Chef Prem Tamang Relocating to Bernal’s “South Asian Restaurant Row”

April 27, 2016August 9, 2017 / Todd_Lappin / 17 Comments

cuisineofNepal

A few weeks ago, Bernalwood received an adorable email from Prem Tamang, the chef at the much-loved Little Nepal restaurant on Cortland:

I have been running Little Nepal restaurant since 2003. The time make me to move to mission and cortland 3486 B mission.

It will be Cuisine of Nepal. I can’t take name of little Nepal because I was leasing this business. When I moved to mission street with new name cuisine of Nepal I would love to put in Bernalwood post so that all bernal Nighbor will know that I moved.

Best regard, prem

“Of course!”we replied. So here’s the news: Chef Prem is relocating to Mission Street where he will operate under a new name as Cuisine of Nepal.

Last week we received more detail on the move. Cuisine of Nepal will open at 3486 Mission, right across from the intersection with Cortland. The soft opening may happen as soon this Saturday, April 30 (fingers crossed), with the proper grand re-opening festivities scheduled for Saturday, May 14.

Chef Prem’s press release says:

Owner/Chef Prem Tamang announces the Grand Opening of his new restaurant, Cuisine of Nepal, located in the heart of Bernal Heights’ South Asian Restaurant Row at 3486-B Mission Street at Cortland Ave. The 30-seat restaurant reflects Nepal’s warm hospitality, where the cozy setting and market-fresh fare are as welcoming as a traditional Nepali home.

Chef Prem Tamang leads the kitchen with a menu that features local seasonal ingredients including neighborhood favorites such as Kukhurako Ledo (Chicken Cashew Curry), Saag Tarkari (Mustard Leaf Curry), and Poleko Khasi (Sizzling Lamb), as well as new specialties specific to Tamang’s home village in Nepal.

Since 2003, Chef Tamang has honed his skills as owner/chef at Little Nepal restaurant, a Bernal Heights gem where the San Francisco Chronicle has urged diners to “discover intriguing twists and variations on traditional South Asian dishes.” Tamang’s warmhearted approach and love of preparing fresh meals can be traced back to his nascent work as a high altitude cooking expert on Himalayan treks in his native country, where he prepared delicious meals at 14,000 feet above sea level for hardy mountain-climbers from around the world. […]

Open six days a week (closed Mondays), Cuisine of Nepal is located in the heart of Bernal Heights’ South Asian Restaurant Row at 3486-B Mission Street (at Cortland), San Francisco, CA 94110. The restaurant is open for Lunch Tuesday through Sunday from 11:00 am to 2:30 pm, and for Dinner Tuesday through Sunday from 4:30 – 10:30 pm. Major credit cards are accepted. Catering, Takeout, and Free Delivery are also available.

***OPENING DAY PARTY: The public is invited to join Chef Tamang & staff on Saturday, May 14th, from Noon – 8 pm, as Cuisine of Nepal offers a one-time only $5 Sampling Menu, with a choice of tasting one Appetizer and two Entrees from the day’s special menu plus Rice, Naan,and Lal Mohan dessert. A $2 glass of Wine or Beer will also be available to those 21 and over.***

Did you catch that bit about the Bernal Heights “South Asian Restaurant Row”?

It’s true! The corner of Mission and Cortland will now be home to restaurants representing India (Zante’s and Spicy Bite), Cambodia (Ankor Borei), and Nepal (Cuisine of Nepal). This is great news, because, our South Asian Restaurant Row is a terrific compliment to our NanoTokyo District, clustered just up the street around Mission and 29th Street.

So let us now join together to say: YUM!

Best wishes with the move, Chef Prem, and so glad you’re still a part of our community.

PHOTO: Work-in-progress facade of Cuisine of Nepal, as seen on April 23, 2016. Photo by Telstar Logistics

Tonight! Celebrate a New Ale at the Old Bus Tavern

April 20, 2016April 19, 2016 / Todd_Lappin

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Your neighbors at the glamorous Old Bus Tavern at 3193 Mission Street (near Valencia) are having a special 4/20 beer event tonight, and they invite you to drop by the brewpub tonight for a taste. There’s even a free Beer Bus to cart you to other beer hotspots nearby.

