San Francisco

I have just eaten what is hands-down my best meal of the year at r n m restaurant (their capitalization, not mine), on Haight & Steiner in the Duboce Park/Lower Haight district of San Francisco (not to be confused with the formerly raffish and now utterly commercialized Haight-Ashbury).

The restaurant is named after the chef-owner Justine Miner’s father, Robert Miner, a co-founder of Oracle. The food was so good I am almost ready to forgive Oracle for their sleazy extortion tactics…

I started with the Parisian style tuna tartare with waffle chips, microgreens and a quail egg, a very classic dish (and one too often botched by careless chefs), given a little pep with a slight acidity. It was followed by an absolutely outstanding pan-roasted local halibut on ricotta gnocchi with asparagus and morel mushroom ragout, meyer lemon vinaigrette and mâche. The halibut was crisp outside, flaky inside. The ragoût was simply wonderful, a deep, rich and tangy broth, also slightly acidulated, with a generous helping of precious black morels. To top it off, the dessert, a Peach and cherry crisp with home-made blueberry gelato combined two of my favorite summer fruit in an unbeatable combination.

Be advised the parking situation in that neighborhood is particularly nightmarish, even by SF standards. If I had realized they offer valet parking, I wouldn’t have had to park halt a mile away (after seeking a place in vain for nearly half an hour).

Update (2012-09-05)

Unfortunately, it closed at least a year ago.

A few months ago, a new chocolate shop opened in Hayes Valley. Christopher Elbow chocolates is based in Kansas City, not a place that immediately springs to mind when the Great American Chocolate Renaissance is discussed. I had bought some of their products from Cocoa Bella, however, and knew they were good, if pricey.

They sell moderately expensive chocolate bars (the No. 10 41% milk chocolate with hazelnuts is pretty good), drinking chocolate, and bouchéees. The latter are a little too bleeding edge for my taste (spices do not belong in chocolate), but the Bourbon Pecan is to die for, a light and moist, pecan marzipan, almost creamy despite the deliberately roughly chopped texture, and topped with ganache. Not surprisingly, it is usually sold out at the other outlets..

The real draw, as far as I am concerned, is the hot chocolate. Dark, rich, creamy and thick, specially if you ask them to blend it with genuine praline, it is absolutely delicious. You can enjoy it in the twee little salon in the corner of the store before a concert at the nearby Symphony, or shopping in Hayes valley. If you are in the neighborhood, try also Miette Confiserie.

I have been living and working in downtown San Francisco for almost eight years now. Until a month ago, my office window (right) used to overlook Third Street and the Moscone center. San Francisco is a popular convention destination (one wonders why proctologists seem to prefer it to, say, Detroit) but Macworld Expo is definitely the biggest show in town. Restaurants and hotels are taken by storm, taxis become scarce, traffic gets even snarlier and the lines at Metron eateries cross the threshold of ludicrousness. So here are a few tips for Macworld attendees to have a better time and not caught in tourist traps.

Transportation

Driving in San Francisco is a non-starter. Traffic is horrendous, parking is scarce and you would lose far too much time just getting around. SF Muni is a pretty good public transport system (at least by admittedly paltry US standards) and their 1, 3 or 7 day Passport passes are good value.

Cars are mostly useless inside the city, but nice if you want to drive to make a Fry’s run or a day trip to Marin across the Golden Gate. If you must drive, the friendly folks at Reliable Rent-a-Car will give you decent rates on Toyotas. Until I bought a car last month, they were my go-to place for when I needed a car.

Lunch

San Francisco has the best food in the United States, but you wouldn’t know if from the overpriced eateries in a three block radius. The Firewood Cafe and Buckhorn Grill in the Metron are actually reasonably decent, but the throngs of convention-goers mean long lines. Mo’s Grille has excellent burgers (I recommend the aptly named “Belly Buster”), and since access to it is a little tortuous, you have a fighting chance (it is literally just above the Moscone South).

Ranging a little further, Nova has decent burgers and a lovely lobster quesadilla, and the new Westfield Mall three blocks to the west has a decent food court. Some good local chains are Bistro Burger, S.F. Soup Co. or Café Madeleine (official birthday cake purveyor to Kefta).

That said, the best lunch experience is to take the historic F line streetcar to the Ferry Building Marketplace with its wide variety of gourmet food stores and eateries. I heartily recommend the clam chowder at Ferry Plaza Seafood (it used to be my Friday lunch of choice) or the eclectic fare at Boulette’s Larder. Chocolates from Michael Recchiuti or fresh-pressed olive oil from Stonehouse make for great (and edible) souvenirs.

Staying hydrated is important when you expect to spend an entire day on the show floor. There is a Whole Foods store a mere block away where you can buy any required provisions.

Dining

Dining in San Francisco is an embarrassment of riches, it would be a shame to settle for overpriced hotel food. A word to the wise: most of the better places are hooked into the OpenTable reservation system which makes finding a good place with availability a much less hit-and-miss affair. This year Macworld coincides with the annual Dine About Town event where participating restaurants will offer specially discounted menus.

Equipment

Murphy’s law will strike at the worst possible moment. If you need help with your Mac, the geniuses at the San Francisco Apple Store (or the smaller Chestnut Street and Stonestown locations) can help. It’s also good to keep in mind the Apple stores all offer free WiFi connectivity.

If you need commodity spare parts like a USB hub in a hurry, Central Computers is a mere block away and carries a wide assortment, albeit PC-centric.

If you are an attendee and have questions I have not answered, please feel free to email me, my contact info is at the right.

One of the perks of living in San Francisco is easy access to MacWorld Expo. I can literally see the Moscone center a mere two blocks from my new office window. This year’s show spanned both North and South halls, but in some ways was a let-down compared to the last two.

