Pinoy Heritage pop-up wins Lamb Jam
A restaurant pop-up called Pinoy Heritage captured the top award at the San Francisco Lamb Jam competition July 22 with a fusion play on a classic Filipino dish.
Chef Francis Ang and his team now will move on to the October finals in Colorado, putting their lamb adobo empanadas up against the winning dishes from chefs in Austin, Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The annual event, sponsored by the American Lamb Board, highlights the 80,000 family operated farms and ranches raising sheep in the United States.
Besides winning best of show on Sunday, the Pinoy team also took home the trophy for their category, Asian style lamb, and the coveted people’s choice award.
For this dish, Ang replaced the pork or chicken most traditionally found in adobo with lamb, then punched up the classic vinegar, soy sauce, black pepper, bay leaf recipe with other spices — and tucked the filling into an empanada.
Ang, who is a native of the Philippines and a graduate of City College of San Francisco’s culinary program, boasts a resume that includes Gary Danko, the Fifth Floor and Dirty Habit.
He took the leap with Pinoy Heritage two years ago and now the enterprise has a number of regular pop-ups: The first Thursday of every month at Pacific Cocktail Haven; Fridays or Sundays at Anina in Hayes Valley; and a tasting menu at Feastly in San Francisco every Saturday.
Last year’s San Francisco Lamb Jam winner, chef Mark Stark and the Bird and the Bottle (Santa Rosa), went on to take the national title with their lamb pastrami.
Best new U.S. restaurants: Bay Area’s 2 honorees
Eater’s national restaurant critic is out with his annual list of the best new restaurants in America, and two Bay Area restaurants are among the 18 singled out.
Bill Addison gives high praise to both the city of Oakland, for its “incredibly dynamic dining scene,” and to Nite Yun, the chef-owner of Nyum Bai, whose cooking he calls “a living document of her family’s journey from Cambodia to California, told through rice noodle soups and lacquered beef skewers and stunners like stir-fried minced pork served in a pool of coconut milk, fish paste, and palm sugar.”
He waxes poetic about her version of the classic Cambodian dish called amok: “Yun steams diced catfish with coconut milk, egg, and a paste tingling with lemongrass and other spices in a banana leaf. It melds into an oceanic cloud, which Yun returns to earth with a final dousing of coconut milk.”
Our Bay Area News Group’s “First Look” at Nyum Bai in February noted the role that La Cocina, a culinary incubator, played in Yun being able to turn her popular pop-up into a brickand-mortar. The colorful eatery with a 1960s C-pop vibe uses locally grown, organic ingredients whenever possible.
In San Francisco, Addison found True Laurel, the brainchild of Lazy Bear chef-owner David Barzelay and bar manager Nicolas Torres.
This bar-restaurant hybrid, he writes, provides “a sanctuary for comfort with unusual wit and style, a welcome model” with its “brainy small plates” and “exquisite, unpretentious” cocktails served in an art-installation atmosphere.
“Barzelay and chef de cuisine Geoff Davis bring the smarts with their riffs on Americana bar food: a patty melt crisped in autumnal beef fat, Dungeness and cheddar fondue with potato chips and vegetables for scooping, and fried hen-ofthe-wood mushrooms with a riff on sour cream and onion dip.”
Other restaurants making Addison’s list include Momofuku chef David Chang’s first West Coast enterprise, Majordomo in Los Angeles; and Bywater American Bistro, the second New Orleans restaurant from “Top Chef” fan favorite Nina Compton, a James Beard Award winner.
Find the full list of 18 at Eater.com.
Halal Guys opens in Oakland, serving late-night gyros
The cult favorite Halal Guys — purveyors of Middle Eastern cuisine with an addictive “white sauce” — have a new Uptown location on Broadway in Oakland that will stay open until 2 a.m. every Friday and Saturday for the city’s late-night Uptown crowd. On Sunday through Thursday, hours of operation will be 10 a.m. till midnight.
Founded in 1990 as a single food cart, the Halal Guys — Egyptian immigrants Muhammed Abouelenein, Abdelbaset Elsayed and Ahmed Elsaka — quickly found a following by serving gyro platters and wraps and other halal dishes to Manhattan’s Muslim cabdrivers. Halal refers to food prepared according to Islamic law.
The other Bay Area eateries are in San Jose, Berkeley and San Francisco, with one planned for Sunnyvale.
DETAILS » 2214 Broadway, Oakland; www. thehalalguys.com