Neighbor Bennett from Old Bus says:

I wanted to pass along a heads up that Old Bus is hosting Meet the Brewers night on April 20. Here are the details:

Wednesday, April 20th, 6-9pm: Meet the Brewers
We’re hosting Meet the Brewers night on Wednesday, April 20th. We’re going to be pouring our Rye-noplasty Pale Ale through a Randall loaded with Amarillo hops for maximum dankness, as well as debuting our new English-style Mild ale called Into the Mild. Oh, and free apps from 6-7pm!

Also, click here for more information on the free Drink SF Beer Shuttle that will be running from Old Bus Tavern to neighboring breweries.

PHOTO: The new English-style Mild ale at Old Bus Tavern

Isabel Caudillo’s El Buen Comer Restaurant Opening Soon on Mission

April 8, 2016 / Todd_Lappin / 3 Comments

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A few months back, we told you about the crowdfunding campaign to support El Buen Comer, a new restaurant that will open at 3435 Mission Street (at Kingston) in Bernal Heights.

Well, the grand opening will (finally) happen soon, and San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jonathan Kauffman is so excited he wrote a big profile about Isabel Caudillo, the founder of El Buen Comer. Kauffman writes:

Isabel Caudillo’s first restaurant, El Buen Comer, opens in Bernal Heights next month with 45 seats, gorgeous terra-cotta bowls imported from Mexico, a beer and wine license, and waiters. But her true first restaurant opened in 2001. It was called her living room. […]

It has taken far longer than anyone thought for the restaurant to be ready. The delays have given Caudillo time to apply for loans from the Mission Economic Development Agency, launch a Kickstarter campaign — one donor contributed $15,000, which still floors her — and, most importantly, to feel ready. Her sisters call from Mexico, offering encouragement. Craig and Annie Stoll of Delfina continue to mentor her. So do colleagues in La Cocina who have already opened restaurants of their own.

Much like Caudillo’s living-room restaurant, El Buen Comer’s short dinner menu will center around comida corrida: four daily guisados with soup, beans, rice and tortillas, served family-style. Caudillo is cooking the food she grew up with, the food she knows in her bones, but the zeitgeist has inadvertently joined up with her: More non-Mexicans are searching out guisados, mostly in the form of tacos de guisado, tortillas topped with a few spoonfuls of stew.

Get to know Isabel Caudillo by reading Jonathan Kauffman’s complete profile of her, and start counting the days until El Buen Comer opens. Guisados! Guisados!

PHOTO: Isabel Caudillo by Gabrielle Lurie for The San Francisco Chronicle

A Barroom History of the Odd Mural in The Lucky Horseshoe

April 7, 2016 / Todd_Lappin / 6 Comments

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Last week, the humble but delightful Lucky Horseshoe bar on Cortland celebrated its fifth anniversary. Hooray! That’s a big deal, because it means that The Lucky Horseshoe can now lay claim to its proud own era at 453 Cortland, a barroom space that has been home to several previous eras of Bernal dive-bar legend.

For decades after World War II, 453 Cortland was known as The Cherokee. (More about that in a moment.) Then the space became Skip’s Tavern, a bar nearby neighbors remember for being rough around the edges and loud at night. Yet Skip’s was also home to some rather incredible blues music and a vibrant culture of its own.

Since then, Lucky Horseshoe has established its own funky vibe, and it retains a commitment to music. It’s friendly and well-maintained, but it’s still the kind of dive a neighborhood can be proud of. CONGRATS Team Lucky Horseshoe!

Through all this, presiding over all these eras of boozy history at 453 Cortland, is the big, weird mural painted above the front door. It’s a faded, vintage scene of cowboys, Indians, and rolling Western landscapes, and it’s obviously been there for a long time:

Lucky-Horseshoe-interior-slide-3 copy

What’s the backstory on the mural?

