John Birdsall from SFWeekly visited Bernalwood’s western frontier recently to field test the house-made sausage from Locavore on Mission Street. He liked what he found:

Jason Moniz was the opening chef at Oakland’s Flora in late 2007, back when Michael Bauer liked the place. Last fall, Moniz and his business partner, Mario Duarte, opened Locavore, in a deep, dark space on the Mission Street slope of Bernal Heights, across from Blue Plate. For lunch, Moniz makes and grills five kinds of sausages ― really good sausages, out of pork he sources from Riverdog Farm in Guinda ― slips them into buns custom-made at Sandbox, and sells them for an amazingly cheap $7 each. Last week we had Moniz’s spicy Italian sausage (pebbly-textured and chewy) half-buried under a ruffle of roasted fennel slices mixed with bits of preserved lemon. Today it was a fat maple andouille, lightly smoky, topped with shredded Treviso chicory, its bitterness balanced with honey. The andouille’s tight, crisp skin was black from the grill; the fine-textured meat within oozed juice. Perfect.

MEANWHILE, 7×7’s Antonia Richmond — she’s a Bernalian! — also loves Locavore:

My (second) favorite part of the meal was knowing that the vast majority of the ingredients came from local farms and purveyors like Marin Sun Farms, Happy Boy Farms, and Monterey Fish Market. So I could have my ethically-raised, sustainably-grown, ecologically-sound, whole-animal-cooked, world-peace making, cancer-curing cake, and eat it too.

Photo: SFWeekly/John Birdsall