Author: sac-eats

Last fall, I was gaga over the prospective opening of Doughbot, a funky, irreverent doughnut dispensary way too close to my home. When it finally opened, I was less than whelmed. I found the doughnuts chewy and unappealing, the toppings one-dimensional, and the frequent sell-outs and equipment related shut downs amateurish.

However, less than a year after opening, this doughbot is running on all doughy cylinders. I hadn’t visited in over six months and stopped in on a whim needing coffee more than a treat. Not one to pass up a doughnut (for the sake of research) I sampled one, the blueberry/cornmeal, and knew right away that things had changed at the d-bot.

This doughnut was mind-blowing: dense, sugary, fruity, and ever so slightly crunchy. I had to try another. I tried the maple bacon. Hard to screw that up, yes? However, d-bot’s initial offering last year was, to put it hyperbolically, a doughbortion. There’s nothing sadder than a disgusting soggy bacon doughball. This current incarnation however, was a thing of culinary beauty. It was pillowy, bacony, syrupy without being cloying. I was in heaven. Doughbot had become that thing that I had hoped for, the best doughnut shop in town.

I’m a convert. I’m sold. I’m investing in Ukrainian diet pills for the duration.

Doughbot- 2226 10th St (at W). 444-5157, www.doughbotdonuts.com

This is all I know. The space formerly occupied by Lounge on 20 is slated to become a German eatery and bar. Now, I’m sure, with only about 10 seconds of thinking, you could come up with a funny and mostly crude name invoking sausages that would play up the new restaurant’s Lavender Heights location.

To look at it from the street, you’d think it was a front for the Russian Mafia, or a grade D chain out of Minneapolis that some optimistic Korean family bought into for a small fortune that they try to repay while still saving enough to send their kids to Stanford, or maybe just a run-down storefront that switches from owner to owner with promiscuous regularity, never quite finding that sweet spot of pizza satisfaction. Trust me though, it’s an ugly duckling with a swan-like beauty within.

You’ve probably seen it before, on J Street, right across from the old Shakey’s, right next to that culinary asylum known as Opa Opa, with a simple sign that says “PIZZA.” If you’re a savvy consumer, you’ve probably never stepped foot in the place. Man, are you missing out.

In no particular order here are the highlights: Continue reading “Hot City Pizza- Delightfully Shabby”

Two newish places have popped up on the eastern side of Broadway and I thought both deserved a little notice. The first is Original Poboys at the flat-ironish corner of Broadway and Alhambra. The place is so well-branded that I at first took it for a chain, but upon my questioning of the owner I found it to be an independent establishment. Specifically, the conversation went like this:

ME: Is this place part of a chain?

OWNER: Not yet.

So, apparently the owner is a go-getter type with Carl Karcher-esque vision, which could work as he has some pretty good ideas. First, Poboys is a small, clean establishment, offering the expected bayou fare, from poboy sandwiches to jambalaya ,bignets to fried oysters. The departure from the expected is the breakfast menu which features an all-you-can-eat cereal bar (not clear if milk is all-you-can-drink as well). I can just picture teenagers on their way to school devouring a pound and a half of fruit loops without batting an eye. I’m thinking that might be a tough sell to franchisees. Continue reading “Oak Park Eats- Grubbin’”

This Saturday, the 2nd annual Amador Barbera Festival kicks off at Cooper Ranch. Unfortunatley, for the second year in a row, the event has sold out. So, if you didn’t get tickets and still want to sample the finest nectar to drizzle from the fruity bosom of Amador county check out this post from 2009 about where to get some of the best Barbera this side of Italy:

If we were to be honest with ourselves for just a moment, we’d readily admit that we live in the deep, enveloping cleavage of the bosom of great wine. Just barely peeking out over the plunging neckline of our beautiful valley, we can see some of the best vineyards in America staring back at us. And while Zinfandel, Cab, and Chardonnay get all the attention and all the praise, it is the simple Barbera that I seek out every time. Continue reading “Barbera on the Brain”

“What the hell is that?” I ask. It’s the only question appropriate at this point as we pull into the Andis Wines parking lot. It was a rhetorical question, sure. I knew it was a winery; it just didn’t look like a winery. Sure, it was in wine country, tucked away in the rolling hills of Amador, just a few hundred yards from standouts Easton and Runquist, but it just didn’t feel right. To be honest it looked like a rural, modern, Scandinavian airport. A cross between Ikea and a heliport. As if the Copenhagen design school had a one night fling with the farmer’s daughter. It did not look like a winery.

But it is a winery. And a pretty damned good one. Andis Wines is overly image conscious, sure (one can tell that just by the logoed Tommy Bahama shirts every member of the staff is forced to wear), but beyond the artifice is some fine winemaking and skilled farming. Syrah and Barbera offerings are just lovely, and the Sav Blanc is as good as anyone else’s in the region. The wine pourers are comely and the grounds, once one gets over the shock of seeing a building that looks as if it were designed by someone wearing comically small spectacles and sporting a few umlauts in his name, are gorgeous, with rolling vines lapping up at the oversized tasting room windows, and a broad picnic lawn spread out under a clutch of snapping flags. Continue reading “Andis Wines- Out of Place, Out of Sight”

I noticed two different menus last week from two different, unaffiliated dining establishments that listed different ingredients as “local,” (my use of quotation marks, it didn’t say “”local”” on the menu (meaning it didn’t say “local” with only one set of quotation marks, I added the second to refer to the fact that I was referring to the earlier non-existent quote of “”local”” that I had quoted before (and by using more than one set of quotation marks I’m in mo way saying that “””””””””local””””””””””” isn’t really local, because the whole point of the following post is to say that some things are local without trying and…. hell I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore))) yet they were items I hadn’t ever thought of before as “local” because they’re only grown locally.  Confusing I know, here’s an example:

Last week I had a lovely dinner at The Press with my lovely lady and my sister and her husband. We had a great time and the food, like always, was fantastic. One thing stood out though. On the menu (or honestly it may have been in the description of the specials, we had already had cocktails after all and my memory’s a bit spotty) an item was described as containing “local” endive. Hmmm, I thought, is it really fair to call endive “local” if the only place it’s grown in the U.S. is Rio Vista?  I guess it is, technically. Rio Vista is right down the road. Endive is delicious. What’s the big deal? Continue reading “Is it Local If…..”