Lucky for all of us, Neighbor Vicky Walker from the Bernal Heights History Project is on the case. Neighbor Vicky tells Bernalwood:

Here’s what we know about the mural inside 453 Cortland!

The mural was painted by Harold Vick (1915-?). Here he is as a young man:

Later, Harold Vick worked at the Sommer and Kaufmann shoe store on Market Street as a card writer, sometimes listed as an artist. (LOOK at that store. Amazing!)

Harold got married in 1940 and moved to 19 Roscoe in South Bernal. His brother, Melvin, took over The Cherokee and ran it with his wife, Barbara, from 1943 to 1946.

The Cherokee in 1973, from the Max Kirkeberg Collection

Harold probably served in World War II. There’s another Harold Vick listed as a survivor of the Bataan Death March, but I haven’t been able to confirm that it’s him yet. In any case, Harold Vick is absent from the city directories from 1942 onward, although his wife, Patricia (Patti/Patsy) is still listed at 19 Roscoe in 1946. And Harold Vick never appears in S.F. directories again.

All that means we can probably assume that Harold Vick painted the Cherokee mural right around the time it was first owned by Melvin Vick.

The story is told that the Harold Vick painted for beer money. The drunker he got, the odder the mural in the Cherokee became:

The mural in the Cherokee wasn’t Harold Vick’s only barroom masterpiece. We know he also painted “After Cassino” which hung at 309 Cortland in Duval’s Studio Club.

Duval’s Studio Club became Charlie’s, which was a dive bar. That became the Stray Bar, which is now Holy Water.

The mural there was from 1944. My pal Jenner Davis is a former bartender at Charlie’s, and the daughter of Anita Davis, who was Regi Harvey’s partner, who sang all the time at Skip’s. She says: “The scene depicted in ‘After Cassino’ was taken from an original sketch Harold Vick found, singed and burned, in a field as he was crossing it with his platoon during World War II. Nearby were the remains of the artist who created the sketch, and his unsuspecting female subject, who had blown them both to bits when her plow hit a land mine.”

Here’s a detail from Harold Vick’s ‘After Cassino’:

We’re told that After Cassino’ now lives in the private dining room at Avedano’s.

IMAGE: Hanging the new sign at the Lucky Horseshoe in 2011

Saturday: Feast on the Chicken Parm of the Bernal Ancestors at St. Anthony’s School

February 26, 2016 / Todd_Lappin / 3 Comments

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St. Anthony’s Church at the corner of Precita and Folsom in North Bernal was founded in the late 19th century by members of what was, at the time, a thriving community of Italian-Americans living in and around Bernal Heights. Today, St. Anthony’s is a focal point for a robust community of Latino-Americans living in and around Bernal Heights, but even today, some older traditions still live on — in form of a deep and enduring fondness for chicken parmigiana.

Neighbor Nancy invites you to get in on some of that action on Saturday night:

St. Anthony-Immaculate Conception School, at Precita Ave. and Folsom St., has served the Bernal Heights/Mission community since 1894. The K-8 school is affiliated with the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose, whose mission is to provide a high quality, value-based education to all children, regardless of income.

The public is invited to the school’s Give ‘Em a Hand dinner on Saturday, Feb. 27, 6-9 pm in the auditorium at 299 Precita. Tickets are $50 at the door, and the event includes a chicken parmesan and unlimited pasta dinner with wine or beer, plus silent/live auctions, raffle prizes and lots of music and dancing. The annual dinner is a welcoming, festive evening for families of the school community and neighborhood.

Proceeds will benefit the school’s technology, art and music programs, as well as tuition assistance for impoverished children. For more information visit us here.

SAIC-GiveHandDinner

PHOTO: Courtesy of St. Anthony-Immaculate Conception School

People Are Talking About 3rd Cousin Restaurant on Cortland

February 19, 2016February 19, 2016 / Todd_Lappin / 40 Comments

3rdCOusinfacade

Recently, during a stroll on Cortland Avenue, your Bernalwood editor ran into Neighbor David. It was a sunny day, and Neighbor David was in grand spirits, because, he said, he was still high from the amazing dinner he’d had the night before at 3rd Cousin.

