The Sunny Mediteranée

The blogging project has been subject to some drift lately. On a couple of occasions we ran out of time, and I resorted to my old standby, the Cheesesteak Shoppe. I am happy to report that this return visit, one of many I have made over the years, did nothing to lessen my high opinion of their Philly cheesesteak. We also were blindsided by the fact that many Asian restaurants have chosen Tuesday as their day off, a fact that we could have easily researched in advance but simply neglected to do. One day when we left the house late we stopped in at a new taqueria in San Rafael (Marin County.) This was a perfectly good experience, and I made the age-old mistake of eating something larger than my head, or at least so it seemed as I downed a chicken molé super burrito. While fully appreciative of the generous amounts of chicken provided therein, the taqueria was merely competent, like so many others, and the recipes and salsas completely predictable. So why go further? Just another taqueria among many, and like most, they don't hand-press their corn tortillas, which immediately marks them as simply ordinary.

Yesterday things took a turn for the better; we decided to try La Mediteranée, a cafe located just south of Pacific Heights in the chic part of Fillmore Street. This neighborhood, and Fillmore Street in particular, has steadily climbed upward and now sports elegant boutiques as well as a host of restaurants. Many of the city's popular restaurants are flocking to this area, opening new outposts. Notable are Dosa (second location) and Pizzeria Delfina (second location, plus they run a full restaurant next door to their Mission District pizza shop.) SPQR is another notable, and it is the second restaurant from a group that also runs A16 in the Marina area on the north side of San Francisco.

La Mediteranée, in contrast, has been on Fillmore for a while. It is a small cafe with a few compact outside tables that specializes in what looks for all the world to be Lebanese food, plus some daily fresh fish specials. We were seated outside immediately; Andrea settled on a falafel sandwich, while I was planning to opt for the Lebanese Plate, which offered a choice of three items from a fairly extensive list of Lebanese specialities like Pomegranate Chicken, dolmades, hummus and many more. As we were ordering the diners next to us received their meal. Andrea asked what one of their dishes was, and it turned out to be a Chicken Shwarma sandwich. It looked so good that I ordered it instead of the variety plate.

As we waited for food it was hard to believe it was the middle of winter. The Bay Area had record-shattering warmth that day, beating the old maximums by quite a bit, so we basked in 70-degree air, and I sat on the sunny side of the table and absorbed a decent dose of sunlight, which hopefully sufficed to boost my vitamin D. The latest research has elevated the importance of this vitamin as a factor in maintaining good health; it seems to affect calcium absorption, which can in turn affect bone density. It also seems to be a factor in the prevention of cancer. So even though my skin tends to burn very quickly, I have become more tolerant of the sun (Andrea and I call it 'Mean Mister Sun',) albeit only for short periods, and the time afforded for lunch at the cafe was just right.

The food exceeded expectations. Both sandwiches were served in a rolled-up lavosh bread, the same sort of wrap used in Levantine Sandwiches. This had been made crisp, probably with a brief stay under a salamander broiler, and had a pleasant crunch to it as you bit through. The fillings offered all the usual flavors of Lebanese dishes, but were exceptionally balanced so each spice and condiment shone through; a hint of mint here, a dash of cinnamon there. Although the portion on the plate did not appear enormous, it proved to be quite filling, and the sides were equally caloric regardless of the diminutive serving size. One of the tastiest was a potato salad, with the potatoes chopped finely, blended with some parsley and lightly pickled in a vinaigrette. There was even a neatly arranged bit of fruit, which washed down the rich flavors nicely at the end. All in all, a delicious outing and an unexpected pleasure as we basked in the mid-winter, very summer-like weather.

Heck of a Way to Get a Tan

I am nothing if not sensitive to feedback from my followers, all 9 of you if you exclude me (the Sharps) and Andrea. And one comment that has returned from the field is that while the food part of the blog is entertaining, we have not heard all that much about radiation.

The good news in this regard is that the treatment, in Andrea's case, has been routine. This is nothing to complain about, and hardly minimizes the entire process of sitting through 30 sessions of being zapped. But this is not a story about dramatic experiences; rather, the process is almost eerily calm and ordered. This is not the case for all recipients of radiation treatment, which is something you discover when you share a changing room with patients destined for the four different machines at this particular facility at University of California, San Francisco.

