atmosphere of The Altamont General Store, a counter-service restaurant and market in Occidental, the secluded town in Sonoma County with a population of 1,000. The casual restaurant makes a credible sausage breakfast sandwich ($16.50), slicked with romesco, but the Hawaiian-inspired plate lunch ($21) stole the show. I went with shrimp, which was slightly crisp and doused in a spicy-sweet sauce. It was rounded out with toothsome rice, creamy mac, miso broccoli and piquant, tangy kimchi. I had one of the greatest fish soups I've ever tried at Mountain View's HalalStreet Xinjiang Cuisine, which specializes in Northern Chinese and Uyghur cuisine. The hulking sea bass in a green peppercorn broth ($58.98) arrives at the table bubbling with fury. While the fish was tender and flaky, I couldn't get enough of the pickled cabbage. The decadent broth is more numbing than spicy, but keep drinking and your sinuses will loosen. I recommend trying it with a group of friends. Or tackle it alone, if you're brave enough. 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., 5-9 p.m. Monday-Friday, 11:30 a.m.-4:30-9 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. 174 Castro St., Mountain View. or 650-386-5103 I had wonderful snacks on a recent visit to the Restaurante Latino Los Sazones de mi Tierra, a new Guatemalan restaurant in San Leandro. The restaurant excels at crunchy appetizers like tostadas topped with sliced beets, boiled eggs and a spiral of ketchup. The standout was the garnaches ($15), 10 cracker-sized tostadas adorned with ground beef, tomato sauce and pickled cabbage. I like to think of them as improved Lunchables. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. daily. 16496 E. 14th St., San Leandro. 510-626-6471
San Francisco Chronicle
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
This Wine Country cafe is known for its hot, tender biscuit sandwiches. Here's the best one to order
Each week, critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan shares some of her favorite recent bites, the dishes and snacks and baked goods that didn't find their way into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for her free newsletter, Bite Curious. I was waiting for my breakfast order of biscuit sandwiches when Contimo 's co-owner Ryan Harris plopped down on the bench next to me. 'I'm sorry,' he said, poker-faced, 'but I'm going to have to ask you to leave.' Not without my biscuits, Ryan! In his review of the Napa sandwich shop, my colleague Cesar Hernandez correctly raved about their tender crumb, a product of the grated frozen butter in Harris' grandmother's recipe. I would argue equal word count could have been devoted to Contimo's pimento cheese, which melts unctuously into the warm-from-the-oven biscuit ($7.75). Contimo Provisions. 950 Randolph St., Napa. I feel like rhubarb is less popular in California than it is in New York, where the first pink stalks at farmers markets harbinger the arrival of spring. It's a promise as much as it is an ingredient. In milder climes, perhaps rhubarb is less emotionally significant, but I still order it whenever I see it on a menu — which is why the strawberry and rhubarb galette ($13) edged out the salted fig caramel trifle (four words of real beauty) at Sonoma's The Girl and the Fig. The sweet-tart pastry, topped with toasted almonds, a burnished caramel and a mondo scoop of vanilla ice cream, teleported me from a 90-degree Wine Country summer day to April back East. The Girl and the Fig. 110 W Spain St., Sonoma. 'We ordered ours with cheese,' I said to our server when she dropped our order of seemingly cheese-less tteokbokki ($20) at Not to fear, she explained, the cheese was mixed into the crimson sauce. This was immediately evident as I served my dining companion a spoonful and was treated to a cheese pull of epic proportions. The cheese content is so high, in fact, that I would caution you to eat at a relatively quick pace; the sauce congeals into a semi-solid state as it cools. 1220 9th Ave., San Francisco.