As you may recall, 3rd Cousin is the new restaurant at 919 Cortland, that used to be a popup called Kinfolk. 3rd Cousin is owned and run by Chef Greg Lutes, and as with every culinary entrepreneur, his effort to open 3rd Cousin in a permanent location has been an arduous labor of love and obsession. 919 Cortland used to be home to the somewhat less stylish Pizza Express, but now Chef Greg has transformed it into a casual venue for his elegant food with Michelin star aspirations. Crazy, right?

Anyway, when I bumped into him, Neighbor David gushed about the food at 3rd Cousin, which he described as being thoughtful and well-prepared but not too fussy. He said the prices at 3d Cousin are a on the higher side, but the quality of experience made it a worthy indulgence every once in a while. And he said the desserts were mind-blowing.

3rdCousinmenu

Hmmmmmmm! I thought.

Then, just a few days later, San Francisco Magazine published an article about “Four Restaurants We’re Crazy For.” 3rd Cousin was at the top of the list:

3rd Cousin
Bernal Heights
At the brick-and-mortar incarnation of his erstwhile Kinfolk pop-up, Greg Lutes serves cozy seasonal fare in an austere charcoal-gray dining room. A robust salad of baby mustard greens comes garnished with persimmon, garrotxa cheese, and dehydrated batons of purple yam, while grilled swordfish is rendered addictive by a shower of dukka, an Egyptian spice blend. Lutes’s strengths are best showcased in his savory uni crème brûlée: The caviar-topped number proves that you can teach an old dessert new, and impressive, tricks.

Frankly, I only understood about half of that.

But the point is, when both the critics and an actual man-on-the-street are talking about 3rd Cousin, that’s a strong indication something special is going on there. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

PHOTO: Telstar Logistics

Bernal’s Coco Ramen Leads List of “15 Best Ramen Spots in the Bay Area”

January 22, 2016January 22, 2016 / Todd_Lappin / 1 Comment

cocoramen

This is a tasty surprise: Coco’s Ramen, the cozy new ramen joint on Mission near 30th Street in Bernal’s NanoTokyo District, made the cut for SFist’s roundup of the 15 Best Ramen Spots in the Bay Area.

They say:

Coco’s Ramen
To get to Coco’s on the Mission strip in Bernal Heights, a spot indicated loosely with a paper sign for “Ramen,” duck inside the more clearly designated Crazy Sushi and hang a left. The two are separate but symbiotically related businesses. In a warm red room, made warmer with a little sake and some steaming broth, snag one of a few tables or a seat at the bar and ask for your old friend tonkotsu [sic] — though the shoyu and curry based options are reason to stray.

Cheaty Bonus Glory: SFist’s list is alphabetically sorted, so Coco’s Ramen appears in the lead position. Yesssssss!

Sounds like Coco’s is finding its groove. Since Bernalwood’s original Coco Ramen taste-test, the restaurant now enjoys four stars and even more gushing reviews on the Yelp.

PHOTO: Tonkatsu ramen from Coco’s Ramen, by Kaitlyn D. on Yelp

Coming Soonish: The San Francisco Cafe and Creamery on Cortland

January 20, 2016January 20, 2016 / Todd_Lappin / 11 Comments

creamerydoors

Among the many questions brought to us by Bernalwood readers, one of the most frequent we hear these days is: “What’s going on with the creamery that’s supposed to go in to the former Bernal Heights Market at 800 Cortland, on the corner of Ellsworth?”

Indeed. As previously reported, the creamery on Cortland is a new project from by the family that created the [transformative] Harvest Hills Market on the Folsom end of Precita Park. It will be called the San Francisco Organic Cafe & Creamery.