Thanks to my daughter Rosie, I have become a reader of Wired magazine. Although they sometimes make me ill with their over-printed, over-inked, overly-glossy and glitzy style, I have to admit that there are some damn good writers covering some topics that don't see much light of day in other publications. The most recent issue had an article about cancer that in essence says the spending pyramid is inverted - - that is, 90 percent of money is spent on patients with Stage 3 or Stage 4 cancers, which are the two most advanced states. This is not surprising; as they point out, these are husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters - - loved ones, in deep peril. So no expense is spared. The point they bring forth is that if the spending was on early detection there would be few cases that progress to this difficult and expensive-to-deal-with degree.

Andrea is a prime example of the advantages of early detection. Thanks to the routine program at Kaiser Northern California, her relatively minuscule tumor was caught early, perhaps not has early as is technologically possible, but pretty close. So dealing with this tumor via lumpectomy, radiation and prescription drug therapy (Arimidex) is pretty cut and dried (ouch!) The therapy is not perfect; perhaps three to five percent of patients who undergo this protocol will have a recurrence in five years. Ninety-five percent or more will not. They will simply be cured by surgery, 30 treatments and five years of pill popping, one a day.

That does not mean that the treatment is inconsequential, and that it is not without its unique effects on the patient. For one thing, there are the nice gowns. You need to change into a gown before treatment, and you only undress and cover with a gown the section of you that needs treatment. Breast people get a bathrobe-style top that opens in the front. These are very soft, since they've been washed and sanitized many times, and provide a degree of comfort that offsets the coldness and starkness of lying on a highly adjustable metal table that can accommodate the myriad positions required to direct the radiation to the desired spot. Another strange source of comfort is the large circle in the ceiling of the treatment area. When the lights are off, it looks more or less like conventional acoustical tile. But when back-lit, someone has taken the trouble to put patterns of celestial constellations into it. It reminds Andrea of visiting the Planetarium in the Museum of Natural History as a child. The upper part of the machine rotates around you to pinpoint its action; in Andrea's case it then pivots to the other side and repeats the treatment. Radiation treatment is not a single therapy; different types (wavelengths) are used for various purposes. Five weeks of her treatment is with proton radiation. This is a penetrating emission, which is one reason all the positioning is so critical. You don't want to shoot it into parts of the body that don't need it, so it is directed more or less horizontally across the treatment area, from the side. At the end of the five weeks she will receive one week of electron radiation. This is directed right at the treatment area, but does not penetrate deeply at all.

The type of radiation you receive, the length of treatment and any concurrent therapies vary completely from patient to patient and by type of cancer. Each treatment, no matter how routine on the surface, is in fact custom-designed to the situation and physical being of each individual. Among those sharing the changing room one day was a woman needing radiation for the eye; obviously this is a whole different protocol than the breast, or than a prostate gland.

As you look up to the glass surface of the radiation source, childish stickers have been plastered around the metal surrounding the central glass cover. While these might be thought of as lame they provide a humanizing and slightly comic contrast to the sterile and frightening presence of this device looming over you.

Returning again to our patient, we are ever vigilant in looking out for symptoms of and reactions to treatment. Most commonly reported are sunburn of a sort, and fatigue, which build up as the weeks go by and sessions accumulate. So far, so good. Maybe a little redness on the skin, which is alleviated at least somewhat by the lotions provided by the facility. Still, it's a heck of a way to get a tan. This could very well get worse, but we are told that it goes away fairly promptly after the end of treatment. As for fatigue, it has not taken an undue toll so far, and in fact Andrea's energy has been notably high. On occasion Andrea has had some random sharp twinges in the treatment area. This too they say is routine, and is not at all constant.

So we have our fingers crossed and will hope for the best. If you don't see that much more about radiation treatment and instead quite a bit more about dining out, you'll know that all is well.

Mayflower Sinks, Pizza Rises

Sorry to be lagging a bit; it's time to catch up with the end of the second week while we move into the third. We had a day off (Christmas) so there were only four eating out opportunities, as well as treatments, last week. We returned to the Mayflower with high expectations, and even dragged two of our friends there for a Christmas Eve lunch. Maybe it was the large number of people ordering fancy dishes like lobster to celebrate, or maybe the chief cook had the day off; whatever the reason, the Mayflower let us down. Dishes that were both novel and nicely prepared just a week ago were suddenly sticky, misshapen, not as crisp, and not as neatly served. I can't blame this simply on being busy, since the Mayflower seemingly serves an overflow crowd every day at lunch (we have not visited for dinner.)Rather than dwell upon the negative, let me simply suggest that there could be a consistency problem at the Mayflower, or it could just be the one bad day out of many good ones. San Francisco is overstocked with good restaurants in every price range. It might be a while before we give the Mayflower another chance.

