Let’s not be ashamed to say it: Despite our great hopes, the first attempt to revive the legendary Palace Steak House on the corner of Mission and Cesar Chavez turned out to be a big disappointment. But on the bright side, it was also relatively short-lived, as the reborn Palace Steak House returned to the realm of the dead about a year after it reopened. Now Bernalwood has learned that the Palace Steak House will be reborn — again!

The Inside Scoop blog reports that acclaimed chef Manny Torres Gimenez from Roxie’s Cafe plans to reanimate the Palace Steak House in the guise of a steak house he wants to call… The Palace!

Confused yet? Inside Scoop explains:

Gimenez signed papers to take over the old school joint on the corner of Cesar Chavez and Mission. Along with his wife Katerina (who doubles as the GM), he will reopen the restaurant as a new steakhouse named The Palace.

“We’re gonna try to do like a take on a steakhouse, but more refined,” he says. “My goal is to create tributes to whole animals with affordable prices.”

The plan is to open the doors on June 1 after a little bit of renovation. He’ll be able to do animal butchery there — whole pigs, beef quarters — and will also bring over many of the favorite dishes from Roxy’s Cafe. Do note that he’ll continue to operate Roxy’s, and he’s hired chef de cuisine there to help out: Shawn Naputi, who worked for five years as a line cook at Incanto, among other places.

At The Palace, Gimenez will make his own sausages, cure his own meat and so on. He’ll offer both an a la carte menu and a tasting menu ($50 for five courses).

Barring the demonic effects of  an undead restaurant curse that haunts the Palace Steak House space, there is reason to believe that this revival will be more palatable and more successful then the last. The crankypants critics on Yelp give the Roxie Cafe four stars, while SF Chronicle food critic Michael “The Bauer” Bauer recently praised chef Manny Torres Gimenez while awarding Roxie’s Cafe two stars:

Manny Torres Gimenez is one of the new breed of chefs who cook from the heart and aren’t deterred by inadequate kitchens and inferior dining amenities. He earned a cult following creating arepas and a $20 four-course tasting menu at Mr. Pollo in the Mission, but in January he “upgraded” to a space in the same block that’s three times as large – Roxy’s Cafe.

At Roxy’s he offers a $25 chef’s choice menu; a $75 10-course tasting menu that includes Asian, Italian and South American flavors from his native Venezuela; and a short a la carte menu.

Before going out on his own, Gimenez worked at SPQR, Coi and Quince, and those influences are evident in what he ladles into his chipped soup bowls and arranges on his oversize white plates.

All this sounds promising… zombies notwithstanding.

PHOTO: Shuttered new Palace Steak House, October 2012, by Telstar Logistics. Hat tip: Neighbor Greg

San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer came to Bernal Heights to sample the fare at the new, permanent, and already popular Hillside Supper Club.

The Bauer explored the menu. The Bauer ate. The Bauer observed. And in the end, The Bauer awarded Hillside Supper Club two  stars (out of a possible four). The Bauer’s review was loving but firm:

Owners [Tony Ferrari and Jonathan Sutton] clearly have vision and talent, but could use an editor; in some cases, the embellishments diminish the effect on such otherwise excellent combinations as handmade cavatelli with lamb sugo. I loved it until I got a sweet, acidic burst of pickled pomegranate. A fresh contrast is always nice on a long-cooked sauce, but in this case the effect was jolting.

[…]

Yet for all its minor flaws in food and service, the room was packed with customers and goodwill. Hillside feels like a club – a neighborhood gathering place in an underserved residential area. In the end, that’s what counts.

PHOTO: HSC Chefs Tony Ferrari (left) and Jonathan Sutton. By John Storey for the San Francisco Chronicle

By day, I work in an office where I sit across from a gentleman named Boris.

Boris was born in Russia, and though he emigrated to the US as a teenager, he retains his Eastern European palate. I was born in New Jersey, and though I emigrated to California after college, I inherited the Eastern European palate bequeathed to me via the DNA of my grandparents. In practical terms, the upshot of this is that both Boris and I have a deep fondness for pickles.

Boris lives in Berkeley, and he loves the pickles he gets at Saul’s Deli on Shattuck.

I live in Bernal Heights, and I’m a fan of the pickles I get from Paulie’s Pickling on Cortland.

So which is better?

To answer this question, Boris and I each brought a jar of our favorite pickles into the office, and yesterday afternoon we organized a Pickle Smackdown: A side-by-side taste test for an office full of fussy foodies, with Best Pickle honors decided by popular acclaim.

Fellow Citizens of Bernalwood, I’m here to tell you at our ad hoc Pickle Smackdown, Paulie’s Pickles prevailed handily, easily beating the competition from Saul’s (which was very good, but just not better). Even Boris eventually admitted that Paulie’s produces a superior pickle product.

Victory doesn’t get any tastier than that.