Bernalwood has learned about an additional component to the plan: In parallel with the San Francisco Organic Cafe & Creamery, the team also plans to launch a fleet of vintage trucks that have been painstakingly restored and converted into mobile ice cream stands. The Creamery will be a restaurant, but it will also function as a supply depot for the ice cream trucks. Here’s what the first truck looks like:

OceanGMC Truck

So when will the Creamery open? What’s the hold up? The wait for opening day has been long. Your Bernalwood editor has been asking the Creamery team about this for quite some time. Yet whenever we ask, we’re greeted with a fatalistic shrug and a cryptic grin that we’ve also seen on the face of just about every would-be entrepreneur who has tried to open a new food business in Bernal Heights. Over time, Bernalwood has come to understand the meaning of this gesture. It signifies: “I’m basically ready, but I am powerless in the face of a vast and indifferent bureaucracy, so I have no idea when my business will open.”

In the case of the Creamery on Cortland, that challenge is magnified, because there are lots of special statewide regulations that apply to dairy-based businesses. As Michael from Harvest Hills sarcastically explained, “We’ve learned that getting a milk plant license in California is almost as hard as opening a nuclear power plant.”

Despite all that, opening day is getting closer, hopefully, and there are new signs in the windows of the creamery that explain what’s to come:

creameryquestions

Bernalwood also received some additional detail from Hannah and Gina on the Creamery team:

We are expecting late February or March for partial opening of the cafe and creamery. They’ll put up the awning next week and then the big yellow truck will start to be up there more often for a little retail time in the afternoons. The yellow truck has won the bid to be in the city parks, along with five other trucks like her that will have organic items from the cafe. We are not sure how soon the final legal leases will be finished and of course El Nino has to run his course. None of our trucks are box trucks; all of them are open-platform diner trucks – you can see more at dinertrucks.com

Seating and some decoration will hold us up another few weeks from opening the cafe to the public. We still have to get the big 80 quart mixer in and its really heavy. The pizza oven and baking oven fired up this week along with other new ovens. We’ve been making ice cream there and hope to start the bread for the store soon, along with organic cookies, cupcakes and pies .. These items will also make it to our stores and others in the Bay area in 2016.

We’ve tried to focus on organic items that we don’t see made in San Francisco. So it’s simple San Francisco Organic… The retail side of the company is the Cafe and Creamery. We hope you get a chance to come up once we are fully operational.

So there you have it. Pretty soon, hopefully, the San Francisco Organic Cafe and Creamery will open for business, serving homemade ice cream and food in a diner-style atmosphere. And if for any reason that doesn’t happen, we can take comfort in the knowledge that 800 Cortland may prove to be a more promising site for a nuclear reactor instead.

PHOTOS: Storefont by Telstar Logistics. Truck courtesy of San Francisco Organic Cafe and Creamery

New Barebottle Brewery to Open on Cortland Early Next Year (Fingers Crossed)

December 22, 2015December 22, 2015 / Todd_Lappin / 17 Comments

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Here’s something to look forward to next year: Barebottle Brew Co. will open a brand-new brewery and brew pub in February or March in the empty warehouse building at 1525 Cortland, along the east end of the street near Peralta.

Inside Scoop reports:

Barebottle’s co-founders, Lester Koga, Michael Seitz and Ben Sterling, met as students at Cornell’s business school. While pursuing other careers — Seitz at Proctor & Gamble, Koga in counterterrorism strategy — the friends all became avid homebrewers, and got involved as judges in competitions through the Homebrewers Association. “As we started judging these homebrewing events, we began to think that the quality of beer made by homebrewers far surpasses what [some] production brewers are doing right now,” Koga says. “But it’s hard for homebrewers to get on the shelf.”

At Barebottle, they’ll host a monthly competition for homebrewers, each month based on a different beer style. A few winners, determined by a panel of judges, will have their recipes produced at Barebottle and poured in its taproom. Those deemed successful after some time in the taproom will become permanent Barebottle fixtures. Koga says they’re still working out how exactly the homebrewers will be rewarded for their winning recipes.

Cortlandt Toczylowski (Drake’s, E.J. Phair) has joined as head brewer, and is kicking off Barebottle’s proprietary portfolio with beers including a Russian imperial stout and a bourbon barrel-aged honey brown ale.

The 1,600-square-foot space, on Cortland Ave. near Peralta Ave., will incorporate the taproom within the production brewery. “Essentially, you drink around the brew house,” Koga explains. “We thought it would be cool to have that production process front and center.”