In what might be seen as an exercise in masochism, we cooked up a couple of our Chinese specialties for our Christmas party for 10. Apparently we can not get too much of a good thing. On the menu were egg rolls and scallion pancakes. There is a lesson to be learned here, which was further reinforced by our added self-flagellation when cooking latkes last night: fried food is best served right from the cooking vessel. The less time spent between hot oil and your plate, the better. Unfortunately, the dynamics of the party dictated that we do advance prep. Thus the oven was used to keep both scallion pancakes and egg rolls at a palatable temperature. While the egg rolls only suffered mildly, the scallion pancakes lost most of their moisture and became scallion pancake crackers. While they were still appreciated by our friends, I have to think that overall they were being charitable. This is quite sad, because a freshly cooked scallion pancake is a wonderment, and while our version may not have achieved world-beating status, it is already better than 74.8% of restaurants, and it's going up the charts with a bullet. I will let you all know when we have perfected it. BUT - - you'll have to taste it right from the stove!

We went into the city with our daughter Sophie on Friday, day after Christmas, with every intention of having lunch at Dosa on Fillmore Street. This is the second outpost of this very successful restaurant, and I can attest that after a recent dinner, I completely grok their achievement, namely, taking Indian ingredients and recipes and doing two things with them. First, they reinvent traditional recipes but make them healthful by reducing gratuitous fats. And second, they appreciate the aesthetic of Indian cooking and use ingredients and cooking methods to create novel but relevant dishes and variants. But enough about Dosa; we will return for lunch and will cover this fascinating restaurant in more detail. What transpired instead was that we got there about 10 minutes before opening, which led to a somewhat aimless ramble up Fillmore Street. This section of Fillmore, above (that is, north) of Geary Ave and below Pacific Heights is a wealth of independent businesses; wine bars, Japanese restaurants from the Japantown era, hair salons, and perhaps the last outpost of stores that sell modern lifestyle accessories. I am not sure what to call a shop like this; some among us might recall Design Research, which sought out beautiful, useful (and perhaps useless) items for the office, dining room and bedroom, many sourced from Scandinavia. Fillmore Street has a few such places, along with boutiques, liquor stores with global Champagne selections, and so on. A Yuppie paradise if I ever did see one. In the process of drifting up this panoply of goods and services, we once again espied Defina Pizza. This is the third enterprise of the burgeoning Defina empire, which now includes their Mission District restaurant; the adjacent pizza outlet; and this more recent pizzeria just off Fillmore. We had eaten there before, but suddenly it beckoned once again. Oddly, there were a few parties waiting outside, despite the fact that we walked up after the putative 11:30AM opening time; turns out that, since it was the day after Christmas, they had arbitrarily moved the opening time up to a hangover-friendly 12 noon. So we dutifully got in line, and were quickly seated. Delfina makes a pizza with a thin crust and bubbly seared edge. They incorporate only the highest-quality ingredients. When it comes to pizza, this is a winning formula, since ingredients are few and flavors stand out starkly. Their salads are equally fresh, and are dramatic only because each component is packed with flavor. A calzone we ordered came packed with esoteric, delicious meats and startlingly fresh ricotta cheese. While it did not seem huge on the plate, the richness and quality of the ingredients were immensely satisfying. In fact, about the only thing I can find to complain about was the background music. This was clearly chosen by a meth addict who dialed in the selection from a mental hospital. The restaurant is loud enough without music, like so many ill-conceived spaces where the owner somehow mistakes chaotic noise for excitement. If they only knew that at least half or more of their clients are gritting their teeth praying for the music to be turned down. Now let it be said that, having reached the age of 60, I am in peril of being called a fuddy-dud. And our daughter at first did indeed compare the music to the Rolling Stones - - "It's no different" - - only to change her mind about 12 minutes later, and say, "You're right - - the music does suck." What you had on the overhead speakers was some continuous version of the primal scream. It would not have been quite so awful if it had not also been turned up to a level that rode over the already-tumultuous riot of conversation. So: Delfina - - if you're listening - - not all of your clients are 12-year old pubescent boys in rebellion against the system. Don't let the guy that takes out the garbage select your audio selections for the day. Keep making that delicious food; turn down the volume and do take stock of your actual clientele. I think most of them would not be heartbroken if the level dropped about 20 decibels. That said, you still get four out of five stars in my book.