My brother and I brew beer in Bernal Heights. We do this to carry on the proud Bernal tradition of the North Star Brewery, which operated a century ago on Army Street near today’s South Van Ness.

Also, we like good, local beer. So we make our own.

I don’t know how many other Bernal brewers are out there, but we’re not alone. In fact, I know we’re not even the only ones making homebrew on our block.

Here’s how it’s done:

My kitchen is all electric, which isn’t ideal. It takes nearly an hour to bring just a couple of gallons of liquid to a boil.

This ordinary food-grade 5-gallon bucket is our primary fermenter. It needs to be clean and sanitized so bacteria don’t compete with the yeast and turn our beer sour.

Sean stirs the wort. (That’s what you call beer-in-progress before it’s fermented.)

Note the use of Hetch Hetchy water for the win.

We steeped this bag of grain in the water as we brought it up to a boil. Now we sparge it — rinse hot water over and through it to extract sugars. Most of the sugar in the wort will come from malt extract, which we’ll see in a minute.

But first, we pause to take in the sunset.

Malt extract, made from malted barley, is mostly sugar; it’s the main food for the yeast, which eat sugar and produce alcohol. Professional brewers and some advanced homebrewers do a “mash” to extract the sugars from the malted barley directly.

Using dry malt extract is more expensive, and some might say it’s cheating. But it saves a lot of time and equipment. My electric stove would take forever to get the larger volume of dilute mash runnings up to a boil, so we’d probably have to get a propane burner and do the boil outside.

Once all the sugar is dissolved and the sweet wort is boiling, it’s time to add the hops.

The hops go in the bag, and the bag goes into the boil:

We use four different types of hops, added between 60 minutes and 5 minutes before the end of the boil.

After an hour, we take the pot off the heat, and drain and sparge the hop bags. Then we set the covered pot in the sink, which we’ve made into an ice bath for cooling.

Then, we go out to dinner. Baby Blues barbecue has become the usual spot, and it seems to bring good brewing karma.

Side Note: As indicated by his t-shirt, Sean’s a Potrero Hill resident now. We shared the Bernal apartment where I still live (and where we now brew) when we first moved to San Francisco. He’s got Anchor Brewing Co. as a Potrero neighbor. Southern Pacific now brews at their brewpub at 19th and Treat, on the middle ground between our hills. We live in a golden age for beer.

Oh, here’s me, still at dinner:

By the time we’re back from dinner, the wort has cooled enough that we can pour it into the primary fermenter, top it up with more Hetch Hetchy water, and add the yeast.

The beer will sit in the primary fermenter for about a week, until the airlock on top stops bubbling.

Then we siphon it into the secondary fermenter, a glass carboy, and add more hops (called “dry-hopping,” although the hops don’t stay dry). We’ll leave it in the secondary for two weeks, and then either bottle or keg it.

This latest batch will go in the keg, to be ready to drink around February 15. If we’d bottled it, we’d need to wait another week or so for it to get fizzy.

We used to make pretty labels for the bottles, but they’re a pain to soak off when it’s time to clean the empties for the next batch. Now we just write the style, month, and year on the cap  (eg. “IPA 1/13”) with a stylish Sharpie.

Besides, it’s what’s inside the bottle that’s important. After six years of tinkering with our recipe, Thomas Brothers IPA is a damn good beer if I do say so myself.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but the last two batches of Thomas Brothers IPA were brewed on October 14 and 24 — the days of the first games of the National League Championship Series and World Series, respectively. The Giants went on to win it all.

We brewed this latest batch on Sunday, after the 49ers won the NFC Championship. I plan to cheer on the 49ers at next Sunday’s Super Bowl with a glass of our World Series brew. It is proven. It is tested. We know it works. Knock on wood.

PHOTOS: Joe and Sean Thomas

The foodie blog One Fork, One Spoon recently paid a visit to Bernal Cutlery, our artisanal culinary knife shop in the tony 331 Cortland marketplace. Blades were sharpened, and along the way, wisdom was imparted about kitchen cutting board selection strategy:

Considering [Bernal Cutlery owner Josh Donald]  is a knife-obsessed dealer and sharpener, it should come as no surprise that his number one priority when considering a cutting board is protecting the knives that will cut on it. If you share that priority, then a wood cutting board is the way to go. While many government and food safety organizations require the use of plastic cutting boards in commercial kitchens, significant debate exists on the topic. Ultimately, the decision to go with plastic or wood is a matter of personal preference; if you won’t be able to sleep at night without putting your cutting board through the dishwasher, then you should probably get a plastic cutting board and plan on getting your knives sharpened a little more often. Most importantly, unless you have a serious crush on your local knife sharpener, do not use your knives on serving plates or cutting boards made out of glass, marble, super hard or super soft plastics.

If this appeals, there are also many more tips on wood cutting board selection and maintenance.

PHOTO: Bernal Cutlery, by Timmy Malloy