Super cool. To track Barebottle’s progress, check out all the construction photos at @barebottlebeer.

BONUS: Via EaterSF, here’s a photo of Barebottle’s new fermenters, installed in their new 17,000 square-foot facility. Sexy!

barebottle_brew_co..0.0

PHOTO: Team Barebottle greets the arrival of their new fermenters, via @barebottlebeer

Healthy Spirits Now Open on Cortland, with a Grand Opening Sale on Saturday

November 25, 2015November 20, 2015 / Todd_Lappin / 9 Comments

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It’s finally open. After weeks of curiosity and voyeuristic speculation, the Healthy Spirits liquor store has opened at 249 Cortland, inside the former Chuck’s Grocery space.

The opening of a liquor store would not typically warrant much attention, but Healthy Spirits is not a typical boozemonger; The new Cortland branch is the third outpost in the Healthy Spirits family, which is regarded as one of the City’s more esteemed purveyors of whiskey and agave spirits.

Store manager Nate Breed brings Bernalwood the 411, and extends an invitation to a special grand opening sale on Saturday, Nov. 28:

We’ve now officially opened Healthy Spirits Cortland.

So we are absolutely thrilled to be a part of the Bernal Heights community, and we look forward to what we can add to the neighborhood. Our first shop was founded in 1998 in the Castro District, so we’ve had about 17 years to perfect and evolve who we are and what we do. Our main areas of expertise are beer, whiskey and agave (tequila and mezcal), but everything we carry is hand-selected and extremely quality-focused.

One of our most important goals is consumer education. We strive to have the most knowledgeable and dedicated staff that can make beer and spirits consumption into an immersive, informative and exciting experience. This notion over the years has helped us provide great customer service, but it also breeds an environment that’s accessible for both the novice and connoisseur alike.

Another chance for education lies in our Beer, Bourbon and Agave Clubs, that feature advanced monthly selections with detailed write-ups and interviews with the distillers and brewers themselves. The clubs come with an awful lot of perks, including discounts, first shot at limited releases and occasional free tickets to beer and spirit events. We also strongly believe in supporting local breweries and distilleries while seeking out the esoteric and saving a special place for the classics. It’s important for us to not only understand how something is made and what it tastes like, but also where it’s made and by who.

Anyway that’s Healthy Spirits in a nut shell. And we’d like to extend a special invitation to all your Bernalwood readers to attend our Grand Opening Celebration on Small Business Saturday November 28th at 11am.

We will be giving away free swag all day and having some unbelievable sales: 10 to 40% off everything in the shop. We’ll also be raffling off the right to buy extremely rare bottles of whiskey like Pappy Van Winkle, Buffalo Trace Antique, Four Rose Limited 2015 and St George Single Malt the first 5 hours, and putting other rare and vintage beer and whiskies on the shelf when the doors open. Come early, as the best deals and rarest selections tend to go fast.

Store hours are:

Monday-Thursday: 11am to 10pm
Friday-Saturday: 11am to 11pm
Sunday: 11am to 9pm

See you at the shop!

Nate

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics

Neighbor Gillian Wants to Make Thanksgiving Pie for You

November 20, 2015 / Todd_Lappin

PaigePictures

hambaker

Attention, lovers of pie! We have a friend in the pie business. Neighbor Gillian of Black Jet Baking Company would like to put a pie on your table during Thanksgiving. She says:

I’m Gillian Shaw, and I used to be the baker at The Liberty, where I made Thankgiving pies for many loyal and wonderful Bernal residents for many years.

I now own my own lil’ baking company, but I still live in the hood on Ellsworth. This year, I’ll be slinging pies at the Epicurean Trader on Cortland, offering pumpkin, apple crumb, and chocolate pecan piece for $24.99 per pie.

Epicurean Trader is now taking orders our pies, for pick up next Tuesday and Wednesday, November 24 and 25.

Just talk to Mat at Epicurean to place your pre-order.