San Francisco Chronicle
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
It opened. It closed. It opened. Here's what to finally try at this hotly anticipated Wine Country café
Each week, critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan shares some of her favorite recent bites, the dishes and snacks and baked goods that didn't find their way into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for her free newsletter, Bite Curious. After an unexpected permitting hiccup that forced a temporary closure, Under-study in St. Helena is back open. The museum café-bakery-marketplace still doesn't have its seating sorted out, but until then visitors can eat their expertly laminated danishes and sweet and sour pig ears on the adjacent patio at sister restaurant Press. You should definitely get both, and be sure to tack on the heirloom tomato ($14) as well. On the menu, it's described as coming with 'preserved plum, toasted sourdough,' but this is no toast. Expect instead an intensely flavorful sculptural salad with precariously stacked tomato and plum segments, tweezered herbs and lacy sourdough crisps. Under-study. 595 St. Helena Hwy., St. Helena. Dafna Kory, the pectin whisperer behind East Bay company INNA Jam, will be shuttering her company in September after preserving the best of summer's figs, berries and stone fruit. INNA is best known for its jams and chutneys, but I recently took home a bottle of its Albion strawberry shrub ($16.95), a vibrant drinking vinegar that can be mixed with seltzer (and the spirit of your choice, if you're inclined). I'll be stocking up on a few more bottles while I still can. You can find INNA products at various local retailers including Bi-Rite Markets and Epicurean Trader locations and, of course, online. Respect the palate cleanser! Whether it's bites of pickled ginger at a sushi counter or sips of Pink Champ, a tart soda specifically developed to reset your taste buds between licks of ice cream, professional eaters need moments of brightness and pause. My favorite course at San Francisco's two-Michelin-star Birdsong was a palate cleanser (part of a $325 tasting menu), but also so much more. Its melange of fresh flavors (ginger, chamomile, lemon) and textures (shaved ice, marmalade, tapioca, sorbet), together with the zing of Meyer lemon zested tableside, slapped me in the face like Cher in 'Moonstruck,' prepping me for the final dessert courses ahead.
San Francisco Chronicle
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F. Chronicle restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan wins James Beard Award
The James Beard Foundation has named San Francisco Chronicle Restaurant Critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan the winner of this year's Emerging Voice award. The annual James Beard Awards are among the most prestigious in the food world, recognizing the best chefs, restaurateurs, cookbook authors and food journalists in the United States. The Emerging Voice award recognizes work of 'immediate impact and lasting significance' by an individual who is relatively new to food journalism. 'It's an honor to be recognized by the journalism awards subcommittee,' Fegan said. 'My first year as a restaurant critic has been the definition of a learning experience, and I'm eternally grateful for the support of my editors at the Chronicle, associate restaurant critic Cesar Hernandez and my predecessor Soleil Ho.' This is not Fegan's first honor this year. The Society of Features Journalism recognized her in its annual Excellence-in-Features Awards with third place in Food Criticism for her review of Tadich Grill and an honorable mention for Food Writing Portfolio. In addition to writing restaurant reviews, Fegan also authors the free Bite Curious newsletter. She and Hernandez collaborated on the return of the Top 100 restaurants list this year. The San Francisco Chronicle ( is the largest newspaper in Northern California and the second largest on the West Coast. Acquired by Hearst in 2000, the San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young and has been awarded six Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence. Follow us on X at @SFChronicle.
San Francisco Chronicle
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
This new Wine Country restaurant makes all its own pasta. This is the one to order
Each week, critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan shares some of her favorite recent bites, the dishes and snacks and baked goods that didn't find their way into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for her free newsletter, Bite Curious. Creste di gallo, a short-cut pasta, is so named because of its resemblance to a cockscomb, but the version at Stella reminds me more of octopus tentacles entwined under a shower of cheese and parsley. The new Kenwood restaurant from the team behind the Glen Ellen Star makes all its pastas in house, and the creste di gallo ($27) dish is a standout. It embraces the flavor profile of a chicken liver crostino, the sweetness of vidalia onions and aged balsamic vinegar playing off the earthiness of a brothy chicken liver ragu. I'm sure other cuts of pasta would have worked equally well, but I appreciate the playfulness of serving a rooster's comb alongside a chicken's liver. Like everyone else who goes into an office, I'm constantly on the hunt for good lunch options within walking distance of the Chronicle's building on Fifth and Mission. I thought I had exhausted them all, but I recently came across The Roll, a Japanese restaurant that specializes in Edomae-style sushi that opened last year. Its signature roll ($15) was well seasoned and generous with the fish, but what I'll return for is the stuffed spins on inari sushi, which typically feature rice tucked inside pockets of fried tofu. Each one resembles a sweet little boat. The Roll offers three for $17 or five for $26, including a side of seaweed salad, and each piece is big enough to split between two people, if somewhat difficult to cut in half. I was tickled to see, in addition to more usual topping suspects like dry-aged tuna ($6) and salmon with yuzu kosho ($6), less conventional options like corn cheese ($5) and yakiniku beef topped with a quail egg ($5). Gougères are simply too small. I could eat a dozen of those darling cheesy puffs, 70% air and barely larger than a ping pong ball. Tartine apparently agrees, because its gougère is no dainty passed hors d'oeuvre — it's massive, more like a concha or bialy in size. A burnished, Gruyere-topped crust gives way to a beautifully rich and eggy interior. Aside from the brobdingnagian proportions, what sets Tartine's gougère apart is the assertive presence of black pepper. Cacio e pepe fans, this one's for you.