What a Difference a Day Makes

The quest for 30 different restaurants in 30 days was broken yesterday by the already-blogged, disappointing return to King Won Ton and Noodle on Irving Street, which did prove to have good dumpling soups, but not much else to entice us back in the future. Having felt the bitterness of a day wasted in trying to put a new place on our map, we fell back today to a familiar friend: Shanghai Dumpling King. This unassuming joint on Balboa Street has an extensive menu, but the stellar items for us are the dumplings. More specifically the xiao long bao (often called 'soup noodle dumpling') are always a treat. These are a small steamed dumpling with a pork filling and about a teaspoonful or less of rich broth inside. How you get the broth to stay inside is one of those special skills that not all that many cooks seem to have mastered; in fact the very concept is audacious. Happily, at Shanghai Dumpling King they have it down to a science. Ten of these little delights arrive in a bamboo steamer tray, along with a small dish with vinegar, slivers of ginger and soy sauce blended. You might consider letting them sit for a minute, because the broth within is probably about the same temperature as the surface of the sun, and will burn your mouth if you dive right in, tempting as they are, when they hit the table. The skins are quite thin, and the whole experience is a delight. We followed this up with what they call Pan Fried Pork Buns. Usually you associate this with a large, doughy bun, but again these are compact, with eight to a serving. They are fried on one side much like a pot sticker, but are round and stand about 3/4 of an inch high.Our final entree on Friday was a Green Onion Pancake, a standard of many Chinese restaurants. Unlike our last experience, this pancake came closer to our ideal, with a flaky texture.

Accommodations at Shanghai Dumpling King are quite modest; there are only a couple of tables in the first room, with a small dining room holding perhaps eight tables of different sizes. The good news is that you are close enough to everyone else to facilitate spying on their choices without too much obvious craning of your neck. But it is hardly a place to linger. No matter; with food as good as this it makes it all worthwhile, and the service is always courteous if not unctuous. When we came at lunch the front room was flooded with high schoolers from George Washington High right up the street, gathering up their takeout orders and adding condiments. It was quite a scene, with dozens of teens gabbing and grabbing their food, but then it was over just as quickly as it started.

We've been on a campaign to avoid parking meters in San Francisco, and have been remarkably successful. There is street parking, if you look for a little while, within two blocks of the UCSF facility. Similarly, if you don't mind walking a block or so you can find spots quite close to our favorite restaurant areas. This is, of course, a silly economy, since the most expensive part of the trip is crossing the Golden Gate Bridge every day to the tune of five bucks (six if you don't have a Fast Pass transponder.) Add a couple gallons of gas, currently down to two dollars each and you've already spent $9. But it is irksome to feed a quarter into a meter and get only ten lousy minutes in return. And carrying around all those quarters is not all that much fun either. So finding the free parking is our way of striking back; never mind the folly of it all.

One final thought about crossing the bridge: it has become a high point of the five-day-a-week trek to the big city. Each day brings something new; a large container ship passing underneath; the Farallon Islands visible (or not) on the horizon; the interplay of sunlight and clouds on the headlands and over the city. We were even treated to the sight of snow on Mount Diablo, something not unheard of but nonetheless rare. So as we pass through the Rainbow Tunnel on Highway 101 South and descend the curves down to the Gate, there is a small tingle of anticipation as to what new visual treats the scene will offer this day. Our appreciation of both the natural and man-made beauty of this area has been heightened, despite having lived here for nearly 40 years.

Of course the destination in all this is the radiation facility, and in this regard, we have a new countdown: one week down, five and a half to go. The extra half of a week comes about because of the intervening holidays; UCSF is closed for Christmas, New Year's and MLK Day, so treatments need to be added on at the end so they total to 30. But - - one sixth of the program is completed, and the patient seems not particularly worse for the wear. We've been cautioned that side effects like fatigue and skin irritation come a few weeks in, but for now all goes well and the more routine the better. Andrea has described a few sensations that occur periodically, one of which is that "the whole experience feels like you are a bug." And a couple of days ago she thought she felt the treatment going through her. This is undoubtedly the product of a rich and fervent imagination, but ya feels what ya feels. In the grand scheme of things, however, it must be said, so far, so good.