PHOTOS: Pie and Neighbor Gillian, courtesy of Black Jet Baking

Neighbor Eliza’s Red Apron Pizzeria Is Coming Soon to Precita Park

November 19, 2015November 20, 2015 / Todd_Lappin / 23 Comments

itwillhappen

For the last few months, the windows of the former Park Bench Cafe at 3214 Folsom (on the corner with Bessie at the west end of Precita Park) have been papered-over to hide the construction taking place inside. The bold, handmade graphics on the paper say “It Will Happen” — a message that serves as both a tease for Bernal neighbors and a mantra for the woman who is spearheading the project.

That woman is Neighbor Eliza Laffin of Alabama Street, and when work is complete the storefront will become home to Red Apron Pizza. Neighbor Eliza tells us more about what to expect:

My tag line is: Every neighborhood deserves great pizza.

I’ve always wanted a pizza restaurant in the ‘hood. I’ve spent 20 years dreaming about it. And now I’m going to make it happen!

I want customers to walk in the door and see a kitchen at home. Red Apron Pizzeria is a place where our neighborhood will enjoy great pizza, made with great ingredients, and a place kids will enjoy. It will be warm, welcoming, and family-friendly; approachable, unfussy, and absolutely first-rate.

I want to make Red Apron the best pizzeria in the neighborhood. (Adjacent territories also welcome, of course!)

As a preview of coming attractions, Neighbor Eliza also shared some photos of her food. Here’s a slice of her pizza, with toasted pignoli-basil pesto, sliced yukon gold potato, chèvre, and a little drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil on top:

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And for dessert, here are some of her zeppoles:

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Yum! A preview of what’ll be on the rest of the menu is right here.

The Gods of Construction and The Myriad Permits are notoriously fickle and angry, but with a little luck Neighbor Eliza hopes to open Red Apron Pizza sometime in January. Please root for her, and join with her to recite the mantra: “It. Will. Happen!”

PHOTOS: Top, Telstar Logistics. Food, courtesy of Red Apron Pizza

Sandwich-Making Robot in Andi’s Market Looks Like Terminator, Tastes Like Proust

November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 / Todd_Lappin / 13 Comments

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Last week, a new worker joined the staff at Andi’s Market on Cortland Avenue: a fully automated, sandwich-making robot. Created by Bistrobot, the newfangled machine makes peanut butter sandwiches on fancy white bread with your choice of honey, blackberry jam, sweet chili, or chocolate sauce.

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Bistrobot CTO Hamid Sani tells Bernalwood:

The machine at the Andi’s market is our first deployed automated sandwich maker. The machine is placed inside the store and the customer can place an order through a tablet kiosk, pay $2 (cash or credit), and watch our robot make them a custom sandwich. Simple as that.

Bistrobot is a startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator. We have a small but dedicated team with the goal of making robotic platforms that can make food, starting with sandwiches.

Neighbor Flo adds that some Bernal Heights DNA flows deep within the Bistrobot’s mechanized heart:

I live on Ellsworth St. My nephew, Steve Littell, is a chef and machinist from Chicago who came to SF with five engineer start-up buddies for the purpose of making this machine and others like it with more sophistication. My nephew now lives on Ellsworth St. too!

Locavore robots! Perhaps this was inevitable.

Neighbor Darcy filmed a video of the sandwichbot in action:

Yesterday, your Bernalwood editor visited Andi’s to conduct my own taste test of our robotic sandwich future. I ordered a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and when it emerged from the Bistrobot’s mechanical maw, it looked like this:

robotsandwich

And the taste? Well, it tasted just like a sandwich mom would have made — if mom was a faceless automaton who looked like a mutant Lionel train set encased in a transparent plastic box. As a culinary experience, it was certainly worthy of any school lunchbox. As an entertainment experience, it was far more tasty than anything you’d get at the Musée Méchanique — and much closer to home too.

But don’t take my word for it. Stop by Andi’s Market, 820 Cortland (between Ellsworth and Gates) and command the Bistrobot to make you a sandwich. Do it while you still can, because today, the sandwich robot works for you. Someday, however, you may work for it.

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics. Video courtesy of Darcy Lee