Of course, all the buzz was about the iPhone. The amazing thing is not that Apple should make one, but rather that not a single cell phone manufacturer has a clue about design and ergonomics. Nokia used to, but they have backslid badly with their sluggish and over-complex Series 60 allegedly smart phones.

The prototypes were securely held under glass bells, presumably to preserve them from the salivating legions of the Mac faithful. From the demos, it looks pretty snappy compared to the incredibly sluggish Symbian or Windows Mobile equivalents, but I have serious doubts as to whether even Apple can make on-screen virtual keyboards work.

The other marquee product is the Apple TV, essentially a severely anorexic Mac mini without an optical drive or separate power brick, and running an unspecified embedded OS with the Front Row user interface. Pity it is limited to 720p (the 1080i support is interpolated). At a time when CompUSA sells a top of the line 42 inch Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD flat panel for under $2000, the lack of 1080p support is puzzling.

I haven’t seen that much innovation among the third party vendor stands either. Here is what I did find at least somewhat noteworthy:

• Fujitsu came out with a new model of its ScanSnap document scanner line, the S500M, the only document scanner with official Mac OS X support. They claim the new model is slightly faster, and has a much improved paper feed. Indeed, the 5110EOX2 I have is annoyingly prone to double-feeding. The new model is also bundled with ReadIRIS Pro and Acrobat 7 Standard, a pretty good bundle all in all since those two programs together retail for nearly the same price as the scanner.
• Speaking of PDF, viewing the PDFpen demo makes me regret even more shelling for that piece of bloatware that is Acrobat. Simple, inexpensive software to manage and edit your PDFs. They have a show special, 20% off if you follow the link www.smileonmymac.com/macworld.
• Invisible Shield was demonstrating its self-healing protective plastic film for various gizmos by shaking an iPod mini in a box filled with screws and bolts, and showing how it survived unscathed. They also make protective films for digital camera LCDs, this looks like an interesting option since DSLR LCDs are very easily scratched.
• A number of stands were using the Logitech 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator controller. Ovolab (makers of the excellent Phlink answering machine peripheral, were demoing a photo geocoding application Geophoto, with lightning-fast Google Earth style navigation (oddly enough, the Google stand did not use this nifty human interface device). The controller has six degrees of freedom and is remarkable easy to pick up.
• Logitech has a fairly subdued stand. There were no real demonstrations of their NuLOOQ controller for Photoshop users, nor of their newly acquired SlimDevices Transporter, or Harmony programmable remotes. The emphasis was on their laser mice. SlimDevices was a popular draw at previous MacWorlds, I am not sure whether Logitech has gotten a grip on how to market that product line yet.
• Infrant had a small stand with a ReadyNAS NV+. I had never seen this NAS before, it is much smaller, quieter and more solidly built than I expected. The rep at the counter was a new recruit and not all that knowledgeable about the product (I asked whether they expect to support iSCSI soon, which would make it a killer expansion option for my Solaris 10 home server with ZFS). Infrant has a partnership with SlimDevices, and the bundle of a Squeezebox with a ReadyNAS is one of the most attractive networked digital music options available, far superior to the flashy but ultimately unsatisfying Sonos.
• Matias was demonstrating a prototype of their new TactilePro 2.0 keyboard. They now make their mechanical keyswitches by themselves instead of buying them from Alps (as with the version 1.0 Tactilepro I am using to type this blog entry). I like the original version so much I bought a spare when Alps announced it was discontinuing the keyswitches. The feel of the 2.0 is slightly different from the old one, but it still has that honest-to-goodness clickety-clack feel, albeit with a more subdued sound. The other differences involve upgrading the built-in hub to USB 2.0 and adding the Optimizer feature, which turns the useless Caps Lock key into a shortcut key instead. I remap the Caps Lock key to Control anyways on Macs, Windows and Solaris, so this last feature is of dubious interest to me.
• Intelliscanner was selling rebadged Symbol CS1504 scanners for $250. Save your money, buy the OEM Symbol version for under $100 and use my free Python driver instead.
• Canon was out in force, as was HP. Nikon and Epson had smaller stands this year. I got to handle the excellent new Canon HV10 HD camcorder, the new 70-200mm f/4L IS lens (a version of the excellent 70-200mm f/4L lens I already own, with gyroscopic optical Image Stabilization added), and the upcoming new Pixma Pro 9500 pigment ink printer that should compete with the Epson R2400 and the HP B9810.

For some time now, titanium has been the material to convey technological edginess. In the hierarchy of credit cards, it apparently trumps silver, gold and even platinum. The metal is used to make fashion statements in products as varied as the original Apple PowerBook, fancy (but dull) knives, high-end watches or cameras like the $20,000 fiftieth anniversary commemorative Leica M7. As an eminently biocompatible material, titanium is also used in implants. I am not entirely immune to the lure of the material, as I recently purchased the iconic titanium spork for travel use.

Titanium has also become the material of choice for extravagant architectural projects, Frank Gehry’s abuse of the stuff in projects like the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao being only the most egregious example. Reportedly Gehry himself tires of the metal, but the tasteless committees that drive much of public architecture worldwide clamor for it, so he is trapped in the style just as surely as less famous architects are trapped in various forms of academism.

That said, there may be a backlash against titanium, and copper may be taking over as the new metal of choice in projects like the new De Young museum in San Francisco. I have also seen it used as a decorative element in a number of new residential buildings in my neighborhood in San Francisco (the picture to the left is from a building on California and Polk). Copper is of course the most beautiful of metals, with a rich hue reminiscent of sunset, and it gets even better with age as it gains its characteristic light green patina.

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